great The Thailand escape
Private yacht offers chance to luxuriate in freedom of charting your own course
MAYA BAY, THAILAND— They roar onto the beach like an invading force — dozens of sleek boats carrying tightly packed loads of uniformly life-jacketed new arrivals for a day in the sun. We stand there in our wet swimsuits, cheek-by-jowl with the masses, a mob intent on having a good time, leaping in the air and posing with selfie sticks and screaming with an eardrum-piercing mix of shock and glee when the waves disturb their photographic frenzies, crashing into them from behind. For a moment, it appears that our escape will be blocked. But then, hand on the tiller of our trusty dinghy, our skipper comes to the rescue.
Squeezing into a narrow gap between two monster motorboats, Chokchai Kongthong, cool as a cucumber in his Ray-Bans, loads us quickly into the small craft, my young niece and nephew gamely and quickly scrambling aboard, my sister situating herself near the bow to help my brother-in-law as he leaps inside, rolling to the floor as we back away, finding open water before another load of day-trippers arrives from Phuket.
We’re inside Maya Bay. A massively popular stop on a circuit that takes day trippers on a set circuit to various snorkel destinations, we felt the need to check that box before moving on. But move on we do — and quickly — because we have our own private yacht. A globe-trotting travel writer, it’s a rare pleasure to be joined on board by my sister, Lisa Lethangue, and her family — brother-in-law Jeremy, niece Brooke, 12, and nephew Hunter, 8.
None of us grew up on the water.
Growing up, the closest I came to a yacht was a little tin fishing boat we used to cruise to islands in the Kawartha Lakes, fishing and tubing and swimming and roasting hotdogs over a fire. Here, the Andaman Sea off southwest Thailand is our playground — a wonderland of green and aquamarine, of empty natural beaches and dramatic limestone karsts, of seafaring and fishing history dating back thousands of years.
“The main thing here is the culture. You see all the long-tail boats, the villages, the tiny islands with just a restaurant on a rock,” Oliver Wilce, base manager for Moorings luxury yacht charters, says as we sit on the dock.
Embarking at Ao Po Grand Marina on the northeast corner of Phuket, we set sail for points south, Kongthong with one slack arm draped over the wheel, all of us gathered on the top deck, transfixed as the sun casts long, warm rays on the calm seas ahead.
Perhaps the greatest luxury of a private yacht is not the four private cabins or the sleek kitchen equipped with gas stove and oven and microwave, or even the sunken seating well on the front of the boat, where we sit and drink coffee (and beer) and enjoy the breeze as an exotic world rolls toward us on the waves.
Rather, we luxuriate in the freedom to chart our own course, and each day holds its surprises. Often we lay down at night below deck not knowing what the next day will hold, holding an impromptu planning session with Kongthong after we’d all finished our breakfast the following morning, rolling out nautical charts on the dining room table and pointing to where we want to go next.
Because he speaks a scarce amount of English (and we know no Thai, beyond the words for “hello” and “thank you”), Kongthong remains something of a mystery to us, but certain salient facts permeate the language barrier.
We learn that he navigated oceangoing tankers for 11 years before making the move to skippering pleasure craft, which he’s done for six. That he’s a dedicated Buddhist, and wears a pendant picturing the Buddha around his neck. That he has a wife and a little girl.
And one day, Kongthong tells us that he was once a Muay Thai kickboxer. Fighting in 55 matches, he still has some moves, and teaches a few of them to Hunter out on the springy nets that stretch across the bow of the boat, at one point letting the little guy take him down, to the mat.
Along the way, we see plenty of long-tail boats, low-slung wooden craft that would look ancient, were it not for the invariably sputtering engines attached to a propeller by a lengthy driveshaft out the back, usually crossing right in front of us. We cruise past isolated fishing villages, their simple, stilted structures jutting out onto the water.
And some days, we just dropped anchor and swam the afternoon away. The kids revel in the joy of jumping off the boat’s stern, climbing up a wooden ladder to just to leap back into the warm water, for hours.
We also snorkel over great heaps of coral, marvelling at puffers and angelfish and tiger fish, often arriving in popular snorkel spots before the masses get there in the speedboats, Hunter — an aspiring marine biologist — pointing excitedly at crustaceans he recognizes from his many maritime books.
We chart a haphazard course, zigzagging south, then east, then north, and then back south, spending a cou- ple days circumnavigating the coral reefs off the Phi Phi Islands, watching dolphins frolic off our bow near Koh Mai Thon, and once getting chased by a monkey on a nearly abandoned beach on Koh Nok.
An island in two parts, which are separated by blue water at high tide, Kongthong drops us from our boat’s dinghy onto one side, where we comb the sand for shells and snap photos of a rather large rhesus macaque monkey that unexpectedly drops out of the thick canopy, seeming almost to pose for our shots atop a large, black outcrop of rock as the kids mug in the foreground, pounding chests like George of the Jungle.
Moments later, we notice something in his eyes. Proceeding with a pace that communicates his intent to protect his beach, he makes (what appear to us) menacing strides in our direction. We retreat first to a small sandbar, but like a zombie in a horror movie, the macaque continues astride, never speeding up, just steadily marching toward us.
To our amazement — and despite my repeated, and apparently mistaken assurances that monkeys can’t swim — the macaque launches into the water, eyes still laser-focused on this family of hapless Canadians, gripped by a momentary and mostly ridiculous panic, wading and then swimming deeper across, toward the neighbouring beach.
We paddle into a strong current, which blocks our progress, and for a moment, it appears he will reach us. But two things happen at once — first Kongthong launches the dinghy and zooms out to pick us up. Next, the monkey is carried away with the tide, and we see him scramble up, a few minutes later, on the far shore.
As we hop into the small rubber boat, we all take a deep breath, asking Kongthong if these monkeys can bite. He responds by flashing his teeth and playfully pretending to grab us, breaking the tension as the dinghy erupts in hearty, adrenalinefueled laughter.
We’ve escaped — again. And as we sail away, we escape again, and again, and again over the remainder of our voyage — fleeing the crowds, eschewing the go-tourist spots, steering clear of the well-travelled channels and heavily trafficked bays, instead retreating on our yacht to hidden coves and little beaches and places that, forever, we will remember as ours, alone. Tim Johnson was a guest of The Moorings, which didn’t review or approve this article.
The Andaman Sea is our playground, a wonderland of green and aquamarine, of empty natural beaches and dramatic limestone karsts