Tag: Khao Lak

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James Bond Island

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

 

A while ago, my partner and I holidayed in the town of Khao Lak, 60 kilometres from the southeastern Thai resort of Phuket.  We saw a brochure for a boat tour in the nearby Ao Phang Nga National Park, which encompasses a large, island-strewn bay in the Andaman Sea.  Among the islands visited by the tour was Khao Phing Kan, a location used during the filming of the 1974 James Bond film, The Man with the Golden Gun.  It’s now popularly known as ‘James Bond Island’.

 

Regular readers of this blog will know I’m a connoisseur of all things Bond-related, especially the movies and the original books written by Ian Fleming.  So, could I resist an opportunity to visit James Bond island?  Of course not.

 

Not, I should add, that I’m a fan of The Man with the Golden Gun.  I think it’s one of the worst films in the Bond franchise.  It has Roger Moore in the main role, in only his second outing as 007 but already looking tired – you’re already waiting impatiently for him to regenerate into Timothy Dalton.  It has Britt Ekland, required to fill out a bikini but not to do any acting.  It has Hervé Villechaize as diminutive henchman Nick Nack (“Dom Perignon soixante-quatre…”) – according to Moore, Villechaize was a lecherous wee pain-in-the-neck in real life.  It has Clifton James as redneck comedy-relief American policeman Sheriff Pepper, who happens to be holidaying in Asia when he bumps into Bond – he refuses to have his picture taken with a local elephant, telling Mrs. Pepper: “We’re Demy-crats, Maybelle!”  Democrats?  That’s a surprise.  And it has Lulu hollering the inuendo-riddled theme song: “He’s got a powerful weapon / He charges a million a shot!”

 

In fact, there are only two good things in The Man with the Golden Gun.  One is its villain, the impeccable Christopher Lee as the super-hitman Francisco Scaramanga: “Come, come, Mr. Bond. You disappoint me.  You get as much fulfilment out of killing as I do, so why don’t you admit it?”  The other is the spectacular scenery.  Scaramanga’s island hideaway is supposed to be in waters belonging to ‘Red China’, but the sequence where Bond approaches it in a seaplane was filmed in Ao Phang Nga National Park, with Khao Phing Kan standing in for Scaramanga HQ.

 

 

Even if I had hated James Bond Island, the boat trip out to it, which first involved traversing a warren of creeks with mangrove trees cramming their sides, and then passing some of the bay’s islands – giant, towering rocks, their summits and all but their steepest slopes cloaked tightly in trees – was enough to make the day worthwhile.  Those islands, which’d looked pretty spectacular during The Man with the Golden Gun’s airborne scenes, with the cameras tracking Bond’s seaplane, seemed absolutely awesome when I was looking up at them from sea-level.  Among the things I compared the fantastic shapes of these islands to in my notebook entries that day were: ‘fangs’, ‘ruined, vegetation-shrouded fortresses’, ‘herds of grazing prehistoric beasts’, ‘monstrous haystacks’, ‘mossy tombstones’ and ‘giant standing stones’.  We passed one vaguely curved island with curious round protuberances on either side, like ears.  Our guide said it was nicknamed ‘The Dog’.

 

 

As it turned out, we spent just 25 minutes on James Bond Island, which felt an adequate length of time.  It was very busy with tourists.  We guessed as much when we approached it and saw the great number of long boats, with varnished hulls and club-shaped bows, lined along its landing area.  If Scaramanga was around today, he’d be erecting angry signs saying GET OFF MY LAND in response to the hordes of visitors.  Maybe even firing volleys of his legendary golden bullets at the trespassers.

 

Despite the crowds, I was delighted to see Ko Ta Pu, the 20-foot-high, precarious-looking limestone rock that stands off the island’s shore and is shaped like an extracted tooth.  In The Man with the Golden Gun, Scaramanga – who, unconvincingly, is depicted as a pioneer of green energy as well as a deadly hitman – has solar panels extend up from the top of Ko Ta Pu and collect enough sun’s energy to power an energy-beam gun, with which he destroys Bond’s seaplane.  Getting a photo of this remarkable stub of rock was difficult, with so many people posing for selfies in front of it.  But I managed in the end.

 

 

The island’s other striking feature is a huge, triangular opening behind the main beach, caused by seismic action. A giant slab of rock apparently broke free and ended up tilting steeply against the rest of the rock-mass there. Beneath it, looking up at its bulk and angles, you have a lurking fear it could topple the rest of the way and pulverize everything below, you included.  It was here that we incurred the wrath of a large, bikinied and ignorant Western woman who’d been posing lasciviously for multiple photos in front of the formation and didn’t appreciate us strolling into her camera-frame.

 

 

As well as being infested with tourists, the island’s main beach was infested with stalls selling tourist tat.  I was disappointed that no 007-themed merchandise was on sale – not even replicas of Christopher Lee’s golden gun.  I guess then-Bond-producers Cubby Broccoli and Albert Saltzman refused to license the Bond brand to the Thai tourist authorities and the vendors here could sell only generic, er, nick-nacks…  Weirdly, one Western-movie item that was on sale were figurines of Groot, the tree-like creature that features in the Guardians of the Galaxy (2014-23) movies.  That’s because if you look at Ko Ta Pu long enough, you begin to see its resemblance to the head of Groot.

 

In fact, Khao Phing Kan, James Bond Island, wasn’t the only movie-connected island we visited in the Andaman Sea.  A few days later, we went on a second boat trip, this time to the Phi-Phi-Phi Islands south of Ao Phang Nga National Park.  One of the stops we made there was at Ko Phi Phi Lee, home to the now-famous Maya Bay.

 

© Figment Films / 20th Century Fox

 

This was where in 2000 Danny Boyle filmed The Beach, based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Alex Garland.  This movie was troubled in a couple of different ways.  Originally, Ewan McGregor was lined up to star in it but, to his disgust, he was ultimately passed over in favour of Leonardo DiCaprio, then seen as a much more bankable actor because he’d played the hero in James Cameron’s world-beating Titanic (1998).  This led to McGregor falling out with Boyle and the pair didn’t talk to each other for many years afterwards.  More seriously, it was alleged that during production the filmmakers caused serious damage to Maya Beach’s ecosystems by ‘landscaping’ – i.e., bulldozering – part of it to make it more ‘paradise-like’.

 

We arrived at the northern side of Ko Phi Phi Lee and disembarked onto a precariously swaying, floating quay.  Then, filing along a slightly elevated wooden walkway – no doubt there to prevent the sand, soil, rocks and plants being pulverized under the feet of countless visitors – we made our way into the island’s interior.  The walkway was divided into two narrow lanes, with tourists streaming along in both directions.   It arrived at a wider wooden platform in the middle of the island, where there were facilities such as toilets, souvenir stalls and eateries and where you could step down onto the surrounding ground.  Two further walkways bifurcated off on its far side, both leading to the bay.  We followed the slightly less busy one.

 

 

Maya Bay itself was certainly picturesque, its white sand and turquoise water encircled by high cliffs and crags.  But it swarmed with the inevitable tourists, taking the inevitable photos and selfies.  Our guide told us we should visit it at the time of Chinese New Year.  Then, apparently, it gets really busy.

 

Although The Beach received middling reviews, it was reasonably successful – enough for it to cause the heavy tourist traffic to Ko Phi Phi Lee and Maya Beach.  Things got so bad that in 2018 the Thai government banned all tourists from it, so that work could be done to restore its now-shattered environment.  It wasn’t reopened to visitors until 2022, at the tail-end of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Tour groups, like ours, are allowed only an hour on the island, and it also gets a two-month, tourist-free breather every year, from August 1st to October 1st.

 

This makes me wonder what would have happened if Danny Boyle had made The Beach with Ewan McGregor, rather less of a draw than Leonardo DiCaprio.  (Sorry, Ewan.)  It would have meant: (1) a less successful film, seen by fewer people; (2) fewer tourists flocking to Maya Bay, which would have put it under less environmental strain; and (3) Trainspotting 2 (2017) being made years earlier than it was, because Boyle and McGregor would never have fallen out and then needed ages to make up.  Win-win all round, I’d say.

 

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The wave

 

 

For the last decade I’ve lived in southern and southeastern Asia.  During that time, the shadow cast by the tsunami that struck 14 countries on December 26th, 2004, has never seemed far away.  Triggered by an earthquake off the coast of Aceh in Sumatra, northern Indonesia, the tsunami claimed approximately 228,000 lives.  The worst devastation occurred in Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka, all three countries recording the tsunami as the worst-ever natural disaster in their histories.  Today, December 26th, 2024, is the 20th anniversary of the tragedy.

 

My partner and I lived in Sri Lanka from 2014 to 2022.  We weren’t there long before we began to notice memorials to, see lingering traces of and hear people talk about the tsunami, which slammed into the island’s eastern and southern coasts, claimed over 30,000 lives and displaced over 1,500,000 people from their homes.

 

For instance, in 2020, we stayed briefly in the southern town of Tangalle, where we hired a local tuk-tuk driver, going by the nickname of Dash, to take us to the tourist attractions in the neighbourhood.  Dash told us his house had been destroyed by the tsunami and now, 16 years later, he was still trying to build a replacement house further inland. Its ground floor was complete but something had delayed the construction of the first floor.

 

Also, my work required me to stay a few times in the same hotel in the northeastern town of Trincomalee.  There, I got to know the barman, who was a southerner.  His tsunami story was that he got trapped by rising waters whilst on a bus east of Galle, southern Sri Lanka’s biggest town.  Despite the water, the bus passengers decided it’d be safer to stay on board the vehicle.  He disagreed with them, climbed out through a window, started swimming and made it to safety.  From what he heard later, he believed the other passengers had died.  The disaster disabled the local mobile-phone network and he recalled afterwards having to beg coins off someone, then having to stand in a long, long queue at an old payphone so he could contact his family to let them know he’d survived.

 

However, what really brought the horror of the tsunami home to us happened while we were having a weekend break in the seaside town of Hikkaduwa in southeastern Sri Lanka.  We heard about the village of Peraliya, a few miles up the coast.  The statistics of the tsunami’s carnage were so tragically overwhelming that they hid a more particular fact – that because of it, at Peraliya, Sri Lanka also experienced the world’s worst rail disaster.

 

I’ll let Wikipedia relate the details: “The 2004 Sri Lanka tsunami rail disaster is the largest single rail disaster in world history by death toll…  Train #50 was a regular train operating between the cities of Colombo and Matara…  On Sunday, 26 December 2004, during the Buddhist full moon holiday and the Christmas holiday weekend, it left Colombo’s Fort Station shortly after 6.50 AM with over 1,500 paid passengers and an unknown number of unpaid passengers with travel passes (called Seasons) and government travel passes…

 

“At 9.30 AM, in the village of Peraliya, near Telwatta, the beach saw the first of the gigantic waves thrown up by the earthquake.  The train came to a halt as water surged around it.  Hundreds of locals, believing the train to be secure on the rails, climbed on top of the cars to avoid being swept away.  Others stood behind the train, hoping it would shield them from the force of the water…

 

“Ten minutes later, a huge wave picked the train up and smashed it against the trees and houses which lined the track, crushing those seeking shelter behind it.  The eight carriages were so packed with people that the doors could not be opened while they filled with water, drowning almost everyone inside as the water washed over the wreckage several more times.  The passengers on top of the train were thrown clear of the uprooted carriages, and most drowned or were crushed by debris…

 

“…the Sri Lankan authorities had no idea where the train was for several hours, until it was spotted by an army helicopter around 4.00 PM.  The local emergency services were destroyed, and it was a long time before help arrived…  Some families descended on the area determined to find their relatives themselves.  According to the Sri Lankan authorities, only about 150 people on the train survived.  The estimated death toll was at least 1,700 people, and probably over 2,000, although only approximately 900 bodies were recovered, as many were swept out to sea or taken away by relatives.  The town of Peraliya was also destroyed, losing hundreds of citizens and all but ten buildings to the waves.  More than 200 of the bodies retrieved were not identified or claimed, and were buried three days later in a Buddhist ceremony near the torn railway line.”

 

 

Today, when you enter Peraliya along the coastal road from the south, you’ll see a monument to the victims called Tsunami Honganji Viharaya  on the right-hand, inland side.  It consists of an 18.5-metre-high Buddha statue rising from an islet in a rectangular pond, built on the spot where the tragedy occurred.  Although the statue was erected with donations from Japan, it’s actually a reproduction of one of the Bhamian statues in Afghanistan that were dynamited and destroyed by those ignorant bigots in the Taliban in 2001.

 

When we visited the monument, there was – and perhaps still is – a small building by the entrance with the words TEMPLE OFFICE painted on its side.  Inside, we found a gallery of photographs taken in the tsunami’s immediate aftermath.  Some of them recorded such carnage they were difficult to look at.  Among the less graphic photographs, one showed the local rail-tracks after they’d been twisted into steel squiggles by the strength of the water.

 

 

A little further, on the road’s left-hand, seaward side, there’s a non-religious memorial to the victims, consisting of a plaque, a column and a scene carved onto a wall of grey and rust-orange stone representing the destruction immediately after train and village had been hit.  It shows piles of bodies, masonry and smashed palm trees, sections of wrenched-up and misshapen rail track, and upended train carriages, some with corpses hanging from their windows.  It’s startlingly candid – indeed, it probably shocks some Westerners, accustomed to such memorials in their own cultures avoiding explicit details and being discretely abstract, so as not to upset traumatised survivors and grieving relatives.

 

The 2004 tragedy at Peraliya has two poignant footnotes.  The locomotive that’d been pulling the carriages, and two of the carriages themselves, were eventually retrieved from the disaster scene, rebuilt and repaired and now, every year on December 26th, they return to Peraliya to take part in a religious ceremony held in remembrance of those who lost their lives.  Secondly, one of the small number of survivors was a train guard called W. Karunatilaka.  His sense of duty was such that following the disaster he continued to work on the Colombo-to-Galle train service.  He was still serving on that coastal route in the mid-2010s.

 

A much more personal record of what the tsunami did in Sri Lanka that day is provided by Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir Wave (2013).  This records how she lost her husband, two sons and parents when the tsunami swept into Yala National Park on the south coast and how she dealt with – often couldn’t deal with – the emotional and psychological devastation that followed.  Indeed, the ‘wave’ of the book’s title may refer to the massive grief she felt during the ensuing years as much as to the tsunami itself.  I found the book a tough read indeed.  However, it’s worth noting William Dalrymple’s appraisal of Wave when he reviewed it for the Guardian.  It was “…possibly the most moving book I have ever read about grief, but it is also a very, very fine book about love.  For grief is the black hole that is left in our lives when we lose someone irreplaceable…”

 

I only realised a few days ago that the 20th anniversary of the tsunami was coming up.  By a coincidence, my partner and I spent a pre-Christmas holiday in Khao Lak, the part of Thailand that suffered most in 2004.  The area’s death toll was officially 4000, though unofficial estimates put the figure higher.  We learned that a tsunami museum had opened in 2022 in the nearby village of Ban Nam Khem and decided to visit it.

 

 

Ban Nam Khem Tsunami Museum manages to be informative about 2004’s events, and convey their dreadful emotional impact, without wallowing in the death and horror.  For instance, there’s a display of photographs from the disaster’s aftermath, showing scenes of mangled, waterlogged chaos – boats, vehicles, trees, parts of wrecked buildings dumped on top of each other – but the more upsetting images have been pixellated out.  One terrifying photo shows the tsunami about to strike a bay, the sea swollen but still weirdly blue, clear and serene-looking, whereas the palm trees on shore are silhouetted against a crashing white wall of foam.  On the premises outside the museum-building, the sense of the tsunami’s gargantuan power is reinforced by the presence of two salvaged trawlers.  One was smashed a kilometre inland and deposited in the village’s centre, the other ended up with its prow stuck in the roof of a house.

 

The museum also has an auditorium where visitors can view a film about a Western tsunami survivor, now an adult, but a kid when he holidayed there with his family in 2004, returning to Ban Nam Khem to search for the fisherman who saved him from the post-tsunami floods.  It’s obviously highly fictionalised, but at least it tries to show how something positive can develop out of the very worst of situations.  The film also serves an educational purpose, warning local children not to be complacent and to take the area’s regular, tsunami-emergency drills seriously.

 

 

For me, the museum’s biggest impact comes from its displays of objects salvaged after the tsunami.  Again, there are a few big things giving a sense of the huge, brutal force unleashed that day, such as the shattered prow of a boat or a pulverised car that looks like it’s been in a hydraulic compactor.  But the small, everyday artefacts have the greatest poignancy: domestic ones (toys, handbags, purses, crockery, chairs, parasols, footballs, shoes), nautical (snorkelling flippers, broken fishing floats, pieces of netting, crab and lobster traps) and cultural (a spirit house, a Buddha’s head, urns, a Christmas tree).  The fact that, 20 years on, some items – a portable CD-playing stereo, a manual typewriter, a box radio, a box camera, an adding machine from a shop – have an antiquated look gives the displays the feel of a time capsule.  Yet this time capsule is from the moments before disaster struck and countless lives were ended or turned upside-down.

 

 

It’s a reminder that, though our brains are hardwired not to think such about things, our safety and security depend upon the whims of nature.  And if we’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, we can be suddenly engulfed in tragedy and chaos on a colossal scale – as happened to hundreds of thousands of unfortunate people in this region of the world two decades ago today.

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Christmas in Khao Lak

 

It’s been years since I last spent Christmas in a place where, around December 25th, it’s actually cold.  For most of the past decade, I’ve experienced the festive season in a country close to the equator, such as Sri Lanka or Singapore, where the temperature outside has been over 30 degrees.

 

For that reason, on Christmas Day, I customarily post a few photos whereby Christmas trees and decorations, bearing wintry images of snow, ice and reindeer, appear against a backdrop of tropical beaches and palm trees.  And I write a few lines where I marvel, “Isn’t this weird?”

 

Well, my partner and I have just spent two weeks in southern Thailand, in the town of Khao Lak, and here yet again is a picture of something Christmassy juxtaposed with something far removed from the snowy north of the world.  This time the photo is of a Khao Lak restaurant that had a Christmas tree standing beside two Thai spirit houses – San Phra Phum, as they’re known locally.  These are the miniature buildings you see outside nearly every Thai home and business, held aloft on wooden pillars like bird-tables, often fragranced by smouldering incense sticks and garlanded with flowers.  Their purpose is to provide accommodation for the spirits residing on the premises and to keep those spirits contented, so that they don’t move into the human building and cause ghostly high-jinks there.

 

 

Inside the spirit house, you get things such as a representation of the angel-like Hindu deity Phra Chai Mongkol, who bears a sword and a bag of money, presumably to ensure protection and good fortune for the house’s ethereal inhabitants; human figures to keep the spirits company; dolls’-house-style pieces of furniture for the spirits’ comfort; and possibly models of horses and elephants, to help them get around.  I’ve even seen spirit houses cluttered with model cars and toy figures, presumably to give the spirits something to play with; and ones bedecked with strings of coloured lights, presumably to allow the spirits illumination after nightfall.

 

While in Khao Lak, I looked for spirit houses that had miniature Christmas trees and decorations put inside them so that the spirits could experience the festive season too.  But I didn’t see any.  Just as well.  I don’t think the spirits would appreciate the gesture.  Imposing Christmas on them would be a step too far in terms of Westernisation.

 

 

Meanwhile, the hotel we were staying at put on a lavish Christmas display in its front yard.  I particularly liked the display’s Christmas tree, which had been assembled out of beer bottles.  Alcohol is the only thing that makes the festive season bearable for many people, so a Christmas tree celebrating beer seems very fitting.

 

 

On the other hand, I have to say the display’s Santa Claus was the most hideous and evil-looking representation of the old fellow I’ve ever seen.  Not only was he wildly cross-eyed, but his face – what could be seen of it above the beard – was a patch of putrid, decomposing brown mush.  I really hope this thing didn’t climb down anyone’s chimney last night.

 

 

Anyway – a Merry Christmas to you all.