What I Sacrificed to Find Thai Gulf’s Pot of Gold

Until now, I'm still grieving. In the world of pirates, the hunt for golden treasures always requires sacrifice — guardians engulfing souls, biting intruders, even taking the life out of you.

Perhaps the myths were real?

To find a pot of gold, there is a price you have to pay — in fictional stories, it's not cash, it's something you cherish the most. I got to see Thai Gulf's "gold basin" but at what cost?

Eighteen and a half hours of flying and staying across three airports, five hours to get from Krabi to Koh Samui through van and ferry, add two more hours of northwestward ferry ride, 650+ slippery ascending steps that takes all the life you have left — that’s how much sacrifice it took to reach this “pot of gold”, sitting at the heart of Thailand’s gulf.

Snapped a photo at the top, mission accomplished. The end.

Or so I thought.

Beneath me, the Ang Thong National Marine Park doesn’t really have gold. It was dubbed as “Ang Thong”, Thai term for “gold basin” or “pot of gold”, for its fertile soil and majestic natural limestone wonders wrapped in 42 protected islands. This was the gold I’m looking for.

As I descended down, the clouds went angry and sprinkled some rain to make the already-slippery muddy rocks even more difficult for human passage. Contrary to the weather forecast, this is not a “sunny day”. It was the beginning of even more surprises, as if I was living the real-life adaptation of Lemony Snicket's “A Series of Unfortunate Events”.

Few hours later, “I’m sorry there’s nothing we can do, we really can’t retrieve it,” my Thai tour guide apologized. A part of me wanted to continue hoping there was someone else who could help, yet a part of me knew we had to move on, we were literally in the middle of the ocean.

How did we get there?

Dozens of tourists riding a flock of kayaks (plastic 2-seater mini-boats) were enjoying the time of our lives. I brought my phone, wallet with important bank cards, Insta360 action camera, a pair of blue slippers, and the confidence that I can paddle through the Gulf of Thailand with a kayak and a life vest. It wasn’t my first time riding a kayak, I’ve successfully navigated across dragons’ teardrops in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam and limestone formations in El Nido, Palawan, Philippines unharmed.

Confidently, I led the pack and had to stop paddling for a while as we wait for others. The waves in Thai’s Gulf, in a sudden turn of events, became taller and taller, forceful enough to turn my boat counter-clockwise.

I tried to recover the direction and started paddling again.

One second, the boat is already upside down, I tried to save the paddle with my feet. I swam for survival and forgot everything else.

“Are you okay”, a woman asked me as she and her male partner try to turn the boat side up.

It wasn’t easy to get into the wobbly boat in the wobbly waves. They patiently waited for more than a minute for me to get back up. “Are you okay?,” she asked once again, and I nodded in assurance and thanked them.

I knew that kayaking was safe with a life vest. I knew that this was a risk and I was okay to take that calculated risk.

I’m alive, yet now I’m grieving. If I lost my phone, I would lose my digital bank access, work documents, and stuff that even Apple Cloud won’t be able to retrieve. If I lost my wallet, how will I survive a few weeks more in this cash-driven island and I wouldn’t even be able to withdraw new cash without my debit cards. If I lost my action camera, I would lose two years worth of travel memories that are not saved in the cloud and are definitely unrecoverable and I would lose my birthday gift to myself back when I freshly graduated.

Quick inventory of my surroundings showed me that I still have my pair of blue slippers floating around, my phone and wallet was still in my waterproof floating bag. The action camera sank down. But my hope never sank down with it.

They say it was unretrievable because it was just beyond the swimmable area, beyond the boundary set by a physical line.

I was hoping one of the tour guides were licensed divers, like the one I had in Coron, Palawan, Philippines who can free dive their way down.

My tour guide asked around nearby yachts and boats and concluded that it was very murky, very deep, and very risky to even think of getting it back.

I’m grieving. Yet at that moment, we’re still in the middle of the ocean. At that moment, we had a schedule to follow through. At that moment, I was no longer leading the pack, I was behind and had to kayak my way to the other island or else, I’ll be left here forever.

It reminded me of university life where people had no time to even break down because the work compounds if you even rest for a bit.

It reminded me of the tough life at work where we have a robotic schedule to follow, no time to pause or even breathe.

But what can I do, I had to move. And so I moved. I paddled back to the shore, grieving. A few days later, I’m still grieving. I don’t know when will the grieving even stop.

I’m grieving for the digitally recorded memories of my first close encounter with a sea turtle in El Nido, of my recent visit in the beautiful chocolate hills of Bohol, of my magical visit in Japan, of everything snapped that will only remain as a memory.

I’m grieving for the hefty price of that action cam that just simply sank. I’m grieving because it was special, a gift to myself. I’m not blaming anyone but myself, I should’ve bought a floatable case or handle, I should’ve held on to it a bit tighter.

I don’t believe in myths, I don’t think it’s a spiritual guardian who engulfed my priceless item. Life happens. “What’s important is that I’m alive and breathing,” I have always told myself that phrase in more times I could ever imagine.

Truly, finding a pot of gold comes with its set of risks and sacrifices, some can be foreseen, some unexpected. If we could turn back time, knowing what I know now, would I still have gotten in that journey? In a heartbeat, yes, I would still have made the same calculated risk with the little change that I should’ve just left my action camera in my hotel. At the end of the day, it was a breathtaking experience to see the Ang Thong’s overall view at the top, truly a bountiful “golden basin”. At the end of the century, most of us will become bones and ashes but only a few can say they truly “lived” — for me, that’s real gold.