With Joaquin out of the race (as he was still hitting the bathroom every other minute), Tim and I decided to go to the monkey bay. It’s supposed to be a really nice beach next to ours, that you can reach by a short jungle trail (~1h) and which is inhabited by lots of monkeys (hence the name). But then Maria (the Bavarian girl) told us, that she went to monkey bay the day before and that the trail was barely existing and that you had to force your way through the jungle with no orientation. But we would be going in the right direction, if we would follow the electricity lines… this sounded way to complicated for us, so we decided to try to go by boat. We went to a place that rented kayaks and got one for two people at 20 Ringits per hour (~4€), which was cheap enough for us. They got me a waterproof bag to put our stuff in and I put my camera in my Aquapac (a little waterproof plastic bag, that protects the camera and allows you to take underwater shots until a depth of 5m).

So we went off, but I didn’t take long, until we noticed, that this wasn’t as easy as it sounded. We had troubles going in a straight line and without any clouds the sun was burning really strong. It was fund, but it got really exhausting and we decided not to go to monkey bay and just to the other end of the beach, which wasn’t that bad either.

But as the tide was still very low at that time, there were ton’s of stones and swimming wasn’t really an option. So we head back after a few minutes. We were only out for about 1,5h, but it was still fun as you could see lots of corrals and fish through the clear water and we got a really nice few of the island:

I then used the rest of the day to get some tanning done (so I don’t get a sunburn whenever I walk out the shadow, with my german-winter-skin), read a little in my book and walked around the beach to take some more pictures. A really magnificent place here. I just hope I get to a better internet connection soon, so I can upload some more images for the last few posts…

As it was Saturday, there wasn’t any school for the local kids, so the island was filled with tons of kids playing. Imagine growing up in a wonderful place like this… Besides the few tourists and the locals the island is filled with dozens of cats. They’re all pretty thin (I’m not sure why, as there must be enough animals for them to catch, as the mouse I found in my bungalow that night, for example), so they always lure around the restaurants and hope that something falls of the table. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to touch them or not, as they carry a whole different batch of bacteria’s as european cats. And many of them seem to have some genetic dysfunction: many have a really short tail, as if somebody had cut it off.

Somehow I felt like it might be time to move on so I decided to take the ferry at the next day and leave the island. When I told Joaquin, he informed me that they had changed the ferry schedule and that it would be leaving now at 7:00 am instead of 4:00 pm. I wasn’t in the mood to get up that early and I didn’t know how good the bus connections would be on a Sunday, so I postponed my plans and decided to leave on Monday morning, so I would have another day for planning, packing my stuff and relaxing in paradise….

… and how was your day?

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