Hike Around the Island

I didn’t sleep very well last night. I’ve learned a very important lesson: don’t give a young Malaysian a beer, a guitar and a Karaoke machine because he spends the entire night playing the same notes and wailing loudly like he’s Elvis Presley.

The owners D’lagoon left the “boys” in charge of the restaurant for the evening and to celebrate they spent the night drinking and singing bad karaoke music. At some point in the middle of the night I heard Mari in the next room say, God, please make it stop, which echoed my sentiments exactly.

As a rather unusual adventure, we took a motor boat to one of the tiny villages on the other side of the island with the intent of hiking around the island to Long Beach and then take a boat back to the D’Lagoon.

While in the village there were lots of interesting sights:

• The quiet woman: sitting quietly with a white cloth wrapped around her head, yellow flowering top, missing teeth, orange and blue sarong. Later, she started to give everyone orders.
• The owner of the store: casual, hips swaying, blue flowered top, flat circular face, green, red, yellow flowered sarong. She helped me learn numbers in Malay and also translate how much money I owe when making a purchase.
• A man with a pox marked face: laughing, brown top, chequered sarong, blue flip flops.
• The children: Two kids one in pink and one in white trying to climb in a hole of a chicken coup, a little girl sitting buck naked by the water making sandcastles.
• Other Adults: A woman drinking milk out of a bag, five westerners enjoying sodas in the store.
• Animals and Stuff: Shaggy goats looking for food, a goat eating a cigarette, Muslim chants blaring over a loud speaker, multi-coloured garbage cans that look like red and yellow khaki, packs of sheep looking for food, a sheep stealing a piece of lettuce from a store, a plaid baby swing blowing in the wind, little huts with people lounging trying to get out of the sun, one post box, multi-coloured boats in the harbour, red ones, green ones, yellow ones like a box of Smarties.

Finding the path that goes around the island was a chore. We passed a police depot with armed guards. There must be a lot of drug activity on the Malay / Thai border, why else would there we such a police presence. The end of the village was loaded with garbage, fishing lines, crab traps, bottles, cans, a scuba tanks, plastic bags, bones, corals, and rope.

We eventually found the trail, which was fairly steep and full of rocks, vines, roots and lizards. It was actually a very nice walk, much like any Canadian wilderness walk. About fifteen minutes after finding the path we came upon Petani Beach and the Petani Chalet. This is a very nice setting with a gorgeous nice beach and a hammock between two coconut trees. The beach sign above the beach says: “Beware of Falling Coconuts.”

There are five small cabins which overlook a grassy area. It reminds me a bit of camp ground areas I went to as a kid. There is a small dinning platform where we all sat and had mango juice drinks. The guy who owns the place sat on the steps while little black and white kittens crawled all over him. He is a very gentle person with a circular face, a pony tail and a nice smile. They have collected pottery from the ocean and are proudly displaying blue china, barnacle covered grey pottery, shells, and red pottery hand decorated probably with a shell.

We continued along the path until we reached the next beach, Mira Beach, an almost deserted expanse. There are mango, banana and coconut trees around all the houses and here we went for a swim to cool off. It was by far the most beautiful of the beaches with its riveted sandy bottom and lack of coral. There are several huts that overlook the beach and many vacancies because the owner was in Kuala Lumpur having a baby. There are wooden chairs on the beach and a giant white object stuck in the sand. It says Perikanah, Mayalsia on the side. Ropes hang off trees so you can swing off the rocks and fall into the ocean. In a relatively large dining hut with pink flowers on its roof a mysterious cat lounged on the bar while its kittens played in the dining area.

We ventured further down the island until we reached Coral Bay, a long and impressive expanse of beach with frequent turtle and wildlife sightings. This is scuba paradise and seemed to be where all the divers were staying. We talked to one fellow who just came back from a dive where he happened upon a Whale Shark, which must have been about 20 feet long. The water here is very blue and on the beach are gads of people playing volleyball, playing with red smoke firecrackers, and other toys (like a red toy that made noise when it was in the air).

The journey back to D’lagoon was relatively quick from here. We took a path that cuts across the island to Long Beach (short and very well used) and then caught our boat back to the lagoon. In all the entire hike from start to finish took around 4 hours to complete.