EXOTIC SEA CAVES GIVE KAYAKERS NEW THAI EXPERIENCE.

Byline: Kristin Jackson Seattle Times

The shiny yellow kayak glided across the water to the base of an island cliff. The kayakers paused, dipped their hands in the bathtub-warm sea and watched an eagle drift overhead on the hot wind.

Then they vanished. My kayaking companions, paddling a hundred yards ahead of me, literally had been swallowed into the earth.

They had paddled into a sea cave, its obscure entrance at the base of a gnarled cliff known only to the savviest local guides.

The kayakers were on their way into the eerie, other world of the ``hongs,'' little-known mazes of sea caves and cliff-walled lagoons hidden deep within the rugged islands of Phang Nga Bay in southwest Thailand.

During a two-week trip around Thailand, I joined a dozen travelers to explore these sanctuaries of stone on a kayak tour.

Phang Nga Bay is a big U-shaped bay, roughly 30 miles wide and 30 miles long, that opens to the Andaman Sea. It's studded with about 160 limestone islands, eroded over millions of years into steep-walled knobs laced with caves and lagoons.

Think of one of these islands as a giant doughnut made of rock. The hole in the middle is the enclosed tidal lagoon or hong, a Thai word meaning ``room.'' The dough is the island's jungle-draped cliffs, sometimes 500 feet tall, which encircle the hong (itself sometimes hundreds of yards across).

Poke a pencil through the doughnut to the hole. That opening is the sea cave, the only way to get to a hong.

The sea caves can be a few hundred feet long or more than a mile in length, with narrow passageways and soaring chambers. Tidal waters flow in and out, submerging parts of the caves at high tide. Tidal timing is everything for anyone exploring them.

About 40 or 50 hongs have been explored so far. More are being surveyed all the time by Sea Canoe Thailand, a kayak-tour company based in the nearby resort town of Phuket.

``We've just scratched the surface,'' said Simon Warren, Sea Canoe's expedition manager. Sea Canoe uses an inflatable rubber craft to explore the caves and hongs. It's shaped and paddled like a kayak, but open across the top like a canoe. A guide does the difficult paddling and maneuvering in the caves, with one or two riders.

That's the practical stuff. How the hongs makes people feel is something completely different.

``People melt. They're awed,'' said Warren. ``Some say it's almost a religious experience.''

After I kayaked into some hongs, I knew what he meant.

I was sharing a kayak with another traveler and one of Sea Canoe's Thai guides. He took us scudding across the water, gliding under hanging rock curtains of eroded limestone that draped a cave entrance.

The cave soon narrowed into a twisting tunnel, with the passageway growing so narrow that at places I could have touched both walls with my outstretched arms. I didn't. The razor-sharp, calcified oyster shells that studded the walls would rip my flesh.

A few hundred feet further on, the cave suddenly widened into a soaring chamber the size of a gymnasium filled with hundreds of bats roosting on the shimmering, dripping limestone ceiling of this underground room.

Stalactites, some 30 feet long, dangled from the ceiling like rock organ pipes, glittering in the swath of light. We whispered only a few words, awed and silenced by this natural cathedral.

The passageway narrowed again, becoming so small that we had to lie flat in the kayak. Our guide cantilevered himself out from the stern, sculling from a horizontal position. The jagged cave ceiling was just a few inches above our faces. The kayak scraped the walls on each side.

I could sense the rocky bulk of the island pressing down from above, the tidal waters pressing up inexorably from below. I held my breath. If I were claustrophobic, I'd have gone crazy. Instead it was profoundly and strangely comforting to lie cradled by the earth and water.

A few minutes later, we glided out into the misty gray-yellow sunlight of the open-roofed hong.

I blinked in the light, then sucked in my breath again as I looked around. I felt like a child discovering that the mysterious lost world of a childhood novel has come alive.

It was eerily quiet in the hong, the silence broken only by a whir of a kingfisher's wings, the splash of a fish jumping.

Jungle-draped cliffs encircled the hong, walling it off from the outside world. Only a monkey or a mountaineer could climb the sheer, 300-foot walls, a tapestry of limestone and cascading greenery. High on the cliff there was a monkey, clinging to a vine.

Our kayak nudged against a latticework of mangrove roots; I found myself eye to eye with a 2-inch-tall, muddy-gray creature perched on a branch - some kind of sea creature that danced along the branch, then jumped into the water.

I lay flat in the kayak and gazed up at the sky. The towering cliffs seemed poised to fall upon me. I felt dizzy, overwhelmed. We all floated silently, lost for words.

Our guide tapped his watch. Time to catch the tide and leave, and more hongs to explore.

That night, camped on a beach, a beer-drinking kayaker grew solemn as we talked about the day. Softly, a bit sheepishly, he said, ``You know, going through those caves, it was like being born again.''

On Location Sea Canoe Thailand offers a variety of kayaking trips in Thailand, from day trips to two-week explorations. Some are offered year-round, others in the November-to-April high season.

Most trips depart from Phuket or the nearby resort town of Krabi; prices range from about $500 for a three-day trip (with an escort boat) to $750 or $950 for a six-day trip (the lower-priced trip without an escort boat) to $2,250 for a two-week trip, meals and gear included. Information: Sea Canoe Thailand Co., P.O. Box 276, Phuket 83000, Thailand; phone or fax [phone] or 212172.

It's also possible to book Sea Canoe trips through some U.S. adventure-travel companies, including Bolder Adventures (call [phone]) of Boulder, Colo., and Asia Pacific Adventures (call [phone]) of Los Angeles.

For general information on Phuket and Thailand, contact the Tourism Authority of Thailand, 3440 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, Calif. 90010; [phone].

CAPTION(S):

Photo, Box

Box: On Location (See text)

Photo: A guide maneuvers a n inflatable kayak with two visitors aboard at the entrance to a sea cave.

Kristin Jackson/Seattle Times