Camping Adventure!

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We heard about a beach a couple of hours away that stretches for 20km with no people on it, clear blue water and a mountain. As there would be nowhere to stay, we thought it would be a good idea to camp there. The place really lived up to its descriptions, as you can see on the pictures. Also if you look at the map, you can see just how long and straight the beach is, stretching all the way up the north east coast with no towns anywhere along it. It's amazing that a place like this goes unvisited, with not a single provision for tourists.

You'd imagine that as a result it would be really clean and natural-looking, but strangely enough, deserted beaches like this are actually the opposite, because all the crap that drifts in from the sea doesn't get cleaned up. A cargo boat of footwear and collectable lightbulbs must have sunk, because there were more different kinds of lightbulbs than you even knew existed, covering the beach. They looked out of place amongst the crabs, bamboo and lush mountainous backdrop.

To reach the beach, we had to take tuk-tuks down a track through the woods, and then persuade a fisherman to take us across a river. Without crossing the river, there is no other way to get there, so the fishermen had originally tried to charge us a ridiculous amount of money to go across on the floating platform contraption thing you can see in the video.

It hadn't rained the whole two weeks we had been in China, and of course on the day we decided to camp on a deserted beach, it chucked it down tropical style. But only briefly. The bonus of the stormy weather was that, when we went swimming in the middle of the night, we could see the storms happening miles out to sea, so every few seconds the horizon would light up and the clouds somehow turned different colours. It looked a bit like the northern lights. Something else that I doubt I will ever see again, was that some combination of the crystal clear water, the strong headlights of a boat in the distance, the darkness, and light-reflecting algae, meant that every time we moved our hands or feet underwater, we could see these amazing little sparkly lights coming off our skin. Me and Ben stayed in the water for about an hour, just marvelling at the sparkles and the lightning. The girls, who weren't impressed by us dragging them into the sea to see the sparkles, have been teasing us ever since for describing it as being like fairy dust. In hindsight it wasn't the most manly of moments.

Down the beach, we could see what looked like a tug-of-war happening. It turned out that half the fishing village had assembled, as they do every day, to tug on the huge rope that went out to sea with a net attached to it, and bring in the haul of squid and fish. To restore some dignity, we approached them and haggled for a juicy fish from the catch (still wriggling in my hand as we carried it away!), gutted it and cooked it in some bamboo driftwood over the fire. That bamboo oven fell apart a couple of times, but the fish actually tasted brilliant when it was done!

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Photos

view from mountain
the beach is empty and stretches as far as the eye can see

restaurant kitchen in the town we stopped at half way
a lot of restaurants seem to use this kind of victorian-style wood oven, and you can often just wonder into the cooking area and watch them chopping the strange body parts with a dirty knife on a chopping board covered in guts. Somehow we haven't had food poisoning once and it's always tasty.