Nepal > India > Sri Lanka > Thailand

Nepal > India > Sri Lanka > Thailand. Five months in extremely religious and conservative countries, where women need to cover up, stay in at night, and they’ll serve you beer but only if you hide it in the bushes, then BAM!
Thailand. OMG Thailand. Booze, booze, everywhere booze, and mostly naked woman dancing on bar counters, and in the streets working on enticing passing men into massage parlors and hotels, Ladyboys grabbing men’s crotches, silk screen T-shirts everywhere of American celebrities giving you the finger, smoking bongs, and being indecent, raucous laughter, up all night, beers in the early morning hours, girls dancing so they can find a man to marry them and take them away, and in the midst of all this there are Buddhas, and prayers, little kids selling strings of flowers for offerings, monks in robes and bare feet walking to temple at 5am, passing the tired working girls in their tiny dresses and stilettos. Thailand seems happy to keep its tourists happy.

There are monkeys in the streets, everywhere, wearing clothes and being dragged around by people pimping them out for photos. In one way I’m in heaven. I can stop and hold them, touch their little noses, and fingertips. One nibbled on my finger and another wrapped his tiny fingers up in my hair and started stuffing it in his mouth until his handler came to untangle him. He started shrieking, and was very distraught by the separation. I must have tasty hair. But like with the baby elephant I met a couple of weeks ago, I can’t help but feel like contributing to their photo slavery is a bad policy. One monkey I saw, wearing suspenders and a picnic table shirt had his long arms and legs wrapped tightly around a woman, when his handler came to take him back he wouldn’t let her go. Once he was finally pulled off he tried to attach himself to a man standing nearby, anyone but his handler it seemed. What’s his home life like? Hopefully when work is done he get’s to let his suspenders down and have a beer on the couch next to his favorite monkey friend.

I’m fascinated by the strangeness of the sex trade dynamic here. The energy around the whole scene really draws you in. It all seems like a lot of fun at first glance. The girls and ladyboys stand around laughing and making a spectacle while music is blasting, singing about your booty and Bacardi and getting down on the floor. They pull you into their bar to play games and win drinks from you, or just play games and get to know you so they can create a “friendship” and hopefully get more than a drink later that night. All the girls are Connect Four experts and will kick your butt without the slightest effort. They plunk their chips with an air of arrogance, knowing victory is theirs. I guess most of the women are there by choice…? But when you go inside a club and there are just rows and rows of girls dancing with the smallest amount of enthusiasm they could muster, and these worried looks on their faces, the fun kind of evaporates, at least for me, the men shopping don’t seem to notice. I’m back to the same feeling I get with the monkeys. I want to see it all out of curiosity, but it feels kind of twisted to participate. For example, they have this thing called a Ping Pong Show, where a woman does tricks using props and her vagina. Some of the props are live animals, like turtles and fish. The one I found to be particularly disturbing was a small bird that she inserts into herself and then removes and displays to the audience. She does a show every half hour, with the same bird.

All this is happening amongst some of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen, and there’s plenty to do if you’d like to avoid the exploitation of animals and sex trade. I went snorkeling and it was one of the highlights of the trip. The things I saw in the crystal clear water were incredible. Hundreds of tiny colorful fish and big ones with long noses, bright blue sea creatures attached to rocks, lolling and swaying in the deep waters. We also went swimming in a place that resembled paradise, the water was unreal. There were fewer fish here, actually I didn’t see any, but there were some invisible criminals that seemed to like the taste of human flesh, mine mostly. I was bitten three times. It was slightly embarrassing as I shouted out loud every time it happened. The first time I was near a girl and shocked her with my outcry, I explained that I was just bitten by something and she looked at me like I was nuts and swam away without saying anything. Mercifully when the next two bites came I was near a couple who could pretend to understand my outburst, and then luckily the guy got bit too, so I didn’t have to feel like a crazy hallucinating person, but the boatmen would not admit to the existence of any biting fish in the waters. I was back to being crazy. Sailing around in those blue waters made me want to be a pirate, no one to answer to except Captain Hook, just taking people’s gold coins, rubies, and chalices, lounging in the rainforest eating roasted boar, drinking rum!

The boar and the rum will have to wait, for now it’s juice and Bentonite clay. I’m doing an eight-day juice fast and detox on Ko Samui. It’s really quiet here, a nice change from the throngs of backpakers and their buckets of Mai Thais on the other islands. On the boat over there was a guy with a fresh tattoo of Thai script down his forearm, passed out on the top deck with a spilled Bacardi Breezer and cigarette butt placed so perfectly next to him it felt like it was art directed. I think he got what he wanted out of his vacation. On the other hand, after all the Thailand action, the quiet is slightly boring. Every hour and a half you have something you have to take for the fast, juice or herbs, so you can’t go too far from the clinic for sight seeing, plus you’re not eating so energy is a little low. They have great wifi and cable TV though, so I’ve been passing the time getting caught up on my pop culture.

The fast itself has not been too difficult so far. Some people here are doing 21 days! Most of those people are doing the longer fast for weight loss, but it’s a detox too, and yes… they give you colonics. Staying in a place where everyone is getting colonics creates a situation where people who have known each other for only moments are speaking freely about their poop, and even showing photos of what they’ve found in it. I am now terrified of parasites, and looking at photos of other people’s poop. Five more days here at the fasting facility and then I have to find a way to slowly bring myself back to solid food while on the road. Luckily they like soup in Thailand.