Ko Si Chang: [blank] Thailand Experience

At some point in the last couple months Spectra and I passed into the realm of “subtle Thai experiences.” We’ve had our fill of massive, spectacular temples & sites, and Thai culture is no longer alien (although it’s still occasionally looking glass fascinating; I’ll get into an example in a future post). We’re now firmly into stuff that the very act of chronicling crushes. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but these are the kinds of experiences that would be best captured by haiku. I don’t think I understood the utility of haiku before that last couple months. Our overnight trip last Sunday to Ko Si Chang is a case study haiku experience.  

We ended up going in the perfect way. Spectra was itching for a bit of a trip; I had a student cancel on Sunday; and out of nowhere we took an overnight trip to the closest visitable island, which just so happens to be Ko Si Chang in the Gulf of Thailand. Technically this is about that impromptu overnight trip, and I will talk about it a bit here and there, but in actuality this is about two aspects that defined the trip: motorbikes and View. 

Not “the view” but rather View: a woman. A 25-year-old computer programmer who is a walking, talking, smiling, laughing, radiating-crystalline-goodness embodiment of what (decent) people think Thailand will be. She was ahead of us in line at the bus station, and before she could walk away the ticket lady commanded her to guide us to the bus. We quickly determined that View speaks just a wee bit of English. Way more than we speak Thai, but still just a wee bit. She led us to the curb and motioned for us to wait. Not a minute later a bus pulled up, View indicated we should get on, and then she turned around and got on. 

"Ah, we're on the same bus,” I thought. 

Once on the bus it was clear what was going on. It was already 80% full and we were catching it on its way out of the station. We’d arrived in the nick of time, lucky us. And lucky View because it meant we sat together in the last row. View had the window, then Spectra, then me.

The ride to Sriracha (yep, spicy sauce lovers, that Sriracha), where we’d catch a ferry, would take about two hours. After a couple rounds of nodding, smiling, and thanking View for helping us, we all settled down in the otherwise completely silent bus. As our friend Ning pointed out, "Loud music is Sawyer's enemy," because it cripples my ability to converse. T’was an astute reckoning and, in the same vein, silence is my siren song. 

During the ride I'd noted that View was still tending to us. She saw we were looking out the window so, without consulting us, she'd occasionally fuss with the curtain to optimize our view. After a fashion she took a rest and reclined back in her seat, folded her arms, and with her right hand pinched the curtain between her fingers so as to keep it open for our benefit; never mind that a closed curtain would have aided her in sleeping (most everyone else had fastidiously closed their curtain). 

"She cares about us," I whispered Spectra. 

"You're imagining things," Spectra wordlessly glared back at me. 

After about 30 minutes the landscape was rural but there'd be pockets of massive condos or apartment buildings. I wondered if the people living out there worked in Bangkok. I leaned over Spectra and said to View, "Khatoadkrap (in this context: I beg your pardon)," View sat up and looked intently at me. "The people who live out here. Do they work in Bangkok?" 

The question proved to be at least two orders of magnitude too complicated. View ran through a series of exaggerated facial expressions to convey she was listening, thinking, confused, sorry, and then clasped onto Spectra’s arm and doubled over in mock exaggerated apologetic shame. It was a breathtaking sequence of cross-cultural interpersonal communication kabuki theater. And it initiated a 90 minute conversation facilitated through Google Translate on three phones, one Thai/English phrasebook, a handful of English, a pinch of Thai, and set against a background of laughter, massive smiling and endless pantomime. 

There were two rounds of group selfies and by the time we got off the bus View and I were openly teasing each other. I told her she was a liar, crazy, and a bad sister. She told me I looked 50. She tried to get her parents to give us a ride to the pier to catch our ferry, which would have been a life-making experience, but they were unavailable and View was exaggeratedly saddened to hear that she too would be taking a tuk-tuk once off the bus. 

Spectra and I talk about superlative culturally specific moments, outings, whatevers as Top ______ Experience. For example, a “Piss Alley” meal with my mother in Shinjuku was a Top Japan Experience; and an egg coffee with Vic sitting on one-foot tall stools in a hidden Hanoi coffee shop was a Top Vietnam Experience. Conversing with View was a Top Thailand Experience. Honestly, the rest of the trip could have been varying degrees of disaster and we still would have fondly remembered it as the Befriending View. Such is the power of View. Here’s our crappy group selfie:

After a harrowing tuk-tuk ride (there may be no other kind) to the pier and a lovely 45-minute ferry ride we arrived on Ko Si Chang. This is not one of the famous islands people fly halfway around the world to luxuriate on. This is a very local island surrounded by shipping vessels with a massive port clearly visible on the mainland nearby. It is not an exaggeration to say the island appeared to be under an embargo enforced by shipping vessels. If that sounds like it’s not a ringing endorsement, well, that’s what I would have thought too. But Ko Si Chang is delightful in it’s own understated it’s a tiny mountain of an island in the ocean... what did you expect kind of way. 

There were temples and charming restaurants and incredible scenery, but I’m going to focus on how one gets around the island. It’s a small place, a shade over 17 square kilometers/a shade under 7 square miles. All winding roads up and down the hills and along the coast. I didn’t see a single car, just a couple pickup trucks. This makes it the idea place to explore on a motorbike. And wouldn’t you know it, you can rent one on the pier where the ferry drops you?! What are the odds? So Spectra and I rented a motorbike. This sweet baby right here: 

My growing Southeast Asia interest in motorbikes isn’t a secret, but I hadn’t been on one. Now I was not only going to ride on one but drive it. I have never, not one time in life, driven a motorcycle or scooter or moped. I’ve been on one a total of, perhaps, five times. Prior to the moment where the rental guy showed me how to start the motorbike it hadn’t really dawned on me that, you know, there’s was, like, stuff to know about driving one. I’d sort of blithely thought of them as bicycles you don’t have to work very hard to make go. As soon as I was sitting on a motorbike the shortcoming of my notion couldn’t have been more obvious or petrifying. 

My bicycle back home weights, like, 20 pounds. A scooter is more like 200 pounds. A 100 times heavier made a 1,000 times more terrifying by the fact that it goes really fast, really quickly. The speedometer went up to 160kmh/99mph, and within a minute I’d gone faster on that scooter than I had on a bike ever in my life. Complicating my learning curve, when we arrived at Ko Si Chang Spectra was wearing a dress so she rode side saddle, which threw the balance of the bike off. The initial ride to Charlie's Bungalows, our perfectly lovely accommodations, was not a life-affirming jaunt fit for Italian fashion magazines. It was white-knuckle nerve wracking. I couldn’t believe they just give these things to people without any proof of having a clue what they’re doing. If you’re wondering whether I was being routinely passed by both the very young and the very old, sometimes on the same motorbike, on that initial ride: you better believe your ass I was. 

After settling into our adorable room, Spectra wanted to go to a beach on the other side of the island. She mercifully changed into shorts and could sit properly on the bike. The “main road” running, more or less, along the coast is a proper, two-lane street. All of the roads that branch off from it crawling up into and over the hills are more like single-lane roads, adding considerably to the charm of the place. Cruising, pretty much alone, through landscapes that look like this: 

What that picture doesn’t capture was how steep and twisty these roads were. They were a motorbike skills acquisition trial by fire. A couple of times we reached the top of a hill and I stopped to gaze in horror at the video game death course I had to navigate to get back down. Here’s where I say after inching my way up and down a couple hills I got the hang of it and bombed around corners, gunned it up hills, and toasted some elderly/children motorbikers. But I didn’t. I never got anywhere near any of that. 

The next day on the way back to the pier to leave I was passed by a scooter driven by a maybe 10-year-old and standing on the platform between the seat and steering column was a maybe 4-year-old who rubbernecked at me on their way by. So I came up short on the Akira-meter, but I did manage to get comfortable enough to stop dreading going fast enough to pick my feet up off the street (a truly harrowing moment the first few times). 

Therein lies the essence of Ko Si Chang: we made a friend we can’t talk to and I can drive a motorbike well enough to be mocked by a 4-year-old. 

Ko Si Chang: Top Thailand Experience.


P.S. On the off, off, off chance any of my Thai students are reading this: yes, I know, it's hypocritical of me not to be wearing a helmet. I swear I didn't know they wouldn't be made available. I hear your scorn. But it doesn't change the fact that you should wear a helmet. We'll discuss in class.