Taking the boat in Asia is sometimes the opportunity to assess your resistance and ability to adapt
The boat that connects Ko Tao to the port of Surat Thani, Thailand is a dormitory boat that I will take the time to describe.
Four rows of thirty mattresses, sixty centimetres wide and one hundred and eighty long, laid on the floor, with a tiny pillow as a bonus.
No sheet, no blanket, we are glued together like sardines in a box.
Ceiling height: one meter sixty (easy to check, I can stand upright).
The boat is full. Average age of travellers: twenty-five.
It’s time to unpack the backpacks. Packages of biscuits, sandwiches, bottles of water, it’s like the summer camp. The atmosphere is full of joy and jokes.
Most of them have taken out their miniature laptops and are playing or looking at their travel photos.
The boat is leaving. In slow motion, the noise of the engine was almost unbearable, now it’s accelerating and the whole carcass is shaking and pitching.
I suddenly feel like I want to make my will all of a sudden. I look around me, the vast majority of travellers don’t look worried at all.
Seven hours of crossing, it promises to be long. The windows are wide open, a row of fans ventilate us a bit, it’s a good thing because already it smells like camels and the night is just beginning.
And this boat doesn’t look that solid at all.
The boat that transports us is a trawler: just a covered deck with 120 beds, a cargo hold and toilets underneath
I didn’t buy anything to eat or drink, naively believing that I would find something to buy on board.
I did take a night boat for three hundred baths (fifteen euros). I had the fleeting vision of small, simple berths. Just like in the trains.
I must even confess that I imagined a small bar that would sell soft sandwiches and warm beers.
Here I am, off to a good start. That was the project, simple places, far from the paths beaten by mass tourism, travelling with local transport. Treks in the jungle, roasted cockroaches for breakfast, night trains.
I wanted a trip, a real one, far from my comfort zone. Well, there’s something new, I’d never been on a dilapidated boat that turned its hold into a dormitory. We won’t be able to move an inch during the whole trip. Apart from the sleeper hold, there is nothing.
That said, if I wasn’t so hungry, it would be very nice.
But I’m hungry and everyone is chewing chips all around me. It makes you nervous to hear the sound of mandibles crushing fat and salted potato and chocolate biscuit on an empty stomach.
There are journeys like this where there is no guarantee of arriving at your destination
I wonder how we’re going to get to sleep if nobody turns off the huge white neon lights that radiate an icy light. As if by magic, the light goes out, plunging the bridge into absolute darkness. And it is this bridge there that we have to cross, curved in two by slaloming between the bags and the bunks to go to the toilets which are under the bridge! I swear not to go to the toilet even if it means blowing out my bladder.
Here and there a shy light from a computer screen illuminates a blissful or serious face.
The boat is still shaking and taking the swell, from top to bottom.
I have in my cabin bag, all the handyman Smurf equipment: a headlamp, headphones, my trusty laptop, pyjamas. The essentials to spend a hectic night listening to Adèle or Zeava Ben, thinking about my kids, writing that I am thinking about them, that I am thinking about tomorrow and all the days that will come after, once I survive this crossing on a Thai Titanic.
Besides, since the sea is warm here, it’s the sharks that will have my skin if I manage to escape the shipwreck.
To tell the truth, I’m not really worried. Sleep is right for all the passengers and the deck is falling asleep, me with it. The ability of humans to adapt is astonishing. We leave it to fate, to God, to the media who have never reported a shipwreck on this sea route.
Humans in transport sometimes behave like cattle
In the early morning, as the boat docks at Surat Tani, the passengers stretch, shake each other and it’s a mess. Bags are packed up, dazed travellers rub their puffy eyes and arrange their clothes.
Disembarkation is violent in this cold dawn. The crew molests the luggage and barks at the passengers. The contempt of the employees for their material or human cargo is palpable. Everyone is managed like cattle coming out of the trucks.
No one complains, everyone seems to find it normal, or else they are just pretending. Whatever they think, they obediently follow the movement. This immediate, tacit submission always amazes me.
I think of the French trains when they were on strike, we found ourselves crammed, crushed in wagons accepting everything so that we could finally go home. We paid the normal price of the ticket, we sometimes complained but above all we accepted to be treated like sheep. Sometimes the train would stop at a station, you had to get off and wait for another train that nobody would announce. We would then wait on the icy platform, at 10 o’clock p.m., worry for the children alone at home.
I think of the French trains when they were on strike, we found ourselves crammed, crushed in wagons accepting everything so that we could finally go home. We paid the normal price of the ticket, we sometimes complained but above all we accepted to be treated like sheep. Sometimes the train would stop at a station, you had to get off and wait for another train that nobody would announce. We would then wait on the icy platform, at 10 o’clock p.m., worry for the children alone at home.
For most of us, the most important is the destination, so we bend to orders or disorder while waiting for the end of the journey.
I’ve taken hundreds of buses, trains, taxis and anything else that can be used for public transportation on earth. Very often the vehicle was crowded and the driver didn’t always have much regard for his passengers. It seems that the simple act of taking control of a vehicle can turn ordinary people into potential tyrants. Is it because of the status of being the only master on board after God?
Nothing new here and i’m ready for adventure : I did my training at the SNCF (french railway) and the RATP (parisian metro company), I feel capable of travelling the whole world without a fuss. It will take more than a rotten boat in the middle of the night to impress me.
To put things into perspective, there’s nothing like finding a cheerful subject
A funny little story to wait for tomorrow: a forty-five year old Argentinean dandy, a bar owner in Ibiza, has been hanging around me like a shark for four days. Learning that I was leaving for the West Coast by night boat, he hastened to leave on the same boat as me.
The fun of the scene certainly escapes you and it’s only because you can’t see the look on his face. He can’t believe that he’s embarked on such a mess for a girl who has already turned him down three times and with whom, I swear, he has no chance of succes!
