Late the previous evening, after a full day of doing absolutely nothing and after debating the relative merits of doing a days snorkelling versus spending a day doing a Thai Cooking course, we eventually opted for the latter and booked in for a criminally holiday-early 7:30 pick up with Tropical Andaman.
I’ve now had the experience (I wouldn’t say “fortune”) of travelling with quite a few minibus drivers in Phuket but our driver this time was something special again – after weaving cautiously from resort to resort (and finally catching the bottom edge of his gleaming new minibus on a steep driveway leading out of Dewa Resort, he proceeded to put on a virtuoso exhibition of stunt driving that would have left Remy Juilenne’s driving team speechless with admiration. One lane became two, an invisible middle lane, and we weaved, darted, swerved around dogs with apparent suicide wishes snoozing in the middle of the road, and finally, to the accompany of a few Hail Mary’s, slid to a halt in a cloud of rubber smoke at the waterfront, ready to board our boat for a trip to the East coast islands.
We were greeted at the door by our tour guide for the day, Josef, originally from Switzerland but who has been living in Thailand for about a decade after marrying a local girl. Josef is a top guy, and is most definitely unforgettable – imagine Werner Herzog trapped inside Mickey Rourke in his “Wild Orchid” phase, and literally covered from head to toe in tattoos: arabesque patterns over his arms and legs, a Buddha on his throat, flowers on his neck. He’d make an excellent drug lord in a Hollywood movie except that he’s so damn affable.
We set off from the harbour at a gentle clip and the moment we passed traffic the driver hit the throttle on our double outboard engined speedboat and we launched ourselves into the Straits of Malacca (titter knowingly if you’re Greek), slaloming around marker posts in the channel, then roared out into a millpond smooth sea heading for our first destination, Bamboo Island, about one hour’s travel away.
I have to admit when we first arrived my heart sank a little – Bamboo Island is a beautiful spot, but the sheer volume of boats was absolutely astonishing. We backed into the beach parallel with probably 12 others, jumped off the back into arctic white, and waded up onto a beach packed with holiday makers all keen to grab their own piece of paradise.
Thankfully any misgivings about the destination faded as soon as we started snorkelling – the coral reef is only metres off the beach, and tropical fish are already swimming up to you in waist deep water. We snorkelled for an hour over a somewhat unusual coral landscape, to my eye dead compared with the riotous neon luminosity of the Great Barrier Reef, but nonetheless absolutely jam-packed with ocean life – clown fish, parrot fish, angel fish and, motionless on the ocean floor, pasty white and brown blotched sea cucumbers half a metre long. We spent nearly the full hour snorkelling, forgoing the opportunity to sit on a few square metres of sand amid a cast of thousands, then clambered gracelessly back onto the boat to resume our trip, heading to Phi Phi Don island, a brief snorkel from the back of the boat, then heading into shore for a buffet lunch – copious, as usual it seems on Thai trips, but although very good not quite up to the exceptional level of the food on the Twilight Hong trip a couple of days ago. Naturally, of course, I still gorged myself, returning for seconds before walking along the beach past bikini’d and topless sunbathers running the full gamut of tones from pale, to incinerated, to pleasingly bronzed, through to ‘skin like an elephant in 10 years time’. We swam a little, I took a few shots of the long-tail boats floating on a sea so green if you saw it in a picture you’d swear it had been Photoshopped within an inch of its life, then we headed back once more for the third and last island, the largely uninhabited Phi Phi Lei, maybe 15 minutes from the much larger and more heavily populated Phi Phi Don.
En route we stopped fleeting at a sea cave where local residents live year-round, collecting the highly esteemed, perilously inaccessible, and ridiculously expensive swallow nests for birds nest soup then headed around the corner for a dip in a lagoon that, apparently Leo DiCaprio’s stunt double leapt into for the movie “The Beach”. The water was salty, warm, surprisingly fish free, but perfect for a brief swim and Leo-inspired leap from the boat, then headed on to a near perfect beach as featured in the same movie. If Bamboo Island was packed, this beach managed to redefine ‘packed-ness’ – between the speedboats and long-tails there was literally almost no room to directly access the sea, yet similar to other places I’ve been fortunate enough to visit, it’s sheer beauty is still powerful enough to overcome the over-population. Damned if I know how they managed to make it look deserted when the movie was shot there, but I can only assume before the movie it was simply yet another beautiful beach, but has now become a focal point of a day trip to the islands. For all my faux-worldly traveller carping however, it was undeniably beautiful, with rainforest coming to within metres of the sea, and separated from the ocean by a wide belt of gracefully curving beach front, the whole lot almost entirely enclosed from the ocean except for a small channel.
Our remaining hour passed quickly, once more everyone was herded onto Boat 9, and we returned on seas almost as calm as the outgoing trip back to Phuket. I’m convinced that although Thai’s clearly know they’re living in paradise, and that the rest of the world similarly is overawed by the beauty they’ve got on their doorstep, they don’t quite appreciate just how special it is, and how fragile it can be. There’s been an increase in eco-tourism over the past few years which is hopefully the start of a genuine change in the industry toward sustainable development, rather than just a bit of tourist bait to snare suckers like me, but at least there’s hope. I can only imagine that if the environment gets too damaged, and the hoards of boats and tourists too great, that tourists will be put off and go to some other tropical oasis, leaving the Thai’s with a mess largely not of their own making. It’d be a tragic outcome for the land of smiles, and for the genuinely most friendly, gracious people I’ve ever had the fortune of meeting.
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