Location: Pulau Pangkor, Malaysia
This trip has been incredibly distracting. As our regular blog readers can attest, we’ve done a lot. A brief recap – diving on the Great Barrier Reef, exploring aboriginal culture on Tiwi Island, surfing in Bali, walking with Orangutans in Borneo, riding the MRT in Singapore – in other words, more than a reasonable person would ask for out of a lifetime. So it comes as no surprise that one might get distracted from the routines of their normal life. For example, prior to Argo, I spent a good part of my day in the ocean. But recently, while I’ve spent a lot of time in the water, I haven’t spent much time in the water. For the last month, we’ve been sailing across the equator, tied up at 5-star marinas, or anchored up a river. These locales are unprecedented, but none afford the simple pleasure of jumping off the rail and going for a swim. I bring this up because today was the first day in a long time. Argo has been anchored in a small island cove surrounded by warm, clean, swimmable ocean water. So I went for a swim. And there is something very, very satisfying about swimming in the ocean. Why this is, I don’t precisely know, but I like to think it has something to do with the following anecdote: Last year when I was stateside, I used to leave little “ocean fun facts” on my answering machine. If you called me and I wasn’t home (which was probably the case), you might have got the following recording: “The next time you hear that the majority of our planet is saltwater, consider the following – so is your body.”