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travel, at a tangent


Beach Branket Babyron

Inspiration came more quickly than expected, and after two nights on Koh Yao Yai I left for my current address, Railay. Railay, confusingly, is pronounced 'Laylay'. Sometimes, Layray. But not Raylay.

Someone at Lonely Planet is to blame for this, I'm sure. Maybe it's the same bright spark who refers to the "tonnes" of good restaurants to be found in yet another over-visited Thai sunspot (pure lies - the best restaurants in Thailand are the toothless old women with birds-nest hair stuffed under filthy hats, squatting in kerbs and loitering at street corners, brandishing frying pans, noodles and bunches of spring onions). Since when did metaphorical measurements go metric? I despair, really. It's like those hungover dyslexics I've worked with who do jobs that involve signing off style sheets. Lonely Planet employs editors who are in chronic recovery from months stoned on Goan beaches or weeks of sleeplessness on the Trans Siberian Railway. By strange coincidence, dear reader, neither destination figures in my current plans.

It may well be time for a total career change.

Laylay is a welcome escape from Koh Yao Yai, which, except for its tourist inhabitants, was fabulous...

Yao Yai - YAY!
Sunset, Koh Yao YaiIf you ever go to Phuket, don't stop there - keep going to Koh Yao Yai.

Take a good novel, mosquito net and your own liquor; it's a Muslim island, meaning that there's no alcohol and, best of all, no dogs. In Asia, dogs bark day and night. Or yap, depending on the size. They're rarely cute, usually malnourished, and they inevitably make themselves unwelcome. Poor Rona managed, a couple of weeks back, to get nipped in the Achilles Heel while on an early morning jog in Sukhothai. Some mange-ridden half-bred runt of a hound had mistaken her, no doubt, for a decent meal. After her seven days of fasting and coffee-colonics, this was, you can imagine, a huge mistake.



Anyhow, back to Koh Yao Yai. It may sound like a dull kinda place to you, but the best thing about a dry destination is that the Club Med brigade are, surprise suprise, nowhere to be seen. Downtown Watford, teleported to a sandbar by some cheap charter, is a different dimension, light-years, light-millenia away.

Women, Koh Yao YaiBeautiful women adorned with sequinned headscarves and brightly-coloured lunghi waft serenely through the coconut groves, their voices rising only to shoo the equally blissed-out cats (not a dog in sight, right?) away from their kitchens. I arrived at the little pier, having crossed the bay from Phuket, and was greeted by one of these Muslim maidens who, in the style of a Bond girl, greeted me with a wai and beckoned me to hop on the back of her Honda Wave (125cc). She drove about 50 yards, dropping me and my backpack at a nearby resort.


It's a Kind of Magic
Not. The Faerie Gathering had, by the time I arrived (late, of course, by about four days), morphed into a cross between 'Survivor' and 'I'm a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here'. It's a chicken/egg thing. Did people, when they went off to camp (or wherever) always form such gossipy little cliques, throwing little hissy fits whenever someone decided to leave in search of: a better time; cleaner bed; more charming company? I once, in my early childhood, belonged to some strange little club run out of a green Nissan hut in Leytonstone called the ATC (jeezusmary they're still THERE!) until I heard some plump little bully boasting about their 'initiation' ceremonies and what he'd done to some other kid with a jar of mustard and a pair of underpants. If there's one thing sicker than child sex, it's heterosexual teenage boys playing with each other's genitals and pretending there's something masculine about it. Anyway, enough. Back to the Faeries.

The 'Gathering' was faintly redolent of a teen camp, populated by out-of-control pubescents in various stages of progeria. The lack of somewhere decent to stay, the nasty (and, by strange twist of fate, contraband even for grownups) beer, 'group activities', having to share with a total stranger, the lot. The last of these I refused outright, stony-faced and jutting my newly-acquired jawline.

A Fisher of Men
The hi-lite of the trip (I choose this word with great glee) was the Curious Incident of the Blowjob in the Night-time. One of the group, a twenty-something from Belarus (yeah, I know - where?), with bleached hair, a hurt foot (motorbike accident, of course, raw flesh under ripped jeans) found himself at a loose end one night and headed down to the beach in search of a good time.

This he found, in the form of two Burmese fishermen, who provided and demanded sexual favours and expected, in return, his mobile phone and wallet. Few caucasian twenty-somethings and even fewer blonds of that age expect to have to pay for sex, least of all sex on a beach with third-world peasants, surrounded by creeping things. He managed to get away with just about everything but his dignity intact, and was henceforth treated by the rest of the group like a small and slightly retarded child who'd been caught shoplifting from a dollar store.

He was all set to return to the beach the following night, sans personal effects, but was reminded of poor Katherine Norton's fate. Whatsmore, it's common knowledge (locally) that some of the fishermen indulge in unspeakable and unsafe practices, shooting up cheap heroin, sharing both needles and the kathoeys they keep as servants and sex slaves. Women aren't allowed on the boats, but approximations are.


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