The place is a dump; don’t bother coming. Ko Samui, I mean. Sure, it’s beautiful. The brochures bill it as Tropical Heaven. Just goes to show you -- any place that’s got brochures about it is probably going to suck, big time. Ko Samui is more like a low-rent dumping ground for cash-strapped gringos, yours truly included. Not even a topless Scandinavian model-type to make life interesting. Just Limeys and Eurotrash of the meanest stripe. A pair of oh-so-French vegan dykes complaining about all the stray dogs everywhere. (Maybe if you just ate a few…?) A brace of louts slumped over their Singhas in front of the football. A gaggle of chicks from Slough or Bognor Regis haggling over the price of a plate of fried rice with a waiter that could really give a fuck. And, as always, there are the requisite dull Americans, loud in every way and so flaccidly huge you feel they’re hogging the very air.
Not that I don’t haggle, myself, mind you. I haggle to my heart’s content, thank you very much. I bargain like a rug trader on a mission from God. I bicker and argue like a man possessed over amounts that really must tally to a couple of pennies. But I’ve got good reason to be a chiseler. Reason is I’m broke. You don’t want to wind up homeless and broke in South East Asia. On Saturday night while the drink is flowing they are laughing right along with you; Monday morning they’re giggling in embarrassment as the feral mongrels lick clean your bones. Can’t say I blame them. Nothing can make you lose face in this country quite as fast as being devoured by a pack of mangy dogs.
Anyway, I’m out of here. Let the Robs and the Julies have it to themselves. I don’t want it. Don’t want the perfect white sand, picked clean of trash by a bent-backed crone just before the dawn. Don’t want the deluxe concrete air-con bungalow with complimentary cockroach on the pillow. Don’t want the friendly smiles, big and false beneath hateful eyes. Let them have it, the dirty old Aussies and Krauts and Brits who prop up the bar from sunrise until sundown, one hand on a beer, the other on their Thai girlfriend’s ass, their foul carcasses sun-baked and bloated like things that wash up on the shore after a disaster at sea.
The Thais make a joke of it all, bless them. The joke is, after all, on us. They’re laughing all the way to the bank. We farangs must seem like a ridiculous race of gigantic clowns, blundering about in our whiteface, filthy of mind and filthy with cash. It’s a sign of the good nature inherent in most Thais that they don’t simply beat us, remove our fat wallets from our oversized foreign posteriors and send us on our merry way. Thanks, I was just leaving anyway.
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