The morning still found me in the passenger train from Bangkok feeling a bit dirty, scruffy, with icky teeth, without getting much sleep but by 6 AM we’d reached our stop and were on our bus to the ferry.
The next two lengths were pretty equidistant between a tour style bus riding through the countryside of Chumphon listening to catchy island sounding beats of the early 90s, and our ferry boat servicing Ko Tao, Ko Phagnan, Ko Samui, and one other i can’t remember. The ferry has a below and above deck, the lower with a long wide roome with seating with the snack bar on one end and the Dark Knight playing on the other, the upper with windy open air seating to sit and squint into the sun at the beautiful coastlines amid a single flat blue. Along both lengths we found people from many different countryies – Canada, France, Germany, the US, Ireland, China, Japan, Thailand and many others all nice, all happy to be here, and all oddly tranquil on the whole – as if they’d been let in on a secret that no one else knew about. With so many languages in one room language barriers were high and you start to realize that people have come to the island for very different reasons.
We arrived at Ko Tao at about 9:30 to be hailed by countless “Hello? Taxi?”s and a host of touristy shops, internet cafes, street food venders and other touristaphanalia as the odd cornucopia of saris, sarongs, beach shorts, boy shorts, tattoos, swimsuits, and pretty bodies rushed upon them.
Our free shuttle to Laem Thien left at 10:30. By then we’d bought ourselves soem swimsuits and introduced ourselves to a couple of pretty German women heading to the same resort villa before bucking into the flatbed as best we could with our luggage, and rumbled off to the hostel dirt roads. All in all a 40/45 minute cross between a rodeo machine and a roller coaster gripping the rail tightly in oen hand and snapping pictures of the awesome scenary zooming past. The palm trees, the rocky and sandy shores, cliffs, roadside restaurants and huts and houses of the locals rushed upon us and by us like lightnight and we held our breath when we neared our tiny village of a hostel.
Got checked in mostly without incident (thought they still have yet to find our reservation). After we dropped our stuff off in our room and looked over the activities board and the menu we rock scrambled over the cliffs to find several killer look out points and views then headed off aroudn teh rest of the area before changing into our suits and diving in. Felt fantastic and it was the first blue water I’d seen in a long time. Large crabs crowded the rocks and scurried away as we neared, red and white coral lay strewn across the floor and schools of bold fishes paid us no heed and even gave us a little cleaning. After playing around in the water for a while we got out, washed up, changed, and took a nap. We needed it.
We woke up around six, went down to the main area/restaurant and ordered a 70 B Chicken fried rice and an 80 B coconut veggie, chicken curry between us. It was definitely more expensive than in the city, but we were paying 300 B a night for both of us, and we’ve also resigned ourselves to sacrificing a little chunk of cash to the vacation paradise dreamland gods.
I beat Rick at a game of chess while we ate but only after a long and epic battle. Afterwards we looked around some more, drank a beer, and made a few German Friends. Zayanpi?… fuck… I’m forgetting the phrase they taught me. Something like “the frosting on the cake.”
He shared some a couple smokes another good convo before we all split to our separate beds where I find you now. I’ll catch you tomorrow for another episode of “Stop pinching yourself it’s real… No really stop it.”
