Following the sea on island paradise

PERHAPS even more fascinating than the multicoloured birds and butterflies seen on this Thai island just south of Burma are the ghost crabs, almost as invisible and fleeting as ghosts.

Sand-grey and no bigger than a euro, they scud away at an extraordinary speed, running sideways on the tips of their toes, all but airborne, especially in a breeze, using it to carry them all the faster across the beach.

Equally fascinating are the patterns made by the sand they excavate for their burrows — starbursts or palm trees in perfect symmetry, geometrically precise patterns radiating from the small hole where they hide. Sometimes, the lines of pinhead-sized sand-balls of which they are composed stretch from one starburst to another, like maps of the constellations, the night sky traced on the beach. I can imagine a novelist of the magic-realism school creating, as a character, an old man who daily scours the sand at looking for the perfect star chart and, indeed, I believe it would not be hard to find simple groupings like The Plough or The Great Bear marked out, serendipitously, by these earthbound, small-brained crabs.

A reader might ask if it’s dawn-to-dusk blue skies over azure seas on these paradise islands of the Andaman Sea? Not quite: during the monsoons, rain buckets down for months on end and there are no foreign visitors but, even in this dry season, we caught some monsoon weather, 14 hours of non-stop downpour. “It’s not normal,” said the owner of our “resort”, a collection of a dozen rattan and hardwood bungalows scattered amongst the trees behind the beach.

Normal or not, the rain continued to fall. All night, heavy drops hopped on the roof above our heads and in the morning, as we scuttled along the sandy path to the open-fronted restaurant, gobbets as big as grapes plopped from the trees. At the restaurant, the polyglot crew of 10 or 12 semi-residents and holidaymakers sat about, in good form despite the deluge. It would stop within hours and, meantime, it was a changed world, all sounds drowned out by the patter of the rain, the busy drops falling from the trees, the small waterfalls rushing off the roofs. There was sound and motion everywhere, the pages of books damp, and drying clothes impossible. It was a novelty to swim in a warm, rain-stippled sea.

Afterwards, when we walked the jungle paths, the earth under our feet was red and soft, and humidity rose like a mist around us. We decided that, in one sense, we were privileged. Few visitors ever experience tropical rain.

But this year, rain did fall, sporadically, in the dry season. The weather, as elsewhere around the globe, has changed.

When we crossed to this island from another, our boatman was one of the chow lair, “people of the sea”. One of Thailand’s smallest ethnic groups, they are of Malay origin and roam the coasts and islands from Borneo to Myanmar.

He stood on the stern of the narrow longtail boat, a bandana and straw hat on his head, swinging the four metre long rudder-prop as one might handle a sculling oar.

Also known as Moken or sea-gypsies, the chow lair are recognised as one of the few human groups whose primary home is the sea. Hunter-gatherers, they once landed on the beaches of this island but rarely come now. They would arrive in three or four boats, some carrying 20 or more people, women, children, elders, an extended family or small tribe whose homes were their boats and whose inheritance and sustenance was the sea and the wild food they could harvest on the hundreds of mainly uninhabited islands that flank the coasts of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Burma. Having exploited the local resources, they would move on.

Now, many of the beaches of previously uninhabited islands are resorts, albeit outstanding in their simplicity but no longer free. Another culture with its ancient knowledge is disappearing, human experience supplanted by science for better or worse.

Since 2004, tsunami warning stations have been built on all the populated islands, but for the Moken they are unnecessary. I’m told that groups still following the traditional way of life on remote islands read the signs of the sea and fled to higher ground. Few, if any, chow lair died in the disaster that claimed 280,000 lives.