23/12/02: Leave Mae Nam, board boat at Bo Phut, return to Anadin Bungalows, check email, go for a drink
at cliff-top bar – rain. Eat at sit-down-on-the-floor place, then drinks on
balcony. Avoid beach and go to a rock bar instead. Give Mellow Mountain a go,
the cliff-top bar on the other side of the bay to the one visited earlier. Form
a gang and take them to the Drop In.
24/12/02: Get up late. Discover ‘Gatorade’, a panacea for my hangover. The Bakery for breakfast, buy Louise a wooden monkey, meet our new friends at Bongos for dinner, then back to
the Drop In for drinks.
25/12/02: Feel awful – drink
Gatorade and eat crisps. Bamboozle for dinner, chill with our neighbour, an
Israeli hippy who’s been here since our first visit to Haad Rin. Drop In for a few beers.
26/12/02: Breakfast on the
beach. Spend most of the day in hammock reading. Try the Bongo Bar for dinner, then joined by our new gang for drinks on our balcony.
It was hard to know whether we were doing the right thing,
but we didn’t have the time to deliberate. Part of me wished we’d stuck it out
in Lamai for a few more days, or maybe even squeezed in a few nights in Thong
Sala, or even Nathon – that could’ve been interesting – and then we could have
spent Christmas in Mae Nam. Having said that, would Mae Nam really have been
the best place to celebrate the festive period? At times it had resembled
something of a ghost-town. At least in Haad Rin there would be a palpable sense of occasion.
They knew what they were
doing in Haad Rin. The prices for our humble abodes – for we returned to the
same in search of affordable accommodation – had gone up from 350 baht a night
to 550, but we were running out of time: the place was filling up and rooms
were at a premium. S tried to negotiate something cheaper but was so disturbed
by the concrete cell he was offered, with sinister looking stains covering the walls, that he bit the bullet and paid the full 550 for his own hut.
In truth, S was not well. He was worried about an on-going skin condition,
concerned about the price of things, and hadn’t taken to the wildlife at all. A
man who values both personal hygiene and space, he hadn’t warmed to the rougher
elements of travelling and was starting to imply that he might cut his travels
short.
Attempting to put a new spin on things, we go for a drink in
a bar perched on one of the outcrops that flank the bay. We haven’t been here
before, and it’s not anything special, but they are playing Lou Reed. My
drink – for we are supping an afternoon beer – doesn't got down very well and makes me think that I should probably take a break from all of this.
We have dinner at the same place
we had dinner when we first came here, where we had to remove our shoes for the
first time. After getting ‘back on the fish’ in
Mae Nam my digestive system is now screaming out for some heavy, western sustenance, so I order the chicken burger with fries.
We’re going to mix it up a bit
tonight. We might even bypass the Drop In entirely. (We will
start by drinking on our veranda, though.) We’ll try the ‘rock bar’, playing The
Doors, Jimi Hendrix, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and the like. It makes for a nice
change, but S and Louise aren’t entirely convinced so we decide to move
on to Mellow Mountain, the larger bar built upon the larger outcrop on the
other side of the bay.
It’s good up here but the
clientele seem to be letting the place down a little. Or are they? In truth, S
and I are starting to regard our fellow travellers with marginal hostility. I
blame Chaweng for this, as well as our exile in Mae Nam where we spent most of
our time in the company of Thai nationals. Nether the less, a nearby crew,
comprising of two Irish girls and two English boys, seem to embrace us, so much
so that we feel compelled to take them to the Drop In, whereupon everybody gets
very drunk.
On Christmas Eve I was violently
sick. It started off well: I was hungover,
for sure, but I slept in until about noon, then armed myself with Gatorade
before hitting The German Bakery for brunch, where I digested, among other things,
the day’s Bangkok Post. There was a buzz about the whole place, and I purchased
a wooden monkey from the shop next door to the 7-Eleven for my partner’s
Christmas gift. The evening then followed the same routine as the one before,
just with added vomiting.
Christmas day itself was
spent in a state of general disarray. I invested much of my time suffering in a
hammock but managed to get it together to go to Bamboozle for dinner, my first
and only meal of the day, which never lived up to the standard set on our first
visit. I should have been phoning home too, but there was no chance of
that: the queues at Haad Rin’s ill-equipped internet bureaus were hanging out
of the door, and they were charging a mint for the privilege.
I tentatively gave the
evening a bit of go, chilling with the Israeli hippy next door who had been
staying here since the tail-end of our first tenure. Up until meeting him, the
travelling Israelis had aroused some suspicion. I’d had no opinion of them at
all before coming to Thailand, but they travelled in packs, fresh out of
national service, bronzed, toned, wearing tight vests and dark glasses,
avoiding mere gentiles. The Israeli hippy was different and unwittingly quashed any
lazy, inexcusable antipathy that might have otherwise crept in.
We eventually made it to the
Drop In to meet our new crew, but after two unsatisfying
drinks I decided to call it quits. When I awoke on Boxing Day, feeling
relatively fit and healthy, a cache of oddments awaited me. They were from our
neighbour, the Israeli hippy. He had moved on and had left us the surplus bits
and pieces he’d accumulated during his month’s stay in Haad Rin. This was
compiled of books mostly, and I spent the day swinging in my hammock reading one
of them – Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Man
and the Sea.
Not before I had breakfast
on the beach one last time, for it had been decided that Boxing Day would be our
last spent on the islands. The party was over and we had to get back
on track. The evening was spent drinking sensibly on our veranda with the
Irish girls and English boys who had served us well on our second bout of
debauchery in Haad Rin, before we bade them farewell.
The next day my partner and
I separated from S, who returned to Samui to try and exploit the island in the
way only a single person maybe can. It was a sad but not totally unexpected end
to our travelling triumvirate, but S had financial concerns as well as
physical ones. To the latter he could now add the irritating bites of the many
sand fleas that had infiltrated his discarded trainers and feasted upon his
ankles. That he’d managed to find his pumps after losing them on the beach was
surprising in itself: even more so when they were subsequently pinched from the
relative safety of his veranda the following evening. And so he was forced to
invest in a pair of flip-flops, something that he and I had hitherto resisted. S was not built for
travelling, but then I wasn’t so sure if I was either.
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