Chapter 31: Koh Tao, the Isle of Charm

Dear friends
So, for those of you who read my last email (Diary of a Fast), I’m happy to report that our little boat did not repeat Gilligan’s adventure, and that despite lashings of rain and very rough waves, I made it safely to the little island of Koh Tao. I had to haul my very heavy suitcase and a plastic bag of replacement books over an unsteady pontoon of boats in a squall with horizontal rain and a buffeting wind to get from my little transport vessel to the pier, which appeared totally empty. So I am feeling rather grumpy when I finally spot a young man, absolutely drenched, with a purple umbrella with the name of my hotel emblazoned on it. He's clinging to this umbrella with both hands; it's tossing in the wind like a bucking bronco. But, hurrah, all is well! I am found!

Unlike, my Diary of a Fast, where told you the story chronologically; here I’m going to organize my tale thematically. Omigod, am I working hard or what to vary my writing style so as to keep you all amused, informed and entertained?

Theme number one: The Island of Koh Tao. Have you ever been utterly charmed, captivated, and entranced by a place? Islands, especially small ones, often exert some weird magic on me, but Koh Tao has really gotten into my soul. Koh Tao, which means Turtle Island (because there were turtles here, once-upon-a-time, until the Thais ate them all) is a goldilocks size; about 5 km long, and just 21 km square. Koh Tao is the last and smallest in the chain of islands stringing out west from the mainland into the Gulf of Thailand. My immediate impression, on looking at a map of the island, is that its shaped exactly like a baby lying on his side, having a poop. The one paved road runs the length of the baby’s curved spine.

I am so entranced by this lovely island that I wrote a gushing email to my divine best friend and ex-wife Ruth about the place and she writes back (with a loving ironic humour):

“Goddamn you Peter Worthington, I gave you the best years of my youth and you can’t even remember what you’ve done with them. Hullo! We’ve BEEN to Koh Tao. We liked it, even though we stayed in a beach hut next to a rather feral couple who spent the whole day fornicating, and when they weren’t fornicating they were meditating in the waves. He was disturbingly lanky.”

Well, actually, I do remember this. Sort of. In fact, I remember it all. I just couldn't remember where it happened. Back then, when I visited with Ruth 15 years ago, Koh Tao was totally undeveloped. But now it has everything: several tattoo parlours, 4 Mexican restaurants, a spa, a home-made ice cream shop (though since my fast I’ve refrained; I am a changed man!), a yoga sala, more dive shops than you can count, a gym, a bank, pharmacies that sell EVERYTHING no prescription, foot massage parlours, lots of shops selling totally funky beachwear (which leaves me in fashion heaven, because in my ideal life I would never need to wear anything other than beach wear.)

There are even three 7-11s on the island, though personally I think this is taking consumer convenience too far. (Is there any shop so ugly as a 7-11? Maybe only McDonalds or a Home Depot.) However, I suppose one cannot have everything, and the 7-11s are really quite unobtrusive.

And overall the island still retains a magical simplicity and quirkiness. Everyone is extremely friendly. The bank machines are quixotic, as are the internet centres; sometimes they work, sometimes not. There is also a restaurant here called The OK View Restaurant. Do you find that as utterly charming as I do? And once you get off the main paved road there are dirt tracks leading into the mountainous interior, with its stunning landscape of huge granite boulders, jungle and palm trees, vistas of green jungle dropping sharply down to the sparkly blue sea, and thousands of bird calls, some high and raucous, some low and liquid, like they were made under water. And of course, these eroded dirt tracks are barely passable, but they are the only way to get to various isolated little coves and beaches, with their totally beguiling little micro-resorts of a few bungalows and a restaurant. All in all, Koh Tao has a magic. People become, not exactly trapped here, but rather somehow psychically bound to the island and unwilling to leave. Many, many farang (a ubiquitous word meaning foreigner in Thai) arrived on holiday and are still here, years later.

Theme number 2: My pink bike. Max and I have rented motor scooters from our otel, for about £2 per day. Mine is hot pink. I have a sign on the back of it from the hotel which says, Call for a free pick up. I think Max secretly gets off on the fact that my bike is pink and his is fire engine red, mine is a lady-bike automatic, while his is manual. However, I will tell you all, that I have taken my pink motor bike EVERYWHERE on this island along eroded dirt tracks up mountains that EVERYONE told me were impassable. But like Captain Kirk, I felt it was my
mission and my destiny on Koh Tao to boldly go where no man has gone before.

The bike situation here on the island is hilariously lackadaisical. It’s so unregulated that not only are you not asked for your license when you rent a motorbike, but they don’t even have license plates! (And helmet? What’s a helmet? Never heard that word before.) Also, I’ve noticed many people actually smoking while zooming along on their scooters, or zipping along with a little child propped up between the handlebars. Even farang do this. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I don’t think adults should decide to take such risks on behalf of their children, but on the other hand, the kids look ecstatic, like they have never ever before experienced anything so fun and thrilling, like they are actually flying and who would want to deny them that pure delight of the wind in their hair? I think the island is so charming that you subconsciously think it is impossible for anything bad to happen to you. And yet every day I see at least one or two copiously bandaged farangs walking somewhere (presumably having given up biking for good and taken to foot transport after some hideous accident.) At night one has to swerve and weave madly to avoid the frogs and toads, which congregate for some inscrutable reason in the roads. There are Rorschach blots of squashed toad everywhere along the pavement.

Theme number 3: Yoga. I have found a wonderful yoga teacher here: Kate from California. (She’s one of the farang who came here on holiday, and after 8 years still has not managed to tear herself away.) My yoga practice has really developed with her; now when seated on a mat with my legs extended forward I can bend in half and nearly touch my forehead to my shins. Six months ago I couldn’t even come close to touching my shins. Also, she taught me a trick which has brought me within tantalizing reach of mastering the headstand. She’s very spiritually hippy-dippy. For example, she made me laugh when we’d been lying in fish pose (which for you non-yoga-ites means lying on your back, hands under your bum, propping your upper body up on your elbows and leaning your head back) for, oh, I dunno, 10 minutes or so. Then she said OK, relax, release your hands and feel the rush of prana (i.e. universal life energy) into your arms and hands. And I was like “No way, that’s not prana, thats blood, and I probably have gangrene in my hands by now, but oh well, let’s not quibble.

The big problem with the yoga here is that its open air and I can tell you from personal experience there is nothing (but nothing!) like a sweaty male body to attract mosquitoes and these horrid microscopic sand flies that leave nasty puss-seeping welts sores when they bite. Consequently, the relaxation part of the yoga session is perhaps the most challenging. As we are splayed out in shivasana (the so-called corpse pose of total relaxation) at the end of a hard workout, it’s like we’re advertising to any blood sucking insect within a 500 m radius “Hey, big hot tasty banquet, come one, come all”. So while I’m supposed to be meditating on my breath, on letting go of my body, and on loving-kindness I’m in fact being driven to a state of near insanity by the swarms of mosquitoes trying to get inside my ear, which of course is the one place I’ve not caked in repellent. And moreover, the repellent seems totally useless for the sand flies. In fact, I think they find it to be a rather tasty seasoning. Still, I love my yoga and have been going every morning.

Theme number 4: Thipwimarn hotel. This is where we stay, and the name means Paradise of Angels. We concur, and we are thrilled because this place is just so much better than indicated by the internet site. First of all, there is an infinity pool; brown wooden deck, azure pool, turquoise sea, powder-blue sky. (Surely, if you had a hotel with an infinity pool, you’d at least mention it in your marketing literature? No?) The young women who work in the hotel are so lovely and sweet, and yet they work like slaves: from 7 in the morning until 10 at night, six or seven days a week. One of them named Dao, with beautiful glossy black hair down to her waist, has developed a Rather Big Crush on Max.

We have a little wooden bungalow (Studio 3) perched high on stilts amongst the granite boulders on a steep mountainside. Our bungalow opens to a little balcony overlooking the sea, and when the wind blows, I feel like the bungalow is sailing in the wind. The sounds of the rustling trees and the surging waves below all combine into one warm roar. I sit outside on our balcony, watching the water, feasting on mangosteens and thinking “Who knew the wind could be so soft?” (Do you know mangosteens? They are, very simply, the most delicious fruit ever, ever, ever. No argument. So, if you’ve never had one, do yourself a favour and go to a Chinese grocer, pay £5 for 3 and wrench open the shiny purple casing to feast on the ambrosial white segments inside. Here we pay just 50 pence per kilo, so gorging is the order of the day. My fingernails are now dyed irretrievably brown from the juice of the mangosteen casings; I have the hands of a chain smoker.) The other day the sea was choppy and slate blue, and as I watched, I could see, in a line, a mustard colour dive boat furrowing the waves, followed by a salmon-pink one and finally a sky-blue one.

There are 130 steps up from our bungalow to the reception, and we climb and descend them many times a day, so if I don’t get buns of steel from this, I’m giving up on ever having them. We have a DVD, and watch Six Feet Under, Third Series, which has some of the most cracking writing and acting I’ve ever seen in television. I keep playing certain scenes over and over again, they are so goddamn beautiful. And outside the bungalow (and even sometimes inside) there are birds and all kinds of other animals everywhere. Descending the 130 stairs to our bungalow the other night we walked alongside a wrist-thick trail of millions and millions of infinitesimally tiny ants all flowing in one direction with some implacable but unimaginable purpose. Frogs and toads also sit on the stairs, stock-still, and we have to use our flashlight
to avoid stepping on them. We have to be particularly careful because there are also ultra-tiny frogs, no bigger than the fingernail of my pinkie finger. (And I have small stubby fingers and, as a natural consequence of this, tiny fingernails too.) And, as ever, the geckos call at night. If you hear one call 7 times in a row it’s supposed to be good luck, and the other night, as I was lying awake at 5am fretting over my future, and whether I could do anything with my writing, I heard one call exactly 7 times, so I’m encouraged.

Theme number 5: Katoeys. This Thai word translates literally as “two-in-one”, but the more common translation given to us farangs is “lady-boys”. Lady-boys are a totally accepted part of Thai culture; there is one lady-boy dive instructor at Max’s dive centre, he has long shoulder length hair, wears Alice headbands, beaded sandals, and has painted elaborate flowers on his fingernails. He’s very nice and funny too. Apparently, the Thais believe that in the beginning there were 3 genders: man, woman, and katoey, and that the latter is the loneliest karmic road a reincarnated soul can follow, but the one which offers the most spiritual growth opportunities. Lady-boys are as Thai as lemon grass. (Ok, ok, that last simile is not mine, but it’s so brilliant that I feel no guilt whatsoever in purloining it from a marvellously fun literary comedy thriller told from point of view of corrupt Buddhist Thai cop, whose
mother runs a brothel. The novel is called Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett, and it is this summer’s required fun reading!)

The other day Max went to get his haircut, and he soon realized that the stunning girl cutting his hair was actually a lady-boy once she started to speak. He was startled when sometime during the haircut she suddenly jumped up, ran out into the street, called to a gaggle of Thai girls, who then all came in the shop, laughing and giggling. Max knew one of them from the dive shop, who later told him that the katoey had shouted at them “Girls, girls, come see what I’ve got in my chair”.

Theme number 6: Koh Taos quirky little beaches and the problem with fish food. Do you want it now, or shall I make you wait for the story about the fish food? Oh, I think you need to wait a little. So I’ll tell you about some of my other beach expeditions first. Koh Tao doesn’t have great beaches in the classic sense, since most of them are too shallow and too coral-strewn to be much good for swimming. So one day I decided that my little pink bike to cross the island to Auw Leuk beach. I was advised against going; Max had an accident trying to get there. But I was successful, and I was so happy to have gone. I sat in a restaurant on some high stilts overlooking the bay, drinking a tamarind juice, eating a shredded papaya, lime and chilli salad and watching some boys, Israeli I think, trying to swim and smoke at the same time.

Another day I went to Tanote beach the dirt road to get there was even more perilous than Auw Leuk, and like the starship Enterprise I had a few near disasters but triumphed in the end. At Tanote I went snorkelling and saw a vast array of giant clams with their huge fleshy purple lips, rimmed by iridescent turquoise dots -apparently the clams’ eyes. I also encountered an immense parrot fish; when it bit the coral I could hear an ear-splitting crunch under the water. He didn’t seem too bothered as I followed him around, but he nonetheless kept his beady eye on me, and when he felt I was a little too close, he’d casually flap a single fin and glide a few feet further away to begin savaging a new piece of coral.

There were also huge coral domes, like giant boulders, peppered with little holes that are inhabited by a marine worms. To catch passing particles of food, they put out little conical fans that look like odd bottle brushes or plastic Christmas trees, which they retract at lightening speed at the first sign of danger. But the really amazing thing about them is their range of colours: it’s like they’ve come out of some cheap Chinese plastic frisbee factory. They come in acrylic blue, 60s kitchen orange, lemon yellow, grey-green speckled with black dots, scarlet red, luminous white, all living closely side-by-side. In other words, you find a bright blue one virtually touching a brilliant orange one. Are they the same species, or not, I wonder? Either way, I wonder what could possibly be the evolutionary reason for the range of colours. And I don’t know who to ask.

Another day we went to Jamakhiri spa, a beautiful resort overlooking a lovely shallow coral filled bay. They have a lovely refuge for rescued gibbons at Jamakhiri. Gibbons are absolutely amazing animals, beautiful arboreal primates with long arms, a mantle of golden or black soft fur around their faces, and immense soulful faces. They have sad calls, like a far-away foghorns. They are totally arboreal (i.e. tree living) in the wild, and they were amazingly agile and acrobatic in their large enclosure, swinging from tree to rope to tire to cage wall, to whatever, lightening quick. Their Thai keeper (who projected this amazing vibe of love for them, totally palpable even to us as mere onlookers) was playing with them, spraying them with water from a hose, and they’d race away from the water stream, only to come right back to him for more when he stopped. One gibbon had lost a leg, but he was so agile in the enclosure that I didn’t even notice until Max pointed it out. The keeper had a beautiful blue and yellow parrot on his shoulder and when he got close to the cage wall, all the gibbons came down to hang on the wire fence to look at the parrot. Also, another amazing thing about gibbons: they are monogamous and they mate only once, for life. When they lose a mate, they stay solitary forever after. Sorry, I’m going off on my mother nature kick again, I just can’t help it, I just love this fucking stuff.

Anyway, at the spa we enjoyed all the usual very much, though I’m somewhat peeved that the aloe vera body wrap has failed to live up to its promise of making my skin look years younger. (How dare they get my hopes up?) Then, as we ate our lunch of delicious crab cakes and aloe vera mango shakes in the restaurant high above the bay we could see a huge black stain in the water, which looked like a giant ink-spill or oil slick. But it shifted shape, then parted into two separate blotches, then recombined, and we realized that it must have been millions and millions of tiny fish, in a cloud as black as the night, feeding on the coral.

Another good swimming beach on Koh Tao is Jamson Bay, so on one of the few days that Max had off from dive school, I took him there. We sun tanned for a bit, and then decided to feed the fish with the food on sale. Chest deep, one small fistful of fish food dropped into the sea around us, and suddenly the water around us was virtually boiling with fish! Little yellow and grey ones would swim up to our mask, seeming to mouth urgently feed me, feed me. So cute. There were so many fish, of many different kinds, in front of our faces that we couldn’t even take a successful photo underwater. And then we discovered the big problem with fish food: it looks perilously close to the male nipple. Our nips got bit BAD, and repeatedly so. And when the food was gone, the nipples were concealed behind a tightly clamped arm (like ladies in the 70s movies, caught coming out of the shower), the excited fish would try instead a mole or a freckle. So that is the basic problem with fish food, or perhaps the problem lies instead with male nipples. You be the judge and let me know.

Theme number 7: Tattoos. I’m having two fabulous ones done at the Burning Tattoo Studio, run by Ket and Soko. The first one, a lionfish inked onto my calf, was not so bad. I was even able to read a novel (Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest, Never Let Me Go, about clones being raised as organ donors. Big Waste of Time!) during the six hours that Soko worked on this absolutely gorgeous tattoo. For those of you (and you are legion, I know) who think I am crazy: I Don’t Care. I love it.

But last night, was a different matter, as we began tattoo number 2: a dragon curling down from under my arm onto my ribs and abs. In a sense with the dragon I’m tattooing dietary discipline into myself, because this tattoo will look like total roadkill unless I keep some semblance of a flat stomach. I think it’s a rather clever and novel approach, don’t you? But my God, its the most painful thing I have EVER experienced despite the dissociative trance I tried to induce with 2 valiums (thanks to no-prescription-necessary Thai pharmacies), 3 painkillers and a beer. In fact, were it not for the fact that once you’ve started a tattoo you have to go through to the end, I would have called it off after 30 minutes. I think it will look great when its done, but I’m ending this email now because I’ve gotta go email it, and then begin day number 2 of the dragon tattoo!

If I die of cardiac shock on the bench, I send you all my love. But then you know you have that anyway. Big love, Peter

Chapter 30: Diary of a Fast

Some of you know I was planning to do a 7-day fast, and for others of you, this will be news. Here, with no further ado, is my report. The long and short of it? I never thought I would be able to go a day without food, let alone 7 of them in a row. But I'm here to tell you that fasting was much, much easier than I had expected, and now I feel so energized and clean - more alive, somehow. I can't recommend it highly enough.

In writing this email, I have debated how much to tell you about the fasting process itself, especially the famous colonic irrigation. Everyone here at Spa Samui quickly becomes rather obsessed with their bowel movements, and there is much discussion and comparison of notes. I'll try to strike a middle balance, and apologies to those of you who feel I've gone too far with the detail. Anyway, here is my tale.

Day 0
I arrive at Spa Samui feeling a little down. Max and I had to get up at 3:30 am to catch our flight from Bangkok to Koh Samui, and I feel tired, and a little stressed. My room seems bleak to me - it is only $25 per night - and the yoga class I attend as soon as I arrive is for beginners, whereas I am looking for something more advanced. There are strange looking people walking around carrying buckets partially filled with what seems to be coffee. I think, what the hell am I going to do to fill my time here? I send out various text message SOS's. I can hear the guy in the cabin next to me straining with his enema - so charming - and it suddenly occurs to me what the buckets are for.

Still, I chill out in my hammock for a bit, and as the day unfolds the slow charm of the place begins to settle in on me. I am in beautiful surroundings, high in the jungly hills of Koh Samui, and there are flowers and plants and hundreds of different kinds of butterflies everywhere. There are also huge bees, with jet black bodies as big as my thumb and irridescent blue wings fertilizing the rampant flowers. Liquid whoop-whoop bird calls fill the air.

We are instructed in the use of the colema board, which is a necessary part of the twice daily colemas, basically washing the intestinal tract twice daily with 16 litres (yes, 16 litres) of a diluted coffee and apple vinegar solution; this delight begins tomorrow. There is even a sieve to put into the toilet bowl, should one have an inclination to closely inspect what's coming out.

Later the chiropractor clicks my spasmed neck. As part of my precleansing day I eat only vegan food, my last solids for 7 days. But who knew vegetarian food, specifically a ginger cashew nut vegetable stirfry and Thai vegetarian spring rolls, could be so delicious? The restaurant at this spa has been voted one of the 50 best restaurants in the world, which is highly ironic, given that most of the people staying here are not eating.

So the day passes and in the evening I am treated to something special; an absolutely enormous lightening storm across the water, but very far off, so that where I am sitting there is no rain or wind or thunder, only a huge ever-shifting Halloween display of black and orange and electric blue taking up the whole sky at the horizon. When I go to bed at night I can hear the cute feet scampering on my roof. I have no idea what the owner of these is. I find a tiny white pellet in my bed, the size of my finger nail. As I hold it between my thumb and forefinger, and it snaps and spatters weird yolk on me.

Day 1
I arise early at 6:30, waking to the rooster. I go for my first 7 am detox drink of juice, water, psyllium husk and clay. And then to morning meditation. To my great surprise, the meditation master, San Bao, reads a poem by Mary Oliver, When Death Comes. I am astonished. Of the millions of poems in the world to choose from, he chooses one that I've been obsessing about for weeks. So I'm inclined to view his choice as a serendipitous signal. I enjoy the guided meditation, but during the quiet solo meditation time, my mind erupts with anxieties and thoughts, and I cannot settle. I have so far to go. I also do Chi Gung, which is like Tai Chi, but I'm not sure that I get it, though just before Chi Gung the master reads the following Taoist poem by Li Po: "We sit, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains". And all day I keep turning this beautiful idea over in my mind.

As the day wears on, I find not eating is surprisingly easy. We are allowed one carrot juice, two coconut waters, 2 wheatgrass shots, and two bowls of vegetable consomme per day. Also, the psyllium husk in the 4-times-a-day detox drinks keep you feeling pretty full. I quickly develop an addiction for coconut water, with it's cool sweet taste and ever so slightly viscous texture. All throughout the day I have a slight headache but I'm told that's a natural reaction as the body starts to detox, especially as the herbal supplements that we also take break down the toxic mucoid plaque in the gut. (For those of you interested in this delightful topic, you can read the more later.) My friend Chip calls to see how I'm doing, and I feel further encouraged.

Day 2
I wake feeling heavy and tired; I didn't sleep well, what with scampering feet on my roof, and some pretty breathtaking intestinal cramps every two hours through the night. This too is normal, apparently. Peristalsis of the gut as it tries to shed the accreted mucoid plaque, apparently. I sun tan by the pool, and meet some other fasters, including two who become fast friends. The first is Lior, an Israeli woman living in Hong Kong with her children and husband, whom she says looks gay. She shows me a picture of him, and I concur. Lior has a quiet peace and competence about her. I also meet DB, a social worker from London with a massive laugh and fabulous waist-long dreads who deals with gun-toting 12 year olds and crack addicts, but is terrified of frogs, geckos, bats, insects - basically anything that moves but is not human.

When I tell her I'm a banker she stops dead-in-her tracks in disbelief, says "Fuck, you don't look like a banker. I thought you were a writer". When I tell her that my dream to be a writer, she begins to push me in every conversation to do something about it, and asks everyone in the resort whether they have any connections in the publishing world who can help me. She even finds some, Jez and Fiona, who are doing travel filming in Asia, who promise to forward my travel writings to some contacts of theirs in publishing and TV for their advice. I emailed my stuff to them, and now I give it up to the universe.

I have an aqua detox, basically a footbath in water with certain unspecified mineral salts through which an electromagnetic current is run. I am highly dubious that the machine actually does what it purports; i.e. draws toxins from the bloodstream and lymph system through the 4000 odd pores of my feet. The blood in the body circulates every twenty minutes, so in theory the 30 minute session should give the blood a once over. However, I'm a bit sceptical since the guy giving the sessions doesn't really seem to have a clear grasp of the difference between the lymph system and the blood system, claiming that the crud floating on top of the footbath water after 15 minutes of treatment is "lymph drawn from the microcapiliaries near the pores in the feet." However, I'm prepared to suspend my disbelief, since interestingly everyone's discharge is different. Some people end up with a footbath full of floating black-green cottage cheese curds, while others end up with a red-orange scum that clings like long-life milk in coffee, while others look like they are bathing their feet in a small frog-friendly pond. I am thrilled; my water turns greenish, but there is no floating crud, and John declares my discharge to be the least toxic he's seen in "months". And afterwards my feet do feel really springy.

Day 3
I am feeling pretty strong. I still had cramps last night, but every one was followed by a truly massive BM. I am not sleeping much, but apparently that is common. The chickens strutting everywhere keep me amused; they are handsome, with glossy black and caramel feathers. Every so often the rooster takes it into his head to show the world who's boss of the harem and he goes after a hen - but I mean really goes after her, with murderous intent it seems - and she hares around everywhere in a panic, running at top speed clucking and squawking, neck stretched out, bug-eyed. These chicken chases can last for 15 minutes and range over the whole resort. Feathers are shed.

Later, I have ampuku, a Japanese stomach massage designed to help elimination. I hop up from the massage and by necessity run down the steep hill from the massage sala to my cabin, hoping not to wipe out on my flip flops in my desperate hurry. I relax that evening with a steam bath in a room constructed out of a confluence of boulders. Some 32 Thai herbs are infused into the steam, and it's very nice, though blinking hot. There is much laughter amongst the various fasters around the dinner table as we make a meal out of our thin vegetable consomme.

Day 4
Not sleeping but I feel amazingly energetic and strong. No more cramps. The routine has settled on me. I feel little inclination to leave the beautiful resort. I do meditation and yoga or Chi Gung in the morning, read and sun tan, do the colemas and enjoy some fanstastic massage therapy, including a two hour classic Thai massage for £7. I feel slimmer. I am not hungry, though a girl named Amanda and I fantasize about the food taste we'd enjoy most. I want scrambled eggs with goat cheese and spring onion on hot buttered brown toast. She is from Arizona, and so wants a chicken enchilada, with guacamole and sour creme, and I realize that I want that too. Then she thinks, perhaps, instead she'd like risotto with porcini mushrooms and truffle oil, and I realize that I also want to eat that. We realize we are salivating buckets, and quickly agree to stop playing this masochistic game.

Later, around 4pm, the skies turn grey and a sudden wind arises. The trees begin to toss, and seem restless, eager. The shaking leaves give a hiss of expectation. A rumble of tremendous thunder vibrates through my body. When the rain comes, it first sounds like white noise, but then comes down so hard that it seems like the trees are applauding. Afterwards the smell of wet earth and flowers is everywhere, and as dusk descends the frogs all start belling, ecstatic and amorous thanks to the rains. There must be four or five different kinds of frogs; one sounds like a groaning door, while another has a high thrumming trill. The air is also filled with the chuck-chuck sounds of geckoes and the chirring of cicadaes and God knows what else. All of them, all the animals out there in the perfumed dark, are calling for love. I am entranced by the idea of this and by the symphony of sound. The next morning DB tells me that she couldn't sleep because of all the noise.

Day 5
In the morning, I fish two frogs out of the swimming pool; one smaller one clasped tightly to the back of the larger. It looks like the bigger one has been helping the smaller one, though they could also have been having nookie, when they fell into the pool. I also have a private yoga session at the tiny house of Ute, a mad lovely German woman who's been on Koh Samui 5 years. She's got two tiny kittens, which are all stomach, and two big stray jungle dogs, which gently lick and nuzzle the kittens, as if the kittens were their own offspring. The kittens both want to lie on my discarded sweat-soaked T-shirt as Ute puts me through my paces.

Ute follows Iyanga yoga, which focuses on the absolutely correct alignment in the different postures, rather than Ashtanga, which focuses more on a continuous flow through the various postures, or asanas, and it's a real pleasure to work on them with her guidance. I am totally into it, developing a real passion for yoga. Later Ute asks me if I've ever thought about teaching yoga, and a zillion fantasies about different lives, i.e. teaching yoga on Koh Samui, Vancouver, Costa Rica, South Africa, etc fly through my mind.

At night in the restaurant, a giant praying mantis flies onto me. Thank god DB is not here. The mantis is gorgeous; with his apple-green body and heart-shaped face and large golden eyes. He runs up and down my shoulders, back and forth. As he cocks his head to look at me, I have the feeling I am being observed by an alien intelligence. I recall that the Bushmen of Africa thought the mantis was the first creature of this earth, the father of all the other animals.

Day 6.
I feel so energetic and alive I can hardly believe it. I feel like going running, though the fasting experts at the resort advise taking it easy. The Thais working at the resort are so lovely, soft and friendly. When the young girls working in the restaurant say "Excuse me" it sounds like "Kiss meeeee".

Still, not everyone here is divine. I meet a German guy who's been fasting for 34 days. When I ask him, "Why?" he screamed at me "To get all that FILTH out of me", and then discloses, with no prompting from me, that he has documented every bowel movement during his 34 day fast with a digital colour photograph. However, he also announces that he is planning to move "back to the Fatherland", so I think I can safely dismiss him has a total wacko-weirdo.

However, when I mention to Ute (my German yoga instructor) that I'd bumped into this totally weird German guy and that I thought he was insane for fasting for 34 days, and she tells me, in all seriousness, about the Prana Diet, which is basically that you don't eat. At All. Ever. Practitioners of the Prana Diet believe that with proper meditation and breathing, eating becomes entirely unnecessary, that one can absorb Chi or prana or life energy directly from the universe, bypassing entirely the medium of food. Ute tells me she once met someone who went 9 months without food, and that he had the most wonderful eyes. She tells me that an Australian couple have written a book on the Prana Diet, which they apparently have followed for years. I say NOTHING, but you all can imagine what I'm thinking. Later, a lovely British-Indian doctor named Sonya, who is also doing the fast, confirms my scepticism by informing me that the Australian couple have been subsequently exposed as secret eaters. Well,
duhhhhh.

Day 7
Even so, prana diets notwithstanding, we've learned some amazing things about food and nutrition while here. Did you know that pasteurized cows' milk is catastrophic for the human body? The human body cannot digest even raw cows milk very well, but the process of pasteurization changes entirely many of the protein complexes in the milk, leaving them virtually undigestible. Indeed, even a calf that is fed pasteurized milk will die within 3-6 months, a secret that the dairy industry tries hard to supress. When you drink pasteurized cows' milk, the body cannot digest it completely, and in order to deal with the unnatural proteins left behind, the intestinal tract secrets a mucus, that binds to the protein particle, but also to the wall of the intestine.

A similar phenomenon happens when you eat starches and proteins together; starches require an alkaline environment for digestion, and proteins a highly acid one. If they are eaten together, they do not digest properly; hence fermentation/rot, hence a feeling of bloating etc, but also a buildup of mucus. Over time this mucus can build up to quite astonishing proportions, with consequent health issues. I will spare you exact details, but just let me say that I have seen photos, and it's not pretty. Having said all that, I think the chances that I give up forever my occassional quatro formagi pizza, with an extra topping of pepperoni are about as close to zero as it's possible to get. Still, I may now make an extra effort to follow it with healthy cleansing food for the next several meals.

In meditation this morning, we do a humming meditation for half an hour - an ancient Tibetan technique. It seems to release a lot of internal energy; I feel very warm and perky. I suppose it also parallels a cat's purring, which not only has been shown to lower blood pressure in people, but also serves to accelerate the auto-healing process in cats themselves. We also focus on making imperceptibly slow circular movements of the hands, which also proves very good for concentrating the mind. In the quiet unguided period of meditation time, however, my mind erupts in a volcano of concerns, worries, anxieties. Arghghghghghg, why can't I meditate properly?

Amanda, Finn and I decide to break our fast half a day early so that tomorrow we can have a full day of eating the good quality food in the Spa restaurant before we have to take our chances outside in the restaurants of the wider world. We spend the whole day poring over the menu, deciding what we will order tonight. I settle on a small somtum salad of shredded papaya, cabbage, onions, tomato with a chilli lime dressing. Chewing was strange, abnormal. It took
forever to eat the salad, like maybe an hour. But I then quickly dispatched a mango softy (basically whipped frozen mango) with cinnamon sauce. Lior rings from Hong Kong to ask if I think it's too soon for her to eat a piece of chocolate pie. Amanda has eaten all of a large somtum salad, so much in fact that she says she thinks she can feel her heart beat pulsing against her stomach.

Still, she declares:"I'm just going to eat a little more, just the cinnamon sauce part of the mango softy". Each mouthful is painful to her, but she keeps going. She discloses that she won eating championships when she was a child. Finally she reels backward in exhaustion, and I proceed to finish off the remains of both her and Finn's mango softies. I am super hungry. My stomach does not seem to have shrunk at all. I am already planning what I'm going to eat tomorrow.

Eating day:
My eating day. Hurrah! First I meditate. Today it is a shaking meditation, followed by dancing - which us boys are well practiced in! - and then a quiet meditation session, again during which I have problems settling my mind. I realize that it's my anxiety over my battle with Inland Revenue which is disturbing me, and I envisage a universe in which my particular tax inspector, a certain Mr Bolton, suddenly has never existed and my accountant suddenly is competent. But soon meditation is over, and the fun begins! It is a delight to eat again. Breakfast is a delicious melee of papaya, mango, goat yoghurt and bee pollen. I feel bloated. For lunch I have a Greek salad and a small soup. I feel bloated again.

The Spa recommends 3 days of eating only raw foods when breaking the fast, but I decide to follow an accelerated program, since this dinner will be the last chance I have to eat in the Spa's restaurant. So I order vegetable spring rolls and a vegetable stir fry. Now I feel truly bloated. But henceforth, I will be better with my eating especially since I have rid myself of the ginormous creme caramel which girdled my waist, even if I haven't yet rediscovered a rippling six-pack of abdominal muscles. It's been a really great experience.

The next day addendum:
I set off on a tiny speedboat for the tiny island of Koh Tao, about 2 hours from Koh Samui. The wind is howling and it looks like we are headed straight for the center of a black cloud girdling the horizon. The waves are super high and I think it would be a terrible shame to lose all my newly ingested food through a bout of sea-sickness. The theme song from Gilligan's Island runs through my head. But I survive, though a fat girl very nearly got bounced overboard.

Very finally a word of caution for would-be fasters: do not be fooled into thinking you can move quickly on from a vegetable stir fly and spring rolls to a chocolate bon-bon and a spicy prawn curry. I am here to tell you that sea-sickness is NOTHING compared to this.