Monday, March 23: Foreign marine life, Foreign language
I wrote that last entry on the bus from Bangkok to Trat, the mainland city across the bay from the island of Koh Chang where we’ve been staying for the past two nights. We rented a one-room bungalow made of bamboo and palm leaves for $6 a night. The six dollars I’m sure is for the running water and electricity, because the hut itself couldn’t have cost that much to make. The Remark Pu Zi Hut is near the southern pier of the island which is covered with shops selling touristy t-shirts and knickknacks, and just a five-minute walk from the 7/11 convenient store. I should point out that there is something completely satisfying and at the same time wholly incongruent about snacking on Oreos and a cold Coca-Cola in a bamboo hut.
Right now I’m sitting on the third and top deck of a snorkeling tour boat. We paid 500 baht a piece to spend eight hours going from island to island, stopping at each of the four stops for forty minutes of snorkeling and lounging on the beach. We’ve seen at least thirty different types of fish, all within an arms length of us. They swim in and among the coral like we’re not even there. The weather forecast we saw in Almaty called for scattered thunderstorms every day, and although it has drizzled almost every afternoon, the showers have been brief and the rest of the day hot and sunny. Yesterday we hiked twelve kilometers to the bank to exchange currency and then took a taxi to a waterfall a bit inland from the main road that encircles the island. Because it is now the dry season and the waterfall is less impressive—supposedly it is even more awe inspiring in the summer—we only paid half price (100 baht) to enter the national park area. The short trail leading in reminded me of hiking in the Appalachians of North Carolina, without the palm trees of course. The weather is hot and humid, the forest/jungle green and full, and the ground a reddish mix of sand and clay. We sat in the shade near the pool below the falls and took in the eclectic gathering of people and languages that had come to enjoy the same spot. We heard Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, several Scandinavian languages, German, and of course English.
I’m so incredibly fortunate that the language that I grew up speaking, the language I can take for granted, is a world language which people everywhere are expected to learn if they want to get a an international job or if they want to travel to somewhere like Thailand. Here, the locals speak Thai and a bit of English. I’ve heard bits of Russian from our guide today, announcing “Sorok Minuti”—“Forty minutes,” but other than that, all interactions between locals and tourists has been in English. Now, this serves me a great advantage as there is no expectation of me to learn Thai, but at the same time I hate that expectation that we put on the local people to speak our language. Shouldn’t the people going to a new land be the ones struggling to lean the local language? Or is it because our tourist dollars are funding the local economy that we feel like we’ve done enough and they should handle the language barrier? Regardless, I’ve made it a point, a personal goal, to learn enough Thai to get by. Struggling through a language barrier is one of the most rewarding and memorable parts of traveling through a foreign culture. With a limited amount of phrases and numbers and menu items, less than 50 words total, I’m not sure I’m at the level where I can “get by,” but rather to the point where I can get a smile of recognition or gratitude or just plain humor when I pronounce—horrendously, I’m sure—any phrase to a local.. Maybe that’s still not enough to break the expectation that everyone must learn English, but at least it’s a step in that direction.
Last night’s sunset on the western coast of Koh Chang was phenomenal, monumental, incredible; right up there with the cliffs of Lagos, Portugal at the “end of the world.”
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