After the madness of yesterday we decided to make today a chill day. Ish. These things are relative.
We love Delft. The island is proper special, with a wildness and a peace and a calming vibe like nowhere else we’ve been. And in truth it actually doesn’t hurt that there really is bugger all to do here. For starters, most of the island is filled with nothing. The population is apparently in the low thousands – and it’s actually hard to believe it’s as many as that – and pretty much all live in or immediately around the one small, quiet village. Most of the island is nothing but flatlands, dotted with lakes, covered in palm trees and surrounded by coral.
The one must-see is wild horses, so this morning (typically long after the recommended ‘early morning or late evening’ time) we climbed onto a brace of decidedly shonky bicycles (brakes are for wimps) and set off to see if we could find them. A couple of Malaysian women, having returned from their trip at the recommended early hour, reported having seen one. Count it: one. Well, we had better luck.
Barely fifteen minutes out, Virle spotted them. Over t’other side of a lake. At first we could only see two or three, but as we approached we saw more and more. Unfazed by our presence, they carried on about their business of wading in the shallows or nibbling the tough grass, while we sat around and admired them. After half an hour or so we decided that despite the increasing heat, we’d forge on and head for the one other landmark that offered itself: a watchtower, on the other side of the island. It was fairly easy going despite the awful roads, which gave our bikes a good rattling and our bums a battering, thanks to a stiff following wind.
After another draining half hour or so we stopped and briefly considered copping out and heading back, mindful that the helpful wind would be in our faces all the way back. Still two and a half k’s to this here watchtower, so promising it didn’t even merit a pic on google, and the road was increasingly broken, the sun increasingly fierce. I suggested Virle try going the other way for a hundred metres to get a feel for what we’d be faced with. ‘It’ll basically be like cycling uphill all the way back.’ She gave it a go. ‘It’s not too bad,’ she said, ‘let’s go on.’ That’s my girl!
Eventually we reached the watchtower, which proved to be a mighty combination of logs, corrugated iron and barbed wire, at least five metres high. Seriously? Er, yup. A couple of local lads out checking their nets at least gave me one photo op to add to the horses. Not much, but not every day delivers a bucketload of pics, what?
And that was pretty much that. We came back by an alternative route. I should say, ‘the’ alternative route. Which proved a good decision: the roads were still little more than rocky tracks, but occasional tree-lined sections offered at least some respite from the wind. An hour or so later we got back to Delft Village Stay, drained and seriously bum-sore, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, innit.
We lunched happily on Bombay mix and a mango we’d brought from the mainland. (Call me a philistine, but I still say nothing made by Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay or Heston bloomin’ Blumenthal ever tasted half so good as a perfectly ripe mango on a tropical island.) Then we settled down to see out the remaining heat of the day around our room: V outside on a camp bed reading a book, me in here happily standing by Ben E King and tippy-tapping away.
Late afternoon, when the heat of the sun was done, we wandered back down the beach, where I went for a swim and Virle had a swing. Lively swimming, in the tumbling surf, and you have to be careful, because not far under the water are boulders of coral – very nasty stuff to be picked up by a wave and scraped onto. But it was great, all the more so because until we got here I hadn’t had a swim for upwards of a fortnight – as a daily swimmer, I do miss it.
Coral, in passing, is everywhere. It’s kind of strange, because you hear so much about it being endangered by climate change, it’s kind of odd to be in a place where it is the ubiquitous building material. Every wall, every quayside, anywhere you’d expect rock or bricks, is covered with strange, fossil-looking patterns.