Tarutao At Last...

After Malaysia we made the long-awaited trip to the island of Koh Tarutao National Park (where we had initially intended on traveling at the end of March, when we ended up at Koh Adang and Koh Lipe instead). We hired a tent (lots of people I’ve met lately seem to say “hire” instead of “rent” and I’ve decided I’m going to try it out too…and I’ll start hiring movies at RedBox, and hiring kayaks and pairs of roller-skates, and cars, and petting zoos, and so on in the future when I’m back in the States and have access to those sort of things again). Then we set up our hired tent in a pretty perfect alcove along the beach.

The main island of Koh Tarutao was comparable to a much bigger version of Koh Adang – by that I mean that there are very few people, mind-boggling sunsets, and incredible wildlife:

- There are beautiful hornbills all over the place. They mostly come out in the evening before sunset and you’ll see them swooping around from tree, to ground, to tree, looking for bugs and other sorts of snacks. They are a quirky mix of beauty and clumsiness; when they land in the trees it kind of seems like they’re always underestimating how fast they were actually just flying, or overestimating the stability of the branch they chose to land on. They are very entertaining and very fun to watch. We saw a number of other cool birds there too, but I don’t know the name of them and can’t paint you as vivid of a picture of them; so we’ll leave it at that.

- On this island there were crazy, wild pigs with strange sparsely hairy backs that look like they’ve been gelled back into place, and also seem to be wearing high heals –you’ll find these guys hanging out, waiting for leftovers from your breakfast, lunch, and dinner – or darting across the road from one side of the forest to the other in small packs, which is pretty startling and hilarious to see.

A little blurry, but look closely and you'll see the high heals

- There are two different varieties of monkeys on Tarutao as well: the langurs and the macaques. You may recall hearing about the mischievous, territorial macaques, as they made an appearance in our last post regarding our motorbike encounter in Malaysia. Ready for another macaque story? Here it comes.

Don’t leave food in your tents. Really, they mean that. After a day out exploring, we came back to our campsite, and as we were walking up to our tent, Bob noticed a long, thin, horizontal slit in one of our tent windows just as I noticed a small tub of my lotion a few yards from our tent. We had forgotten about a small bag of sunflower seeds that we had left inside, and the macaques had tactfully executed a seed-heist while we were gone. Unfortunately, we did not get the chance to see the whole thing go down, but based on the evidence (the slit in the window, an empty sunflower seed bag that had been barbarically torn open and probably licked clean, and an immaculate tent with nothing out of place -- besides the aforementioned lotion which, despite their agility, opposable thumbs, and cunning efforts, they just couldn’t open), I imagine an invasion that was quick and pretty flawless. You could tell this wasn’t their first rodeo -- since there was nothing out of place, there was no rummaging around for anything; they knew what they wanted and they went straight for it (presumably). I envision a scouting crew and lookout crew as well, probably with different code sounds, whistles, and hand gestures, too.

The tent incision, when further examined, seemed to be pinched in the center and pulled or plucked until a small hole formed, at which point I figure the monkey in question simultaneously pulled upward with one hand and downward with the other in order to create an opening big enough to squeeze his sneaky, slinky little monkey frame through. He got in, darted for the goods, and in a moment of panic, or confusion, grabbed my “Emily” brand lotion that my sister kindly provided for me before our trip (It’s great stuff, and it’s nice to have a trusty hand lotion in tow, even if it is vain to carry products largely because they say your name on them). Anyways, I’m glad they didn’t eat it.

I think it’s quite telling of the macaque-monkey ways that they clearly sat there, right beside our tent and ate the seeds. They didn’t carry them away or bring them back home; they committed the theft, and then rubbed it in our faces, basically leaving the trash on our front lawn for us to clean up. This was the point when Bob aptly began referring to the macaques as “punk-eys” instead of monkeys, because that’s what they seem to be: rascally little monkey punks.

Besides the cool birds, goofy pigs, and devilish monkeys, we also saw the huge and elusive Komodo Dragons (not really, still Monitor Lizards), and GIANT purple hermit crabs.

Tiny lamp guardian lizard

Bigger than a baseball

We also we heard lots of unknown, outlandish jungle sounds coming from who-knows-what. We heard a number of these unidentifiable sounds on our jungle walks. Walking around the island is how we spent a lot of our time on Tarutao. Bob and I are trying to be financially savvy in our travels, particularly at this phase in our trip where we still had to figure in a whole other month of traveling without an income, as our teaching positions won’t begin until around May 15^th. Basically this means that we opt out of the pricier travel ventures like the boating outings, or the paid rides, and we walk to the places we want to see, even if that place is 15 kilometers away and there’s a rainstorm brewing. Over the course of two days, we covered over 40 kilometers (about 25 miles) of the island on foot. For free.

Mile-marker...well, really a kilometer marker, but mile-marker sounds cooler.

Koh Tarutao is well-known as the site where Thai prisoners were sent during the late 1930’s and through much of the 1940’s. The island’s remoteness was a desirable attraction, as it prevented prisoners from being able to escape.

We walked across the width of the island to the east side where the prison camp is located. There is a historical National Park trail that’s been dedicated to the history of these prisoners, with educational signs and explore-able remnants of structures from their daily lives: bunkhouses, cafeterias, hospitals, solitary confinement, etc. It was very cool, informative, and, on the whole, I’d say less spooky than it sounds. I think we were both half expecting to crawl into a drippy, damp dungeon with skeletal remains still chained to a wall. Instead, it was mostly a beautiful walk through the woods at an absolutely incredible port. Take a look:

Drying Fish

There just a couple of kind of spooky parts, one of which being when I was going to take a picture of Bob in Solitary Confinement, but once he got himself all the way in there, a swarm of bats started flapping around his head. But actually, that was really funnier than it was scary. It was a very cool and worthwhile day-long journey.

Solitary Confinement

Pre-bats

Look what we found

Old Prisoner Hospital

Our last night on Koh Tarutao was an exciting one. We spent the early evening eating dinner with the world-traveling couple from the Netherlands (the guy was a mega-genius who worked for IBM designing software, and he was on a paid sabbatical at the estimated age of about 32, I’d guess). When we met them they were towards the end of a yearlong, enviable travel-extravaganza. They have been to so many places! We spent our sporadic meals together soaking in the stories of the things they had seen and experienced, while trying to extract as much travel wisdom as possible without being obnoxious about it (this is a skill Bob and I are trying to hone...we constantly leave conversations with other travelers, whispering to each other all the things we really wondered and wanted to ask, but couldn't because then it turns the friendly conversation into just an interview for our own benefit).

After dinner we moseyed on back to our tent and went to sleep until around midnight when the wind picked up a bit and the lightening in the distance was fantastic to watch across the water from inside our tent; then we drifted off back to sleep, aware of the storm, but finding it more enjoyable than threatening. A couple hours later we woke up abruptly to a totally different scenario: the wind was roaring while whipping raindrops at our rattling, flapping tent; the lightning was no longer a mysterious, eye-catching spectacle in the distance paired with the lulling roll of occasional thunder – instead, it was flashing in quick and scarily close bolts while the thunder rose to an incessant banging and crashing. So now that I’ve described to you your basic thunderstorm using borderline cliché storm-vocabulary and imagery, I’ll tell you what we did next. We grabbed some stuff and dashed to the visitor center, which was about 200 meters away. Luckily it was unlocked; it was also completely vacant and without power, since they shut it all off around 10pm or so every night.

There was a tent in shambles on the floor that a previous renter must have recently returned, which had not yet been put away – so we plopped down on top of the nylon, zippers, and poles, and we turned the visitor’s center into our own storm-watching / sleeping quarters for the next couple hours until the sun came up when we ventured back out to inspect our abandoned campsite. There were no lightning-induced flames rising from our tent, no leaks, no monkey-looted goods, and no problems. So we packed up our tent and hopped on the rollercoaster ferry to the mainland after being only slightly embarrassed at breakfast by the couple who had watched us run for cover through the rain in the middle of the night from the safety of their bungalow porch. 

Make-shift sleeping quarters

Stormy Aftermath