Ko Si Boya

This guide to Ko Si Boya asks what is quietly grazing in the seagrass meadows off its shore, part of a twenty-one-thousand-hectare mangrove estuary that earned international Ramsar recognition in 2001 for the more than two hundred fish and bird species it shelters. You'll hear about the dugong, a whiskered marine mammal behind old sailors' mermaid tales, and how fast the seagrass it depends on has been vanishing along Thailand's Andaman coast. The island itself stays quiet too, home to about a thousand people who still fish and tap rubber on unpaved tracks.