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Tales of the Andamans
By Phuket Magazine team
writers
Stories
abound in the islands of the Andaman Sea. Phuket Magazine chose 5 islands at
random and sent writers trawling through memories and jumping aboard
longtails..
This Water Colored Life
By Mark Pettifor
A little over two years ago, prompted by her mother's
death, Susanna Bachman, like so many before her, donned a backpack and
headed out to see the world. But, unlike the others, her pack contained so
many tubes of paint that she hardly had space for clothes. Susanna was on a
mission to water colour the world.
Inspired to paint the planet in her unique "impressionist
land-scape" style, Susanna Bu-chanan has found the ideal base on the
southern Thai island of Lanta. From her seafront home in Old Lanta Town, the
bouncy, six-foot blonde American combines her love of painting with other
favourite pastimes fishing and eating. Now happy to call Koh Lanta home,
getting there, paintbrush in hand, was a long and interesting journey.
After three months of painting the island landscapes of
Fiji, Susanna moved on to New Zealand, Central Australia and Indonesia. Her
passion for art then turned to teaching after she stumbled upon a vacancy
for a "Marine illustration secondary school teacher" in Lanta Town, on Koh
Lanta, southern Thailand. This job was perfect for her, given that she'd
previously worked on a marine magazine in the USA. Susanna consulted with
peers and refreshed her skills in this particular genre. Alas, in the
outcome, she found mainly herself teaching English to excited students and
staff.
Still, she very much enjoyed her stint teaching in
Thailand before continuing north, taking in Nepal and Europe. But Thailand
finally drew her back. During her previous stay, a wise Lanta island
matchmaker introduced her to Sayan, a Thai man who had spent 10 years as a
monk, before working as a resort chef and then going on to charter a vessel
for fishing and island tours. On her return, Susanna found herself both in
Sayan's arms and on his fishing boat.
They both love to fish the sea around Lanta. In a
previous life, Susan-na was a graphics designer for a large marine
publication in Santa Cruz, with full access to a company boat whenever the
fancy took her. Unsurprisingly, she spent eight years chasing blue fin tuna
and king salmon up and down North America's West Coast, including multi-day
sorties into Mexican waters. Now she and Sayan both take visitors fishing
and prepare the subse-quent seafood feasts back on land.
Weather permitting, Susanna finds time each day for
painting, fishing and being fed delicacies by Sayan. She has only returned
to the US once in the past two years, exhibiting 100 artworks reflecting 20
months of travel across the Pacific, Australia, Asia and Europe, and she is
now producing prints of her work. The energetic couple recently bought
themselves a four-wheel drive vehicle and a map of Thailand. Their latest
mission is to travel to all corners of the Kingdom painting, eating and
fishing along the way.
To preview Susanna Bachman's art, visit www.worldwatercolors.com.
You'll find samples capturing the essence of Australia, California,
Cambodia, Costa Rica, Fiji, Hawaii, Indonesia, New Zealand and, of course,
Thailand.
Adventure Tourism
By John Everingham
Looking down through my camera lens, fitting the
twisting, snake-like trunk of the ancient cycad plant into the frame, I saw
a traditional longtail boat slide into the corner of the composition.
Abruptly, I found myself glued to the viewfinder. A man stood in the bow and
pointed something stick-like right at the camera. "Ah," I thought. "That
sure looks like a gun." Then it occurred to me: "Hey, if that's pointing at
the camera, it's also aimed right at me."
I lowered the camera, with its extreme 20mm wide-angle
lens, causing the image of the gun-toting intruder to jumped alarmingly
close. In fact, the barrel of his M1 carbine loomed very real, just metres
from my nose.
"Get down!" he yelled at me. "Get down!"
What the hell's wrong with taking photos of a
1,000-year-old plant, I wondered? What does this guy want? My cameras? Is
this a robbery?'
No one cruising Phang Nga Bay in a boat expects to get
hijacked at gunpoint. Rob-bery or violence is virtually unheard of, here in
this bay of ever-friendly fishermen. All of rural Thailand is safe for
travellers. And I was a regular visitor who had climbed over many islands in
this amazing bay of towering limestone monoliths. But this guy's gun was
real, and his manner threatening.
"You are going to our leader." He sounded like something
out of a children's cowboy-and-indians story. But the gun was now aimed
directly at my back and I was indeed "going to meet the leader".
Things swiftly cleared up for me. As my hijackers' boat
rounded a bend, I recognized the significance of the bamboo huts jammed
under rocky overhangs, of the open-air campfire, the little temporary jetty,
the bamboo poles and piles of old junk and ropes. This was a bird-nesters'
camp. My relief was immediate, for now I knew I was going to keep my
cameras. Not to mention my life. There were no stolen bird's nests in my
camera bag. The leader was in fact a pleasant guy in scrap-py old clothes,
his belly rolling out over his belt. Unlike his rough underling, he knew
foreigners were after photos, in these parts, not birds' nests. We chatted.
He told me the island he guarded night and day carried the name Bird Island,
due to its many caves in which the swiftlets built their valuable nests of
spittle. Heaven help any local fisherman foolish enough to clamber up the
rocky cliff face and be mistaken as a nest thief. Or a real thief who got
caught.
Theft from Phang Nga's caves is rare. Thieves do not live
long in these parts, where a kilogramme of nests fetch up to 100,000 baht
a fortune in this region. The caves are guarded zealously. When a rare clash
between guards and thieves breaks out in southern Thailand, the result is
invariably dead bodies, discarded if possible to avoid police intervention.
But this is an violent anomaly in a generally serene region. And it's a
situation that's easy to avoid.
This incident happened about 1992. Interestingly, tourism has itself
since brought significant changes. All bird-nesters, even the gangsterish
underlings, now realize that foreigners take photos rather than nests.
Today, you can cruise up to Bird Island, just outside the channel separating
Big and Little Yao islands, with no fear of being chased away at gunpoint.
Indeed, the guards are more likely to invite a foreigner to join them for a
tipple from their whiskey bottle. And their guns usually remain out of
sight.
Free Rides to Burma
By Collin Piprell
The tall, be-turbaned Thai-Sikh businessman hunches
over the high-stakes roulette board with the grave concentration of a tailor
at his cutting table. Following some arcane system, he uses both hands to
place large stacks of chips on a series of numbers, ignoring a ravishing
trophy sidekick perched on a stool beside him. The croupier spins the wheel,
waits till it stops,
and sweeps away yet another small fortune in chips. Right away, the gambler
goes back to his cutting table, focused to the exclusion of all else. His
friend, or maybe it's his niece, looks bored to tears.
Aside from the British casino manager, this writer is the
only Westerner in the VIP gambling rooms. At 1pm on a Thursday, little
groups of middle-aged, middle-class Asians, the majority of them women, sit
here and there, lost in the immensity of the place. In the course of the
night, I meet a honeymoon couple from Taiwan and a couple of charming
dowagers from Bangkok. They're here for the fun. Most of these people seem
to have their gambling under control.
I'm here for the writerly colour. Which comes at a price.
The VIP rooms have charming receptionists and a step-through metal detector.
So you have to check your pistol. Admittance as a member also means you have
to wear long trousers and buy 10,000 baht in chips. A flash of clairvoyance
tells me this purchase is more like a cover charge. (In my own defence, I'm
short of sleep, and not playing blackjack at my best.)
The Andaman Club sits on the Burmese island of Thahtay
Kyun, or Kho Son in Thai, which lies just south of Kawtaung, Burma's
southernmost com-munity, a lively market town with a population of 25,000.
The Club is de-scribed for legal purposes as a "resort with gaming rooms".
It welcomes visitors with its own Immigration office, roomy and staffed with
especially courteous officials and the floors and toilets are granite. The
hotel lobby has a single ATM machine, which should be one of the busiest in
the region, verging on melt-down. But it wears a sign saying it's out of
order something to do with Thailand's anti money laundering legislation.
The reception areas and lobby are huge and airy, with high ceilings, heavy
woods and stone everywhere, a sweeping staircase and enormous chandeliers.
Looking north-ward from anywhere in the resort, you are presented with
magnificent island views.
The hoi polloi rooms are packed with one-armed bandits,
automatic blackjack machines, and lots more. Both these and the VIP rooms
are open twenty-four hours a day; which is unfortunate since, first thing in
the morning, this writer has to board a boat for the Burmese islands north
of here.
The most remarkable thing about the 800-island Mergui
Archipelago is that such an extraordinary natural resource could lie so
close to a major tourist area as Phuket and go largely unremarked for so
long. Given the post-1940s isolationist regime in Rangoon, the Mergui
Archi-pelago was off limits to visitors for decades. Over the past several
years, however, the government has cautiously begun to develop tourism in
the area. Among other things, this huge island group promises to become one
of Asia's best sailing and sport-diving destinations. The southern islands
of this group, mostly uninhabited, still support amazing rainforest and a
diverse wildlife. Pristine white-sand beaches are so numerous they become
commonplace.
A number of Phuket-based com-panies are running cruises
in the Archi-pelago. SEAL, for example, offers sailing, diving, snorkelling,
kayaking, forest-walking trips. Others do dedicated sailing or diving
excursions.
Boat rides to the Andaman Club from Rayong a Thai town
on the mainland across from Kawtaung are free.
Under Water World
By Hayley Wilson
Scuba diving. The very words have always provoked
mixed feelings of excitement and fear. My mind would fill with a flurry of
fish and exciting explorations, contrasted with visions of uncomfortable,
unnatural and unfathomable attachments. Then I took a dive course around the
Phi Phi Islands...
The first day was filled with introductions, videos,
reviews and a few pool-confined dives. All very good for calming nerves and
conveying vital knowledge, but it was only on day two, out in the open
water, that the real adventure began.
Feeling like a giant frog in my scuba suit, I enter the
water and watch people all about me disappear below the surface, leaving
only bubbles behind. I chant the divers 'golden rule' over and over:
Breathe continuously and never hold your breath; breathe continuously;
breathe
I tell myself that, if this is the most important rule in scuba
diving, then I should be okay. Just seconds later I realize that I am
already there under water, breathing con-tinuously and feeling okay.
I am mesmerized, intrigued by the diversity of my
surrounds, struck by the variety and contrast of colours, sizes, shapes and
textures. Altered qualities of sound and vision combine with a novel sense
of buoyancy to create a wholly new experience. I'm told that sound travels
20 times faster under water, but, with the boats on surface lying still at
anchor, and aside from the bubbles that brush past my ears as I exhale, a
peaceful silence prevails.
My wide-eyed and alert explora-tions are soon interrupted
by a gentle tug on my fin. I look back to see the instructor pointing
upward. "Leopard shark," he writes on his underwater notepad. At the word
shark, I remind myself once more of the divers' golden rule: "Breathe."
I position myself vertically, keeping one eye on this leopard of the sea,
observing every graceful move it makes before I lose sight of it above a
coral shelf.
And it wasn't just underwater leopards that we saw. This
world was busy with parrots, stars, angels, clowns, horses, feathers,
damsels, flutes, trumpets, lions, ghosts and even cucumber sea creatures.
They say that there's more to be seen in 10 minutes on the reef than you'll
see in the forest in a week. After 55 minutes, I exit the water boiling with
excitement and enthusiasm, eager to make the journey again.
Enveloped by the underwater world a second time, with the
fish not half as curious of me as I was of them, I began to feel as though I
actually belonged there. But it took only a glance at another tanked-up,
masked and artificially finned being swimming awkwardly by to destroy this
illusion. All the same, it didn't take long before I felt truly at ease.
Soon I was surprised to discover a tiny treasure of the
Phi Phi sea a dart-ing, dizzy little fish coloured psychedelic
blue-on-black. My instructor's eyes, magnified by water, lit up as he
scrawled on his notepad: "Juvenile emperor angelfish. Not easy to find." He
follows up with two "okay" signals, which I translate as the un-derwater
expression for "two thumbs up". Merrily, I continue on my way. Eventually,
with a mind full of amazing images and tank emptying of air, I venture back
to the surface.
Heading home over the rough surface of the sea, I
recalled a video voice from lesson one: "Human beings know more about the
surface of the moon than they do of the ocean floor." But I know now where
I'd rather be, and I hope to return there soon.
Our reporter was graciously hosted at the Phi Phi Island Village &
Dive. See www.ppisland.com
Koh Maak Betel Nut Island
By Lana Chanhom-Willocks
Phang Nga Bay is famous for its limestone isles, with
their towering limestone cliffs. But near the top of the bay sits Koh Maak,
an island whose beauty reveals itself in a more subtle fashion than do its
dramatic Phang Nga sisters. While there are no karsts or caves here, Koh
Maak is a fertile place permeated with the sweet smells of flowers and
fruit. In fact, given the plantations of cashew, rubber, betel nut, palm and
coconut trees pressed into it, the island resembles a pincushion.
Rather than playing host to sun-bathers, Koh Maak's
beaches, with their clusters of longtail boats and piles of fishing net,
serve as work sites. Some beaches feature gangly, twisted trees sprouting
from the shallows while, on others, rows of wooden poles march out into the
water to secure fish traps and boats. The poles make handy spots for
seabirds to perch while scouting the sea for a meal.
While the nearby Panyi and so-called James Bond islands
are visited by hundreds of tourists daily, Koh Maak remains notably absent
from the tourist literature. An Internet search on the island turns up
nothing. A query to a tourism official in Phuket yields only a puzzled look
and a search for a map. On the map, the island appears as a tiny oblong dot,
with Phuket, the Phang Nga mainland and Krabi arching around it. Looked at
from a development perspective, Koh Maak might be described as the eye of
the tourism hurricane that swirls all around.
Koh Maak's population of 2,500, most of them fisherfolk,
are scattered around the island. The mosque in the island's centre also
serves as the heart of community activity, with a few shops and homes
clustered around. The islanders' houses are primarily raised wooden
structures, although newer ones and most of those under construction are of
concrete. TV antennas poke out of the top of some homes that turn into
gathering places to watch muay thai boxing matches, advertised by the
whoops of excitement from within.
The few narrow roads that tran-sverse the island were
paved only two years ago, and so far only a few motor-bikes, bicycles and
the odd stray chicken travel on them. A long concrete jetty on the island's
east side serves supply and fishing boats, rather than tourist-filled
ferries or speedboats.
There is no tourism development at present, though a
bungalow project that villagers say was started by a German investor now
sits abandoned and incomplete on the side of a hill rising from a sandy bay.
This was the island's first taste of tourism a taste that appears to have
quickly gone sour.
Unlike many of the islands in the waters off Phuket, Koh
Maak truly remains a natural place, with a "land that time forgot"
atmosphere. When talking with its residents, who look healthy and proud in
their weather-beaten way, one gets the impression that they wouldn't mind so
much if the outside world forgot about them for longer still.
Getting there: Long-tail boats can be hired from Ka Sohm Pier, in
Takua Thung, just south of Phang Nga Town. Travel time is about 1 hour.
Sayan Tour, at the Phang Nga bus terminal, can arrange a daytrip with a
guide for around 2,000 baht (Tel. 076 430 348). Bring your own food and
water supplies. There's no place to stay on Koh Maak; the nearest
accommodation is on Koh Panyi, the "floating village" about 20 minutes away
by boat.
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