My First Tropical Island Getaway

After almost two months in Thailand, with most of my time consumed by the mundane practicalities of every-day life (settling in to work, settling in to my new apartment, etc.) the unofficial staff bonding trip was my first real taste of oh-my-gosh-I'm-really-in-another-country adventure (well, other than the military coup that is). In case you're thinking I used some sort of photo-editing technique to make these pictures blur around the edges, actually that's just what happens when my camera lense fogs up when I step out from the air-conditioning into the humidity outside. We had a three-day weekend, so a bus-load of us set off straight from school on Thursday afternoon. Right from the start this trip stretched me into new experiences. Before I ever moved to Thailand, I'd been warned about the squatty potties here, but I'd managed to make it through more than 6 weeks without being forced to make use of one. Until the pit stop on the way to Koh Samed.

After a couple hours on the bus, we all piled into a large speedboat with our luggage for transport to the island. It was already dark, so there wasn't much to see along the way, but about 20 minutes later the boat stops along a beach, and we each grab out bags, take off our shoes and pull up our pantlegs, and climb off the end of the boat into the water to wade ashore. Half the group starts heading left down the beach, while the other half starts heading right. I tag along with some friends to the right, and we walk down the beach in the dark for a while before some leads us up some rocks onto a dirt road full of puddles from a recent rain. For part of the trek the only light comes from an on-coming motorbike. It sounded like there were cows or warthogs or something grunting in the trees alongside the road, but it turns out that's just what the frogs sound like here. Eventually we emerge out of the shadows to find Jep's, the place that will be home for the next two days. For the sake of getting my berrings and feeling like I'd done a little exploring, I did take short walks in both directions down the beach from Jep's over the course of the weekend, but for the most part, all the necessities of life and relaxation were available right there. We stayed in small jungle bungalows, ate all our meals at the outdoor restuarant right on the sand, and set up camp in rented beach chairs under a tree during the day -- a few steps in one direction brought us back to the restaurant for sustanance, a few steps in the other direction were ladies providing ocean-side massages, foot-scrubs, pedicures, etc., and a few steps straight ahead was the warm, calm water of the sea. We didn't even have to go anywhere in order to shop for souvenirs -- local folks walked up and down the beach offering sarongs and tatoos and snacks from their baskets and backpacks. Now, having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, this was a far cry from my personal experiences of what the beach is like. For most of my life, visiting the beach usually meant a place to bundle up and battle the wind, listening to the crashing waves, and maybe dipping your toes in the water if I was willing to brave the icey waters. The closest I'd ever come to this kind of tropical setting was on my trips to Florida in my Boston days, but even that couldn't really compare -- Florida offered the warm, calm water for swimming and the climate for lying in the sun, but it was still pretty developed. This place felt like a movie set. And I felt as pampered as a movie star: I am convinced that the beach is THE place where massage was meant to happen -- lying on the sand under the shade of a tree, listening to the waves, all just adds to the utter relaxation of the experience. And the perfect follow-up for the complete tropical experience is to have some woman come by with her basket full of chilled coconuts, hack the top off of one with something that looks like a machete, and stick a straw in it for you -- yum! Getting to the ferry to head home involved my first ride in a song-tow (sp?), which is one of the standard forms of public transportation around here -- basically riding in the back of a pick-up truck. The only negative part of the whole experience was when I was unpacking at home and found the medium-sized cockroach that had hitched a ride in my back-pack. Eek!