The Beach

∨ The Beach ∧

24

Exploring

The toilet, a small bamboo hut on the edge of the clearing, was a good example of how well the camp had been organized. Inside the hut was a low bench with a football-sized hole, through which I could see running water – a tributary from the diverted waterfall stream. There was a second hole cut into the roof, to let in what little light filtered past the canopy ceiling.

All in all, it was a lot more agreeable than many of the bathrooms one finds outside the westernized world. There wasn’t, however, any toilet paper. Not a surprise in itself, but I’d thought there might be some leaves or something. Instead, by the water channel, there was a plastic pitcher.

You find plastic pitchers all around provincial Asia and their purpose has confounded me for years. I refuse to believe that Asians wipe themselves with their hands – it’s a ridiculous idea – but, aside from washing digits, I can’t see what other use the pitcher has. I’m sure they don’t splash themselves down. Apart from being ineffective, it would make an incredible mess, and they emerge from their ablutions as dry as a bone.

Of the various mysteries of the Orient this should be the easiest to unravel, but the subject matter appears to be veiled in a conspiracy of silence. A Manilan friend once came with me on a trip to a small island off the coast of Luzon. One day I found him standing on a mud-dike, peering into the mangrove swamps with obvious concern. When I asked him what the matter was he blushed furiously, which made his brown skin go almost purple, and pointed to some bits of toilet paper that were floating in the water. The tide was leading the toilet paper towards some houses, and this prospect had thrown him into a panic. Not for reasons of hygiene but because it would betray his western toilet habits – habits that the locals would find unacceptably disgusting. In his shame, he was considering wading into the swamps to hoick the pieces out and hide them elsewhere.

We managed to solve the problem by bombarding the water with stones until the paper shredded or sank. As we slunk away from the scene of the crime I asked him to describe the locals’ acceptable alternative, but he refused to tell me. He just hinted darkly that I’d find it as disgusting as they found our way. This was as close as I ever got to finding out the truth.

Luckily I only needed to piss so I was spared having to experiment. When the time came for solids I decided I’d slip into the jungle.

I left the toilet and began walking back across the clearing. I was still feeling slightly feverish but I didn’t want to spend yet more hours breathing stuffy air and watching flickering candle-flames. Instead I continued past the longhouse, thinking I might explore. I also hoped that I might find Étienne and Françoise, who’d been missing since I woke up. I imagined they were exploring too.

♦

I counted nine tents in the clearing and five huts, not including the longhouse. The tents were only used for sleeping – inside the flaps I could see backpacks and clothes, and in one I even saw a Nintendo Gameboy – but the huts all seemed to have functional uses. Apart from the toilet, there was a kitchen and a washing area, also fed by tributaries. The other huts were for storage. One contained carpentry tools and another some boxes of tinned food. It made we wonder how long the camp had existed. Sal had said that the dope fields had appeared a couple of years ago, which implied the travellers had been around for some time before that.

Tents, tools, tinned food, Nintendo. The more I saw, the more I marvelled. It wasn’t just how much the camp had been organized, it was how it had been organized. None of the huts looked newer than the others. The tents’ guy lines were held with rocks, and the rocks were moulded into the ground. Nothing seemed random, everything seemed calculated: designed as opposed to evolved.

As I wandered around the clearing, peering through tent flaps and studying the canopy ceiling until my neck ached, my sense of awe was matched only by a sense of frustration. Questions kept appearing in my mind, and each question raised another. It was clear that, at some point, the people who’d set up the camp had needed a boat. This suggested the help of Thais, which in turn suggested a certain kind of Thai. A Ko Samui spiv might bend the rules to let backpackers stay on a marine-park island for a few nights, but it was harder to imagine them ferrying crates of food and carpentry tools.

I also found it strange that the camp was so deserted. It apparently supported a large number of people, and a couple of times I thought I heard voices near by, but no one ever appeared.

After a while, the quietness and occasional distant voices began to get to me. At first I just felt a little lonely and sorry for myself. I didn’t think Sal should have left me on my own, especially when I was ill and new to the camp. And Étienne and Françoise were supposed to be my friends. Shouldn’t friends have hung around to make sure I was OK?

But soon loneliness turned into paranoia. I found that I was starting when I heard jungle noises, my shuffling footsteps in the dirt sounded oddly loud, and I caught myself acting with an affected casualness, aimed at the eyes I suspected were watching me from the trees. Even the absence of Étienne and Françoise became a reason to worry.

Maybe it was partly to do with my fever, or maybe it was a normal reaction in abnormal circumstances. Either way, the eerie quietness was freaking me out. I decided I had to get out of the clearing. I went back to the longhouse to pick up my cigarettes and some shoes, but when I saw the long avenue of shadow that lay between the door and my candle-lit bed, I changed my mind.

There were several paths that ran from the clearing. I chose the nearest.

♦

By good luck, the path I chose led directly to the beach. The sand was too hot for bare feet so I jogged down to the water’s edge, and after making a mental note of where I’d come out of the jungle, I flipped a mental coin and took a left.

Getting out from the claustrophobic cavern of trees calmed me down. There was plenty to distract me as I walked through the shallows.

From the waterfall, I’d seen the vast circle of granite cliffs as a barrier to getting down, but now they were a barrier to getting back up. A prison could hardly have been built with more formidable walls, although it was hard to think of such a place as prison-like. Aside from the lagoon’s beauty, there was a sense that the cliffs were protective – the walls of an inverse castle, sunk instead of raised. Sal hadn’t given me the impression of being very threatened by the dope farmers, but the knowledge that the cliffs lay between me and them was still comforting.

The lagoon itself was almost perfectly divided between land and sea. I estimated its diameter at a mile, though I wouldn’t rely on the accuracy of this guess. Now nearer to the seaward cliffs than on the waterfall, I could make out features in the rock-face I hadn’t seen before. Along the watermark were black hollows and caves. They looked as if they penetrated the cliff deeply – perhaps deeply enough to provide a passage for a small boat. The sea itself was punctuated by protruding boulders, slick where the waves lapped against them, flattened into slabs by centuries of tropical rain.

I’d walked a few hundred metres down the beach when I noticed some shapes splashing around one of the larger boulders. Bizarrely, my first thought was that they were seals, until I realized there couldn’t possibly be seals in Thailand. Then, looking harder, I realized they were people. At last I’d found someone.

I checked the urge to call out, for no particular reason other than a vague instinct to be cautious. Instead I jogged back over the sand to the tree-line, where I could sit in the shade and wait until the swimmers returned. There I found footprints, T–shirts, and to my delight, an open packet of Marlboros. After a millisecond of debate I stole one.

Contented for the moment, I blew smoke-rings into the still air, discovering that when the smoke-rings floated over the beach they would rise quickly and, without dissipating, drift into the overhanging palm leaves. It took me several baffled puffs to work out it was due to heat rising from the sun-baked sand.

The swimmers were less confusing. They were spear fishing. Every so often they’d all get out of the sea and gaze intently at the water around them, spears poised. Then they’d all throw their spears at once, dive back in, splash around a bit, and repeat the process. They seemed to catch a lot of fish.