Too much pressure

---

The lady in the booth keeps saying something, but the fact that she speaks extremely softly and that the words she utters might be English, but sound more like some Asian language doesn't help me understand what she's trying to tell me. I'm at the Thai border, I just got my exit stamp out of Malaysia, and I'm still very sleepy, having caught the bus from Penang to Hat Yai at 5am. A line of impatient-looking Chinese people forms behind me, and I lean down and put my ear through the tiny window so I can hear her desperate attempts better. "You go to polee stashawn in Nakhon, you ge' one mo' mon." I try to tell her that the 60-day visa I have should be sufficient for my travel needs in Thailand, and finally she stamps my passport, smiles, and dismisses me.

In Hat Yai I alight to a bus to Nakhon Si Thammarat, which doesn't prove to be too hard, I just tell my destination to the first-best person at the bus station, and in a jiffy I'm ushered into a bus that's already waiting. I realize I'm in Thailand when I try to ask in English how much the ticket is. The driver and the conductor just stare at me, then look at each other, say something in Thai, and laugh. So I consult my phrasebook, but the words I say don't seem to click. I take out my notebook, write down 'baht?', and they finally understand, and one of them writes down 130, an acceptable price for the five hours that the bus ride will take.

After I arrive at the bus station in Nakhon, I call my host Mac, who works there as an English teacher. He is an American from the US and A. He asks me to come over to his place, so after some severe miscommunication I finally make myself understood to a mototaxi driver by pointing frantically to the address that is written on a piece of paper. "Look, mobon maniwat, mobon maniwat, it's written here!" The old guy finally seems to remember where that street is, and off we go on his motorbike. He puts my camera bag in the basket attached to the front of the bike, and wedges my small backpack between his legs. I carry my big backpack and my didge, and surprisingly the ride is more comfortable than it sounds.

I meet Mac. He's roughly my age, quite small and has a bit of a gut going on. His face seems to be a bit too small for his head, but his constant smile makes up for that. He lives in a really nice house, spacious, cool and light, and he points out the fact that he could never afford such a place in the US. We chat for a bit, then he excuses himself and goes to take a rest, since he has a "stomach cold", which I take to be the shits. He goes to watch some TV in his room, and the programme sounds very familiar, but I can't put my finger on it at first. Later I remember that it's Roseanne, and as it turns out, Mac owns a DVD collection of Roseanne shows. When asked about it, he admits that it's sad.
I decide to go check out the centre. Pretty much anything in Nakhon appears to happen on the one long main street, which runs 7km from North to South. My guidebook says the city is "the south's religious capital, an absorbing place, well-known for traditional handicraft, shadow plays and especially its festivals." At first sight it just looks dull and dirty. I try to get something to eat at a street stall. They have noodles, rice and veggies, so they should be able to cook something for me. At least in theory. They don't speak English, so I pull off the Thai phrase for 'I don't eat meat', but maybe I mispronounce it, for all I get is a shake of the head. "Mangsawirat?", which is the Thai word for vegetarian, but when I say it, they just shake their head and wave their hands as though I asked them if they want my AIDS. After wandering around for a while, I finally find a stall where I get a banana pancake, ignoring the backpacker stereotype.

The following morning a Thai friend of Mac's comes over for a chat. Mac later tells me that "he's always coming over without giving me a call first. I can't say anything against it, in their culture it would be a cause for deep offence. At home, I'd just say 'Dude, stop coming over!', but here that's impossible." The friend's Thai name is impossible to memorize or pronounce, so he just calls himself Beer. Beer is a colleague of Mac's, and he says he slaps his students, but only when they disrespect him by not using the polite form when addressing him.
When I want to go for brekkie, Beer volunteers to give me a ride to town. On the way he says I can join him to go to a friend's place, that they have breakfast there. Although the alarm bells start ringing softly, I agree, and a couple of minutes later we arrive at the Full Moon Bar. The bar is owned by Surat and his girlfriend, both hippies with dreadlocks and the usual paraphernalia. Surat is from Surat Thani. He has a brother called Thani. Whenever he refers to Bob Marley, he touches his heart two times and points to the sky. His gf has a stall on the roadside, selling deepfried battered bananas and sweet potato. I rejoice eating some and have a coffee with it. Surat has a bad hangover, and as proof a whole bunch of empty beer bottles are piled up near the bench outside the bar. After he eats some of the spicy curry rice with chicken that his gf cooked him, his hangover suddenly seems to have miraculously disappeared, and he gets more animate. He says he's a musician, he plays the guitar and also has some other instruments in the room behind the bar. There's a small drum kit, lots of congas and shakers, and a bamboo didgeridoo. I check if it's playable, and it's ok, although the sound is not good, typically bamboo. Surat is completely blown away and amazed, and says he's been looking for a didge player for so long, and that I have to come back to record with him. He gives me two of his CD's as a present, which is lovely of him, but I can't even read anything that's written on them, since it's in Thai script. He asks me to come back at night to jam, and I ask with a mock Jamaican accent "Jammin'?", to which he just laughs, touches his heart, and points to the sky.

Beer offers to fetch me, and I gladly accept. When we arrive, there's two guys sitting outside on the bench, drinking some beers and looking pretty stoned. Surat gets out his guitar and starts playing songs like 'Redemption Song', 'Imagine' and 'Blowing in the Wind'. His singing is not bad, it just doesn't sound like real English, but I don't care. I play along a bit, and he seems to dig it big time, although I'm not even sure if I'm in tune. An older Thai guy grabs a guitar, and starts playing some Santana stuff, which fits perfectly with his long black hair, his moustache and his leather pants. I share some beers with Beer. Beer drinks his beer Thai style, with ice, I drink mine as usual, not fancying watered-down beer or anything else associated with the word or the concept behind 'waterdown'. After two beers and a couple of hours of Jammin', I decide it's better to head home before things get out of hand. Mac says the expats call it 'Thai-napping', which means that once you're drinking with a Thai, it's hard to get away. I bid farewell to Surat, and he asks me to come to his wedding, next year on Valentine's Day. I say maybe, because he looks so hopeful for me to come back, and so sad to see me go.
Beer drops me off at Mac's and spontaneously decides to sleep on the floor in the lounge, without asking Mac. I decide not to give a fuck, since that's easy and free, and go to sleep.

The only other thing to do in Nakhon is to check out the temples. The most important one is called Wat Mahathat, and it's dominated by a huge stupa, but also has some impressive Buddha statues. Although it's all interesting and nice to look at, I get bored by the temples pretty quickly, same as with churches or mosques.
I take the bus to move on to Surat Thani. They show Thai karaoke videos during the two and a half-hour ride, and my amusement about it soon turns to annoyance. Maybe one would be able to stand five videos, but not 500, goddammit! The songs were all pretty much the same: ultra-generic pop ballads in Thai language without any edges, variations or surprises, and the videos all featured late high school/early college-kids, the guys with emo haircuts, and the girls with the Asian cutesy-look. Invariably a girl would have a crush on a guy, but he wouldn't notice because he has a crush on another girl. He keeps doing silly things to get that girl's attention, while the other one tries deperately to get his. At night they always write to each other on MSN, and during the day they text on their mobile phones. At one point in the video the girl would run through the rain, crying, with her mascara running down. In the end the boy would finally realize that the girl is in love with him, and out of convenience fall in love as well, since the other chick seems to be dull anyway. They end up hugging and looking into each other's eyes, and maybe there's even a little peck on the cheek, but no kissing on the mouth is involved, of course, that would be more than indecent.
Just one variation was a more upbeat pop song where a guy and a girl, who might be in love with each other, but don't know it yet, work together at a street stall seeling bao (dumplings). The guy next to them gets a lot more customers than they do, and although they are really friendly and always smiling at everybody, the customers are rude and don't buy from them. On top of that, when they load the dumplings onto their motorbike, the guy trips and the bao end up in the dirt. Although they are really sad about everything, they are determined to struggle on, and finally the guy comes up with the great idea to draw smiley faces in bubblegum colours onto the bao, and of course this brilliant idea results in a dramatic increase in sales, and in the end, everybody's happy, they even tease a possible falling in love between the two.

In Surat Thani I catch the night boat to Koh Tao, the only island I will be visiting in Thailand. I go there with only one purpose, to finally do a diving course. Before boarding, I eat dinner at the harbour street stalls. That's where I see my first tourists since I've arrived in Thailand. In Nakhon, I was the only foreigner, apart from the expats, and there were no other ones on the local buses. I look at them in bewilderment, and after finishing my meal, I decide to wait it out on the boat. The boat is concipated like a big dorm, there are about 60 mattresses next to each other on the floor in two rows, with a small aisle in between. Some people are already sprawled out on the mattresses, reading or sleeping. About half of them are Thais, mostly families. The foreigners are mostly couples. The boat takes about 9 hours, and to my surprise I even manage to get some sleep. At about 8am we arrive on Koh Tao, where I ignore the tuk tuk-drivers and make my way to a diving centre that has been recommended to me. I am greeted by a tan guy with shoulder-length blond hair, who looks like an Australian, and a guy with short cropped hair, who I take to be Russian. As it turns out, they are English and Scottish, and both are diving instructors. I sign in for a 4-day open water SSI course, which is due to begin the same day. With the course, I get free accommodation at the diving resort, and I'm most happy to see that I've got a big, clean ensuite double room with balcony.

The first day consists of watching a DVD about diving, which I do together with a French chick. The DVD is two hours long, and both boring and interesting at times. The most irritating thing is the constant hard-sell of the SSI brand. After watching I feel I got a rough idea about diving, and I retire to my quarters.
The next morning I am less-than-delighted to see that there are six people doing the course, four of which are French, one is Norwegian, and the other one is myself. There's the French girl, Florine, who watched the DVD with me, one guy and a couple. The Norwegian guy's name is Uffe. He looks really young, maybe 19 or 20, he has short blond hair and he's really tall. The instructor is also French. His name is Julien, and he says he also owns a tattoo shop on the island. He sports a decent-looking dragon in Japanese style on his left biceps, and a dull modern tribal on his thigh. The course starts in a class room, where we get some tuition about diving. Basically Julien gives us a sheet and a book, and we have to do some homework and go through it the next day. I failed to prepare anything, but the material is not too hard to follow. The really annoying thing is that half the course is held in French, since the sheets that the Frenchies got are in French, naturally, so they answer the questions in their mother tongue. Of course one can't expect of a bunch of Frenchies to do the same 'effort' (muaha!) as me and the Norwegian guy, and to do the course in the mysterious foreign language that is Anglais.

After lunch we get acquainted with the diving material we're gonna use. You get a mask and a snorkel, a wetsuit (ours has short arms and legs, the more professional ones that the instructors use are full-body suits), fins, and the most important thing, the BCD, the buoyancy compensator (diving), which is an inflatable vest that you wear during the dive. We get a bag for our stuff and head out to a boat in a smaller motorboat.
First thing we do, we take a dip and swim two rounds around the boat, which is not that easy, since the waves are quite strong that day. While we do that, Julien and the English guy watch us and smoke. We get our material ready, which involves attaching the BCD and the aqualung, the underwater breathing set, which consists of a bunch of hoses, to the oxygen bottles, opening the oxygen bottle, checking if the air inside is clean and if the BCD inflates automatically and manually. Julien goes through the procedure with us again, he tells us what we're about to do in the water, basically it's just a practice run and some skill tests. Before we jump into the water, we put on our wetsuits, then weightbelts with 5kg of weights in 1kg units, attach the snorkel to the mask and put it around our necks. We then put on the BCD with the oxygen bottle attached to it. A Thai minion helps us get up, since with all that stuff fastened to your body, that's not an easy task. We do the buddy check, although Julien says it's the 'body check', which makes me think of Rob Lowe and Patrick Swayze. My buddy, naturally, is Uffe, to let the Frenchies be amongst themselves. You check your buddy's BCD, weight belt, air, and if all the straps and the oxygen bottle are properly fastened.

Julien jumps into the water, and we follow individually, putting on our fins just before we jump. We do 'the big step' first, which means you just do a big step into the water about two metres beneath. While you do that, you hold your weight belt with the left hand and the mask and the regulator with your right hand. When you're in the water, you inflate your BCD, so you can float on the surface. We swim to a nearby spot using our snorkels to save up on oxygen. We start our first dive there, breathing through the regulator now, and deflating the BCD as we go down. Every metre, you have to equalize your ears by squeezing your nose and gently blowing. I find that breathing through the regulator is extremely strange, since you can't exhale through your nose. At times I feel slightly panicky, and there's some sort of a claustrophobia building up in my sinuses. We only go down to about 5m, but I feel as though I'm being suffocated in a tiny room without any air, with six other people I don't even know. It feels like a dependence situation, but I try to stay calm and breathe regularly, which is the hardest thing. I have to clear my mask sometimes by lifting it up on the bottom and exhaling through the nose and then putting it on again before stopping to exhale.
We get down on the ground on our knees, and as I do that, I feel a pretty intense pain on my right knee, not as bad as the jellyfish sting in Penang, but still very painful. I don't know what I've knelt on, but my knee feels like it's on fire. I try and bear the pain, although it's pretty hard when you're already struggling with the breathing and everything else. We do some skill tests, like taking your regulator out of your mouth and letting go of it, and trying to get it again while continuously blowing bubbles, and taking off your mask and putting it on again. I'm really glad when we're back at the surface and I can breathe normal air again. I tell Julien that I burnt my knee. He has a look at it and asks me if I can continue, and I say yes, although I don't really feel like it. I feel slightly dizzy, my sinuses hurt, I'm getting cold and my knee burns like hell. We do another dive, going down a bit further this time, doing some more tests, then we go back on the boat. I feel miserable and unsure if I like diving and even if I should continue the course.
We have some sliced pineapple and hot tea, which is more than necessary, since I also started feeling colder and colder towards the end of the last dive. Julien doesn't look happy with our progress, and we head back ashore, clean our equipment in freshwater and hang it up to dry, and then we're dismissed. Julien urges us to prepare well for the morning session in the class room, since there's an exam after that.

I have a shower and go out for dinner. I eat a nice vegetarian green Thai curry with steamed rice. The restaurant is run by a sole Thai lady, thus it takes ages until the food arrives, since she takes the orders, then goes to prepare and cook the meal individually for everybody. The place is quite popular...with Frenchies.Ii think I'm the only non-French person, and I start feeling exacerbated with the colonization of the future département d'outre-mer Koh Tao.
After dinner I go and see a doctor, since the pain in my knee hasn't stopped. He's a middle-aged British guy, and he gives me some antihistamines for three days. I feel secretly comforted that the doctor was a Westerner.

The morning session bores the shit out of me, and I cheat just a bit to pass the exam with 82%. I still feel I know what's going on, and I'm determined to do better today than yesterday.
We head out on the boat again, get our equipment ready, do the buddy check and jump into the water, this time with a somersault. I lose my mask and snorkel in the process, and Julien has to dive for it, which doesn't take too long, luckily, since I'm already embarrassed enough. This time we go down to 10m, using the boat's rope to get down. I'm the first behind Julien, and my ears are killing me for some reason, although I keep equalizing like a madman. Julien does the ok gesture and I respond with the not-really gesture and point to my ear. He motions for me to go up a metre and then to go slowly down again, but it doesn't make it better. He then realizes that I've been holding on too tightly to the rope with my right hand, and that the movement of the boat has me going up and down without me really noticing it. So I loosen my grip, and go down slowly, scientifically equalizing, and the pressure in my ears stops.
This time, I don't kneel on the ground, I just stand there while the others kneel, which looks like we're having a campfire underwater, and I'm not integrated. We have to take off our BCD and put it back on again, not an easy task for the noobs that we are. When it's my turn, I forget to hold on the the bottle, and it floats upwards. It looks like Julien gets a heart attack, and I quickly grab it and put my BCD back on, and check if everything is nice and tightly strapped. We now proceed to do some fun diving, looking at fish and corals. One of the French guys always seems to be next to me, on top of me, beneath me, as though he hasn't noticed my existence yet. I get pretty fed up but decide not to kill the shit out of him at that moment. Uffe looks like the clumsiest guy underwater. He is so tall that he doesn't seem to know what to do with his arms and legs. He keeps floating up when we're supposed to kneel on the ground, and he fucks up all the skill tests. He just waves his arms all over the place, although you're supposed to keep them attached to your body or put them straight in front of you, in a line with your body. As a result, he uses more oxygen, and always when Julien checks with us how much oxygen there's left, he seems to roll his eyes inside his mask when he hears Uffe's oxygen level. I'm very glad that he's there, otherwise I would be the idiot of the group.

Back on the boat, Julien is even less happy than yesterday, he seems downright annoyed with us. He says if we don't do better tomorrow he won't sign our diver's certificate. Oh well. Back ashore, we do the usual cleaning procedure, and I go have some fried rice with egg and veggies. Cheap and good. I feel a bit bad because I haven't seen much on the island, but then I'm really busy doing the course, and I'm not really up for anything else, above all not for indulging in hedonist activities like the rest of the tourists. There are scores of Westerners riding around on hired motorbikes, or worse, quad-bikes. You always know somebody is a massively obnoxious jerk when he hires a quad-bike. Many Western guys have tiny Thai girls sitting behind them on the motorbike, and I always wonder whether they're paid, or if they're doing the pretend-to-like-them-and-love-you-long-time-thing to get on the big money in the long haul.

The last day of the course we head out really early for two fun dives. This time, I'm even enjoying myself, my ears are ok, my knee is getting better, I'm not claustrophobic anymore, and we see heaps of great stuff underwater. One of the most interesting fish we see is the triggerfish, which Julien warned us of, saying he had a fight till the death with a couple of them once, during which he puked into his regulator and barely managed to get away with his life. The triggerfish is quite territorial, so when Julien does the gun-and-trigger-sign with his hand, we know we should better swim away from the fish so it won't molest us. Or so we won't molest it, I reckon.
The last skill test we do is an emergency ascent, which involves you taking out your regulator, approaching your buddy, shaking his shoulder and making the cut-throat gesture, which means you're out of air. He then gives you the sign that you can use his spare regulator, and gives it to you. You can breathe again, lock arms with your buddy, and slowly ascend together, making stops where necessary.

I'm quite happy that it's all over, although I started enjoying it in the end. I get my open-water diving certificate and card, but I don't really fancy doing another course, or diving regularly. It seems like fun and everything, but it's a quite expensive hobby, and I still don't feel too comfortable underwater.
I don't really feel like joining the group for a last beer, there's only three of them anyway, I just quickly drop by and say hello to not be a complete social retard. I'm glad I got rid of the Frenchies, and I decide not to do anything that expensive on this trip again.

---