bang sak

so i last wrote from patong beach in phuket. it was horrible, an entire urban sprawl based on bourgeois tourist trash. cost of living was exorbitant, with food costing perhaps 10 times what is does in real cities.



eli had this masochistic urge to make me see bang na, this party-road that is overflowing with prostitutes and liquor and clubs. he knew i would be repulsed and pissed at him, but he wanted me to see it anyway just for my reaction. i never saw it, because my brain physiologically rejected the entire city, giving me a fever for one night. not fun. luckily i recovered quickly, with just dizzyness and weakness for a few days. fast recovery was probably due to our speedy exit. only one night lost to that pit.



we took a bus about 2.5 hours north to bang sak, a tiny town, really just a higher concentration of buildings along the coastal highway. this is where amanda, our friend from boulder, has been living. she has been an english teacher at a local high school, and now that her class has graduated she has started working at the office of a tourist scuba diving company. she grew up in thailand, went to an international school, and she is half thai half american. she speaks both languages with almost no accent, so she is great to hang out with here.



we stayed in the same duplex as her for the last 6 nights, spending our time at the beach and at an amazing little thai restaurant, where we ate at least one meal a day every day. i don't think i'll ever find better food than that. goodness.

amnat runs the restaurant with his girlfriend bam (who does all the cooking and cleaning, just can't speak english so amnat took our orders until we learned enough thai). amnat offered to take me fishing with him in the andaman sea, paying $5 to a local boat owner for a trip that normally costs tourists $50. i accepted, knowing nothing about what i was in for, and amnat told me nothing. so i was totally unprepared.

we got on the water at about 5:00 pm, five of us, me and amnat and a young boat driver and two elderly men. the boat was maybe 30 ft long, with a ragged tarp canopy covering a bit of it. we had fishing poles and lines connected to bamboo rods and we pulled by hand. the targets were little tropical looking fish, maybe 1-3 lbs each, that live near the bottom and apparently eat dead squid meat, which was our bait.

first there was the squall. heavy rains, thunder and lightning, and me without any kind of jacket at all. then we stayed out all night, a total of about 17 hours in fact, well into the next day, pulling in these little fish. my genetic curse reared its ugly head for the first 15 hours - i only caught one fish, at 2:30 am. they made sure i was baiting the hook properly, was letting the weight sit on the bottom, everything. they couldn't understand my bad luck. amnat would look at me all forlorn and ask "why no bite?". meanwhile the other guys, especially the older men, were pulling them in every few minutes, quietly filling up coolers with their catch. it was miserable, exhausting, humilitating.

finally at about 8:30 in the morning i started using a free line to fish, just holding it in my hands. for some reason it worked, and i was almost keeping up with everyone else those last couple hours. all told i caught 1 kungfai, 1 samat and 8 gau. i guess i would do it all over again if i had the chance. maybe. i was slaphappy crazy that day when i got back, and exhausted for several days afterwards.

amnat and bam cooked up some fish dishes for me that night. too bony to really enjoy (thais just eat the bones i guess) but it feels great to eat what i just caught a few hours before.

after that eli and i spent our days in bangsak lounging around on the beach, reading, socializing with amanda's group of friends, eating absurdly well, naking naps, planning for our upcoming travels, and exploring a bit. i rented a motorbike for three days which we used explore and visit other beaches, other restaurants and other towns.

bangsak and the towns near it were hit the hardest by the tsunami of december 2004. amnat showed us a book of written accounts and pictures published by one of the relief organizations that helped rebuild. most people on this coast survived (about 8,500 died) but the wave took every building and material object it could, leaving nothing but foundations. we spent several hours reading those stories and listening to amnat's own account: the wave hit them while they were trying to escape in his minibus. he was thrown out and managed to stay on top of the water and survive, but his wife was killed. even though she was in the bus with him, it took him many days to find her body. heartbreaking stories, i wish i'd been there to help in the aftermath.

today i split with eli again. he's going to fly back to chiang mai to collect his things, and i took a bus 5 hours south to krabi. we will meet up in bangkok in about a week. krabi is famous for having lots of good rock climbing around it, lots of beautiful beaches and cliffs and lagoons that i'm sure are crawling with farengs, but i can't figure out krabi town itself. i walked this city all afternoon and evening, looking for cheap accomodations and the tourist district (which i needed only for a used book store, where i can trade read books for unread ones). i finally found a decent guest house, but i couldn't for the life of me find any fareng territory. no bars, no hotel strip, no western food restaurants, no booking agencies, no harrassment. no english-language bookstores. maybe i just failed to find it. it is nice though, being completely ignored in a town in southern thailand.

tomorrow i will take a ferry out to an island called koh lanta.