Day 7.
Take a minute to consider the life in the sea -the vast, limitless and open sea. Think of the fishes, corals, aquatic animals and plants that make life under the waves a wonderland of excitement and discovery. Add a little warmth to the water and proximity to the shore... Heaven!
Of course, the open sea may be vast but it isn't limitless and many of those creatures found in it often have something of a precarious existence. In addition, as well as the constant Darwinian competition with each other for food and space, sea creatures also now have the increasingly demanding human equation to deal with.
I love diving. It's a simple way to experience another semi-alien world where air is absent, but life is abundant. Man's rude impact in every in-shore location, however, now means that delving down onto a celebrated dive site may result in finding (along with a lot of dead coral) the lesser-jagged broken bottle and the ubiquitous floaty plastic bag -objects that have obviously been put there with good reason. With little or no homes to live in, the fish will have buggered off -or been taken, dynamited, poisoned or otherwise decimated. Sometimes, in the really under-protected areas, all that is left is an underwater desert -with a few slimy plastic pieces for good measure, and there's not much fun to be had paying good cash to see an acre of two of that.
Koh Lipe is an Andaman Island 70km from the mainland province of Satun. Granted by the thai royal family to sea gypsies in order to ensure this border region came firmly under the Thai flag, the island has also become a haven for island resorts -cool and trendy, scruffy and dilapidated, genteel and exclusive resorts that have given the place a bit of a laid-back, party atmosphere. Ko Samui and Phuket may have been around longer, and they must have started this way, but there's something a little special about being quite this far out, this far from the rest of the world. And the diving's good, that's for sure.
Out in the Adang-Rawi Archipelago, it's also possible to do your own bit of amateur oceanography by looking at a particular kind of flotsam that ends up on the shores. It seems the lovely Indonesians have thought that the best way to say 'hello -we're a really nice bunch of guys' to people in neighbouring countries is to send them lots and lots of little pieces of pvc plastic, be they drinks bottles, fast-food containers, spoons, toothbrushes, bags and bits of nylon string. So good are they at doing this that the Malays have decided to adopt this happy practice, but they're not as good at it. The Thais have put in a bit of an effort, but they're even worse -perhaps it's the script on their mesages that they know no-one else can read. That hasn't put off the Indians who clearly believe spreading joy and happiness using pieces of plastic covered in Devanagari is the way ahead.
Such it is that even the environmental demi-paradise that is an Andaman island is visited by decidedly un-environmentally friendly calling cards from elsewhere. And such it was that after a recent squall, yours truly had to ask for a bin liner to begin a bit of environmental one-man beach clean-up of these people's trash. It must be said that the Memsahib and meself were quickly joined by the somewhat red-faced workers at the resort, but I'd just seen one-too many of these messages for my liking.
And so at the bottom of the sea this afternoon, with all the big and little fishes, the beautiful sea-horses, flapping rays, vibrant-coloured clams and munching sea slugs living on the spectacular coral, there was also man's pitiful, sun-bleached, toxic, wasteful, plastic contribution.
