It's a Jungle Out There
It's not all fun and games, you know. Us travellers have our share of problems too.
For example: You've just come back from an afternoon of languishing on a white sand beach and splashing in the warm water. When you jump off the longtail boat and start the walk to your guest-house, how exactly do you get all that fine powdery sand off your feet before putting your sandals on? If you wash your feet off at the seashore, you've got sand gritting away in your sandals by the time you make it to the road. If you go barefoot and try to brush off the sand at the roadside it's impossible to get it all. What to do? What to do?
Or, sure I've got a lovely room for 150
baht (about $5.50) here in
Ao Nang
,
and yes I get to walk through lush shaded
grounds filled with tropical plants and trees to get to my door, and yes I've
got a shaded porch with a table and couple of chairs to sit on and read in the
shade of these lush grounds, but it comes at a high price you know. Just as
dawn starts to break these same beautiful grounds turn out to host a thousand
different kinds of exotic birds, cicadas and other loud insects, and a clack
of bassoon-sounding frogs - all intent on making the biggest racket to
welcome the dawn. Try sleeping through that.
Or, suppose you're on
Railey Beach
.
Yeah, yeah - it's gorgeous with perfect water, tropical sand, fringed with
palm trees, surrounded by huge limestone cliffs, and dotted with shaded little
cafes under the palms where you can have a beer or some lunch if you wish.
Hardship occurs here as well. For example, in the astonishing heat of
mid-afternoon I found a perfectly shaded stretch of beach under a lovely
over-hanging tree and proceeded to stretch out on my sarong for an afternoon
snooze. No sooner did I start to drift off when a gang of monkeys decided to
have lunch in the branches directly above me, dropping their fruit pits around
and on my perfect spot. I had to move.
So you see, it's not all perfectly blissful. There are challenges to overcome everyday.
I particularly like the idea of a "day
off" here. That's what I'm having today is a day off. Yesterday I signed up
for a four island tour where we spent the day
island hopping
and snorkelling above the corral and through huge schools of fish. Tomorrow I start my open
water diving course. So today is a "day off". That's when you sleep in, slowly
drink tea while watching the world wander by, do some banking, hit the
Internet, and have a few beers when the hot sun goes down. It's important to
rest every now and then, hence the need for days off every now and
then.
Oh, and another problem... After my scuba course I have to figure out where to go next, and what to do. Right now I have no idea what it will be. Siboya perhaps?
Well, off I go into this hot day to see what challenges it may throw my way. I think I'll take a big bottle of pineapple juice to a shady spot on the beach and study my dive book in prep for tomorrow.
Pop gun mai... (See you later...)