Yesterday was one of those days of misses that don’t add up to anything too bad, when you try to enjoy the lemonade made from the lemons. If I wasn’t that successful at doing that yesterday, rest assured that I feel better today!
We arose early and went to the front desk at Bottle Beach 2 to check out. Nobody was there right at 7, and neither was our boat that was supposed to bring us to the dive outfit we booked to take us to Sail Rock. But shortly, the manager shows up and says the boat may not come, because there are big swells on the water. He also tells us that, much to our surprise, though we paid for the room in advance with a credit card, we cannot settle our bill that way for meals and such – it must be cash, and more than we have, with no ATMs for miles.
Fortunately, our boat did make it, and the old captain agreed to wait for us to run to an atm when we arrived at Chalok Lam and bring our cash to the bungalow manager the next time he went to Bottle Beach, later that day. Problem solved.
We then were treated to an excellent display of seamanship. The old boatman could not cut his tiny long tail boat through the waves, as they would swamp the little craft. Instead, he surfed the giant swells, riding each until the boat could be delivered safely to the start of the next swell. The boatman had a wide frog-like mouth with no chin to speak of, and wore fisherman’s pants rolled up to his hips, an open button down shirt and a small shoulder bag with an elephant motif and gold thread. He was, in short, everything you could ever imagine in such a boatman.
We arrived in Chalok Lam and were picked up by our dive instructor, who looked an affable blonde Viking, and is Belgian. Like most dive masters here, he inexplicably smokes cigarettes. He and a compatriot took us to the dive shop on motorbikes, and soon we were on our way to Sail Rock, widely regarded as the best dive site in the Gulf of Thailand, home to the mighty whale shark, a plankton eater that grows from 3 to a whopping 12 meters.
Sadly, we did not see leviathan. One may have been there, or not, but our visibility was severely compromised by the same rough seas that showed us the quality of our morning boatman. The dive involved a long (for me) surface swim over some pretty big waves, and it was hard for me to relax after that – so much so that my normally decent air consumption rate went out the window, and I spent part of my dive sharing air with the dive master so we could stay down longer. That said, it is a magnificent site. We went to the eastern pinnacle, where we were surrounded by schools of big eyed trevaly just inches from my own eyes. There were also schools of the biggest fusiliers I have ever seen, and huge chevron barracuda, and the occasional giant grouper, and schools of smaller, sadly doomed baitfish, ringed by the big predator schools. At the end, we swam up through a chimney that started at 18 meters and opened up at five meters, with a charming pair of very large boxing shrimp inside.
But few were up for a second dive in those conditions. One by one, the dive boats left before their second dive, and we were the last. We went to a few different calm shallow water sites, each rejected for lack of visibility after we couldn’t see the dive master if he was more than one kick-cycle away. Finally, we found a slightly calmer site among some lovely coral reef near Haad Salad, and spent our time looking at rare nudibranches and other small scale life.
Our dive came with a free ride to anywhere we wanted on the island, and so at the end of our dives we did not return to Bottle Beach, but went instead to Ban Tai on the south coast.
I barely have the words to describe this trance music Mecca. But let me try. All the clothing stores sell clothes suitable for festivals. Half of the bars have evocative names. Music that would be considered very, very niche in the US blares out from nearly every bar or store. Yoga-healthy, dreadlocked, clean thirty-somethings seem to dominate the white population, and party fliers paper the entire exterior wall of the 7-11, as well as the inside of the Sicilian pizzeria and I imagine most other businesses. But there are still lots of Thai people here, and the area seems quite wholesome, perhaps lent that air by the organic coconut-palm and lime orchards and the water buffalo in the yards.
Our dive master had recommended a place to stay, so we proceeded there. But it was beyond our price range at 1500 baht a night. Happily, just nearby was a place prominently billing itself as for backpackers. After waiting for about half an hour for the front desk clerk to return, while happily reading Roald Dahl in a hammock in the front desk, a lovely hippie woman from Illinois booked us in to a happy little bungalow with shared bath for 150 baht. Though it could be locked up if you wished, when we entered the room had its windows wide open, with beads hanging over the windows and doorway. There was a mosquito net over the bed, with sheets that read “for the love” over and over again. The floor was rough slats with gaps in between, but the bed was firm and comfortable, the lighting was surprisingly good, and the shared bath had plenty of showers and a full length mirror, and a tapestry advertising the Blackmoon Culture festival. In short, the place had soul, and was in our top two places we have stayed on this trip.
We were very beat, though, and booking into this place was the last good decision we made. We decided to go to the herbal sauna at the nearby Wat. But we were distracted by shopping for trance clothes, of which we bought a few, and then dinner. When we got to the Wat’s sauna, it looked wonderful, but was within 10 minutes of closing and denied us entry. A patron, however, told us of another one 20 minutes away that was open an hour later, and was near the evening’s moon-set party besides. We seized the opportunity for adventure and jumped in a sorrng-taa-ou. It took us to the bar with the party, and we jumped out and looked for the sauna. We couldn’t find it, and were told we had actually passed it some kilometers back.
Because we were stinking and desperate to wash, we jumped in another pickup truck and drove to that place. We got out and looked around, seeing unspecific signs for it, but not the place itself. Finally, I called a number on the sign, and learned we had been ill-advised: the sauna had closed two hours previous, though sometimes it stays open later to accommodate patrons already present at the closing time. To make matters worse, we realized we had left half of the clothes we had bought in the back of the second taxi, with no way to recover the items. We felt wretched, and went back to our room without visiting the party, showered, and went to bed. We decided to take the early ferry off the island.
But today is a new day. We slept beautifully in that rustic little cabin and woke to a gorgeous moonlit predawn. We are on the Raja ferry to Don Sak, on the end of which journey we are likely to see the pink albino dolphins(!) that frequent those waters. I plan to take pictures of them to share with our guide in the Amazon. And then we will bus to the Krabi region, Railey in particular, where we will see the fabled Andaman sea and climb rocks over turquoise waters. And then, on to Indonesia.
– the private eye
PS- It’s as good a place as any for me to spill the ugly truth – Lonely Planet really isn’t for backpackers anymore. I cannot see why it lists so many higher-priced accommodations but fails to talk about the remarkable budget deals in this region, unless they either no longer care about these customers, or deliberately leave these gems off the pages so that they are not swamped, the same as you would not post the location of a remarkable but unprotected tree for fear that someone would fell it. In either case, my advice at this point is to use their guides as a marker for where accommodations are clustered, but to look around at the unpublished offerings for better deals. Which is sort of sad, as we’d already written the restaurant sections of the guides off as not being foodie enough to our taste – we pretty much prefer eating at the markets to just about anywhere else. The books are useful for general planning, but your own groundwork when you arrive is the best option.
The Professor and the Private Eye: Adventures Abroad 