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By Sam Wilkinson

“Taffy” Trevor Davies was born pragmatic. A life-long bachelor contemplating early retirement and seeking adventure away from staid old Cardiff, he’d read a for-sale ad in Yachting Monthly for Dream On, a 50-foot ocean-going yacht.

Within the week he’d checked out every square inch of her and found her to be a beaut – an absolute beaut. Her hull was impeccable, her decks varnished to perfection, and the living space below tastefully yet economically designed. He couldn’t have found a better boat anywhere without badly denting his doctor’s pension. Three weeks later, as he sea-tested her, he counted his lucky stars to be so fortunate as to have bought her.

He rented out his cottage to a newly-wed couple, wintered in Majorca, rounded the Cape and slipped into the Andaman Sea for the tail end of the rainy season on Phuket.

He moored in Chalong Bay, chatting and drinking with the locals onshore, all the while watching angry black clouds scraping over the Kata hilltops. They emptied onto the eastern slopes, poured down the hill into the muddy confusion of Chalong Town, then disappeared into the bay. Trevor loved every minute of it.

Come December, he took to exploring the island with the help of a rented motorcycle and a foldout map, searching out the cheapest noodle stands, the prettiest beaches and the best ship’s chandlers. One evening in Karon, he ran into a group of fellow Welshmen, and together they all but drank a beach-bar dry before calling it a night. At dawn.

Still, according to locals, Trevor was “a bit of a solo artist”.

He was seduced by the idea of yacht chartering out of Thai waters, either up off the coasts of Myanmar or down in Malaysia. He soon found himself busy and productive in a way that didn’t seem like work to him. Life appeared to be starting over again, and he felt younger than he had in a long time.

In March of the following year, a letter arrived from his old university friends in Cardiff. They were on their way down to Phuket, and would he please put them up and show them around? For Trevor, solitary as he was, this was like having them pitch a tent in his front room and then ask him to please hurry up with the cooking. Still, his mates had continually ribbed him raw in the old days, and he’d always reacted badly. Maybe it was time to make amends.

When Rhyss, Andy and Lee stepped through Phuket International Airport customs, they saw a short, muscular, greying man in tattered shorts and T-shirt. The only sign of affluence was a Seiko diver’s watch on a deeply tanned wrist.

For his part, Trevor saw three portly, pallid men in bright silk shirts, each carrying expensive luggage.

It was an awkward meeting.

Once in the hired jeep, though, things got better. They dispensed with English and chatted like Welsh schoolchildren as they wove through late afternoon traffic back to Chalong. As soon as he’d unpacked, Rhyss cracked open a beer and winked across the crowded room.

“Here’s to the lassies, then. Trev, mon – you must be an expert in that field by now, look you.”

Trevor looked away in embarrassment. But just then, like an afterthought, Andy called out from the shower: “Taffy, you have exactly 24 hours to find me the woman of my dreams.”

Trevor smiled uncertainly then went outside to find something to do with the garden water tap. So that was it then. They wanted him to be their pimp. The only Thai ladies he knew cooked noodles and washed his laundry for him. He hadn’t a clue what to say to a bargirl, much less how to pick one up for his friends. He’d picked up barely enough Thai to say hello to his neighbours. How could he possibly get out of this ludicrous arrangement?

They set out that night and ate at a beachside restaurant north of Patong before heading to Soi Bangla in Patong. Trevor was shaking with nerves. He’d already drunk too much wine and was in need of a coffee, but, once they arrived at the beer bar strip, he realized that needn’t have worried about a thing. As soon as the bargirls saw the gold watches, the expensive shoes and the bulging wallets, they descended on the visiting Welshmen like flies on discarded candy floss.

“Halloo, whe’ you flom? Wha’ you name? You velly hansome.”

He drove home alone that night after offering mumbled excuses to the bar’s scowling mamasan for having spurned the advances of one of her girls. The three men, deeply engrossed in the brown eyes, brilliant smiles and satin skin of their newly-found companions, didn’t seem to notice or care that he’d left. Trevor went back to Chalong, parked outside Jimmy’s Lighthouse, locked the car and chugged back out on his dinghy in inches of water to Dream On, barely cheating the outgoing tide.

Clambering back down into the main cabin was akin to re-entering his mother’s womb. The familiar odours of fresh varnish and diesel calmed him and, once in bed, the gentle rocking of the yacht lulled him to sleep sooner than he knew it.

The next morning, as he arrived back at his house, he heard laughter before he’d even opened the car door. The place echoed with the clattering of crockery on ceramic and the frantic stirring of sauces in pots. Two girls – strangers to Trevor – were preparing tom yam gung at the kitchen table while another lay nestled in Andy’s hairy arms in a hammock slung across the front room.

“Hello, Taffy,” he thundered. “Thought we’d lost you last night. Poo here is to give us a guided tour of the island today. Guess who’s the designated driver? Look now, where’s that food? I’m famished.”

The day went by in a hazy blur of sightseeing. Everything, from temples to baby elephants to conical-hatted street cleaners was photographed. And all the while, squashed into the jeep’s back seat next to Andy and Rhyss, the girls preened, pouted and chatted.

Poo, as it turned out, was from Udon Thani and wouldn’t have known Phuket from Paris, but it made no difference to anyone’s enjoyment of the day.

Over beers that evening, the men planned a two-day yacht trip up to Phang Nga Bay starting on the morrow. But the girls, after much indecipherable discussion, hissing, and brow furrowing, declined to go, claiming to have “important business” back in Patong.

The next morning no one seemed to mind as they waved goodbye from the back seat of a tuk-tuk.

To beat the tide, Trevor decided to shop at the dawn market, drop the hired jeep off and take fresh supplies out alone in the outboard. Which he did, returning quickly for his waiting friends. Once aboard though, the camaraderie quickly faded as his friends criticized the yacht, complaining about the lack of headroom and the constant swell. Rhyss insisted Trevor stop the yacht’s motor because the diesel fumes were making him nauseous, then moaned in exaggerated seasickness as the yacht tacked to and fro in the northeasterly breeze.

To add to Trevor’s misery, Lee sat upwind from him, lighting his third cigarette of the day, blowing the smoke in his skipper’s face. And no matter how politely he tried to stop the lads throwing things overboard, Trevor couldn’t stop the constant procession of beer cans bobbing in the yacht’s wake. By the time they were sailing parallel to Laem Prow, Trevor had made up his mind to have a showdown.

That night, as the blue-and-white yacht lay moored and sheltered in the shadows of Phang Nga Bay’s scenic limestone islands, he sat his friends down, poured each man two fingers of rice whisky on ice, took a sip himself and said quietly: “Look you. I don’t know what’s changed, but something has. You boyos think I’m a stick-in-the-mud for not staying on the other night and making a pitch for girls who look at a foreigner and see only a dollar sign. And maybe you think it’s paradise to be able to drive drunk without the fear of a blue flashing light in your rear-view mirror, but this is paradise for me. He waved his glass at a towering limestone cathedral above him. “And that says bedtime.” He nodded at the setting sun. “And this is my music.”

The men looked at each other in bewilderment until they realized he was whispering about the waves gently slapping against the hull.

“I’m as blind as to what’s so darn great about Soi Bangla as you are blind to the beauty of swifts diving for insects before a storm. I hate the idea of girls selling themselves as much as you’d hate your kid’s losing their mortgages. And it’s as simple as that.” He leant over the railing and spat into the sea.

Silence. The men looked at their feet. Darkness had fallen. The yacht’s port and starboard lights winked ruby-and-jade in black velvet as a half-moon rose above the Phang Nga mainland.

Lee shifted and spoke: “Taff mon, you’re right. There are two sides to this place; there’s no denying that. We can’t see yours, and you can’t see ours for the moment, but somewhere in the middle … Maybe that’s Phuket. It’s not yours and it’s not ours.” Lee crunched an ice cube, shaking his head slowly and said, “Well, here we are, then.”

Trevor looked up and smiled. “Here’s to where we are then. I’ve always been a bit of a self-righteous ass, haven’t I? Here I am, going on like a Kilkenny electioneer about things we already know about. Sorry lads.”

The four men raised their glasses and toasted one another, laughing.

“Here’s to where we are.”

Fifty metres above them, from the mouth of a limestone cave, the first of the night’s 1,000 bats fluttered out through the yacht’s rigging into the night while the rest of its family blinked and shook itself awake, only to follow suite seconds later. Strange, that it was nighttime and yet everyone was waking up.