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