I hadn’t been much to the Andaman Sea before last week, when I ferried out into it for about an hour to a square island with sheer cliffs on all sides. The only habitable spot on Koh Laoliang is a beachlet, 500 meters wide and 100 meters deep. An entrepreneur puts up a handful of safari-style tents six months a year.Nobody at all lives there in the rainy season because the waves are generally too rough to land a boat. The island’s lone permanent structure is a tall metal pole supporting four large speakers, an early warning system paid for out of the flood of international donations following the 2004 tsunami.
It was Thanksgiving, our office had several days off in a row, and a group of friends from work had flown down to Trang on one of the last flights out before protesters closed the Bangkok airports. We had booked two nights on the island, but as there were a few minutes before our ferry departed the mainland, and the future was uncertain, somebody bought two cases of Heineken.We passed our days doing what people do when they don’t know how much longer they have: kayaking, card playing, snorkeling, rock climbing. When the time came to return home, the sea wasn’t cooperating. Our group and one other planned to take the ferry back to Trang, but riding a long-tailed boat out from the island to meet it, and docking with it, looked like a challenge.
The solution was for the boatmen to wade next to a kayak, pulling us away from the beach one at a time, until everyone in our group was aboard the long-tailed boat. They said they would have to come back for the second group. Understandably, the boatmen were in a hurry to return for them, so we weren’t too concerned when they rushed us onto the ferry after (rather forcefully) coming up alongside it. What we hadn’t understood was that the long-tailed boat had been damaged in the collision, thus stranding the second group until another boat could be found. The ferry didn’t wait.Our trip home was otherwise uneventful. We stopped for a couple hours at a lovely hot spring. A cute little kid, no more than six or seven years old, took all of our orders flawlessly at the local food center. Nobody was even bothered too much about having to take the overnight bus because the Bangkok airports were still closed. We didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, and frankly didn’t much care.
