Today I went on my first ‘touristy’ thing since I’ve been here. You know, I hate to admit it that It was just what I needed. I’ve said it to other people and I guess I needed to hear the same thing, the reason people do touristy things is because they’re usually fun. It was a fun day.
The itinerary said that it would be a full day of kayaking and sightseeing, including a visit to feed some ‘friendly monkeys.’ I could have sworn that some snorkeling was involved, but I think I may have misread or confused this trip with another, because we didn’t do any snorkeling.
The truc picked me up at about 8am and made the rounds to pick up the other people who were going along. When I got on the truck there were already two young girls on board. You could tell that they were the shy nervous type… It turns out that they were from Myanmar and to be honest I was glad that the trip wasn’t full of Aussies or Europeans. When we finally emptied out of the truck there was a total of about 8 of us and two were small children. We arrived at the dock at about 9 that we would board a traditional fishing boat called a long-tail boat that would take us to the spot where we would do some kayaking.
It wasn’t that long, maybe thirty minutes before the long-tail boat pushed up on the very small beach where we were to begin our kayaking adventure. As each kayak was lowered to the water two people would jump on and start paddling out to wait for the rest of us. I kind of hung back because as I’m always so painfully reminded, I’m by myself and don’t quite know who’s going to be with me. I can compare it to being the last to be picked for a team. You watch as people start leaving and pretty soon you’re the only one left. It turns out that the guy who is in charge is going to be with me. While we were getting set I look over at the two girls from Myanmar and they are floundering… they are going in every direction but the direction everyone else is going. It was so funny to watch them. It wasn’t long before the guy in charge switches the girls with us, I was with one of the girls and he was with the other. The girl I was with was named Bam.
After the kayaking we jumped back on the long-tail and headed to a small island for lunch. The island was beautiful and the lunch was okay. We were there for probably an hour, but probably closer to two. To get a feel for the island, it’s got white sand beaches and little to no waves. The water is warm, in fact any warmer it probably would be too warm Nearly everyone in the group went for a swim and took a nap afterwards… that is except for Bam and her friend, they just hung out at the table we ate lunch at. They didn’t get up or move the whole time, I even tried to convince them to go swimming, but with no luck.
We loaded up the long-tail and headed to a mangrove area that had ‘friendly’ monkeys, if you were to believe the brochure. Turns out the brochure was pretty accurate. These monkeys have grown accustomed to people feeding them so they are pretty friendly. We had a few jump in the boat and steal things, mostly just garbage, but it was fun to see. I’ll post photos since it would take too long to explain.
We spent about thirty minutes feeding the monkeys and soon we were on our way back to the dock. It was a good time and although I think I would have enjoyed more kayaking than we did, I can say that I had fun and glad that I went.
