Island Hopping

So we decided to make our tent on Koh Adang and found it wasn’t nearly as well-kept as Tarutao. Garbage stink stunk, and there was just something funny about the staff. The snorkeling right off the beach was excellent and I was finding Nemos all over the place. Happy versions with two surviving adults and a little one flittering around inside an anemone. But suddenly I started feeling pin pricks all over my skin, even through my long sleeve shirt (which I wear snorkeling and refer to as the ultimate sunblock 50/50). I was being stung, nothing too painful, but then the numbers started to amount and gave me the feeling of a swarm of small bees. What the heck was going on? I saw some fragments of a jellyfish that perhaps had had an encounter with the prop of a longtail and figured that was the problem. Tried again later but felt the same “attack” of stingers. Toward dusk three men from a local ferry boat moored in the sand a couple hundred feet from our tent sat down on the log in front of the tent and stared at us over their shoulders as we went about doing camping stuff (swatting mosquitoes, scratching bites, hanging things to dry, unhanging them to see if they’re dry, hanging them again with a frown). Well, Moe Larry and Curly gave us both the heebie-jeebies, seedy looking as they were. So next morn after lying awake listening to every little sound the entire night, we broke camp and headed back across to Lipe, the other island which is full of little cabanas and bungalows and an actual community. And tourists with strollers in the sand. And this is when the snorkeling really got good!