Over the next couple days, we were beach bums, napping, swimming and eating. The Gulf of Thailand was warm and seemingly free of any menacing sea critters, plus, since we were outside of Sihanoukville by several kilometers and it was the low season, the beach wasn’t crowded. There were waves which were fun to play in though strong enough to sometimes shift my bikini top in an embarrassing way. Greg assured me we were only around Europeans who don’t care, but I replied that I’m not a European, I’m a puritanical American. But it was true there were so few people around, no one was close enough to notice. So I was just a little extra careful and continued to enjoy a much needed break.
On our third day at the beach, we rented a kayak for an hour. I don’t think we were even out that long, because on the water, we could start to feel the sun burning us even though we’d put on sunscreen. As we paddled back in to shore, the waves capsized us and Greg lost his sunglasses. He loves those things and can’t replace them in Cambodia. I prayed we’d find them as we searched the incoming waves, but we gave up and went for lunch. Later that evening, I decided to go to the beach to take some photos. I got some good ones of the sun reflecting off the water and of a pink, angel-wing shell. While I was there I thought I’d walk up the beach to the kayak rental just in case his glasses happened to wash up on shore. And there they were, folded and waiting for me to pick them up. I couldn’t believe no one else had taken them. There was nary a scratch on them, I just had to rinse the sand off. You can think it was just coincidence or luck that I happened to decide to go back to the beach that evening and that the glasses washed up that evening and that no one else discovered them and took them. But I believe otherwise.
Now, when I returned to the guesthouse, I discovered that something had happened to my camera and the pictures I took at the beach didn’t record. Greg had to fiddle with it and reformat things before it started working again, but I lost those pictures. So the next morning I went to the beach to have some kind of picture of it. There was a rainbow. A full one. And I also found a starfish, so my replacement photos are just as good as the ones I lost.