This week’s dream: Kayaking into the hidden chambers of Phang Nga Bay
I couldn’t resist making a return trip to Phang Nga Bay, said Jeff Greenwald in the Los Angeles Times. “It may be the most beautiful place in Thailand”—a 5-mile-wide expanse of sparkling water hemmed by high limestone cliffs and studded with towering islands, or ko. A 1974 James
Bond movie was filmed in Phang Nga, but only years later did an American naturalist and his wife deduce that, at low tide, a person could paddle a kayak into the middle of a ko and be enclosed in a cathedral-like natural stone chamber teeming with wildlife and with sunlight that pours in from above. Now in his 70s, John Gray is still leading kayak tours into these pocket ecosystems, and I was lucky enough to join him once again.
A quarter-century after my original visit to the bay, we entered the first hong, or hidden chamber, through a low passageway that Gray calls the Bat Cave. The tide gave us just enough room to pass under the entrance’s ceiling, and as our guide paddled, “I leaned back in my kayak like an Egyptian mummy,” my nose passing just below smooth calcite formations and scores of bats hanging upside down among them. We emerged from darkness into brilliant sunlight and another world. We listened for a few minutes to a giant hornbill and the langur monkeys climbing overhead in the trees before exiting while the tide still allowed it.
We visited half a dozen hongs during our three-day visit, and each had its own character—some webbed with the latticed roots of mangrove trees, some aflutter with butterflies. And with Gray’s tour company handling food duties, “every meal was a small miracle”—fresh fish or prawns grilled over a beach fire, pad thai, and vegetable curries. Gray is also busy these days leading a fight against unscrupulous tour operators who threaten the bay’s magic waters by bringing crowds in on motorboats and leaving behind floating debris. Only if he wins will others be able to enjoy our after-dinner routine: wading into the warm, shallow surf, “where every movement stirred up glittering trails of luminescent plankton.”
John Gray’s Sea Canoe Co. (johngraysea canoe.com) offers all-inclusive, three-day expeditions for $860.