Opportunity Knocks

“And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-Well…How did I get here?”
-Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime

I ask myself all the time. This week has been a good follow up to my time in Chiang Mai. I took an overnight train to southern Thailand and hopped aboard a ferry to Koh Samui, an island off the east coast. I got myself set up with a beach-side bungalow for a little under 9 US dollars a night, including mosquito net. It’s the first actual bed I’ve slept in in weeks, and I had my own private bathroom. Not bad. In the shuttle on the way from the dock to here, we passed a little place called, “Ninja Crepes”, and I thought, please please please be close by. It’s next door. I’m there right now, in fact. I’ve just finished my nutella and banana crepe. Yum. So, all these factors combined, and I’ve felt pretty comfortable right here. Because I am quirky, when I think of places I’d like to travel, “the beach” isn’t usually at the top of my list, and I never really feel a compulsion to visit beaches even when in coastal areas. I never realize how much I actually enjoy the atmosphere until I’m in it, and then time just sort of doesn’t matter anymore. Sadly, (or perhaps fortunately) my visa runs out on the 14th, so I have been forced to make plans to leave…but be not mistaken, I shall return. Maybe not to the beach, but I’m thinking I will spend 3 or 4 days in Kuala Lumpur and then re-enter Thailand, and head back to Chiang Mai to finish up there. Then, maybe I will come back to the beach. Somehow, though, knowing myself, I think by then I will have lost interest in the sun. There is something to it however, the sun does improve one’s mood. The first day I was here, I rented a motorbike (yes, ma, I wore a helmet) and used it to explore the island. It was a costly 5 dollars for 24 hrs, but I don’t think I’ll be doing it again just because I didn’t particularly enjoy the keen and constant awareness of my own mortality. But it was certainly an experience. I rode it to hunt down some sunscreen, but by the time I found some, I already had a biker’s, er, burn.

One day I had the bright idea to wake up early and go running barefoot down the beach, just like they do in the movies (and, in my defense, I saw other people doing it here too). Well, this was a terrible idea, and it landed me with a blister large enough to have been a 6th toe, and has impaired my walking abilities since. Luckily, the nutella is just next door. Other than that, it’s been a pretty uneventful week with a lot of reading, topless sunbathers (not me), and oh, monkeys. Today I went for a walk and saw a sign offering a “monkey show”. I asked the guy what this entailed, and he said the monkey goes up the tree and gets a coconut, 100 baht. I’m not really interested in the monkey’s retrieval skills, so I ask how much just to play with the monkey. 50 baht, that’s like a dollar. It was a really cute baby monkey, but I think I interrupted it’s lunch, which it proceeded to wipe all over my face an arms. Lucky for it, I think baby monkeys are cute and so I will excuse this kind of behavior. Incidentally, did you know that the plural for monkey is monkeys? I didn’t. I thought it would be monkies, but I guess that if I were really applying the rule of subtracting the “y” and adding “ies”, it would have to be monkeies, which is just absurd.

Tags: Ko Samui, Thailand, Travel

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