12.27 Samui first impressions

While my travels in Asia have been going on for over a month now, this is my first full blog entry. I ask myself why it’s taken me so long to get the thoughts, impressions and incredible stories I’ve been lucky enough to experience down in some written format, and my best response is “It’s better late than never.” In that spirit, here’s where the spirit has placed me in this moment.

I’m sitting on the North Side of Ko Samui, an island off the coast of Thailand, at a beachside bungalow. I arrived here with my friend Gift after a full day of traveling which was not without its own adventures.

We started the day in Trang, Thailand, where we had been for a few days, being treated to the most amazing hospitality I’ve ever experienced by the parents of my friend Gibb. They deserve their own blog entry for all of the amazing stuff they did for us, but for now, let’s continue. So Gift and I boarded a bus in Trang to head north 3 hours. While waiting for the bus, a man walked up with a chicken, holding it in his arms as if it was his prize-winner (it turns out it was!!). When we began to board the bus, the man and his chicken joined us. I can check “Riding on a Bus with a Chicken” off on my list of life goals. Surprisingly, the chicken was very well behaved on the journey, and the only way I remembered he was a passenger was the by the occasional “Gobble, gobble,” that was too authentic to be smart-ass Thai making jokes.

The ride consisted of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Love in the Time of Cholera. I’m such a sucker for Marquez, but does prose get any more beautiful? I mean how could one quietly slip the quote, “He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past,” appropriately into his writing without sounding pretentious? Only Marquez.

The book has had a big impact on me not so much for the story itself, but for the descriptions of the characters in this love story. Marquez is a genius for picking out the nuances of his characters that make them distinct, but that every one of us can find in the ones close to us. I read somewhere that Marquez considered himself to be more of a journalist than a writer, and from his sensitivity in describing people, places and, most heart-wrenchingly, love, its evident that his journalistic inclinations were just as honed as his gift for storytelling.

That being said, I’ve started to record information about folks I briefly meet on the road, hoping to record what I learn about them with as exactly and as revelatory as Marquez . . . we’ll see how that goes.

Ok, here’s one for you:

One the ride on the bus, Gift and I shared a seat with a man named Bao we’d met in Trang. Bao was in his mid to late 20’s, and with his ironed white shirts and designer shoes, you could tell he was off to either make impression or to maintain one. While Bao spoke no English (and my Thai won’t let me talk with anyone), you could see his kindness in some of the most beautiful brown eyes that ever graced a two-legged creature. He had an easiness to him that could make him forgettable, but behind his quiet voice there was a firmness to his words that forced you to take him seriously. He carried with him only a camera bag, meaning that he had clothes in the place he was going, and I later found out the purpose of his trip was to visit his girlfriend. They are to wed in August.

After leaving the first bus, another bus was in store, no chicken this time, that led to a ferry. The ferry ride took us to Ko Samui and offered up some beautiful scenery on the open sea.

Ko Samui was not what I expected at all, and I think the whiteys (or farang as the Thai call them) have overrun the small island. I wrote in an email to my brother that the island was like the Myrtle Beach of Thailand, and while this may have been a little of an overstatement, but yes, there is a Starbucks and a McDonald’s on this island (along with over 100 7 Eleven’s)!

Gift and I were exhausted from the traveling, so after a stroll on the beach, it was time to settle down for the night.

I’m looking forward to seeing more of Samui and getting to the good stuff the island has to offer in the morning.

This seems like a good time to end, so until next time, sawadee krab.