I just wrapped up a few days in Ko Phangan, a small island about 30 minutes by ferry from Ko Samui in Southeastern Thailand. Much of the island is rocky and undeveloped, and I stayed on the southeastern tip, a small beachtown called Hat Rien. The island is full of stoned-out twentysomething hippie backpackers who want to drink and party away the wee hours of the night and convalesce on the beaches during the day. I saw backpackers limping around with arms, legs, arms, knees and wrists wrapped in gauze so many times that it became a running gag, fallout from drunken motorbike accidents, like those moments sprinkled throughout Clueless where you see future sorority girls walking the school grounds with bandages on their noses as they heal from plastic surgery bankrolled by their rich Beverly Hills parents. Remember that scene where the students prepare to play tennis in gym class and the girl with the bandaged nose declines to participate? Amber: "Ms. Stoeger, my plastic surgeon doesn't want me doing any activity where balls fly at my nose." Dionne: "Well, there goes your social life."
Ko Phangan reminds me quite a bit of Goa. I flashbacked to this January where I spent 3 weeks in Goa, which was about 2 weeks too many. I lasted 3 nights.
I met an Australian couple on the ferry ride over and went with them to a pool party that first night, where I was introduced to vodka buckets, a Thai specialty. Not satisfied with the massive quantify of liquor per bucket, the Aussies added Red Bull to the concoction, and told me that because Thailand is less regulated than the West, their Red Bull is extra strong, with something like 2.5 times as much caffeine as what we get domestically. I've had a few vodka Red Bulls in my day, but I avoid them now because they get me drunk but I'm too wired to realize it, and I end up acting like an imbecile. I also don't much like coming home drunk and being completely unable to sleep as my mind races from all the caffeine. I can only imagine the brain-erasing potential of the Red Bull vodka bucket, a poor man's speedball. Not surprisingly, the Aussie chick kept insisting that the drinks were watered down and she couldn't feel anything, until reality hit like one of those vicious sidewinding kicks in a Muay Thai fight, and the couple had to jet out of their around one a.m. so she could go home and puke. I stuck to Tiger beer and was pretty drunk but basically fine, but one a.m. was past my bedtime and I left when they did.
I had opted to stay in the Same Same Guesthouse. "Same same" is one of those tricky half-English, half-Asian phrases used through the region, and generally refers to a reasonable facsimile of a Western brand of clothing, watch, or electronics or whatever else happens to be ripe for bootlegging and/or imitation. A fake Rolex, for instance, is "same same but different." Same Same was one of those prototypical Asian guesthouses with a big open area downstair containing a restaurant and a screen showing American movies and episodes of the Simpsons and Friends from late afternoon to night. A friendly, social place designed for the budget-conscious traveler just out of Uni and searching for adventure and people to party with. I like these types of places -- the amusingly named Okay Guesthouse in Phnom Penh was another memorable example -- but the downside is that they tend to be a bit grimy. My needs are not so great, but I do expect a room to be clean. My room at Same Same had an above-average level of grunge to it and had a couple of ratty-looking mattresses thrown in a corner for no apparent reason, which put me over the edge. I found a room that day at a place called Sea Breeze Bungalows, and it was a striking contrast, bungalows draped over the edge of a cliff looking directly over the ocean. I took about 20 pictures of the sunset from my balcony which I will share after I download them. Absolutely beautiful.
I spent the next day reading and walking around, and signed up for a tour on my last full day that took us from Hat Rien up the east side of Ko Phangan to a waterfall and a few remote beaches for swimming, eating and light snorkeling. I hung out with a Croatian guy who lives in San Francisco-- as post-straight as they come-- and a British girl fresh from 7 months in Melbourne who was about to do the BKK- Cambodia- Vietnam (south to north) route. Both were 26-- the Aussie couple from two days before were 23. I now regularly hang out with people born in the 80s. They always seemed surprised to learn that I'm 34, the baby face is really coming in handy these days, although it was a bit of a drag when I was a 26 year-old lawyer. All good things come to those who wait. I've liked a lot of people that I've run across, but as the trip goes on, I have found myself putting less effort into prolonging these friendships, which often last anywhere from 2 hours to 2 days, but rarely more than that. Single-serving friends. I miss having my real friends around and it's one the main reason I'm starting to burn out on traveling.
I liked Ko Phangan well enough, but one of the things that I've learned about myself on this trip is that I'm at heart an urban guy. I like cities. I feel slightly out of sorts in remote, undeveloped areas away from urban centers. This creates some paradoxes when it comes to beach travel, because the prevailing wisdom is to find the most remote beaches, but if you really get out there, there's nothing and nobody around and it things can get dull pretty quickly, particularly when you're doing a lot of solo travel. I felt better when I got off the ferry from Ko Phangan on Ko Samui, knowing that I had just entered a more developed area with better restaurants and nightlife and more people to hang out with and maybe even a decent bookstore. Bookstores, I have discovered, are my benchmarks of civilization. I could not live in a place that didn't have decent bookstores. (Rule of Thumb #1 for bookstores in Asia: It's a bad sign when all the books are alphabetized by the author's first name. Rule #2: You never know what you're gonna find in a used bookstore, so keep looking. Just pinched 2 Dashiell Hammet short story collections for peanuts.) For all those reasons, out of the beaches I've been to in Southern Thailand, Phuket was by far the most enjoyable. This is mostly because the area I stayed in-- Patong-- had some over-the-top nightlife, as well as plenty of places to drink coffee, watch movies, get Thai massages (no, not that kind), check out Muay Thai boxing, buy bootleg DVDs, and generally indulge myself. (I saw the new Indiana Jones, absolutely terrible. Clunky diagogue, overdone CGI, bland performances, pedestrian plotting. Absolutely nothing to recommend it.) Still, this is Thailand, and inevitably the nightlife is cut through with a generous dose of sleaze.
At night, Patong comes alive with expat bars, go-go clubs, ladyboy cabarets, Thai boxing, freelancers offering up the boom-boom, and whatever else you could possibly want. One section of the town is closed to all but pedestrian traffic at night and the streets buzz with energy. Airline tickets from Australia to Phuket have become very cheap, and the place was crawling with Aussies. The hawkers quickly become oppressive, trying to shake your hand as you walk by in order to drag you into their stores, asking you where you're from-- most assumed I was Australian, once I got mistaken for a Swede, and my resolute muteness in the face of these incessant inquiries even earned me the question "Do you speak English?" At night it was impossible to avoid dudes trying to get you to check out what they delicately referred to as "pussy shows", descended from the infamous onstage spectacles that originated in Bangkok's Patpong. They would hold up a little sign listing twenty or so gymnastic feats their female dancers (if that's what they're called) were supposedly able to perform with the most intimate parts of their anatomy. I didn't have any particular interest in checking it out, and I was especially leery when they insisted that the shows were free, which smelled like an unpleasent scam to me. The Aussie couple checked it out and confirmed that it was totally disgusting (darts shot out of women's private parts, unwinding long strings out of the same area, and so on) and they were charged 400 Baht for their first beer, which is roughly 7 or 8 times more expensive than a beer in a regular bar.
In Phuket, you also couldn't avoid the ladyboys. Ladyboys are ground zero of Thai mythology for many Westerners, a nerve center firmly enmeshed in the cultural landscape, and I can understand why. Thai ladyboys can be unnervingly difficult to spot. Their builds are much slighter than Western men and their legs and torsos much slimmer. They're also everywhere-- finding a transgender (s)him in this country is as easy as locating the nearest 7-11. (Credit to my friend Casey for inventing the term "(s)him".) In Patong there was a table set up for dancers advertising one of the ubiquitous ladyboy caberets. I never tired of trying to figure out who was a chick and who was a chick with a dick or some other variation on the theme. Massive fake tits were a dead giveaway, as was an overly aggressive manner (Thai women are generally very shy) or paradoxically an exaggerated feminine walk, hips swaying back and forth in a caricature of womanhood. There was one shim in particular who was hanging out in front of the club that confounded me with "her" convincing feminine looks, and (s)he pulled me over when she saw me wielding my camera and insisted I take a picture with her and a friend (pic also forthcoming). I was pleased to note that her voice gave her away completely. As I departed she lightly rubbed her hand along my stomach. That kinda sums up the unnerving aspect of the ladyboy-- all the aggression of your average street hawker, but amps up the discomfort with transgender ambiguity and an alarming willingess to invade your personal space, especially if you're a man. I opted against attending a ladyboy cabaret in the end because I didn't want to deal with the harassment.
Thai boxing is also huge in Phuket. I went to a gig there which was fun but the fighters weren't as professional as the ones in Bangkok and not quite as raw as the street brawl fighters in Chiang Mai. The first fight in Chiang Mai was between two kids who couldn't have been older than the early teens, which unnerved me and I found myself rooting for the underdog simply because I couldn't bear to see a little kid get his ass kicked, even if it was by another little kid. I've seen a bunch of knockouts. Knockouts are the real deal and as a result can come out of nowhere, one kick or punch connects totally, usually with the head, and what seemed to be a reasonably even match ends quite suddenly. I was rooting for the underdog in one of the fights yesterday in Hat Lamai when the he unexpectedly smashed his opponent backwards and kicked him square in the head as he rebounded off the mat shielding the inner corner of the ring. You can identify a solid blow when its recipient freezes in shock for a moment and teeters on the edge of passing out. He recovered but then a round or so later began to stagger around drunkenly and could barely walk back to his corner after the whistle blew, but bravely fought on even as he struggled to stand. He made it through the fight without getting knocked out, but mostly because his opponent hesitated at those crucial moments when he should've moved in to finish him off.
In another fight yesterday a fighter got kneed under the chin twice in quick succession and after the second blow his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he crumpled to the ground. He bounced off the mat and got back up immediately, the impact having jarred him back into consciousness. The ref displayed poor judgment by not stopping the fight at this point and the other boxer moved right in and a couple punches later his opponent went down again, this time for good. A ref in Chiang Mai stopped a fight early because one of the boxers had just taken a hard knock and was wobbling on glass knees and a well-directed punch at that moment of vulnerability could've done some very serious damage. My first fight was in Bangkok, and there the fighters were comparatively quite skilled and there were no knockouts. Every other boxing gig I've seen since then has involved knockouts, although all of the fighters have managed to pick themselves up and stagger to the locker room after spending some time spread-eagled on the mat, head lolling to one side, eyes blinking in and out of consciousness. The walk out of the ring is a painful sight, shoulders hunched down, barely mustering the strength to move forward.
The "half-time" show in Chiang Mai consisted of three fighters stepping into the ring and putting on blindfolds, and then lurching around trying to punch the other two. It quickly became chaos and even the ref caught a couple of stray punches. The ferocity with which they would punch each other blindly was quite startling, although they were all smiles with each other after it was done. I dissolved into laughter at the absurdity of it all. The half-time show captured for me one of the SE Asian qualities that I will miss when I'm finally back in the States-- the feeling that something completely bizarre could happen at any time and out of nowhere. I went to the bathroom at the Muay Thai show in Phuket and as I was washing my hands, two Thai dudes who worked at the club descended on me for some unsolicited Thai massage and starting cracking my back and even tried to crack my neck-- I stopped them, I was slightly drunk and that stepped outside of my comfort zone-- something that would never, ever happen back home in the land of over-regulation and personal space issues.
I will also miss collecting stories on the road, both first and secondhand. For instance, when I brought up the infamous Aussie Quarantine (see blog below) with the 23-year old Australian couple, the woman admitted sheepishly that she once accidentally brought a gram of coke through. She had throught the gram of coke lost but it was merely hidden somewhere in the cavernous depths of her purse. She went through customs totally oblivious that she was walking a tightrope between freedom and incarceration, and then arrived home and discovered the gram while emptying out her purse. Unbelievable. Still, it's nothing even remotely as jaw-dropping as a story I heard from a Canadian dude I ran into on the streets of Bangkok. He'd been traveling for approximately as long as I had throughout SE Asia and was coming off a week or two in Chiang Mai. (WARNING: The following is not, I repeat not, for the faint of heart. If you're squeamish, stop reading right here.) He told me a story of a German businessman who traveled to Bangkok every month as part of some kind of obscure import-export electronics gig. He picked up a prostitute on the streets of Bangkok and at some point during their assignation became a bit disconcerted, because the prostitute kept insisting on getting fucked in the ass. Well, I suppose you can guess why. The Canadian remarked to me, in mock despair, "Why couldn't he have told me that this happened to someone he knew, or a friend of a friend or something? I felt like throwing up after he told me." (The first rule of Thailand is...) I have a strong stomach, but that little anecdote managed to singe my eardrums. Thai Ladyboys-- same same, but different.
people born in the 80s rule !!!!11!1!
Posted by: Geetu | May 30, 2008 at 05:55 AM