Environment Girl

Today I meet up with a few tourists I encountered in town yesterday and we all split the price of a long tail boat to go snorkeling for the day. It was a delightful group. First there were three Muslim Swedish girls traveling together, who were originally from Malasia. One, Pi Yang, spoke fluent Thai, one Amanai spoke fluent English, and one Amoneh, seemed pretty shy and didn’t speak much while I was there. They had made friends with two Thai guys who came in on the boat with them. Both of them were apparently named Bond. One Bond was from Bankok and spoke english well, and the other was a friend who Bankok bond met online as a travel buddy for sourthern Thailand. Overall, our gang was hilarious company since we were such a hog-pog of languages. Sometimes Bankok Bond would try to ask me something in english, but I woudn’t understand so he would tell Pi Yang in Thai and she would Tell Amanai in Sweedish and Amanai would tell me in english.

I bought some fried chicken and sticky rice on my walk to met them at their resort where they were having breakfast. I’m not sure whether Thai friend chicken is the best in the world, or if I just don’t eat fried chicken enough in the US, because it was great. At the resort, which was the same one my study abroad program stayed at six months ago, the wait staff recognized and remembered my name which was really touching! It was so fun to see them again!

Our boat driver was named Coon Lehk. He had smile lines on the corners of his eyes that looked like the v of a fish tail. He had rich tan skin, and short dark hair that was just starting to go grey on the tips. He wore a silver ring and bracelets, and a black and silver chain and shell necklace. His character might best be described by his wiry black gotee.

As we were leaving Lipe, a stormy rain shower came sweeping in between the two islands Ko lipe and Koa dang. Our boat motored off into the gale, which rapidly got more adventersome. The troughs of the waves rocked us, cold rain pelted into the wooden boat the islands almost disappeared into the clouds. We hung tight to our lifejackets, and I carefully watched Coon Lehk as he handled the boat. Long tails are steered with outboard motors, attached to a long handle and a pivot. Coon Lehk branced against the rain and the waves using all his strength to guide the boat in a zig zag across the channel. He looked like the was concentrating very hard, and I could see every muscle in his strong calves and arms as he steered the boat.

In maybe 15 minutes we reached the lee of Ko Adang. Here, it was just raining lightly, s the mountain blocked the cloud. We got out and took a peak around in the warm water, with a thin layer of cold where the rain had fallen on top. Almost immediately, I saw two long thin predatory fish gliding along the surface and then a beautiful blue and purple and black hexagonally patterned eel coiled under a coral. We snorkled three places alongside of the lee of Ko Adang. Each place was thick with coral heads, about a third of them bleached. There was still a lot of sea life around. Schools of parrot fish chewing on the coral. Large true clown fish (black and white not orange and white), and the normal colorful array of reef fish. It was clear that the staghorn coral and other thin branching kinds were hit hardest by the bleaching. They were like white chandeliers sitting on the reef. Some of the Massive coral boulders were bleached, others were still vivid green. Coon Lehk explained that the coral turns very bright blue just before it bleaches.. which may explain the “easter eggs” I saw off Mountain resort the other day… I’m not sure.

There is a smaller Urak Lawoi fishing village on the lee side of Adang, which we saw from the boat. The island is thick with jungle, and emergent trees, waterfalls. Two Urak Lawoi boys were playing of a moored row boat, they looked just like my friends playing on a raft at Friends Lake back home.

We ate lunch on a white beech, and waited for the water to calm down for a while. Bankok Bond made a woman out of sand, and named her Lisa. Coon Lenk talked to Sounthern Bond quite a lot about the coral, and Bond was full of questions. Some I understood, a lot about the currents ext. I couln’t. It turns out Coon Lehk is not a Urak Lawoi, he is from another part of Thailand, but he came to Lipe because he likes the fishing lifestyle. Although, as I understand it, only Urak Lawoi are supposed to be allowed to fish (as part of their traditional life style, early claims to the island resources), so it was interesting to see that Coon Lehk has been able to live as a fisherman on lipe as well. There are a lot of mackerel and barracuda, he said. He also explained climate change as the cause of the reef’s bleaching. So far, most of the people I’ve met have been aware of climate change’s role in the bleaching of the reef. Only one Farang, and one Thai person of maybe a dozen or two I’ve asked, couldn’t tell me when I asked why the reef was bleaching.

While we talked Pi Yang and Amanai were walking down the beach collecting shell and hermit crabs and putting them in plastic bags. They showed up and dumped their load onto the sand, and the treasure immediately began scuttling away full speed, so they were gathered back up and redeposited in the bags. Amanai showed me her bag, to which she had added seawater for them to live in. The crabs had abandoned their shells, and were clawing and wiggling wildly at the plastic. I suggested that maybe they were drowning as opposed to swimming. She seemed hesitant, but poured out the water. When we were getting ready to leave, they wanted to bring the shells and crabs with them, but I asked them not to. They agreed not to bring the crabs, but still wanted the empty shells. I explained, feeling cheesy, that the crabs needed bigger homes when they grew up and would need the other shells. They weren’t happy about it, but they left them behind and I felt better. This started my reputation as Nak Anorak or Environment Girl. This became the joke of the next twenty four hours.

We snorkled one last place by the Urak Lawoi village. Here I saw a crab sneak up a giant colorful ocean clam before it could snap shut. The crab grabbed the fleshy meat of the clam and then slowly pulled and yanked and tore the clam out of its shell. Meanwhile, the reef fish swarmed the pair, trying to steal the clam meat. The pink red crab moved like a slow and jerky puppet. His buggy white eyes with red dots for pupils twitching this way and that. He had just broken away with a long stretching piece of clam (it just kept coming out and out of the giant clam shell, which would twitch futilely now and again), and suddenly a huge green-brown moral eel lunges out of the coral and the crab retreats and the fish flee and the eel grabs a big chunk of clam and disappears again. It was classic “always a bigger fish”. It looked just like something you’d see on Discovery. The eel came back and snapped at the fish that were still trying to get pieces of the clam. I was only floating a few feet above all this and wondered if the eel electicuted a fish if I would feel it in the water.

The last place we snorkled, was just off the place where boats are moored on Lipe. While I saw swimming around the people on the boat caught a bunch of reef fish, (with a dumping food in the water and net I think) and were holding them in their hands. I swam up to the boat and they handed me one, which I didn’t know what it was until it was flopping in my palms. Surprised, I dropped it into the sea. It looked frazzled, but swam away. I followed it for a bit, interested to see if it recovered, which it seemed to. The bottom of the boat was swarmed with tons of fish (looking for more handouts?) it was very fun to swim though the cloud of them.

We ate together at a little restaurant next to the school. I was starving and it was delicious chicken soup with wide noodles. I can’t even explain how good it was. We told stories and tried to translate jokes through many langagues. I ordered a drink for a card table nearby, successfully without knowing what it was and as they man handed it over, I asked what it was called (looking for the word smoothie) and he said ‘cow-poat” which is “corn”. (it turned out to be a corn flavored smoothie. It was pretty good.)

I went home, showered, cleaned my gear, ext. and we were going to meet again for dinner, with Coon Lehk to grill fish and make som tom but I got there ten minutes late, and no one was there. I watched kids play soccer at the school for twenty minutes, it started to get dark. I feel sad, thinking of everyone bar-b-queing and having a great time without me. I decided to go see if I could find them, at the resort maybe, and walked along the beach to mountain resort. Three thai guys asked me where I was going, and then three dogs ran up and jumped on me, and I hit them on the nose with a waterbottle and shouted at them (the dogs), and felt harassed and awkward. When I arrived at the resort, my friends the employees in the restaurant showed me which bungalow my diving friends were in, and the girls where in there watching a movie. Apparently there were no fish to grill, so the night was cancelled. Bond and Bond came over and we watched the American movie and then I ahd a sleep over with the girls, since it was late and dark. It was fun to have AC and hot water for the night.

Oh yeah, and after the movie we all went on a spontaneous trip to visit Coon Lehk at his house. Bangkok bond’s idea. And he was eating dinner, so we went out to another restaurant and ate some more. I was so tierd I could barely think (it was like 11 – way past my island bed time  ) but I intervewed Amanai a bit more.

On the walk to go to see Coon Lehk we ran into two people fishing in the dark on the beech. One was an Urak Lawoi man, and the other a Russian tourist. They had caught two reef fish and a small blue spotted ray. They had cut the stinging tail off the ray, but neither the ray nor the fish had died yet. They flopped half in a plastic bag, half in the sand. You could see the flat nub where they sliced off the ray’s tail. Its back was coated in sand. Its eyes flashed wildly about. The spots on its wings, which are normally glowingly bright blue in the water, were pale and drab in the moonlight. I had been hoping to see a ray, on the reef. I don’t know if the Russian man was paying the Urak Lawoi man to take him fishing, or if they were friends, or what. Bankok Bond teased me about being environment girl. He asked me if they ray was beautiful. “more beautiful in the water” I said. All the sadness I felt for Lipe and the reef, and this amazing natural place that is so rare and so special, suddenly welled up in me and I felt angry and hopeless. There is so much stacked against this place: climate change, tourist development, the trawling big fishers off shore, the corrupt national park, the local fishing people, tourists who take shells and put crabs in plastic bags because they don’t know better, this Russian man fishing in the dark. I wanted to pick the ray up and fling it back into the sea. Bankok bond asked me if I ate fish. “I eat fish” I said. And we walked on.

Earlier in the day, Bankok Bond, Southern Bond, and I had been walking along the beach. Southern Bond was taking picture of the ocean. Bankok bond said he had come to this part of Thailand because his mom had been all over southern Thailand years ago. She had talked about how beautiful it was, the perfect beaches. But so far, he said, the beaches, the islands, everywhere his mom had went has disappointed. There were many more bunglows, more people. The beach we were walking on, (the beach I walk everyday) is very heavily littered with debris, trash, glass, lighters, syrofoam, diapers, you name it, its probably somewhere on this beach. I explained how we had learned on my study abroad that “in the past” people just brought their trash down to the ocean at low tied and let high tied take it away. ((Yesterday, I saw someone carry a bag to the sea.)) “The island’s aren’t the same as when she came here” he said. “it makes me want to start a volunteer organization for opeople to come here and pick of the trash. I’ll take a picture of what they used to look like and tell my volunteers, O.K. make the beach like this.” I told him how Pi Pung has also had the idea to make a organization to take Thai kids camping here, and then show they how to protect the nature. The idea to teach kids to have a “consciences mind” was finally the word we came to, as the best English translation. “You know today, you talking about not taking the shells because they are the homes for the crabs.” He said. “I make joke you are Environment Girl, but that is a good thing. Maybe if enough people say like this it will change how everybody acts.”

The thing is, it will be so easy and quick to destroy places like Lipe, but to get them back? If we ever wanted to it would be so hard, expensive, and they wouldn’t be nearly as strong or as beautiful… I don’t know how much of the bleached coral is dead, and how much could still recover. (bleaching doesn’t necessarily kill it right away, it can come back sometimes.) But, if Lipe doesn’t get monsoon rains to cool down the waters soon, the coral will probably not recover.