Getting Wet/KO PHA NGAN

Sarah left early in the morning.  She gave me these parting words: "Don't take Xanax and drink, or you'll die."  Psh.  Whatever, mom.  For the first time in four weeks and four countries, I spent the day alone.

Well, not totally alone. Here's a watch ad by Nicolas Cage, where he is pictured not wearing a watch.

I ate some sadness flan.

And I found one of Shanghai's favorite piss-corners.

In the morning I rode the 20 subway stops back to the airport, mostly standing, because I had made the mistake of wondering how the subway ride could possibly get any worse.  I was worried about airport security.  I hadn't had any problems with the security checkpoints in the subway, or with my previous airport entry, but carrying around a full bottle of prescription medication did make me a little uneasy.  And then, after putting my backpack on the conveyor belt, I got flagged.  Time slowed down as the conveyor belt was ran backwards, and my bag went back under the x-ray, and then pulled back out to be examined by hand.  A security officer addressed me sternly, brandishing an item from my bag.  It was my alarm clock.

One of these things is illegal, and one looks like a bomb if you don't really know anything about bombs.

"What...is...this?" she asked, holding the clock gingerly with her fingertips.  "Clock!  Alarm clock!  Time!" I replied, relieved, then realizing I shouldn't look too relieved.  She gave it one last glance, and stuffed it back in my bag without another word.  I felt like Jason Bourne.  I felt like James Motherfucking Bond.  If those Xanax pills were state secrets, I thought, I just totally espionaged you assholes.  The victory was short-lived, however, when I spent twenty dollars on fried rice and ice coffee in one of the airport restaurants.  I felt like James Bond's cousin Doug who works at the mall and knows his wife cheats on him with the high school kid at the Orange Julius.

On the plus side (?), this store exists.

My flight is with Sri Lankan Airlines, a welcome change from the usual Air Asia budget flight.  Not only do we get headrest TVs, but an actual menu for the food as well.  I watch The Tourist and drink complimentary Scotch, which comes in handy when watching a movie like The Tourist.

Thanks, Scotch!

From the Bangkok airport, I ask how to get to the train station, and am put on a bus.  I was trying to get to the island of Ko Pha Ngan, and had read that I could get a cheap train ticket to the dock.  And that was exactly the extent of my planning.  Once we near the train station, a Thai woman in charge of the bus asks me where I'm going.  I tell her Ko Pha Ngan, and she becomes very adamant that I follow her to "her" travel agency.  It'll be as cheap as the train, she tells me.

What the hell, right?  I follow her to the travel agency office, where she presides as I'm sold a joint bus-boat ticket that is actually far more expensive than the train, but the addition of the boat ticket makes me okay with it.  Sure, I've just played into this stranger's cunning hands and padded the pockets of an exploitative travel agency, but there's something nice about not having to lift a finger as other people organize my plans for me while I lie back in apathy.  Like being sedated before oral surgery; I may feel extorted and slightly frightened, but I'm free to shut my brain down and get in some good drool time.  Once I've handed over the money, the lady disappears, and I'm directed to a bus waiting just down the street that'll take me to the port at Surat Thani, and from there I'll get a boat to Ko Pha Ngan.

The really worrying thing is, I was never actually given a ticket.  They put me on the bus, and then tell me to stay while they bring one back for me.  Outside the bus on the street is an impromptu dance party, which only made me more suspicious.  What do they have to be so happy about, I thought.

The travel agency people still hadn't come back with my ticket, and the bus began to leave.  This could be a murder bus, I think.  I'm on a murder bus, and I don't even have a ticket.  That would be so typical.

The overnight bus ride is a feared and hated staple of backpacker life.  Fortunately, this was one of the better buses, just below a Greyhound in terms of comfort (as one should hope, at 30 bucks a ticket), and I had the foresight to grab some food and beer from a 7-11 before we took off.  Unfortunately, all the window seats were taken, which can make for an uncomfortable night.

I'm no stranger to long bus rides, and over the years I've developed a strategy for what experts call the "Aisle Seat Conundrum".  I find an empty seat next to a nice-looking non-skinny girl.  We make pleasant small talk, after which I offer some food, maybe some beer, maybe some invaluable witticisms about whatever movie is playing (this is 100% always a hit).  I let a decent amount of time pass, and then pretend to nod off in my seat.  Ever so slowly, I let myself slide over, until my head falls on my shoulder, and then I "wake up"!  I stammer an apology, smile sheepishly, to which she'll say something like "Aw, that's alright..."  Now it's time to grin, but only in my brain, because she's just fallen into my trap.  Now I can happily rest against a total stranger's shoulder, while all the suckers around me in aisle seats are forced into more and more intricate yoga positions in their fruitless bid for sleep.  You can even try it with a skinny girl, provided she's got a soft coat or hipster scarf or something.  I guess guys work too, if you're less prejudiced about your meat-pillow.  The muscly ones feel real nice, I bet.

Don't try to hang out with your human cushion afterwards.  Don't make it weird.

The ride to Surat Thani takes about 8 hours, after which we waited in the bus depot for another hour before being driven to the pier.  Our bus tickets are swapped for boat tickets, which I'm given despite not having the boat ticket.  Things are working out after all, it looked like.

It's on this last leg of the drive that my bladder finally reached critical mass.  I had peed at the last stop, but the beers broke a seal that every bump in the road painfully worsened.  And there are a lot of frigging bumps  on a Thai road.  With my back hunched over and knees locked together, I made my way to the bathroom on the board, only to discover that it was locked.  I knocked on the door, waited a few moments, knocked again, and nothing.  It was unoccupied, and locked for reasons unknown but almost certainly diabolical.  I had a few options now.  The most obvious was I could wait until the bus stopped again, while my bladder exploded and I died.  That was unacceptable.  The other options required more creativity.  But I didn't get a B.A. in Fine Art for nothing.

The bathroom was at the bottom of the stairwell, connecting the first class seating in the front of the bus on the lower deck with the economy seating on the upper deck, where I was seated.  All was quiet at the moment, and everyone seemed to be asleep.  The toilet may have been locked, but I noticed that the sink was outside, in the open.  Opposite the sink was the door to the first class cabin, which looked sturdy and easy to block.  The trouble would be the upper deck, as there would be no stopping anyone from coming down the stairs.  One look over the railing and I was busted, but I had no choice.  I was desperate.  So, with legs splayed apart to both straddle the sink and block the first class door, my eyes desperately scanning the upper railing like a cornered mongrel, I peed in the sink.  A bright, never-ending stream of liquid yellow shame.

It wasn't easy.  I have a shy bladder in the best of times, and rabid paranoia makes for a poor diuretic, not to mention the sheer logistics of trying to piss with your legs angled wildly four feet apart on a moving bus.  And then the faucet wouldn't work.  I had no choice but to hope the urine would finish trickling down the drain by the time we stopped again.

We reached the pier and while it hadn't finished draining, at least there was no tell-tale foam.  Unfortunately, the smell had not fully dissipated.  I got to watch an entire bus of sleep-deprived backpackers wince as they passed one-by-one through the ammonia-drenched failure box.

I am so sorry.

I shouldn't have peed on that.  Another thing I wish I could stop saying.

At the pier we have another hour wait before we can board the boat, which provides enough time to visit a real bathroom and wash my hands figuratively and very, very literally.  While washing up, I notice my soap dispenser has a little guest.

If you could harness uncontrollable shivering as an energy, this soap would be a perpetual motion machine.

The boat first stopped at Ko Samui, then continued on to Ko Pha Ngan.  After the shuffle of passengers disembarking and the crew unloading luggage, I overheard a British girl sobbing to her friends.  At some point during the voyage, all of her cash was stolen from her bag in the luggage compartment.  Earlier, I had read quite a bit about this sort of thing happening on buses, and thus tried to never leave anything valuable in my larger backpack.  I empathized with her, but felt sufficiently superior in my own savvy travel sense.  Who leaves a great deal of money in an unattended bag?  The girl was practically begging for it to be stolen.

We finally reached the dock in Ko Pha Ngan around noon.  Once disembarked, I was struck by a great mix of relief, joy, and homecoming.

Yup, drink it in.  Drink it all in.

I had been to Thailand once before, but until this moment I had had no chance to appreciate the nostalgia of return, having been caught up in relentless cross-country movement since boarding my flight.  More excitingly, this was where my plans ended.  I had booked a bungalow for a week here, and had nothing planned beyond that.  I could go anywhere, with anyone, and my actions were limited only by my ever-loosening sense of morality and civil behavior.  This was what made people quit their jobs and empty their savings. This was what sold millions of Lonely Planets.   This was pharmaceutical-grade freedom.

I still had to get to my bungalow, which very quickly presented some hurdles.  For one, I hadn't printed out an address.  This was an easy fix, though: I ducked inside the first internet cafe I saw and wrote the pertinent info down.  The bigger hurdle was I had come during the Songkran festival, a New Year's celebration that consists of everyone in Thailand drenching everyone else in as much water as humanly possible

Here's a little girl kindly spraying passersby with a hose, like the cutest riot police.

Sure, there are some traditional religious underpinnings to the whole thing, but that sort of shit isn't going to fly in Ko Pha Ngan.  Unless that shit is colored talc, which was very popular for throwing on people who had been recently doused.  I hopped on a tuk tuk bound for the vague direction of my lodging, and we would be ambushed every minute on all sides by buckets, hoses, bottles, and water guns of every caliber.  Having learned my lesson about mixing water and electronics already through my MP3 player, I decided I should probably do something about the backpack that was starting to soak through on account of being in the general vicinity of me.  There was a luggage rack on the roof (that the smarter passengers had taken advantage of before they got in), and so I hung off the back off the tuk tuk, one arm clutching the railing and the other arm attempting to lift my entire backpack and fling it on top.

My sunglasses were clipped to the neck of my shirt, and in the midst of my flailing they came unhooked and went flying into the street.  I watched dumbly as our tuk-tuk drove on, leaving them behind.  It was about 5 minutes later that it occurred to me I might've asked the driver to, well, stop.  Too late now.  Of all the things I had bought for this trip, only my swim trunks and my netbook were left, and that was only providing the latter had escaped the festivities un-soaked.

The tuk tuk dropped me off in Haad Rin, at the southern tip of the island.  My bungalow was supposed to be near Haad Rin Nok, or Sunrise Beach, also the location of the monthly Full Moon Party.  After hiking around the hills for an embarrassingly long time and getting multiple conflicting directions from people, at last I found the Venus Resort.  The resort sits along a hill overlooking the far end of the beach, not quite in view but within easy walking distance.  Once let into my room, I looked over the damage.

The contents of my bags had made it through okay, but everything in my pockets was utterly soaked.  This included my passport, which now had many stamps leaking ink through the pages, and my wallet with all my Thai and Chinese cash.  I laid the passport out on the desk to dry, along with 30-odd cash bills, and prayed that I hadn't just set off the spidey sense of every burglar in Thailand.

The room itself was bare to a fault, as can be expected for a 10 dollar-a-night bungalow.  There was no towel, no toilet paper, no promised wi-fi, and the shower was so busted that it seemed to want to conserve as much water as was being wasted outside.

You could get the same pressure and amount of water if you just had a guy stand above you and squirt a mouthful of water between his teeth.

The most worrying thing about the room was the door that wouldn't shut.  So, I'll just keep it locked all the time, I figured.  I locked the door, and discovered that it would still open if pulled hard enough.  Not the greatest situation when you have 500 bucks lying on a desk in the open.  Maybe stealing from tourists is really exaggerated, I thought.  That sort of stuff probably almost never happens.  Like, say, someone's bag getting robbed on a boat.  Never happens.

I tried to nap but to no avail, so instead I took a quick hobo shower (just wet the important bits) and headed out to rediscover Sunrise Beach.

This is what no responsibility looks like.

This was my second time visiting this particular beach, after a trip to Thailand nearly a year earlier.  I had forgotten about the massive heat, for which the ocean breeze was a welcome tonic.  April is the beginning of the hottest time of the year for Thailand, which made me real thankful for the shorts I had bought back in Shanghai.  Travel Tip: when traveling to Southeast Asia during the hottest time of the year, pack shorts.  Don't forget them because you packed your shit in 20 minutes before your flight, while drunk.  I really can't stress this enough.

It was past noon, but there were still crowds milling about, some people playing volleyball, some sunbathing, some swimming.  For the off season it seemed to be an awful lot of people, but then it was also only 5 days till the Full Moon Party, one of the biggest and most famous beach parties in the world.  It was going to get a little crowded.  I walked along the beach, remembering the sights...

The tide carrying in last night's bucket drink straws...

Creepy inbred island dogs scavenging for food...

Mellow Mountain's siren call of hallucinogenic treats...

The line of bucket drink stands were intact, but the signs had changed.  I looked with concern for my personal favorite JAMIE ROCK STAR bucket stand, and found it in good health, although slightly modified from when I had last seen it.

Now with 900% more Paul Rudd references.

Although I think I have a new favorite, in BETHLEHEM'S FUCK BUCKET.

Seeing the beach again reminded me of Jessie, who had been with me on my last visit.  I realized again how alone I was.  If I got too fucked up, there was no cavalry, no shoulder for support.  This was it.

Fuck it.  I bought some counterfeit Ray Bans and signed up for scuba lessons.  Freedom's still a hell of a thing.