Secrets

I can’t tell you where I am, only that it is where I have always wanted to be. It is a town on the edge of its end, still predominantly local, still crowded with the faces of people who may never live anywhere else, may rarely even see anywhere else. But just developed enough for a traveler to have easy access to all that she needs. To put the name in writing, to contribute publicly to the inevitable discovery of this place, would leave me sleepless at night. But I’ll tell you all about it, and you’ll know it when you’ve found this place, or one like it.

This island is gloriously anachronistic, ripe with perfect combinations of things that look like they should never have been put together. Teenage girls in Muslim headscarves, sometimes stacked three deep, rip around on their motorbikes. Adidas-imitation track jackets are hung out to dry on palm fronts. Emimen’s rap music emanates from a bungalow just big enough for a thin, twin mattress—and cargo pants are on top of a stack of laundry hung over the windowsill, so local moms must tell local teens “Clean up your bungalow or no dinner tonight.” The family’s brood of chickens wander the yards and cross the roads freely, and cats, who look a few genes closer to lions, their noses flat and golden eyes wideset, roam over porches and under the stilts houses are raised on. They sleep everywhere.



We came over on Saturday by boat, the only boat connecting our peninsula to this island and one of few that would dock at the long pier here all day. The taxi driver spoke little English, pulled out a map of the places tourists usually stay and waited for us to point.

“Where do the climbers go?” Stephanie asked. He pointed. We boarded. His taxi was a truck with benches down the bed and a canopy over its top. He drove a coastal road that cut through a small village and then up past the beach, past little coffee houses, a dive shop, a yoga retreat, and then he stopped. It took a bit more fumbling and one call to Camila, whose advice it had been to come here, to actually get pointed in the right direction, which was to Danny’s place.

When followed a sign up a dirt road carpeted with pine needles, and man jumped up from hammock on a porch crowded with hammocks, and walked through a fleet of motorbikes to greet us.

“We’re looking for Danny,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” he said. Like, of course you are.

“Are you Danny?”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “You need a bungalow? I have two bungalows.”

We were lucky. His last two. He walked us by the hammocks, where two women, other tourists were lounging like lounging was their permanent business, and into a garden circled by bungalows. He directed me up a porch almost buried in greenery and onto the broad, wood planks (and nearly all of them seal together) of a bungalow. It’s maple wood shutters were closed, but enough light came in from the midday sun to see the bed, a desk, and the fresh towels and blanket at the foot of the bed, and then through to the bathroom, which has a larger countertop than any apartment I’ve rented in the last five years and it looks to be granite. The floor is covered in these smooth white stones and the stairs down and the shower tiled in large, dark gray tiles. There’s a real showerhead. It was luxurious, and barely more than what I’d been paying in Ton Sai. Of course, I took it.

With the front door open, I can see into the garden, a riot of orange, yellow, pink and white flowers. I can guess at the names of some of them—I know the lotus, and think I recognize plumeria. But the others are lost on me. Once I’d set my bags down and wandered back to where Danny was again swinging in his hammock, I said, “Danny, I may never leave.”

He seemed all right with that.

Tourism hasn’t taken over dominance yet, so there’s still industry here—rubber farms. The rubber trees are planted in fanatically straight rows, and each has a feather-shaped carving in it to loosen the sap, which drips into a small black cup at its base. I walked along a dirt road far enough into a rubber farm to see a man hanging the sheets of rubber out to dry and to smell it seeping fresh from the trees, where the smell we know later as having turned acrid is still sweet.

There’s a small community of travelers, many of them repeat visitors. They’ve been here before, they know one another and knew where to stay when they arrived. To know to come—particularly to know to come to go rock climbing, you would have to know someone who knows someone, and someone would likely know the couple who runs the rock climbing shop in town. They coordinate the boats out to the crags, and yes, many of them are only accessible by boat and the handful of others by motorbike.

To know about this place, a person would have had to scrounge through the guidebook and take only the barest of hints that there was something here worth seeing. And let that be a lesson in finding where you’d like your next stop to be while traveling. Of course, it’s a gamble. They may not all have stretches of white beaches you can walk to from your bungalow, or an island that’s accessible at low tide but nearly flooded over at high tide. If it’s not too high, it only appears that people are walking on water as they walk over the mirrored surface toward the island.



If I were that kind of travel writer, I would leap at the chance to write about this place. It’s poised on the edge of becoming a hot destination for those hordes of tourists looking for an authentic experience, but then it would have hordes of tourists and not much of an authentic experience. I wouldn’t want any responsibility in that.

And where would I go the next time I wanted to come to Thailand? I’ve already written to my mother to say I’ll bring her here.