Siam Chronicles 6 - The Hop Began in Koh Phangan

Thong Nai Pan Noi
Being forbidden from going into either the sun or the sea while shacked up on a tropical island is akin to being allergic to butter and sugar while walled up at a confectioners. I’d picked up the parlous prohibition at an immaculate Bangkok hospital, which was replete with gimcrack oils of a blond and hortatory Jesus assisting doctors in various operations and also, oddly, in tabulating patient’s bills. I’d been forced to go – the blisters from the burn bloated so badly that it appeared to my gimlet eyed fellow man (while slipping willy-nilly over themselves to put distance between their persons and mine), that I was wearing a double-layer of bubble wrap for socks. I still felt this move may have been precipitate, but the pallid look of panic on the doctor’s face as I hiked my hem revealed I had indeed chosen the most salubrious course.
I was harangued into waiting a week off my feet, all hammocks ahoy and docked in sick bay. I made it five days before I succumbed to my prurient thirst for the cooling tincture of the azure ocean and I was romping rubicund through its welcoming waters. I was a lambent, laughing waterspout until I noticed we had splashed into a dollop of exquisite carmine jellyfish covered in white polka-dots. They were stunning, I got stung. I slugged sheepishly back to shore and so ended my premature nautical peccadillo.
The previous five days had been long and hot - reading, sketching, voyeuristically watching other people swim and skip and kick each other repeatedly in the head (accidentally witnessing Muay Thai, or Thai boxing, is unavoidable it seems, even if you really, really try). I also got to see an English expat held at knife-point by two toddlers - he assured me this happens regularly and is their normal way of expressing their boyish enthusiasm. This display of affection was accompanied by their impressive farrago of obscene gestures, culled from around the far points of the globe, in time to one phrase bleated over and over: “big boobies.” Kids just do the cutest things.

Bottle Beach
This small sandy stretch was filled with naked European families. The babies were fevered and covered in sores, screaming and sick, the parents totally unclothed and even more unconcerned as they smoked their cigarettes and lolled about in all their flabby over-tanned splendour. My muttered imprecations at their deplorable comportment did not prove to be useful.
As dusk fell I rapidly learned how to say in Thai, “there are many, many mosquitoes here” (Hyung MAH-mah). Although true, this phrase also turned out to have a limited range of use. I slapped myself silly and ran for cover under a nice fort of netting.

Haad Rin Nok
Climbing into a hammock four feet off the ground requires the sacrosanct integrity of the true believer. Lummoxing into position, the aged ropes creaking their antiphonal alarm, I wiggled my toes at the bay and swaddled in to reminisce.
Six years ago I was here - not in this shabby new bungalow, a blue plywood gewgaw set high over the ocean, surrounded by trees teeming with butterflies and the occasional pack of sleek gray monkeys, sitting Buddha style munching leaves, watching us watching them – but in a beautiful tree-house style bungalow sculpted of curling natural boughs red-stained and raddled together in symmetry, using the rock of the mountain for walls.
Things have dramatically changed for this place since then - no longer a glut of huts several stones in diameter, but instead a hard concrete slab town, ramshackle and rubbished, trendy and distrustful, distinctly unlovely.
Things have dramatically changed for me since then – I hear my darling husband’s deep voice at the back of the porch. Feeling the acute temporary loss of our coddled special-needs Chihuahua, he has adopted the local lizards. I hear him soothing a friendly gecko, saying supportive things as it chirps its calisthenics on a sun-blanched stone, communing in a nurturing murmur.
But here I swing as this place and I mirror each other again, both more capitalist and expansive than when we last plumbed depths. The clouds wading over this same weary bay, watched by the same eyes wearing a few more creases, still and stall in thrall of a brief elegiac interlude and buying respite for mottled legs sporting a shiny new coat of sterile white gauze.