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)