I Am Kayak, Hear Me Roar

And what does this picture have to do with the post, you may ask? Well, nothing. I just saw this little statue of Ganesha over a fountain and had to stop and take a picture. On with the real post . . .

After getting a van from Trang to Surat Thani, I got the night ferry to Koh Tao. The guide book warned it was more of a cargo ship than an actual ferry, and so not to expect comfort, but I figured I'd be fine and didn't want to find a hotel room to wait for the next ferry. Riding the night ferry was . . . well, an adventure, if you get to sleep during an adventure. True to the guidebook, the bottom deck was full of cargo, like crates of water and alcoholic beverages. A few motorcycles made it on board. The top two decks were full of very thin, narrow mattresses. And when I say deck--well, perhaps they were hoping to be decks when they grow up a little, because they were only about four feet high. I found my assigned mattress without too much trouble, as it was on an end (lucky), but had to double over to get to it. When I first saw the beds, my first thoughts were: 1) Yay, I get to lay down instead of sitting up all night like on a bus, and 2) You know, the proportions here are a little reminiscent of berths described on slave ships from that movie "Amazing Grace" . . . (great movie, btw. If you haven't seen it, go watch it now.) The girls who crawled in after me and settled on the mattresses next to mine had a more positive view: "it's like an enforced sleep-over!" I did get to sleep, and yeah, it wasn't too bad.

The boat pulled into Koh Tao in the gray, rainy morning. Which meant the island didn't give the best first impression. When the rain stopped, I decided to just walk around for a bit and ask at a few places before I settled on a place to stay. I had lunch, read the first quarter or so of Brahm Stoker's Dracula, took a nap, and walked on the beach. Not a great beach, as beaches go. Not one of those that calls to the world, "come lie on my sands and swim in my water." It was sort of mucky. I did have some very good pizza for dinner, though, and ended my day on an "oh, well" sort of note.

This is the morning that greeted me yesterday:

It's amazing the difference a little bit of sun makes. The beach still qualified as kind of mucky, however, no matter what you might think of the picture. So after a leisurely late breakfast and some more reading, I rented a kayak for half a day:

. . . and spent about four hours paddling around and humming pirate songs to myself (as per the Slater sibling kayaking tradition beginning circa August 2003). The kayak, unlike the ones I've experienced in Seattle, was more a sort of aero-dynamic plastic raft with a paddle than anything else (the ones in the Seattle area almost always have rudders), with strategically placed drainage holes that guaranteed a saturated bum. But at 200 baht per half-day, I wasn't going to complain. I started out from about midway down Sairee Beach and made it all the way around the nearby island Nangyuan--which, given that my upper body strength is, well, negligible, felt like quite the accomplishment.

I finally understand the phrase "turquoise waters"--I don't think I'd ever seen a body of water that didn't look more sea green (or murky green) than turquoise, but once I got away from the shore, there was no other word for the color. The guy who carried the kayak down to the beach for me warned that the coral was quite shallow close to the shore, so I'd have to be careful not to scrape the bottom of the kayak and sort of zigzag out into deeper water. I wasn't quite prepared for just how shallow it was--less than two feet down, I got to see tiny fish darting to safety as I passed. You can sort of see it here:

When I got into deeper water, I caught glimpses of schools of fish around the island, some with bright yellow tails, some tiny and silvery, and some with stripes similar to the tiger barbs I kept in an aquarium when I was little. Unlike kayaking in Seattle, there were no seal heads that popped up, and there were more butterflies than sea birds passing overhead. And I got to see things like this:

and this:

Which don't look as huge and impressive in photographs as they did in real life.

You've probably lost all curiosity by now, but the title of my post comes from an episode of Gilmore Girls, in which one of the characters compares herself and her husband to two people paddling a canoe, which will go in circles if one person stops paddling; and then she compares her daughter to one person paddling a kayak, with power to steer herself because she can paddle on both sides instead of just one. Sometimes it's daunting to be traveling alone, and sometimes it's just plain lonely. When I first got to Koh Tao and sat at the dock waiting for the rain to stop, I watched several couples and other tourist groups help each other unpack rain gear. And there have been several moments when I've had the thought, "I'm the only one seeing this" and I haven't had anybody at hand to whom to point out some curiosity or wonder. While there are always new friends to be made, it's mostly brief acquaintances. Not that traveling on my own hasn't been a good experience, overall--I get to choose what to see, travel according to my own preferences and in my own time. But for the past few days I was feeling the lonelier side of the experience. Kayaking helped with that a bit, I think--it's an empowering feeling to go somewhere and see amazing things under your own steam. I don't need to wait for somebody else to do something amazing. I am a kayak, not a canoe.

I'll admit, though, that my arms and shoulders are very sore this morning.