Hornbills, drydocks and monkeys

It's a curious corner of the world here. It's a comfortable resort sitting on the edge of a small island. But it is also a marina, a refuge from the squalls and travails of the Andaman Sea. There are no local villages on the island so its quite undeveloped in a developed sort of way.
This morning I took a long walk, while it was still cool, around by the marina and out into the nearby forest. I had heard the waves crashing a little louder than usual during the night and so was not surprised by the waterlogged path and the strewn detritus of the recent storm. Walking out in the overcast 6.00am morning, a high wind shaking the trees and rocking the boats at the wharf, my mind wandered to times gone by when this would have been totally unvisited, unlike Penang and Malacca which saw the effects of trade and development through rubber and spices.
My ear then picked up a harsh musical cry and I looked up just in time to see a pair of hornbills flap and glide to their next roost in the forest. Of course I have seen them in captivity but to see them in their element crossing the skies effortlessly brings out the nature boy in me. [Note to self: must get some blurry pictures of minute hornbills in sky before I leave].
Beyond the marina was a dry dock housing upwards of 50 boats in various stages of repair or refurbishment. The boat's name and their home port painted elegantly or functionally on their prows pulled the imagination toward California, Phillippines, Banff(Australia) and Falmouth (UK) with a single high-and-dry vessel from Malaysia. Where are their owners? Counting the bills from the caulking (or whatever they do in dry dock) as they sit on their Pacific coast balconies? Or rueing the day they scraped those rocks off the west coast of Malaysia? There is something disconcerting about a boat out of its watery element, straining at the leash(or should that be line?) to be out to sea but lifted up here, tantalising close to the ocean - to that wind-tossed freedom under the control of the sail, the tiller and the GPS (purple prose passage 1)
Further on up a winding path my sweaty vision focuses blearily on a group of what looks like small people (could these be a native population long lost to the history books and the maps, I think improbably)only to realise with closer acquaintance it is a troupe of around 30 macaques. I am immediately wary since I have some encounters with them elsewhere where their closeness to humans has made them familiar, daring and kleptomania-inclined. But these just look at me slowly and leap back into the forest apart from one, about my age in monkey time, who slowly ambles in to the trees glancing (it seems to me) knowingly at me as if to say "out for a walk too? Blustery weather we're having." Too much Jungle Book, I fear.