Koh Samui to Koh Pha Ngan
April 9th 1995
The boat from Mae Nam beach was open, longish and fairly narrow. The motor was a sort of outboard that had been made from a car engine mounted on a swiveling bracket above the back of the boat, with a long, straight propeller shaft that entered the water six or eight feet behind the boat at an angle to the surface. On the other side of the motor was a steel tube which served as a tiller and allowed the driver to steer by moving the whole engine on its mounting. It was the standard form of boat engine in those parts.
I thought this form of engine was a bit strange, as it must have been very inefficient in terms of fuel consumption, because of two things. Firstly, the angle of the propeller in the water, which wasn't in line with the direction of movement of the boat. Secondly, because of the angles involved, the propeller was very close to the surface and often even slightly out of the water, this created a lot of spray and splashing which would have wasted a fair proportion of the power of the engine. Still, they could get up a fair bit of speed with the things and as all the boats there were powered in that way, they must have been pretty good.
The journey to Koh Pha Ngan took about half an hour and we landed on the west side of Haad Rin, which was one of the two main towns on the island. There was a sort of dock, with a kind of breakwater or pier built from coral, which the boat stopped alongside. I asked someone on the shore where the best place to find a cheap bungalow was. She gave me a bit of an idea where to look and i wandered off into the town.
Haad Rin was more my sort of place. But only just, in those days, by the look of it. It was on the verge of becoming another Cha Weng. However, it wasn't there yet. The streets were still only dirt tracks and the buildings were on a human scale and built in a sort of friendly way, rather than with the ugly efficient concrete prison architecture they use when they go more upmarket.
These places all start as a collection of roughly built huts with no electricity, running water or much else in the way of services, i thought. The only people they could attract to stay there were the more hippyish, traveller types, who actually liked the fact that the place not only felt natural, it felt like Thailand (or wherever it is). The straight, conventional people who live in television land and are scared of nature don't want to go to that sort of place. But then, after a while of the traveller-types bringing money into the place, the locals could afford to build something better and the place would gradually go a little bit up market. Eventually it would become a tourist ghetto cum prison camp and the original people who put up with the inconvenience and discomfort in the first place would get driven out by the hoardes of two-week tourists who can afford to pay exorbitant prices because it's only for two weeks every year.
I wasn't not really blaming the two-week-tourists for it, although i couldn't understand why they lived the way they did and why they had to imprison themselves in some kind of isolation unit where they didn't have to deal with the real world. It was really the fault of the original travellers, for wanting to stay somewhere where there's other people like them, rather than just immersing themselves in the local culture without a little colony. They were the ones who provided the initial money for the construction of these vast luxury prison camps that had destroyed, and were continuing to destroy vast areas of land and culture.
Anyway, i liked Haad Rin, it had a good feel to it, even though it was a fairly large european tourist ghetto. I found a bungalow high up on the hillside overlooking the north end of the east beach.
Haad Rin was on a peninsular, which stretched out into the sea southwards from the island, so it had a beach on both sides of town. The west, or "sunset" beach was where the boats came and went from. There was a narrow strip of sand, along the edge of a generally totally calm stretch of sea. All along the beach were bungalows of various different types and prices. They mostly had thatched roofs, but some were built from timber and plywood and were very small, with just a single room and some were built from brick or concrete with bathrooms built in.
The east, or "sunrise" beach was a wide strip of white sand on the edge of a slightly rougher patch of sea. This was where everyone in town went to lie around in the sun and swim. In fact, this was where all the life of the place was focussed. The main bars were along here and there was a lot of accomodation next to this beach - some bungalows and some big buildings with separate rooms or rows of flatlets. At both ends of this beach there were rocky hills rising above the water, making it into a bay. And on the hills at both ends there were bungalows.
Mine was a long walk up a steep path. But it was worth it. The view from up there was good and it was a bit more isolated and quiet than the beach-level ones. It was also cheap. However, i got accidentally thrown out of it after being there for three nights, because the idiots that ran the place reckoned i hadn't checked in properly and thought the place was empty. They'd given me the key. It was their responsibility to tell me how i was supposed to check in. There hadn't been any check-in formalities at Mae Nam, so how was i supposed to know? Anyway, the bastards broke my padlock, which was on the door, and put someone else in there. I was really pissed off, partly because there was a big full moon party in a couple of days and the accomodation in Haad Rin was filling up. I didn't fancy my chances of finding somewhere else cheap. They said i could talk to the woman who was in there and ask her if she'd go, but i didn't want to do that, it would only put her in the same position as me and as i was already in it, i might as well stay in it. Anyway it had left a bad taste in my mouth and i didn't want to stay in their shitty place any more anyway. However, i'd stashed my passports in the roof and i had to go and get them back. As the woman wasn't there, i had to climb in through the window, which was really easy.
Oh well, i thought, it was time for a change of scenery anyway. I decided to move to the sunset beach if i could find somewhere cheap there. That turned out not to be as hard as i'd expected and i was soon in a bit of a tumbledown old bungalow right on the beach (that was the main reason why it was falling down!) It was cheap and pleasant, although it was smaller than the other one. But it was nice to have the water right outside my door and to be able to sit on the verandah and watch the sun setting over the sea, straight in front or the bungalow.
This period in Haad Rin was an unusual one for me. I spent most of the time out all night, listening and dancing to loud techno and drinking Mae Kong whisky and bottles of water. I slept a lot of the day and spent a fair bit of the rest of it on the beach. It's not a way i lived very often those days, but it was just what i needed and i really enjoyed it.
I didn't get to know many people while i was there, in fact i hardly spoke to many people at all really. The only people i saw and spoke to regularly were a group of scandinavians who i got to know on a very shallow level. But that all suited me as i needed this space to myself at that point.
While i was in Haad Rin it was the thai new year, or Song Kran. This is a holiday for Thais and they all spend the day partying and throwing water over each other, which is their way of celebrating the event.
A day or two after Song Kran, was the full moon party. They had one every full moon at that time of year, although this was due to be the last as the police had got too heavy and were causing too many hassles and the organizers were giving it up. The party took place on the sunrise beach on Friday the fourteenth and hundreds of people came to the island just for that night.
On the Friday morning i ran into Kelly, a woman i knew from Australia. Neither of us had seen or heard of each other since the SkyRail blockade in Kuranda in north Queensland eight or nine months before. At that time we were camped in the middle of a patch of World Heritage National Park rainforest, trying to stop it being chopped down to build a tourist cable car. Unfortuately we didn't manage to prevent them from ruining the place.
Kelly was travelling with a woman called Yoki who came from Croatia and had somehow managed to escape and find a way to travel a bit around the world. She'd had a lot of problems though, as not many countries would allow Croatians in. They were there for the full moon party and only planned to stay in Haad Rin for that night. But they ended up getting a bungalow in the same place as me and staying there for three days.
The full moon party was nothing special. Just a massive crowd of people on the beach all night. I'd preferred the place when it had been a bit quieter, before all this. And i didn't stay up very long that night as i was tired and i couldn't really be bothered.
The following night, however, when the town was very quiet because everyone was recovering, i stayed up all night and watched the sun rise over the sea on the east beach. Although the thai calendars said that the day before had been full moon, i was quite sure it was actually the following night. I don't know why, but the moon's really full for three days and maybe they put down the first day, rather than the middle one. Later, my british tide table agreed with me, but then there's eight hours time difference, and it's possible that it was really on the Friday in Thailand. Who knows? And, really, who cares?!