Casting Off (20 page)

I stuck to the boat after that, trying to ignore the hideous human aspects of the island (difficult when house music is being blasted out on the beach from dusk to dawn) and concentrate on
enjoying the natural beauty of Phi Phi instead. We were anchored off a small beach that was supposed to have monkeys on it. At least, that was what we cleverly assumed: it was called Monkey Beach.
At dawn, Chris, Aaron and I took the dinghy ashore to try to catch them at play, even taking some apples and longans as gifts, but they were in hiding. On the dinghy ride back to
Gillaroo
,
though, we spotted something much more exciting.

‘Is that dolphins?’ Chris asked, jerking his head seawards.

‘What? Where?’ I asked. Surely they wouldn’t come this close to land? We often saw them when we were well offshore but why would they come here, with the noise and boat traffic
and snorkellers everywhere?

And yet come they did. A school of about eight of them surfaced a couple of hundred metres away. I gunned the throttle and sped over to where we’d seen them, dropping us into neutral as we
approached so that I wouldn’t damage any protruding fins with the propeller. They popped up again, back where we had just come from. And so began a five-minute game of cat and mouse, or
dolphin and dinghy, as we dashed to and fro. We got pretty close to them in the end, about 10 metres or so away, before they vanished.

Aaron and I decided to take the third boat in our collection, the canoe, for a spin. Well, with my spindly arms, a slow paddle was more accurate. Each time I’d been in the canoe before,
Chris or Aaron had been in the front seat and I had sat in the back. For some reason this time we got in the other way round and it was a complete disaster. With the strength coming from Aaron in
the back, his paddle acted like a rudder, steering us to one side with every stroke he did and, no matter how hard I tried to dig mine into the water, I couldn’t counteract it. We were a long
way off from the boat before we worked out why we weren’t able to go in a straight line.

‘There’s some rocks up there,’ Aaron said, indicating an outcrop at the foot of a cliff. ‘If we can get there we can switch seats.’ Easily said; not so easily done.
Canoes are not stable things to stand up in, even less so when waves are crashing up against the rock you are leaning on with one hand, and you’re afraid of falling into the water in case
you’re dashed against the near-vertical cliffs. Somehow, wobbling a lot, we managed it and it was so much better. Off we paddled, scanning the rock face for a gap I thought I’d seen
when we’d been coming in to anchor. I had had a funny feeling that there would be a sheltered lagoon beyond the gap, like at Koh Muk, but it was just a hunch. For all I knew, it was just a
brief, natural indentation in the hundred-metre-tall cliff. The waves were big rollers, lifting us up and down a good metre or so every few seconds. We were a long way from the beach and the
drivers of the engine-powered tourist boats that came shooting around the corner towards us gave us quizzical looks when they saw we were so far from the allocated areas – and not wearing
lifejackets. But we persevered and, just when I was beginning to think I’d imagined it, we found the gap and, inside, a sheltered long, thin, natural harbour that hooked backwards and had a
very small beach at the far end of it.

Dragging the canoe up the sand, we stood to take stock of our surroundings. The remnants of hammocks, half rotted away, hung from a couple of trees and there were some wooden platforms built
into the rock face, like hideaway huts. It was decrepit but all the more picturesque for it. A circle of blackened stones and ash on the beach told of campfires and secret parties. There was a red
and white sign screwed into the rock but it was in Thai so if it was telling us we were not allowed in this place, then we were blissfully in ignorance. (Later I found out it was a protected area
for swifts to settle without fear of humans stealing their nests and turning them into soup.)

It was the peaceful beauty of places like this that started to attract people to these Thai islands in the first place. The Leonardo DiCaprio movie
The Beach
was filmed on Phi Phi Lay,
the neighbouring island, and that beach’s remote loveliness had led to Phi Phi Don’s overcrowded tackiness. People came here expecting to find an empty paradise like in the film and
what they got was boat- and hotel- and beach-loads of others all coming for the same thing. And the more that came, the worse it got. Little pieces of paradise, like the one Aaron and I had found,
were still left and I hoped they would remain that way.

It was forbidden to anchor at Phi Phi Lay, Guy had told Tyrone, but if you were lucky you could take one of the mooring buoys after the daytripper boats had left for the evening. I was curious
to see this famed beach and judge for myself if it was all it was cracked up to be. We planned to reach the bay in the late afternoon and keep our fingers crossed that there would be a mooring
free.

In the movie the secret beach is surrounded on all sides by cliffs, like a bigger version of the emerald cave we had seen at Koh Muk. In reality, it is a sharply concave bay but open on one side
to the sea. That made our entry easier – no jumping off waterfalls. There were no moorings free when we got there so we sat tight, the engine idling, watching people from the daytrip boats
swimming and larking about. By five o’clock they had all gone and, apart from two other cruising boats, we had the bay to ourselves. To be fair, it was a breathtakingly spectacular place,
with a deep beach, jungle at the back and high, sheer cliffs all the way around. And the Thai authorities had done a good job of recognising what they had and holding on to it. The only development
was a small campsite hidden behind the jungle, where people could stay on closely supervised overnight trips.

It took me all of five minutes to explore the campsite, following the sandy path that had been cut between the trees, and then I was back on the beach again. Tyrone was sitting on a wooden
bench, talking to an older man with neat, short white hair, sensible round spectacles and a grey moustache. The man was wearing only a pair of shorts and the skin of his naked upper half was well
weathered.

‘Hello,’ I said, going over to join them.

‘Hello,’ the man said. ‘Would you like some rum?’ He passed me a flask of neat Bacardi. I took the tiniest sip and it burned the back of my throat.

The tan, the rum and the overall weathered look led me to presume he was on one of the other cruising boats and the conversation turned to the usual yachtie talk: where have you come from? Where
are you going? How was the weather? The tide? Current conditions?

‘Oh, the tide is a big problem for me,’ the man said. ‘If it is stronger than two knots I go backwards.’

I frowned, looking at the boats on the moorings and then back at the stranger.
Gillaroo
’s 4 knots under engine was the slowest I had come across before.

‘Your yacht can only do two knots?’ I asked him, confused.

‘Oh no,’ he laughed. ‘I am not in a yacht. It is just me and my kayak.’

Detlev, it emerged, was a German who lived on Koh Samui with his Thai wife and children and ran a resort. For his holidays he liked to fasten his kayak on to the roof of his car, drive it
somewhere and paddle off.

‘This is it,’ he said, proudly, walking us over to a small kayak parked high up the sand.

‘Where do you stay? Where do you sleep?’ I asked him, slightly incredulous.

‘Oh, I have everything I need. I have my tent, my tea and of course my rum.’ He waved the bottle. I looked again at the kayak. One of the seat spaces was empty, the other was packed
with his belongings.

‘And how long are you away for?’ I asked Detlev.

‘Oh, about a week. Already I go to Phi Phi Don. Now I would like to go to Phuket. But I think it is a long way. Perhaps you can kindly let me see your charts?’

‘You don’t have charts?’ Tyrone asked.

‘So how do you know where you are going?’ I wanted to know.

‘I have my compass,’ he said, pulling an old-fashioned compass from his pocket, ‘and if I know how far away the next island is, I know if I can get there in one day.’

I don’t think my eyebrows could have risen any higher on my head. ‘So you just point in the right direction and keep going until you reach land?’

‘Yes. It is good fun.’

This had to be one of the craziest things I had ever heard. But at the same time I felt a deep admiration for this little old man, who looked like he weighed barely more than eight stone. He was
an adventurer proper, doing it old school.

‘So I come to your boat in the morning and you show me the charts?’ he asked. We agreed.

He turned up while Tyrone and Chris were still out canoeing the whole circumference of Phi Phi Lay. I heard his greeting and went outside to see him paddling on the spot alongside the starboard
hull. He had brought his own tea with him and I brewed a pot and showed him the computer.

‘Hum,’ he frowned, peering at the screen. ‘I think maybe it is too far to go to Phuket.’ He finished his tea and shrugged. ‘So, OK, I go again to Phi Phi Don. Thank
you for showing me this. You save me a lot of trouble.’

And with that he got back into his kayak, taking his jar of tea leaves with him, consulted his compass, and paddled off into the distance.

I
f I thought Phi Phi Don was bad, it was nothing compared to Ao Chalong in Phuket. So far we had been in Thai waters for a week without stamps in
our passports or visas and we had to check in in Phuket with customs, immigration and the harbour master. The harbour was vast and absolutely chocka-block with anchored boats: cruising yachts and
catamarans, dive boats, tourist boats and, worryingly, the odd wreck. Because Ao Chalong was the main port of call for visiting yachts, some clever government official had set up a one-stop shop
with all the various checking-in authorities housed in one building. It went very smoothly and quickly until I saw a sign on the wall that said anyone who arrived in Thailand by boat had to leave
Thailand by that same boat or, if they wanted to leave by other means, have to forfeit a bond of 20,000 baht. I had to fly back to England for my brother’s wedding and Aaron and Chris were
going to leave under their own steam. None of us wanted to pay £400 to leave the country. ‘You go main immigration office,’ the man behind the counter said. ‘Talk
them.’

The immigration office was in the town centre so the following day we set off in the direction of the main road the official had roughly pointed out to us to flag down a taxi. To get there we
had to walk along a decrepit street lined with seedy bars and massage parlours. Thai women in tiny clothes shouted hello to us as we passed, trying to persuade us to go in for a drink. They looked
nothing like the beautiful and elegant air hostesses I’d seen on my flight out to Borneo and instead had bloated bellies forced into cheap polyester vest tops and brightly-painted faces that
looked squarely masculine in the harsh morning light. Every bar we passed on a street maybe half a mile long was like that. There were no customers at 11am.

I dreaded a huge queue at immigration but we went straight in and were seen immediately. I explained my problem and a woman official told me, yes, there was this bond to pay. And I could only
pay by cash. It was a fair way to a bank, apparently, and I wasn’t really sure if I could withdraw £400 in one single transaction.

‘I speak my boss,’ she said, and picked up her mobile, said something in Thai and passed the phone to me.

I must pay the bond, the man on the other end told me, who spoke good English. I could claim it back after I left Thailand the second time.
But how would I do that?
I wondered.
I
wouldn’t be in the country any longer to get the cash.
Or, he continued, I could pay an agency a fee to put up the bond for me. The fee, which worked out at about £30, was
non-refundable. I opted for definitely losing out on £30 rather than possibly never seeing £400 again and they gave me a pile of forms to fill in and stapled some paperwork into my
passport. Chris and Aaron decided to take their chances at the border when they left the country. If they were blacklisted and banned from entering Thailand again it didn’t matter, they
shrugged. But I had paid for flights and I was due to get back on to
Gillaroo
after the wedding so I needed to be sure I could return.

Aaron left that very afternoon – I think the draw of some partying friends in Koh Phangang was too strong to put off for a moment longer. ‘Remember – keep leftin’
it,’ he called out over his shoulder as I waved him off into a van. Chris went the morning after, leaving me his broken guitar to bury at sea in the Indian Ocean. And then
Gillaroo
was down to a crew of just two.

I hated Ao Chalong so much that I was itching to get away but I still had a week to go before my flight back to England. I dug out the piece of paper that I had written Guy’s email address
on. I knew that he was due to be in Koh Lanta now, renting an apartment on land for the winter season. I turned the paper over in my hand, wondering if I had the gall to email him and invite myself
over for a while. I got out my laptop and stared at the screen, biting my lip. He had reassured me on Koh Lipe that there was no French girlfriend, so that wasn’t the problem. My fingers
hovered over the keys, poised to write, but the fact that I wasn’t sure how he felt about our evening together stayed me and I shut the lid sharply. I got up from the saloon table and made
myself a drink, staring into the depths of the cup. I desperately wanted to escape being stuck on anchor in this shithole, I reasoned with myself, and I could use that as an excuse for a
‘friendly’ visit. I could tell myself that until I was blue in the face but the reality was that I wanted to see Guy again and this might be my last chance. I fired off a brief email in
a brave moment.