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| Katie and a coconut. |
My friend Katie, the very same Katie who spent two weeks with us in Spain about a year and a half ago, just departed from her visit here in Thailand with a promise to see us again in our next destination. She's amazing. A day after her arrival, we left town to spent three days on Koh Phangan, an island off the coast of Surat province famous for its landscapes and parties. Our time on the secluded beach of Haad Yuan consisted largely of drinking beer in the sand and reading on our beachview terrace, but the journey there, in retrospect a dark foreshadowing of the rest of Katie's Thai experience, was....arduous.
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| The view from our bungalow. Nice place. Bad, bad bathroom. |
Getting to Haad Yuan, a beautiful (albeit touristy and way too boho) beach on the west side of the island, entails the following: Drive motorbike to bus station. Park in slightly sketchy enclosed lot near bus station. Take minibus on a one-hour ride to the port. Wait at the port, normally for less than an hour, but for nearly three if they happened to have changed the departure times that day without telling anyone. Play cards and eat overpriced food to pass the time while grumbling about the Thai inability to keep to a schedule. Board the ferry and sit for 2.5 hours, during which time you will be incredibly hot and dealing with various waves of unpleasant smells. Nice views though.
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| Katie and I on the taxi boat. It's much nicer in the daytime. |
Arrive at Koh Phangan at sunset. Pile into tuk-tuk with several European strangers and embark on thirty-minute ride of terror through the hilly, curvy terrain of the island, at the mercy of a driver who appears to have consumed a dangerous dose of amphetamines. Arrive at Haad Rin, the party beach. Walk ten minutes through the garbage of last night and the crowds of the young evening to the shore, where you will hire a taxi boat. It's a wooden longtail with a car engine strapped to the back. The driver will go at a speed you judge to be way too fast for nighttime along a rocky coast, but you've just gotta trust that he's done this a million times. Arrive at destination, find an available bungalow, sit at beach restaurant and order beers immediately.
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| Western luxuries in tourist paradise. |
But after we had gotten through the trials, and with Katie now familiar, on her second day in Thailand, with about seven forms of Thai transportation, we enjoyed ourselves relaxing on the postcard of a beach. Levi and Katie even woke early one day and walked to the bar, where zonked-out hippies were still raving in strobe lights to nineties trance music well after dawn. Quite an experience. And our ride home was much smoother; we even had the luck of an air-conditioned ferry. We rested up in Surat for a day before embarking on our next journey: Thai New Year. More to follow soon; it deserves a focus of its own.
