The Good Times Are Killing Me

It’s always 12 o’clock somewhere. That’s what Robin told me as I sipped my first cold one of the day at 9.45am last Tuesday. I justified my brewski using the following evidence: We had been up since 3.30am, almost six hours before, getting from Bangkok to Koh Samui – our tropical island getaway off the eastern coast of Thailand. We had spent the previous two days in a state of semi-conscious head-lolling, travelling from Toyama to Tokyo, Tokyo to Narita airport, to Bangkok, through crazy Bangkok to hostel, a quick evening in Bangkok, a cab, a plane, a long wait, a bus and eventually to our hotel on Koh Samui. Who had never heard of us. A couple of phone calls to our agent cleared everything up, but we could not check for another four hours, it being 8am. But please, we were told, have full use of our facilities. So, I rationalised, why not beer? And why not, I’m on holiday.

But, consider you’re not on holiday; what time can you have that first sup and not have a problem? UK pubs don’t open until 11am, but if it’s not a weekend and you’re ordering the pub’s first pint of the day then you have a problem somewhere. On holiday the rules go out the window. Christmas Eve: morning Irish coffee. Spain or Greece: a nice cold white wine with breakfast. France: cheese, croissants, red wine. Bank holidays, on tour, week off work and the sun is out? Why not start the day with a game of snooker and a pint of bitter? And there’s nothing quite like a cold pint of Guinness as the Dublin sun is rising above Temple bar.
Many times I have woken up in the middle-morning, washed, dressed, and headed straight to the pub – normally to meet Alex, or Gagsy, or some other reprobate friend of mine. How many times have you Brits had two pints too many with lunch on a workday? How many times have you popped out to the shops for lunch and had to convince yourself it would be a BAD idea to get that refreshing looking tall-boy in the fridge next to the bottles of water? In Japan it’s a constant struggle.

But back to that tropical island.

“Ah” I said to Robin as we made the 10-yard stroll from the bar to our sun loungers on the beach, “the sun is shining, the sea is shimmering. I have a good book, excellent company and an enormous girly cocktail. Does life get any better than this?” Imagine this: lunchtime, under a thatched canopy a wicker table, laden with Thai curries and fruits. From there a short green lawn dotted with exotic looking flowers stretching to a low terracotta wall, beyond which the shade of a row of palm trees, a strip of white warm sand, and the soft lapping waves of a clear blue sea. Further out: a sand bar, some kayakers and tree-covered island in the distance. Blue skies, intermittent fluffy white clouds, a very slight refreshing breeze. A gin and tonic. Do you hate me?

Thailand is a truly wonderful country - the people are nice and friendly and speak excellent English. In every asian country there are those that try to cheat you or drag you off on a special trip where they try to fleece you of your money. Thailand is no different in this, but the people generally are nicer, more polite, friendly.

This is our first grown up holiday – our first holiday on which we have spent more then 10 pounds on a room per night; where there is room service, and the staff call you “sir”. I’ve never stayed anywhere with a mini-bar that I am paying for. It made me strangely restrained. With this slightly higher bracket though comes the Germans: fat middle-aged Germans and Russians. The hotel library is entirely in Dutch. The hotel we’re staying in is called the The Coral Bay Resort, an eco-friendly place where they recycle their water through a system of streams, rocks, and charcoal, spread around the ten hectares of natural gardens. They urge us to re-use our towels (but insist on replacing them every day); they remind us to conserve our use of the water they store for each bungalow in a rain tank on the roof (but use 10 litre flushes in the urinals).
It is a very environmental resort – in that we are surrounded in it. The environment that is. One morning I chased a frog out of the shower. For our entire stay a rather large lizard kept watch, attached to the wall above our front door; birds demanded toast and coffee in the mornings; enormous colourful butterflies escorted us up and down paths and alighted on my cocktails; local dogs took shelter beneath our loungers. As we were waiting for a lift to the airport a frog very calmly made the ten-minute commute from his home lily-pad on one side of reception to his other lily pad on the opposite side. I regard my Thai chicken curries with suspicion.

Just down the road from our resort was the lovely town of Chaweng. Lonely Planet describes the island of Samui as an already beautiful woman who goes and spoils it by using too much make-up. This certainly applies to Chaweng, which resembles the Costa del Sol more than it does a tropical island town. We ambled in now and then, to get some dinner and a drink and then escape back to our peaceful and clean resort. What is it about hot climates that attract the shirtless, tattooed, skinhead, lobster-red, drunken Englishman? You want a pint of Heineken? Full English breakfast? Fish and chips? Chaweng. The restaurants advertise ‘western food’ and make much of the use of bottled water used to wash the vegetables. Shops sell Palmolive soap, Heinz Ketchup, The bloody Sun newspaper. There are of course lovely small Thai restaurants and out of the way cafes and bars, but soon enough I’m sure they’ll be overtaken by ‘development.’ When Robin worked at Traveler magazine she says that the editorial team would decide whether to do an article on a place depending on if it would attract the wrong kind of tourism; whether it would be spoiled by too many people going there. I think maybe Lonely Planet should leave Thailand alone for a while.

Robin and I have discovered ourselves (okay, just me) to be the uncouthest of the uncouth. In Japan you don’t tip, you just don’t. For me this has not been a hard habit to adopt, being from a skinflint country as I am. For Robin however it took a while of servers chasing after us with our ‘forgotten’ change. It didn’t occur to us until too late in our stay in Thailand that we should probably have been tipping the staff at our very nice hotel. At the end of our stay we made envelopes of generous tips for housekeeping, the restaurant, and the very pleasant chap at the bar who had been making my G&Ts for the past week. Smiles all round. However, while sat in reception we saw a couple of fat Germans tipping their cab driver as he dropped them off. Oh dear, hadn’t thought of that; another demographic alienated.

Is it only Asian countries that have currencies where the 100th denominations are worth so little that they’re never used? Thai Green Curry – 45 Baht. Korean Beer – 250 Won. Japanese house – 47,000,000 yen. Brad insists he can get drunk every night because “we’re meeelleeeeonaires!” I was extremely excited when I first heard I was going to get paid 3.6 million yen a year. But Geoff – a friend of mine e-mailed me – that wouldn’t buy you a car. Oh.

If you have to be delayed in an airport it might as well be at an airport where Terminal One is only called terminal ‘One’ because it is nearest the bar and Terminal Two is a palm tree covered lean-to and security wears shorts and flowery shirts. Unfortunately the delay meant we wouldn’t get to Bangkok until 2am and our tenuous hostel bookings might be gone. We were leaving our idyllic paradise to sleep on the streets of Bangkok. Thankfully though, it turned out our hostel reservations were still there. Unfortunately, however, it turned out our hostel reservations were still there. Lonely Planet lists ‘Prakorp’s Hostel’ as “a nice break” and as having “the best guesthouse coffee.” He might have added, had he not been so high, that “it is the ideal place to collapse after a hard night of drugs and drinking. Because you will be oblivious to the grubby mattress, the grimy hole-filled plywood walls and the deafening screeching of the bars upstairs and immediately to your left.”

Being wary of a booking not being kept we had reservations at two hostels. ‘Rannee’s Guesthouse’ deserves it’s own chapter in Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ If I were a washed-out, end-of-the-road junkie, down to my last pennies, skin hanging off my ravaged body, who had lost all faith in man, god, and liquor, and only sought a way out of the hell that is humanity, Rannee’s Guesthouse is where I’d come to overdose. Even the cockroaches looked desperate.

We credit-carded our way to an upgrade at the local branch of the Sawasdee Hotel chain.

Bangkok is the kind of place that you come to get wasted; to overload on the hedonistic voyeurism that is the Khoa San Road. The beer is cheap, the spirits cheaper, the vendors raucous, and the traffic rudely oblivious. Do not go to Bangkok for a getaway; it’s loud, smelly, and full of foreigners. Drunken foreigners. I liked it, but it was not what I was looking for. We were surrounded on all sides by gap-yearers, hippies, students, and old time hippies who never made it home.

We strolled down the Khoa San Road on our last night before the next morning of solid sightseeing. The night was banging on, and the road was heaving with people in dreadlocks, goatees, Birkenstocks and at least one item of native clothing – mooching from stall to stall. We stop in the 7 Eleven (seriously, they are the world over) for an ice-cold beer. Strange – the beer fridge is locked, with a rope. The shop fills up suddenly. People try the fridge. There is a murmuring; a very quiet desperation is creeping in. “What’s going on with the beer?” someone worriedly asks. Outside in thee street people are sat at tables in the bars with cokes and juices in front of them; they fidget and twist, they don’t know what to do with these strange drinks. “What’s going on?” a Londoner cries as he races down the road.
“No beer in the pubs. No beer anywhere” gasps somebody else. We hurry back to our hostel before all hell breaks loose.

Elections, a wise old hand tells me later. We came to Thailand in the middle of a constitutional crisis. The Prime Minister of the last ten years is being increasingly harangued for corruption and has called elections for the Sunday before we leave. Opposition parties have boycotted, there are daily demonstrations in Bangkok. People are appealing to the King to intervene. It appears that Thais cannot be trusted to drink AND vote; with every election alcohol is prohibited from the night before to the night after the election – emotions run high perhaps? At home you would have to force-feed the public with hallucinogens to make them that excited about voting. Hell, you almost have to drug them to vote at all. Back safe at our hostel a few streets over from Khoa San we discover the manager doesn’t care for these rules “are you selling?” we ask, looking furtively over our shoulders. How many? he replies. All his guests sip quietly, not wanting to attract attention from the masses. We sit down, quietly rejoicing that the night has been saved. Not so for the Londoner on the Khoa San Road “it’s my last night in Thailand,” he told me, grabbing my shoulders “I wanted...wanted, to go out…” looking quickly around him, “The clubs! The clubs must be selling…!” he yelled as he ran off into the crowd.