Nesta wears a red t-shirt saying “Be nice or you’re fired”. He is the captain of the canoe, I am told, when I ask how I can cross the river that splits our beach in two. He takes me down the sandy shore of the river, to the point where it meets the sea, and we climb into a narrow dug-out canoe. He has a lovely smile.
Nesta says he is there until dark, and I pay him 1,000 leones to take me the twenty metres across the river. When I want to come back, he says, I should wave my umbrella from the other side and he will come over and get me.
Walking along the beach under ominous skies, a little boy comes running from a dilapidated building where his mother is winding up rope into a tight green knot.
“You want to see live crocodile?” he asks me, beside himself with excitement. How could I refuse?
This little boy, taking me by the hand, leads me over to the back of his house where his father has trapped four crocodiles. Two more kids join the first, the little girl holding my hand.
The father comes along and insists on opening the tiny cage where the four toothy reptiles are penned up, adding at the last minute that they haven't been fed for four days as he has no money for fish.
“You snap-snap them,” he insists, and the mother, teeth missing, laughs and says something along the lines of, the white man is afraid. Too right, I think. Someone’s going to get snap-snapped in all of this.
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