River Monsters (25 page)

‘
Ngaw
.’ This was my allotted minder-cum-guide, an athletic cheerful man in his mid-twenties.

Me: ‘
Ngaw
.’

There were concerned shaking heads all round, but also encouragement to have another go. But still I kept getting it wrong. Then, on maybe the twentieth attempt, people were clutching their
stomachs, slapping each other’s backs and wiping away tears. When they finally calmed down, they tried to explain to me, in nasal sing-songy Thai, that I’d just said (starting to giggle
again) something that sounded like
ngaw
.

My fishing, meanwhile, was meeting the same level of success. At the nearby gorge, fishing a slow, deep, silver spoon, I quickly found myself with a bent rod as I hooked one of the countless
nets and longlines that were strung across the water. Even a hook dropped at my feet got snagged. So, instead, I went with a local fisherman in his leaky canoe, retrieving a longline that had been
out overnight. He’d put out a hundred hooks, baited with grasshopper, but not a single one had a fish. I met a
pla buk
fisherman who showed me his nets, with meshes so wide that I
could have squeezed through them. But he rarely put them out now because hardly any fish were left. I started to realise that my quest was turning into a failure.

So when my hosts invited me to an evening of Thai boxing at the nearby town, I happily went along. I was given a front-row seat next to a bespectacled man who spoke some English and kept
ordering me bottles of beer. He turned out to be the district officer paying a visit, and I was told I’d be spending the night at the town’s police HQ. I was shown to an upstairs
office, where I slept with an armed policeman beside me, and in the morning the man continued to ply me with beer and questions. Most of these seemed designed to uncover my political views, but I
kept my replies noncommittal. He also said, many times, ‘You could disappear here – nobody would know.’ I took this to be concern for my well-being, so I told him I’d be
careful, but this didn’t seem to be the response he wanted. After a few hours of this, my host, by now quite drunk, suddenly snapped, ‘Give me your passport!’ Looking at the photo
page, which in those days listed one’s occupation, he declared, ‘This is not a teacher! This is a spy from the Middle East!’

That my passport photograph looked rather villainous was true. And that embarrassing youthful attempt at a moustache, a bit like Prince, probably did merit some kind of punishment. But escorting
me off to the cells, as they were doing now, seemed to be taking things a bit far. The next thing I knew, I was being repeatedly measured, with the results compared with the height in my passport,
as if they now thought I was some kind of impostor. A few hours later, despite the quiet politeness of the lower ranks holding me, I was seriously worried. I wasn’t keen to end up with those
other Westerners, shackled and forgotten in the ‘Bangkok Hilton.’ I considered making a run for it, but that would be seen as confirming my guilt. Instead, using gestures, I asked that
somebody go and fetch my bags from the border post, and a couple of hours later, to my surprise, they turned up. I rummaged inside and found my envelope of spare passport photos: one with Jimi
Hendrix hair, one showing a scowling biker, and so on – but all me. ‘Look!’ I indicated, to puzzled frowns, appealing to some logic in a situation that didn’t seem to have
any. This is just what we’re like in England, always changing our hair and look. It’s just a fashion thing, not a disguise.

Shortly after that, they let me go. I got straight on a bus going south and headed for Bangkok, anxious to get as far away as possible. During my questioning, the officer had confiscated all my
film. This included shots of an eighty-six pound
Probarbus
, a relative of the Indian mahseer, that I’d seen doubled into a freezer at a fisheries station, and a stuffed
pla buk
that I’d seen in an old shed. This fish was as long as my outstretched arms and immensely deep-bodied. It was the biggest fish I had ever seen in my life, and I hazarded a weight of two
hundred pounds. There were also several shots of the river, and this was what concerned me. They had all been taken with the permission of my police minder, but the district officer wouldn’t
know that. When he saw all those pictures of the border, he might conclude I had been a spy after all. (However, he might not see anything at all, as I had loaded bulk 35mm film into an assortment
of used canisters, whose markings bore no relation to the contents. I did this to save money on film rather than it being an espionage thing, and I had given him written details of the correct
development process needed. But his expression told me that he would be going by the canister labels, which might make him think, when everything came back blank, that he’d been
double-bluffed.) So I headed to the British embassy to see if there was any way I could repair the situation and establish myself as a bona fide tourist. After telling me twice to come back the
next day, they had an answer: ‘Our advice is to leave the country as soon as possible.’

A few days later, travelling by bus and boat, I crossed overland into Malaysia. My savings from a year of teaching in London had financed a spectacular ‘blank’.

Five years later I came across a newspaper article that made me break out in a sweat. It stated that around the time I was there, the British government had secretly sent members of the Special
Air Service (SAS) to northeast Thailand to train Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. At first the British government denied this. Why would we upstanding Brits aid a genocidal dictator-turned-terrorist?
The answer lay in the algebra of
realpolitik
. Because the Khmer Rouge had been overturned by the Vietnamese, some in the West now saw the people who had killed two million Cambodians as the
good guys. This was a case of our enemy’s enemy being our friend or, rather (one more sideways step, because this was about the UK’s ‘special relationship’ with the United
States), our friend’s enemy’s enemy. My Kafkaesque nightmare suddenly made sense. There were things going on in this remote, tourist-free area that the world was never supposed to know
about, and along comes this person with a notebook and camera, spinning some cock-and-bull story about fish . . .

But in 2009 the world had moved on. All this was now old news that nobody, it turned out, cared much about – except those people who’d had their legs blown off courtesy of our taxes.
I walked through arrivals at the spanking new Suvarnabhumi airport without feeling a hand on my shoulder and continued by van into Bangkok.

The stingrays, known as
pla kaben
in Thai, are also little known about, and their enormity shocks those who encounter them. I’d been hearing about battles lasting up to six hours,
with rods sometimes broken. The biggest recent catch was nearly eight feet across and estimated at around 600 pounds. (Some put it even heavier – at over 750 pounds – but it was not
weighed because it was a pregnant female, and lifting such a heavy fish out of the water could have damaged it internally.)

I was also surprised to find out how close the captures were to Bangkok. The tidal reach of the Maeklong, just forty miles from the capital, flows right through a built-up area, past houses,
temples, and markets, all of which inevitably raised questions about the potential danger of these fish.

One member of the fishing team had had a scary encounter. While handling a ‘small’ (100-pound) stingray in a net, its spine scratched him at the base of his left index finger.
‘After five minutes, it feels like I’m holding a heavy stone,’ he said. Then his whole arm and the left side of his trunk went numb as his heart raced and sweat poured from his
face. At present there is no antidote to the venom, which appears to be similar to that of a pit viper. So he was more than relieved when he recovered after three hours.

Another fisherman I spoke to, hauling a small one in by the spiracles, had its spine pierce his thigh to a depth of three inches. He crawled back to his house and was rushed to the hospital.
Luckily, the spine went in at an oblique angle – any steeper and it could have opened his femoral artery, which, if not immediately shut off by applying pressure to the groin, could have
caused fatal blood loss.

So catch-and-release fishing for them is a serious business. For a start, stingrays can attach themselves, like a giant suction cup, to the river bottom, sometimes covering themselves with an
equal mass of mud. This dictates the use of extremely heavy-duty tackle and a complete lack of subtlety in playing them. Light gear simply will not shift them. Period.

On the first day I motored on to the river with the fishing team in a canopied long-tail boat, a narrow wooden vessel with a rear-mounted car engine driving its ten-foot propeller shaft. The
place we were heading for is nicknamed Area 51 because people say, ‘It’s full of aliens’, which do indeed look like underwater flying saucers. Once in position we put out multiple
lines baited with live ten-inch snakeheads that were lip-hooked on size 10/0 circle hooks. Line was 160-pound monofilament, ridiculous in fresh water (and in the sea for that matter), that was
backed with 100-pound braid. There’s a tide of a few feet at Area 51, and at low-water slack something took one of the baits. After letting it run, we tightened to set the hook and then I
slackened the drag momentarily while I clipped into two harnesses, one round my lower back and another round my shoulders, and inserted the rod butt into a gimbal in front of me. Meanwhile, a
second boat rafted up to our narrow vessel to create a broader platform. Otherwise, we risked rolling over and capsizing with a powerful fish under the boat. The other danger was that I’d go
over the side if the line coming off the reel, under extreme tension, cut into the coils behind it and jammed. So one of the team was hanging on to the back of my harness. In my pocket, as a last
resort, was a knife to cut the line.

After only a couple of minutes, I know I have a very big fish here. My broomstick-stiff rod is bent into a semicircle, its tip just inches from the surface and occasionally disappearing under
it. For extra leverage, my feet are up on the gunwales, and after ten minutes my bent legs feel like those of a weight-lifter holding a squat halfway up. Even with the harnesses, my back is
starting to complain – this is precisely what backs aren’t designed to do, and exactly the position in which the bent and compressed spinal column can pop a disc or two. I listen to the
pain, but I can’t do anything to lessen it. In fact, I increase the drag a notch and strain harder because I want this to end. As I double and groan in response to the fish’s lunges, I
feel like a boxer slugging it out in the ring, hoping my opponent will give up before I do. I gain line inch by inch, glad to have an extra, low gear on my reel, only to lose a foot or two at once
as the rod is forced down to the folded rag that pads the gunwale. Somebody says it’s been an hour now, that I’ve been playing this gruelling hybrid of tug-of-war and arm wrestling.
They’re pouring water over my head and on the reel. Mostly, the line is straight down, but at times it cuts sideways, spinning the boat. I bitterly regret not receiving the 5½-foot rod
I had ordered for this trip; this 7-footer gives the fish too much leverage. We pass the hour-and-a-half mark, but I can detect no weakening in the fish. What I’ve heard about these fish is
no longer unbelievable. Four more hours of this is unthinkable. Then, at close to two hours, the rod springs back and I gain a couple of turns. It’s off the bottom! The rod-tip bucks as I
pump in more line. The crew have hung the big knotless net off the side of the boat, like a curtain, and as the pointed rostrum breaks the surface, they push the net underneath the fish with long
bamboo poles. But the ray is too far away, and as I lean back to bring it closer, I hear a sudden loud crack and the weight of the fish has gone.

It takes me several seconds to register what has happened. The end of the rod broke, and the resultant jar on the line broke that too: the final punishment for using a rod that was too long.
Despite its formidable backbone, my ‘high sticking’ bent its tip too sharply. And with these fish, I now realise, there is no room for error. Something else seemed to go at that moment
too, but for now, I just stare at the broken rod, refusing to believe that all that time and suffering were for nothing. We never saw the rest of the fish, but everyone knows it was huge.

The next day, I had another bait taken, but we failed to hook up. The bait came back with a fine honeycomb pattern pressed into its rear half, the characteristic signature of stingray teeth
– but also the sign of a wary fish. Then later I hooked something, which over the course of an hour pulled the boat half a mile against the tide. At one point the fish rose thirty yards from
the boat and boiled at the surface, but it was not capitulating – just coming up to check us out. This time there were no slips at the boat. With the net pulled around it, cradling it outside
the gunwale, the team carefully bound the barb to its tail with a rag, and then we slowly returned to the landing stage where the scientists were waiting. It was a huge female, over six feet
across, but with the memory of the lost fish still raw, I was not as jubilant as I might otherwise have been. (The bigger rays are invariably females, the smaller males being easily identifiable by
their paired claspers near the root of the tail.)

The next day I brought in another, this one measuring six feet, three inches across. As the team supported it in the shallows, clipping a small notch of skin for DNA analysis and scraping a blob
of black mucus from the base of the eight-inch spine for the toxicology lab, we were suddenly aware that there was another stingray in the net, and then another. This female had just given birth,
and unlike my first stingray in the Amazon, these newborns were at full term, nearly eighteen inches across, with no yolk sac and fully developed barbs. Before our eyes, these miniature weapons
started to lose the protective capsule that prevents internal damage to the mother. Although they were babies, we could see that nothing was going to be bothering them in the river. And it occurred
to me that this could be the reason for the mother’s immense size: simply to be large enough to harbour such large young.