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| Koh Samet |
Alicia had left me in in Koh Samet to fly to Shanghai and on the ferry to Rayong it felt strange to travel alone. In Bangkok, I spent the night in
street-side bars chatting to backpacker couples with clean hiking boots who
were obviously bored of each other’s company and talked over one another constantly.
Most of them were on a four week trip through Thailand,
Laos and Cambodia – their first time in Asia.
They stopped talking each time a street vendor approached with a tray of wooden
frogs and plastic shit, smiling and no-thank-you-very-much-ing. They all had a
morning buses to Chang Mai or Koh Samui and one by one they made their excuses.
Later, as I sat alone, I overheard a French girl talking to a busy waitress.
“Excuse
me, I asked for fresh orange juice, zis is not fresh.”
“Yes
it is. We make it everyday.”
“Non.
Zis is, how you say, concentrate. It’s full of chemicals. I can’t drink it.”
The
waitress shrugged and started to walk off.
“I’m
not paying for it.” The drink was less than a dollar. They argued for ten
minutes until the waitress stalked away. It pissed me off.
“Excuse
me, what happened?” I asked the French girl.
“This
juice, I’m not paying for it. Here, taste this.” It was fine.
“It’s
terrible. You know that she’s gone to get the police right?”
“What?”
“Yeah,
I speak a little Thai and I think that’s what she said.” I lied.
“Oh…
really.”
“Yeah,
might be easier to pay. You know what Thai police can be like.” I was laying it
on thick.
“Well,
yeah, maybe.” She thought for a minute then slammed some money on the table.
“Thanks.”
She smiled at me.
A
manager had been watching us.
“What
did you say to her?” She asked as she collected the money.
“I
said you called the police.”
She
laughed. “Stupid bitch. You want another beer?” I didn’t, I just wanted to get
out of there. I dodged and elbowed through a whole community of hustlers –
tuk-tuk drivers who doubled as sex show touts flashed explicit photos like they
were FBI badges, massage parlour girls and lady-boys beckoned and whined, girls
in lycra Heineken outfits and welded smiles held menus in front of ladies
selling greasy noodles from carts which blocked the road. Everywhere people
sold fake watches, glasses and underwear beside tasers, handcuffs, num-chuks
and flick knives. Back at my hotel I locked the door behind me.
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| Night time Bangkok. |
In the morning I
caught a train to Chumpon. As we rattled south, I read and watched the sunset
out of my second class carriage’s open window. The land was brown and dusty and
I remembered how green and wet everything had been just a few months before. We
arrived late at night and I wandered the wide streets past closed shops and
dark houses. At a 7-11 I asked directions to a hotel and an English-speaking
customer left his place in line to point me in the right direction.
The Farang bar and
hostel was just closing when I walked in. Farang is Thai for foreigner and
Ivor, the farang, led me to a bare room with a pedestal fan and a shared
bathroom. There was no food so I sat with him in the closed bar drinking Singha
and chatting. He had come to Thailand
from England
twenty years ago to work on the then-undeveloped island paradise of Koh Pha-ngan
where he had met a Thai girl. They had gone from island to island, moving on as
development and tourism pushed the prices up before settling in this dusty
little nowhere where the only trade was from SCUBA divers on their way to Koh
Tao. It seemed all veteran travellers and expats ever talked about was how much
better Thailand had been twenty years ago – friendlier, safer, cheaper, more
beautiful. I wondered how much of this was misty-eyed nostalgia and how much
was true. A lot of the same people said that Burma
was like Thailand in the
‘80s or Vietnam in the ‘90s
or Laos ten years ago – the
last undeveloped, unspoiled country in South-East Asia.
I mentioned this to Ivor but he had never been, even though the border was only
30kms away.
“Can’t go
anywhere, mate. Chained to this bar seven days a week.”
By then a big
olive-skinned Welshman, the only other farang in town, had joined us and I
asked about the chances of getting across the border.
“I doubt it mate.
You’ll be locked up.” But he hadn’t been either and, like everyone else I had
asked, was just guessing.
In the morning
Ivor gave me a business card for a travel agent in Ranong and pointed me to the
bus stop.
I waited an hour
for the mini-bus to fill before we left. The road soon left the river valley
and wound past small villages, terraced rice paddies and concrete towns. As we skirted
the Burmese border, a soldier flagged us down at a road block. He swung the
door open and collected IDs before speaking to the driver. A young guy near the
back of the van was beckoned outside where the soldier directed him to stand against
the side of the van and took a photo. He grabbed the young passenger by the
collar and marched him away as the driver jumped into the van and roared away.
I wanted to ask what had happened but nobody spoke English. An hour later I was
standing in an empty lot between industrial buildings that served as Ranong’s
bus station. I jumped on the back of a motorbike taxi and asked to go to a
cheap hotel. The driver awkwardly cradled my bag between his legs as we wound
through grubby streets, the back wheel scraping harshly with every rotation. At
the hotel I checked into a bare room. The driver gave me his phone number and
waited at reception for his cut of my $15 room charge.
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| One of Ranong's many fishing boats |
Ranong sits on the
Andaman Sea
where Thailand meets Burma
and the locals make their money from fishing and trade – both illegal and legal
– from across a wide estuary which
separates the town from Kawthoung, its Burmese counterpart. I chained my bags
to the bed and went in search of the travel agent Ivor said might be able to
help me. Pon’s Travel is a one-stop western restaurant and ticketing service
and Pon himself gave me the low down as I wolfed a curry. He told me that I
could get to Kawthoung but only on a special one-day visa that couldn’t be used
to travel more than five miles outside the town. I already had a 28 day tourist
visa and was hoping to make my way by boat to Rangoon. He doubted that I would get my visa
stamped and even if I did no boat would let a foreigner on. It wasn’t looking
good for my overland route but I decided to give it another go. I bought a
ticket for the small island
of Koh Payam, where I
knew there were travel agents and expats.
In the open back
of an old pick-up a handful of backpackers and I drove through the heat to
Ranong’s dock. The ferry shared the dock with a thousand wooden fishing boats.
In a huge shed next door hundreds of people unloaded, gutted and packed fish
into ice chests – there was no mechanization and they operated like a yelling,
sweating production line. Blood and guts sluiced down the sloped concrete floor
into a mangrove-choked stream and the workers moved quickly through the filth
in flip-flops. The road in front was covered in rubbish that crunched
under the tyres of reversing trucks. The smell was unreal – like a fishy hell.
I noticed that the sing-songs yells and jokes weren’t in Thai. As I walked closer a wiry, dark-skinned
man in a shirt stained black with fish blood waved me over. “Where are you
from?” he asked.
His English was
good and he told me that he was Burmese, as were all the workers, and had moved
here from Rangoon
two years ago to earn Thai wages.
“I like Thailand,
so many jobs, but not Thai people.” He said. “They are not nice to us. I live
with these people in the Burmese part of town.” He indicated the workers. “I
don’t even speak Thai!”
I told him that I
was going to Rangoon
and he said that his father worked there as a diplomat. It was strange to think
that this diplomat’s son with his perfect English had come to this dreary
border town to make his fortune processing fish.
We docked at the
end of a long concrete pier on Koh Payam where I rode a rented scooter to a
thatched bungalow near the beach and watched it rain for two days – a steady
tropical downpour that clattered on the palm fronds and seeped through the
roof.
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| You know you're bored when you start taking photos of yourself reading. |
I liked Payam,
especially once the rain stopped, and spent a few days swimming in the warm
clear waters and waiting for the generator to come on at the posh resort next
door so I could use their wi-fi. I learned that my granddad had become gravely
ill and spent hours trying to get through to his hospital bed. He was
morphine-confused and hard to hear on the scratchy connection and the call left
me deeply homesick and wondering what I was doing. It was the last time I spoke
to him.
In the morning I
caught the boat back to Ranong. As we came into port, I hung my feet over the
side and watched the Burmese coast slip past a few hundred metres away –
dull-green jungle over dense mangroves and muddy water. Back at Pon’s Travel I
booked the night bus to Bangkok and an Air Asia
flight to Rangoon
for the following day.
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| Koh Payam. |
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