I’m finally leaving the Phuket area – tsunami relief work has a gravitational pull that kept me here longer than I thought I would stay. There is always so much more to do and after I left the Phuket project, I returned to Ko Phi Phi to help out there for awhile. The volunteers on the island have an organization set up that should be studied and used again in some form or another in disaster relief everywhere and I was proud to be a small part of it (www.hiphiphi.com for more info).
I’ve been thinking that the places most worth visiting are the ones you can never see again – the places that are changing so fast you can’t visit again – at least not as you first saw them. Think of the Three Rivers Gorge in China, about to be filled in with water or the glaciers of Montana, soon to be melted away by climate change. Go now or never. And I think too of Phi Phi island as my ferry boat leaves the dock for home. On December 25, last year, this was one place and now today it is another transformed – twice – by both tragedy and then the volunteer labor of hope. And when I return in a month…a year?…it will be a different place yet again, because the island is too beautiful and so full of potential to stay so broken but not beaten.
Even in the three weeks I have known it, it has changed. Many of the people I first met on the island are gone, but new ones have arrived. Several new businesses have opened. The school I started to build was just a floor,now it is walls and windows and roof. The medical clinic, that for four months was on the unused dance floor of Carlito’s bar, has moved to a better place, still temporary, on the first floor of a windowless unused hotel, behind an abandoned 7/11 store. The island today has a funky make-shift charm that despite what happened does not seem the least bit sad. But the change coming will not be all for the good, I fear.
There is a path on Phi Phi that I call the yellow brick road – it goes through most of the populated parts of the island. It has mostly red bricks and at points no bricks, but near the sewage clogged reservoir – that at one time, not so long ago, was filled with bodies – the yellow brick road completely disappears, along with all the buildings and trees, all washed away into the sea. At this point a little hand painted sign points down a dirt path to the Sunset Bar. Follow the path to the beach and there stands the Sunset bar that turns out to be just a shack. You can buy a beer or a bucket of the local drink, Samsong Whiskey and Red Bull and then sip it on a mat watching the sun set on the calm waters. At a moment like this it is perhaps the most perfect place to be in the world. If you talk to the bartender he will tell you he lost his whole family in the Tsunami, on this very spot perhaps, and now this little shack that is a bar is his fragile claim on his past.
In a moral universe this man has as much a right to be here as anyone, but it looks like the Sunset bar will be swept away by the greater forces of capitalism. If the Tsunami was heartless, so too are many of the people who see the island now as a blank slate – to be redeveloped in whatever way makes the most money. This is going on all over the Tsunami ravaged coasts of Thailand – land speculators taking land from poorer people who lived on it for many generations but lost everything and have few legal rights. After so much hard work by volunteers to clear the streets, reopen the shops and get the island back on it’s feet, it could all be for nothing if the
Government in Bangkok gives it’s blessing to the wealthy well-connected landowners.
I wondered often why I was here – especially on days when my fingertips were rubbed raw by the concrete blocks I was lifting and my face burned by the sun – what the hell am I doing here? At the end of every sweaty day, Khet, a Thai I worked with who I really respected would say, “Tomorrow, you come back. O.K.” and so I came back again and again, because Khet wanted me there. On my last day he told me he lost two long tail boats in the Tsunami, and soon he will have money to buy a new one. “You come back. O.K.,” he asked again. “Take you fishing. Big fish.” So I will come back.
My favorite memory of the island was on the night there was a Tsunami false alarm. Two of my friends, Dan and Zack and I were in a restaurant watching “the Beach” on the T.V. when someone ran in and screamed “Tsunami!” “Tsunami, must go!” and everyone emptied out of the restaurant. For a while there was a bit of mass panic and confusion. Something about a report of an earthquake in Phuket that turned out to be wrong. Even after five months there is no warning system – no sirens – in place. So we just run every which-way for higher ground. Zack disappears, I do a race walk and Dan sprints all the way to the high area known as the viewpoint while
screaming to everyone he sees, “Tsunami! Run!” and then runs up the long flight of stairs in total darkness.
But by the time Dan gets up to the top no one is following him. No one is sure what to do and no one wants to go up the steep stairs in the heat and darkness until they have to. So I go up the stairs to see what happened to Dan and found him with Bo (b’Ow) a Thai who harvests coconuts and lives in a small house at the top of the stairs. While we wait it out, we hang out with Bo in his hut with his four kittens – he gives us rainwater to drink and smokes for Dan and teaches us some Thai. We wait listening below and then decide to all go up to the viewpoint. There we meet up with Ati who lives at the top and we sit on a rock under a full moon, just the four of us, watching the town below. It looked alive and well. Ati says, “In real Tsunami, no lights, no rock music.” We hear the thumpa-thumpa from a bar below. No Tsunami.
Bo was born here on Phi Phi and he and his family have always made a living here on the safe mountains above the village. There will always be coconuts here and if so there will always be Bo. I’m certain when I return I will see him again, but uncertain of everything else.