A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
Phang Nga, Thailand

My thought processes surrounding the decision to go to Phang Nga were a bit flawed. I was in a bad mood, so I wanted someplace cheap from which I could take tours and keep myself busy while not darkly pouting in my room. After seeing Phang Nga, I think I must have wanted to punish myself for some unnamed transgression.

The tragedy of Phang Nga is that its setting is beautiful. It's located in a sort of valley cauesd not by a river but by huge limestone formations covered by the usual tropical greenery and frolicking monkeys. The town itself, unfortunately, looks like it was erected in a series of long weekends in the summer of 1975 by amateur engineers using only materials rejected by Bangkok slumlords as being too ugly. Truly, it's awe-inspiring what can be accomplished in the way of eyesore development with a little concrete, some rusty iron grilles, and an utter lack of architectural imagination. Even the metal accordion doors that weren't rusty and decrepit were made to look that way by their close association with blackened, crumbling and moldy concrete walls. The sidewalks were uneven, though in Phang Nga's defense, they did lack the gaping holes descending into the dark sewer that are characteristic of Vientiane, for example.

It's not as though the leaders of Phang Nga didn't make any effort at all. The road leading into town is lovely, with a landscaped highway divider and parks along the roadside. I imagine they threw up their hands when they reached the city limits however -- basically the whole place needs to be razed so they can start over with decent materials that can stand the heat and humidity, and an architect who is willing to branch out from the three existing building plans in Phang Nga: 1. One Story Concrete Box; 2. Two Story Concrete Box; and 3. More Than Two Story Concrete Box.

The reason I had so much time to muse about Phang Nga's architecture or lack thereof was that there was virtually nothing opened when I arrived. The bus station, a couple of minimarts (including the ubiquitous 7-11), and a couple of restaurants were the sum total of the Sunday afternoon activity. Oh, and the barber shops. I neglected to mention that the primary business of Phang Nga appears to be hairdressing. All the barber shops in town were constantly full, no matter what time I walked past, and on Monday when the beauty parlors opened up I realized that this had to be the most well-shorn town in Thailand. They had a staggering number of per-capita hairdressers, none of whom appeared to have a moment's peace. My theory is that the town is so dull that its residents have adopted haircuts as a hobby. I was quite dissapointed, therefore, that I had gotten a trim in Krabi -- clearly I should have waited to deal with the experts.

In light of the feeble entertainment options Phang Nga had to offer, I immediately signed up for a one-day boat tour of Phang Nga Bay National Park and environs. This, in fact, was my primary objective on this side trip. The headline attraction of this tour was Ko Poo, aka James Bond Island, and as a bonus we were to be taken to various caves and beaches and generally tool around the National Marine Park and look at the views for the day.

To give you an idea of how depressed the tourist industry is here in Thailand, in Phang Nga there are two tour agencies, Mr. Kean and Sayan. Each have several boats and offer a couple different half, one and two-day tours, the last of which includes an overnight stay in a Muslim stilt village in the bay (I passed on this -- these floating and/or stilt villages invariably smell strongly of fish and rotting wood). On the day I went I shared the boat with just one other person, and it was Mr. Kean's only tour of the day. Sayan tours similarly had two passengers and no other tours. It's grim for the tourist economy here in post-SARS Thailand.

I was quite fortunate in my touring companion. Joe, a good looking 25 year old Irish computer programmer considerately removed his shirt almost immediately upon boarding our boat, thus substantially enhancing my view throughout the day. Just in case you are picturing me on a nice fiberglass powerboat with two massive outboard motors like I experienced when touring with Amanda and Geoff, let me remind you that now that I am alone again I have reverted to my old budget-oriented (the ungracious might say "cheap") persona. So rather than a massively powerful ocean-going speedboat, our tour was conducted on what is referred to around here as a "long-tailed boat", which is a narrow 35-foot shallow draft wooden craft with a tarp over the top to protect tourists from being burned alive. In more prosperous days it could possibly seat 10 passengers, and the driver sits on a box (of spare parts, I suspect) in the back guiding the tiller, upon which rests the massive motor, in a manner very similar to the way we drove the metal dinghy on Lake Chelan as kids. Though fortunately Mr. Kean didn't sink his. The other difference, in addition to the fact that clearly Mr. Kean had more than five horsepower to work with, was that instead of the prop dropping down right behind the boat, it was attached to an axle maybe 12 feet long -- hence the "long tail" designation -- that could be levered completely out of the water in shallow conditions.

We began by taking a circuitous route through the mangrove forest. Am I alone in finding mangroves kind of creepy? It's just not right the way they have all those insidiously twisting roots above the water line. Roots ought to be hidden like they are in northwest forests. It's unsettling to see the world upended like that, and the fact that mangroves are so dense and gnarly doesn't help matters, as it just convinces me that if I fell out of the boat I could be lost forever, unable to retrace the water route due to an abysmal sense of direction. And while in the case of the Phang Nga Bay mangrove forest we didn't actually see any creepy deadly animals or reptiles or snakes or piranhas, I always expect to see such things in these situations, as mangroves just scream "scary critters lurking" to me. Naturally, we made it through without incident.

The rest of the morning was spent motoring around the large bay, which like Halong bay, was chock full of those enormous tree-covered limestone boulders, though "islands" is of course the term used when they're sticking out of the sea. There's not a lot of beach around. The islands are steep and tall for the most part, with sheer rock faces plummetting to the watter and tiny coves leading to caves eroded away be millenia of storms and tides.

Despite my well-documented loathing of caves, I decided I didn't want to look feeble and pathetic to the cute Irishman, so I gamely tripped and slipped my graceless way through the darkness. At least these caves had a point to them -- a light at the end of the tunnel, as it were. due to what I assume to be a glorious marriage of Andaman Sea tides and the nutty geology of the region, on several islands you can walk through a cave (or sometimes boat under a huge rock face) to get to a lovely hidden lagoon with steep walls, vines, etc. All were lovely and pristine, and one was even accessorized by monkeys.

After two hours of swimming and lunching on a miniscule shell beach in a cove at the back of beyond, we were off to the tourist trap known as James Bond Island. This island, called Ko Ta Poo by the locals (though since they have a huge "James Bond Island" sign posted the distinction is a bit moot) played a role in The Man with the Golden Gun. For those of you for whom all James Bond movies run together (which would include me -- I thought I was going to the Doctor No island) The Man with the Golden Gun was the one with Mr. Scaramanga, the hit man with the golden bullets and, more interestingly, a third nipple. It also had Herve Villechaize, the guy who played Tattoo on Fantasy Island, as Scaramanga's servant.

Can you picture Tattoo bringing Mr. Scaramanga an iced drink on a chair while sitting on the beach? Well, I'm not sure if that's the island or not. It doesn't look quite the same to me, if I remember correctly, which is questionable, I admit. What I did recognize is the little tiny island (more of a large rock, really) out in front of the beach (which unfortunately contains 127 bracelet-and-tacky-shell-souvenir saleswomen). In the movie, and I'm not completely clear on this, Mr. Scaramanga has some sort of laser or ray gun or some such thing that, when you hit the power button, comes rising out of a tall rock just offshore. That rock's the James Bond Island I can actually remember from the movie. Sadly, as I write this I'm on a touristy beach island not too far away from Phang Nga Bay, and while there are plenty of cafes that play that godawful Leonardo di Caprio movie The Beach in endless rotation, none of them are considerate enough to show The Man with the Golden Gun even once to satisfy my curiosity.

Our final tour stop was to Ko Panyi, a 200 year old muslim village built on stilts in the bay. The Lonely Planet states that the village subsists primarily on fishing, but let me just say right now that as is often the case, the Lonely Planet is full of crap. I'm sure they still do fish, particularly in the rainy season, but what I witnessed was a village that had sold its soul to the tourism devil. I have been in stilt villages before in Asia, and I've never seen anything quite like this. While one side looked like a normal fishing town, that was not where we were dropped off. In fact, that side of town proved impossible to locate despite the fact that the village couldn't have had more than a couple thousand people in it. No, we disembarked on the side of the village that had been given over to brand new upscale and huge restaurants, set up to be able to serve all the passengers on several large tourist boats simultaneously. Whereas the rest of the town was the usual amalgam of brick & stucco, tin and wooden houses, these restaurants were made of the kind of gleaming logs that wouldn't be out of place in a Fisherman's Wharf type seafood restaurant. There were four of these buildings, each of which was set up to serve over a hundred people at a time. Fishing village my ass.

Behind the restaurants it was even worse. The whole village, or at least the parts of it we could get to, had been transformed into one big low-grade tourist shopping center, with one tacky souvenir stand after another punctuated by periodic minimarts selling Oreos along side the bags of dried fish. Most of the walkways between houses/shops were covered with plastic tarps, so it was basically a visit to a very dark, very tacky mall. In fact, it bore a passing resemblance to Valley North, the dark, poorly-designed and lightly-peopled shopping mall of my youth. Same indifferent shopkeepers and uninterested shoppers, too. Oh well. At least we only had to spend half an hour there, and the rest of the day was good.


Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 10:25 PM