I Love You Poo

Mary: The thing about evolving, is that it's damn hard. The tagline for Agama, where we attend our yoga classes, is "Choose Evolution", and I do feel like I am changing and growing through this process. But it's not exactly what I would call fun, at least not on a regular basis (there are some moments of joy). I finished my last day of our first week exhausted in body and mind, and probably quite dehydrated from combination of tears and sweat. I fell into sleep like a stone into water, with the light on and Dana not even home yet.

So yesterday, our day off, we decided to really milk this place for all the joy it is worth. This necessarily involved sleeping in, then slowly waking up drinking tea on our veranda with our lovely friend Penny. Penny needed to get a scooter, which meant a trip down to Tong Sala, and the sun was already high in the sky when we all got on our scooters and headed up the coast as a three-man biker gang. Riding a scooter is one of a very small amount of options available to keep cool here. The wind we created caressed our faces as we raced down the curving cliffside roads and through sleepy resort villages (it's the off season).

We were looking for the optimal swimming beach, "glory beach" if you will. The beaches that we have so far experienced are absurdly beautiful, but equally absurdly shallow, shallow for ages, so swimming is more scooping sand than swimming. We'd heard that up north their were some good options, and we stopped at the first beach on the north side of the island (Koh Panang is shaped a bit like a wonky upside-down triangle, so there is a proper north side). The beach was called Koh Ma, and it was NOT glory beach. This we discovered, about 100 feet from shore, when the water was still not above our knees and the ground below us appeared to be littered with rocks and snails, which Penny told us were sea cucumbers. She picked up one of these phallic creatures and water shot out of one end. We decided to get out.

We continued to the relatively long beach at Chaloklum, a small fishing village with little traffic and no other tourists that I saw. We stopped here and ate a lunch on the beach of barbecued Marlin with vegetables and a glass noddle salad, which one of the women running the place was eating, and gave us bites of before we even sat down. It was spicy and sweet and full of vitality, like I imagine steak is like.

True to our goals, we asked her where the best beach was. She discouragingly said that the best beaches were on the east side of the island, and the roads don't connect, so we'd have to take a boat. It's probably about a mile between the end of the west road and the end of the east road, which is a bit silly. But, she gestured out next to the brightly painted wooden fishing boats and said, "You just swim here, not so bad" with a shrug.

After a moments hesitation, we did, and discovered the water to be, thank God, surprisingly deep. However, we were only in the water for a few minutes when we found ourselves surrounded on all sides. Danger was upon us. That's right, we were surrounded by...

...Children! Exhausting, hilarious, joyful kids. A crew of little Thai boys, to be specific, that sort of made me think of the goonies. They all introduced themselves, and the names I remember sounded most like Ack, Mud, and Poo, which somehow can't be right. We played with them in the water til we got pruney, Dana starting the action by catapulting one off her hands, and Penny and I soon following suit by offering "scooter" rides on our backs, accompanied by the obviously necessary "vroom vroom" noises. When we got out they entertained us with a panoply of skills - whistling through their thumbs, cart-wheeling, doing headstands, and, amazingly, break dancing. One little boy in his underwear with a t-shirt around his neck ran around yelling "Superman". I believe that was Mud, actually.

It was truly magic, what one of my favorite writer Geoff Dyer calls the "Zone", when everything just falls into place better than you could have imagined and easier than you might have dreamed. The thing about the Zone, though, is that you must eventually leave it. Nobody can actually live in the Zone, unless they are maybe Buddha, so perhaps the Zone is synonymous with Samadhi. But that's a tangent for another time. My point here is that, as we saw the sun dip below the mountains, we realized we would have to get west to see a proper sunset, which was an important seal to the day. So, in a race against time, we bid farewell to our princely hosts and scooted quickly back down the coast road, arriving at the Haad Yao beach just as the sun dipped below the sea, and pearly pink, orange, and red seeped away like an inverted water color.

I took a deep breath and sank into a chair, Dana smiled with contentment, and Penny laughed, sipping on her coconut. We all want to evolve, but sometimes, we need to just be.