TASHY TRAVELS

Every Sunday, I am going to upload a post about the different countries I have visited and/or lived in since 2002.

I can assure you of some interesting stories.

THAILAND - PART FOUR

Usual thing, we arrived and there were plenty of people offering us a boat taxi and accommodation. ‘Free taxi and see what we have, if you don’t like, you come back’. Once again we listened and made a decision, not a very good one as it turned out. We climbed into one of the long-tail taxi boats and set off.

While we ride in the taxi, let me tell you a few more things about Koh Tao. It is 70 kilometres off the mainland of Thailand, on the east side. In English, it means turtle island. By the way Koh means island, so the clever ones among you, and me, will guess that Tao means turtle. There used to be many sea turtles in the waters around here but the local brochure told us that they have now moved on to other breeding grounds. This may be so, or maybe, they are not actually breeding any more.

The island wasn’t inhabited for a very long time but in 1899, with nothing much else to do probably, King Chulalongkorn (pronounced Your Majesty) visited the island and left as evidence his monogram on a huge boulder on the west side. This area is still worshipped today. From 1933 the island was used as a political prison but in 1947, the Prime Minister obtained a royal pardon for everyone and all the prisoners were taken to the mainland and set free. Seeing how idyllic the island is today, they may not have been all that pleased.

In the same year, two brothers sailed to the island from Koh Pha-Ngan, an island to the south, and brought their families with them and started living here. They lived a simple life, harvesting coconuts and growing vegetables that they traded with the people on Koh Pha-Ngan. The population began to grow and in 1980’s the first tourists, or more precisely travellers, reached the island. It didn’t take long for news to pass around and soon the island became quite popular and the locals started to cater for their visitors. The natural beauty of the island was not its only draw. It was surrounded by some of the best diving sites in the world and soon the island was catering not only for travellers but also divers

Today, the number of visitors is still small compared to nearby islands, but the people’s income is based almost solely on tourism with boat taxis, road taxis, resort accommodation, restaurants and shops. To give you some idea of the still primitive nature of the place, there is only one concrete road on the island; the rest are dirt tracks. Our boat took us to Tao Tong Villas and we were offered a small hut for £2 a night. We took three nights. This may not have been the best decision we had made in Thailand. The taxi journey had taken about 15 minutes and we spotted, when we arrived, that, apart from the owner’s home and about 12 huts, there was nothing else around here. The trouble is that until you know how far you are going from ‘civilisation’, and by that I mean shops etc., you don’t realise how long it will take you to get back.

As you can see it was a very beautiful place with superb, clear waters and fishes swimming around you. We dipped in the water just after arriving and a small fish bit my girlfriend on the part of her body she usually sits on. I’m trying to make this polite, OK. It probably thought it was a good plaice. The view from our hut was amazing and I think we both looked forward to a little peace and quiet, after the bustle of Bangkok, the work we had done in Hua Hin and the excitement of our trip down to Koh Tao.

But, my little friend is a bit of a party lover and so she wanted to see what the locals had to offer. Well, once you’ve had your bottom bitten you tend to dance a bit don’t you? So, after we settled in, we decided to try to find the main centre of life on this idyllic island. And that, my friends, was where the fun began again.

This story is all about decision-making, something I used to teach to would-be managers of large companies. The old maxim of ‘do as I say not as I do’ is quite appropriate. Almost all the decisions we made, could have been better. Still it was good fun. The first thing we had to do was find a way to get into the centre of Koh Tao. It was now getting dark so we decided against the boat taxi. We had been told it was a 45 minute walk down a mountainous path and this seemed a bad idea in the dark. There was the possibility of hiring another motorbike but this wasn’t really considered. I have no idea why.

My girlfriend asked the guy who seemed to own the huts if he could take us in his 4X4 and he said it would cost £2, but it might be more coming back at night and he wouldn’t be there to give us a lift back anyway. We decided to accept, which may have been wrong decision number one. We set off. If anyone thought riding a motorbike was scary, this beat it. Those of you who know the back roads, sorry tracks, of Koh Tao will know that driving there makes the Dakar Rally look like a motorway jaunt.

At one point we went down what seemed like a 1 in 2 hill. My girlfriend, clinging on tightly in the back of the open truck, asked what should we do if his brakes fail. I said jump. ‘I’ll hurt myself ‘, she said. At the bottom of the hill, the road turned sharp left and straight on, somewhere, was the sea, about 100 metres below. A little hurt from a jump seemed the better option to me. His brakes didn’t fail and we made it, had a meal and went partying.

The music was fairly typical, even a bit like my Polish parties, many of the dancers were tourists and we stayed till about twelve. Then we went to find a taxi. We told the first one where we wanted to go and he said no. The second one said £10 (a 500% increase on the trip there) and the third one said yes, £1.50. This seemed suspicious to me but we accepted and drove off with him. Wrong decision number two. He had an interesting style in driving. Flat out, sound the horn, and hope. We stayed on the concrete road for a long time, which surprised me for two reasons. Firstly, because we had been on dirt track most of the way there and, secondly, because his driving style didn’t inspire me with the confidence that he could actually keep it on any bit of road.

Then, he stopped at a shop and called someone over, said something and the other guy came up to us and said, ‘where you wanna go’? We told him and he said, ‘he can’t take you there’, pointing to our driver. We said, ‘he said he could’ and he said ‘yes but he didn’t know where it was’. ‘However’, he added ‘, I can take you for £8 plus £1.50 to the other guy who bought you here’.

This seems a bit typical for Thais so far. They are very agreeable but sometimes they will agree to something just, so it seems, to make you happy. Can you imagine offering to take someone somewhere but not knowing where? By now we were a little upset, or my girlfriend was because she got upset easier than I would. It wasn’t the money; it was only a small amount. It was just the fact that we were beginning to wonder whether we could trust anyone to get us home. We asked the other guy, our first driver, to take us back to the centre. He stroked me on the shoulder, smiled, got in, put his foot down, ignored the horn and took us back. We found another taxi who said £6 until another potential fare came up and he upped ours to £10.

At this point we gave up. We returned to the party wondering what to do next. The party finished at 4. Lights out, no music, so we walked back to the town. Wait, I wasn’t going to call it that but by now, who cares. We were offered several taxis again but the offers soon changed if we said where we wanted to go. I can’t really blame them because the road was so bad even for a 4X4 and in the dark, well…………..

We asked one taxi driver when the first river taxi was and he said 8 maybe 9 perhaps 7. We found an empty open-air restaurant and my girlfriend went to sleep on one of the tables while I kept guard. The taxi driver came over and slept on another table; he was waiting for the night boat to arrive at 6 although I suppose it might come in at 8, maybe 7.

At 5, exactly, a little lady came and opened up a café and quite a few taxi drivers sauntered in for a bite and a drink and a chat. At 6, my girlfriend awoke from her table and we went over to the café. Then I thought I saw a water taxi and we quickly walked along the beach but it wasn’t, it was a smaller boat. However, as we passed one of the huts, a voice came out from underneath, all these places are built on stilts, and said ‘water taxi’, so we turned round. Swinging in a hammock was a guy who apparently had been there all night, not 20 metres from where we had given up.

He hauled in his boat, we got in and he took us back to our hut. We thanked him and went to bed about 7.00 am. We got up at 11.00 am. Ah, this is the life. We decided that we would have to find a place nearer the centre otherwise we would be completely isolated. We went to ask if we could have our money back, we had paid for three nights and only used one, sort of. As check out time was shown as 10.30, I was happy to actually pay for two nights, however the woman said, ‘no, no money back, it was your idea to pay for three nights’. It really isn’t worth arguing about £2 but it seemed a bit mean to me.

We loaded our stuff into a water taxi and found a lovely resort right alongside the main beach. Finally, after three days of excitement and misadventure, we are settled.

We settled into our new accommodation and then went out to look at the beach. Have you noticed how I am linking all these blogs so anyone joining for the first time has to go back and find out what was happening before? You may think this is really clever; to be honest I only just noticed it.

It would appear that the life of a beach cleaner is not that unpleasant. We came across this guy who first picked up all the litter around and then proceeded to produce these sand sculptures. This part of island was far livelier, although still nothing like other places where I had been. We had a meal in the resort restaurant. We got talking to a waiter and made arrangements to interview him a little later. He openly admitted to being gay but was surprisingly critical of the ladyboy culture. Surprising to me, anyway. Sadly, I wasn’t the one taking notes at this interview and I, therefore, can’t tell you more. After this, we danced till midnight and then retired to our little hut and bed. Fortunately, I wasn’t the one dancing, so everyone else was really happy.

We seem to have got in the habit of waking up early and today was no exception. We were sitting on the veranda of our little hut at about 7.30 am and two young children walked by, obviously dressed in school uniform. We decided to follow them and see what we could find out about education around here and, of course, the local school. When we got to the school we found a teacher who spoke English and she told us something about education here.

The school catered for pupils between the ages of 6 and 12. There were a total of 71 pupils in six different classes. Each class roughly corresponded to a year-group. The largest number of pupils, 20, were in Year 2 (aged about 7) and the smallest, 7, in Year 6 (aged 12). I first thought this could be because the population of the island has grown substantially in recent years but I also wondered if pupils of 12 or so got bored and tried to find work. The teacher said this was not so as, after 12, the pupils had to go to senior school for three years but as there wasn’t one on the island, they had to go to Koh Phangan each week and stay in a hostel while they attended school. I think this is a bit sad as it breaks up families and, possibly, results in some pupils deciding to leave their island and find work elsewhere.

The school day was interesting and we were able to watch a little part of it. Pupils have to arrive early so that they can tidy the classroom and the school grounds. At 8.15, they have an assembly at which they raise the national flag, sing, I assume, the national song, and say prayers for the King and Buddha. Some of the older pupils had recorder type instruments and played along to the song. My daughter used to play the recorder and I was pleasantly surprised to hear it could be played in tune. Years 1 and 2 went off to their classrooms while the Head talked to the older pupils. All this in the heat of an open playground.

Lessons start at 8.30am and each class has their own teacher who teaches them for all subjects, except Thai and English which are taught by one teacher who flits between classes during the week. Lunch is at 11.30am and then they resume study at 12.30pm for another three hours, so school finishes at 3.30pm. All standard subjects are taught including sport and gymnastics, while the children go the local temple to be taught religious studies by a monk. They have two computers but no internet access. Many places on the island only have electricity between 6.00pm and 6.00am, our hut included. However a professor from the nearest university on the mainland had been over to talk to the pupils about the internet. Sometimes a class will go to the local internet café to use the net.

All the pupils had the same uniform. White shirts and tan shorts for the boys and white shirts and blue skirts for the girls. We noticed that most of the pupils had the same shoes. I asked the teacher who provided the uniform and she said the parents unless they were poor in which case the school provided it.

We had a look into the year 5 (aged 11) classroom and, according to the diagrams on the board, they were learning areas of shapes including Pythagoras’ theorem. This they were using to calculate the area of a trapezium, if I have correctly remembered the name of the shape that has two parallel but unequal sides and two non-parallel ones. By converting it to a square they were left with two right-angled triangles at each side and………………………hang on this wasn’t supposed to be a Math’s lesson. It was a fascinating insight into Thai life.

The next day we had to leave Koh Tao and head to Koh Phangan, where we had decided to have a livelier few days. Our taxi arrived to take us to the boat and the picture of it is on the left. My girlfriend rode pillion while I stood, in the side-car with our luggage, feeling not unlike Boadicea, on a good day, or Boudica , on a bad one. Fortunately, for the Thais, I did not strip off and cover my body in woad to frighten them off, and if anyone said the woad would have been unnecessary, shame on you. My concern for safety made me wonder if this road, looking a bit Roman, might be my Watling Street. I needn’t have worried, we made the boat, and set off to Koh Phangan accompanied by several flying fish for part of the journey.

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