Turtle island
Trip Start
Jun 07, 2004
1
12
50
Trip End
Nov 27, 2004
Ko Tao, Thailand
Thursday, July 1, 2004
I'm taking the long way back to Bangers. First I eat an apple doughnut at one of my favourite little breakfast bars in Haad Rin. A pick up truck transfers it's human cargo to Thong Sala and we board a boat to Koh Tao, turtle island.
There is precious little room to sit on the long sweeping roof of the vessel and no shade from the overhead sun. It's packed with weary post-FMP ravers and their backpacks. The trick is to take plenty of water and try to sleep. From the main pier on Koh Tao, I walk briskly to Sairee beach. It is blissfully quiet and I bathe lazily in the warm crystal clear water, lost in thought while soaking up yet another paradise around me. Recalling last year when the Dude was here too.
I order up a whole red snapper fish, directly from the coals smoking outside the AC bar, and I look for Nebraska. The bubbly waitress who apparently no longer works here. As a young geezer rabbits on about a bar he has just bought on the craggy north coast of the island - and how he can't fail to win. Which is a load of cobblers. I've heard it all a hundred times before. Foreigners 'own' nothing, in this case only a document that calls itself a lease. It's never worth the paper it's written on. Anyway, I'm more interested in my banana milkshake.
The second boat journey is longer and for a while I feel like a man cheerfully wandering the world's oceans. There is no land in sight. Until we reach the entrance to Chumphon canal. Royal Thai Air Force jets streak past overhead as we steer our way through a vast array of fishing craft and timber houses perched on stilts at the banks to the canal. At the small port in Chumphon, I board a double-decker bus that's heading north and sit upstairs at the front, behind a vast window. I am aware that as we take the highway, the border with Burma is close by to the left. Then comes the hissing of airbrakes and the throbbing of the great diesel engine, as we sit in the evening traffic in Hua Hin.
Next ; The midnight train to Bangkok
