Friday 14 November – stormy kayaking

This morning we headed in the other direction in the kayak, to find another wall with some rock art on it. It was a longer paddle to get there, once again surrounded by hundreds of bizarre karst (eroded limestone) islands. It is like a maze, navigating through it, quite a challenge. We just have Rowan’s phone, as the kayak is not the most stable of floating devices. The phone is in a ziplock, but we have no signal, so makes it all a little more difficult. We finally found the paintings, very similar to yesterday’s, all in the same red paint/dye. Once again with the hand prints high up. Rowan wanted a bit more exercise so we decided to take a long route around to get PolePole. We had been going a little while when we realised the enormous dark cloud was coming our way. Suddenly you could hear the wind whistle through the islands, and the squall arrived. Trying to wiggle our way back while navigating with the phone in the rain, was not the easiest. It was not the most direct path back, I got rather twitchy the waves were going to pick up and we still had one fairly exposed area to cross. The rain came and the wind whipped up the water but luckily the main force of the squall missed us. We paddled hard to get home quickly especially when we heard the thunder. We were glad to be back on PolePole when we had a huge deluge of rain about 20 minutes later. A couple of hours paddling in those conditions was the most exercise we have done in a very long time.

We spent the rest of the afternoon recovering from our energetic and tense morning.The evenings are wonderful, so peaceful, nobody about, and the noise of the birds, frogs and insects is magical in our enclosed anchorage and a good antidote to the tense morning! Again we watched the groups of Hornbills coming home to roost in the big trees. The wonderful thing about this jungle is that it is pristine because it is totally inaccessible to humans. There are a few Homestays a little further away, but they are all built out onto the water. No wonder there is no village right here, these karst islands islands are so inhospitable. There are a few tourist boats/pinisis about, but none near us. I don’t think they would risk coming this far in.