Back of Beyond (47 page)

“Very quiet,” my captain assured me before we left Phuket. “You like to snorkel or scuba?” I admitted I’d never tried either seriously. He gave one of those endearing Thai grins. “Best in world. Better than Barrier Reef. Australians told me. Better than Maldives, better than Hawaii. You try.” I promised I’d try.

Way out on the starboard side, something was moving across the hazy horizon. “Chao Lae, ‘Sea Gypsies,’” the captain told me. “Not friendly. Only like the sea.”

Little seems to be known, or at least understood, about Thailand’s elusive colonies of Sea Gypsies. One of those ponderous surveys conducted by some obscure division of the United Nations recently concluded that they were “unsuitable for conventional social integration and assimilation.” (I had this picture of tropical-suited census-takers and bespectacled sociologists being chased out of Sea Gypsy territory by harpoon-waving natives unpersuaded by the benefits of “assimilation.”)

There were two longboats, maybe three, low in the water like alligators. Each had four fishermen, silhouetted against the silver sea. They showed no interest in us.

“Some come from Burma and China. Some have very black skin and fuzzy hair, like Andaman Island peoples.” The captain grinned again and wagged his head. “A bit slow. Not educated. Don’t even know where Bangkok is!” I on the other hand knew all too well where Bangkok was, having spent a week in that city’s interminable heat and traffic before driving south to Phuket. I envied the Sea Gypsies’ ignorance.

Soon they were gone, vanished into the haze. We nibbled on cold cooked shrimp the size of baby lobsters and slices of fresh mango. The captain offered me a mug of “Genuine Thai Scotch Whiskey” (which tastes exactly the same as “Genuine Thai French Brandy” and “Genuine Thai Jamaican Rum”), but sun and alcohol don’t mix for me. I borrowed his panga, sliced the top off a big green coconut, and drank the sweet colorless milk.

This is exactly what I’d been waiting for—days of happy hedonism among the outer islands of Thailand, eating when hungry, snoozing when the sun scorched my eyes, being part of this empty ocean for as long as I chose.

“Similans coming.” I woke and peered over the rough wood sides of the boat, scoured by rope burns. He was right. Way in the distance, tiny blips of land floated like mirages.

“We do snorkel off Ko Payang. Good place.”

This was to be my first real snorkeling experience, and I was as excited as a young child, peering into the clear ocean as we approached the shore. I could see the coral reefs below us rearing like prehistoric forests; patches of white-blue sand lay between them, silhouetting hundreds of fish of all shapes, sizes, and colors.

Khun (the captain and I were now on first-name terms) gave me a cursory explanation of snorkeling techniques, which to him were as obvious as breathing. But it was the breathing bit I couldn’t quite master. I didn’t trust that tube as my only air supply and wasn’t used to having my nose trapped uselessly inside a glass fishbowl. I jumped (actually Khun pushed me) into the warm ocean. Looking back I blush at my flailing antics as I choked on the sudden rush of water. I even forgot how to swim properly while struggling to breathe. I pulled off the mask and sucked in great gulps of fresh air. Khun was in hysterics.

“Put on, put on. Try again. No problem.”

Slowly—far too slowly—I became accustomed to this strange suffocating device. I learned to clamp my lips tightly around the rubber mouthpiece and breathe evenly and regularly. My nose gradually accepted its redundancy and I began my first exploration of the undersea world of the Similans.

Below was a universe of infinite color and form, lit by dappled sunlight. The higher reefs were flat and gray, topped with hundreds of sea anemones; lower down the shelf corals glowed deep orange and purple. Great filigrees of sea fans waved slowly in the half light. Butterfly and damsel fish floated by nibbling at the coral, ignoring me completely. I swam further and further from the boat. I was in my own world now, weightless, full of wonder at the wealth of things to see. Ahead loomed an enormous vertical reef topped with delicate tubastrea. The colors changed dramatically as the reef descended into the gloom—brilliant golds and greens became blood-red crimsons and bronzes. I wanted to dive deeper, scuba-style, but one more choking session with the snorkel tube convinced me to remain close to the surface.

I felt something brush against my legs and turned quickly. Two parrot fish, decorated with brilliant patches of scarlet, emerald blue, and white, retreated a little and then sort of hung there, as intrigued by me as I was with them. Slowly I extended a hand and very gently let it rise to touch the underbelly of the smaller one. It didn’t move; in fact it seemed to rest peacefully, with a vague smile on its face, cupped in my palm. The larger one drifted closer, its dorsal fin hardly moving. I could see every detail of its dark eyes and fluttering gills. Then ever so gently it drifted up to my mask and planted a big soft-lip kiss on the glass. I just lay there boggle-eyed, meeting its gaze until I was attacked by the giggles and had to surface, laughing like a jackass. Kissed by a fish! What a novel experience in the middle of this bright blue nowhere!

Far in the distance I could see Khun fishing over the side of his boat with a homemade bamboo rod. Behind him rose the surf-rounded rocks of Ko Payang, edging a beach of brilliant white sand. The vegetation was low and thick, shaped by the sea winds until it looked almost like land. Behind, dense vine-laced jungle rose to a thick green canopy. The island was only a mile or so across at its widest point; most of the others were smaller, strung out in a line of receding blues north to Ko Similan.

I returned to my hidden world, hoping to see one of Thailand’s famous (but harmless) coral sharks. Instead I was the only spectator at an impromptu ballet by a shoal of tiny fish, thousands of them, performing precision-formation rolls and tumbles, turning silver, then gold, then shadowy green in quick succession. Even the larger fish paused to watch this little afternoon delight in a flickering amphitheater of meticulously carved coral.

I don’t know how long I was down there. Time was irrelevant. I forgot my own body completely and became a part of this magic water world. A spectator turned passive participant—an honorary member of a secret society engaged in ageless rituals….

Much later, when I swam back to the boat, Khun proudly displayed our dinner-to-be in the form of six filleted fish lying on the warm wood deck. We ran the boat up onto the sand in a hidden cove surrounded by more rounded rocks. I chopped pineapples, bananas, and mangoes while my friend prepared a simple fire of driftwood and cooked the fillets in an ancient cast-iron pan he’d carried in his boat for twenty years. He sprinkled them with spices from an old rusty Balkan Sobranie tobacco tin. When I asked about the contents he became aloof and mysterious. In a country where food is an important art form, Thais protect their private recipes jealously and Khun had no intention of giving away his family secrets. Suffice it to say, whatever he added to the fish gave them a piquancy and zest unmastered by any of those gourmet restaurants in Bangkok. We ate without talking for almost an hour as the sun sank slowly behind the rocks. Our grins were conversation enough.

A few days later I traveled north from Phuket to Ranong. This important fishing port and growing commercial center sits on the east bank of the Pakchan estuary overlooking the hazy hills of Burma. I’d hoped to make a brief foray into that still-mysterious country, but recent internal problems and student uprisings had (once again) resulted in tight closure of all borders. Even the local fishermen, who rarely concerned themselves with territorial infringements, were taking particular care not to trespass across the invisible centerline of the estuary.

I wandered down to the harbor to sketch the frantic activity at the fish auctions and managed to find a small boat to take me to one more group of Thailand’s magic hidden islands—Ko Surin.

We left very early the following morning, edging nervously down the Thai side of the estuary, well away from the Burmese gunboats, past Ko Chang and Ko Phayam, and finally out into the blue ocean again.

Just like the Similan journey, I felt I had the world to myself along with occasional flurries of flying fish. After an hour or so we made a brief stop at the tiny island of Ko Gum Yai and swam in one of the most perfect little bays I’d ever seen. A few hardy adventurers were camping on nearby Ko Gum Noiey—otherwise it was just us and the parrots and the monkeys. All was idyllic, at least for a while, until I noticed the old captain casting uneasy glances at a handful of high clouds way off over the Burmese outer islands. But surely we were still in the dry season. So why was I worried?

An hour later my apprehension was transformed into fullblown fear. Our tiny puffball clouds had turned into ogreous hammerheads, the afternoon sky had become deep dusk, and a furious hot wind rolled the waves like battering rams into the side of our tiny wooden boat. Everything movable was tied down or thrown below into the galley. Then, without even a sprinkly introduction, the rains came, and came and came. Blinding curtains of the stuff, even battering the sea into submission with their sodden pounding. The galley was rapidly filling with water—the boat seemed to have leaks everywhere. The pump wasn’t working so we baled by hand, using two battered buckets (even at the height of the storm the captain managed one of those hapless Thai grin-and-shrug combinations). Keeping dry was useless; keeping a hold on anything firm was essential. What a ridiculous place to disappear, I thought, on my way to an island no one knew anything about and maybe didn’t care anyway.

Eons later the storm drifted eastward, leaving us floundering in swells and steaming under a hot evening sun, too exhausted to even consider clearing up the mess below in the galley….

Fortunately Ko Surin was beautiful, more lush and laden with flowers and fruits than the Similans. And the diving! This time I tried a little scuba and vanished into an undersea world even more dramatic than Ko Payang, with more fish, reef caves, and those famous coral sharks whose sleek, sinister presence I never quite trusted. A few fellow divers joined us. They had traveled on an organized tour from Phuket with mountains of diving gear. Two Australians (Australians seem to get everywhere), who had enjoyed a couple of years of Asiatic wanderings, took me night-diving off Ko Sindara. Armed with powerful torches we frolicked among the reef caves like water babies, amazed by the dazzling colors of the corals. Some reefs resembled Bangkok traffic jams—countless thousands of fish hovering, scurrying, swooping in shoals or lurking in shadowy anemone-encrusted passages. It was almost an anticlimax to crawl back to our sleeping bags under the stars. In dreams of vivid color I returned to those reefs again and again, floating endlessly with the fish through coral canyons and fantasy cities far more dramatic than anything created in science fiction.

A week later I was scampering over the soft white sands of Ko Samui and playing tourist again. A few years back, the island, fifty miles north of Surat Thani on the east coast of Southern Thailand, was an undiscovered, palm-growing paradise. But word travels fast among the travel fraternity, and soon tiny banana frond A-frames were being built (in a day or two) by starry-eyed dropouts seeking another Goa for their endless revelries. And for a while it truly was. Money was virtually unknown on the island; the locals were friendly, sharing people; coconuts (the best in Thailand), fruit, free-range marijuana, psychedelic mushrooms, and fish were available in endless supply. What more could a true earth gypsy ever want? But gradually—maybe inevitably—the developers arrived with their upscale A-frame colonies, followed by trendy beach bungalows offering nightly beach parties, and finally the five-star resorts with every imaginable comfort at amazingly reasonable rates (relative to Western standards at least).

I’d been advised to avoid Samui’s notorious psilocybin mushrooms. They were officially illegal anyway, following the deaths of a couple of overindulgent tourists. The tales of their demise varied. Some said they were convinced they could fly and had leaped off a high cliff on Samui’s eastern coast; others claimed they’d tried to play Neptune among the coral reefs and never returned. Whatever. Sadly they had died, and it was all blamed on the island’s hallucinogenic mushrooms, so the police decided it was time for a crackdown.

“Try some omelet.”

I’d met a bunch of free-wheeling Italian travelers. Now Italians seem to have a knack for finding places that everyone else seems to miss—hidden beaches, unmapped mountain paths, an old woman in a palm-frond shack who cooked the most exquisite Thai curries brimming with prawns and lobsters, the quietest out-of-the-way places to camp. Wherever I go I look out for Italians—kindred spirits in my nooks-and-crannies ramblings.

“Is very good omelet. Have a piece.”

I should have known something was not quite right. There was too much giggling.

“Not bad,” I said. And it wasn’t. A rich creamy texture, laced with black flecks of what I thought to be truffles.

“Oh yes. Truffles. Just like truffles,” they all assured me.

I ate a few more slices. We were all sharing our dishes, Chinese style; it seemed the sociable thing to do. Everything tasted so good: rice noodles laced with coriander and small pieces of Thailand’s fiery orange chili,
prik kee nu luang
; a whole rainbow fish cooked with basil, cardamom, and garlic and liberally sprinkled with
nam pla
, a variant of the ever-present fish sauce; finely chopped vegetables with lemongrass in coconut milk; little bowls of
tom yaam gung
, a spicy shrimp and lemon soup; fat juicy chunks of
gy pat by gaprow
, chicken roasted with mint, cloves, and coriander, and plate after plate of tiny sweet banana fritters known as
gluay twat
. A wonderful spread, served by two beautiful Thai girls in a lopsided beachfront house of palm and bamboo, miles from anywhere.