Last Days in the Blue Lagoon and Bucket Fever

The final few days in paradisic Ko Tao yielded some glorious weather and magic times. Though after declaring the pitfalls of Sangsom Thai whiskey in my last post you’ll be unsuprised to learn that we spent our second last night on the island smashing buckets in horribly perilous style. This activity produced one of the less magical moments of the trip, the buckets flooring me completely whilst jiving old school in the ‘Lotus Bar’, forcing me to re-meet the seafood dinner I consumed some hours earlier. And it was a great meal. Pete, Big T and myself parked under a lightning lit black sky at a makeshift beach restaurant where the locals offer a mammoth range of fresh seafood and cook it up for you. We dined in style – lobster, crab, king prawns and a big feesh, cooked to Thai perfection. As great as the meal was, I would have preferred seeing it only once.

Looking for a little relief, and I aint talking about the Henri Lee variety, Big T and I booked ourselves into a little beachside massage shack for a bit of Thai massage. Not knowing what to expect, we both got an absolute working over as the little Thai woman cracked and smashed my inflexible body, ramming her elbow into all sorts of nooks and crannies. They work right into the groin area these masseuses, and this proved fairly embarassing for Big Trev as he began to sport raging wood during the middle of his leg session. This made me, and the Thai women laugh a lot.

At first, the night seemed like it was going nowhere, as Pete and I trailed along the main drag unsure of what to do. We ended up at bloody Chopper’s bar, again choc to the brim full of Westerners and the two dudes playing backpacker favourites on acoustic guitars to a drunken, table top dancing audience. Sometimes the best nights are the ones you don’t plan – the ones that suggest an early bed time would be a more suitable option. One way to remedy this is to run into a couple of Swedish lunatics. Enter Olaf and Julius, two Swedish lunatics who proceeded in buying us shots and joining us in the smashing of much piss. Olaf spoke of his run in with the Laos authorities, and his dream of finding finding a shipwreck that his old man discovered once off near scandanavian waters. Pete and I united to down our first Thai bucket, which, as you’ve already read, set the night in a very different direction. With the power of amphetamine driven bucket whiskey floating around our systems, we hit up the 80’s party down at Lotus Bar and got down big time. Met a bunch of poms and a Brazilian, and due to the fact that noone was going to remember anyone’s name, we donned each other ‘the Units, and a letter of the alphabet attached to the start of ‘unit’ to reflect the area one one’s origin. Brazilian was B-Unit, the beefeater from North England was E-unit, and hailing from Melbourne, I became M-unit. So I didn’t actually get anyone’s name, but this system worked pretty damn well.

At around this time I suffered the technicolour maritime yawns and my night was bollocked. One positive is that I didn’t lose my pants. And my body still felt pretty good after that massage, though perhaps not as good as Big T.

Our final day was whiled away at an even steven pace, mentally working off the bucket-over. It rained a gale this night. We had pancakes from ‘Ali’ the jedi-pace pancake chef who parks outside 7-11 every night to capitalise on the drunk Westerner market. I reckon he must do pretty well. His banana-chocolate pancakes are bloody tasty. Watched the 4th series of Entourage on DVD in our shack and was reminded of the two weeks I worked night shift back home and how integral the viewing of this series was to my routine and sanity. Good times.
Tomorrow, we be bangin' in Bangkok