Safety Third

By Tom
Bangkok, Thailand

For Christmas in Cambodia this year, Julia and I tried to make friends with whom we could share in holiday revelry.   With these new friends, we would raise a hearty eggnog toast to Jesus and pass around plates of Christmas cookies.  This plan failed miserably.  Instead, we had to wait until we returned to Thailand before we found friends.

On the second night of our week on the Thai island of Koh Chang, we met Mikey and Claire, an American couple who have been living in Korea teaching English   Mikey proposed later that evening, so we added 'being engaged' to the list of the many things we had in common with them.  We shared a fun-filled week on the island, glad to have not only fulfilled our goal of making friends, but to have met a couple who were among our favorite people from the trip.

The view from our cabin on Koh Chang, an island off the Thai coast

Having lunch with Claire and Mikey

We teamed up with them to rent motorbikes and passed a couple of days exploring the island.  After spending the last six months at the mercy of bus schedules and train timetables, it felt incredibly liberating to steer around the back roads of this tropical paradise and feel the sun on our (sun-screen covered) shoulders and the wind in our hair (beneath our helmets).  Despite the fact that Julia spent most of her time trying not to picture how she would look in a wedding dress with all of the skin removed from her body following an unfortunate run-in with a road-side fruit stand, I was a patient and safe driver.  While Thai people flew by us at breakneck speeds with no helmets on and infants in their arms, Julia and I maintained a pace that was somewhere between 'old man with cataracts' and '4th of July parade.'  

The open road of Koh Chang

A Thai man steers his boat through the mangroves

For New Year's Eve, we hit the beach.  Thailand's beaches are famous for their full moon and New Years parties which are a combination of substance abuse and bad decision-making.  While this is not our idea of a good time, it was a spectacle we definitely wanted to witness while we were in the neighborhood.  As we approached the beach, we heard the pumping beats and saw the glowing fluorescent lights and flames in a distance and I knew we would not be disappointed.  A crowd of people were gathered around a ring where Thai performers were juggling burning sticks and performing acrobatics through a flaming hoop.  

After a watching this performance for a while, a combination of testosterone and Ecstasy pills convinced several of the frat-boy westerners that they too could perform acrobatics through the hoop of flame.  It turns out that not only were they unable to clear the edges of the hoop, but that when 220-pounds of baggy-cargo-short-wearing dudeness knocks into the flame of doom, this is enough to knock it loose and cause it to fall down on top of them.  Because nobody ended up permanently disfigured from several rounds of this, they decided to kick it up a notch and see if they could really sear some flesh by dousing a rope in lighter fluid, lighting it, and using it as a big long jump rope.  In loose sand.  With a bunch of drunk people.  

This is what the beach parties look like, but with way more fire (from google images)

Many of the party-goers were experimenting with hallucinogenics despite the fact that quite a few of them typically end up either in the hospital or in Thai prison (not my choice of vacation-destinations).  Julia and I learned a fun and hilarious technique back in Kathmandu to deal with the sketchy local who steps behind you and tries to say discretely in one long, mumbled breath 'hash-smoke-drugs-marijuana-buy.'  You simply face him and say as loud as you can 'NO I DO NOT WANT TO BUY DRUGS' and watch them trip over themselves to scurry away.  

At midnight, everyone decided that even flaming ropes and hoops wasn't causing the requisite level of death and dismemberment, so they decided they needed to bring in the explosions.  Unlike fireworks displays in the U.S. which use professionals trained in pyrotechnics, this show was put on by a bunch of locals with bamboo shafts stuck in the sand.  A bamboo shooter got loose and suddenly the four of us found ourselves within the explosion radius of several fireworks in a row.  Like a scene from a war movie, everything went silent after the explosions and time seemed to run in slow motion.  As the guy next to us was nailed in the chest with a hissing piece of fireworks shrapnel, we ducked and ran for cover.  After the show was over, we decided that the safest thing we could do was to get in the back of the pick-up truck taxi, wind our way back through the dark curvy hills, and call it a night.

This picture is for those readers living in places that will see neither green nor blue for 4 more months

Happy New Year!  And congrats to my cousin Liz and her new husband Matt!