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Not much to report today, we had nothing planned and so chilled in bed, having a long lie in and dragging ourselves to breakfast in time to catch the last of the scrambled eggs. As we ate, we were watching new tourists arriving - Dutch, English, Aussie - and I had this sudden feeling that we'd been there too long, as we sat at the table like we owned the place. We were in danger of 'settling'. We had to sort Koh Samui tickets.
Steve and Katie, the Australians we'd met on the sleeper train from Agra to Varanasi, had recommended trying the sleeper trains in Thailand. Apparently you get clean crisp white sheets, air conditioning, reading lamps and "There's even a woman who walks up and down the train with a bucket of cold beer on ice," Steve had said with a faraway look in his eyes. A far cry from the Indian sleepers - the beds were plastic bunks with no sheets, cramped and dirty, the air conditioning was a single fan which dated from the days of the Raj and did nothing but blow mosquitos in your face, and beer just didn't exist. With this in mind,
we headed for Kanchanaburi train station on foot to sort tickets back to Bangkok. Walking out of the main village down a small side road, we had to cross the main motorway and then mosey on down to the station itself which was set back from the road and marked with a beautiful old steam locomotive displayed on a plinth out front. I interrupted the ticket sales clerk's obvious addiction to some Thai soap opera, and she didn't seem to appreciate it.
"Hi, two tickets to Bangkok for tonight or tomorrow please,"
"Solly, all full," without taking her eyes from the screen.
"Even tomorrow?"
"Yes yes all full," this said without even checking, "thankyougoodbye."
"Yeah, thanks..."
Back at Blue Star, we reluctantly decided to take the bus to Koh Samui. This was cheap at 600 baht (about nine quid each) but entailed a minibus drive to Bangkok which left at lunchtime, then a two hour stop in Bangkok, and then an overnight coach to the coast where we'd pick up a ferry. A 21 hour round trip. We'd arrive on Koh Samui on Saturday morning, and then would have to get over to Koh
Phangan that afternoon for the all-night Black Moon Party. We booked two places and spent the rest of the day chilling at the end of the jetty by the river Kwai, reading, chatting and later on watching ominous orange stormclouds rolling in and, eventually, the storm itself break.
A loud commotion behind us turned out to be two cats having a fight. One had chased the other up onto a precarious perch on the roof of a hut, and as we tried to see where they both were, there was a wavering yowl as one of the cats fell twenty feet or so and disappeared into the lagoon below with a big splash. The frog choir applauded the high dive with a renewed chorus and the cat pulled itself out, wet and none too happy. The victorious feline laid down on the top step of the stairs to the hut, and started to preen itself with smug self-satisfaction.
4/4/08
Our minibus came at 12.30 and, having wished the Blue Star staff 'sawaddy kaaap', we threw our packs in the back and climbed in. Joy of joys. We were awash in a sea of the loudest Israeli people
I'd ever met. One would make a comment in Hebrew, and then the rest would join in, getting progressively louder and louder like an orchestra tuning up, until finally they'd explode in a shower of laughter that really hurt our ears. Then the whole thing would start again. We fitted earplugs and tried to sleep. We succeeded, amazingly, and woke up as we rolled into the top of the Khaosan Road.
We left our bags at the coach company's HQ and headed off to waste two hours. I got stuck well into a few glasses of Singha and finished Vulcan 607 - the true story of the RAF Vulcan raids on Port Stanley airport in the Falklands in 1982. I'm not the patriotic type usually, despite a long-held interest in military aircraft, but this book, detailing the politics, the problems, the people and especially how close it came to disaster, makes addictive, rousing reading. A real RAF hero story. Maya watched Hannibal on a big screen, the prequel to Silence Of The Lambs, complete with diabolical subtitles in English. She noticed one incident that made us both a little uneasy - whilst I was buried in my book, she
noticed a grubby old Westerner apparently try to bodily pick up a small Thai girl of maybe five years old. As the little girl and her parents all started screaming and the dirty old sod amazingly tried to argue his point, Maya sat up and drew my attention to it, as well as a few other people in the bar. Faced with that much attention, the old man put the girl down and shambled off down an alleyway. The family disappeared in the other direction, without any fuss. Was that real? Was it some kind of wind up? Had we just come this >< close to witnessing a child abduction? Spooky stuff.
An hour later we were on our coach and heading out of Bangkok again, and in front of me sat a tourist with an enormous afro. He totally eclipsed the video screen so that while everyone else got to watch Juno and Sweeney Todd, I just caught odd glimpses of the films around the side of this titanic hairdo. Faced with this kind of entertainment, it wasn't surprising that I dropped off so quickly.
5/4/08
We got around two hour's sleep in total last night,
with the bumpy roads, frequent toilet stops (why, with a toilet on the bus, was that necessary?) and the incessant snoring of some nasally-challenged passengers. Red-eyed and in desperate need of coffee, we were on the ferry by 7.00am and floated past enormous hulks of grey rock sticking vertically out of the ocean, each topped with a fashionable toupe of green trees. Tiny silver fish, startled by the mass of the boat and the thudding of the screws, swam clear of the water and danced along on the tips of their tails for a few metres at a time. The deep blue horizon was full of the hazy shapes of distant islands and we tried to work out which was Koh Samui. As we drew near, we saw the town loom up, busy even at this hour, and before we knew it we'd docked.
Again, all the other tourists had hotels booked and places to go, and as we all walked along the pier they were waylaid by taxi touts and hotel reps. By the time we reached the end of the pier, at the front of the town, we were alone, preferring our usual method of turning up
somewhere and chancing it. We decided to find a cafe, get a coffee and work out our next move. At the cafe was an interesting dog - it was a large black long-haired labrador type. We immediately made friends with him and he ended up lying at our feet under the table. However, whenever someone with a hat on walked past, he'd jump up and bark at them. He met his match in a wizened old Thai man who was laboriously pedalling a pushbike past. The dog barked at him, hackles up, and made such a ferocious display that the Thai man hopped off his bike, fearing for his life, removed his shoes and started to throw them at the dog. The dog neatly sidestepped the flying footwear and continued his assault. Only the intervention of the waitress rescued the old man from a doggy demise. We felt glad we weren't wearing hats, or our welcome might have been less friendly.
We found a hotel on the seafront - nothing fancy, but it had air conditioning and a huge comfy bed. We checked in at about 11am and decided to sleep for a couple of hours. Up and out
again later that afternoon, we left our bags chained up in our room and walked down to the ferry port to catch the last boat over to Koh Phangan for the Black Moon Party. Once on the ferry, we realised we had no idea a) if the Black Moon Party was even on, b) if it was still on tonight, c) where it was or d) how to get there. All we'd seen was an unconfirmed date on the internet two months previously. Hmm... I had assumed it was on Had Rin beach, which is where the infamous (and infamously over-commercialised) Full Moon Party is held, but we thought it prudent to check first. As soon as we got to KPG we found a net cafe and checked - yes, it was still on tonight (or at least, the site I'd seen two months previously hadn't been updated in the meantime, which was less inspiring...) and no, it wasn't on Had Rin - it was at another beach called Ban Tao. Okay, so how do we get to Ban Tao? Luckily, one of these taxi-type hop-on pickup trucks rolled past with 'Ban Tao' written on the top. Congratulating the driver
on his impeccable timing, we jumped in and headed off. The driver looked back over his shoulder, grinned, and shouted "BLACK MOON?" We replied in the affirmitive and, finally, had confirmation that we hadn't come to this island in the middle of the night on a wild goose chase.
On the road to Ban Tao we rolled past many bars. Most were displaying English football games at ludicrously high volume, and all were decorated with pink strip lighting and were full of bored-looking Thai women in extremely minimal clothing, sitting around drinking or half-heartedly shunting balls around a pool table. Drunken Brits tripped over each other in their haste to get in, and the girls dutifully sat on their laps, smiled crocodile smiles at them and had drinks bought for themselves. We rolled on, thankfully.
At the gate was a beautifully-painted Black Moon mural, and we were deprived of 300 baht each - about six quid. Fair enough, so long as it's a good party. Even from here we could hear the unmistakeable organic pulse of dark psytrance and as we came around a corner, saw the whole arena laid out. The decor was all in UV reactive paint, and there were electric blue grids and spiderwebs stretched out above as a canopy, with murals, multicoloured walls and lighting effects standing vertically. On either side was a bar and, on the far side of the main area, was the beach. Usually this was a quiet, tranquil tropical paradise, but tonight it was party central. The speakers reached up way above our heads like giant black obelisks and in the booth, a DJ in a white shirt that glowed under the UV lights was already swapping psytrance and techno records. It was pretty empty so we sat down for a beer. One early starter was already jumping around to the music, and the grin on his face and his extremely dilated eyes indicated that he wasn't 'just drinking'. As more people started to arrive, the body painters went to work on the ravers and did some incredible art. Maya, as an up-and-coming bodypaint artist, went off to watch and get tips and photos. I sat with a vodka & Red Bull and enjoyed the music. A while later, Maya came back with an American girl, Kelly. Kelly was a professional hula-hooper and had travelled all around SE Asia, funding her way by hula-hooping at parties and raves and getting paid for it.
By this time, the beach was pulsing with ravers - Hawaiian shirts, dreadlocks, UV paint and bare feet kicking up the sand. The temperature was still way into the mid-30s and so, as we got up to have a boogie, we ended up sweating buckets and collapsing with bottles of water. We went back later, of course. The music was awesome - hard psychedelic trance/techno, high bpm and extremely high volume. For those who know it, think the Meltdown Room at Planet Angel or the psy room at Synergy, but all lit up in UV and with waves crashing at the back of the dance floor. The night degenerated into a whirling, pulsing blur of kaleidoscopic UV after this. The party generally was extremely friendly and well organised, although we wouldn't have known it, we were so wasted. Although not as badly as some - at one point, Maya ended up looking after a Thai girl whose drink had been spiked.
Amazingly still awake (and even more amazingly still moving) at 5am, we started to make a move for the exit, to get a taxi back to the port and then get the hour's ferry back to Koh Samui so we could get some sleep. After a long conversation with an English couple from County Durham (to whom we thoroughly and repeatedly recommended Nepal with slurred voices) we jumped on two taxi bikes and, shortly afterwards, were awaiting the ferry. As the sun came up we realised we'd been two nights without any decent sleep, having only caught a couple of hours on the coach and again at the hotel the previous afternoon. We were shattered, and the Red Bull was wearing off. We had enormous black bags under our eyes and desperately needed a shower. Other passengers on the ferry looked at us in disgust. We couldn't have cared less.
6/4/08
We tramped back into our hotel at about 9am, and the owner - a jolly, large Thai woman - laughed at us heaving our dishevelled selves up the stairs. We had enough time for another 2hrs sleep before we had to check out, and took full advantage. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. Later we checked out, still groggy and tired, and headed for the taxi rank.
Before long we were on the way to Big Buddha Beach, where I'd been recommended a chalet/hut village resort called Shambala by a friend who knew the owners. Meaning 'peace' in Tibetan and having beautiful chalets situated right on a calm beach, Shambala sounded just the job. We arrived and enquired about a vacancy. We were shown to a cabin and hardly even looked at it, throwing our bags on the floor and staggering to the bed, still extremely tired. The owner smiled sympathetically at us and said "Check in later, whenever you're ready..." kindly closing the door quietly. It wouldn't have mattered. I was already asleep and wouldn't have woken up if a brass band marched across the bed.
Later in the afternoon we awoke and, starting to feel human again, went for a look around. The beach - golden, clean and unspoiled - was right outside. We went over to the bar for a bite to eat and a drink - we were both still extremely dehydrated. Shambala had a beautifully decorated open air bar and restaurant, with fish mobiles, windchimes and Buddha wall hangings everywhere. There was even a chill out area with beanbags, board games, a book library and a TV with a big box of DVDs. We ate Thai curry and massaged our ailing brains, Maya with green tea, me with a beer. Yep, as ever. We also met the dogs, one large fluffy personality who seemed slightly schizophrenic but was friendly enough when not trying to nip at ankles, and a lovely old boy whose back seemed badly injured. He tried to climb the steps to greet us and yelped with each step. We rewarded his efforts with titbits and fuss, and in doing so made a loyal friend who didn't desert us til we left five days later.
We chilled on our own veranda, reading, dozing and listening to the sound of tiny waves breaking on the beach with ever such a delicate sound. I lay in the hammock, and after three attempts to get in, once safely aboard I refused to get out again. Shambala - peace. Perfect.
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kate
non-member comment
sounds like any normal night out...hehe
Mooooore! Mooore blog! Hope you uys still having fun...really curious to kno where u are now! xx