Back of Beyond (48 page)

We all ate slowly. There was no rush.

The only problem was my chair. I kept looking down to see if the legs were straight. I felt I was slipping sideways. Maybe it was the heat. Or those fiery little chilies—they can make your head spin.

And then I was sitting on the sand, quite a distance away from the table. I had no idea how I got there. I had no recollec tion of leaving the feast. But it felt okay. The sand was warm, enticingly warm. Sensual. My legs moved backward and forward, digging deep into its softness. So soft. Like duck down. And I was bouncing up and down—ever so slowly—like a baby on a puffy cloud. I could hear soft laughter behind me. Or was it a waterfall? Or a breeze in the palms? No matter. It was a lovely gentle sound, trickling over my head like warm water, tickling my ears.

Someone put a glass of coconut milk in my hand. There was a face—one of the Thai girls. Peach-colored with tiny pearl eyes and a coy smile. Her small oval mouth was moving slowly; I couldn’t take my eyes off her teeth. Such neat, white, tiny teeth; like a miniature keyboard. I could reach out and play them and make wonderful music. But my hand didn’t seem to want to move. I watched my fingers ease through the pink-gold sand like wriggling worms….

The sky was a blue I’d never seen before—a brilliant silky turquoise with a texture of soft tofu. It looked—well—it looked, edible! As if I could reach out and cut pieces from between the cotton-candy clouds. And the clouds were different too—moving backward, then forward—gracefully, as in a slow minuet, leaving little images behind like lace petticoats.

Thoughts tumbled. Cascades of twirling perceptions, each one a different color and shape. Wouldn’t it be fun, I thought, to slice through them and look at their cross section—all those colors and forms, all intertwined, all changing.

And then I was in the water. Again, no recollection of moving. I remember thinking how nice it would be to float in the sea. It undulated like a big rubber waterbed. Inviting. Promising. Tiny silver and gold fish moved between my toes. I heard a voice saying “f-i-s-h” very slowly. Sort of a surfy sound. “Fishhhh.” Then a breath. Then “fishhhhh,” again. It was my voice. I could feel the vibrations in my throat. Fishhhhh. A beautiful sound. The most beautiful sound in all the world.

I was on all fours now. Some kind of creature. A large lizard? Playing in the shallows, seeing finger-long fish dart in shoals, scores of them turning as one, one mind controlling them all. My hands became flippers. A seal now? As each flipper entered the water the shoals would move away in sinewy curves and then curl back to look more closely, then curl away again as I moved forward, my body swaying from side to side. I could feel the sun’s heat on my back, like massaging fingers, moving up my spine and outward across my waist and shoulders and tickling the underside of my chest.

Round pink boulders at the water’s edge became enormous scoops of ice cream, piled on top of one another. A huge sundae. Particles of quartz sparkled like sprinkled sugar. I splashed water on the rocks and they darkened to a deep red. Raspberry syrup! How lovely.

Then my giggling began. Just ripples at first; it all felt so soft—pillowy—to this sea-frolicking lizard (or seal) or whatever I was supposed to be, faced by all this ice cream. Except that I was changing now, rising up out of the water. I felt as light as a breeze. Lifting. As I moved my head, I seemed to lift even higher leaving my lizard body behind. Floating. Really floating. I was looking down at my ice-cream rocks and the water and the beach from up high. And I felt no weight. Nothing at all. I stretched out my arms, tilted to one side, and floated sideways. I lifted my neck and looked at the sky and moved upward, toward the blue tofu. I looked down and my body slid down through the warm air like a seagull riding the thermals. I was utterly free. I have never known such sensations except in dreams. I could feel the giggling rising from my stomach, up through my lungs and throat, and right out the top of my head—waterfalls of laughter, bringing more laughter, like a child, lost in the moment, in the fun of floating and laughing and soaring and diving…and the earth had never looked more beautiful….

Much, much later I landed gently and found myself sitting on the sand again. The sky was a more normal blue now and the pink rocks were—pink rocks. Pretty things, but rocks nevertheless. Certainly not ice cream sprinkled with sugar and laced with raspberry syrup. Silly idea.

My companions were all around, sprawled on the beach, asleep. One of the Italians rolled over, opened an eye, and smiled.

“Good omelet, I think.”

The omelet. Of course. Those truffle-like flecks had been Samui psilocybin mushrooms! Sometimes I worry about me. But that floating bit really had been very, very pleasant….

Ko Samui began to get to me. Too many people. Time to look for quieter islands again.

Eighteen miles or so off to the west I explored one of the world’s most beautiful archipelagos, Ang Thong. Here in the clearest of turquoise-blue waters sit forty jungle-shrouded islets, each with its own secret beaches of white coral sand. Towering pinnacles of eroded limestone rise hundreds of feet, fantasylike, from dense tangles of trees, vines, ferns, and creepers. Recent designation as Thailand’s second Marine National Park ensures preservation of Ang Thong’s pristine delights and the safety of the nation’s favorite fish, the
pla tu
, or short-bodied mackerel, which spawn here in countless billions in March. The headquarters island of On Koh Wua Ta Lap (Sleeping Cow Island) has a few bungalows for rent and abundant fresh water, but all the others are virtually untouched. Most visitors come here from Ko Samui to snorkel and fish among the blue lagoons. A handful of hardy ones visit Moe Koh (Mother Island), to swim from the tiny beach surrounded by spiked cliffs and scale the tallest one to catch a glimpse of Talay Noi, an emerald green salt water lake trapped among soaring karst pinnacles. From here the whole interlocking beauty of the archipelago stretches for miles into the brilliant silver haze.

I’ve left my favorite place until last. When the overabundant distractions and delights of Ko Samui began to pall I hopped a ferry to the less-developed island of Ko Phangan for a couple of days’ quietude in a palm-frond bungalow on a little cove, taking occasional walks on jungle paths to the hidden waterfalls of Thaansadet and Pang.

Finally I decided to go completely native. A small fishing boat chugged me even further north to the ultimate escapist islet of Ko Tao. Here I discarded all trappings of our so-called civilized ways and gave myself up to the sun, the ocean, the warm breezes, and the company of a handful of travelers who seemed to have discovered the ultimate in peace and simplicity, living lives as gentle as gossamer. There were few luxuries and organized distractions here. Most tourists would never enjoy the “nothingnesses” to be found here. All you really have is you, your own experiences and your own perceptions.

And that was just fine with me.

Somewhere deep in dreams comes the echo of bells and the rumble of gongs—long booms followed by the chitter of cymbals and then silence; I wake up suddenly; I can see branches swaying outside my window. I’m lying on a wooden board covered by straw matting and my back aches. It’s very dark and hot, mosquitoes are doing kamikaze imitations and I can’t remember where I am.

Slowly the real world returns. Right—I’m a guest at the Buddhist monastery of Po Lin (Precious Lotus) on Lantau Island, way out in the bay west of Hong Kong, and it’s 4:00
A.M.
, time for the first service of the day.

I light my candle in the cell-like room, dress quickly, and creep downstairs to the courtyard. The air is cool. A breeze rolls down from the dark hills, rattling leaves and bringing scents of early morning. The richly painted walls of the main temple, brilliant crimsons and golds, are illuminated by strings of tiny lights. Inside I can see the serene profile of a twenty-five-foot-high Buddha flickering in the glow of tiny candles, and down the ornate stairway I peer directly into a smaller temple lit by more candles. Fifteen black-robed monks chant in a low, slow monotone, like an endless mantra that seems to ease its way across the cobbled courtyard, over the pagodas on the high terraces above the temple compound, up the empty hills, and out into the starry blackness.

Hong Kong seems a galaxy away. Yet, a mere twenty sea gull-skimming miles to the east was one of the earth’s most frenetic cities, the money machine of Southeast Asia, the “get-ahead-or-you’re-dead, eat-’em-up-and-spit’em-out” nexus of our little blue planet. If I’d looked I would have seen the glow over the black hills, but I preferred to be just where I was, and so I didn’t look.

I had left that frantic whirligig behind three days ago, bidding farewell to its million scurrying residents, its twenty thousand exotic restaurants, its neon strips, endless open-air street markets and food stalls, and its huddled sampans, jammed shanty-town fashion in the typhoon basins. I’d jumped aboard a ferryboat and waved good-bye to the organ-pipe jumble of chrome and glass towers and moved out into the mists of the bay, heading for a few days of walking on Lantau.

This sparsely populated place is the largest of all the 235 outlying islands (even larger than Hong Kong island itself) but more than half of its 155 square miles has been designated as protected areas, many with lovely secluded beaches, and all linked by sinewy networks of footpaths.

First stop was tiny Peng Chau Island. Here the air was cool, and I began strolling the narrow, winding alleys that smelled of brine and noodles and drying fishnets.

“Hey, mister, you wan’ sampan?”

My ramblings were cut short.

“Sampan here now. You take.”

I had ordered a boat for the crossing to Lantau so—farewell Peng Chau. An old Chinese gentleman, very wrinkled and bent, scampered up to me, grabbed my knapsack and scampered back to the pier.

“Sampan go. Quick, quick.”

He pushed me off the dock into a tiny wooden contraption bobbing around like a cracked eggshell and into the arms of an Oriental beauty wearing a broad rattan hat tied under her chin with a purple scarf. She smiled and lowered her eyes in that demure way Oriental women have of sending your heart pounding. Then she sat gracefully, adjusted her hat, snapped the engine into life with a quick tug on an old rope, and we were off, roaring across the choppy narrows. The engine sounded like a swarm of very angry killer bees.

I gazed across an ocean dotted with small wooded islands as far as the eye could see. Directly ahead were the high hills of Lantau, burly green peaks rising layer on layer—a real walker’s island; touches of Scottish highlands tinged with Irish emerald green, floating in a Mediterranean-blue ocean.

I had decided to begin my hike from the northeast coast at the Trappist Haven monastery, and within minutes of leaving Peng Chau my charming captain bounced us up on the shore below the church, perched on a bluff. I clambered out unsteadily. She handed me my gear, smiled that smile again, and vanished in a swirl of spray.

For a few moments I was alone; big blue butterflies arabesqued for me in the early-morning air. Then a small truck appeared, banging and clattering down a steep track, driven by Buddha himself. He emerged in rather grubby white robes and stood, plump and beaming at me with a face I had seen a hundred times before in pictures and statues, a face of utter contentment and knowingness. But, like the girl in the boat, he had business to do and started unloading milk churns from the back of the truck. I remembered that the Trappist monks rear dairy cows here and are the main suppliers of Hong Kong’s top hotels. I also remembered that Trappists don’t talk. So, after he offered me a seat by sign language, we rode in silence up the ridiculously steep hill to the monastery where he vanished (after one last all-enveloping grin) into a cow barn.

There was no one around so I strolled over a foot bridge across a deep ravine and into the simple church. A list of resident monks was posted near the door with only twelve names on it. From an adjoining list of eight daily services, starting with Vigils at 3:15
A.M.
and ending with Compline at 8:00
P.M.
, it appeared they must be very busy people.

The views back over the bay and the islands were breathtaking but unfortunately I had little breath to give as I made the long climb up from the monastery, through shoulder-high elephant grass, to the first line of green ridges. The morning seemed to be taking pernicious delight in getting hotter by the second. A yellow snake sinewed into the bushes leaving its ominous imprint on the dust. A single sea gull hovered above me, dropped a little souvenir (it missed), and soared off in the spirals, pretending to be an eagle.

At the top of the fourth ridge the whole of Silvermine Bay (Mui Wo) opened up with its arc of white sand and wooden sampans bobbing near the shore. Kids frolicked in the shallows, and I had such a strong urge to join them that the two-mile descent seemed to go very quickly, at least, until the last section, when I got lost in a mini-jungle of thornbushes all wrapped in sticky spiders’ webs with dozens of black spiders the size of campaign medals.

I finally emerged from the sweaty tangle, flung boots and pack on the sand, strode straight into the surf, and promptly disappeared. (The disappearing bit was unintentional—I had walked off the end of a hidden rock ledge.)

The serious leg of my hike began on the hills behind the bay. Local folklore claims that the same Chinese clan (once notorious pirates) has occupied a strange walled village on the north coast of the island for over a thousand years. That seemed a good enough reason for visiting the place.

Finding the correct route from Silvermine Bay was not easy. I made at least four separate starts on different paths before an old man on a mule put me right and I began the long climb up the valley past huddled villages of stones and timber houses. Gradually the country became wilder. Soon there were no houses or people; a cool wind blew down the hills, which now resembled the moors of Yorkshire in their bleakness.

After six long miles I crossed the high watershed and I was looking forward to a spell of easier downhill walking. I paused for water in a hamlet of poor stone houses and could see the trail wriggling hundreds of feet down the slopes to the ocean far beyond. And there in the far distance was the village—a sinister black-walled fortress with massive towers at each corner. A young man sauntered up, dragging a pink piglet on a string, and I pointed out where I was going. He scowled and shook his head.

“No good. Is trouble there. No good to go.” I showed him the route on my map. The path was clearly marked. “No. No way to go. No road. People very sick there. You go back now.”

Then something very odd happened. The sky ahead suddenly began to darken rapidly and long gray tentacles of cloud trailed across an oily black ocean. I could see sheets of rain obliterating the outer islands, moving toward the cliffs of Lantau and the strange walled village far below us.

“You go back. Now.”

I don’t usually put much faith in omens and suchlike but somehow I knew that the young man was right, so I thanked him and set off fast on the long trail back down to Silvermine Bay.

As I half ran I could sense the huge clouds crowding behind me, rumbling over the ridges, growing larger and darker. I turned and the hills were already gone in mists. I knew the rain was really coming, pushing the winds over the low grasses, bending the scrub bushes. I tried to run faster but my legs felt like cement blocks. The gale was shrieking now, tearing at my clothes; the first fat drops were here, hitting the trail like quail eggs. And then it was on me, sudden cold dousings of water falling in solid shafts, pounding my head, and making the trail into an instant streambed—pure and wonderful chaos; the land and the elements rolling together in a primeval tag match with me as solo spectator, right in the middle of it all….

I continued running downhill and arrived at a lonely house with stone walls, a tin roof, and a big blue door, which was half open. An old man was peering out, watching the downpour. He saw me, laughed, and beckoned me inside (an unexpected gesture—islanders seem to relish their own privacy). I almost tumbled down the two steps into a tiny dark room filled with pretty little girls who scampered around pushing bundles into corners and piling up cushions on the wooden floor. When all the scurrying ceased, the girls became very shy and an old woman, who sat almost invisible in the far corner of the room, sent them off to make tea in the rear of the house.

I could see a raised platform bed shrouded by a mosquito net and partially hidden by a bamboo screen. The main room was simply furnished with a chest of drawers, a statue of Buddha in a small house-shrine lit by tiny candles, two bamboo chairs, and a chipped wooden table by the door. Light came from a hurricane lamp, which sent flickering shadows across the unpainted walls.

I was served a small bowl of perfumed tea, followed by a much larger bowl of thick noodles in broth with chunks of bok choy cabbage and two sweet buns. The six little girls all sat in a circle on the floor. When I smiled, they giggled; when I ate their lips moved with mine. No one spoke.

Much later, when the storm had passed, I got up to leave. I looked in my backpack for gifts but all I could find was a small flashlight and a box of TicTacs, which they accepted with embarrassment, then grace. The old man came with me to the door and when I turned back to wave, all the girls waved back and giggled in unison. Their lovely smiles kept me company all the way down the long (and now very muddy) path to Silvermine Bay and the comforts of a beachfront hotel room.

Next day, everything was bright and blue again and I discovered one of the most unusual villages I have ever seen on my travels.

I took a local bus along the coast road, past lovely Cheung Sha sands, over the pass by Kwun Yam Shan Mountain, and down to a bay of ancient salt pans in a bowl of green hills. Tai O village is a jumble of tiny fishing shacks perched on stilts alongside a narrow inlet that neatly divides the community in half. Linking both sides is a tiny rope-drawn sampan, which always seems full of locals, wobbling around in upright positions, as the odd little craft is hauled across.

The day I arrived all the fishing boats were decked out in brilliant-colored banners and streamers in preparation for the great Tin Hau festival in May that celebrates the favors bestowed on the fishermen by the goddess of the sea. “Dragon boats,” long thin racing craft ornately carved and powered by eight oarsmen, skimmed up and down the inlet to the beat of drums and gongs. The ferry made hasty crossings between the impromptu races, but then got tangled up with the prow of a large fishing boat that was making a clumsy docking with a large catch of flapping fish.

And fish is really what this zany little place is all about. Scattered everywhere around the hundreds of lopsided shacks are ornate little temples, door shrines, and painted posters pleading to the gods for bountiful harvests of fish, shrimp, abalone, squid, and even shark, whose dried fins and tails sell for enormous sums in tiny stores along the winding bazaar. I watched one bargaining session in progress with a group of casually dressed merchants sitting in wicker chairs around a dozen shark appendages. The price was already at $3,000 (U.S.) and climbing! Some fish here are so valued for medicinal purposes that a single average-size specimen can sell for over $800 (U.S.).

The whole village was redolent with drying shrimp (Tai O is famous for the quality of its shrimp paste), conch, tuna, and dozens of other denizens of the deep hanging like stalactites from store awnings. Combine this with the sight of thin golden sheets of drying tofu, drying seaweed strips, mounds of silvered whitebait, and enticing aromas from seafood restaurants offering just about every imaginable kind of shellfish and huge sea bass you pick yourself from crowded window tanks—and Tai O is one of those special places that lingers in the mind and on the palate for years.

But Buddha must have known of my need for sensory and gustatory relief. By evening I found myself on a wheezy old bus being carried up impossible grades high into the hills again to spend some time at the Po Lin Monastery. I had seen signs boasting of the construction here of “the tallest outdoor bronze Buddha statue in the world,” but in spite of an impressive ceremonial staircase and massive marble plinth on a hilltop by the monastery, there was little evidence of activity. (Funds had apparently run out.)