Underwater World

The following day we awoke to glorious sunshine, the sound of crickets and the complete absence of a hangover in The Husband. The one good thing about having the hangover from hell is that it makes you feel amazing when it finally leaves you. He leapt out of bed, opened the slats on the wooden blinds, put his hands on his hips and a grinned inanely. "Let's make the most of the day," he declared. It seemed he had spent quite enough of the previous day in bed and he was determined to spend as little as possible of it there today. Which is how, just before 8am (ridiculously early when on holiday if you ask me), we left the room and, on my insistence (I needed to prepare myself for the buffet breakfast ahead of me - I do not take such challenges lightly, the prospect of all that food to be tried is a serious matter in need of careful planning), took a pre-breakfast stroll down the beach. The cool of the early morning was already beginning to dissipate as the sun drew higher in the sky but there was a welcome breeze and it was wonderful to scrunch my feet in the sand. Ao Prao beach is just what might come to mind when conjuring up an image of a tropical beach - powdery soft, white sand, gentle sea lapping at the shore, palm trees lining the fringes. With no-one yet in the sea or on lying on a lounger, we had the beach to ourselves and it made for a lovely walk.

Following a hearty breakfast (for a detailed account of how I approached this buffet breakfast in November, see Day 2 on Samet, Part 1: Just a Little Bite to Begin the Day - it was a similar scenario this time around), we wasted little time in heading down to the beach, and nabbed ourselves one of the last remaining sun lounger pods. Feeling in need of some exercise after the breakfast gorging, I grabbed my snorkel, mask and flippers and waded into the sea. I didn't look quite as expert as I might have wished, thanks to my snorkel being tied to my mask with one of my hair elastics - this due to The Husband breaking it last year in an incident dubbed Snorkelgate which is best left forgotten - but I was looking forward to the first snorkel of the trip and swam off excitedly, with just a smidgeon of trepidation. This latter emotion was due to my love/hate relationship with snorkelling. I love the feeling that you are exploring a previously undiscovered world - of course, I know that hundreds of people will have swum over this coral before but when you're there it doesn't feel like that. It's that feeling that you just don't know what you might see next that is so exciting, and it is like another world down there, teeming with life. It is just that, however, that also makes it so scary. Who knows what you might encounter? Just because a shark may never have been spotted in these shallow waters doesn't mean that one won't appear on the day I decide to go snorkelling. That is exactly what those sort of films are based on - the complete unexpected. As I'm swimming around I can't help but hear the Jaws soundtrack, and the tagline to Jaws 2 pops into my head - 'Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water'. This happens every time I go snorkelling - I get that little pit of fear deep in my belly and constantly look around to ensure some deadly creature of the deep isn't approaching me from behind, or about to attack from the gloom when the sun disappears behind a cloud.

I also do that completely irrational sucking in of the stomach when swimming over sea urchins, of which there were many. They are too far below me to ever be a threat (although, again, I might swim over that rogue sea urchin that decides to shoot out a spine, puncturing a leg and causing pain to engulf me - that sort of thing would definitely happen in a film) and besides, it's not like it would help me. It's like ducking in the car when a low-flying bird flies overhead. These sea urchins were the biggest I have ever seen though, with huge spines and something that looked distinctly like an eye in the centre, hence the fear that they might suddenly, and without provocation, spear me. Of course, all was fine and I returned to the beach without injury.