Sorry for the Group Email

I don’t think I’ve explained the “leg” thing very well.

Our journey is divided into legs. The first was St Petersburg to China, the second from Beijing to Hong Kong, the third from Bangkok to southern Thailand via the rest of the region, and the third is Malaysia to Singapore. Then it’s Indonesia, then Australia, then Alaska to San José, Costa Rica. Six legs in total, with a little half-leg thrown in in Hawaii.

As we left Ko Tarutao, the third leg of our trip ended. The day before we had bought boat tickets to Ko Lipe. Ko Lipe is a slightly more developed island to the south of Tarutao, and it’s from there that you can catch a boat to Langkawi, Malaysia’s northernmost isle. There were two kinds of tickets on offer: ferry and speedboat. Because of the dearth of tourists, both boats cost the same amount, so we plumped for saving an hour and got on the speedboat.

The night before, we’d wandered into the black surf along the beach of Ko Tarutao, and remarked on how extraordinarily rough the water was. The waves were big and powerful, and we beat a hasty retreat as we came within inches of being knocked off our feet. We didn’t realise it at the time, but we were getting the very tail end of Cyclone Nargis, which at the time was flattening large expanses of Burma. It was, perhaps, not the best time to board a boat.

The speedboat that growled up to the jetty at Taratao had three 225bhp engines on the back. The thing about ferries is that, despite being slow, their ponderous progress across the ocean is pretty reliable. Unless they’re overloaded or dreadfully unseaworthy they tend not to sink or crash, instead pitching up one side of the wave and then gently pivoting across the top of it and sliding down the other side. It’s certainly nauseating, but your greatest wish is simply to get off the boat, rather than a fervent and heartfelt prayer to survive.

My worst experience on a boat was on a trip for journalists. An electronics firm was sponsoring a yacht in an around the world race that launched from Southampton, and I’d been invited down to have a look.

The night before was the company summer party. I developed a well-deserved reputation at work for having “Ok, I’ll just come for the one,” and crawling out of the pub seven hours later anxiously hoping that today was Friday so I wouldn’t have to get up the next morning. The summer party was no different. Each time I neared the bottom of my glass a man in a suit would appear with a wine bottle and top up. At the time I congratulated myself. Technically I hadn’t lied: I had, after all, only had one glass of wine.

It was a super evening, and I staggered triumphantly home.

The alarm rang the next morning at 7.30, a clear two hours early. My fogged mind clutched slowly at straws for the rude intervention, and eventually settled upon the day’s trip to meet and greet PRs and industry folks. I made it to Waterloo with no problems, but began to feel distinctly woolly as soon as the train started moving. I met a nice woman from Grazia magazine, who no doubt decided that I was a prototypical IT geek with poor social skills, because all I did was stare pastily out of the window. Still, I thought, the boat wouldn’t be bad. We were soft London journalists, after all; they weren’t exactly going to make us do anything.

The boat was awful. While everyone else furthered the future of their magazines and newspapers, making friends with the PRs and wondering over the high-tech-ness of the boat, I fixed a gloomy stare on the horizon, praying that I wasn’t about to launch myself to the height of journalist gossip by unleashing a litre of last night’s white wine over the side. In the afternoon a full-on buffet was produced below decks. I managed half a slice of bread before excusing myself and going back to gaze at the horizon. At enormous length we made it back to the shore; I even did a bit of steering on the way, but it was my worst experience on the water of my life.

Up till, that is, the speedboat from Ko Taratao to Ko Lipe. The islands are an hour apart by speedboat, but it honestly felt like the boat would disintegrate a long time before that. Where a ferry pitches lurchingly over the top of a wave, a speedboat launches itself, missile-like, over the crest, before falling 15 feet back to the water beneath. Our boat landed with colossal violence each time, accompanied by a smashing sound and half-caught screams of genuine terror from the passengers in the back of the boat. As the boat fell all of the bags in the front would levitate half a foot off the deck, so when the boat smashed back down onto the water, the bags would collide with the deck a second after. We’d been on the water no more than fifteen minutes than the deck looked like the bags had simply been dropped on board rather than carefully piled up.

It was terrifying. A speedboat is, after all, only made from fibreglass, and ours was carrying 20 people plus all of their luggage. I noted grimly that the handrail that we were clutching had broken at some point in its life, and had been secured with duct-tape.

Speedboats are dangerous things, something that was brutally underlined in 2005, when an overloaded boat headed from Ko Phangnan to Ko Samui capsized mid-trip, hurling its passengers overboard and killing 15. Our boat may not have been overloaded, but it was flying over the waves.

There was little to do but push the thought to the back of my mind, and work on not being launched into the air. Our arms became bashed and bruised by the constant crashes, and a few times we lurched so far into the air, and so suddenly back on the water, which had inexplicably taken on the consistency and solidity of cement, that the pain at the base of my spine made my toes tingle.

After an hour and a bit, we arrived at Ko Lipe. Shakily, we gathered our things about us and climbed down from the speedboat, which I’d mentally christened the Marie Celeste. There’s no jetty at Ko Lipe, so you need to get into a longboat to take you to the shore. A longboat is simply a long, thin, wooden craft with, more often than not, a diesel engine lifted more or less straight from a truck attached to the back. They’re enormously loud, but have a top speed of perhaps 10 miles per hour, so we didn’t complain.

Ko Lipe looked beautiful, and we instantly regretted not spending a few days there. In early May hardly anyone goes, and so while it has a few guesthouses, a couple of nice bars (at least one of which, Pooh’s, even has WiFi) and plenty of places to get diver certification, it was all but deserted.

We went to buy tickets to Langkawi. The woman selling them looked at us as if we were the victims of a particularly cruel gag. “Who told you to come here?”, she said. We gathered that not many people took the boat to Langkawi. “No, no,” she agreed. “This is last boat of the season.”

By enourmous fluke of timing, we had arrived just in time to buy tickets for the last boat to Langkawi until October. Missing the boat would have been a fairly full-blown catastrophe; we’d have had to have taken a boat back to Pak Barra via Taratao, across the same ocean that had had me mentally reciting Hail Mary’s for an hour.

While we were on Ko Lipe we ran into Tim again, the ex-pat we’d met on the boat to Taratao. He was a reassuring presence. Not only did he seem to know what he was doing, but he spoke a smattering of Malay, and promised to take care of us when we reached Malaysia.

The ferry to Langkawi arrived, and wasn’t particularly assuring. It was a long, fibreglass model with rust stains down both sides and a slight but undeniable list to port. Still, it was the last boat until October, so we swallowed our fears and got on. No sooner had we found ourselves a blustery spot on the top deck than the communication mast toppled over, and I held it until a kindly chap with some duct tape arrived to fix it into position.

It was the most unpromising of beginnings, and as our boat made its lonely way south, I wondered, not for the first time, what compelled the earliest sailors onto boats and in hapless search of new lands.

“So, what’s this all about, Smythe?”
“Well, sir, we’re going to hop into that boat over there and head west. With a bit of luck we’ll find incredible riches.”
“What’s the boat made from, Smythe?”
“Wood, sir.”
“I see. And what happens if we hit bad weather?”
“Well, we’ll spend all day being sick over the side.”
“Right. And if we hit really bad weather?”
“I suppose, sir, the boat will break up and we’ll all die awful deaths from drowning.”
“Ah. And if our navigational equipment fails?”
“In that case, sir, we’ll suffer a few forlorn months of cannibalism, and then we’ll all die awful deaths.”

We had a boat made from a space-age material, modern navigational equipment (albeit equipment that communicated with the world via an antenna help up by duct tape) and even so I didn’t feel safe. I closed my eyes and waited for it to be over.

Then, we hit what I believe mariners like to call a “freak wave”. It was taller than the boat by some margin, and everything in its path was utterly, completely, and irrevocably soaked. My socks, which were wet from the longboat and I’d put out to dry, were sodden, as was my shirt, my bag, and, by far the worst, my camera. It was wetter than it had ever been before. I was sure I could see water dripping down into the mirror box and my heart sank at the thought of unspeakably corrosive salt water working its way into the contact and mechanics of the camera. Sure enough, once it had dried out, it no longer switched on.

When we arrived in Langkawi, night was falling, and there was no chance of getting a boat to Penang until the next morning. Helped by Tim and a few Germans he’d met on Ko Lipe, we spent the worst $20 of our trip so far, on a small, boxy room near the port, where we spent the evening listening to the scurrying of cockroaches and browsing the seven channels available on the tiny TV secured to the ceiling in the corner.

Still, it was nice to be dry.

Dave is not sure he’ll ever be a sailor. He’s also on the lookout for recommendations for camera rain-jackets. Suggestions to the comment box, please.

LINKS: Now you’ve read that, how about one of the following?

Koh Phangnan, Thailand. If you’re looking to island hop across the peninsula, you could end up here. Click here to see where to stay and the best vantage points for spotting fat Europeans in Speedos.
Ko Tarutao, Thailand. If you’re going the opposite way to us, click here to see what to expect on Ko Tarutao itself.
Langkawi to Penang, Malaysia. Going the same way? Here’s what to do on Langkawi, as well as how to get off and get to Penang. Click here to find out.