Forward to Koh Phangan. Back to Bukit Lawang

Well the President may not be in Bangkok at the moment but I still am, day nine. I think I am about ready to make my first big move out of the city. There are still a few things to do here but I think I am coming down with Khoasan fever. It seems the choices are rains and floods in the mountains or rain and beaches on one of the Islands or Koh’s. So, tomorrow night I am heading off to Koh Phangan. It’s back on the bus tomorrow night for a twelve hour run down the Thai Peninsular to Sarit Tani, close, but comfortably far enough away from, the Malaysian Border. Then it’s on the boat for a four hour trip out to Koh Samui then Koh Phangan. I almost made it here last time around before Amanda persuaded me to stay on the train and keep going to Bangkok. So, I go here with no knowledge or experience although I do know that Koh Samui is a party island of young folk mixing it with alcohol, drugs, techno, house, reggae and other music. I don’t mind staying where young folk are having fun but the deep duff duff duff bass of the sound systems could penetrate two meters of concrete so I’ll head north to Koh Phangan. I don’t know too much about this island either but I’ll be heading to Haad Kuwad, (Bottle Beach). The guild book makes it sound quiet idealic although every beach in this part of the world looks like it deserves a postcard. The appeal of Hadd Kuwad is that it’s only accessible by boat and the thought of spending a little while on a bleached white beach in a hammock sipping fresh coconut juice and reading a book, without the sound off cars, trucks and buses buzzing about is rather appealing. Yet the reading the book in the hammock image could well turn to sitting in a thatched hut in teaming rain squatting mosquitoes and trying to avoid the leaks from the roof!!! I cross my fingers.

Bangkok has been fun. I’ve been up and down the Chao Phraya river a few times on the high speed river boats. They are a cheap, easy and reliable way to get around. Two days ago I did a full circle of the city by heading down the river on the river boat, catching the Skytrain to the Freedom Monument with a stop and a change along the way then finally a bus from there to the Banglumpu area to complete the circle. The last two days have been very humid with heaps of rain. Well, it is the rainy season here but hopefully we are coming to the end of it which apparently is the end of September. I might then be able to get that train up to Chang Mi. There are buses there and they are no doubt cheaper and quicker but when you have had this idea of catching a train to Chang Mi in your head for a couple of decades then hell a few extra dollars and a change of itinerary is a small sacrifice. I like the idea of travelling there by train because, well, I am a self confessed train buff, and secondly trains bet buses hands down when you can take a sleeper and arrived refreshed as opposed tried, dirty and stiff. But then I suppose that is nothing that a day or two relaxing under palm trees on a tropical beach doesn’t solve fairly quickly.

Backpacking around places like this is a bit like playing cards as you never know who or what is going to be dealt to you next. There was the French guy sitting on a bar stool who started to tell me how he liked Australia but thought we were a racist country and part of the history of bloody English colonisation. I had to remind him of Frances little ventures in West Africa, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and so forth and their current colonial presence in New Caledonia and the fact they continue to drop atomic bombs on tiny atolls there against the New Caledonian’s wishes. Oh, and isn’t there considerable right wing neo fascists in France and weren’t Paris suburbs burning for months due to racial problems a year or so back? Oh course there are racists in Australia but I wasn’t going to let this French man get away with it so easy sitting on a bar stool in Bangkok.

Next morning it was a Swiss woman probably in her early sixties sitting at the breakfast table. She had just come over from Indonesia to Panang by boat then a train up to Bangkok with a young Indonesian who she was paying his course fees to do a Thai message course. Having been to a number of places in Sumatra, Indonesia’s northern most island, I knew the tourist village she told me she had come from. Bukit Lawang is a small village, probably four or five hundred people, situated on the edge of a lovely river right on the edge of the Gunung Leuser National Park. The place holds special memories for me as I had travelled their with my mum somewhere back in the late 90’s so probably about ten years ago. My mum discovered backpacking herself later in life and had been a number of times to Bali, a place she loved. She surprised me and others by becoming quiet proficient at Indonesian Language, Bahasa, and actually taught it at U3A, University of the Third Age. Anyway, mum hadn’t been outside of Bali and as I was heading up to Sumatra we arranged to meet up and travel together for awhile and Bukit Lawang was our first destination out of Medan where we had meet up. The main attraction for many was the orang-utan rehabilitation project up the river which is worth a look but be quick to move as a number of oranguatan’s get particular pleasure out of urinating on tourists standing below taking photos.

Anyway the direction of this whole story revolves around the river which runs through the tiny village. It is probably the only river in Indonesia, or Asia for that matter, that I would swim in. It comes straight out of the national park and is crystal clear. The river running through the town moves fast over rocks and boulders yet it is still deep enough to ride down on a tyre tube. I hired a tube and walked up the track a number of times coming zooming back down the river into town. It was great fun and a little unnerving as you realised that things could go wrong. So when I noticed my 60+ mum walking up the track with a tyre under her arm I was just a little concerned. Hell, I could see my brothers standing around me beating my breast bone if something went wrong asking why the hell had I let my mum go tubing down such a rapid. I thought she would go once, freak out, and quietly take the tube back and spend the rest of the afternoon drinking tea and reading a book which is what you would expect of your mother at that age. Hell no. She was up and down all day having the time of her life. I could feel the role reversal thing happening as I started to wonder if I should persuade here to take the tube back thinking the more times she went up and back the more possibilities of a disaster. In the end I just gave up and thought dam it she is a 60+ year old woman and can make her own decisions and hell would you rather your mother died from sticking a knife in the toaster or in high adventure in the jungles of Northern Sumartra?

I am now getting to where this story was heading too from the start. It is very dark at night on the edge of the national park especially as there is no electricity and people use candles and kero lanterns. There is also no cars in Bukit Lawang with pedestrian access via a long suspension bridge over the river. . I think it was the second night we were there we were sitting at a large rough cut wooden table at a restaurant which literally had the river right at its side. You could drop a stone straight into it. As with most places in Asia there was music playing at volume so when a noise rose above it you seemed to take notice. I heard it first. A rumbling indistinct kind of a sound which seemed to be gaining volume. I walked to the edge of the balcony and tried to concentrate. I could see flashes of lightning in the distance but it didn’t sound like thunder and it persisted. Then suddenly crash, it hit, a wall of water about five feet high came pass where I stood, now only about ten feet above, and I got a free shot of adrenalin that night. Whoa, I’d never seen anything like it. A flash flood. Mum and I travelled together for a couple more weeks before she headed down the west coast of Sumartra on her way back to Bali and I headed up to Banda Aceh on the very north tip of Sumatra yet that night remained etched in our memories and we often liked to recall it later.

My mother passed away four or five years on from then so the last part of this story needs to be told in her absence. I meet the French woman over breakfast downstairs where I am staying. She told me she had travelled with the young Indonesian man from Bukit Luang to Bangkok so he could do a massage course then began to tell me the reason behind this. Apparently in 1993 there was another flash flood in Bukit Luang yet this was the mother of flash floods with a wall of water 35 feet high ripping through the town and killing around 350 people or most of the village. She produced a photo from her bag and I recognised some of the buildings still standing but basically it was all gone and it was quiet a shock. Apparently there had been so much illegal logging up in the national park that the water which would normally soak into the ground simply sheeted off the bare hillsides and into the river. I could remember this boys father who ran the guest house mum and I had stayed at. He had been killed in the flood and the son, who I vaguely remember as a child, now ran the guesthouse and was here to learn massage to try gain a marketable skill for tourism.


It had taken years to cross a path I had taken here before yet yesterday a part of my history found me here in Bangkok. You never know what cards are going to be dealt to you.