Janice Horton - The Backpacking Housewife - Escape around the world with this feel good novel about second chances!

The next morning, I’m saved the expense of an expensive taxi by the free hotel shuttle bus to Suvarnabhumi airport. Once there, I find transiting through the domestic avenues rather easier than navigating the international ones. At the gate for the Krabi flight, I see Summer waiting.

Today Summer looks all bohemian and quite beautiful in a pair of light-cream flowing harem trousers and a white vest that shows off her deeply tanned skin. Her long dark hair is loose about her shoulders. On her arms, she wears lots of jangly bangles. In contrast, I’m wearing a baggy white cotton blouse and my old jeans that this morning I’d decided to turn into knee-length cut-off shorts. I’ve scraped back my humidity frazzled hair and tied it into a tight chignon, the way I’d always wore it at home. I had thought I’d looked chic as I left the cool ambiance of the hotel but now, having spent almost an hour travelling in a hot minibus with a dozen other people, I feel both overheated and underdressed at the same time.

I rush over to greet Summer and I’m full of apologies in case I’m late.

But she tells me our flight isn’t even in yet and it might have been delayed. I offer to buy us both coffee and a muffin while we wait. A couple of hours later, our flight departs and we arrive in Krabi to sky-high temperatures and blue skies and body-soaking, pulse-pounding humidity.

‘How far away is it to the boat?’ I ask. My heavy denim shorts are now sticking to my thighs and chafing me uncomfortably, and sweat from my hair is trickling down my beetroot-red face.

‘It’s about half an hour on the bus.’ Summer replies, coolly taking it all in her stride.

We walk past the taxi rank, ignore all the touting drivers, and we buy a bus ticket each for just a few baht from the transport office in the arrivals hall to take us from the airport to the pier. Soon afterwards, we are escorted to a minibus already packed full of passengers and we’re ready to set off. It’s hot and stuffy and crowded. Even with the air-con flowing it’s quite suffocating on the bus. But everyone seems to be in a jolly mood and so there is lots of laughter and enthusiasm for seeing the famous Railay Beach.

In the bus with us are several young couples and a group of five young lads. The lads all seem to know each other well. Summer immediately gets chatting with them. They tell us how they all started out travelling solo around South East Asia but had met up in Vietnam and for the past few weeks had been travelling together. Three of them, Chad, Rick, and Brad, are loud chatty Americans with the same short, choppy haircuts, who all seem very keen on outdoing each other to impress Summer. Another lad is German and called Peter who, being European, speaks very good English. The fifth fellow in the group is a Brit who introduces himself as Nate, but the others immediately tell us they’ve nicknamed him Prince Harry, because of his short red hair and clipped British accent that makes him sound rather royal.

Poor Nate. To compensate for his poshness, I notice how he’s finishing all his sentences with ‘man’ or words like ‘gross/cool/awesome’ to try to fit in with the laidback Americans.

I guess they’re all around the same age as my sons and suddenly I feel rather old.

What must they think of someone my age backpacking around Thailand?

The topic of conversation between the lads is entertainingly all about which of their bus journeys across Asia has so far been the longest and the smelliest (sixteen hours from Hue to Hanoi with someone who had vomited and missed the sick bag) and how many times they’ve all had food poisoning (at least twice each with bad seafood being the main culprit) and whether Chang or Leo or Singha is the best beer in Thailand (Leo, apparently, and then Chang and then Singha). Then there was the big debate on whether we were all going to find Railay Beach as beautiful as was promised or – like the not-too-far away island of Koh Phi Phi Ley (known as ‘The Beach’ because it has been used as a location for the movie of the same name starring Leonardo DiCaprio and was once voted the most beautiful beach in the world) – we would find it full of discarded plastics and totally ruined by mass tourism.

‘It’s a shame but I hear Koh Phi Phi Ley is now so overcrowded it’s impossible to even take a selfie,’ says Chad (or Rick or Brad) shaking his head in dismay.

‘I hear thousands of tourists go there every day, all pouring out of long-tail boats like lemmings onto what once used to be a perfect beach,’ says Rick (or Brad or Chad).

‘Yeah, I heard that too, so I’ve already decided I’m gonna give it a miss,’ says German Peter, trying to be heard over the loud Americans.

I listen in disappointment, as I too had bookmarked Phi Phi Ley in my copy of Lonely Planet: Thailand as a must see. But now, like the lads, I’m not so sure it would be worth the effort of taking a boat over there just to stand on a beach with thousands of other tourists.

‘Not to worry, I’m sure there are other beautiful islands and beaches to see,’ I say brightly.

When we arrive at the pier, we all pile out of the bus. I wait with our backpacks while Summer goes into the shop to buy us a couple of bottles of water. I’m far too hot. Sweat is pouring from every pore in my entire body, making me pant like a mad dog. I know my face must be a hot red swollen mess and my hair a fizzy muddle on the back of my head. I have my sunglasses on against the dazzling sun, but they keep sliding down my nose and I desperately wish I had a hat too, as the sun is beating down on me like a blowtorch. I scuttle sideways dragging our bags into the shade of the wooden canopy over the ticket office.

When Summer comes back, I see she’s not only bought us a cold bottle of water each, she has strawberry ice lollies too. I haven’t had an ice lolly since I was a kid and thoroughly enjoy sucking and licking it as fast as it was melting off the little wooden stick and running in scarlet dribbles down my chin and over my sticky fingers.

Soon, several long-tail boats turn up. A long-tail boat is named after the long prop shaft sticking into the water at the back of it that propels it forward. The boat itself is a traditional narrow wooden one with rows of bench seats – a bit like a large canoe – and to me it looks and feels wholly unstable. The front, where all our backpacks are being precariously stacked for the journey, has an extended bow and this is decorated with colourful garlands and wreaths of flowers that look really pretty but that I know are specifically there to provide good luck and to ask for protection from sinking from the spirits of the water. There is a roof of sorts, but it’s just a metal frame tarpaulin, designed to offer passengers some protection from the sun or rain.

Our boat has sixteen passengers aboard and one Thai boatman, who operates the ‘long-tail’ with one bare foot while a cigarette dangles from his lower lip. The engine looks like it’s something he’d salvaged from an old car and as he revs it up and steers us out into the open sea it pours out a reek of black smoke all the way from the pier and around the monumental headlands to Railay Beach.

I sit completely still on the wooden bench in the midsection next to Summer. The boat rocks and tilts as it smashes its way through the choppy waters. The large rolling waves that crash against the front of the boat are soaking all the bags and spraying those of us sitting at the front.

I’m petrified but trying desperately not to show it. I try to recall the last time I was on a boat.

It was in the Lake District, I think, when I was about twelve years old. In a little flurry of panic, I wonder if I can still swim? I try to remember the last time I went swimming. Properly swimming, I mean, because I can’t count the time Sally convinced me to take up water aerobics and we never left the three-foot end of the local pool. I tell myself that swimming is like riding a bike. Once you’ve learned, it comes back, no matter how long ago you did it last.