I have been waiting for over a week for the opportunity to sit down and put together my thoughts on our experiences in Thailand, but now that I do have the time it seems like an odd thing to do. Most of me is focused getting into the Hong Kong experience, and I have been running around buying things and filling in forms and trying to fit into my tiny little 3mx2m niche in this crazy city, so Thailand seems a long way away.
This may be because I want it to be far away, I want very much to move on.
There is also another feeling I have, something like shame, to be talking about this at all. It feels a bit like taking snapshots of the dead, or trying to paint myself a hero when somebody else was actually doing the dying. Survivor guilt is not unusual in a circumstance like this, and I think we all got a dose of it. And the sense of shame is magnified considerably by the feeling of being incredibly lucky, of being blessed, almost, to be alive. Yet there was no sense or order or method in the distribution of death, it was random. Death happened, and you were there or you weren’t. So I feel like one of the chosen, as if I had been selected to be on the Ark when the flood came, but I feel absolutely undeserving and I also know that the choosing of me to be a survivor was arbitrary, meaningless, like a lotto ticket.
These feelings are a bit mixed up. Let me try and tell the story and maybe it will make more sense.
I woke up that morning to the sound of chugging diesel engines. We were on a yacht, the Jaya, and we had been popping around the most idyllic coastline imaginable. If you have seen the movie The Beach, you can try imagining that, but add a few hundred islands of scenery like that, and imagine us sailing through them on a big old wooden barge of a yacht, a sturdy Ark, built from solid beams of hard Indonesian wood. Snorkelling, jumping off the ship into the ocean, exploring deserted islands, sleeping on the deck under the stars… we were having a very good time.
It had been strange Christmas, out there in the middle of the Andaman Sea with a boatload of Swedes, a can of fake snow, and a bottle of Thai rum. We had anchored on Christmas Day off an island called Ko Phi Phi Don, and had gone ashore for some supplies – ice cream, beer, and candy for the two Swedish kids – and for me to send some update e-mails home
from an internet cafe there. So when I woke up the next day to the chugging of the engines, we were on our way out of Ko Phi Phi Don, and on our way to her sister: Ko Phi Phi Lei. We wanted to get there early because this is the island on which The Beach was actually
filmed, and its beauty is very quickly marred by the presence of hundreds of motor boats.
We made it there by 8AM and quickly headed into the water for some snorkelling. It was deeper water, and not as beautiful as the corals we had seen off Ko Phi Phi Don the previous day. I have to admit that the most colourful thing I saw down there that day was a school of Japanese tourists, in the most extraordinarily bright snorkelling gear, being towed along by a rope. The experience was also a little nerve-wracking, with the screws of motor boats mincing the water around us as the tourists pulled in. It felt a bit like leopard-crawling through a parking lot as it fills up on a Saturday morning, but it was a lot more beautiful.
Anyway, something made Joe and me decide to swim to the shore. Something makes him and me do strange things quite frequently, like a few days before we had nearly killed ourselves kayaking out to an island that looked a lot closer than it felt. So off we swam, dodging tourists and motor boats, until we got to The Beach and checked out the view. By then we had spent more time in the water than we had intended to, and we felt that the rest of the people must have returned to the boat and would be wanting to go by now. So we swam back, and the Jaya made her sedate way back towards Ko Phi Phi Don to pick up supplies.
On the way into the bay, we started to notice some strange things. First, three major waves rocked the boat. We were in the back, reading, and noticed the waves as you would notice the sun covered by a cloud – we looked up and we sommer noticed it. It didn’t seem particularly dangerous, it just seemed odd. ”Weeee”, we said, as the bow crashed and splashed through the swells. Then we noticed that a lot of boats were anchored outside the bay, out to sea, and that several motor boats were heading at high speed out of the bay. At this point we became aware that something was going on, and we wondered what it was.
Boatmen coming out started to signal to us, but none of the crew spoke Thai so we couldn’t quite make out what it was they were saying. One pulled in close, showed us a young boy in the back of his boat, and motioned to the top of his skull. I thought perhaps the boy had been injured by one of those crazy speedboats in the bay. But this didn’t tie in with all the boats being offshore. Someone mentioned a bomb, and that there had been some recent fighting in the area. But there was no smoke coming from the island and surely a bomb big enough to rock our boat would have made some smoke?
Then the strangest and most unsettling sign came: two moray eels, one after the other, came floating drunkenly past the Jaya. Moray eels stay on the seabed, tucked into the nooks and crannies of the coral with their ugly mugs sticking out, waiting for unsuspecting fish. In fact we had seen one the day before while we were snorkelling off this island. Why on earth would we see two of them, looking startled and lost, on the surface of the sea? Could it be some kind of bizarre current?
Read the next installment on M-Web