Danny & Treawk Galaxywalker
The Story of Danny & Treawk Galaxywalker
“You’d never seen a table of people take something so well…just like it was commonplace. All of us just kinda nodded our heads like – ya ok, right, why didn’t I think of that”
-“What’d he say?”
“He said he came back to his room one night a little while after Sept. 11th and felt like ‘man, the world needs a change, needs some different energy,’ so he just walks out to the room where his friends are and says ‘look, from now on I’m just gonna be called Treawk Galaxywalker,’ and that was it. He just didnt have much more to say after that.”
The day before I met Sandor, a Dutch guy who had been living on Phi Phi for about 5 months, working in a dive shop. Sandor was bout 5’10” or so, thin with one ear gauged out with some big black swirl earring thing. He played 4 nights a week in an Irish pub in town, where I met him the previous night. I ended up talking with Sandor that night and we met the next day and practiced a few songs at the dive shop, which we played together in teh bar that night. [Breaking the Girl, Big Empty, Wish You Were Here] Breaking the Girl ended up working out pretty well for us, can’t go wrong with a little old school Chili Peppers.
The bar was set up, actually buit from the ground up by Keom, a 24 yr old from Ireland. After the tsunami he came over and built the bar from the ground up (or what was left of it), decorated it, got it running, and was now managing it. It happened to be his last night when I was there. He flew in his buddy Finn from back home, who was a DJ and worked the sound for the nights they had live music and DJ’ed the rest.
So I had just gotten back to the room from playing the set with Sandor when Andrew, the International travelling preacher I had met a few days ago in Krabi, comes back to the room. Andrew is quite a character in his own right – travelling through the world by God’s hand, prayig in toungues, getting resqued by angels and such – but I’ll explain Andrew later.
So, he comes in laughing and telling me about how he met some guy that calls himself Treawk Galaxywalker at dinner that night. [The name is a combo of ‘tree’ and ‘hawk’] Andrew had just trekked back from Long Beach in the dark, which is about a 35 minute walk along the beach/boulders and a pretty decent outing during the day even. “Man, I just gave myself a mission, you know? Thats how I motiviated myself. I just said ‘right, you’re in the army on a night mission to invade the town.” We both bust out laughing. Most anything will make us laugh at this point. We are on a natural high from easy living on the island. So I tell him about my night with Sandor and he goes on about his dinner with Galaxywalker and some other people, one of whom was a professional poker player named Steve Calbo. A 24 yr. old from San Diego, who had made about $270,000 last year playing poker, mainly online. Steve was almost all the way through law school when he started playing poker. He applied the principles of study he learned the to poker, studying nearly every poker book that is out there. He says he plays about 2-4 hours a day, I think he said on Poker Stars, and one other one. I, of course, had to question him relentlessly on his play, tactics, study, and strategy, which I did in full the next night at dinner.
Theres something about people like Galaxywalker, or this other guy, Danny we met. They’re full of life. Both Galaxywalker and Danny were bronzed from the sun and in really good shape. Although they were both 40 somethings, they looked like at most they could be 28 or 30.
I mentioned this to Andrew, noting that people back home who are over 40 are nothing like this. “Thats cause, man, those people are dead! They’re gone man! Their pasty. They’re not eating right, they’re stuck in jobs they hate, they’re nto living their dreams, man. When you live your dreams it energizes you. People like Danny or Galaxywalker, they may not neccissarily be doing the right thing, but they’re living, man, and they believe in what they’re doing.”
Danny was another one of these people. We met him outside the Reggae bar in Phi Phi, handing out flyers. Danny is tanned, about 5’8″, has an intense, wide-eyed gaze, and sports short dreds. He’s originally from Australia. He’s 43 or something, and fit as anything. Runs 10 km every day and does yoga. He also smokes 40 bongs a day.
Within 5 minutes of meeting him, he’s telling m how he went up into the mountains and smoked ‘copious amoutns of hashish’ with the Buddhist monks. “You’re up there with these monks, right, and you’re smoking pipes on the top of this mountain – the monks use it for chanting, right, so you’re up there and you take a few hits (mimes hitting bong) and watch the sun go down, right, then you take a few more (mimes again) and go back in and all sit around this long table and eat this huge meal, right. Then later you go back when the stars come out and hit the pipe (mime) and just look up and see it all man – It’s not as good as [some place in Australia*], I mean there you see galaxies, man. I always tell people, you have to go to [same place*] if you like constellations. You have to go to [same place] , its spiritual, man.”
Andrew interjects with “Thats where I had the revelation of God, mate.”
Just then a girl and a guy walk by and Danny reels off “Hey, welcome to the Reggae bar”, and hands them a flyer. The girl takes it and says something to her boyfriend in another language. Danny says something to ehr and she says “You speak Hebrew?!”
They had and excited conversation in Hebrew and then when they walk off I ask Danny about it and he says ‘Oh ya, I speak a few words.’ I say, ‘sounded like more than a few words, how the hell do you know Hebrew?’ He tells me its actually an ancient form of Hebrew specific to some small Biblical town in Israel and that he picked it up while he was travelling through Israel for a few years. ‘You travelled through Israel!’ I ask. ‘Ya, I’ve been through the whole country top to bottom.’ He had been through places this girl hadn’t even been. ‘Ya, I could tell exactly the region of Israel she was from just by looking at her, right, thats why I knew to speak to her in her own language. Its a bit different, I learned the older, more ancient language when I was there.’
“So, you know any other languages?” I ask. ‘Ya, a bit of this, a bit of that…I get by.’ We were off to get some dinner, so we told Danny we’d see him later. ‘Alright, see you later, and if you’re looking for a bit of smoke…’ [smiles]
Turns out Danny had been travelling for 14 years or something ridiculous, had been around the world 5 times, and had been to every country on the planet except Greenland and Iceland.
The next day he told me some crazy stories about how he ‘did the run from Nepal’. Meaning he picked up a bunch of hashish from the monks in Nepal for really cheap, strapped it to his body and flew it to Amsterdam to unload in the cafes. ‘You just gotta be cool man, like you’re just going through..cause thats all you’re doing..just going through.’
After dinner and all that I walked back to the bungalow, which was cliffside, overlooking the ocean and two islands. There is virutually no air pollution out here and the sky is packed with stars, as I look up a shooting star just rips across the sky. With that I call it a night.
Tags: Ko Phi Phi, Tag Index
J
February 15th, 2006 at 10:26 am
well…. sounds like your meeting your own “octavious salvation”
good shit.