Day 7: Leaving Koh Tao

Day 7

Burnt my arms despite the complete lack of sun. Need to stop taking the gamble and not putting cream on. Before we came Henry dragged us into 'tanning salons'. He goes almost too far with how much effort he puts into his personal apperance. He brought fucking straigteners with him to Thailand. So he's been going on about how we need to keep topping up the tan, and now I'm burnt.

We have no recognition of time, each day just blends into the next, and we only know its lunch time when we're hungry. We sat around eating massaman curry and pad thai and slept on the beach. It was a lazy dull sort of day. Henry went off by himself to play football with some locals on a rocky and sandy pitch, Harry went for a noncey walk up the beach listening to Jack Johnson, Jonny practised aerobics and kick boxing with the bird Herny got a handy off (the one who made him listen to the iPod) and I sat and read.

The monsoon forced us inside. It was overcast all day and we were getting ready to head over to Phuket. We bought our boat tickets, had one final meal on Koh Tao (they served me noodels that tasted and looked like human flesh). Some cockney guy said 'you aren't going out on the overnight boat now are you? Fucking hell, good luck. Take these.' He handed us 5 white pills from his back pocket. Fuck knows what they were. We took them and made our way to the boat.

The sea couldn't have been any more pissed off. A twenty hour journey on a wooden boat ran by a bunch of crazy gooks. It could well be my last diary entry. A German girl was waiting in the line for the boat, and thinking I was looking cool with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth, I got talking to her. She was skinny, a little gaunt, high cheekbones, tired eyes, brown dry hair, short, swept across her forehead. The inside of the boat was filled with small matresses and pillows, and 60 people crammed in and lay next to each other. Henry made us go and get a pack of cards, which were the single most expensive purchase of the trip, because he was sure we'd be able to play 'naked card games on the boat with all the birds. Here trust me man, I'll get their kit off.' The cards remained unopened, and they all fell asleep. The pills were fucking strong.

The German girl happened to be on the matress next to me. She was travelling alone, had been for a while, said she had nothing to do back in Germany, so decided one day to sell most of her stuff and combine the money with all of her savings and just fuck off. So I sat next to her and talked for about 10 hours, and then we eventually lay down to kip. I had the horn though. I was fighting in my mind with whether to get close to her, or whether to just call it and go to sleep. So I lay there for an hour, and could tell she was still awake. I kept edging closer to her and then bottling it at the last minute and moving back. I brushed my hand past her a few times, but like most things with girls in my life, that was the extent of it. Not even a pull. Not even a dry handy. Just balls filled with frustrated jizz, that I'll release in a few days on a poor young girls back.

In the middle of the night the boat stopped. The engine packed in. The lights went out. Water was coming on board. We were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by sharks, miles from land. And everybody just kept sleeping. I was half asleep at this point. Harry got up to inspect what was happening. He went down to the toilet and saw the whole crew of Thai men huddled around the engine, which was steaming, and they were kicking it and had their hands on their heads. He just came back to bed, and when we woke up we were in another part of Thailand and were making our way to Phuket.

A five hour bus journey was grim. The air conditioning was cold, it was pouring outside, shitty water was dripping from the ceiling onto me, I was in wet shorts and a tshirt and in desperate need of a shit. The German girl got on a scooter and rode off into the morning. I'll never see her again. She's just a vague figure in the wank bank.

We were all wishing that we were still in Koh Tao, waking up on the beach and spending a day dossing, or going to Sharky's burger bar or boxing in the sea. But instead we were on a cold bus heading towards the prostitute capital of the world.