Blitzkrieg on Gannett Peak; Big Schmile; Scrambled Dano; Hunting an Excuse; The Retreat

I'd been idly considering a trip into the Wind River Mountains of big Wyo.  After a handful of hours gathering beta online, Gannett Peak presented itself as interesting due to its proximity to my HQ, to accounts of its rugged beauty, and to the savor of a challenge.  My mind immediately associated the appellation of Gannett to the peak which is Wyoming's highest with a villain of Nintendo legend: Gannon, the lizard king who kidnaps Zelda's girl.  "We'll soon see to this Evil Fucker," I told myself glibly.  No mere 13K+ feet could withhold its summit from me.  I run up 14K+ in tennis shoes.  I shut my laptop with a smirk.

Now, a side-note concerning my experiences in mountaineering is in order.  I do not presently own a piolet, nor do I have so-called "hiking boots", much less a pair of dedicated mountaineering boots.  Despite these omissions, I feel as if I've done rather well for myself with regard to my gambols amongst and on top of mountains.  I have climbed 9 of Colorado's summits at 14K+ feet, skipping across Sawtooth Ridge between Evans and Bierstadt and cartwheeling across the Narrows on Long's in nothing more than sneakers and just enough clothes for modesty.  I have also done winter ascents in Danner steel-toe work-boots.  I have some climbing technique, i.e. I can set an anchor, belay, self-arrest, &ct., as well as being lucky enough to have great balance, a high level of physical fitness, and a natural proclivity to play well in the great outdoors.  In short, I am well-equipped with everything but gear and, as I found, a facility for blithe commitment.  

A word on commitment: to do so completely is to forever turn from any contending options.  This can be a very scary thought, especially to a person such as myself who believes that a key general principle to leading a happy life is to keep one's options open.  But the extreme of that philosophy leads to gadfly dilettantism, superficial acquaintance but never deeply meaningful relations, and finally, in extremis, the high treason of yourself by not demanding that you do something, even just one thing, to the very best of your ability.  It has been my blessing/curse that I've never been absolutely obligated to commit to anything, ever.  I have always had an embarrassment of choices at my disposal, and have struggled under the weight of them.  This is, I know, a very first-world, privileged, even enviable problem to have, but there you have it.  Additionally, my intellectual curiosity and taste for life are wide-ranging, so I've always wanted to sip from every cup rather than drink deeply from one.  In my own defense I offer the fact that I've done things that not many people have the pluck for.

That detour was all by way of saying that I did not commit fully to an ascent of Gannett Peak from the word "Go", and therefore shot myself in the foot and did not accomplish a goal half-heartedly set.  But I did get in a great day of hiking.

08/10/13: 0300 hrs saw me driving towards the Green River Lakes trailhead in the Wind River Range just North and West of Pinedale, WY.  I opted for the alpine start rather than camping at the trailhead because I like to get mentally psyched on the drive to any climb.  Loud country music billowed from my truck as I ground to a halt in the gravel of the trailhead lot.  Early morning mountain silence is dense and heavy, and it rushed in to fill the air when the sound of my truck's engine died.  There was just the slightest penumbra in the East as the Sun began to spill into the darkness from across the other side of the planet.  Scent of pine, wildflowers, dew, cold air that almost catches at the back of the throat.  The sky was clear of clouds.  A beautiful day to hike.

Saltiness and Yar

One lucent and lovely day I'll return to my tale of Thailand in the name of consummation, but for now I jump to earlier this month when I was to help sail a Beneteau 45F5 to Hawaii from Marina del Ray, CA:

5 June 2012, Tue.
We leave Marina del Rey around noon, hoping to skirt around gale-force winds just southwest of Catalina Island. Though the seas are tumbling chop and there is a solitary red flag flying from the customs house – a small-craft advisory warning – we seem to succeed in edging past the worst of the wind, keeping just enough in our sails to lift us southwards at around eight knots. We celebrate with a few beers and watch Catalina fall off our starboard beam. Paul is the first of our crew to get seasick, emptying his stomach to leeward. I pull the midnight to 0300 watch, the first watch of a new day.


6 June 2012, Wed.
Light winds early in the morning prompt us to try and cut southwest through the lowermost portion of the area where the gale was forecasted to be, and by 1000 hours we’re heeling hard to port, sailing nearly parallel to the troughs of the ten-foot swells. It becomes a bad idea to go below-decks as fruit not properly stowed flies through the air and one’s stomach flip-flops in agonized empathy with an inner-ear all-ahoo. Both cooking and eating are kept to a minimum, prepackaged protein shakes are the order of the day; a generalized nausea is thus the background to what follows. The aft head backs up and the forward one reeks of piss and an unidentified foetor, the combination of which makes it nearly impossible to sleep in the forward cabin without gagging. There is also the gleeful thwap of Paul’s catheter – hanging, as it logically does, from the shower-head – against the side of one’s face as one flushes the manual marine head. Add to all of this the fact that I don’t have my own bunk and am obliged to play musical beds every three hours at night and my state of mind should be apparent to even the meanest understanding. When we nearly broach, twice, and seas begin coming over the starboard gunwale with shocking regularity, I ask myself what the hell I’m doing here. If mountaineering is the art of suffering, then this type of sailing is a crash-course in the science of torture. I try and get some sleep before my watch, expecting at any moment to be roused out and up in order to jump into the life-boat.

7 June 2012, Thurs.
I go on watch from 0300 to 0600, dawn patrol, and the seas are black, lit by the full moon with a saliva sheen, and very, very large indeed. The swells are probably fifteen feet high with a short period, which means they come in quick succession, and the fact that we’re sailing in their troughs means that every time one swell passes us and our keel cuts through the top of it, we roll with the correction of the auto-helm.  Though our deep keel cuts like a snowboard through the swells, tossing and turning on an angry ocean is pretty far from sunshine and Jesus juice. Discomfort is not the word. I tether my life-vest to the jackline and sit in the companionway, cold, wet, and realizing that this is not even a fraction of what the wind and water have to offer in the way of raw power. Wind howls through the rigging at around 50 knots, the lee rail is buried in a foaming torrent and every so often a swell will break over the deck, sousing the poor watchman – me, in this instance – to the bone. However, three hours, no matter how arduous, is still just three hours, and when Cap’n Abel relieves me on deck the seas are calm enough for us to exchange a few pleasantries on the weather. One wave had completely ripped the 2x6 to which two reserve diesel cans were attached off of the lifeline stanchions to which they were lashed with four 175-lb test marine zip-ties (which, to my mind, confirms my suspicion that a zip-tie, no matter how ostensibly burly, is still just a plastic trinket and not a seaworthy securement). Luckily, however, the diesel cans were still connected with the nylon webbing which had lashed them to the board. One can was waterskiing off of our port quarter, held fast to its twin wedged between two stanchions; too banal an occurrence to be labeled a miracle, but striking nonetheless. We winch them both further inboard and tie them off. This is only the beginning of our problems.
It is found that the watermaker will only work on a starboard heel, an impossibility in these conditions unless we were to head in the direction opposite our destination; more, the water-pump has stopped working and we thus have nothing flowing from the tap. We must turn back to land: Ensenada, Mexico.

8 June 2012, Fri.
We motor sail almost all day, reaching Ensenada just before the marina office closes for the evening at seven. Almost immediately upon our arrival the Cap’n is pouring a rum and cola, an act he is to reprise at regular intervals this evening; he is drunk as a lord as we all stumble back to the boat to sleep after taking showers and eating dinner in the Hotel & Marina Coral’s excellent restaurant.

9 June 2012, Sat.
Alan and I make our way into town for a few important items. Alan, a recovering Mormon, had spent two years in northern Mexico trying to win converts for his church and is thus as perfectly fluent a non-native speaker of Spanish as I’ve heard. He will have ample opportunity to practice this skill over the course of today. A conversation of his with our cab driver ends in our finding a delicious place for fish tacos. We return to the marina to find Paul hard at work on the boat. The Cap’n, Alan and I opt for beers in the computer room instead. After several rounds of said beers we’re quite jolly and also a bit better informed, thanks to Google, about the course that the weather may take within the next couple of days. It looks like it could be a bit of trouble, with a tropical storm brewing down near Guatemala and slowly moving northwards while tracking us westwards. We somewhat boozily bring this up to Paul, and he is obviously unimpressed with the state of us and chomping at the bit to get going. We must, he says, leave on the morrow. We sail at daybreak. -Ish. But first, we drink. We go out to a bar called Hussong’s, an Ensenada institution and old fisherman’s hangout. Ambassador Alan befriends the entire place and we all get famously drunk. Back to the boat.

10 June 2012, Sun.
Hungover and hurting, the crew musters around 9:30, after the Hotel’s excellent breakfast buffet, to fill the S/V Rever with fuel and set sail again for Hawaii. Everything’s right as rain, except for the fact that we have no wind. We’re, as the song has it, motorin’.

11 June 2012, Mon.
Motorin’. I start weaving a lee-curtain for the galley, to keep any would-be airborne fruit from pelting the crew, my skill – learned in the Alaskan bush – at the double sheet-bend holds me in good stead. Uneventful. Cap’n Abel reveals the fact that he’s brought a head-wrench and veg. Grog rations increase.  The wind freshens.  Alan and I go forward to put a reef in the main, a butt-puckering maneuver in beam seas and doubly so in my very un-seamanlike street shoes which slide o'er the wet deck like oiled fish.  The wind backs and veers and freshens further, so we furl the jib in, leaving just a small triangle pulled flush with the boat's midline to act as a stabilizer.  We're entering another gale.  When I go on watch from 2100 -- 0000 the boat's rocking and rolling again.  Cap'n Abel relieves me and almost immediately the auto-helm fails, beeping like a teenybopper's cell-phone every five minutes and changing our course.  We must now steer by hand through gale-force winds.  Later in the morning our chart-plotter/gps shits the bed too.  Luckily Cap'n Abel has a handheld gps or we'd be sailing by the binnacle compass alone.  200 miles out and we're turning back again.    

12 June 2012, Tue.
Steering by hand through 40 knot winds isn't fun, but the heave and pitch of the boat isn't as bad in the cockpit.  Paul celebrates his birthday with five hours behind the wheel. 

13 June 2012, Wed.
I go on first watch and Cap'n Abel comes topside to join me.  We pass a large tanker, lit up like a small city on the waves.  They must think we're crazy and I might be inclined, just then, to agree with them.  As we near the Coronodo Islands the wind dies a bit.  We pull into the San Diego Yacht club around 1700 and go out for seafood.

14 June 2012, Thurs.
Alan and I debate the merits of continuing the trip.  He most certainly will, but we both have misgivings.  I tell Paul that I might not be joining them in the continuing saga; am conflicted about this as I feel a strong desire to see this thing through to its end, about as strongly as I feel that the end could be a bad one... Paul tells me that there has just been trouble for another boat on its way to Hawaii: a guy onboard had a stroke 1000 miles from nowhere.  We go out to a local fisherman's bar that night and I meet Liz, a beautiful blonde with almond eyes.  She invites me to stay with her and all of a sudden my plans have changed drastically.  Looks like I'll be land-lubbing it for a while...  From boat to boho in one day flat.

15 June 2012, Fri.
I'm an Ocean Beach local.

16 June 2012, Sat.
The S/V Rever is still in its slip at the San Diego Yacht Club.  Liz and I go to the Del Ray Fair to see Joan Jett and Led Zep Again.

17 June 2012, Sun.
S/V Rever leaves port.

18 June 2012, Mon.
S/V Rever returns to port with the same auto-helm issues.

19 June 2012, Tue.
S/V Rever leaves port for the fourth time.

25 June 2012, Mon.
The S/V Rever is about 600 miles offshore.  Godspeed, you salts...          

Untitled

I'm exactly a month returned from Asia and the neurological symptoms caused by my diseased blood have begun to make me question my own sanity.  I fear that I will soon be dead, but before that I will probably infect many others.  The only solution is to take my own life.

Just kidding.  I have been getting flashbacks, though.  Of the night on Gili T. when the all of the alien stars of the southern hemisphere shone as brightly in the sky as the luminescent algae forming constellations in the sea.  Of the boy muezzin practicing his adhan on the town's loudspeakers.  Of the moon on the ocean and the waves on Indonesia.

So I'll try to convey, as best as I can narrate retrospectively (with apologies to N. N. Taleb) what happened in the now-intervening three months:

Day 17 & 18:  Three days of peace and quiet is my fill.  I bid Bao's Fishmerchant Guesthouse goodbye and board the minibus for Krabi Town.  Five Brits board in Khlong Kong who've spent the night at the concert -- Job 2 Do, a local reggae artist with one good song: "Do Chan Dai" -- which I opted out of.  Shades of Ko Phi-Phi.  I keep to myself and disembark 3 hours later in Krabi Town.  The Brits demand to be taken to their hostel (the Pak-Up, mistaken for the "Un-Pack" by ye Brits) and I jump out where the driver is pulled over, a riverwalk on a mangrove-threaded bank where street vendors do trade in fruitshakes, oddmeats and noodles.  I sling my packs and walk to find a cheap room.  Krabi Town has a lot, at the cheapest prices I'll see in Thailand but for imaginably spartan conditions.  One hundred baht (about US$3.10) buys you a double-wide closet with a lightbulb and fan, a mattress, pillow and sheet.  Good enough.  That night I go out to the Old West Bar where I meet two English girls, then we're all off to the Buffalo Bar where the owner and his friends are playing bad covers of classic rock tunes.  They do "Do Chan Dai" on my request.  Hell, I missed hearing it live last night.  The girls make an early night of it but I finish my beer and have a conversation with a Canadian (with one day left in Thailand before he flies back to a newly repossessed home and estranged girlfriend in Canadia) and a Kiwi (who's just begun his trip and is unsure how long he'll be gone or just what in the hell he'll do next).  We eventually move back to the Old West Bar where the DJ, a skinny Thai with a greasy black pompadour, is spinning the Doors and selling drinking-straws filled with "cocaine", one of which the Kiwi buys (for around US$100).  It's not coke, but some sort of designer amphetamine with an hallucinogenic kick that gives you the walleye and the dipsydoodle, but without the full coldcockin' teethrocker.  You know what I mean, a real boom-BANG!  Kidding.  From all reports -- I didn't partake of any hard drugs in Thailand, out of a prudent fear of their Draconian anti-drug (re: license to extort) laws -- the powder inside the straw was as inert as chalk.  We end up drinking beer until the sun is in a fair way to rise.  I go for a walk along the river as the boys go home, feeling pretty good, and before you know it I'm going for a run.  Still drunk, I run along the river until I come to a jungle gym where I do a few pull-ups and half an abdominal routine.  I run back to my room, really feeling my oats now, and flush all my tobacco down the toilet, determined to quit and devote myself to an healthful life from that moment forward.  I catch forty winks and wake, still drunk, to move to a yet cheaper hostel that I'd found the night before (about five minutes after I'd already checked in to the first one).  I fall asleep again and wake up with a nasty hangover and a lingering determination not to smoke.  After a water and a Sprite I feel partly human again (to be continued...)

Reasons I'll be glad to leave Thailand

The women:  Much is said of Thai women's beauty, supplicatory nature, eagerness to please, etcetera etcetera.  As for their beauty, there is bound to be a couple lookers even in a women's maximum security prison, but the rest will probably be masculine, busted and wore-out hoes who are crazier than a shit-house rat.  The proportions in Thailand are roughly the same.  It's not that I can't appreciate Asian beauty.  On the contrary, I find them to be -- and here I broadly generalize, no pun intended -- more softly feminine and sensuous than their Western counterparts with beautiful, deep black pools for eyes and a wonderful languour about them even when they're working their lovely asses off, which most Asian women -- again in contrast with most, that is, not all, of their Western sisters -- do on a daily basis simply to survive, and modesty is something that they know the meaning of.  Much props.  However, the women in Thailand, due likely to their extended contact with farangs from all nations, have adopted what they take to be the Western standard of beauty and seduction, with horrible results: they use whitening products for their skin which ends up looking like they've been rolled in honey and slapped with flour, they think that grabbing a guy's arm and pulling him towards them constitutes a legitimate claim on his time, and they think that they're sitting on platinum which magically bestows upon them the right to act all kinds of stupid.  Now this assessment, granted, is not applicable to the good girls in Thailand, but the good girls in Thailand are either hidden away, married at 14, Muslim or just generally uninterested in farang men because of our unflattering stereotypical characteristics which are pretty well represented in most of the guy tourists that I've seen operating.  In short, unless you have years to stay here, speak perfect Thai or are incredibly lucky, you probably will not meet a good Thai girl.  And it is more than likely that the Thai girl you do meet at that bar is not a girl at all...

The landscape:  Like a lot, i.e. all, of third-world countries, the Thai people survived solely on local agriculture for a lot longer than the western world and are therefore pretty ignorant of the effects that synthetic products have on the environment.  While you can toss a banana peel just about anywhere and be confident that it won't poison or kill something, the same is not true of an "empty" quart of oil.  Garbage festoons the wilderness here, to a comic/depressing extent in some places, e.g. Phi Phi, and to a lesser and perhaps even more depressing extent in places like Khao Sok which receive a lot less tourists and are much more staunchly "protected" by law and the locals.  It seems that all "protected national lands" means here in Thailand is that you can't build a McDonald's right on the spot, but instead have to move it to just outside the boundary line.  Regardless of the garbage, I've seen a lot prettier places.  The limestone stacks are pretty cool, yeah, but not breathtaking in the way that a panoramic view of the Rockies from on high is.  And the beaches, well, they're beaches without good surf, with too many people and the marine life has nearly all been killed by overfishing and pollution.  And the beaches are supposedly the most stunning part of Thailand.  I remain unstunned.  So, the most I can say about the landscape is, "Eh."   

The language:  At first I found the Thai people's English solecisms and malaprops cute; a menu listed the lobster at 700 baht per kilo, and the "crap" at 500 baht per kilo.  And I was going to have the crap, as well, but not for that price.  The "vermiform appendix", while perfectly spelled, was understandably cheaper.   The place names are also amusing to an English speaker with a somewhat juvenile sense of humor, e.g. "Damrong Rd.": shit, I knew I should've taken a left back there; "Kok Khain": that explains the white dust everywhere; "Bangkok" and "Phuket": do I need to elaborate?  But after a while of listening to Thai being spoken I find it unbeautiful at best.  33% nasal, 33% guttural, 33% whiningly pitched and repetitive, repetitive, repetitive.  It is a language suited neither for poetry nor for song, and to hear it spoken is to want to get away from it.  Most of the time I just block it out, but sometimes, as when I was getting my hair cut by an old Thai woman who kept muttering to herself, I want to run screaming down the street.   

The attitude:  Yes, the Thais smile a lot, and that's because they're dishonest, cunning and mercenary; at best it's because they are obsessed with "face", that is, presenting a good one.  If you think a smile is means the person wearing it is necessarily a pleasant person, then I'd like to move to your planet.  Of course my cynicism doesn't extend to every single Thai I've ever met, only to the majority of them.  Oh yeah, and if you move off of the tourist trail, you're gonna see a lot less smiles and a lot more open hostility.  If you're a farang, you represent a dollar sign and not a potential friend from abroad. 

Paying the farang price:  Cheap?  Comparatively.  You're still being taken for a ride...

Reasons I'll come back to Thailand:

Days 14-16

Day 14:  Get me the hell out of Phi Phi.  Risto and I hop the first boat for Koh Lanta and as we step off of it Risto is again buttonholed by a tuk-tuk driver who "knows a good place to stay."  I go along for the ride but am getting sick of being shuttled around and long to simply strike out on my own, start walking and see where the road takes me.  We arrive at the Ting Tong, an irie bar owned by Tofi who also promotes Muy Thai fights and concerts, sells party favors and shoots pool with the local police.  I strike up a conversation with a Canadian expat named Jocko who tells me that during certain times of the year Koh Lanta's beaches are literally piled with the garbage from Koh Phi Phi.  The monsoon rains wash it all away, but the tourists are coming... As a matter of fact when we stepped off the boat there was a Phi Phi feeling to the port town, complete with an English expat who threw a flyer for his bar at us as we passed in our tuk-tuk.  Fuck fuck.  But for now Koh Lanta is quiet.  I pitch my tent on the beach and fall asleep.

Day 15:  I feel as if I've finally arrived in Thailand, or at least at a place where I feel as if I can unwind and stay for a while.  Ironically, the feeling of wanting to travel on my own, extemporaneously -- along with the fact that there is a small breaking wave a bit south of us and I take this as a sign that I'm meant to follow it (and follow it I will, all the way to Bali, but again I'm getting ahead of myself) -- makes me pack up the tent and start walking down the beach.  I tell Risto that it's time to part ways and I feel surprisingly light on my feet as I walk down the beach.  I'm smiling.  After a few kilometers the beach turns into rocks and I walk to the road.  The Thais who pass me are all smiles and "hello"s, no doubt surprised to see a farang on foot, laden with a gigantic bottle of Cooly Fresh water and a backpack.  I have a lunch of fresh pineapple, which I peel myself, and tamarind which is so energizing that, as a Frenchman at the Ting Tong told me, if you were to eat it everyday you'd operate with "full power, 24-hour, no shower."  The girls on motorscooters who pass me as I walk are some of the most beautiful I've seen thus far, and when I finally arrive in Lanta Old Town I find that the people are gracious, happy and quick to laugh or play a joke.  They've got a charming rascality to them and the town itself is a prosperous, quiet place not geared towards tourism.  There are, of course, tourists as well, but most of those who come to Lanta are of a different breed than the Phi Phi set.  In Lanta Old Town I stay at an old fish merchant's turned guesthouse and the owner, Bao, teaches me a little Thai.  It's a quiet evening in Old Town and I feel fine.

Day 16:  Here in Koh Lanta I've begun to hear the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer in the evening, a sound which will become more common the further south I go.  It is a softly beautiful sound, almost a lament, and in these tropical surroundings under a pastel sky I too feel the urge to fall on my knees and touch my head to the ground.  It's a much needed change from Phi Phi where one hears the flyer-plastering booze shills calling the sober to drink.  Lanta as yet is a far cry from Phi Phi, but probably will not escape the onslaught of the tourists' trampling feet; sadly it is much too beautiful, the people too welcoming, its soul too pure to escape defilement.  But right now in Lanta Old Town all I hear is the wind wafting the muezzin's wail out over the water.  The rhythmic ploonkaploonk of my gigantic water bottle as I walked south out of Khlong Khong and the Ting Tong was nearly as sweet a sound to me, signifying a sort of resilient solitude, as if I carried on my back and in my two hands everything I could need to survive and even thrive.  My tent, a few clothes, first aid kit, water and a bit of food are all I need.  In other news Bao, the owner of the old fish merchant guesthouse, is a jolly character.  I talked him down from 500b to 400 for my room the day I came in, and he has refused payment for letting me borrow his motorscooter after we'd agreed on a price of 200b for the day.  Now he keeps jokingly suggesting that I borrow his flip-flops when I step out into the street.  I told him I'd buy him dinner if he gave me a Thai lesson during the meal, but he declined.  I don't think he wants to repeat word after word untold times in his 5-tonal language for some silly farang from god-knows-where-Wyoming-is.  Mai bpen rai.

Days 11-13

Day 11:  We wake up early, check out of the bungalows and drive to the marina to meet Tom.  He seems like a good guy but the boat needs a lot of work before it will be ready to make the trip.  He gives us an estimation of about two weeks until she's seaworthy, and hands me a can of tropical strength bug spray.  I am now thoroughly repellent.  We agree to meet Tom in two weeks and drive south back into Phuket Town for the night before leaving for Ko Phi Phi in the morning.  We check into the Thalang Guesthouse and get a great room with a private garden -- complete with an outside shower -- for 200b.  I go out for a walk, unaware that it is Chinese New Year's Eve -- year of the rabbit -- and there is a free concert in the park given by five of the cutest Thai girls in all of the land.  I rush back to the hotel to grab my camera and head back out.  After an hour at the concert I'm done and I head back to the Roxy to see if there's anyone I know there.  There isn't, but there is an impromptu show given next door by three Thais chasing a rat running around their restaurant.  They eventually whack him with a broom and pose for a picture with their prize.  I'll end up eating one of his rat brethren on Phi Phi, but I'm getting ahead of myself. 

Day 12:  Up early to catch the ferry to Phi Phi.  Everyone on the bus to the ferry is wearing white sunglasses -- refer to the website "Things I Hate About Backpacking" to learn more about the psychological type of people who wear white sunglasses (hint: they tend to be douchebags) -- and this proves to be portentous.  As we all load onto the boat there come more and more twenty-somethings with less and less clothes on and I think to myself that this is a microcosm of Phi Phi, minus everyone's weight in booze.  As we near the island I can see that it is packed to the gills with people all lowing like cattle and milling around aimlessly.  Risto and I make a dash for our bags and step off of the frying pan and into the fire.  It is 20b to get onto the island for a "cleaning" fee because Phi Phi is a "protected" marine reserve.  I might as well have crumpled the 20b note up and thrown it into the water because Phi Phi is filthy, and I'm not talking about "Clean your room!" filthy, I'm talking "strike a match and the whole place goes up in flames" filthy.  There is raw sewage running down the street and garbage literally everywhere.  An unholy stench makes you wish for a respirator and rises in visible waves from the sea and the beaches.  Going for a swim on Phi Phi is simply not an option unless you're into hepatitis and/or E. coli, yet there are plenty of mindless youth from around the world frolicking in the garbage like the happiest shit-flies on the planet.  The booze probably helps, and there is a lot of booze.  Phi Phi's specialty is "the Bucket", a sandpail full of Sang Som rum, RedBull, and Coke.  At night the world's dimmest and drunkest down about ten of these buckets per person and suddenly become impervious to third-degree burns.  The fireshows, Thais who juggle flaming hoops, wands and bolos, are entrancing to watch at the beginning of the evening, but by the end of the night all of the drunken farangs are giving it a try as well and it can get pretty ugly.  In the morning there'll be bandages and burn ointment, but for tonight it's open bar at the amateur circus.  I check into the Rock Backpacker Hostel dorm and immediately spray the place with my bedbug fogger; it looks like that type of place.  Sure enough, after I've stowed my gear, and bought two locks for the safety box at the head of my bed which was previously sealed with zip-ties, I start talking to a few of the other inmates and one girl shows me the tell-tale line of bites on her ankle and asks if it could be bedbugs.  I point to bite #1 and label it "breakfast", bite #2 "lunch" and bite #3 "dinner".  An English lad -- more probably a "chav", the English equivalent of our American "wiggers" -- in white sunglasses recovering from the night before tells me that Phi Phi is "good fun" but that Koh Lanta is a bore.  I decide then and there to get to Koh Lanta as soon as possible.  There are, however, some people worth talking to on Phi Phi and as fate would have it they're staying in the same room as me.  Ruben is from the Netherlands -- "All anyone ever asks me about is the coffee shops" -- and Vinny is from Italy.  They are both homeward bound and have decided to make Phi Phi their last stop.  We go out for an unbearably spicy meal, the waiter laughing at us as he watches us suffer through it, too proud to push it away and watch it spontaneously combust.  Risto joins us midway through and after a few beers we're ready to brave the shit-show that is Phi Phi.  We stop first at a reggae bar which has staged, i.e. "fixed", Muy Thai fights every night.  It's my first Muy Thai fight and even though the winner is decided beforehand, some of the blows connect with devastating results.  I wouldn't want to piss these guys off, however unimposing they look at 5'5" and 130 lbs.  So, after a few bouts and faced with the prospect of watching two amateur Thai women fight -- a fun idea for the first five boring minutes -- we head off to the beach and the fireshows.  Ruben, Risto, Vinny and I watch for a while and then hit the dance floor hard.  After a while I decide to take a break and shoot some pool with some fun-loving Chileans.  Then, suddenly, it's two o' clock in the morning.  On Phi Phi two o' clock means that everything shuts down, everything.  For an island where booze is the only thing to do this is one helluva disappointment.  We all head home but Ruben and I meet a Dutch girl along the way and decide to see if there's anything, anything, open.  As it turns out there is.  One food vendor is catering to a late-night crowd of Thais and we order up one of her specialties.  I briefly wonder what the meat is, but after seeing one unmistakeable cross-section and a tiny rump roast with a tail still attached I put two and two together.  We're eating rat.  Still, the spices are just right and we finish the meal with gusto.  Plus, it was free-range rat.

Day 13:  Risto and I go for a boat tour of Phi Phi Don (the island we're staying on) and Phi Phi Ley (the sister island where Maya Bay, from "The Beach", is).  Tourists, tourists everywhere, fouling the water and polluting the air.  I'm thoroughly disgusted with all the gawking, preening, picture-happy farangs destroying, directly or indirectly, such a once-beautiful place and I decide to leave on the morn.  Too depressed for revelry, I leave the boys to it and go to bed early.

Day 7-10

Day 7:  West again to the beaches north of Patong: Kamala, Surin and Bang Tao, each quieter than the last.  We spend most of the day and Bang Tao taking the sun and then head back to Phuket Town.  The line of bites along my arm has spread to my back and both of my feet and lower legs, they're really unbearably itchy.  After a sleepless night I find out why on the morning of...

Day 8:  Bedbugs! One of the bigger ones -- about the size of an apple seed -- gorged himself to death on me in the night and I found his bloated corpse in the morning.  Apparently I am severely allergic to bedbugs and now I'm itching like a junky.  We check out of the On On -- now I know why Robert Carlyle's character committed suicide in the movie -- and hit the road a la Easy Rider, northwest to Nai Thon where the bungalows are expensive and then further north to Nai Yang where we find a good deal at 400b. per night.  The beach is nice, just enough people for company, the girls' age-to-toplessness ratio just right.  That afternoon I go for a run shoeless along the beach.  I tell myself that I'll just run up to the point I see in the distance.  An hour later and I'm still running; the point seems to have gotten a little closer.  Half an hour after that and I'm still not there.  A shooting pain goes up my leg.  I fell into a sort of a trance as I ran, not noticing the growing blood-blisters on my feet until they nearly cripple me.  I reinvent profanity when I turn around to see that I've run nearly half the length of the island and am now effectively hobbled by my sheer enthusiasm.  So I begin to swim back, soon realizing that that's not going to work, what with darkness quickly falling and jellyfish in the water.  I ask a guy with a motor-raft how much he would charge to ferry me back to my bungalow and he quotes me 1000b.  Nothing doing.  I walk to the nearest hotel and have them call me a taxi, but when the taxi arrives he doesn't have a meter and wants to charge me 500b.  Fuck that.  It seems that the tourist boom has rung dollar signs into the eyes of all of the Thais it has touched, and even a guy who can barely walk can't catch a break.  But barely walk I did, for four hours back down the beach, the monotony only broken by a beautiful sunset in neon pastels and a chance meeting with a Lithuanian girl who gives me a drink of water.  I spend my first night in a bungalow, probably the soundest I've slept since I've arrived, but...

Day 9:  I've brought the bedbugs with me in my luggage and I wake up itching in the morning like it's my job.  Can't take much more of this and so I go on a hunt for poison.  At a pet shop I pick up some tick powder, at 7-11 -- Thailand is chock-full of 7-11s -- I grab some poison fog, at a pharmacy I pick up some calamine lotion with H-1 blockers (corticosteroids to stop the itch), but the lotion doesn't work nearly as well as the Tiger Balm given to me by the owner of the bungalows.  I use the shotgun approach on the bedbugs: liberally dusting the entire bungalow and everything I own with the tick powder, fogging the shit out of the bungalow and applying a layer of 25% DEET over a layer of Tiger Balm all over my pustule-ridden corpus.  That seems to take care of the bedbugs, but now I look as if I have a contagious skin disease and smell as if I'm a geriatric pest exterminator.  Risto & I take the bikes to the northeast part of the island where there is a marina.  We leave our contact info on the notice board and two hours later we get a call from Tom, a retired long-line fisherman from Alaska and the captain of the sailing vessel Saveke.  He wants us to help him sail his boat down to Malaysia on its yearly visa run.  Sure, why not?  Risto & I decide to celebrate.  At the Freedom Bar Risto tries Thai whiskey for the first time -- I still haven't -- and says it tastes like bathtub spirits with some cinnamon and oil of cardamom mixed in.  I have a discussion on Tom Waits with a Scotsman.  We end up in a bus converted into a karaoke bar and I treat the crowd to the dulcet tones of Dano, singing some godawful Thai song as best I can.

Day 10:  We lay on the beach...all...day...long...