Thailand Tentacles in My Soup
February 25, 1999
At the Big Blue Cow Restaurant on Nai Yang Beach – part of Phuket Island – I ordered Tom Yam (seafood soup). I dipped my spoon into the stuff and fished out a long tentacle. It had little suckers all along – you know, like octopus tentacles, only smaller. Kinda tasteless protein until added together with some other unidentifiable pieces of protein from the sea, a few really hot chilies, some lemongrass, chunks of ginger, a little coconut milk and maybe whatever else they found lying around loose on the chopping block. Uhmmm! Delicious! All that and Olivia Newton-John singing “Let Me Be There.”
It had been a long day of fairly hard work at having fun. We spent the previous night at one of the most popular vacation destinations in Southeast Asia – Patong Beach. It is still near the height of the tourist season, so we were lucky to get a room along the beach. Tourists were very cosmopolitan, mostly from Germany, but also from Switzerland, Italy, France, England, Australia, the USA and elsewhere. They lie around the hotel swimming pool, possibly because that is the only place they can go topless. Nude bathing is illegal on Thai beaches. The only way I knew that some ladies were topless is because Pat told me. I did not sneak a single peak. Honest, I didn’t even look their way. Well, maybe I did sorta glance their way out of the corner of my eye, but I didn’t inhale.
The crescent-shaped beach is surely one of the most beautiful in the world. But, even in the heat of the afternoon, it is covered with tourists so you can hardly see the white, white sand. Lots of white skin turning pink and red. The water is very clear, so this is also one of the top diving destinations in the world. Collecting and selling coral has been made illegal, but the reefs still suffer considerable damage from anchors and dynamite to kill fish. However, it still looks like a good place to dive to my inexperienced eye. A brief swim after our morning jog felt very good.
Phuket Island is also a good place to get my email. I use my brother Pete’s Internet service provider (Loxinfo) which has a local access number here. I am running up a large bill obtaining my email because I use Loxinfo to access AOL’s mail via the Internet. During the working day, it can be very difficult to obtain a line. (Pete, I promise to pay you back.) About 5 am is the best time. There are many email-Internet shops along the beach, so maybe they keep the lines busy. Anyway, from here it may take 10 to 15 minutes just to log on to AOL’s Netmail service. Using AOL over the Internet is klutzy because there is no feature for automatically downloading, uploading or saving mail. Consequently, the process is very slow and I am often online for 45 minutes to an hour just handling email. However, it still beats the heck out of licking stamps and addressing envelopes.
Before we came to Phuket Island, we made a brief stop at Khao Lak National Park. A young lady met us at the gate. When I asked how much the entry fee cost, she replied, “It’s up to you.” She smiled when I gave her 20 Baht. I asked her where is the best place to find birds. She recommended a 3 K trail that wound through the bamboo and strangler fig forest. It also skirted along the rocky headlands overlooking the blue, picture-perfect Andaman Sea till it reached a small, deserted, secluded beach. There we hoped to see crab-eating macaques (monkeys) that are often seen there, but all we saw was a hornbill flying overhead and a wagtail. We did not even see any birds around the small, fresh-water lagoon behind the beach. Not very good birding, but the large, tropical trees and palms with lianas and rattan vines snaking between the trees made the trek worthwhile. Pat waded in the gentle surf and I watched fishermen in a long-tailed boat check the net they had strung across the bay by the secluded beach. It appeared that they caught only a couple of small fish.
Pat proves to be a very interesting person with whom to hike. She uses her sense of smell more than most. She also has a good ear for birds. On the hike to the secluded beach, Pat kept smelling a very fragrant flower and searched to try to find its source. I thought it might be blooms about 100 feet up in one of the tall, tropical trees till Pat finally found a lower canopy tree covered with white flowers. She is usually the first to smell something like cooking oil when we are approaching a human habitation or the smell of engine oil from a distant boat. Unfortunately, she also sometimes smells sewage in places where there should be none.
A drive around Phuket Island is a very interesting exercise. The west side consists of a series of beaches separated by headlands. The small, two-lane road winds up several hundred feet over these rocky headlands and then down into the beach areas. At one high overlook, a fellow had a couple of large, White-bellied Sea Eagles. For 50 Baht, he covered the talons of a male with coverings and told it to jump. The eagle obediently jumped up onto my outstretched arm so Pat could take a photo. Later, at the Gibbon Project, I learned that I had committed an ecological sin by posing with the eagles. “We should not reward those who capture wildlife and use them to make a living.” Especially, the fairly rare Sea Eagles. Gibbons are captured by shooting the mother out of a tree. If the young survive the fall to the ground, they are kept as pets by bar girls and others to attract tourists. The Gibbon project takes tame White Footed Gibbons, who have 90% of the same genes as humans, and teach them how to live in the wild so they can be released back into the forest.
A visit to the Butterfly Garden and Aquarium held our attention the longest. It was a first class operation – especially the butterfly section. A large, blue, tropical butterfly used my finger as a perch to unroll its long proboscis and stick it down the tube of a tropical flower.
Yes, Phuket is a very touristy area with lots of shops, bar girls, restaurants, hotels, and sight-seeing. But it is also a very scenic and interesting place to visit. I am pleased that we took the time to see the sights and to find some tentacles in my soup.
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