Floating Market

Part 2

On the second night in Koh Phangan I was climbing over some large rocks I was sitting on with friends and slipped down the side of one. After riding in a boat back to the main beach, I went into the medical clinic nearby and was stitched up on my knee, elbow, and side, and spent the next three days in the clinic. It was good to sleep, get fluids, play cards and generally rest. Here are some photo's, all is well now.

Koh Phangan, Part 1

This entry will have to mostly be straight out of my journal as I don't really feel like rewriting so much all over again.

The first day of my time in Koh Phangan was one of the most beautiful of my life. Technically it’s still continuing.. depending on how you regard time, but I need to take a moment to record the details. At 8:55pm we boarded a bus in downtown BKK on Koah San Road. Sitting in the very last seat tilted forward and right in the center of the row with nowhere to put my feet, I attempted to sleep and listen to all the good music on my IPod. The guy sitting next to me was one of those classic white guys that grew ten years older in his Thai neverland and still goes to the islands for the hard partying that all the tourists were heading to. While cracking his way through ten or eleven Leo’s, he wanted to chat his way through the nightlong bus ride and while sitting at the boat launch through the breaking hours of dawn while I was trying to read/sleep through my insomnia. It was pretty nice at a few moments however, sitting on all our backpacks at the boat launch watching the sun rise revealing the fact that we definitely weren’t in Bangkok anymore. Instead we were back to aquamarine water and rickety wooden longtail boats. We walked the longest boardwalk I’d ever seen to the Lomprayah Speedboat and an hour and a half later we stopped at Koh Tao. The bungalows and hotels built into the huge white boulders around the coast of the island looked like a fairy tale, and I decided I needed to come back and explore Koh Tao eventually as well.

Another hour and a box of pringles, entire chocolate bar, and Chinese Philosophy book later, I started to see Koh Phangan appearing in the distance. I squeezed upstairs to the rooftop deck to stand and take in this enormous island, with one road encircling it and rising mountains of jungle in the center. The rocks were different from PhiPhi, huge white boulders you would want to climb around on.

We walked out of the boat launch and met a guy with a sign waiting for us, then got in the back of the taxi to ride about 30 minutes up the coast and down a long dirt road, to our resort at Haad Tian. Coming here is one of those moments when all you can really think is – so places like this really do exist. Wooden bungalos with hammoks under trees, ten feet from the sand.

My friend Josh and I climbed around the rocks next to our beach, then pulled a kayak out of the bushes and some bamboo poles and paddles out to float in the sun. Then Carina switched and we did the same for a while, talking about the differences in the way we see our lives now, what we want to do in the future, everything that has changed – or just how many times in a day we find ourselves thinking ‘If I died in this moment I’d die happy, because at least I know I lived and found my bliss, and that was all I ever really had to do anyway.’

After playing in the pool, eating, and getting ready to go to Haad Rin Beach, we loaded into the taxi truck and sped through the night. Meeting up with some more friends from school, I went to town painting glow paint designs on my friends.. I was pretty happy, I could probably be happy just as a career body paint artist at the full moon parties now that I think about it.. Anyway, the beach was lined with music and people twirling jump ropes that were lit on fire. There aren’t really sufficient word to describe the scene, but after running around the beaches, and climbing up to the bars built into the sides of the cliffs, two of my friends and I decided to take a longtail boat around the corner of the island to another beach we had heard about. We rode this boat into the darkness over the huge rolling waves until after coming around a bend, a small beach appeared. Lit up with small places to stay or eat. We jumped off into the sand and the driver lead us up to a place in the trees, along boardwalks made out of sticks and footing carved out of the sides of boulders. It was strange to be so secluded from the world, exploring a place you could never access by road. I really felt as if I had walked into the fort of peter pan and the lost boys and never wanted to leave.

We did leave however, and made our way back down to the beach. We boarded another boat with German guys, took a detour to drop them off around the corner, driving through boulders in the water and looking at the the tiny lights in the hillside, wishing I could stay in one of the places there. We dropped off the Germans and floated, waiting for the driver to sort out his engine trouble. The guy was literally hard-wiring this huge longtail engine as we floated out in the darkness. Then he told me to sit facing forward in the center of the bench so everyone was behind me and I didn’t have much to hang onto except the sides of the seat. I held on tight and at full speed we took off back to Haad Rid, all I could see in front of the was the nose of the boat, the dark rolling water under us, and the huge night sky. I put my head back into the misty warm wind and, getting lost in the stars and the universe above me, couldn't bring myself to do anything other than grin the biggest smile of my life and melt into the ecstasy that is life.
    

A Picture's Worth A Thousand Words Right

The last few weeks around Bangkok

The last couple weeks had a few highlights. In the first weekend of February my program took about 150 international students to a kind of Thai army camp. We did some zip lining, team games, and had a fun night staying in a large building on mats of the floor. It was cool to get to know a lot of new Thai students that we don't usually get a chance to really get to know. Playing music out in the parking lot and with coolers and coolers of bottomless beer courtesy of Rangsit University ;)

A few days later we had International Day, a day for international students to represent their countries of origin or just any general heritage. We were supposed to hold the flag in a parade around the campus and then make a traditional dish to serve about 300 people. We also got a table to set up and we said hello in Gailac on the stage in the university auditorium. My friend Josh and I represented Ireland, and it was a really fun day off from class to eat delicious food and decorate my table. Some of the students also put on performances of traditional dances or show anything else that represented their country.