Siam Chronicles 7 - Shark Bay? Okay!

Things You Don’t See in San Francisco, Part I:

Cockroaches
Even more disconcerting than finding a swarm of black ants immured in your toilet at three in the morning is the rebarbative omnipresence of kamikaze cockroaches attempting to end the Kafkaesque nightmare of their own existence by plunging pell-mell under your trammeling hooves. Or at least skitter up your leg to parse out the pain and get a good laugh in. Their quashed carcasses litter the streets come morning amidst the chicken bones and fruit parings, a somber memorial to the die-hard death-drive of the world’s most ubiquitous beetle.
It’s something I never fully understood - some claim it’s the constant chill, others aver direct divine intervention – but one of San Francisco’s greatest benisons is to be somehow roach-free. The lucky bastards.

Huge Lizards
In our peregrination I’ve become accustomed to the wee speckled ones that wiggle through the sugar packets at breakfast, or the quotidian skinks and geckos a hands-breadth across that officiously divest your bedroom of moths, or even the larger iguanas whomping their way through the rushes of the roof. But it was a close-call to a coronary in Koh Phangan when I nearly trod on a moniter lizard protruding its long snaky neck from under a step, it’s sharply elongated talons gripping the stone below, a saturnine beast balefully basking and fully two arms across. As luck would have it, this was a rare moment when I left my camera in the bungalow but take my word for it, it was THIS BIG and it looked hungry for toe.

Family Danger Mobiles
Although there are souped-up ghetto-sleds aplenty in SF that may risk imminent threat of spontaneous combustion, something you will never see is a full family of five crowded onto a single rusted motorbike, sans helmets and carrying a six-pack of live geese strung up by their feet and slung over the handle-bars. Another thing you will not see is a pack of eight year-olds invidiously tearing their way through town on motorcycles, also sans helmets but plus big buggy smiles.
This is common in South East Asia, where, like L.A., walking is viewed as an atavistic past-time for the less evolved - sort of a coprolite litmus test. Even before a child takes their first steps they are taught to bike. I even witnessed a lady letting her poodle drive one through the crowded streets of Haad Rin - my husband can attest to the veracity of this claim - it happened although we both wished vehemently that it had not.
This mentality is evidenced all too clearly in the circular side-walks constructed as mandalas that go nowhere, or end abruptly at busy intersections with no possible cross-way. This leaves the intrepid constitutionalist with two viable recourses: to scurry over concrete barriers and dodge merciless motorists, or turn around, go back and try again with at least a unicycle. These ersatz walkways are purely meditative exercises, allowing the fatuous wanderer who would willingly walk and eschew the wonders of the wheel to ruminate over the immortal question: do you cross the street or does the street cross you?

Turtle Island, Shark Bay, Tiger Temple
It takes balls of brass and a head of lead to elicit another sunburn on an all day snorkeling extravaganza after finally healing from a second degree toasting. All the expense for covered boat and super fancy all-day waterproof sunblock (reapplied every hour on the dot) went for naught and I fricasseed my fanny but good. Luckily, this was a regular run-of-the-mill burn, different intrinsically from it’s savage cousin, and has amenably achromatized to a swarthy sienna.
It was worth it.
Koh Tao (Turtle Island), according to local lore, was recently rich in turtles but no more. There is apparently one courageous fellow who pops up every once in a while, but given the concupiscent native need for sucking up turtle flesh, I believe this plucky survivor story to be outright mendacity. We were beginning to think the same about Shark Bay, as we snorkeled through the crackling of the castellated coral reefs, emblazoned with bright anemone plumes and outrageous clouds of variegated prismatic fish, kinds I thought just grew in aquariums from seed. We had already surveyed the susurration of the still and cold blue depths, waiting patiently for a stealthy shape to swiftly coalesce out of the tenebrous murk, but with no luck. We finally decided to pack it in. While waiting for a French matron saddled with acute embonpoint to waddle up the rickety ladder, I felt a something banging insistently against my leg. I refitted my mask to sneak a peek, and lo and behold, there was a baby black-tip reef shark, two hands from fang to fin, head-butting my leg over and over again. I dubbed him Fortesque, the Moron Shark of Koh Tao, and wished him some much-needed luck.
Soon we were off to shabby Krabbi, and, following the advice of the illustrious Alyssa Hamel, made our way to Tiger Wat, which (like Turtle Island) no longer has any tigers. But there are many, many crazed monkeys.
The big draw is a mountain-top wat reached by an hour-long hike up a steep set of friable steps, totally irregular in shape and 1,300+ in number. At first I ignored this obviously grueling ordeal, as the pitiful penitents who came sopping down the torturous track, gasping and clutching trees for support, were proof enough for me to relinquish any delusion that it may be a fun time. Instead we opted for a circular hike through the dense jungle of the valley caves.
This turned out to be an unprecedented entomological cornucopia. I didn’t even mind being eaten alive by, well everything with six legs or more, as I gaped slack-jawed at specimens I’ve handled with reverence at the Smithsonian Insect Zoo ruling their dark and irriguous world. There were spiders big as your hand, brightly bedecked in crimsons in golds, waiting watchful in huge spiraling webs trimming the path. We even found a walking stick over two hands across – this tricky relative of the preying mantis is almost impossible to see usually but propitiously this one chose to station itself on a case that was (inexplicably) displaying a human skeleton at the mouth of a cave. I took photos anyway but - of course - it just looks like a stick. Huge black pollinator beetles clumsily banked through the trees with a low drone as their small fire red cousins stood out starkly on the slick green of the dense undergrowth. It was a radiant dazzle of elegantly animate jewels inset into the hushed lush of dripping jungle.
The prehistoric forest explored, we found the tiger cave and listened to the mellifluous monotone of the monk's incantations. This left only the steps, and I succumbed to the pernicious temptation to try them. Around step 600 I felt strongly that it was time to turn around and go back. At step 1000 I was dizzy and doused, but like an automaton up, up, up, the legs moved, and I wondered in high dudgeon why everything interesting is always at the top of a mountain.
It was worth it.
The newfangled temple was ringed round by the soaring vista of farmland receeding into a brume of onrushing rain one side, the glittering etiolation of the sea, harboring dark banks of islands on another, and armies of tall jungle-coped mesas filled the third. Lack of oxygen and latent vertigo helped contribute to the swooping certainty that this was a heiratic and sanctified place, the home of light and wings high above all things, with scattered songs rushing with the wind and a hint of plumeria from far below fulsome and fine in your exhausted lungs.
The monkeys were also cool.