Thai Beach Koh Phangan: June 27, 2008

A hiatus in a cove:

Night, men with miner helmets on spray light across the black waters scaring up fish, while down the beach someone unseen is setting off fireworks. You see them crackle and disperse into white and raspberry colored dots but you can never see the perpetrator. On the dark end of the cove, the stars are pulsing and luminous, and I curse myself at my lack of astronomical education. From this part too, the far end of the beach, the palm trees strung with octagonal lanterns looks like some nearly vacated boardwalk at Christmas time. Closer to the lanterns, the sand looks like snow and we hear the drifting hard syllables of people speaking German, spreading out on rugs thrown on the beach, sipping beer.

Then burning fire drifts across the sky. Fleets of them. Or actually just three. The lanterns set adrift that people mistake, the world over, for UFOs.

We landed at Koh Phangan three days ago, but wisely evaded the detritus of the Full Moon revellers for the remote north-eastern part of the island, a bumpy truck ride through volcanic mountains smothered in jungle, on switchbacks, the paved giving way to red, dusty unpaved paths. We land and see a pool flush with the sea, and only a minute later we are standing on white sand in an enclosed cove and it looks like no one is about. The bungalow we find is the cheapest so far. Beds: a four poster mosquito net feeling like a child's fort. A swing on the beach. The water still and clear and blue green.

Midday heat, we attempt a swim to the other beach beyond the rocks. Low endurance and heat stalls me on the rocks where for the better part of an hour, and quite stupidly, I clamber half naked in the sun across the rocks, through tide pools jagged with shells, determined to reach the beach through quite awkward and rather reckless bouldering. My hands are cut up, I'm sweating, my back is turning red, I lack water. I stop and explore tide pools, anenomes and urchins as big as basketballs and baseballs, the color of amethyst and scarlet, twitching and gasping. Scary to walk through the lairs of such densely-packed sea creatures. And the black crabs too which bask and then flee the bright, slippery rock faces.

At the other end of the beach, it is clear we have to swim back. Which is when my masterful dog paddle and 1920's fop side stroke become indipensable, as well as my flapper back stroke.

Then Tim and I discuss the peculiar belief in "fan death." And then I wash my wounds and work on a much-promised sketch book.