Boy, that was brutal!
Looks cheerful I’ll grant you. But the reality of the ferry from Koh Lipe to our next destination, Ko Libong, was an hour of spine-shuddering, filling-loosening impacts, as the boat took off from one wave only to hammer down onto the next. Absolutely relentless. The next hour or so, the sea was calmer, and it was just very, very bumpy, but that first hour was like nothing I’ve experienced. Imagine being driven down a hard-packed dirt track littered with deep potholes, mounds and trenches, and the occasional tree lying across the road, at an unyielding 40mph, with absolutely no let up, and you get some kind of idea.
If we don’t do that again anytime soon it’ll be quite soon enough for me.
But we’ve arrived! Here we are on Ko Libong, and very nice it is too. Even at a glance, rather less posh than Koh Lipe – a bit more reminiscent of Vietnam, in its scruffiness and basicness. No Walking Street here. The tuk tuk ride from the ferry to our ‘hotel’ took us through a rather modest looking village, with no concessions to tourism: just a handful of very basic buildings, one or two locals, and a few dogs lolling about by the side of the road. It all feels really simple and unspoiled, and all the better for it.
And company! Our friends Jessica and Jens came our way on the one road on hired scooters as we were on our way here – they’ve been here a couple of days; enough to give us the lowdown on restaurants and the like, and to let us have one of their hired scooters, which we’ve used to come back to our very basic room foir a bit of a siesta before heading back to theirs for, well, nothing very much, since that appears to be what Ko Libong has to offer. But it is lovely to sit out here on the verandah with nothing around but rustling palms, the occasional tail-wagging dog, and the sound of the sea lapping the shore, not 50 metres from where I sit.