It's been a long time since my last post from Thailand. A lot has happened and I will no doubt fail to recall all the details but I'll do my best. One of the reasons I haven't written in the blog is because I've been busy. The other reason is that I wanted to make sure I was in a positive mind-state when I wrote. Certain events have been a bit overwhelming to deal with and therefore, I was't sure if I'd be able to write anything worth reading. Anyway, for what it's worth, here's the rest of the story ...
Budda's Revenge
The day after my last post I woke up early to fullfill one of my new vows which was to run at least 2 out of 3 days. I wake up to find Mack already awake, he gives me his WWF stare down and points at his gel-formed mohawk. He tells me it's his "running do". Kewl. Let's do it.
We run all the way down to the end of Chaweng beach and do sprint intervals on the way back. I feel great. Lungs, legs, everything is solid. Then, out of boredom perhaps, we do these running drills where I run and change directions based on Macks signals. Forward, Backward, left, right, and 4 corners diagonnally. They're sand drills intended to give you better feet and defensive reflexes for volleyball. I don't know if it was the slanted beach, the 2 days of pounding on the bikes, or my minor back injury before I came here. For whatever reason, something went really wrong and I had the worst lower back tweak I've ever had. Sitting, standing, & walking all become a massive challenge. I'm an old fuck-head.
I fell a bit better after shower and breakfast. The guys talk me into getting a Thai massage. HUGE mistake. I come out worst than before. Now I'm REALLY fucked. They suggest another day on the bikes (brilliant) and I agree (genius). We go to the south end which we haven't been to yet and check out some ancient fishing villages. On the way back, we stop at an intersection in the middle of no where. I see a truck with a Monkey on the back drive by. I watch the monkey, gun it to catch up with truck and keep watching him. Small detail ... when you gun the throttle like you're on concrete but you're really on sand here's what happens. Your back tire shoots out to the left and your right elbow drops. This cranks the throttle down even more, exacerbating the situation. Then your front wheel cranks right and you flip over. You skin your shouder. This last part is optional but I chose it for the full experience.
Luckily, a chicken shack at the corner had 1st aid and some friendly Russian nurses nearby were kind enough to clean me up. This process was a bit embarassing since all I wanted was to get out of there. The eyes staring at me burned more than the alcohol swabs wiping sand out of my skinned back. Towards the end Mack comes by and encourages us to attend the "Snake Show" at the other corner. So now I get parraded to the 2nd corner at the same intersection. The snake show was actually kind of cool. I even let the guy put scorpions on my arm since I figured after my morning back injury and afternoon bike wreck, god couldn't possibly keep fucking with me anymore. We got pics of the scorpions, my back, and other cool stuff.
After the show, I get paraded to corner #3 for some skewered chicken. Once the fellas had ensured that the Thais had had their fill of staring and laughing at the idiot American who wrecks his bike at 3 mph, we headed back home. We had a fun dinner on the beach where I got beat in checkers twice a by a fat 10 year old kid who went around the beach betting foreigners. Granted I was on painkillers and Vodka by this point, but I lost very fast & easy. The fellas had a good laugh about it. I returned my motorcyle and booked boat tickets to Koh Tao leaving the next morning for all 3 of us. Needless to say, I went to bed early and slept in the fetal position crying all night.
House of Pain
We get up early and catch the boat to Koh Tao. Packing is excruciating. Putting the pack on and off is even worse. I try not to complain too much even thought I know I do. Mack laughs at me. Matt helps me. I'm glad I don't have to be tough around him.
The cutest little girl insisted on playing cards with us and listening to our mp3 players on the pier. I got pics of her. Little butterball.
While on the boat someone tells us that the full moon party is actually on the 13th, not the 14th. We also find out that the boat is stopping at Koh Phangan on the way to Koh Tao. After stepping up the line of scrimmage and reading the defense I call an audible and change the game plan at the last second. We're getting off in Koh Phangan. Pooping on the boat was quite an ordeal. I won't go into details.
We get off and start looking for a beach-front bungalow close (but not too close) to the main party on Haad rin beach. We don't find anything beach front that works for us but we end up staying at a brand new (we were the 1st occupants) bungalow just off the beach at Bayshore Bungalows. Perfect. We spend the rest of the day swimming and chilling on the beach and checking out dive shops. We also find out that the full-moon v-ball tournament is cancelled due to the reconstruction of the bar that hosts it. We're a bit relieved due to my back and Matt's knee problems but I'm also a bit torn at the same time. I'd been thoroughly consumed with training for this tourney for over a year. It was the light at the end of the tunnel that kept me motivated to eat clean, train hard, and play in freezing weather. And now ... just like that ... poof ... the light is gone.
The next day we rent snorkels and explore the rock formations all the way north to the next beach. It is deserted. I stretch. We swim back. My back feels better but not nearly ready enough to play volley ball. I fall asleep on the beach. When I wake up, Matt's gone. I ask Mack where he is, but he just laughs at me. I see Matt playing v-ball. Mack laughs harder. It hurts. Kinda like watching your girlfriend making out with some other guy.
He have dinner and finalize our dives. We decide to go diving with Phangan Dive Shop. The owner and main dive master is a stocky long haired Swiss named Alex who looks just like Sammy Hagar from Van Halen. He was intelligent, articulate, laid back, and funny. We trust him. We book with him.
We head out of for a bite and plan to go to bed early but get temporarily side tracked when we get invited to a beach party somwhere else on the island. We go. It's fun & different but we cut out early due to our morning dives.
The next day goes well, we go to Shark Island near Koh Tao and I pass my 1st of 2 days of open water dives required for my certification. Visibility is poor but I'm just glad that the cert process in under way. The guys decide to skip diving the next day due to poor visibility. I go anyway since I just want to get certified. I meet a guy named Manuel on the boat. He runs an e-commerce site out of Amsterdam that sells Marijuana seeds. He's very intelligent and well-travelled. We get along great. I pass everthing and officially get certified. I go to the beach with Manuel and he meets the fellas. He takes off to dinner with Mack. I sit and watch Matt cheat on me some more with some little Israeli dude named Udi. He actually turns out to be a super cool guy. My back's feeling fine now and I want to play but Matt insists that I wait one more day per the game plan. 2 days of diving and no stress have helped the healing process along quite well.
That night we go out and celebrate. I had not partied since I got to the Island and I was ready to seriously kick it. We celebrate 3 things:
1) Matt's Birthday
2) My certification
3) My healing
We kick it Sea-Town style, Deez-like, call it what you want. We have a blast on the beach, meet lots of people, and party like little boys. It was great. We were definitely the stars of the Island that night (maybe just in our own minds).
I sleep great and attack the beach ready to take out all my pent up aggression on the v-ball court. I win a couple of games with Matt and then he grabs a bite to eat. I team up with a Danish guy named "Moegens" (Pronounced "Muntz") and we rattle off another 5 wins before losing a close one to a Swedish Team of "Johan & Johan". My back is not 100%. I can't jump serve, but manage to play within my limits and have a fun, pain-free day. That night I meet up with Muntz and his girlfriend and some other Danish & Sweedish folks for dinner. He ends up getting real drunk and leaving his girlfriend with some other gals. The two of us walk around the Island and drink buckets of Samsung. It's a good time. He's very funny and intelligent.
The game plan for the next day was to drink some "Special" Koh Phangan shakes and climb some waterfalls north of Haad rin that have to be reached by boat. We stop at a place called Purple Haze where a Macaque (Monkey) stole my shades. I could not get them back. The bastard was so quick. Finally, I took a shiny blue carbiner off Matt's back pack and sorta traded it with the Monkey for my shades. We got the whole thing on video.
Once we drink the shakes, however, Matt and Mack melt into the Sand and I do what I do. Muntz is eating nearby but he's EXTREMELY hung over. I team up with an Amazing Australian named Jim. He's not only a great player, he's also a great person in general. His wife helps me with my back pains and gives me advice on how to take care of it. We don't lose the entire day. I eventually stop playing due to back pain.
Matt: "How can you be playing volleyball right now?"
Ardi: "It's the only thing I know how to do."
We're like Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek except on the beach instead of the dessert.
We go out and have more fun that night. Frankly, I can't recall the details. The next day we keep our promise and do climb the waterfalls, albeit sans-shake. It's a good climb and we do some small cliff dives at the top. The challenge on these dives was getting to the edge using vines as ropes. We swim through a little cave and explore some more. We go to a Thai Boxing match which was pretty cool and go out briefly but take it easy since the following night is the full moon party.
The day of the party is spent playing more v-ball. I can feel the repeated back injuries sapping the snap out of my core and legs. My 1st step is very slow and I'm not jumping very high. I play poorly but go all out and play 'til sundown since I know it's my last day of playing. I have dinner on the beach right next to the courts wrapped in a towel and laughing with friends. As coldplay would say (1st song, 1st album) We live in a beautiful world.
The full moon party is great. So many colors, lights, music, and strange people. I curse myself for forgetting to charge my camera battery despite Mack reminding me. We see so many strange, funny, and beautiful things and I wish I could have took pictures of them. We see people passed out on the beach and their freinds building sand castles on them. We see a 300 lb woman who can't get out of 2 feet of water. We see a guy who spends the entire party just digging a hole in the beach. We see people with strange body paint. We walk, watch, & laugh. I loved it.
We watch the sunrise on the beach with 1000's of others and euphoric Robert Miles cuts. We go to our rooms, pack, and catch the boat to Koh Tao with no sleep.
Koh Tao
After my first trip to Thailand, if you were to ask me about the most beautiful place I've ever been, I'd say it was Koh Tao and possibly Kauai 2nd. If you were to ask me that today, you'd get the same answer. Koh Tao is the smallest and northern-most most Island in the Surithani province. It is very primitive and primarily a diving heaven. There's something surreal and almost cartoonish about the way the trees, rocks, and buglows are all interwined with each other on the hillsides and jagged cliffs. It's almost as if Dr. Seuss was hired as the architect and told that the only rule is you can't move or destroy any rocks or trees when you build the bungalows. Unreal.
All the bungalows and dive shops are intertwined so you usually dive with the place you stay and save $ in the process. We stayed at Sairee Hut. They had a brand new dive shop and super cool dive masters.
We check in, swim, clean up, have dinner and go to bed super early since we got a dive the next morning and no sleep from the night before. I stay up a little later and chat with Jeff, an American from North Carolina who now runs the artificial ski slope in Dubai. What a crazy job.
We get up at 7:00 the next day. We walk 50 yards and we're on the boat by 7:30 and under water by 8:30. That's what's so cool about Koh Tao. Everthing is so close and convenient. The dives are cheap and take no time. You can do 2 dives by noon and still have the whole day to do other stuff. And that's exactly what we do. We dive in the morning and explore the Island on motor bikes the rest of the day. We go to a bay on the Southern end of the Island called Shark Bay (for good reason). It required us to take our little toy mopeds off road. I have video footage of some of the trail. It was comedy (& terror). We skin dive with black tip sharks. I swam next to one that was the same size as me for close to 30 seconds. A small 3 foot one attacked Matt and he had to fight it off with his fins. I'd hate to see what the 7 footer would have done to me.
We eat a snak at the same place we rented snorkels from, right on the beach. The beach is surreal. It has bush-like trees growing right in the middle of it, almost creating separate rooms on the beach for extra privacy and something to hang hammocks on. I really like the owner. He was very hospitable and kind. The kind of person you'd read about in the Celestine Prophecy. He has an older relative (dad/brother) that drinks samsung all day, sings, and teases the owners little daughter. It's a beautiful vibe all around.
We ride our bikes up a treacherous hill to the highest point on the Island, to a place called Happy Days to catch the sunset. We drink Opium tea. We get severly sick. It was hell. Matt and I puke (repeatedly) right over the edge into the jungles below. Each trip to the bathroom is like a long walk on a boat in rough seas. This is not the warm, fuzzy, blissful effects of opium that I'd read about all my life. We keep waiting to stabilize enough to ride our bikes back. Eventually we give up on that plan, stumble down the hill, and catch a pickup truck taxi back. There was something nostalgic and endearing about the whole exprience. I felt like shit but I somehow knew the whole thing sounded cool on paper and for whaterver reason that made it a bit more bareable. 3 buddies poisened on bad opium on a small primitive Island in SE Asia. As the Deeez would say: "How cool am I?" Well ... I was cool enough to puke in an alley as we went to the store to get some gatorade for rehydration.
Couple of symptoms we had to battle that night:
1) Severe Itching: I kept coating myself in bug repelent but I was itching all over like crazy.
2) Inability to Urinate: I also kept drinking fluids to stay hydrated and clean my system out. But none of us could pee so the fluids would build up and we'd eventually puke it all out.
Eventually we fell asleep and woke up around 11:00 feeling a bit better but not even close to 100%. We had a 1:00 pm dive booked so we had some breakfast and head back south to get our bikes. Boy oh boy, the walk up the hill in that state in the noon sun and full humidity was biblical. We were walking up the mountain of our past sins with gods vengence beaming down upon us with no mercy. Classic.
I actually felt a lot better once I got on the bike. By the time we got on the boat I was good to go. The dive was great fun and we went out that night and partied the old fashioned way.
The fellas left the next morning. I woke up long enough to say goodbye and move my stuff into a smaller bungalow for 1 person. Passed out again and woke up at 1:00 to a knock on the door. The dive master was waking me up for my dive. Only in Koh Tao.
It's another great dive. On the way back I grab some pineapple and head to the front of the boat. I sit there. I'm tanned black. I've lost weight. Got a 3 day beard. I remember seeing a picture of my dad rowing a boat when he was younger. He was thin, tanned, and looked happy. I think it was in Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf. I imagine that I must look a lot like him in that picture. I also realize that it's almost 5:00 pm and I'd spent the entire day asleep or under water.
Before the fellas left, I'd been telling myself that I'd enjoy a few days of alone time. What a crock of crap! I missed them. A lot. I went out to dinner and drinks with a few other divers but it just wasn't the same. I walked home alone and got some water on the way.
I always advise folks to travel alone but I guess by this point I was so hooked on the good times and fellowship that I'd been taking for granted that I just wasn't in the mood to get close to anyone else. Not cool. But true.
The next day was a dive free day. I took off and explored the entire Island on my inadeqate bike. I ended up at the same bay where we dove with the black tip sharks. I was in a deep funk but the owners recognition and hospitality was a nice treat. I ate, read, slept, swam and made my way back to Sairee. I booked another early morning dive and went to bed early. The next morning I packed and checked out before the dive. Afterwards I slept, returned my bike, and and caught a cab to the pier, jumped on a boat and arrived in Koh Samui to catch my flight to Bangkok the next morning.
As soon as I get in the truck, it starts raining. Just as we touched down in Bankgok as I finished the last sentence of my book, I was now feeling the Islands say goodbye just I begin heading out. Sad.
When I was young I used to read stories and see movies about Vietnam vets who would lock themselves in their hotel rooms for days after coming out of the bush. Never stepping out except for a quick bite and a bottle. I always used to wonder why they didn't just go out and party, get drunk, gamble, chase chicks, and live it up. After climbing Matchu Pichu, I understood.
Now I've got that feeling once again. You would not understand. This is not how I am.
- Pink Floyd
I slept in my Samui Bungalow only to step out long enough to write this blog. I'll probably eat and go back to sleep. Just blocks from the Green Mango, the central Samui party spot. Why am I so drained? I don't know. I don't like it. But hey, I've been through a lot.
I guess at the end of the day you got your friends, your family, and your teammates. And if you're really lucky ... they're all the same people. I feel painfully blessed.
Thanks for visiting. Hope to see you all again soon.
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