Hey, we have a day off, it’s time to enjoy being close to the sea: let’s go to the beach !

– You can’t swim at the closest one but there’s an other one, 17km away from here where you will be all alone, with very little pollution and water you can swim in.

– That sounds perfect !

– But you’ll need motorbikes to get there since it’s a little bit far, and one each since it can be quite steep sometimes.

– Ok, and we will also need to ask them to come back to pick us up when we’re finished then.

So here we go, first to the market to get some fruits for lunch then up on the moto dops (motor taxis) to go to the beach. Out of the town quickly, the wide road is already quite steep. So that’s why it’s only one passenger per moto dop… I’m happy I prepared my scarf before we went on the bikes because the dust coming from the cars in front of us is quite nasty. My driver has a good laugh seeing my nose rolled up under the scarf. And so what? At least I’m not troubled with the dust.

Soon, we arrive in an other nice little town along a river.

Hey, that wooden bridge looks funny, I would like to cross it by foot if I get the chance to do it : it goes strait up, then a little bit flat and then strait down again. Little did I know that we would cross it with the moto dops ! The wood cracking under us doesn’t feel so safe… But we know they wouldn’t cross it if it wasn’t made for motorbikes.

After the bridge, a steep way straight to a pagoda. We take the little bumpy trail on the left side of the pagoda and soon after that we take an even smaller trail in the middle of nowhere. You know, the kind of trail you would only take with a horse because it’s so uneven everywhere, full of stones and carved by old water streams. You wouldn’t venture there by foot by fear of hurting yourself but you would go there with a mountain bike for some fun. And here, I thank Diane and Joel for taking me mountain biking a few month ago. Now, I have a lot of fun on a road that would have frightened me 6 month ago.

For 15 minutes, we ride on this trail. Sometimes, it’s not even a trail. When the driver decides to turn, I don’t get how he could recognize this was the place to turn. But in the end, he was right, we arrive near the sea. And… oh surprise, this beach is not an all sand blue sea beach. It’s a mangrove beach. Meaning : very little place to sit on the sand, lots of trees rooting in the vase and shallow water for meters long. So shallow that you can’t swim…

But it is true that we’re alone there, at peace with nature and with very little plastic trash around us. That’s quite a nice change. We enjoy the place for a couple of hours, watching fishermen far away walking around their boats (very shallow water!), enjoying our all fruits picnic, walking between the vase and the trees and waiting for the return of the moto dops because now we know how much fun we will have going back.

The beach was definitely different from what we expected but quite a nice discovery.