Today we decided to drag ourselves away from the heavenly beach No 7 to do a bit of jungle trekking (and sweating) and also to see some more accessible sea life. Elephant Beach is on the north coast of Havelock Island and is only accessible by foot or by boat. At high tide is completely inaccessible by foot as you would have to wade through a mangrove estuary (not a good idea with 6-7 metre Saltwater Crocodiles around) and even if to you managed that the beach would be underwater. So with all this in mind we set of at 7am to beat the 1pm high tide, we got a taxi to drop us at the start of the path (unmarked) off the cross-island road and set off past the farm land, through a couple of knee deep marshes and into the jungle. Thankfully the path was easy to follow due to the massive footprints of Rajan the elephant who heads down to the beach to swim and a dog that met us at the road and lead us all the way to the sea! Once we made it to the edge of the jungle, suddenly you entered a world of mangrove flats, this is mainly due to the tsunami which destroyed the beach and has been replaced by mangroves. After walking through this slightly alien landscape with its scary inhabitants we made it to the small but perfectly formed patch of beach with not another person in sight.
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As we had clock running in terms of the approaching hide we weren’t able to spend more than an hour snorkeling around on the reef that was just off the beach. The serenity was soon broken anyway, by the time we returned to the beach for a breather about 5 longboats had turned up with day trippers aboard.
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So after another quick swim we started to head back through the mangroves to the jungle edge. This time our trusty guide dog, who had also waited by our stuff on the beach while we were swimming, was not so keen on returning to the village so we said our goodbyes on the beach. We again headed back through the even stickier jungle than earlier, then walked the 4 km back to beach No7 along the cross-island road.
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