Cleansing Ko Lanta

 Breathing and cleaning up in Ko Lanta, Thailand  

The grainy sand sticks to my toes and won't let go, leaving a dusty perma-film along the soles of my feet. The hot wind blowing across my back distracts me from the heat of the sun. An unknown black lump has attached its sticky tack to a washed up water bottle. It moved at my touch, slinking and clinging between my fingers, like toxic play-do.

Getting up, I took a few steps nearly treading in another blotch of mystery goo. Ahead of me tiny lumps had bottle caps in-bedded in them, larger ones showing off a sand casing, sprouting plastic straws, and even one completely shaped around a lost flip flop.

I conceded that missing the Klong Dao clean up was justified while my book –filled beach time with long thoughts on how to make dream catchers, turned in to a two-woman black gold treasure hunt. Only the treasure was unwanted, and, we wondered, where had it all come from?

If you ever wondered what an island of hippies might look like, go to Ko Lanta. The smell of incense cones and clunk of wooden wind chimes will explain it all. Stumbling off a Songteaw few days previous, I lumbered around muddy potholes on Thailand’s second largest island, in the dirt track next to Chill Out House hostel. An ivy-laden gable tickled my hair as I trundled inside to discover wooden tables in a tree house, people playing Jenga and a bed to myself for 100 baht per night. After the prices on Koh Phi Phi, where you’ll pay two thirds more a night for a strobe-lit dorm full of teenagers crawling all over each other, like drunken incestuous rats, this was a very good deal.  I was also quickly informed that the best Pad Thai on the island was a two minute walk away and could cost just 40 Baht per serving (about 80p).

Not only did Ko Lanta impress my wallet, it turned out to impress me. After months of living in Bali and months of buses on winding Asian highways- the traveller’s road- I was in need of some peace and quiet. Bangkok had ruined me again, Kanchanaburi educated me in the hardships of war, Krabi showed me how easily a beautiful place can become a tourist wreck and Phi Phi told me how sad it all was. I needed somewhere to exhale.

I spent my time here eating the cheap pad thai, visiting a lighthouse and getting attacked by monkeys that were too familiar with humans and ice cream. Sunshine bleached the tops of womens’ hijabs as they whizzed by on their scooters in the midday scorch.

I visited a Mangrove forest for the first time and saw tiny crabs scuttling along the silt, squaring up to each other as they held up a giant red claw each. Their mismatched arms a sign of virility in this swamp of roots pulling out of mud. I even fed some malnourished and poorly treated elephants. Why did I feed the elephants you ask? Well I’m so glad you did.

So often in South East Asia, elephants are used to attract tourists to certain areas. People need to make money and feed their families. But too often putting food on the table comes at the expense of a creature’s liberty or even their health. Quite often Mahouts will use a Thotti, a long wooden stick with a metal hook, to control the elephants. This ‘control’ generally comes in the form of beating and driving the hook in to an elephant’s ears. For more information on this go to One Green Planet.com. 

On the drive to the Mangroves rainy season storm clouds hovered above menacingly. A Canadian girl and I wondered in to an elephant trekking ground, after finding a monkey park with the monkeys all tethered to posts, unable to run about or escape. This time of year is slow business for the locals, allowing us a better look at the animals. We stopped the bike and went to say hi to the Mahouts in a dusty open field. Two hungry looking baby elephants were bound to a tree, their ears ripped and full of bloody holes and mother tied to a post across the other side of the field. With a look to each other we decided to find a market to get bananas for the animals, we were not going to give money and feed the supply and demand of this treatment.

It’s up to you to decide whether we did the right thing that day. To us it felt like the right thing.