Popagandhi

How about it - a mere seven nights on this island, this little slice of paradise I took a coach, a train, 2 minibuses, and a boat to get to - and the guide on my Munchies Boat Trip tour comes to me as we’re walking from the Thansadet waterfall back to our boat:

“Excoose mee lady, I hear Thai people say.. heeeheeehee… I hear Thai people say to me, you are her girlfriend, she is your boyfren. Izzit? Not my fault, not I say! The other Thai peeple say!!”

Cue for me to act as if I have no idea what he is talking about, and insist - “but she is not a boy!” At this point David turns to us, incredulous, wondering how we could have inspired rumours from what little time we’ve had here.

In other news, everybody smokes pot (especially while swimming in the waterfall - but I’m so uptight and so SingaporeanI can’t even litter here, much less..), and we didn’t make it to the Half Moon Party, after missing the Full Moon Party, and the Black Moon party isn’t here yet..

Catching the night boat to Surat Thani, then a train to Kuala Lumpur from Hat Yai tomorrow. I love islands - especially Thai islands - but there’s only so much of sun, beach, drink, and sunburnt and drunk Caucasians that I can take. I’ve been on far too many boats in recent days - evidently, I am not a water person. Water scares me; I gave up on swimming somewhere between learning to trap water and learning the breaststroke. I don’t trust myself in water and my idea of hell is to have to swim continuously across a pool.. width-wise, and I’m terrified whenever I can’t feel concrete or sand when I place my feet down. Something about having beefy men for lifeguards scarred me as a child, and I knew then I would never want to swim so well as to have too much to do with them, or swim so badly I need their rescue. I remember thinking it’s so fucked up, why can’t I have hot women saving me?, then again I’ll try to drown too many times - we’ll talk about this in therapy next time.

But I have a capsize routine. Meticulously planned and mentally rehearsed a thousand times over in my head, perfected as we snorkelled in the rain. You would too, if you’ve seen the boats I’ve been on. My capsize routine is, you might say, fairly ambitious; it requires that in the split second of detecting trouble, I retain the calmness of mind to pull out ziplocks from the depths of my backpacks, into which I will place my ‘perishables’ (cameras, laptop, iPod); then inflating a little boat on which I can float my stuff. Failing which, I would simply flail about in the water, holding my precious ones above my head - even if I can’t really swim.

Clearly, I don’t have the right priorities in life.