Travel with Indigo

Thanks to a delay in the arrival of some needed parts and to a cyclone hovering over our intended path across the Indian Ocean, we were obliged to stay in Thailand several weeks longer than planned.  I greeted this turn of events in the manner of an enthusiastic bar patron confronting an unexpected extension of closing time. Black clouds sometimes hold little rays of sunshine.

Leaving Malaysia, the first islands we encountered in Thailand were the Butang Group in the fifty-one island Ko Taruatao Marine National Park. It remains one of our favorite stops with lovely beaches and glimmering clear waters barely discovered by tourists. On one of my favorite islands, Ko Lipe, a gently arcing beach set deep in a cove is lined with a few mid-range one story resort hotels, some bungalows and inviting sand floor bars. I landed the tender there and wandered along the water’s edge exchanging casual greetings with the long-tail drivers and chatting mindlessly with a few of the pasty white tourists from places like Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and as always in Thailand Scandinavians. Rarely have I encountered Americans in such remote places.

For dinner that night we climbed a winding staircase up the face of a cliff and ate at an open air restaurant with glorious views of the surrounding islands and the Andaman Sea. At the stair’s base is a simple thatch roofed open air bar with grass mats spread on the beach for the use of its patrons. Most of these fall into a group roughly but inaccurately described as backpackers. All are under 30, eco-obsessed, unemployed for the season, traveling on money from home and well-behaved. They have little in common with the crew of Indigo and less with yours truly.

After dinner and drinks the tide had gone out just enough that our tender couldn’t get over the reef to pick us up so we hired a long-tail boat to deliver us back to Indigo. It had no lights of any kind but the ambient glow from a half moon and a sky full of stars were enough to find our way.

The sea water in the Butangs was the clearest any of us had ever seen. One afternoon I went snorkeling on some reefs near our anchorage, a time of day when the surface was undisturbed by breeze. So perfectly transparent was the water that I had the sensation of flying through clear clean air rather than swimming in a sea. The reefs, as everywhere else we would go in Thailand, held a menagerie of colorful sea life. Every conceivable species of reef fish, large and small, darted about or meandered among the coral, many in dense schools.

The Butang islands mark the southerly beginning of a long chain of the most geologically remarkable and visually arresting islands anywhere in the world. The limestone karst islands of the Andaman Sea are shaped by the millenia into squat hat boxes, columnar shards, high mesas and grotesque statuary cleaved by deep fissures and caves and undercut by erosion. If islands were precious gems, the Andaman Sea off Thailand’s west coast would be Tiffany’s.

High up on these island’s sheer faces a species of tiny birds builds their nests with the usual sticks and twigs but, oddly and with regrettable effect,  cemented with their own saliva. The nests of these birds are the essential ingredient in bird’s nest soup so treasured by the Chinese, and it’s the saliva that is said to make it so delectable. Throughout these islands we came upon rude shacks housing the men who gather the nests for profit. Peering into caves and tunnels it’s common to see intricate networks of bamboo poles used to shinny up rock faces, enter the otherwise inaccessible interior nooks and crevices and gather up the valuable nests.

At the northernmost end of the islands, four freshwater rivers draining Thailand’s western highlands converge and empty into the Andaman Sea. The resulting brackish water interacts chemically with the limestone karst turning the sea from its customary deep clear blue to opaque emerald adding still more visual drama to this already dramatic place.

At the delta of the four rivers sits a tiny fishing village built entirely on stilts and anchored floats. I took the tender there for lunch one day at one of its numerous waterside open air restaurants. Upon my arrival the owner offered a photo op with local sea eagles perched on my shoulders, this for the price of $2.85 which seemed like a bargain to me.

On the menu was a variety of fish all described as “live”, which gave me pause as I’ve always preferred to dine on fish that are inarguably dead. I ordered one nonetheless just to see what it was all about and became further alarmed when the waitress showed up with a bamboo serving tray on which were four fish, sure enough alive and gasping for air in the manner of, well, fish out of water. These I learned had been plucked from an underwater holding pen in which just moments before they had been swimming happily about.

Eventually it became clear that no these were not to be served up raw and squirming and in desperate need of oxygen. They were offered so that I might choose the most delectable and prescribe the manner of its preparation. This I did in something like pidgin sign language with the result that I enjoyed one of the finest, not even to mention freshest, seafood dishes of my life thus far.

From the Butangs, we traveled a short distance to Ko Phi Phi Don and Ko Phi Phi Leh, known in phonetic translation as Big Pee Pee and Little Pee Pee, names apparently not chosen by the local chamber of commerce.  Big lies on a small beach lodged tightly between two karst hills. It is home to a dense thicket of motels, bungalows, bars, restaurants and miniature shops arrayed along a bewildering maze of brick walkways, all newly built since the deadly 2004 tsunami.  Plenty of restaurants for every taste and budget and fun bars line its two waterfronts, each facing onto a cove. We anchored in the north cove, took the tender into the village and had a grand old time eating, drinking and funning.

Big’s apparent role is to provide commercial support for visitors there for scuba diving and sightseeing on Little, just a mile away. A fleet of long-tail boats, dive boats, and speed boats ferry tourists between Big and Little all day long and it’s well worth the trip. Development is forbidden on Little with the happy result that its numerous secluded lagoons, shaded beaches and scuba sites remain pristine. It is where the movie The Beach was filmed, or at least scenes from it, a fact extolled in every brochure on the area.

Entered through narrow openings in the karst cliffs, the lagoons of Little are almost fully enclosed by three hundred-foot walls rising straight up from pools of iridescent green water. Hidden beaches, copses of local forest, jumbles of rocks and opulent reefs make this a dazzling place. While we were there the world’s economy was in the tank and the tourist trade suffering, yet still the place was crowded with people, almost too many for my taste. I can only wonder what it must be like in better times.

After the Pee Pees, we cruised a short distance to the epicenter of Thailand’s west coast fun spots, the large island of Phuket.  Its west coast is a thirty-mile long stretch of superb beaches strung along the coast in bights. During our stay we anchored off most of these, tendered to shore, ate exotic dinners, visited some of the many bars and other attractions and had a fine old time of it. Through our agent, Asia Pacific Yacht Services, we employed Kuhn Nong, a wonderful kindly Thai gentleman, to drive us to the many and often hard to find choice spots. He helped us choose wisely from among a bewildering array of diversions, some more innocent than others.

What I especially liked about Phuket is its diversity. Each beach is set within a town having its own unique personality, ranging from funk to swank and everything in between. Most are furnished Euro-style with rows up to six deep of colorful umbrellas shading lounge chairs and all are lined with thatch roofed huts offering inexpensive Thai massages and with simple restaurants featuring Thai dishes, cold beer and wine.

Some of Thailand’s finest restaurants are found on Phuket, often in the five-star resort hotels. Kuhn Nong took us one night to a fabulous public restaurant overhanging a high cliff from which we watched a flamboyant sun set over the Andaman Sea. Because of the high cost of electricity, this place, like most, was not air conditioned though the climate tends toward muggy.  Evening breezes bring relief and eventually you just don’t notice the absence of air conditioning.

Of all the towns and beaches along Phuket’s west shore, my favorite was Surin Beach. It is here that three of the top hotels in all of Thailand are found, the Amanpuri, the Banyan Tree and the Chedi, all within easy walking distance from each other. Along its beach under the shade of tall palms and banyans is a stretch of every kind of restaurant and bar anybody could wish for, from tres chic to rustic, some owned by Germans, others by Irish, most by local Thais. There is even a reggae bar.

It was here at Surin Beach that the crew and I had one of our more memorable celebrations for which a note of explanation is in order. During our travels in Southeast Asia, we have been joined at most of our ports of call by the girlfriend of our engineer, Scott. To our good fortune, she was born of Thai parents, speaks and reads the language fluently, yet was educated in Australia and so speaks English with equal skill. On top of all that, Melonie, her English name, is a delightful, charming young lady. I say that even though she persisted in calling me Papa, which is the rough equivalent in Thai of grandfather, and doting on me as if I were just a few steps away from the nursing home.

To set the stage, back in Singapore during my absence she, Scott and some other crew went to a nightclub where a few of the catty bar girls said to Scott, with ulterior motive, that Melonie looked like a lady boy to them, which she most assuredly is not. Still, the sensitive Melonie took offense as you can imagine. So when the time came to celebrate her twenty-fifth birthday a plan was hatched by Chef Fiona to surprise her with a party in which all the crew and yours truly dressed in drag as lady boys. I refer you to the photo gallery for more detail from which you will see that in the unlikely event I should ever elect to go the transgender route considerable surgical enhancement will be needed.

There is one other beach on Phuket that cannot go unremarked. Patong has a long and very fine crescent beach and a handsomely landscaped promenade but these are not the features for which it is famous. Each night at 6pm the town’s main thoroughfare, called Bangla Street, and most of its side streets are closed to traffic. From that point on until the wee hours the place is about as wild and debauched as any you could imagine, though in a playful way.  It’s something like Bourbon Street in the New Orleans French Quarter during Mardi Gras (pre-Katrina), without the parades, multiplied by about four. It’s also lots of fun.

I went to the Bangla district several nights, always with Kuhn Nong as my trusty guide. He and his family own a small but popular bar there called U-2 so he knows the traps awaiting the unwary. Each time I went I couldn’t suppress a huge euphoric grin, as though I was six years old and it was Christmas morning. The streets were packed with tourists and locals alike shambling along, some like me gawking in amazement, others drinking or singing or cheering. Still others clustered around pole dancers or street performers or lined up at the push carts of street food vendors. Groups of befuddled guys wagered among themselves on which of the dancers were true females and which were lady boys. Magicians and street musicians played the crowds, enterprising fellows with endangered species perched on their head offered up their creatures for photo ops. Tarted up hookers strutted, garish lights flashed, raucous music blared. Hordes of unruly celebrants shouted above the brassy din and drank themselves silly. Aromas of Thai curry and garlic prawns hung in the warm tropical air. It was for me a raffish wonderland of raw unrestrained energy, a place where inhibitions are bound and gagged and locked safely away. And a place that quickly had me mesmerized. I just loved it.

One of the more gratifying effects of world economic disaster is that there are far fewer tourists wandering about clogging up the place. In Bangla this meant also that bargirls outnumbered patrons ten to one.  We called them long time girls, as in “Hey meesta, you buy me cell phone, I love you long time.” At one typical bar, I bought drinks for the crew and generously tipped the several girls serving us in return for which I was invited to join a group of them dancing suggestively around a brass pole, an invitation that I accepted thus adding another to a long list of my improvident choices. After watching my performance, marked as it was by a wild flailing of limbs and done at a rhythm not exactly in accord with the music, the crew agreed with the girls that although I got high marks for vigor and an inexplicable self-assurance, my future lay in other directions.

One of the most curious attractions of Bangla is the transvestites who come there to parade their beauty. At a curbside arcade is an open air raised dance floor about twenty feet square on which the “girls” take turns gyrating feverishly. Sometimes there are three or more performing at the same time. The locals say that the only difference between the transvestites and real girls is that the trans are more attractive. Kuhn Nong, who sees them nearly every night, agrees.

I went one night to the area’s finest transvestite cabaret show, held in a large well-appointed theater with plush seats and wide aisles, and for an hour and a half was entertained by acts in which there was not a single female. You would never know it though. My favorite acts, and the crowd’s too, were a Tina Turner impersonator and a mime of a Japanese geisha. As my seat was on the front row, center aisle, I and a few other members of the audience was the recipient of cheek kisses from several of the “girls” who paraded among the audience. After the show the cast lined up outside for photo ops, an opportunity as you will see from the photo gallery I couldn’t resist.

With Kuhn Nong’s assistance, I was able to discern the only outwardly visible means by which you can tell a transvestite in full costume from a true female. It’s the feet, men’s are of course larger and less sleek than those of a woman. There’s no surgical treatment available to hide this difference. Otherwise you just can’t tell.

Kuhn Nong got me ringside tickets to a card of Thai boxing matches. These began with some young boys slapping and kicking enthusiastically but ineffectually at each other followed by progressively more talented combatants, including one match featuring a Swedish female bruiser who trounced a stocky Thai chick. Betting was heavy and the cheering partisan but polite. Eventually though I grew weary of it and left early. As I was headed for the door, the owner/manager in true Thai style asked me why I was leaving and seemed hurt as if he had offended me staging a poor event. Only after repeated and honest assurances that my departure had nothing to do with the quality of his show did he seem assuaged.

No visit to Patong, or to Thailand for that matter, is complete without a visit to a show in which especially talented ladies perform the most astounding feats. These involve five ping pong balls, five live if small fish, a live bird, a dart gun, dart and balloon and much else. It’s not clear yet that these sporting events will be welcomed into the Olympics any time soon but you never know. They are a considerable improvement over synchronized swimming though.

On the mainland coast east of Phuket is the fabulous Railay Beach, described by our guide book in accurate but overwrought prose as “the most stunning beach location in all of Thailand, home to emerald silk water punctured by surreal limestone formations, honey-hued beaches and psychedelic sunsets.” It is surely that. Its premier resort has a bar at beachside with many of its tables set in an adjoining cave others placed in the welcome shade of palm trees. I had dinner at its restaurant on a night that featured a fabulous show of ethnic dances performed to traditional music, not usually my favorite entertainment but in this case spellbinding. Each day specially equipped long-tail boats nosed onto the beach selling Thai lunches prepared on small grills, a sort of floating version of meals-on-wheels. If it’s luxurious sunbathing on nearly perfect beaches you’re looking for, this is the place.

Just seaward of Railay Beach is a collection of karst islands in a national park frequented by day trippers from the small nearby town of Ao Nang. One of these features a prominent rock formation that with imagination resembles the neck and head of a chicken, really more like those of a turkey, and is thus known as Chicken Island.

On its main beach are a few thatch and bamboo huts where an extended family of park rangers live and supplement their meager incomes by selling cold beer and hot lunches to the tourists. With the invaluable help of Melonie, we engaged the family to prepare for us a home cooked sunset dinner with fresh fish, Thai chicken, local veggies, grilled squid and fruit salad. The fish and squid had been pulled from the sea that very afternoon. With the entire island to ourselves, we helped the ranger family set up wooden tables on the beach as the tide receded and on these they served up at water’s edge one of our most memorable meals ever. We brought our battery powered Bose speakers and iPod the better to liven up the occasion with some Reggae tunes and of course lots of wine.

After dinner I shared a wee bit of my treasured Jameson 18-year old Irish whiskey with the papa of the clan, who had declined wine and beer. Neither of us spoke the other’s language but with Melonie’s help we managed to talk in rudimentary fashion. I complemented him on the fine life he and his family clearly have made for themselves. He thanked me and grinned in agreement. A fine life indeed.

Just as the sun set we were treated to the sight of thousands of fruit bats leaving their cave high up in the hills above us, circling overhead then flying across the nuclear orange sky on their way to the mainland to feed on the fruits and insects there. I half expected Count Dracula himself to appear.

We also visited the overly touristy James Bond Island, so named because one of these movies, Man with a Golden Gun, was filmed there many years ago.  Near it we anchored at a resort called Six Senses and from there took a local taxi, really just a pickup truck with a canopy and bench seats in back, miles into the jungle across the island to a wonderful thatched roof, raised floor open air restaurant. As I had experienced at another restaurant a few days before, live fish in a plastic bucket were brought to our table fresh from an underwater holding pen so we could choose the exact fish we fancied and specify its manner of preparation. The overused term “fresh seafood” will never have quite the same meaning. Forewarned that it was Muslim owned, we brought our own wine to which they had no objection. In true Thai fashion, they even refused our offer to pay a corkage fee.

After dinner, it being Friday night, our driver took us to the island’s hottest open air nightclub, run by an earthy American girl and her Thai boyfriend. There we were treated, if that’s the word, to a small band of modest talent playing and singing Thai pop music, mostly sappy love songs that prompted more shuddering than romance. Though disagreeable, the music did have the salutary effect of chasing us all back to Indigo before the harmful effects of overly exuberant celebration could take hold.

The parts needed for some essential repairs on Indigo still had not arrived in country and when they did would face delays in clearing through Thai customs, so I decided to use the time to travel a bit in the interior making sure that I could get back on short notice. The monsoon rains had not started yet but would soon.  Cyclones in the Indian Ocean were a threat and the one that had blocked our path to India still did. The weather was closing in on us and if we didn’t make it out of there soon we’d be confined to Thailand until the next weather window seven months hence.

I decided to fly to Chiang Mai in the north central part of the country, rent a car there and drive to Chiang Rai and the Golden Triangle, stay there a few days before flying to Bangkok for two days then back to Indigo.  It was a nice way to kill time waiting for parts and improved weather.The next blog, Thailand, Part Three, reports on these travels.