Langkawi Paddling Day 3 - A beach too far

I never had such a easy time launching off on expedition day. We had a leisurely brunch, packed slowly in the air-conditioned comfort of the room, and then moved everything out to the beach at the checkout time of noon. We were quite a sight there on the beach, with everyone else lazing under the sun on deck chairs while the two of us moved around building our boats. I think many of the tourists there are envious of our freedom.

A Cambodian-Chinese man was fascinated with our trip and offered to take pictures for us before we set off. It's pretty hard to get couple photos when there's only 2 of you on the trip.

I think we spent another 20 minutes floating on the water after going out, adjusting our gear and so on. Karen's pinning a scarf onto her hat so that she can get all-round face protection against the strong sun.

The pink bandit. It didn't last long however - she reported being nauseous trying to breathe through the scarf, and gave up the idea early in the trip.

So what happened was that we started the paddling just before 3pm. The wind was demonically strong and the spring tide against us, making us go at a little more than 1km/h around a jetty. We passed a becah at 5pm, at which point I persuaded her to go further seeing that there's 2 more hours of light. Bad decision. The strong winds blew unabated and it turns out that that was the last patch of sand for that stretch! After an hour, we could only see jetties and ports stretching all the way up, and the town of Kuah still 8km away.

We wasn't mentally prepared to do night paddling, and pounced upon this fishing boat with 3 men, wanting to get them to help tow us to the nearest beach. They couldn't understand our English and we couldn't say more than a handful of Malay words, and initially they thought we were asking for directions. They intended to stay at the spot to fish overnight, and were reluctant to leave and return, but they gave in eventually after some pleading from us. Thank goodness we were pretty good with Charades.

We clambered on board and their motor boat towed the kayaks alongside. It was totally dark by then, and we travelled for 30 minutes before we entered a small river outlet at a village area. We basically camped on the ground beside the small boat pier, attracting much curious attention from the locals with our camping activity.

It was saturday night, and the KTV session nearby screeched till 3am. There was also a constant stream of people walking by our tent, apparently to fish at the pier. The sleep wasn't good, needless to say.