10-31-10: Second Chances

After we secured a room for the night, we ventured out for food. We were famished, having had only coffee and a meat stick since our last meal over 12 hours ago. Genius planners we are, I know. We found a place to eat next door and quickly ordered two beers, green curry and jungle curry, a non-coconut milk curry. We scarfed our food down, my jungle curry being nearly Thai spicy. We left quickly to escape the chain smoking Germans sitting nearby. Next we went scouting the other nearby guesthouses and to our dismay found a wonderfully clean room, right off the beach, for the same price as ours! (Melameen guesthouses) curse.

Now back to the main road, away from the beach, for more exploring. I don't have the desire to right another crazy long post, so I will try to abridge this without losing the point - second chances. We walked up the road quite a ways, taking it all in. Dirty street, jammed with vendors and touts offering everything from Thai massage, food, tailored Armani suits, skin shows, gasoline in plastic water bottles or old liquor bottles, and much more. As you walked, sellers would greet you with their robotic, memorized phrases: hello, welcome my friend, Thai massage, come look. It was hard not to look when you heard the English words, but that only encouraged them to sell harder. We were not impressed to say the least.

We went back to the beach to walk in the opposite direction to see if it was nicer down there. No dice. The beach was a thin strip of debris-strewn sand accompanied by lots of hotels and eateries right next to the water. The establishments were a mix of upscale and skeezy, none being charming or inviting. We went back to our lunch place, Rock Sand, because it had Internet, beer and a place to sit. This is where the tide turned. 

After a beer, things didn't seem so bad. The place emptied out. The teenage workers struck up a game of ping pong. We devised a way to practice our numbers - go fish in Thai, basically, ("do you have a nueng? No, go fish.") and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. We left only because we were hungry again and wanted to try a new place. We had seen some cheap authentic thai food amongst the brash western-catering joints on the strip, so we headed there. We skipped the place with a motion sensor on their sidewalk menu, which chimed, "hello! Welcome!" repeatedly until i cut the switch, turning it back on after we surveyed and rejected their menu. We found a better place and had papaya salad (not as spicy as we had hoped), green curry and noodles - aroi! (delicious) 

We wandered the strip again for a while, but under cover of darkness, with most of the people ferreted away, who knows where, it was actually quite nice. We stopped for an excellent coffee before wandering back to the beach, where we were planning on retiring despite it being only about 6:30pm. We opted to turn away from our guesthouse and see the beach at night. Surprisingly, the tide had receded, revealing a wide, white sand beach (hence it's name - white sand beach/ hat sai khao). The eateries had strung up lights in the trees and we found a place to have a beer to try to keep us up until a normal bedtime. Failure. Alcohol is a depressant, did you know that? Quickly I wanted to head home and pass out, especially because the bar was playing horrible, ancient pop music ("hit me baby, one more time" among others). 

Home we went, scaled the mountainside, strung up our mosquito net, shook the leaves off the sheets, slid into our silk travel sheets and fell asleep - determined to move on tomorrow to Lonely Beach, but not as grumpy at making a stop here, at White Sand, than we had been earlier in the day.