7.
After breakfast, it’s only about a twenty-minute ride to the waterfall.
Bang Pae is on the island’s quieter eastern side, up in Khao Phra Thaeo National Park.
It’s the last real patch of virgin rainforest left on Phuket.
From the road you’d never know it was there.
You turn off the main highway and suddenly you’re in it, the temperature dropping two degrees under the canopy before you’ve even paid the entrance fee.
“Are there monkeys in this forest?” she asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “The place to see them is a reserve further south.”
She purses her lip, deciding something.
“I don’t think the monkeys are going to carry off your bag.”
“Probably better to be safe.”
She reaches around in the folds of her big travel pack and pulls out her passport and some valuables.
“There,” she says. “Now if it gets stolen, at least they won’t get the important stuff.”
The trail is short, maybe five hundred meters to the waterfall, but the forest on either side of it is something else.
The trees are old, the kind with massive buttress roots that ripple out from the base in long flat ridges, the trunks themselves wider around than a car.
Some of them are draped in fern and vine so dense the bark is invisible underneath.
The canopy above is layered, light filtering down in columns through the gaps, everything green-lit and still except for the insects.
Every few meters along the trail there’s one of these enormous White Back Palms, a palm with leaves so wide and flat they nearly form a ceiling over the path.
Thais call it lang khao. I’ve been told it only grows here.
Phuket’s last rainforest, and even that’s not quite safe.
Clouds of gnats swarm us as we walk. I pause at a bend on the trail, waiting for her.
“How are you not covered in sweat?” she asks when she clomps up the hill. “I’m sweating like a pig.”
“You’re not,” I say. “You’re glistening like a… I can’t think of what.”
“Like a glazed donut?”
“Interesting,” I say. “Okay, let’s go with that.”
Before I can offer my hand she’s already grabbed it, picking her way over a cluster of deep roots that have pushed the rocks up out of the earth at a sharp angle. The path here is concrete in patches, slippery with moisture even in the dry season, the edges crumbling back into the soil.
Something calls from somewhere in the canopy. Not a bird exactly. A long, rising whoop that sweeps up and then falls, then repeats. It echoes off the trees in a way that makes it hard to locate the source.
“What is that?” Thalia asks, stopping.
“Gibbons,” I say. “There’s a rehabilitation project just off the trail. They take ones that’ve been kept as pets and try to reintroduce them to the forest. You can hear them but you almost never see them.”
She listens for a moment, head tilted back. The call comes again, overlapping now with a second, slightly lower voice.
“That’s the saddest and most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard,” she says.
I don’t argue with that.
“So, this is a Monday for you,” she says, resuming walking.
“Yep,” I say. “But not a normal one. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be doing this. In fact, I’ve never been here before.”
She pauses to take in the green canopy above us. A crow with brown wings and red eyes dives through the foliage, cawing once, and disappears. You don’t expect crows in a subtropical climate like this, but I guess evolution doesn’t care about what you expect.
We reach the waterfall, which in the dry season is really just a trickle against the rock face—a thin white line coming down from maybe fifteen meters up, landing in a shallow pool at the base with a sound more like pouring a glass of water than anything dramatic.
There are two or three connected pools, each one a little lower than the last, the rock between them covered in a green-black slime that makes the footing treacherous.
Amazingly, we’re the only ones here. But there’s evidence of the people who came before us.
Somebody left what looks like the remains of a mango smoothie, a cigarette floating in it.
Just sitting on a flat rock, as if whoever left it expected someone to come along to clean up after them.
“Kinda makes you ashamed to be human, huh?” she asks. “Especially a Western tourist.”
I pick up the cup and look at it.
“The Thais litter all the time too,” I say. “I’ve watched old men throw cigarette butts in the river without a thought. Unless you teach people not to do it, they always will.”
“They know better,” she says. “They just don’t care.”
“I don’t let it bother me anymore.”
She tugs off her shirt, revealing just the bikini top underneath, and for a second I break my concentration. God she looks good, and young.
“You’re too zen for that?” she asks.
“I don’t know if I’m zen,” I say. “I just gave myself a new perspective on it.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“Imagine if there was nothing wrong here,” I say.
“It’s just perfect, like Eden. What would it matter if we came or not?
The place would be perfect as it is and all we could do is ruin it somehow.
” I hold up the cup. “But since our friend has done that for us already, we get to do a good deed by improving it just a little. I’m going to take this down and put it in the trash, and I can feel good about having come here. It’s worth something.”
She turns her head as she looks at me.
“Yeah, I like that. I was thinking that picking up trash makes me feel a little less bad that I’m a tourist in this poor country taking advantage of how cheap everything is. But I like your way better.”
“It’s not about guilt,” I say. “That’s why it’s better.”
She shimmies out of her pants and I take off my linen stuff and fold it in her cloth handbag. We leave our flip flops and pick our way carefully across the rocks, lowering ourselves into the pool. The slime on the rocks is real, and the first step is always the one that almost gets you.
The water’s not cold, of course. And we don’t try to get our hair wet. But it’s deep enough in the center that you can’t touch the bottom and have to kick to keep yourself afloat.
“So, what do you think?”
“It’s small,” she says. “Wallaman Falls is a two-hour drive from where I grew up, and it’s a lot bigger than this one. And the forest smell’s different. The smell of eucalyptus. I miss that.”
“What else did you visit when you were little?”
“We’d take road trips to see different things during the Christmas holiday, but other than that we usually didn’t go anywhere,” she says.
“I mean, we took trips to Brisbane, obviously. But my whole family’s in Mackay, and everything’s so spread out.
Outside of town, there’s just nothing but bush for hundreds of kilometers. ”
“The Outback,” I say, the word sounding so romantic when I think of it.
Thalia is quick to dispel my illusions about it.
“I always hated the Outback,” she says. “Well, hate isn’t really the word. None of us actually hated it. We were just convinced that life was better everywhere else. I wanted to be American. I wanted to live in New York.”
The words have the same magic for her that the Outback has for me.
“That makes sense,” I say. “It’s hard to see what’s beautiful about where you’re from. If we were born here, none of this would be impressive.”
I stretch out my arms at the forest surrounding us.
“Some Thai teenager looks at all of this and sees a place to dump their trash and dreams of living in Australia.”
“Exactly! There are a lot of Thai people in Queensland now. And Vietnamese and other Asians. The immigration policies in Australia used to be really racist but they’re getting better.”
“You can’t stop people from moving,” I say. “They’re going to go where they’re going to go.”
“Like you,” she says. “How are you allowed to stay here, by the way?”
“I’m not,” I say. “I’m a fugitive. Don’t tell the police.”
I sink down like I’m trying to hide, my eyes scanning from side to side looking for danger. She smiles.
“Seriously,” she says. “I mean, a lot of older Aussie guys come here to retire. But you’re not old enough to retire.”
“True.”
“So, how do you do it?”
“Okay, it sounds really douchey and pretentious to mention it by name,” I say. “But I’m on what’s called the Elite Visa.”
“Ooh, the Elite Visa?”
“It sounds more selective than it actually is. Basically, if you want to live in Thailand but you don’t have any other box you can check—a work permit, a marriage visa, whatever—you can pay a bunch of money and they let you stay for five years, no questions asked.”
“How much is a bunch of money?”
“A lot,” I say. “But when you live here everything’s so much cheaper than the US that it kinda balances out.”
“So it’s like paying a bribe, but an official one, right?”
“That’s basically what it is, yeah.”
“So everyone’s happy and that’s good. But it doesn’t seem fair.”
“It’s not,” I say. “I’m just incredibly grateful that I get to take advantage of them and they get to take advantage of me.”
“I couldn’t see myself moving to another country,” she says. “Except New Zealand, but that doesn’t count.”
“Will you roll your eyes if I tell you that New Zealand sounds amazing?”
“No, it is,” she says. “Expensive, lots of sheep, but also lovely.”
“I read somewhere that it was the country least exposed to climate change. Or the most resilient, or something like that.”
“Then it’s going to have loads of Aussies,” she says. “Queensland’s hot enough already. That’s another reason why the Outback is worse than you think.”