My principle wasn't the second overnight bus ride in a row that got me to Surat Thani that was the main mistake. After all, I'd a brief chance to practice my Spanish with an Argentinian couple and despite the halfway stop in the typical overpriced for basic Thai food restaurant, presumably owned by the bus driver's mate, perhaps with a cheeky commission-handshake involved with each visit, I haven't got that much to complain about, at least it got us to our stop on time.
We arrived at Surat Thani at around 6.40 AM, a town that acts as a good port to some of the islands on the east coast of Thailand - Ko Phangnan, Ko Tao, Ko Samui, but I wasn't going to any of those islands. It also acts as a kind-of halfway point from Bangkok to Krabbi, which works as a port to those islands on the western coast, most importantly to Ko Phi Phi, where I was headed. It dropped us off at the most ridiculously overpriced cafe/travel agent's office I've ever been to, where we were to wait until 7.30 AM for the bus to Krabbi. Wanting food and water, but not wanting to pay through the nose for the overpriced crap sandwiches, I asked the travel agent if it were OK to go for a quick walk.
"No, you need to stay here," he commanded.
"The bus doesn't come until 7.30 does it?" I asked.
"Yes, 7.30."
"Well, then we have 50 minutes, I'll be back in ten minutes," I assured him.
"OK, but if you're late, or the bus arrives early it will leave without you," he warned.
Thailand time is a little bit like Spanish time. Almost nothing is ever on time. I suspect the agent knew I was planning on getting some reasonably priced snacks and wasn't too happy about us spending money in other places. I walked with two young Dutch women, Nova and S to get some roadside fried chicken, some water and some semi-boiled eggs, which when cracked open turned out to be disappointingly runny. We got back to the picnic tabled travel agent area, with twenty minutes to spare - for the scheduled time. The bus to Krabbi was two hours late to pick us up, then it drove two streets away, where we spent another forty minutes or so waiting for Thai passengers to board. To suspect another thing, buses in Asia don't like to leave their points of origin with anything less than maximum and with this being off season, they were shy of the number of tourists required to deem the bus profitable enough to leave without locals. Unsurprisingly this bus arrived late to Krabbi. As the local passengers got off at various spots I'd found a spot at the back of the bus to lie down and sleep, in order to try and recoup some of the sleep debt incurred over back to back night buses. I woke up to the angry Thai bus staff, who'd almost driven off with my unconscious state in tow. Thankfully the Dutch girls had alerted them of my presence and I roused into an awake but grumpy state before leaving the bus, giving off to the staff for their repeated grouchy rudeness, which they'd displayed multiple times over the journey.
In some ways, I still find my grumpiness justifiable. The bus hadn't even taken us to the Krabbi port, it had taken us to some other remote travel agent where we were required to pay 50 baht per person to the tuk-tuk driver to get us to said port. This struck me as one of those "Who needs customer service when you can just rip off the fat westerners at every given opportunity" moments. When we got to the port, they were less than helpful in regards to the ferry. Due to the dicking about waiting for the bus from Surat Thani to Krabbi, we'd missed the ferry we had the ticket for. This meant buying another ticket unless we were able to provide a phone number for the travel agent where we got the original ticket. This is something I could not do.My mistake lay in not getting the business card of the travel agent. The telephone number had been printed on the receipt of purchase, which unfortunately I'd had to hand in to one of the buses. Without this I had to fork over another 400 baht, but before that I needed to get more cash out.
To explain Baht again as a currency, in a very strange sense, it's a decimal currency. Almost nothing is less than one Baht but there are coins that are equal to less than one. Fractions of a penny. Occasionally you'll buy something with a fraction of a penny in its cost. A bottle of milkshake might cost you 12.25 baht which is roughly 24.5p. Most of the times you throw those penny fractions change pieces in charity boxes when they appear, but they affected me that day in the most irritating fashion.
When I went to get the money out, I was asked to type in the amount I required to take out. The machine displayed a decimal point, followed by two zeroes. Not having come across these decimal points before I mistook this decimal point for a comma, so when I entered the amount I wanted to take out, I was short two zeroes. Instead of taking out 10,000 baht (200 pounds), I took out 100 (2 pounds). OK, you say then just put your card in again and take out 10,000 baht. No problem. Except for the fact every withdraw in Thailand charges you around 180 baht (3.60) for the withdrawal. So this particular error meant I had to pay this three pounds sixty twice, just for taking out the miniscule amount of two pounds the first time round. I grumbled and took the hit on the chin, nobody was going to refund me for the ferry ticket, nobody was going to refund me for this bullshit. Despite Thailand trying to claw money out of me at every turn, I wasn't backing down. An English guy who had lived on Koh Phi Phi before was stuck for cash and his bank card was getting rejected by the same ATM that had ripped me off. I paid for his ticket under the grounds that he'd pay me back as soon as he got back to his work place, Phi Phi's Banana Bar. Sure, he could have turned out to be a complete scammer but I decided to have a little bit of faith in humanity for a change.
After all this ticket drama, we boarded the ferry and were all set to go when drama of a different kind took place. A girl who was about to get on the ferry was suddenly having a panic attack, her friend had to get off the boat and comfort her but for some reason they left their luggage on the boat, in the care of another group of girls whom they'd just met. I kind of felt sorry for her, but there was nothing I could do. The boat sped away from the dock and a large number of us sat on the deck watching the boat ride the waves on the way to our destination. As I sat, I scribbled down on journal pages I no longer have, one of those waves crashed overboard and drenched the paper with its salty sea goodness. Also on board the boat was a large group of Northern Irish uni students. They were good craic, but they were an indicator of the type of people I'd be surrounded by on Koh Phi Phi, the type of people I'd have been happy as a pig in shit acting like a lunatic with a few years ago. Call me a grumpy old cunt, but the prospect of all day drinking just doesn't excite me in the way it used to. I need an occasion, other than "You're on a beautiful island off the coast of Thailand".
Maybe I'm taking myself too seriously. Maybe I just burnt myself out in that trashy town in Cambodia. Maybe I've just lost my ability to have fun?
Day One
We arrived in the island and I can't deny its beauty. It was as picturesque as any postcard could ever be. There were no cars there either. To get around you had one choice - walk. The two Dutch girls, the English guy and I walked through the crowded, narrow-street'ed town in search of a place to stay. The English guy stopped at the Banana bar, grabbed some cash and gave me what I was due, plus a little more to make up for some of the loss incurred at the ATM. Good guy. At this point we all separated for a while in order to find somewhere suitable. I've no idea what my guesthouse was called, but I was immediately struck by how much more expensive everything was on the island than it was in Chiang Mai. 400 baht got me a pretty basic double bed room with fan and ensuite. Perhaps I could have got something a hundred baht cheaper for a dorm bed room but that would of been my own personal hells. Sharing with a bunch of drunk Eurotrash kids. Whether they were English, Irish, Spanish or French I knew there'd be no chance of sleeping if I was going to be surrounded by their bucket guzzling ways, regardless of their nationality.
I checked in and went out for some much needed grub. I bumped into the two Dutch girls and they joined me in a generic "we do western food" restaurant. I've no idea what I ate. It could have been pizza. It could have been a panini. I don't have a clue what I ate then, but the restaurant happened to have a decent wifi connection, which I used to contact the two Italian girls and the Magician. Once again, I'd missed the girls by a day, they'd hopped off to the other island but the Magician soon appeared. He was on good form, well rested and beaming the type of smile that said "I've just spent a week with a beautiful woman". We chilled for a while then checked out a few of the bars in the town. I watched some of the scrappy fights in Phi Phi's well known Reggae Bar - a bar not famed for its reggae music, but for the ring in the center of the ring where random drinkers could step in, put on some safety gear and throw down, each earning themselves a bucket filled with rum, Red Bull and whatever soft drink they fancy. I wasn't quite in the mood for fighting but I was keen on watching. The girls on the other hand weren't, so we went off to some beach bars where the typical Thai island music was being played loudly and extensively in your face. What do I mean by Thai island music? I mean both Avicii songs played six times a night in each bar, that stupid fucking "I've got a hangover, I've been drinking too much.." bullshit and that hideous blend of bad RNB and EDM - the American's attempt of making the piano house rave music with the grinding noises from Transformers injected into it to make it more "pumping". Other bars would attempt to do something a little bit different but it it was always electronic music that in my eyes would require a serious amount of drugs to appreciate. Not that I was for doing them on this island. Whilst it may have increased my appreciation of the noise, I wouldn't want to waste good mood altering chemicals around a bunch of drunken young fools.
Our decision was to keep moving, going from bar to bar picking up buckets along the way. I must have had a couple of them, opting for the more expensive Bacardi and Sprite combinations, shunning anything with the M150 or Thai Red Bull based concoctions. Thai Red Bull, or Kratingdaeng as it's known here isn't carbonated. It comes in these glass cough-medicine esque bottles and tastes as bad as the music played on those Thai beaches sounds. It's a liquid representation of that gunk. Initially I believed it was full of amphetamine like chemicals that guarantee it's existence being banned in Europe.
Apparently the Austrians allow it though.. Maybe they like battery acid based beverages.
We watched some more of the fire dancing that some of the bars put on. Some of this stuff was quite impressive, but it starts to wear out its welcome the more you see it. Especially when it becomes less about the spinning of fire sticks and more about the twirling of petrol soaked skipping ropes as overweight English men in their mid 30s, somehow still in Thailand jumping and landing with sand and jelly belly going in all directions. They really tried to force this thing to keep going. Two Thais would stand at either end of a pair of flaming skipping ropes swinging them with hope some fool would jump. At some point on the way back from the toilet threw myself through the ropes and then went back to sit in my seat. Maybe in high season there are scores of drunken buffoons getting involved in the potentially scar incurring jumping game but all of the bars running this activity seemed like they were scraping the bottom of the barrel for participants. The night wasn't all that bad though. The banter amongst the four of us was good and I took a liking to Shun, which she shared. She was a good looking girl, whom I presumed was of North African descent originally but later found she was half Chinese, half Dutch. Towards the end of the night when we were both good and drunk we ended up kissing, but that's as far as it went. She seemed a little bit shy to kiss but confessed a dislike of public displays of affection, suggesting she was more affectionate in more private, intimate settings. I should have taken my queue to invite her back to my room but I got a strange distrust of those thoughts. I didn't want her friend to think less of her for being "slutty". I don't know where those thoughts came from, especially as I said before, Dutch people seem to be less judgemental of others having fun as the Irish and the British are. This exchange marked the end of the night, we all went to our separate places of accommodation.
Along the way I bumped into one of the Northern Irish girls who I'd met on the boat. We ended up having a debate which quickly increased in it's intensity. She was trying to suggest that those who die of drug use, particularly those who were taking the green rolex pills in Northern Ireland. Quickly she turned very nasty, questioning my education and as to whether I felt an intellectual superiority over her based on her assumption I went to Queen's University Belfast. The fact is, I never went there. I can only assume that she went to Northern Ireland's other university, University of Ulster, a former polytechnic which typically ranks much lower in UCAS tables, provoking many cultchie students (students from small countryside towns) to have insecurities about the strength of their academia. With a snort of derision, feeling largely unaffected by her outraged outburst, I went off to bed and entered into an alcohol induced coma for about ten hours.
Feeling Good
I like to think I'd earned the right to do as little as possible on that second day. Two night buses in a row followed by a night of booze meant that I didn't have all that much energy for anything other than sitting on the beach with Shun and Nova. The Magician joined us and we spent a good few hours lazing, occasionally going for a brief swim in the refreshing water. I'd had to take a few Immodiums that day but still felt the need to be close to toilets. I made a promise to my asshole that day, if it agreed to do solid shits, I'd agree not to drink anything out of buckets again. A promise I was half sincere about as was my hoop.
There's not all that much to do on Phi Phi. You can take a boat trip out to Maya Bay, famed for being the set of the Beach, but I didn't care too much for spending too much money on a boat ride with more ignorant tourists. I didn't have any interest in snorkelling either, having only done it once when I was about eight I just pictured myself sucking up half the sea and spitting out the salt water after.
As the day lurched on I found myself more and more hungover. We got some food in a decent restaurant at the Magician's suggestion. There are two "Papaya" restaurants on Phi Phi, obviously with the same management and they specialize in typical Thai food. I got a really good Papaya salad and a Massaman curry and was completely stuffed. I was amazed at the Magician's appetite. It seemed like the guy could eat non-stop for days without feeling full. Normally I reserve this feat for myself but with all the travelling I'd done over the week preceding, my stomach seemed to have shrunk. It was hard getting food or alcohol in there. So rather than force drunkenness upon myself, this was going to be one of those draining hangover evenings. I'm not sure if I've told you before, but my hangovers often don't start until mid afternoon and slowly intensify over the course of the evening, becoming a bigger and bigger drain on my energy. I might endure a deep existential crisis, questioning why the fuck I was doing what I was doing, or why I haven't made it as an actor/writer/venture capitalist yet and once that settles in, attitude of mellowing melancholia pervades. That's kind of what happened that night after we ate. The Magician had to go off and take care of his businesses which he owns in America but runs away from home, so I was left with Shun and Nova.
Whilst I still liked Shun, I didn't feel the need to make a move on her that night. I'm not sure if I had the energy for anything. We went to a bar where I drank a solitary beer and beat them at Connect 4 several times before I was done for the night. My one regret about this evening was that I had a kind of argument with Nova. She spoke about how so many people on Facebook were posting articles about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict but they knew nothing about it. She insisted one side was as bad as the other. I disagreed and snapped at her, telling her that Israel seemed bent on committing a slow and punishing act of genocide against Gaza. Perhaps I was right, but I realize how ignorant I am about the ongoing affair. It's a part of the world I've never been near and every time I read something which would affirm my beliefs, I'm given something contradictory. I don't feel informed enough to sustain an argument but yet I felt infused with a fervor to correct her. She needed to know about the tanks rolling into the refugee shelters. She needed to know about the UN condemnation and she was a fool for not doing so. I don't know what I was trying to achieve but looking back on my mentality, it was one of self-righteousness and of a completely condescending tone. I'm angry less about what I said, than the way I said it. Though we parted on reasonably good terms, I still felt a sense of shame. They went off to party some more on the beach, I walked back to my room and mused about leaving the next day, two nights on the island seemed sufficient.
Did I manage to leave though?
Next.. Phi Phi Part Two
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