NGAPALI BEACH

We had pushed the boat out a little and had an enormous room overlooking the beach. The bathroom area was bigger than some of the rooms we stayed in earlier in the trip.

The beach is basically a 3 mile palm-fringed crescent of white sand on the eastern shore of the Bay of Bengal.

The sand is part tide-washed and part scrupulously cleaned by the various resorts along the bay. The water is beautifully clear and almost tepid – perfect for bathing and paddling.

There are not very many people about so the beach was practically empty most of the time.

At the southern end is a large fishing village with lots of activity morning and evening as the boats come and go. Hundreds of people turn out to help with unloading and handling the catch – which seems to be predominantly small fish which are laid out to dry on acres of blue netting. We understood that they are later processed into fishmeal. The fishing is done at night and every evening we could see a line of bright lights stretching along the horizon.

The hotel served breakfast on a deck overlooking the beach which was a lovely leisurely start to each day. But in the evening we preferred to walk a short way along the beach to a group of beach bars and restaurants where we could refresh ourselves after a hard day’s idling with happy hour as the sun went down, and then move on to a simple but fresh and tasty seafood dinner.

When we arrived with four full days ahead of us we were a bit concerned that we’d overdone it and that we might go a bit stir-crazy with nothing much to do for all that time. But it turned out that we quite enjoyed the laziness of it all – long breakfast, long paddle up or down the beach, bit of a swim before a long lunch, relaxing afternoon lounging about reading in the shade, another swim, another paddle and then happy hour and dinner. We slept like babies after all that exertion.

On the beach at low tide we noticed some disturbances in the sand...

 On closer inspection we could see that they were separate groups of patterns of tiny balls of sand

 And that they were caused by these little fellers.........

A bit of googling showed that they were called sand bubbler crabs - they scour each grain of sand for microscopic bits of food and then discard the grains in a small ball. Why they arrange these in the patterns we have no idea.