It took a bus, an overnight, multiple taxis and a ferry to get from Bangkok to Koh Chang. It wasn’t the fastest route, but it was cheap and less stressful than brushing against cliffs in a minibus.
My heart will go on
Some parts of the trip were stressful — the hangovers, the studio audience of a slapstick Thai TV show shrieking endlessly over the bus speakers, and the frequent stops. Ugh, the stops.
Once on Koh Chang we hopped a truck taxi to White Sand Beach. Cristina (with no h), Skip, and I settled into affordable oceanfront accommodations. Tiny wooden huts, steps from the water, for less than $15. Low season has its upside.
The Thai coastline looks like it’s been reverse-engineered from a screensaver. Sometimes there are swings attached to the trees along the water. At night the tide comes in, creating pools beneath the swings, projecting up the moon from the ground.
We spent one night at White Sand Beach, then rode down the coastline to Lonely Beach, quickly finding another beautiful beachside bungalow to stay in. You could feel the ocean mist hit your face from the patio out front.
Not pictured: Corona
The streets of Lonely beach are narrow and dusty. Scattered overhead are party flags, better suited to high season, but cheery even in July.
An utter lack of crowds meant that there were no lines to get a tattoo. Dangerous. On a whim (or was it a dare?) Cristina and I got one. Matching tattoos done by hand with a bamboo needle, in high spirits at 3am in the morning.
Möbius & Chill Vibes (top to bottom)
That tattoo is the top half of what you see in the picture of my freckly ginger arm. Cristina drew the design on the spot and I believe — if vokda-put-to-memory serves me right — she used the word möbius to describe its true nature to the artist. So it’s called Möbius. My first tattoo was the three lines underneath Möbius. Its name is Chill Vibes. They’re friends.
Skip didn’t get a tattoo with us, but to be fair he was already back in Bangkok singing karaoke at a 6-seat lounge called Woodball with a Hungarian model who sung equally well in English and Japanese, to the extreme satisfaction of a neighboring group of Japanese businessmen. Hi Alexandra!