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Published: January 3rd 2009
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Tuk Tuk in Koh San Road
I only managed 1 Tuk Tuk journey.....always good fun. So the evening of New Year’s Day was a bit quiet. Koh San Road was pretty tranquil- a rare event I’m sure as normally it’s really bustling. I wandered about, had a beer or 2.
I met a couple of lads from Doncaster who were pretty funny. They’d been to Koh Samui for NYE at one of the famous Full Moon Parties. They told some pretty wild tales of excesses, it sounds like the normally severe Thai police turn a blind eye to a lot of stuff they’d usually frown upon (drugs of all varieties, rutting on the beach……). The 2 lads were looking a bit worse for wear, foolishly thinking Vodka and Red Bull would solve their problems. I doubt it did.
I also got a massage in a toilet. You’re standing there, doing what blokes do at a urinal, and the first warning sign is a hot towel placed on the back of your neck, then some shoulder rubbing. Once you’ve done your dash in the dunny, the real stuff starts. They cracked my back, my neck, my shoulders, lifting me off the ground. I didn’t really have any say in the matter, all while I’m standing
in front of the urinal. Most odd. I only went to the toilet once in that place. I wonder if anyone ever takes offence and clocks them one…..
But I was still jaded from New Year’s Eve, and had a quiet one. I wonder if the 2 Doncaster lads fared any better.
Friday was my last whole day of the whole trip, amazing to think I’d been away for 6 weeks now. On the 1 hand that meant I should get the most out of the day, on the other I thought some relaxation would be a good move in the hope of arriving home refreshed and ready to go. Koh San Road is a fun place to hang out, there’s great food for sale at incredibly low prices - Sweetcorn, Noodles / Pad Thai, lots of fresh fruit and juices. There’s also a huge range of tourist tat - T-shirts, ripped off DVDs and CDs, posters, ornaments. The whole street is constantly accompanied by the chirruping of dozens of frogs - but they’re all wooden ones being sold by little women constantly thrusting them into Tourist’s faces like they’re the most amazing thing you’d ever seen. It gets a bit waring after a while……so after taking all of this in, I found a couple of cafes on sidestreets and took it easy before retiring to the hotel’s pool and taking it even easier.
The Fear and Loathing part kicked in at about 6pm, I guess it was bound to happen on my last night. I found a good spot at a bar, right next to the street, for a couple of drinks. I chatted to a German girl called Sandra from Munich who was lovely, but met up with some friends and wandered on. Then it was 2 German lads who’d just arrived and seemed determined to hit the self-destruct button, they were good value, then 2 Thai girls who were really good fun. Pat and her sister were playing at being tourists themselves, off work for new year and, in behaviour I hadn’t really seen in the Thai’s before, they were out for a big night. The 5 of us went from a dodgy tourist bar, to a really dodgy tourist bar that was simply a trolley full of spirits surrounded by stools on the pavement and a dirty great big stereo. For 300 Baht (6 or 7 quid) they served cocktails in buckets loaded up with spirits that we shared with straws. Not your ‘mopping the floor’ kind of bucket, more a ‘bucket and spade at the beach’ kind of bucket……..but it didn’t take long for things to get very mangled. I have some disjointed fragments of memories, snippets of conversations recalled with people from Finland, Denmark, Canberra, Scotland, Sydney, Canada and St Louis, we were all dancing to cheesy house music and amazingly the 2 Thai sisters were leading the drinking charge - but I’m not one to shy away from a challenge and I did my best to keep up.
I haven’t got the faintest idea what time we left that place. One of the Germans had disappeared, the other was slumped in a corner looking broken, unable to remember the name of his hotel. I danced (well, I say danced) with the girls, and the wider league of nations, until the place - such as it was - decided to call it a night sometime between 2 and 8am (I have absolutely no idea). Thankfully the D&D hotel was about 50 yards away.
All this left me bright-eyed and bushy tailed the next morning to pack my bags and check out of the hotel. I was clearly thinking straight, I screwed up the time of my flight which is, I think, the first travel-related stuff up I’ve made all trip.
My flight was due to leave at 530pm, so I needed to be at the airport at 330pm. Somehow over the course of the last day my head turned that into a 330pm flight so I need to be there at 130. Which meant I got to spend over 4 hours slumming around the airport - admittedly a very nice new airport - with a bad head and a sense of wasted time on my last day.
The last flight was with Thai Airways, and if I ever meet someone from Lufthansa I’ll tell them to try a Thai Airways flight. Everything I could think of was better, with one exception that was admittedly beyond the airline’s control:-
I sat with an Indian and a French guy and we chatted a bit. In the 1st seat across the aisle was a fairly old guy who didn’t say a word or cause any trouble at all until about an hour before we were due to land when he quietly sh@t himself. He didn’t say a word to us, not that any of us could have answered what with pillows, blankets, jumpers and anything else wrapped over the noses and mouths of everyone around him. He clearly had some digestive issues, the smell was something to behold. He disappeared off to the toilet, and I don’t know where he went but he never came back. It was obviously pretty bad though, he’d covered his seat up with his blanket before he left and certainly didn’t take the smell with him when he left.
It kind of reminded me of my mate Will, who I shared a flight from Bangkok to Sydney with 5 years ago. He’d done himself some real damage during our stopover in Thailand, and spent most of the flight in the toilet. At least he made it to the toilet though.
Walking through the terminal to customs we smelt the old guy again, walking ahead of us. I won’t miss him, and I presume some poor unfortunate cabbie got a very special experience this morning, and is still scrubbing out his back seat now.
So anyhow, I’m home now. My houseguests have been and gone and it’s odd to be back. I think I’ll probably write one more entry to this blog tomorrow, drawing things to a close before I go back to work and life returns to normality. Then, you lucky people, the spam will end.
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