Back of Beyond (46 page)

I nodded. The sorting had begun in his mind. Serious seekers from the merely curious; the pecking order of spiritual purification. I sensed an unpleasant conflict of Western competitiveness with traditional Buddhist tolerance.

“Have you seen Emmanuel Sherman’s paintings in the temple?” he asked.

“No. I’ve just arrived. Who is he?”

“He isn’t anymore. He was a recluse. He lived for years in a cave on Ko Phangan Island in the Gulf of Thailand. Then he came here and did all these paintings. They’re pretty famous.”

“What happened to him?”

“He got malaria. Wouldn’t take any medication. Went back to Phangan and died there.”

The paintings were certainly powerful, executed in sweeping Japanese-style brush stroke monochromes, vibrant with themes of Western decadence and the “eight-fold path to freedom” and accompanied by Sherman’s Zenlike verses:

The silence of the forest behind the temple encouraged introspection. I walked on winding paths, past tiny huts raised on stilts. (“They’re for the monks and long-term residents,” I’d been told by the Californian. He seemed envious. “We get the dormitory.”) Butterflies bounced on the warm, wet air. Foot-high statues of Buddha and fragments of carved bas-reliefs marked the path to another open-walled temple set in a clearing. Blackboards and piles of notebooks suggested this was some kind of classroom for initiates.

It was all so quiet. Vines and creepers hung in lazy loops from the trees. I could see a young girl in a white robe sitting among a swirl of banyan tree roots. She was quite a distance away, but I could sense her total stillness. Just watching her made me feel enormously peaceful.

I was glad I’d come.

The next phase of my journey is hard to describe. I still dream about Phang-nga Bay, and it’s difficult to separate the reality from the dreamscape.

I’d reached the town of Krabi on the west coast of the southern peninsula, overlooking the Andaman Sea. The town itself offered little inducement for dallying, but the nearby beach of Noppharat Thara is one of those earthly paradises that encourages you to make a serious reappraisal of worldly ambitions and wonder—quite honestly—why you would ever wish to go anywhere else. And this is only one of a string of deserted strands all along the indented coastline, some with talcum powder—soft sands, others littered with millions of multicolored seashells, and one in particular, Susarn Hoi, aptly named “cemetery of shells.” Not much sand here. Instead the sea bed itself has risen up to display vast rock platforms consisting entirely of petrified shells more than thirty million years old. Strange place.

Only forty or so miles to the west, beyond the hazy profile of Yao Yai Island, lay Phuket Island, one of Thailand’s most overcrowded bits of recreational real estate, packed with package-tour tourists. But here, on the eastern side of the bay, there’s no one—no distractions, no girlie bars, nothing but these beautiful beaches, the occasional junk sailing by from Penang or Singapore, a few fishermen, and dozens of scattered offshore islets, jungle-shrouded and mysterious.

Oh—and the Phi Phi Islands.

In recent years this fantasy-shaped archipelago, full of soaring limestone cliffs, crystal-clear coral reefs, and turquoise bays edged with silver sand has become a little too “discovered” for travelers seeking solitude. But in spite of a couple of small resorts and a few beachfront restaurants, those willing to rough it can take off over the jungled hills with a sleeping mat and a few basics and soon discover their private corners of paradise.

I was taken by a local Phi Phi fisherman toward the southern tip of this arc of islands. His pitch had been simple: “You like bird ness soup?”

“Not particularly.”

“You want see caves where ma’ get ness?”

“Not really.”

“Good. We go.”

So we went.

It was hot on the main island and a breezy five-mile boat ride in a “longtail” didn’t sound like such a bad idea. I’m a pushover for pitchmen anyway.

And what a strange world we entered.

Incised near the base of towering limestone karsts were dark caves, full of eerie shadows and dripping with enormous tiered stalactites. Our voices echoed in their murky interiors. As my eyes became accustomed to the dank gloom I saw a spidery web of bamboo pillars and catwalks, lashed together with rope and vines, rising from the floor of the cave and disappearing high into the darkness.

“For ness,” the fisherman explained in his singsong English. “Ma’ climb for ness. Ve’ high.”

“They climb these things?” I gasped. They didn’t look strong enough to support a monkey—even a parrot.

“Li’ bird. Swiss. Have ness.”

“Swiss?”

He grinned, revealing a toothless mouth. He was having problems with the word and tried again.

“Swisses? Lil’ birds.” He flapped his arms like wings.

“Oh—swifts!”

“Ya, ya—swiss. Ve’ li’.”

“Very little. Yes, swifts are very little. And this is where they build their nests?”

“Ya, ya. Ma’, climb.”

I must have looked a bit sceptical. Next thing I knew the fisherman leaped onto one of the vertical bamboo scaffolds and began climbing—almost dancing—upward, pulling himself up by the dangling vines, his toes outstretched like fingers. The bamboo poles creaked and swayed. I expected the whole gossamer construction to fall apart and placed myself to catch my falling guide.

In seconds he was up more than fifty feet, on the edge of the deep shadows. He pointed into the far recesses of the cave. The scaffolding seemed to be everywhere. “Ve’ far. Two kilomet.”

“Okay. I believe you.”

“Ma’, climb.” His voice sounded miles away.

“Yes, I understand. Come on down now.”

He was looking around. “All go. No swiss.”

Then he spotted an object on the side of the high cave wall. He reached out, touched the mossy rock, and something white floated down to the floor. I picked it up. It was a bit like sponge tissue—webbed strands of soft fiber.

He was down again. I hadn’t even heard him coming.

“Ness,” he said.

It was a tiny fragment of a swift’s nest, left behind by one of the pickers. Apparently the birds build them out of strands of saliva, which later coalesce into tangled rubbery strips, rather like transparent vermicelli.

“Ve’ goo.” He grinned and rubbed his skinny belly, then flexed a sinewy bicep. “Mak’ stron’.”

I tore off a tiny piece and tasted it. Nothing. A texture like sponge with no discernable flavor whatsoever. It reminded me of the soup fiasco in Hong Kong when, unwittingly, I’d eaten a bowl of the most innocuous broth laced with gelatinous strips and been charged an outrageous amount for the honor of ingesting the finest shark’s fin soup on the island. Birds’ nests obviously fell into the same category. A dish for the purist, offering promises of virility, energy, longevity, and all those other virtues so anxiously sought by Oriental epicures.

It seemed like an awful lot of trouble and danger to go to for something so—well—bland.

The fisherman was now firing an imaginary machine gun at me and laughing. “If you ta’, me go…” (more machine gun sounds). “Bi’ dollas. Man’, man’, dollas. Much money.”

Apparently these nesting caves are very valuable and jealously guarded.

The fisherman stopped firing. “Is alri’—no more swiss.”

The cave had been abandoned by the birds. These were old bamboo scaffolds and presumably even more dangerous than they looked. The fisherman was even crazier than I’d thought. One or two rotten bamboo poles or some broken vine knots and the whole fragile construction could have collapsed. But he didn’t appear to mind. He was firing his machine gun at invisible birds’ nest looters again.

A few days later I was sixty or so miles to the north of the Phi Phi Islands, drifting in my own longtail through the dreamscape of Phang-nga Bay. The limestone karst pillars that had followed me most of the way south from Bangkok congregated here in the hundreds, rising like an abandoned city of eroded skyscrapers out of shallow waters. The largest were over a thousand feet high; great gray monoliths, sheer-sided and topped by scrubby jungle and vines, showing yellowed scars where slices of eroded limestone had fallen off recently and tumbled into the coral beds at their bases. They receded into the heavy haze of the bay like solitary hooded monks on some strange and lonely pilgrimage.

Well away from the tourist boats, I drifted for hours among these eerie formations peering down into a translucent ocean, watching parrot fish flash their gaudy colors. Some of the pillars enclosed tiny coves etched with arcs of white sand. No one lived here. They beckoned. “Stay awhile,” they whispered. “Why not?” I wondered. “Why not?”

Toward evening I paused at the only village out in the bay, an odd clustering of wooden houses on stilts occupied by a group of devout Muslim fishermen set against the rocky islet of Ko Pannyi. A blue minaret rose up above lopsided bamboo catwalks. A muzzein chanted the call to evening prayer, and the sounds echoed off the rock pillars, now turning scarlet in the sunset.

I drifted on, at one point right through a towering karst pillar, where the sea had opened up a tunnel dripping with stalactites. As I emerged from the other side the bay was bathed in gold-and-purple light. And the whispering was there again: “Stay. Stay.” Plans, schedules, timetables, itineraries, all seemed so utterly pointless. Southern Thailand had so much more to show me, so many little “lost worlds”—clusters of islands out in the Andaman Sea, other hidden islands I’d heard about on the world-wanderer’s grapevine in the Gulf of Thailand….

The decision made itself and who was I to argue? I’d planned to return early to Bangkok and surprise my host, but that would have to wait. I had to find these places. The islands beckoned, and I had no choice but to respond—happily.

I feel motionless but by the size of our frothing wake we seem to be traveling pretty fast through this heat-hazy limbo. Land is far behind. The pounding discos and gorgeous-girlie bars of Thailand’s Phuket Island are way to our east, long gone in the early-morning mists. In spite of impressive world-class resorts and superb beaches, Phuket depresses me. Thousands of European, Australian, and American bronze-skinned Buds and Chucks flying high on cheap beer, grass, and exotic female companions. The food’s good—some of the best seafood in the world—but the fun and the pace palls fast and you soon begin to wish for silent white coves and the shimmering eternity of an empty blue ocean.

It’s 9:00
A.M.
but the sun is already hot. Boat breezes create an illusion of coolness, but that won’t stop your skin blistering like a paratha if you don’t smother yourself in high-spf lotion. The ocean is alive. Tiny flurries of fish, bright as hummingbirds, leap together in rainbowing sprays. The captain looks out for sailfish, the prize of deep-sea fishermen who work the waters in the cooler November-to-March season.

I don’t feel like fishing. I really don’t feel like doing much of anything except sitting in the shade of the cabin and watching our knife blade prow slice through turquoise waters.

For an hour or two that’s all there is to see. It’s fifty miles from Phuket to the first of my island discoveries, the Similans. There are nine of them and only two have any kind of native population.