After breakfast we left the island for another, smaller one nearby. This turned out to be a picture-perfect, deserted, idylic tropical island, selected for its coral reef. Snorkling gear was produced, and we spent the morning gazing down at the coral formations and schools of fish. I was slightly disappointed by the reef, but it would be tough to beat the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. After a couple of hours a boatload of Thai tourists and a couple of property surveyors arrived and made our island a lot less deserted, although no less idyllic.

We left around 2pm to go see the ‘Emerald Cave’, a tiny tropical beach competely surroounded by high walls of limestone that restricted access to a narrow sea tunnel through the rock. We formed a chain as we swam into the tunnel entrance. A number of turns made the central section of the tunnel completely dark, so I found myself swimming onwards without being able to see where I was going, the person I was holding on to, or even the water I was swimming in. It is the most strange and exciting experience to swim in complete darkness. As we turned a corner there appeared to be another branch of the tunnel going off in the opposite direction. I wondered whether it eventually led to the beach or the outside, or maybe it just wound endlessly round inside the rock.

A sense of triumph prevailed, rather like reaching the proverbial ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, but in a literal sense. The small beach at the tunnel exit created a fan shaped bay that bulged as water surged in and out of the tunnel rythmically. I was surprised that waves managed to penetrate the tunnel at all. The water didn’t justify the term ‘emerald’ though. A quick questioning of Charlotte revealed that the water shines green when the sun is high and can get down to the ground level inside the cave. But it wasn’t, so it didn’t. Seemed like bad planning to me.

Someone had written their name in the sand on the beach. Having made appropriately dissapproving noises, we set about doing the same, and as we left the names “Steve”, “Sue”, “Lorna”, “Charlotte”, and “Andrew” adorned the beach, along with the instigator’s offering (which was now rather feeble in comparison). Hurried on by the tide, which rises to completely submerge the tunnel, we swam back out of the cave, and took the boat back to Koh Muk.

In the evening I started to feel the effects of the sun, and accepted the inevitable sunburn that I will no doubt suffer from tommorrow.