The rain has been coming down for days now. A million tattoos drowning out the birds and the sea. You almost need to shout to be heard, but here you lose the ability to shout. The rain and the thunder do the shouting here and there is no point trying to compete with the gods of Thailand.
I approach the songthaew at Na Thon pier all sitting like big tins of spam on wheels waiting for lunch. I speak to a driver and get a deal to go over to the other side of the island. The songthaew are basically pick-up trucks with two rows of seats in the back and a sheet metal roof, they function a bit like a cross between a taxi and a bus, they generally have a set route and pick people up and drop them off along that route but if you are willing to pay you can pretty much get them to take you wherever you want. Various people get on and off, three young Thai girls laughing and joking the whole way, a thin young German boy with his grandmother who sit in silence the whole way. A man from Burma who talks to me at length then disappears with a smile off the back of the truck. I find The Wave, a backpacker’s bar with a few rooms upstairs run by two English ex-pats with a love of dogs. The place has dogs sleeping under every table, only stirred when they smell food being brought out to one of the tables. I book my room for later in the week and go out to look for transport back to the other side of the island. When I get back to Na Thon, I negotiate a motorbike taxi ride back to my accommodation with the last few of my Bahts. The other motorbike taxi drivers laugh as they see the load that their friend has to carry, me.
I have been up since about 4am, although I didn’t really sleep. I haven’t really slept since I arrived in Thailand. There is so much here to help you relax, the sun, the sea, any type of massage you could want at every turn. But the tropics don’t let you relax, they are relentless, relentless sun, relentless noise. The noise of the street, of cars and scooters, of music from the girly bars goes on all night. The sun rises early and the birds are in full chorus. I couldn’t wait to get out of my room and go and lie on the beach. I open the oven door from my air-conditioned room and a big sandy coloured dog looks up lazily from the heat. I step over him and down the stairs. The street is deserted, scooters fly by, smiles of prostitutes on scooters heading home after a long nights work. One of them stops in my path, ‘Hello’, pink lipstick and long dark hair. I walk on to the beach. Half filled plastic glasses of beer sit on tables of a beachfront bar, abandoned in the night, empty bottles strewn on the sand. The beach is quiet but a few people go past, a blonde girl jogs along the water line in the sportswear she might run in in Central Park or on the early morning streets of London. An old scooter overtakes her, laden with a huge white sack. I look out and the clouds are forming in front of the rising sun, greys and turquoise. I watch the grey sheet of rain on the horizon, the wind blowing in my face. As I get back into my first floor room the rain is smashing off the tin roofs.
The high curbs and narrows pavements make for a challenge just walking down the street, past the stray dogs lying on their sides, legs straight out, giving up in the heat and not moving in the shade. They are the smart ones, with temperatures going up to nearly forty degrees Celsius and with humidity so high that you feel you have a warm damp tea towel over your face and the sun on the back of your neck, like slow burning embers on flesh. Sweat drips from every pore and even if your clothes had been clean this morning, they are not now. The normal rules at home don’t work here. At home I would be up, hot shower, dried, antiperspirant on, clean clothes, freshly ironed shirt, aftershave, shoe polish, over coat and off to work. Here, I get up, have a cold shower (most places don’t have hot water, you pay more if they do, but once you have been here a while you realise you don’t need it), put on shorts, a three day old shirt and hat and head out into the heat of the day.
Someone once asked me “What’s the best thing about travelling?” I said “Getting washed.” and the second? “Putting on clean clothes.”
The boat from Big Buddha beach on the North coast of Koh Samui to Haad Rin on Koh Pha Ngan leaves at one o’clock. We check out The Red House where we stayed in Bo Phut, a Chinese shoe shop with four rooms and a little bar and go straight over to Big Buddha Beach, luckily we do not have to wait long and the backpacks on the pier let us know we are in the right place. More and more backpackers appear, English, Russians, Israeli. We pay our two-hundred Baht and walk along the long rickety pier swaying from side to side, eventually reaching the old wooden boat. There is no glass in the windows and the sea is azure blue. We see the golden Big Buddha on the hill as we pass, Koh Samui gets smaller and the rocks and cliffs of Koh Pha Ngan become larger and clearer with each minute. The Haad Rin Queen pulls up alongside another boat at the pier and we walk across it to get onto the pier.
The busy ferry taking divers to Koh Toa from Koh Pha Ngan chugs along a still Gulf of Thailand. We are overtaken by the faster catamaran which plies the same route. But we are outside and we are happy to watch the flying fish jump out of the water and skim the surface of the glassy sea. The journey is supposed to take an hour and a half, we are still at sea after two hours. We pull into the pier and negotiate the narrow and very steep plank to get off. They are unloading our luggage onto the pier while a few impatient backpackers grab their bags off the crew making it more difficult for themselves to get down the ramp. Much as to our eyes Thai ways of doing things can appear chaotic at times, we are in Thailand and it really does help to just take a breath and let things fall into place.
The Skytrain is cool, modern and orderly, a world away from the city is serves. A little television screen shows advertisements in Thai as we glide along. A large middle aged American couple sit chatting to their Thai guide. We savour the cool and calm of the train and watch young Thais in shorts and t-shirts get on and off the train, we could be anywhere in the world. Flying high above the city and the traffic we see the high rises of the city, huge corporate buildings, we look over the Royal Bangkok Sports Club, a golf course and games fields. A side of Bangkok most of it’s residents will never see, a world of privileged and luxury which evokes thoughts of a time when cricket was played on the lawns of almost every city in Asia, although Thailand was never subjected to colonisation itself. We alight at a Skytrain stop called Siam, out into Bangkok’s main shopping mall district, no fewer than five super sized malls all within a single block. We hear the shouts as we get off the train and we rush to look over the barriers and down onto the street. Hundreds of Red Shirts banging drums and forming a parade, joining the groups in Hawaiian shirts taking part in Songkran festival, Thai New Year.
Lumphini Park at 6pm. The Thai national anthem blares over loudspeakers, a daily event in many places in Thailand. We stand still and try to look respectful as everyone in the park stops and stands to attention, some even singing along. As we walk round the park, soon we hear music blaring over loudspeakers, not the national anthem this time, but the soundtrack to this evenings outdoor aerobics session. A huge crowd of men, women and children move in unison, following the actions of the leader on stage. Runners pass us, both Thais and Ex-pats and in the dense smog and heat of Bangkok, Lumphini Park is an oasis of physical activity in a sea of mechanised noise and motion.
