Day 82: Kayaking to Koh Mook's Emerald Cave
Claire: There's not too many 'activities' on sleepy Koh Mook but Emerald Cave kept coming up as #1. Otherwise known as Morakot cave, it's only reachable on water at low tide and most visitors go by boat. But we decided to go via kayak!
Having scoped out our rental options yesterday we were at Charlie Beach for 8am for the 30min kayak round the coast to the cave. We'd been told that after 9:30ish all the boat trips from neighbouring islands turn up and it gets super super busy so we wanted to make sure we beat them (we did).
To reach the lagoon you have to go through the cave in pitch blackness. It's pretty fun, if not a little eery but it's only 80m long so once you've done the second bend you begin to see light at the end of the tunnel (no pun intended!). Undecided whether to swim or kayak, we ended up paddling through in the kayak — me navigating with a torch and Gav steering. Coming out the other side there was only maybe 8 other people so it was really quiet and so beautiful.
Due to the time of the day it was quite dark so we didn't get to appreciate the emerald waters but the surroundings were beautiful. I imagine there's just a couple of hours in each day it glistens brightly when the sun shines down the small opening above.
We saw thousands of fishes en route back to the beach. The jumping ones were the best!
Gav's day 82 takeaway
- OMG, the schools of fish were amazing, loved that.
- OMG, we cannot canoe in a straight line for love nor money we cannot do it. If there was a medal for the most inefficient canoe pairing at the Olympics, we'd win every time.
