Lorna called me at 7:30 so waking up in time turned out not to be such a problem after all. I finished packing quickly, putting everything I needed for our island stay into my day pack and one of the hotel’s laundry bags. My backpack would be left in Wizit’s office in Trang to be picked up on my way back to Bangkok. Our guide for the day picked us and all our island luggage up at nine and we drove to what was described in the Gecko itinerary as a sea gypsy village, but which, for our purposes, simply was the place where the boats were kept. With Sue and Steve sharing one canoe, and Lorna, Charlotte and I in the other, we set off for the mangrove swamps that lie near the coast. We were towed most of the way there, and then released to paddle through the mangroves. The boats were very unstable, so I didn’t take my camera.

I always imagined a swamp as a sticky, gooey kind of place like the one in Star Wars where Skywalker goes to meet Yoda (I’m not a true fan, as I can’t remember the name of the planet, but it does the job as a good swamp example). Anyway, these mangrove swamps were not at all like my mental swamp. The water was clear, and the mangroves grew in clumps where the water got very shallow or the mud protruded. It was very much like canoeing down a river, except that it split and merged a lot. The canoes weaved through the corridors of water between the thickets of mangroves, and finally approached the sea caves that I had been looking forward to.

The entrance to the caves was a wide section of cliff face that just seemed to end before reaching the water. Not by much though – I only had about 20 or 30 cm headroom as we floated into the opening. A passage went off to the left, and as we turned, the light from the entrance disappeared. Torches were turned on and trained on the ceiling as it decended in on us. With the torches providing the only light, we navigated the boats through the maze of tunnels, mostly using our hands on the rocky roof to propel the canoes. At one point the roof was so low that we had to lie completely flat in the canoes to get past.

The size of the cave network was impressive, though the time passed quickly as the canoes negotiated the maze in the semidarkness. The tide was just right – high enough to allow us to easily reach the roof in most places, but no so high that the route became entirely impassable. Inside, the caves were hot, dark and damp – the water looked like oil without any light on it, but it was actually clear.

All too soon we emerged back into the blinding sunlight, through which we paddled to a second, dry, cave system. Torches came out again although daylight usually filtered through as we made our way into the cave on foot. The walls were largely made of a kind of rock that, whilst pale and dull in shadow, shone with thousands of sparks of refected light when a torch was played across it.

The beauty of the rock was not to be the only attraction of this cave though. As we moved further inside a sound which had been nudging the edge of my consious mind started to get louder. I can best describe it as a high pitched mixture of a chirp and a squeak, but as though from many sources, like thousands of voices singing at the same time. I had seen bats before in our earlier cave visits, but I had never heard them, and there were certainly a lot of them here.

The light in this cave was getting too dim to see the bats, but the noise was unavoidable. It rose and rose, and as we reached the furthest point that the guides were willing to take us, the sound was almost deafening, coming from all directions. It was as if I were standing in the middle of a stadium, listening to the roar of the crowd, but unable to see them. We made our way back to the canoes.

In the late afternoon we boarded a long tail boat for the short trip to Koh Muk, an island where we would be spending the last few days of the tour. As the boat neared the island it showed itself to be a perfect, idyllic tropical island, complete with white sandy beaches. Coming ashore, this impression proved to be largely correct, except for the odd piece of litter lying around. I realised that I’d left my sandals on the mainland, but didn’t mind too much – I didn’t like them anyway. I tied up a hammock I had borrowed from Charlotte and watched the sunset on the beach.