And also this young chap, who was handling one of the other boats with what looked like a masterful hand, while his father, presumably, was down in the boondocks chatting with a punter.
And they were wonderful. Must confess I was more than half expecting the whole thing to be a complete washout – one of those occasions where you travel days, spend a packet, and end up with people apologising because, well, it’s sad we didn’t actually get to see any, but that happens…
But it didn’t! We hadn’t been out for long before we saw the first – a back, sliding out of the water, and down again – and before long we saw many more. They were hard to catch on camera, but I did get one or two half-decent shots…
Strange how one of the most moving things about the whole experience was the noise of their breathing. Reminiscent of my encounter with the deadly king cobra back in Thailand – it was the strangely familiar breathing that really brought home their reality as animals, real sentient beings, sort of like us. It sounds weird, but sometimes there’s an unreality about such encounters. Breathing makes it suddenly very real.
Anyway, they were wonderful, and we felt privileged to see them.
After that, Suk – our homestay owner and tuk tuk driver for the day – suggested we might like to visit the mountain. Well, we’re always up for a mountain, so off we went.
In the event it proved to be not so much a mountain as a hill – though by a margin the highest thing around – and one with a Buddhist temple on top. It was quite a climb in the midday sun, and then we had to beware of the monkeys, which we were told could be aggressive, but it all turned out fine, and the monkeys behaved themselves. Apart from one baby, which showed signs of wanting to climb up me. Poor sport that I am, I declined the honour, feeling shoddy but…
Come the afternoon, we took a trip over to Koh Trong island. We just missed the ferry, and, having read that that could mean a wait of anything up to an hour (‘the ferry goes when the ferryman decides it’s full enough’) we negotiated with a chap who was going back anyway, and got taken across in our own boat for 5,000 riel – a little over a dollar. Arriving on a shore alongside a bunch of meagre shelters, we walked along gormlessly in the burning heat, wondering where we might be able to find the bicycles we’d heard were for hire. Poking my head round the corner of one, I found myself confronting half a dozen or so teens, who were instantly reduced to helpless laughter by my appearance, and proved amiably useless when it came to getting any useful information.
So Virle fired up one of her map apps, and we set off across the sandy waste. It was seriously hot, and we weren’t at all sure where we going, but soon enough we stumbled across a track of sorts and, following that, we found ourselves after five or ten minutes at a small collection of buildings, one of which hired bikes. $2 apiece and we were on our way. And very nice it was too. The path was good, there were (there are) no cars or anything more intrusive than a scooter, and we worked our way happily round the island, at one point encountering the famous Vietnamese floating village, which apparently is indeed entirely Vietnamese, and did appear to be floating.
After that it was time to continue round the island, stop off at a cafe to polish off an ice cream and a one and a half litre bottle of cold water, return the bikes, and head back to the beach, arriving just in time to see – yes – the ferry once again leaving just as we arrived. Goddamit! I don’t know how long we waited in the heat, but it felt like a long time. Maybe 45 minutes? Something like that. Eventually of course the ferry did come back, and we piled on, along with fellow passengers including an astonishingly drunk and very cheerful motorcyclist, who tried to engage us in conversation, but eventually gave up on us as a lost cause.
And so back to the mainland, where we decided to walk back to our homestay rather than take a tuk tuk – it was only half an hour or so, we have some serious walking coming up in Vietnam soon, and we’re proper out of practice. Back then, and a very nice dinner, in the company of our fellow homestayers, followed by a display of Cambodian traditional dancing (and the Macarena) by the 12 year old daughter of Suk, the homestay man.
And now to bed, even though it’s not even ten. Because those damn cockerels will be waking us for sure again at 4.30 in the morning.