A Few Days Of Nothing
These two pictures sum it all up nicely.
But if you want to know more…
Rupert writes
Koh Chang is paradise. More accurately the Tree House guest house on Lonely Beach on Koh Chang is Paradise. The beach isn’t perfect, for from it – most of it is filled with rocks and the locals are moving them further and further up so the beach is just getting smaller and smaller and will soon be pushed off the island. However, it’s not the beach that makes this place paradise.
During our time here we did nothing. Nothing but eat (and we ate a lot) and drink (I’m not ashamed to say me and Chang Beer are best of friends now). Chang means elephant, and the similarities of that and the island are apparently it’s shape (as much as apparently not) and not that it’s swarmed with elephants (if it was the human population on that island wouldn’t last long, the island is small and made even smaller because of poor or no roads to many parts of it. Most of the island, like many of Thailand’s islands, is jungle infested mountains). Fortunately the only reference to Chang and the beer is the little pictures on the front, but if I’m wrong it’s still not a problem; the stuff tastes good and that’s all that matters.
With Laura hopping or getting carried by me for the first two days we didn’t do a lot, as I think I mentioned before. Tree House’s dining area was a large round room on stilts above and open to the views of the sea. Seating was a choice of comfy cushions on the floor or, and this is the key, the important aspect here; hammocks.
Oh boy, when was the last time I got to spend quality time in a hammock? I’m not sure I ever have. The last time I sat in one of these I probably hadn’t hit puberty and was using it as means to achieve high velocity adrenaline rushes because I was too short to ride on the Runaway Spanish Train roller coaster ride at Euro Disney. Damn they’re comfy – I think I’m going to do away with the bed, and for that matter the chairs, back at home. One day we spent seven and half hours, I’m not kidding, in hammocks. Just reading books or playing cards. Oh yes, and eating.
We ate and drunk more in those days than we have on the whole trip! Well maybe not, but we ate a lot. And best of all? We saved money! The room was so cheap (two hundred Baht, half of what we’ve been paying) we figured we could spend the extra on food and drink; but we couldn’t! A meal with dessert and mango shakes a plenty was costing us just a couple of pounds. And the food tasted so good. Laura couldn’t drag herself away from hot chocolate rice pudding with cornflakes as dessert, I was hooked on their banana shakes and we both enjoyed there BBQ varieties.
Above and beyond all this the people was what made it for both of us. The staff were so friendly. We were soon getting drunk with them and promising hook-ups in England with fellow travellers and even the staff. My most memorable time was one night when we took a walk to a bar where there was some party going on. We begun the walk and gave up because it was to far and Laura’s foot still wasn’t up to it. We were walking back to our room when we thought we’d stop off at this bar right next door. Just off the beach and built out of wood, it had a few people resting with a drink. Here we met my favourite Thai so far; the crazy barman. Accompanied by a nice chap from Newcastle they entertained us until late into the night. His real name or not, we all called him D, who’s crashing rants of seemingly nothing in particular would often end in “Hollywood man”, and whenever he heard anyone talk of Bangkok he would slump into a solemn nature and say “If you go to Bangkok, and see my momma, you tell her, I love her”. He had my in stitches throughout the night. But he may have been mad, drunk and stoned with a hilarious laugh but he never forgot what you drunk – the perfect barman perhaps?
At this bar something else happened. Something a little odd, maybe? We met a man who called himself (at least that day. Don’t ask) O. From what I gathered (his English went erratically from good to garble) he followed Zen, or something alike. He noticed Laura was limping and offered his services. Why not we thought? So he got to work. After twenty minutes of massage and energy waving around her foot and head she was walking without a limp. Perhaps it was science, perhaps the foot only needed a push in the right direction and the rest was mind games – but whatever it was it intrigued me and I got talking to him the following day. For anyone who’s read anything about Enlightenment and, moreover, the book Celestine Prophecy – you would have found him intriguing, as did I.
Of what beach there was, was lovely
These local ladies were digging with their hands for shells. Because she sells sea shells… terrible Rupert…
In short; we want to go back and spend many more days doing nothing, and we urge anyone else who’s coming to Thailand and anyone who isn’t to go there. Go to paradise.
Tags: Koh Chang, Thailand, Travel
Monkey
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