I’m the sort of person who ends up with scratched legs or face but doesn’t know how I got them. I get hay fever. Wounds never heal well. In my first week in Indonesia, I cut my ankle on a piece of coral as I pushed my kayak up the beach, my flip flops rubbed my feet. I cut my knee on my split paddles as I scrambled back into the boat after snorkeling with manta rays, my legs got peppered with mosquito and sand fly bites and a mild case of athletes foot between 2 toes took on a life of its own in the constantly wet and humid environment that is my kayak cockpit. My usual attitude of leave it and let my body deal with it was never going to work here. I’ve seen photos of infected coral cuts left untreated which flare up into bloated pusy infections.

One of my biggest fears of tropical paddling was my allergy prone, injury prone body getting covered in heat rashes and unable to cope with cuts that never dry. I quickly made friends with Sandy’s iodine bottle and brown dots and stripes now regularly adorn my legs like war paint. I need to allow an extra 15 minutes every night before bed to clean scrapes and nasty bites and apply anti itch cream, antibiotic cream, antiseptic cream and athletes foot cream to various body parts. It takes 20 minutes if it’s one of those humid nights where sand sticks like glue to everything.

After 2 weeks my athletes foot covered all my toes on one foot and the sole of my foot was tender and swollen. The other foot was even more swollen some nights although had very little athletes foot. Sandy got in touch with a doctor friend who thought I might have got cellulitis. I doubled my dose of doxycycline, the antibiotic I’m taking to try to prevent malaria and swapped from my general anti fungal cream to a specific athletes foot cream that Sandy had. Over the next week, the flakey skin slowly improved although the sole of my foot still looks like most of the skin might come of and my foot is still swollen some evenings.

More recently the tips of my thumbs and some of my fingers have been really sensitive and red. They are throbbing now as I write this in my tent and they keep me awake at night sometimes . I ruled out sunburn to start with because I wear lightweight hand covers made by kokatat specifically to block out the sun without being too hot. They are great and we are rarely apart during daylight hours but I now think that maybe the very tips of my fingers and my thumbs aren’t fully covered and they’ve got burnt. The doxycycline has an unfortunate side effect of increasing sensitivity to sunlight which can’t help.

Now I regularly put suncream on these extremities but they aren’t getting better. Maybe the cream washes off or perhaps it isn’t sunburn. The jury is still out on that one. Yesterday I put electric tape over the fingers and took some ibuprofen and my fingers are a bit better.

As a girl from chilly Wales, spending so much time in the heat I need to be constantly careful and mindful. A paddlers tan is usual brown hands and face. I’ve developed a new trend of a red stripe around each wrist like a thin bracelet. This was from one cloudy day where I wasn’t careful enough to make sure there was no gap between my hand covers and shirt sleeves. I have to be constantly alert to make sure things are tucked in, zipped up, suncream reapplied, lipsil handy and I’m often slightly uncomfortable – too hot, too sweaty, too sandy, too itchy, too tender.

It feels to me a bit like being in the death Zone above 8000 metres where your body can’t survive. You are slowly dying until you come down to lower altitudes. This hot humid climate is not so much life threatening as wearing, it feels like I have a limited time until something flares up or my tolerance runs out.

Having said that, I am proof that a clumsy cold weather lover can survive here. My initial cuts have healed pretty well, faint pink scars remind me of their origin. I’ve avoided heat rash on my body by tucking my shirt under my spray deck and making sure none of my skin touches the seat or spray deck. If I get really hot paddling I pour water over my self! I’ve got a bit too much sun at times but so far my religious application of SPF 20 lipsil has kept my lips blister free.

If you are still reading then hopefully this isn’t too boring or tedious. I am having a good time here but I wanted to share some of the challenges and their solutions!

I have about another week’s worth of paddling with Sandy to reach Nabire And I’ll fly back to Jakarta from there, then home!