I was dreaming I suppose
Fast forward ten days from the mangrove swamp at 5.30 am waiting for the boat and I’m at the lovely Haad Chao Pao beach on the north eastern side of Koh Phangan. My Thai is not good but I have worked out that a Koh is an island and a haad is a beach. The trip over from the mainland was perfect, clear skies and calm seas on a fairly large passenger boat that can hold around 400 passengers. It is a two story vessel with VIP seating upstairs for around 80 for an extra 40 baht. Now I know the backpacker code is to take the bottom line on just about everything but I thought hell, for around $1.30 I’ll be a VIP for the next four hours as we head out into the gulf of Thailand. I have a koori friend in Katoomba who has a saying at times like this that it made you feel like ‘a two bob millionaire’. Well, such are the joys of travelling in this part of the world and I took my seat in the rarefied VIP lounge heading west into the morning sun. I seem to have clocked up a few miles travelling the globe now but these are the journeys I enjoy the best, the journey into the unknown. I travelling to London not so long ago and while that was fun I kinda knew what would be at the other end. Getting on the boat to Koh Phangan I had no knowledge or expectations and as the mainland slowly slips out of view and you’re heading out into open waters you start to feel, well trodden backpacker path or not, that this is going to be fun.
I had no plans to come down here when I arrived in Bangkok but a dinner conversation with an aussie couple just off Khoasan Road and flooding in the north of the country soon put Koh Phangan on my itinerary. I’ll slip down and spend a week and hopefully the floods will have dropped and I’ll make that train trip up to Chang Mi. Well, a week has come and gone and I know I’ll be here at least another week if not more. And that is perhaps the greatest joy of being here, sweet surrender. When I first arrived here I found a small hut right on the edge of the beach, stone throwing distance. You notice immediately the postcard views but I takes a day or two to really touch down in a place like this and realise you are sitting right on the edge of a huge ocean and get a sense of place. Other backpackers I talk to have similar feelings of feeling a sense of place only after you have been here awhile, when you have let the passing of the tides wash over you a little and sat still long enough to hear the silence. You stay here a shot time and you think, how often do I get to sit on the edge of an ocean on a tropical island, go to sleep at night with the sound of waves in your dreams and just why am I in a hurry to leave this place?’. It seems I and surrounded by people with similar thoughts.
Last night was the ‘full moon party’ down on the south of the island which is a big event here with about two and half thousand people partying on at the beach. I decide to do what any self respecting middle age fart would and pass on the event. I didn’t expect there to be too much reverence given to the moon in any event and a lot of worship to alcohol, drugs and sex. I had intended to slip down there for a short while just to witness the spectacle until Brett, a Scottish guy armed with a couple of beers and conversation arrived at my door. He told me how he had been working for almost twenty years as a chief then as a window assembler for the last six years or so. He’d woke up one morning and decided he had to get out of the situation he was in and by the end of the week had bought a ticket to India. He had got there an it had, “absolutely devastated me…I felt like I had been defeated, pumbled”. He exited out to Bangkok where he’d meet a Scottish woman there who basically told him, you are going to Koh Phangan, and arranged his travel and accommodation and the next thing he knew he was here. He seems totally blow away by just how much he is enjoying being here just doing nothing and the coincidental nature of his arrival. The place seems to be full of people taking in what I call wave theory.
Koh Phangan isn’t however without some blemishes. Down in the south part of the island there is a lot of prostitution. I know a lot of people would like to give it another name but that is what it is. There are so many young Thai woman who get together with western guys and spend a week or two with them. The western guys have a holiday lover who lives with them and pays an agreed daily sum. Thankfully, I am surrounded by opportunity yet have an interest factor of zero, and it’s good to know that. I would feel like such a loser with a Thai rent a girlfriend.
Having said that I do know hundreds of Thai prostitutes and I have wondered if one might walk up to me and say hello. I think I need to reveal a little of my past here to explain that statement. I worked for six years in immigration detention in Australia for an American company, Wakenhut, who was the parent to an Australian company Australasian Correctional Management, ACM. The Australian government who had until this time ran detention facilities contracted out the management to a private company, a controversial departure from departmental responsibility to corporate responsibility in managing such facilities. I happened into the job essentially as it was just one of a number of positions I’d applied for after leaving uni and when I was offered a position I accepted.
I learned a hell of a lot about human nature from my time there and I’m talking not just about the refugees but people outside the centre as well. I coped a hell of a lot of scorn from working there especially from some on the left of the political centre. For some it was simply enough that if you worked in a detention facility then that equated to you being an arsehole, end of story. Yet like many things it wasn’t that simple. There were certainly a number of people who worked there who had a bad attitude and really should not have been working in such an environment but there were also a number of others who didn’t have to agree with government policy yet work there because they knew they could do there small part in making the day to day world of these refugees a little easier and let them know that not all Australians have racist attitudes. When I first started I was on the bottom of the heap and it was just little things you could do that made a difference. One officer might yell at detainees to ‘line up, hurray up we haven’t got all day’ when it came to presenting for medication where another might say, ‘OK folks we have to get this medication thing done as quickly as possible, if you don’t mind lining up along here we’ll try and move you all through as quickly as possible ’. It is often just a subtle differences in attitude and tone like this that make people feel less like an animal being rounded up and more like a human being. When you work closely with others you start to recognise your colleges who were able to come in day in day out and never lose sight of the fact these refugees, regardless of their circumstances, were people and deserved to be treated with dignity. Yes it was a detention facility and there were procedures that needed to be followed yet how you went about it made all the difference. I often thought it ironic that the detainees themselves realised that I didn’t write the immigration policy and was trying to make the best out of a bad situation but for some outside I might as well have penned to document myself. My time in immigration detention can’t be told in a couple of paragraphs so I’ll have to carry it over.
Meanwhile, I have been here twelve days now. It is the low season here at the moment which apart from a few downpours, a few cloudy days and less tourists it is much the same as any other time I imagine. I lot of people actually like visiting at this time of year because it is a little cooler and a few grey days and downpours break the (tedium?) of a perfect day every day.
Koh Phangan sits just north of Koh Samui a slightly bigger and far more tourist developed island. Nevertheless Phangan is still a significant tourist destination and the whole island economy, like Samui, exists on tourism. Every beach and cove has a string of accommodation bungalows ranging from rock bottom to resort. Typically there will be a clustered number of bungalows and a large dinning area come common area under a large elevated roof. The title ‘resort’ seems to be used in a generic way to describe any collection of bungalows rather than any level of comfort but there are certainly some resorts worthy of that title. Accommodation ranges from around $5 a day for your no frills leaky tap level to around $40/50 for resort style with pool air con and breakfast. There is building work going on all over the island with people eager to be part of the tourist economy. Much of it fairly sympathetic to the islands character and at this point doesn’t seem to be out of control. Tourism is probably a good industry for this area so long as it does get out of control and kill the thing people come to escape to.
The island is good to tourists also. The Thai people on the island seem to treat the tourists with fairly good regard. They have been exposed to western culture long enough to know that not everyone is a larger lout on a booze trip and often treat you more with curiosity than anything else. They respect their own culture but also seem genuinely interested to know more about the wider world from interactions with the tourist trade. They seem to know they can both hold on to their culture and learn from others at the same time. Maybe the visitors here may also learn something beyond the palm trees and sandy beaches?
I haven’t ridden a motorcycle for years, close to two decades. It is amazing really considering such an avid fan of motorcycling I was in my 20’s. I went everywhere on motorbikes and at the time it was a bit of a lifestyle thing. Have wheels will ride. I hired a step through 125cc Honda Dream. Oh, how the big men have fallen! Yes it was a bit of a step down from a Ducati, or BMW but it was a motorcycle with two wheels and an element of danger and that’s enough when you haven’t held a throttle in your hand or leaned into a corner for years.
So day two I was off. The bike hire cost me all of 150 baht, around $6, and I was sure I was going to get my moneys worth. I soon did the circuit on the eastern side of the island and had the map out looking at the only real other destination, the western and north western beaches over the range that straddles the mountain. The local guide book has a caution of hazardous road conditions and frequent accidents from the end of the bitumen and should only be attempted by experienced drivers and bike riders. It was a caution that soon had me climbing the range on my Honda Dream looking for a bit of two wheeled action. You see when you ride bikes around town then that is just transport but when you get out and mix it with the terrain it becomes far more fun and a challenge to stay upright. It is a great ride pulling up the range which is a straight climb for around four kilometres rising to around 650 meters. I have done it now three times and it is still fun. You basically start at the bottom and wind the throttle open as far as it will go and start climbing at one point getting down to first gear as the dream struggles to haul my 100 odd kilos to the summit. It is much as you may expect on the range, deep red volcanic soil, rainforest and a slightly cooler and fresher breeze. The road through this terrain is much as you would expect also, rough and rutted with frequent washaways. It is very easy to come off a motorbike over here and by the display of bandages and injuries of many western tourists, many do. There are the obvious reasons of inexperience and bravado but there are also two main other factors conspiring against the rider. The first is the dustings of decomposed granite on the roads which can act like fine ball bearings if the rider is slightly off balance or uses the brakes at the wrong time. The other is the tyres that the bikes are fitted with at the time of sale. They are a very slick thin road tyre which is fine for Bangkok or Tokyo but the worst possible tyre for the local conditions were a mixed terrain tyre with a higher profile and slightly softer compound would see heaps less people leave here with injuries. Then again if you were a conspiracy theorist you might claim that the local bike operators and Honda don’t mind a few fall offs as it seems the repair part of bike hiring is a lucrative as the rental itself. The Scottish guy Brett lost his key to his bike and was informed it would be 800 baht to replace yet a trip into town bought a cut key for 80 baht. A new clutch lever costs about 300 baht but the repair of a few minutes cost is 2300 baht.
Well, I certainly didn’t want to be putting my hand in my pocket for repairs but it is the thought of flesh wounds and broken bones that had the caution light flashing in my mind as I rode through the rainforest on my way to the north eastern beaches. It is at about the summit and the end of the bitumen that the faint hearted turn back. There are still plenty of bikes head out along this road but nowhere near the volumes you see on the coast. Up here it is mainly locals on bikes and a few of the more adventurous like myself heading out to explore the other side. Now there is not a whole lot more I can say without sounding like I am writing for a two wheels magazine but I did make it to Thong Nai Pan Noi and back without damage to myself or motorcycle. I hadn’t thought it such an achievement but by the response of a few backpackers saying incredulously, ‘you rode a Honda Dream all the way to Thong Nai Pan Noi!’ it must have been. I didn’t tell them, or the bike hirer, of the other trip I did to another eastern beach which made this trip look sedate and got my heart pumping as I climbed up hills strangling first gear knowing, ‘if you stop your stuck and not getting out’ which kinda gives you a bit of motivation to keep the bike moving forward. I have been back to Thong Nai Pan Noi three times now because it’s a great ride but it is also a very lovely beach, probably my pick on the island. There is next to no vehicles other than a few supply vehicles, 4WD’s and the odd crazy on a motor scooter. The small village has a small generator for power and apparently it gets turned off at 10 PM and everything switches over to candle power. It has a real end of the road feeling and the bay is far more protected from the winds on the east so the water is most times flat, clear and glassy. I will come and spent some time here but it will be at the end of my stay on the island. I have been at Haad Chao Pao two weeks tomorrow. I spent a week just up on the point in the bamboo looking hut with a coconut tree you may have seen in my photos. It was a great spot right on the edge of the beach but it didn’t have a good swimming beach and the restaurant part of the ‘resort’ was a step climb back up the hill. It was a great view once you got there but not necessarily the climb you want to do before breakfast. I’ve moved about a five minute walk down the beach to another resort with a gorgeous beach and basic huts or bungalows as they like to call them. This resort is run by a family who seem to have a more layback approach to their business and although it is probably one of the more lower end and basic operations on the beach it seems to have a good flow of backpackers who like the more low key approach and what seems the social hub of this area of beach..
Well, two weeks on and with only five days left on my visa it is decision time. Some way or other I have to leave the country and return to get another 30 day visa. So it is either head back to Bangkok and on into Cambodia or Laos and check these countries out or it is a visa run into the southern part of Burma and back to the island. Hum, holy conundrums batman!
I had no plans to come down here when I arrived in Bangkok but a dinner conversation with an aussie couple just off Khoasan Road and flooding in the north of the country soon put Koh Phangan on my itinerary. I’ll slip down and spend a week and hopefully the floods will have dropped and I’ll make that train trip up to Chang Mi. Well, a week has come and gone and I know I’ll be here at least another week if not more. And that is perhaps the greatest joy of being here, sweet surrender. When I first arrived here I found a small hut right on the edge of the beach, stone throwing distance. You notice immediately the postcard views but I takes a day or two to really touch down in a place like this and realise you are sitting right on the edge of a huge ocean and get a sense of place. Other backpackers I talk to have similar feelings of feeling a sense of place only after you have been here awhile, when you have let the passing of the tides wash over you a little and sat still long enough to hear the silence. You stay here a shot time and you think, how often do I get to sit on the edge of an ocean on a tropical island, go to sleep at night with the sound of waves in your dreams and just why am I in a hurry to leave this place?’. It seems I and surrounded by people with similar thoughts.
Last night was the ‘full moon party’ down on the south of the island which is a big event here with about two and half thousand people partying on at the beach. I decide to do what any self respecting middle age fart would and pass on the event. I didn’t expect there to be too much reverence given to the moon in any event and a lot of worship to alcohol, drugs and sex. I had intended to slip down there for a short while just to witness the spectacle until Brett, a Scottish guy armed with a couple of beers and conversation arrived at my door. He told me how he had been working for almost twenty years as a chief then as a window assembler for the last six years or so. He’d woke up one morning and decided he had to get out of the situation he was in and by the end of the week had bought a ticket to India. He had got there an it had, “absolutely devastated me…I felt like I had been defeated, pumbled”. He exited out to Bangkok where he’d meet a Scottish woman there who basically told him, you are going to Koh Phangan, and arranged his travel and accommodation and the next thing he knew he was here. He seems totally blow away by just how much he is enjoying being here just doing nothing and the coincidental nature of his arrival. The place seems to be full of people taking in what I call wave theory.
Koh Phangan isn’t however without some blemishes. Down in the south part of the island there is a lot of prostitution. I know a lot of people would like to give it another name but that is what it is. There are so many young Thai woman who get together with western guys and spend a week or two with them. The western guys have a holiday lover who lives with them and pays an agreed daily sum. Thankfully, I am surrounded by opportunity yet have an interest factor of zero, and it’s good to know that. I would feel like such a loser with a Thai rent a girlfriend.
Having said that I do know hundreds of Thai prostitutes and I have wondered if one might walk up to me and say hello. I think I need to reveal a little of my past here to explain that statement. I worked for six years in immigration detention in Australia for an American company, Wakenhut, who was the parent to an Australian company Australasian Correctional Management, ACM. The Australian government who had until this time ran detention facilities contracted out the management to a private company, a controversial departure from departmental responsibility to corporate responsibility in managing such facilities. I happened into the job essentially as it was just one of a number of positions I’d applied for after leaving uni and when I was offered a position I accepted.
I learned a hell of a lot about human nature from my time there and I’m talking not just about the refugees but people outside the centre as well. I coped a hell of a lot of scorn from working there especially from some on the left of the political centre. For some it was simply enough that if you worked in a detention facility then that equated to you being an arsehole, end of story. Yet like many things it wasn’t that simple. There were certainly a number of people who worked there who had a bad attitude and really should not have been working in such an environment but there were also a number of others who didn’t have to agree with government policy yet work there because they knew they could do there small part in making the day to day world of these refugees a little easier and let them know that not all Australians have racist attitudes. When I first started I was on the bottom of the heap and it was just little things you could do that made a difference. One officer might yell at detainees to ‘line up, hurray up we haven’t got all day’ when it came to presenting for medication where another might say, ‘OK folks we have to get this medication thing done as quickly as possible, if you don’t mind lining up along here we’ll try and move you all through as quickly as possible ’. It is often just a subtle differences in attitude and tone like this that make people feel less like an animal being rounded up and more like a human being. When you work closely with others you start to recognise your colleges who were able to come in day in day out and never lose sight of the fact these refugees, regardless of their circumstances, were people and deserved to be treated with dignity. Yes it was a detention facility and there were procedures that needed to be followed yet how you went about it made all the difference. I often thought it ironic that the detainees themselves realised that I didn’t write the immigration policy and was trying to make the best out of a bad situation but for some outside I might as well have penned to document myself. My time in immigration detention can’t be told in a couple of paragraphs so I’ll have to carry it over.
Meanwhile, I have been here twelve days now. It is the low season here at the moment which apart from a few downpours, a few cloudy days and less tourists it is much the same as any other time I imagine. I lot of people actually like visiting at this time of year because it is a little cooler and a few grey days and downpours break the (tedium?) of a perfect day every day.
Koh Phangan sits just north of Koh Samui a slightly bigger and far more tourist developed island. Nevertheless Phangan is still a significant tourist destination and the whole island economy, like Samui, exists on tourism. Every beach and cove has a string of accommodation bungalows ranging from rock bottom to resort. Typically there will be a clustered number of bungalows and a large dinning area come common area under a large elevated roof. The title ‘resort’ seems to be used in a generic way to describe any collection of bungalows rather than any level of comfort but there are certainly some resorts worthy of that title. Accommodation ranges from around $5 a day for your no frills leaky tap level to around $40/50 for resort style with pool air con and breakfast. There is building work going on all over the island with people eager to be part of the tourist economy. Much of it fairly sympathetic to the islands character and at this point doesn’t seem to be out of control. Tourism is probably a good industry for this area so long as it does get out of control and kill the thing people come to escape to.
The island is good to tourists also. The Thai people on the island seem to treat the tourists with fairly good regard. They have been exposed to western culture long enough to know that not everyone is a larger lout on a booze trip and often treat you more with curiosity than anything else. They respect their own culture but also seem genuinely interested to know more about the wider world from interactions with the tourist trade. They seem to know they can both hold on to their culture and learn from others at the same time. Maybe the visitors here may also learn something beyond the palm trees and sandy beaches?
I haven’t ridden a motorcycle for years, close to two decades. It is amazing really considering such an avid fan of motorcycling I was in my 20’s. I went everywhere on motorbikes and at the time it was a bit of a lifestyle thing. Have wheels will ride. I hired a step through 125cc Honda Dream. Oh, how the big men have fallen! Yes it was a bit of a step down from a Ducati, or BMW but it was a motorcycle with two wheels and an element of danger and that’s enough when you haven’t held a throttle in your hand or leaned into a corner for years.
So day two I was off. The bike hire cost me all of 150 baht, around $6, and I was sure I was going to get my moneys worth. I soon did the circuit on the eastern side of the island and had the map out looking at the only real other destination, the western and north western beaches over the range that straddles the mountain. The local guide book has a caution of hazardous road conditions and frequent accidents from the end of the bitumen and should only be attempted by experienced drivers and bike riders. It was a caution that soon had me climbing the range on my Honda Dream looking for a bit of two wheeled action. You see when you ride bikes around town then that is just transport but when you get out and mix it with the terrain it becomes far more fun and a challenge to stay upright. It is a great ride pulling up the range which is a straight climb for around four kilometres rising to around 650 meters. I have done it now three times and it is still fun. You basically start at the bottom and wind the throttle open as far as it will go and start climbing at one point getting down to first gear as the dream struggles to haul my 100 odd kilos to the summit. It is much as you may expect on the range, deep red volcanic soil, rainforest and a slightly cooler and fresher breeze. The road through this terrain is much as you would expect also, rough and rutted with frequent washaways. It is very easy to come off a motorbike over here and by the display of bandages and injuries of many western tourists, many do. There are the obvious reasons of inexperience and bravado but there are also two main other factors conspiring against the rider. The first is the dustings of decomposed granite on the roads which can act like fine ball bearings if the rider is slightly off balance or uses the brakes at the wrong time. The other is the tyres that the bikes are fitted with at the time of sale. They are a very slick thin road tyre which is fine for Bangkok or Tokyo but the worst possible tyre for the local conditions were a mixed terrain tyre with a higher profile and slightly softer compound would see heaps less people leave here with injuries. Then again if you were a conspiracy theorist you might claim that the local bike operators and Honda don’t mind a few fall offs as it seems the repair part of bike hiring is a lucrative as the rental itself. The Scottish guy Brett lost his key to his bike and was informed it would be 800 baht to replace yet a trip into town bought a cut key for 80 baht. A new clutch lever costs about 300 baht but the repair of a few minutes cost is 2300 baht.
Well, I certainly didn’t want to be putting my hand in my pocket for repairs but it is the thought of flesh wounds and broken bones that had the caution light flashing in my mind as I rode through the rainforest on my way to the north eastern beaches. It is at about the summit and the end of the bitumen that the faint hearted turn back. There are still plenty of bikes head out along this road but nowhere near the volumes you see on the coast. Up here it is mainly locals on bikes and a few of the more adventurous like myself heading out to explore the other side. Now there is not a whole lot more I can say without sounding like I am writing for a two wheels magazine but I did make it to Thong Nai Pan Noi and back without damage to myself or motorcycle. I hadn’t thought it such an achievement but by the response of a few backpackers saying incredulously, ‘you rode a Honda Dream all the way to Thong Nai Pan Noi!’ it must have been. I didn’t tell them, or the bike hirer, of the other trip I did to another eastern beach which made this trip look sedate and got my heart pumping as I climbed up hills strangling first gear knowing, ‘if you stop your stuck and not getting out’ which kinda gives you a bit of motivation to keep the bike moving forward. I have been back to Thong Nai Pan Noi three times now because it’s a great ride but it is also a very lovely beach, probably my pick on the island. There is next to no vehicles other than a few supply vehicles, 4WD’s and the odd crazy on a motor scooter. The small village has a small generator for power and apparently it gets turned off at 10 PM and everything switches over to candle power. It has a real end of the road feeling and the bay is far more protected from the winds on the east so the water is most times flat, clear and glassy. I will come and spent some time here but it will be at the end of my stay on the island. I have been at Haad Chao Pao two weeks tomorrow. I spent a week just up on the point in the bamboo looking hut with a coconut tree you may have seen in my photos. It was a great spot right on the edge of the beach but it didn’t have a good swimming beach and the restaurant part of the ‘resort’ was a step climb back up the hill. It was a great view once you got there but not necessarily the climb you want to do before breakfast. I’ve moved about a five minute walk down the beach to another resort with a gorgeous beach and basic huts or bungalows as they like to call them. This resort is run by a family who seem to have a more layback approach to their business and although it is probably one of the more lower end and basic operations on the beach it seems to have a good flow of backpackers who like the more low key approach and what seems the social hub of this area of beach..
Well, two weeks on and with only five days left on my visa it is decision time. Some way or other I have to leave the country and return to get another 30 day visa. So it is either head back to Bangkok and on into Cambodia or Laos and check these countries out or it is a visa run into the southern part of Burma and back to the island. Hum, holy conundrums batman!
posted by transavante | 2:44 p.m.
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