June 29 marks my three months back in Baltimore. I’ve succumbed to a rather expected and predictably boring life at home: a full time job with a 50 mile (one way) commute at least twice a week, sharing the bathroom with my sister and the food with my parents, and trying to read as much as I did in Thailand (but the damn television and internet keep getting in the way). Memorial Day Weekend was also eventful; since then I’ve been boyfriendless and my grandpop’s been in the hospital. It’s a lot of ups and downs, but in a lot of ways it’s great to be back. I’ve been going to baseball games all the time and seeing my best friends pretty frequently. It’s not enough to keep me around permanently, but it’s good for now.
Yesterday I returned from a week in New Mexico on work. On the flight home, I started a new book called Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer – the travel writer being Chuck Thompson. It seemed appropriate (for me) and cliche for the first chapter to be about Thailand, but at least this writer wasn’t claiming Phuket to be the last great paradise or tearing apart the party-till-another-full-moon set on Koh Phangan for being annoyingly naive and insisting that those parties ended in 1987 (probably before they even got started).
Instead he wrote about a story that I could really relate to: getting scammed. This guy’s first trip to Thailand and he meets a group of “Bible thumping” Thai university students who accompany him to Koh Samet before stealing his 1200 USD. The best bit of it all was when he tracked down the women and summoned the local police. Here Thompson learned the greatest lesson – you’ll always be a falang, especially in a touristy area. Even though he summoned the cops on his behalf, he realized that the women had most likely bribed them into keeping their secret. Thompson knew they had the money, and the women and police knew he knew, but it was all futile – he was dead broke, scammed, and helpless.
Though I haven’t finished this book, and Thompson sometimes appears as cocky as most in the travel industry, there’s just some things I agree with him spot on. This story is great because it’s never the side of Thailand you read about from the US or UK or other western country, but it’s the side of Thailand that anyone who’s left the exclusive resorts on Phuket and in Bangkok will have encountered.
Us TEFLers spent the first weekend on Koh Samet, being only a 30 minute boat ride from it.That first Friday night, as anyone who’s been in college or drunk can imagine, was a shitshow. We still couldn’t get over how cheap things were – beach bungalow for 5 USD split at least two-ways, sometimes split 10-ways, buckets of sangsom and coke or G+Ts for 5 USD, and fireshows all over the island. It got fun, then messy, then sandy – especially for the people who passed out on the beach. I can think of at least six people who left their stuff in a pile on the beach at midnight – cell phone, 5000 baht, iPod, whatever – for a night swim thinking, ‘It’s okay, I can totally see my stuff.’ Well, lo and behold, they totally could not and when they got out a few minutes later, only sand was hidden underneath their clothing. I don’t know whether anyone tried the cops, but it would have been more futile than Thompson’s encounter; he was solo and sober, but picture at least a dozen drunk kids trying to ramble at the police. Only bad would have come of it.
A guy from England who always had a guitar on his back and handrolled cigarette ashing from his mouth had it the worst. He was one of the kids who lost his significant stash of baht and his camera from night swimming on Friday. He slept on the floor of our bungalow that night, convinced he’d get the first speedboat back to the mainland at sunrise, but when someone lent him just enough to stay on the island for another day, he did. Saturday night he passed out on the beach again – why no one was with him, no one knows.
Cue Sunday morning. The only things he had left on his body had been stolen – his cigarettes and his sunscreen. Even worse (or better, for those watching) was the amount of mosquitoes that had attacked his pasty, English skin. He was more spotted than a dart board in a dark bar, but his thick, mumbling accent and all-be-damned attitude helped him survive the day, as well as handouts from eager TEFLers who hadn’t been pillaged.
