We took a walk that started in daylight. We weren't sure how far it was. We hadn't bought a map of the island. This tear shaped island in the Gulf of Thailand didn't really seem big enough to worry about having a map for its 45km length. Stepping off the surprisingly smooth ride on the prop plane we already knew there was some jungle to greet us as it felt like the wheels had clipped and chipped the mangos hanging on to the tops of the trees. Anyway, our taxi shied away from the main drag of resorts and took us up into the hills, a red clay track with potholes that could claim cattle.
A bumpy half an hour later we were at our eco resort. This was the kind of advertising that was designed to pull liberal-minded schmucks like me in, who don't mind flying over some beautiful aquamarine sea to get to paradise as long as we don't see the damage that our in flight service is doing. Offset that.
Except no one cared. The owner seemed more interested in drinking from mid-morning onwards and then going off with his mates to snorkel while the staff were left to fend off a slew of criticisms from the rooms to the beach; from the food to the over-charging. The place seemed like a tropical building site but in the end it wasn't the noise that we couldn't cope with but the wrong atmosphere, the wrong people and the wrong place. Our eco haven was built on top of the remains of dead prisoners, transported here from the mainland. Poltergeist that.
So we walked to a place we thought was close by. It was another world. Whereas EcoLipService Resort conjured up images of gangstars in bermudas, this place had a simple elegance to it. A tropical Shaker feel to the rooms, coloured-up woods minimally spaced in the large huts and where the bathrooms had saplings growing from between the tiles reaching up through the opened ceiling. A Franco- Vietnamese couple greeted us without surprise as though they were used to seeing
refugees from a marketing ploy.
So we returned in the dark to our eco resort, resolved and ready to transfer the next day. In the company of one of Ridgeback dogs who befrfiended us and padded alongside us we ascended the hill away from the resort. Darkness fell as it always does here like a stone; a rock fall that denies dusk and soon we were left flicking at our half dead torch cursing our eyes for their city focus. We passed by what we knew were homesteads with their mixture of scrapheaps and Buddhist shrines; their howling Ridgeback dogs and the flicker of VN soap opera in homes opened up without protection to the mosquitos we could both feel biting our faces.
Then a human howl, a raucous refrain lurching into harmony some ways off in the dark as we held on for balance and for reassurance. For the first time since I have arrived I felt insecure; a little edgy in the way that I had got used to feeling back home. That's the way you had to be if you were walking along the streets of Glasgow, say after the pubs closed in a lot of places and even then, it was at any time in some places. You didn't have to be scared you just had to be aware of your surroundings and be prepared for something to happen. It's the same thing, I know.
Nothing did happen. No. Something did. Our friendly dog stopped suddenly, its ears bending back. Never a good sign. Out of the black and into the road came a song that had a slurred tonality to it and my head torch picked out a startled figure of a half naked man who froze where he was, empty rice wine bottle in hand, his bare chest heaving with the fuss of adrenalin in his body. He didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to say. This wasn't the United Nations. This hadn't been rehearsed. He rushed out some words and I whispered a particuarly weak Hi and we moved on, a little ruffled but reassured.
Later, under the mosquito net, it was hard to sleep. The throb of Saigon motos had been replaced by a wall of sound, the crazy, scary, plain what the hell was thatness of it all was great. Here we were under the canopy next to the sea listening and a part of nature's tinnitus.
