- SEARCH OUR SITE -  ABOUT US - ADVERTISING - SUBSCRIPTION  - CONTACT US - BUSINESS INDEX - PHOTO LIBRARY  - OTHER MAGAZINES -

 

LATEST ISSUE OF OUR PRINTED MAGAZINE

ARCHIVES:

By Thom Henley, Photographs by John Everingham

How the world’s longest reef rose from the sea to become Thailand’s most dramatic landscape

Between 225-280 million years ago, long before humans first peered beneath the sea with their state-of-the-art diving.

Several times longer than the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, this massive living structure was formed in a shallow Permian sea by the same marine organisms that build reefs today. Tiny coral polyps, together with their symbiotic algae partners, were able to build up over time such a colossal structure that it stretched along 4,000 km of coastline and acquired a depth of more than 1,000 metres.

During the Cretaceous period (66-136 million years ago) heavy sediments washed in from the land, burying the ancient reef to great depths and compressing it into limestone. In the Tertiary period (3-66 million years ago), the Indian subcontinent collided on shifting tectonic plates with mainland Asia. The whole of Southeast Asia was rotated clock-wise from the force of the collision, and Asian plate sediments folded, faulted and up-lifted into the Himalayas, the highest mountain range on earth. The limestone sediments of the ancient reef also rose, and as rainwater penetrated deep along the fracture and fault lines, the process of karst formation began. Today, monsoon rains and pounding seas continue to erode the limestone into dramatic towering crags.

Since the beginning of human time, these structures have inspired everyone from pre-historic cave painters to Ming Dynasty artists, coastal traders and pirates to modern camera-toting tourists. They’re celebrated for their beauty the world over.

From Guilin, China — long described as “the most beautiful place in the world”, one can follow this ancient reef to the countries and locations where it most dramatically emerges from the earth. Many of these sites, with their multiple pinnacles soaring into the sky above rivers, lakes and coastal waters, and their dream-like hanging gardens, are among the most popular tourist destinations in Southeast Asia.
Not far from Hanoi, Vietnam visitors flock to Halong, a karst-studded bay in the Gulf of Tonkin which has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Farther southwest, in central Laos, the great reef emerges dramatically again in the picturesque rice-field setting of Vang Vieng. The next showstopper is in Thailand and, in many minds, the karst landscape here surpasses all others.

Cheow Lan Reservoir, in Khao Sok National Park, Surat Thani Province, may have flooded the best lowland forest areas of the park, but it did little with its 100m elevation pool to drown out or dwarf the magnificent karsts found here. Rising more than 900m in places, the sheer vertical magnificence of the ancient reef can be viewed here in its boldest profile. Just south of Khao Sok, the limestone spires stretch down through Klong Phanom National Park right to Phang Nga Bay. This newly created park has no lake, river or established trails to allow for easy visitor viewing, but it does lie directly on the flight path from Bangkok to Phuket. Anyone stealing a peek out their window the last 15-20 minutes during the flight approach to Phuket Island will, on a clear day, get an eagle-eye view of one of the most stunning landscapes on earth. From the steamy, jungle-clad crags of Khao Sok and Klong Phanom to the breath-taking setting of Phang Nga Bay, these “islands in the sky” make the transition from land to sea as seamless as an ancient Chinese painting.

Phang Nga Bay rivals Guilin as the best-known place in the world for karst topography. It may not match in visitor numbers the millions of Chinese who flock to Guilin annually, but it surely surpasses it in the number of foreign visitors. More than 5,000 foreign tourists per day descend on Phang Nga Bay during the peak holiday months of December through February. This is conveyor-belt tourism at its worst, with hundreds of racing mini-vans, tour buses and roaring longtail boats all headed for two locations: James Bond Island (Koh Thapu), immortalized in the Bond movie The Man With the Golden Gun, and the so-called “Sea Gypsy Village”. Sea gypsies do not live here at all; it is instead a small Muslim village that now resembles a row of warehouses in an industrial park, as it struggles to serve seafood buffet lunches to 3,000-5,000 people per day on cram-’em-aboard peak-season tours.

Stretching south along the Andaman Coast of Thailand from Phang Nga to Krabi, Trang and Satun provinces, this ancient reef assumes a very high profile, scenically. From the caves of Ao Luk, with their intricate prehistoric paintings, to the dazzling white beaches rimming the karst-walled coves of Krabi and Trang, this may well be one of the most beautiful stretches of coastline on the planet. Phra Nang Beach, with its soaring cliffs and sacred cave, has been rated by travel magazines as one of the two most beautiful beaches in the world. Equally stunning are the beaches and lagoon of Koh Hong and the karst island of Koh Kai and Koh Phi Phi, Krabi's best-known site. Maya Bay on Phi Phi Le, is now world-famous as the karst-walled cove where the movie The Beach, starring Leonardo di Caprio, was filmed. (It also enjoyed some infamy on the World Wide Web as protest swelled when the national park allowed Twentieth Century Fox to bulldoze flat the island’s only sand dunes and plant 250 coconut trees so Leo could romp around in Hollywood's version of what paradise should look like).

South of Thailand, the great fossilized reef makes a few more dramatic appearances, but not in peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra or Java, as one might expect from following the line of karst outcroppings south from China. It appears instead far to the east, on the Philippine island of Palawan, and on northern Borneo in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. This discontinuity most likely resulted from the violent clock-wise rotation of the whole region with the collision of the Indian and Asian tectonic plates.

Today on Palawan visitors can boat many kilometres through complex cave chambers at St. Paul’s Subterranean River National Park. In Sarawak’s Mulu National Park, the ancient reef comes to a dramatic end in the amazing razor-sharp Pinnacles rising above the steamy Borneo rain forest, and in two world-class caves. Deer Cave has the largest cave passage in the world, and Mulu Cave is home to the world’s largest cave chamber (big enough to hold 47 jumbo jets).
 

Karst landscapes display a distinctive flora and fauna throughout their Southeast Asian distribution. Vegetation cloaking these limestone crags has evolved the ability to withstand long periods of dryness, an almost complete lack of soil, desiccating winds and other demanding conditions. Among the distinct plant species which colonize karsts are cycad palms, the oldest tree species found in Asia. Animals which have the ability to flourish in this vertical rocky realm include long-tailed macaques, leaf monkeys, sure-footed serows, Indian pied hornbills, blue rock thrushes, dusky crag martens, peregrine falcons and giant fruit bats. The caves which honeycomb nearly all karst formations support a distinct fauna of their own: insectivorous bats, pythons, cave racer snakes, cave toads, crickets and a wealth of cave aquatic life where rivers flow through subterranean passageways.

One feature rarely seen in karst landscapes is waterfalls. Since limestone is too porous for water to flow over it, it instead percolates down through it. Dissolved calcium carbonate suspended in the rainwater is responsible for the spectacular cave formations one finds within karst chambers. A feature of Southeast Asia’s karsts that astonishes many visitors from temperate latitudes even more is the melting ice-cream appearance of many exterior karst walls. The huge external stalactites dripping down the face of these limestone precipices are the result of frequent rain and fallen leaves from karst vegetation rapidly decomposing in the humid tropical climate; it takes only a very slightly acidic solution to dissolve calcium carbonate.

From a recreational point of view, no other landscape in the region accords the same range of opportunities. With their sheer walls plunging to great depths in the clear Andaman Sea karst islands provide excellent dive sites for viewing encrusting sponges, sea fans, soft corals and many species of pelagic fish. South Thailand provides one of the only places in the world where one can see living corals attached to a 280 million-year-old fossilized reef.

Sea canoeing through the intricate waterways of karst islands and into their hidden hongs, lovely lagoons and complexity of caves is becoming a huge recreational industry in Thailand. Krabi has recently become the rock climbing capital of Thailand, with more than 10,000 climbers from around the world annually challenging its huge limestone faces. While professional spelunking (cave exploring) is still in its infancy here, there’s much to reward even the casual visitor to the region's extensive cave systems. Painters, poets and professional photographers find an endless source of subjects in this inspiring landscape, as do birders, botanists and nature lovers in general.

The wonder of it all is it’s never - ending drama — coral reefs compressed into rock, pushed above the surface to form towering crags, only to be slowly dissolved by the rain.