Torinla Bay

The Surin Islands sit at the top of Thailand's Andaman Sea chain, closer to Myanmar than to the mainland resorts of Khao Lak. This remoteness, combined with strict marine park management since 1981, has preserved coral reef systems of exceptional quality. Torinla Bay, on the southern island of Koh Surin Tai, is where this preservation is most evident: a sheltered coral garden of startling beauty in water shallow enough for snorkellers yet rich enough to captivate experienced divers. The bay is a natural amphitheatre, its sandy floor rising to a reef crest at two metres that drops gently to twenty-two on the outer slope. The inner reef is a coral garden in the literal sense: staghorn thickets in pastel blues and pinks, brain corals the size of small cars, and table corals extending in overlapping canopies that shelter clouds of damselfish and chromis. The hard coral coverage is dense and varied, with a complexity that reflects decades of uninterrupted growth. Green sea turtles are resident fixtures. I counted six during a single fifty-minute dive, each engaged in the unhurried business of grazing, sleeping, or cruising between reef sections. Hawksbill turtles, rarer and more cautious, appear on the outer slope where sponge growth provides their preferred food. The turtles show remarkably little concern for divers, a behaviour pattern consistent with an environment where they have not been hunted. The Moken village on the adjacent shore adds a dimension unique in Thai diving. These sea nomads have fished and free-dived these waters for generations, developing an intimate understanding of the reef that academic marine biology is only beginning to catalogue. Some Moken individuals guide snorkelling trips, pointing out features and inhabitants that outsiders would overlook: a sleeping octopus in a seemingly empty crevice, a banded sea krait hunting through coral rubble, juvenile blacktip reef sharks in the mangrove shallows.

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