Pulo Bardia
I closed my eyes and breathed deep, filling my lungs with the salty ocean breeze one last time. As I opened them again I saw the island I had come to know so well fade into the horizon and out of my life.
Speeding toward it 11 months earlier I speculated as to how it was formed. Sailing around it, it would seem as if a pile of giant granite boulders were thrust up from the ocean floor and vegetation began to grow on them. The earliest account of human habitation that I can find is in 1852, though the inhabitants had obviously been there for some time as they had farms with cows and chickens, crops etc. In 1933 it began to be used as a political prison, all inhabitants of which were pardoned in 1947. Western backpackers discovered it in the 80s and its opportunities for diving would only become known in the 90s. Early European cartographers knew this island as Pulo Bardia, Siam. I would come to know it as Ko Tao, Thailand.
On November 24th 2007, I arrived on the aforementioned island expecting to stay for a week to do my Open Water Diving certification. Eleven months later I left as an Assistant Instructor with over 500 dives and a mind stuffed full of new experiences and ideas. The fascinating part, I find, is not how long I ended up staying or how many dives I amassed, but that my situation was so strikingly common for this place. In all of my time on the island I met not one single person who lived there that came with the intention of staying. The stories (including mine) were always the same: People go to this island with the anticipation of staying a mere week or less. They dive, explore and sample island’s simple ways of life, savoring it before realizing something inevitable: They are in love. Whether it be with the diving, the lifestyle, the people or the island itself matters not. The attraction is simply too much to resist and they stay. A month passes and they tell themselves “Just one more month”, but on it goes. For some it may only last a few months and others never leave until that one fateful day, either through shear will power or circumstances beyond their control, they are pried from the island’s unrelenting grip.
But that is what makes this particular island so very special. It is populated, for the most part, by people not too unlike myself; travelers with no particular reason to return from whence they came–all united by a common love of the ocean and the lives that they have found. It is unique in the truest sense of the word; one of those few rare places left on this earth that can be labeled so. But alas, there is no such thing as paradise.
As with any place the good is tempered by the unpleasant. After living there long enough you eventually slip behind the well-kept curtain of tourism that hangs before most passers-through and you witness the stained, rusty machinery that makes the island chug forward. Knowing these truths can range anywhere from delightful to scary. From the handful of mafia-like Thai families that ultimately own and control everything on the island to the farms where trained monkeys scurry up palm trees and harvest coconut crops, the island is saturated with the texture and grit of life. Crime in general is extremely rare, but the environmental problems make up for it. Development is rampant and relatively unhindered. As more trees are removed more rain reaches the soil and washes it into the sea, killing coral reefs. In attempts to maximize their profit, fisherman drag their nets as close as they can to the underwater pinnacles where fish take refuge. The nets are too often caught, torn from the boat and blanketed across the habitat. I personally have had to help cut these nets away on more than one occasion. The island’s tone is shifting, albeit slowly, as resorts are building larger, ever more elaborate complexes that cater to a much wealthier demographic than the backpackers that have been it’s base for so long.
There is hope, though, not only in that a large group of people are actively doing battle with these problems, but also in an elusive feeling that the “soul” of the island will never truly change. For a place is not only what you see. A place is people, smells, sounds, the whole gamut of experience and every place to me has its own distinct feel; that intangible quality you get from this experience. And there is something truly special that emerges when the right environment is populated with the right people at the right time. Ko Tao is one such place. Whether it will remain so or for how long, only time can say.
I am removed from the island now, but every night I am painfully reminded that the island is not removed from me. Every night for a month, in fact, I have been plagued by the first recurring dream I have ever had where I return to “Pulo Bardia.”
-Tyler
“I was a quick wet boy
diving too deep for coins
…now I’m a fat house cat
cursing my sore blunt tongue”
-Samuel Beam (Iron & Wine)
Into the Blue
I’m going to try something new. Now that I have settled into a place that I’ll be staying for a few months obviously my stories of traveling will slow a bit. I’ll still have things to recount (as you’ll read shortly) but there won’t be as much of it I don’t think. I’ve grown a bit used to writing quite a lot in these posts so I’d like to take that extra space to put down my thoughts and discuss certain subjects. Not necessarily this time, but in the future. So I guess whoever is reading these things stands to learn more about me. And don’t worry, I’ll still have pictures to post. In fact I have some right now, but I need to upload them. That being said I’ll go ahead and move on to the part where I tell you about my last couple of days here on the island.
There is a dive site off the mainland here called Chumpon Pinnacle and when the water is clear and conditions are right it is the best diving to be had around the island. It contains a staggering array of marine life from giant barracuda to bat fish to groupers. I dive here quite often as part of my job filming open water students on their last 2 dives qualifying them as open water divers. They stay around the 12-14 meter (40-45 feet) depth, but I always make my way to the bottom 30 meters (100 feet) down to film the grey reef sharks that inhabit the area. On this particular day I was separated from the group in a section of bad visibility while filming the sharks and was swept off of the main pinnacle by a current. With no reference point I soon found myself a bit turned around. This is nothing all too uncommon so I proceeded slowly to the surface continuing to film along the way. I was separated from the other divers in a section of water not normally visited by them and for a moment time seemed to slow. I found myself suspended motionless in a surreal blue void, no bottom in sight and only a glimmer of light from the surface far above. Soon I began to notice dark shapes moving around me in the blue haze.
The blurry shapes soon narrowed into unmistakable silouettes and it was in this moment that I realized just what it was about sharks that makes them so inherently frightening. To me, at least. Not so much their sharp teeth or reputation, but their perfection. Never in my life have I witnessed anything so perfectly adapted to its environment. I really don’t think that they could be better at what they do and given what it is they do, I find this is terrifying. As I looked down I saw one below me, then one to my right, one behind me, everywhere. They kept their distance, though, as I ascended and I took comfort in the knowledge that no one has ever suffered a shark attack in these particular waters. Just before I reached the surface I managed to catch an enormous blue marlin on film in the water as it swam in the distance. By this time I had drifted a good ways from the boat so I surfaced and swam back. This was the most incredible dive I had done so far and probably something that I will never forget, but it paled in comparison to the following day.
I went out to Chumpon again with a different shop this time but still filming students. This particular shop is quite small and their boat is tiny compared to some of the others around the island, but I actually prefer this. There were only about 11 people onboard and it was very relaxed, which is just what diving should be. As everyone was getting ready we spotted a giant jellyfish moving around the boat. I got all of the shots I needed and jumped in with the group. Just as we got to the buoy line to descend the instructor looked down into the water and called out two words that send tingles down the spine of any diver on this island: “Whale Shark.”
I put my mask into the water and saw the giant lumbering 10 meters below us and as quickly as my mouth was out of the water I blurted out “I’m going down.” I let the air out of my BCD and descended as quickly as I could to catch up with it, leaving the group behind for the worthy cause of getting the animal on film. For almost 10 minutes I swam along with it taking in its massive size (about 6 meters long if I had to guess) all alone. Again moving away from the dive site, again finding myself in that hazy blue void, but this time with something entirely different. How do I describe it? My lexicon goes only so far. I will say that it was one of the defining moments of the trip thus far. I reached a point where I didn’t feel comfortable swimming any farther from the boat so I stopped and watched the whale shark fade into the blue. At only 10 meters deep I decided to surface and get my bearings as to where the boat was. It was closer than I thought so I swam back to the bouy line and descended to the pinnacle for about 20 minutes. I never caught up to my group, but upon getting back to the boat they were waiting for me, all smiling wide and holding up the hand signal for “whale shark”. After it left me it turned back towards the dive site and everyone on the boat had the chance to swim with it. Once everyone was back onboard no one could stop smiling.
The only other boat at the dive site left and we had the whole place to ourselves for the next dive. While we were waiting we saw blue marlins leaping from the water and shark fins breaching the surface as they circled their prey. We all gathered in silence at the edge of the boat watching the sea deliver one amazing sight after another. “Its one of those days…” the instructor remarked with a smile.
-Tyler
One of those days we all live for.Shark Diving on Christmas Eve
It is now safe to say that I will soon have a job here on the island of Koh Tao where I have been for about a month now. I’m now staying in a simple fan-cooled room in a quiet spot away from the beach. Its spacious with a big double bed, hot water, a fridge and a TV. I swim in the ocean everyday and watch the sunset on the beach every night. Life is good.
On the last two dives of my open water course we were accompanied by a videographer who filmed us as we finished our course. As I watched her work, I thought to myself: “that seems like it would be a cool job…” and I made a note to ask her how she got into it. Later that day we gathered at Big Blue’s bar to watch our video and after it was over I talked to her a bit and found out that she had gone through a course with Ace Marine Images on the island and then stayed to do an internship with them and ending up working for them full time. I read up on the course and it sounded quite good. I stayed on at Big Blue to do my advanced certification and as I did that I went in and talked to the people at Ace about doing the video course. It was on the expensive side, but I had a good feeling and splurged on it. It consisted of an on land photography course and 8 dives with a camera and housing. As this went on I moved from Big Blue to the place I am now and spent time hanging out with the German friends I made from my open water named Chris and Tina. We rented scooters and accidentally took the back way to one of the other beaches. The dirt roads where in terrible shape and it was my first time riding a scooter, but we pressed on anyway. That was one way to learn I guess. The scooters were returned miraculously unscathed after our off-road adventures. Having learned our lesson, the next time we decided to go across the mountainous interior of the island we rented ATVs, which I have a bit more experience with. We hit almost every beach on the opposite, much less developed, side of the island via these primitive dirt roads. We even had to turn around once when we found a section so steep and sandy that I could tell our 4-wheelers wouldn’t be able to bring us back up if we went down. We also found an incredible view looking out across the island on top of a rock accessed by a makeshift bamboo ladder. After a few days hanging out with them and others we met, they left for Bangkok on their way back to Germany.
Shooting video underwater was admittedly harder than I expected, but over the dives I got better at it and when I finished they invited me to stay on for the internship. After much thought I decided that I would like to stick around for a while and give it a shot, so I did. The past week or so I have been out diving with the other videographers at different dive shops to get a feel for the job, what to shoot, when to shoot, when to get set up etc. The guys at Ace were really great and lent me dive gear when I needed it. Eventually I got my own setup for relatively cheap.
Around lunch time on the 19th I looked at the stamp in my passport and realized I was supposed to be out of the country that very day. Most every foreigner in Thailand has to do “Visa Runs” which means leaving the country and coming back in to get a new stamp and hence, more time. I frantically called Heather from Ace wondering how I was going to make it off the island that day, much less out of the country. She directed me to a travel office where I sorted out one of these visa runs. I wasn’t going to make it out that day, but my boat to the mainland left at 10am the next morning and I was on it. Fun fact: This was also the first day I had worn socks in about two weeks. It was a nice, fast, air conditioned boat and I arrived in Chumpon around 12:30pm. The boat pulled in slowly passing lines of fishing boats and ports on either side along the way. Once I left the boat I was greeted by the bus driver holding a sign that said “visa run.” Myself and 6 others who were doing the same thing, piled into the van and started on our way to Burma. We dropped everyone off at the Thai port for a place called the “Andaman Club” across the way in Myanmar, but because I had overstayed by one day I had to pay a fine in a different place across town. The van took me to the right place and they made copies of my passport while I filled out a police report about overstaying and payed my 500Baht fine. Lesson learned. I got back to the port just after 4pm and the bus back to Chumpon was leaving at 5pm. I had less than an our to get my paperwork through, get across the bay, get stamped and get back in time. I was in Burma, literally, for 5 minutes and I made it back right on time. The bus dropped me and the other 2 who where taking the night boat back to Koh Tao off at a cafe while we waited for a taxi (pick up truck) to the boat a few hours later. I had dinner and used the internet to kill the time. I had heard stories of how uncomfortable this particular night ferry was and I have no trouble admitting that I downed a few beers to help soften the blow and get some sleep. And it turned out to be the best decision I made all week. Once the pick up arrived me and the two British girls hopped in the back a got to chatting. The truck stopped and picked up two South Africans and we met two Australians when we arrived at the port. We all gathered around and cracked jokes about the boat we were about to get on. The 7 of us were the only foreigners on this boat and when we boarded we found out why. It was easily the oldest vessel I’ve been on and our place to sleep consisted of thin mattresses laid out on the floor and the shelf just above it, like two huge uninterrupted bunkbeds with a good number of locals already sleeping. I snatched an open place on the floor along with the two Brits. Maybe it was my sense of adventure or maybe it was just the alcohol, but I was actually pretty comfortable with the situation. The boat was loud, but the seas were calm and I slept surprisingly well throughout the night after watching us sail away under a full moon. The boat pulled in around 5:30 in the AM and I bid the others goodbye as I hopped on my scooter and zipped back to my room to catch a few more hours of sleep.
I ended up feeling good enough to dive that afternoon, so I went out and did more following. We went to a site I hadn’t been to yet that had caves you could swim through which was quite an awesome experience, made even more interesting by my fogging mask which I had to keep clearing in the cramped space. Yesterday morning I woke up early and went out to a beach called Shark Bay do some snorkeling.
Today is Christmas Eve and I got up around 5:30am to follow Heather out on a couple of dives, but this time with a camera back in my hands. The first site was a place called Chumphon Pinnacle which I have dived many times before, but the conditions there were the best I’ve seen yet. 30 meters down you could still see light at the surface. Also 30 meters down is where the sharks tend to be. Nothing wakes you up in the morning quite like turning around and find yourself face to face with a Reef Shark not much smaller than yourself. Not to mention the Great Barracuda that also patrol the area. It was an incredible dive and I got some good footage. The next dive was also quite good, but less eventful. Did I mention everyone was diving in Santa Hats?
Its hard to believe Christmas has already come so quickly and being in a country that doesn’t ‘officially’ celebrate it is interesting… and refreshing. There are no lines backed out of superstores, no extra traffic, no holiday hordes wrapped up in the consuming frenzy that Christmas has become. There is only celebration. My Christmas day will consist of a BBQ on the beach, swimming and laying in the sun. It should be an interesting change from the cold I’m used to. More later
-Tyler
Of Travelers and Tourists
I feel I should take a moment to elaborate on my definitions of “tourists” and “travelers.” To me a “tourist” is someone who buys a package vacation or tour and rides around on a tour bus seeing the same major sites that everyone else sees and skipping everything in between. You see them everywhere around the main attractions of any city being lead around like sheep by a guide with a raised umbrella or stick etc. Travelers on the other hand are more independent and tend to spend more time digging into the local culture rather than only visiting the touristy spots. In other words, tourists are in a speedboat skimming across the surface while travelers are going for a swim. And in places like Turkey that can make all the difference in the world…
Istanbul is an incredible place and I enjoyed the experience thoroughly. Walking around the city is quite different to most places I am used to. Shop and restaurant owners constantly beckon tourists into their various establishments by asking where they are from and making small talk, many times claiming they are very special because they are the first customer of the day, when in reality the only thing special about them is that they are about to be taken for a ride. Such shops are often ludicrously overpriced and they get away with it because of uninformed visitors who just don’t know any better. For instance some people… we’ll call them “salesmen” may approach you with watches to sell and they will ask 300 Lira for them. Some people may just pay that thinking it is the price, when in reality they could be talked down to about 5 Lira. It is my experience that once these shop owners and hawkers realize that you know what you’re doing and that you’re not “just another tourist” they generally leave you alone and actually show you a bit more respect. I spent a few days wandering the city, seeing the sights, getting lost in the bazaars, eating the local kebabs and woken up by the call to prayer thundering over loudspeakers throughout the city.
Later, I made the leap and purchased what was my second one-way plane ticket of this trip: from Istanbul, Turkey to Bangkok, Thailand with a quick layover in Bahrain. I gave myself the better part of the week to see more of Turkey and I used that to bus it out to the very center of the country to an area known as Cappadocia (Kappadokya). I left on an overnight bus with two New Zealanders from my hostel room in Istanbul. Every time I take an overnight bus or flight, I seem to forget just how terrible they can be. I can never sleep sitting up and with an aisle seat there is no place to lean so it always ends up being a restless drawn out night that leaves me exhausted the next day. Nonetheless after a long night of riding the sun rose to reveal a desert-like landscape that soon gave way to the strangest area I have ever found myself in. Again, my vocabulary and descriptive skills fail me when thinking of how to explain a place like this, save to say it looks like another planet. The people that lived here long ago carved their homes and churches directly out of the mountainside’s soft rock and a good number of them are still in use by local residents and renters who used them to accommodate travellers. We stayed in the town of Goreme, which is overlooked on most sides by such mountains and indeed we stayed in cave rooms carved directly out of the rock for our time there. Granted they were modernized with bathrooms, heat and electricity.
The day we arrived it was rather cold and the weather was not cooperating so I took a nap for a couple of hours while the rain cleared before heading out to the open-air museum east of town. The open-air museum in Goreme is another UNESCO site and it features an array of small churches carved out of the rocks. The entrances to the churches are quite modest, but once inside you realize that the carved pillars, arches, domes and vaulted ceilings directly from the rock and covered them with frescoes. Though small, the craftsmanship is more than impressive. However extraordinary the museum was, it paled in comparison to the following day. I woke up around 9:30am and had breakfast before picking up some water and stocking up on a few apples at the local fruit market for my walk. I set out back towards the museum, but took a trail leading away from the road and up a hill toward the edge of a valley.
I passed a stray dog along the way and once I neared the top of the hill I looked back and found that it was following me. I don’t know why… I didn’t feed it, or pet it or call it… she just decided to tag along. I would stop to take photos and she would lay down just behind me and once I started moving on she would trail along. Eventually she caught up and laid down at my feet so, I pet her a bit while I rested. This small female german shepard ended up walking along with me for the entire 6 hours I was out hiking. I tried to give her some of my water and attempted to share one of my apples, but she would have none of it. I started off on the trail, but strayed off of it into the countryside as I worked my way around valleys and across fields before finding a marked trail that lead down into a small canyon and eventually to one of the places I was looking for called Rose Valley. Its name comes from the pink color of the rocks that line the gorge. Every time I would pass other people, the dog would stick right by my side. Sometimes she would track ahead on the trail and disappear around a corner and I would round it to find her waiting on me to catch up, but nearing the end of my walk on the way back towards the town I came to a crossroads. I needed to go left, but the dog apparently was headed right. We walked in our opposite directions and I never saw her again. It was the strangest thing.
The next day I went on a walk with the two Kiwis around a separate equally interesting section of the area and we got back a bit after lunch. We hung around the town and got our things packed for the overnight bus back to Istanbul before having dinner. The bus was about usual except this one had satellite TV on board and there was a soccer game on. Turkey was playing Norway in a qualifying match for next year’s european playoffs and the whole bus was really getting into it. Clapping a cheers would erupt after a goal and gasps for near misses. Turkey won the match 2-1. The rest of the bus ride was per usual and we checked back into the same hostel we left from around 8am and I took a nap. I spent the rest of that day organizing some last minute details for my trip to Thailand and went to be early. I was set to catch the 7:20am shuttle to the airport the next morning… I was awoken at 7:30 by the bus driver who had others on the bus waiting for me and I snapped into scramble mode and was out of bed and in the bus by 7:40. I got to the airport with ample time which was good since there were 2 security checkpoints (one right as you enter the airport and another at your gate) to go through, plus passport control. And the security checks are picky, you have to remove your belt, shoes, etc. They even scanned my watch. Are terrorists really that inventive these days? I mean, these airports seem to think you can fashion a bomb out of shampoo and a tray table…
After my layover in Bahrain I landed safely in Bangkok. I knew I would be heading back through the city later anyway and I decided that I wanted to head straight for the southern islands, so I went through immigration and found a really cheap flight to Surat Thani, the port where you can catch ferries to Ko Samui, Pha Ngang, and Tau. I landed and hopped a bus to the port. The balmy heat hits first as you exit the plane. Looking out the bus window the landscape reminded me, oddly, of Vietnam. But only in the sense that, if you watched a film about the war it would be set in this type of environment. Forests of palm trees, flooded low grasslands, makeshift towns on the banks of muddy rivers and cows wandering across the street as they please… As I got closer and closer to the pier I couldn’t help but realize: This is a whole new ballgame.
At the pier I found a Thai woman offering beach hut accommodation on the island of Ko Pha Ngang. The price was reasonable and I was exhausted and I didn’t want to haggle when I got to the islands so I took her up on it and caught the ferry out. It was dark when we arrived and the owner of the huts was there to meet me and a few others at the port. I jumped into the “free taxi” which was the back of his truck and he drove us off the main roads and through what I would almost call a jungle on one of the roughest dirt roads I’ve ever seen. Soon enough, though we arrived at the little complex which included a resturant and a few huts right near the beach. They lead me to mine and put my things down. It was exactly what I expected and what I was looking for. A little fan-cooled hut on a secluded beach… but it wasn’t $8. It was $9.50. High season, you see.
The hut was about as basic as it could get. Just one big double bed, a fan, a bathroom with a cold shower and a toilet with a flusher that consisted of a bucket of water and a sprayer. It was basically a shed… but a shed, quite literally in paradise. I have to imagine that when most people picture paradise in their heads it doesn’t look too much different than this island. After I got settled in, I went up to the open-air restaurant and ordered some food, which I found to be quite good. I turned in early and slept until about noon the next day, catching up on my sleep and nursing my jet lag. After a few days there the weather wasn’t holding up so I decided to move on to Ko Tau and find a place to do my scuba certification as planned.
The day I checked out of the hut I hopped into the back of the owner’s truck once again as he drove me back to the port where I caught the ferry to Ko Tau in a nick of time. It was an express ferry which cut through the waves like a dull hatchet would a tree and the engine quit twice, but it got me there in good time nonetheless. Once arriving at the port there were a multitude of dive companies waiting to greet us with their information paphlets and what not, but I chose to skip by them so I could check out a few different places on my own and see the place first hand before I made a decision. I caught yet another back-of-the-truck taxi to the far end of the main beach and began walking down, passing all of the dive resorts along the way. In the end I settled with Big Blue Diving. The course was cheaper than I thought, plus after some negotiations I scored a free room and PADI book along with it. Not to mention that their operation seemed solid… which I turned out to be right about. So over the past few days I’ve been doing the course and its bringing back a lot of memories just as I suspected it would, since my parents used to own a dive shop when I was a kid. With the smell of wetsuits, the taste of regulators and the sound air tanks clanging together come fond recollections of a time that I’ve always been partial to. It reminds me of home…
Its 11pm and I have to be up by 6:30 for the last dive of the course so I suppose I should wrap here. I’m not sure how long I will be on Ko Tau as I’m seriously considering staying to do my advanced certification after this and then there are many places around the island that offer special courses in underwater photography… which seems up my alley. I’m sure its a bit pricey though, so we’ll see.
So far my impression of Thailand is one of the most positive I’ve had of a country so far. The people are incredibly friendly which I find to be such a refreshing change from eastern Europe and it is about as gorgeous as gorgeous gets here. I finally understand why there are so many expats in this country.
Pictures are coming…
-Tyler