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...
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