Sorry for the Group Email

From Phuket, we headed south. Actually, we headed north, then east, then south, because Phuket is an island only connected to the mainland by a single northbound highway. We were headed, on the advice of a much better traveller than me, to Ko Taratao, which sounded perfect. Pristine beaches, wildlife, and no tourists. Mind you, we’d been promised the same about Ko Phangnan, which turned out to be, euphemistically, not great.

Rather belatedly, I began to note a theme. Our intercity journeys are, more often than not, tempestuous, drawn-out affairs, complete with double-digit-hour bus journeys on creaking old beasts from the sixties, followed by a random sprinkling of pickup-truck, motorcycle and tuk-tuk journeys. So it made perfect sense that our first stop was Phuket bus station, where we boarded a rattly old number that must have been doing the rounds when Victor Meldrew was a lad.

Back when we were planning the trip, this kind of thing was a worry. Mind you, when we were planning the trip, everything worried me. I was concerned that we’d stay in terrible hotels where we’d fight running battles with multi-legged foes who should, by rights, have been on the front cover of a science-fiction book. I was concerned that we’d be using toilets that necessitated squatting and no small amount of praying. I was certainly concerned that our bus journeys would resemble bad-tempered remakes of Carry on Camping. The funny thing is that, sooner or later, all of these worst-case scenarios came to pass, and when they did there was never much we could do but stick them out and blithely assume that the sun would come up tomorrow. If nothing else, the sun would make the cockroaches hide.

So the fact that the bus had squeaky air-conditioning and a distinct list to the left failed to bother me. At least I wasn’t perched timorously on top of a child’s garden chair in the aisle.

It took the better part of eight hours to reach Hat Yai. Hat Yai, according to the British government, is not a place you should go. As tempting as it might be to think of Thailand as a land of smiley, welcoming people, the south of the country is by all accounts not a terribly happy place. There’s a strong and enthusiastically violent separatist movement in the south that would prefer some of southern-Thailand’s provinces become either their own state, or integrated with northern Malaysia. 2,400 people have died since 2004, and the Foreign Office recommends against travel to the area.

It wasn’t exactly Baghdad. Hat Yai is what Bangkok would be like if it had fifteen per cent less neon, 80 per cent fewer Europeans and a few more holes in the pavement. It’s where a great number of Malaysians come for holidays, in thirsty search of cheap beer. But we arrived just as it was getting dark, and since we meant to get out to Pak Barra, from which boats to Ko Taratao leave, we looked for a hotel near the bus station first.

I’m not sure if all bus station hotels are required to be desperate flea-pits, but the one we saw certainly was. When we arrived the room was already occupied by a group of chain-smoking men watching TV. Once they were gone the room, stained sheets and all, sat smouldering, daring us to spend the night. We blanched and took a tuk-tuk into town.

Ko Phangnan, as I may have mentioned, was a bit disappointing. Ko Tarutao, we were reassured, was the place to go if you wanted to get away from it all. Miles of empty beaches and a full-time population of zero – as a life-long sociopath it sounded like heaven.

You have to reach it first, of course, and the difficulty with which this is achieved underlines Taratao’s remoteness. First, we rose at five in the morning, and presented ourselves to the first tuk-tuk driver we saw. He waved away our attempts at bargaining, and pointed us in the direction of a dilapidated red pick-up truck with an even more dilapidated Thai at the wheel. Our ancient driver agreed to our lower price, and we rode to the bus-station in the back of the truck with – I swear I’m not making this up – his zimmerframe.

From the bus station we rode for 90 minutes to Satun, an out-of-the-way town which, bless it, had a surprisingly large number of English-speakers. We wandered aimlessly for a bit, and soon another tuk-tuk presented itself. We hopped in and were whisked to La Ngu, where we hopped out again and waited for our third tuk-tuk of the day. This third one finally dropped us off to the pier at Pak Barra, from which the islands of Lipe and Tarutao are reached.

No sooner had we sat down on the boat than we were joined by Tim, an ex-Derby man on his way back to Malaysia via Ko Lipe. I asked him what he did for a living. “Fuck all,” came the cheery reply, which I took to mean journalist. Close: he was working on a documentary about a Malaysian woman who formed a one-person resistance to the Japanese during the second world war. Tim had an informed opinion about everything: the scandalous behaviour of NGOs who take paying customers as volunteers, the work (or lack thereof) of the WHO in Cambodia, and the work of the Lonely Planet as the “destroyer of worlds”.

Suddenly he leaned forward, earnestly. “Listen,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone about this place, ok? Word of mouth is fucking murder for places like this.”

I was inclined to agree. Ko Phangnan may have been very nice before the developers moved in, and Sapa in north Vietnam is a splendid place that could nonetheless do with a few hundred fewer hotel beds.

When we arrived on Tarutao I saw what he meant. Ko Tarutao is designated a national park, which means building anything from a guest-shack to a water cooler is on a par, difficulty-wise, with getting an ape to play “Blue Suede Shoes on the bagpipes. Tarutao has a single road, wide enough for a single truck to drive along, no houses and no permanent population. We arrived at the quay with a huddle of holidaying Thais; our boatload contributed the only people we could see to the footprintless beach.

Things were equally calm at the park headquarters on the other side of the island. A handful of barrack-style bungalows combine for the only permanent structures bar the headquarters itself, a jetty for receiving and dispatching tourists, and a restaurant and a small shop.

It’s entirely possible that the overseers of Tarutao intend to keep it quiet by making it one of the most expensive places in Thailand to visit. To wit: a bed in a bungalow costs 500 baht for a single person. At most places in Thailand 400 baht (about US$10) will buy you a fan-cooled room with a shared bathroom and warm showers. In Tarutao, assuming two people, the bungalow would set you back more than twice that for an uncooled room with toilets which were not only shared, but 150 meters away across the compound.

Luckily, we’re not idiots, so we hired a tent. The tent cost us 250 baht per night, which was quite enough, thanks, and it was a disaster from the moment we pulled it out of its disintegrating canvas bag.

I like to think I get on fairly well with tents. Given an instruction manual and ten minutes, I can generally get a tent in the ground and relatively wind-proof with no sweat and the only minimum of high-intensity swearing.

Perhaps it was because our tent was a rental model that had seen plenty of idiots, but it was a nightmare. Most of our problem came from pitching on the beach – sand is bad news for tent pegs – but things weren’t helped by the poles. The poles were the tough, thin plastic efforts you get with geodesic designs, and a buggered pole looks fine while it’s bundled up with the rest, but no sooner had we got our first set of poles into the canvas than it became painfully evident that we had a catastrophe on our hands. Our tent, instead of being a perfect half-globe of strong, weather-proof canvas, was a distinct concave of frantically flapping material.

We fought for two hours, eventually storming back to the park office and demanding a new set of poles. “You should really throw these away,” I said to the the chap in charge, who grinned, shrugged, gave us a new set, and popped the broken set into the nearest tent bag, ready to be given out to the next set of hapless campers.

Tarutao is as close to untouched as it’s possible for a place to be and still have links to the rest of the world. There are no internet cafés or bars, just a few miles of trails through the jungle. Wandering no more than 200 meters from the camp, we saw lizards the size of dogs, monkeys swinging in the trees, and heard enough strange snuffling noises to have us nervously clutching each other every night we were in the tent. It even has resident eagles, which we caught fleeting glimpses of.

Even when we were there, the signs of construction were there. I recommend that you go, of course, because deserted, kind-of accessible tropical islands aren’t exactly a dime a dozen, but it might be best if you go sooner rather than later. Sorry, Tim.

Dave isn’t going camping again until he has his own tent. Also, I can be found here, if Photoshop is your thing. Or if it isn’t and you’d like it to be. More pictures from Tarutao in the Flickr set.