Bird of Paradise

I hitched a ride with a snorkel tour boat one morning to escape Ko Hai. After a day spent snorkeling various coves and islands the boat stopped for lunch on the windward side of Ko Kradan or what should have been the windward side, but at the particular moment, with an offshore wind blowing in from the east, was the calmest part of the island. The ferry dropped me off at a deserted beach and the captain pointed to what looked like just jungle and said that if I followed that path I’d get to the other side of the island.

Ominous black clouds had been moving westward all day and were nearly overhead by the time I jumped off the boat. The captain wasted no time in pulling away. I was hardly to the tree line with my bag before the boat disappeared around the corner of the cove.

I sat down on the sand and smoked a cigarette. Worst case scenario I get a little wet is some warm tropical rain. Sitting there I felt for a fleeting second like maybe I understood a little bit of what Tom Neale must have felt that first day when the boat dropped him off on Suvarov. But then the rain came so I gathered up my things and headed inland.

The path the captain mentioned actually did exist when I got close enough to the tree line to see it. It wasn’t that long either. I emerged out of the jungle into a small clearing with a restaurant and a few bungalows. So much for Suvarov, though this little collection of huts would turn out to be about as close as it’s safe to wish for these days. For me anyway.

The Paradise Lost Resort was not listed in any guidebook I’d ever read. And it was owned by an American. That was enough to put me on edge. After chatting with said American for a bit I decided to check out my options. Pig headed man that I am I continued on to the other side of the island in search of where I had intended to stay.

Just about the time I reached the eastern beach the rain decided to get more serious. I took shelter under a few of pine trees that lined the back of the beach and met Zoë, who had been out on the beach and also taken shelter from the storm. We chatted for a while and she recommended that I turn around and stay at Paradise Lost rather than continue up the beach to the other resort which she described as “more of a refugee camp.”

So it was that I came to meet, Tony, Zoë’s husband, and Inda, their three-year-old daughter, as well as that american I had chatted with before, Wally Sanger, the man who runs Paradise Lost, along with his partner Nok.

Up until I arrived on Ko Kradan I had been, were I too be honest, not too fond of Thailand. Despite its reputation as the land of smiles, I hadn’t found the Thais to be nearly as friendly or welcoming as the Cambodians and Lao. I also generally found the travelers in Thailand to be a rather cold and often downright rude bunch. As a result I spent the month of January alone and ever since the girls left I’d hardly talked to anyone. But on Ko Kradan I discovered a slice of Thailand the way it’s often describe by wistful hippies who first came here twenty years ago.

Nok and the rest of the Thais working at Paradise Lost were the nicest people I met in Thailand and Wally was by far the most laid back farang I’ve come across. I ended up staying on Ko Kradan for the remainder of my time in the south.

Wally arrived on Ko Kradan six years ago having spent the twenty years before that sailing all over the South Pacific. How exactly he came to start a guesthouse operation I never did hear, but it was quite an operation. Nok was an excellent cook and had an especially tasty (and spicy) massaman curry which is a southern Thai specialty, but Wally also offered a full range of barbeque options from massive steaks to pork chops and chicken. And as I discovered one night, when you order the grilled chicken dinner you in fact get a grilled chicken, as in the whole damn chicken, which works out well for the six or seven dogs that live at Paradise Lost (all purebred Thai ridgebacks and probably the best cared for and most spoiled dogs in all of Southeast Asia). One of the dogs, Tang, took a liking to me (or else he just liked company on the beach, who knows) and would follow me down the beach everyday, though he usually took off once I disappeared on the reef.

The reef off the southern end of Ko Kradan was the best snorkeling I found in the Islands provided you made it out during high tide, as it could be tough to navigate at low tide. For the entire week I was there I spent nearly every morning on the reef swimming among the Moorish Idols, Parrot Fish, Trigger Fish, Cleaner Wrasses and Butterfly Fish as well as the ever present Sergeant Majors and Barracuda.

Ko Kradan was barely touched by the tsunami so the reef was as it had always been. According to Wally there were a breeding pair of turtles somewhere out there, but regrettably I never came across them. So long as I got out there before noon when the day trip boats began to arrive, I had the reef to myself like some sort of private underwater playground.

Afternoons were my favorite time on the island, after the day tripping long tails from nearby Ko Muk departed for home and the four island tour boats from Ko Lanta moved on to the next island, a peaceful silence and almost total stillness settled over the beaches of Ko Kradan. Often a westerly breeze would kick up around two providing a welcome relief from the midday heat and the tide would retreat to the point that when I went back out on the reef the coral fairly scrapped my nose as I floated about, listening to the sound of Parrot Fish munching on bits of lumpy coral or the broken antlers of staghorn coral already half eaten and partly covered in sand.

I got in the habit of not using fins when I snorkeled so I tended to just drift with the currents moving rather slowly over great fields of coral, reddish brown staghorn with white tips and countless fish hiding in the numerous tangled shadows, including schools of smaller iridescent blue fish with yellow tails, fish whose bodies seemed to me the brightest and most intense blue I’ve ever seen. Other times I’d do a bit of swimming to follow one of the massive Parrot Fish who’s front fins flapped not unlike the wings of their arboreal namesake. These huge riots of pastel hues, pinks and greens and blues and yellows often seemed, when viewed at very close range, to be so finely detailed and the colors so smoothly flowing in gradients of pastel that would have made any circa 1986 interior designer proud, that it was impossible to distinguish scales and after a while they seem to have been perhaps airbrushed or created by some Photoshop whiz. Moorish Idols too, which most often swim in pairs, have such fine scales that even up close with the water magnifying everything it’s still impossible to make out the scales.

Whenever I was on the reef a school of juvenile parrotfish, small wrasses and Sergeant Majors would follow behind me nipping at my knees and ankles hoping for a bit a bread which they are accustomed to getting from the tour boats. Despite the fact that I never had any food they persisted from one end of the reef to the other. Once I stopped to adjust my mask and stood on a large lump of coral. While I was fiddling with the mask I could feel, but not see, something nipping at a cut on my left foot. I put the mask back on and peered down to discover that I had stopped at a cleaner wrasse’s station and though no doubt slightly confused by my foot, the fish was nevertheless gamely doing what it did best. I waited until the fish seemed satisfied with his work and then I swam off following a parrotfish so large it had a sucker fish attached to its gills.

Sometimes I swam out past the reef, where the bottom turned sandy and dropped off rather quickly making it impossible to see, in hopes of finding the turtles or perhaps a black tipped reef shark (which are perfectly harmless for the most part), but neither ever showed their faces. Eventually I would give up and move back toward the reef which by then would be very shallow indeed and only passable by carefully swimming through the sandy gullies between the fields of coral, an experience somewhat like I imagine it would feel to fly low and fast through the canyon country of eastern Utah and northern Arizona.

Closer into shore where the coral began to drop off, great fields of giant black sea urchins lay swaying in the currents and small waves in such a way that the spines looked like little fingers feeling about in the murky water, and at the center of each a great yellow and blue “eye” stared back up at you. Where the coral stopped and rocks began to be half covered in sand, the water visibility dropped and the fish became fewer limited to delicately colored yellow and blue striped fish with bodies and eyes that resembled squirrel fish and a few tiny Gobi fish that darted skittishly about as I floated over them. The reefs around Ko Kradan are known for their abundance of rock fish which sit here in the shallows, heavily camouflaged and difficult to see as they remain still, perched on their front flippers, as if patiently waiting for the fins to evolve into arms so that they can leave the sea behind once and for all.

I never wanted to get out of the water, but inevitably some reminder of my terrestrial origins would come back, thirst, hunger or perhaps just exhaustion, and I would head back to Paradise Lost for a late lunch.

Everyday around six I would take the trail back to the beach where I was originally dropped off and watch the sunset from the lookout on the bluff.

Eventually Tony, Zoë and Inda left for Malaysia and for two days it was just Wally and I. But then a few yachty friends of Wally’s sailed in and I met, Brian, Dawn and CT, the crew of a fifty-two foot yacht sailing under the name Ten Large. While they slept on the boat, the three of them came ashore during the day and always ate dinner at Paradise Lost. Another yacht whose name I’ve forgotten, also with a crew of three, came ashore for two days. And eventually an Australian named Peter escaped the other resort (refugee camp was a rather apt description I discovered when I finally made it down that way) to stay at Paradise Lost.

Wally operates mostly on word of mouth, and, in cases like mine, dumb luck. But because he isn’t listed in very many guidebooks, the other resort is able to waylay travelers in Trang with package deals paid for in advance. They simply meet the trains arriving from Bangkok and book an all-inclusive package, boat transfer, lodging, etc. and ask for the money up front. Eventually most of these folks find Paradise Lost and end up eating here, but because they’ve already paid for the lodging they’re stuck down at the refugee camp.

It’s too bad because Wally has a great place with friendly people, excellent food and nice bungalows. If you happen to be headed to Ko Kradan or any of the south Thai islands I encourage you to stop by. Wally has a website with contact info [update: the sites is gone], but beware that there is no internet on Ko Kradan and the cell phone reception isn’t great so you may have to call a few times to get a decent connection. I just showed up and got a room, but it’s worth calling ahead, especially in the high season since there aren’t too many bungalows available (though Wally is building more every year).

I spent the evening eating barbecue and chatting with CT, Dawn and Brian about our various travels and some of their sailing adventures (they recently became mini celebrities in the yachty world when they were boarded by pirates while passing through Malaysia). One day I took a break from snorkeling and made a return trip to emerald cave with the crew of the other yacht. It was a nice change and this time we had the cave to ourselves for quite some time.

But like all things that begin, my time on Ko Kradan had to end. I didn’t want to leave, but I had a plane flight to London that couldn’t be missed. So after ten brilliant days on Ko Kradan we all caught a long tail for shore as Ten Large needed to clear customs and Wally needed supplies for the island. After spending the day running errands with everyone, they dropped me off at the train station and I headed back up to Bangkok.