Stragbasher Moves On
Created | Updated Apr 24, 2002
The story so far. I am in China and this is news to most of the people who know me.
It's all due to Nurbs. Nurbs is the property of my former flatmates and, as you can see, nurbs is a kitten. Nurbs is lovely. He's mellow, he's affectionate, he's quiet, he has a silly name, and he's almost housetrained. In fact he doesn't pee anywhere he shouldn't, except in my bed.
What more could you ask for in a cat?
In my case I would ask for restraint. Imagine: You get out of bed, and five minutes later Nurbs is standing there next to a puddle of smelly urine, with an air of surprised innocence. After rolling the little so-and-so across the lounge you wash and air everything, re-assemble it at the end of the day, and five minutes later Nurbs is standing there next to a puddle of urine, with an air of surprised innocence. What's a guy to do, except pack up and leave?
Well, I rubbed his face in it - vigorously - and to tell the truth I had already made my plans by then. But it's nice to have someone to hold responsible when you do something precipitous, especially if they are too small to defend theirselves. Poor little s*d, I miss him already.
So here I am on Hainan, the tropical island off China's south coast. This is the place where the Americans land their spy-planes, and the site of the only scuba centre in China. It's also where I'm going to spend the next year teaching English to aspiring Asian Tigers, unless something unexpected happens to interfere. (It has been known!)
I arrived by way of Thailand, where I spent a pleasant few days scuba diving on Koh Tao - a small island to the south. The overnight bus trip from Bangkok to the port of Chumpong was a cryogenic adventure in legroom all by itself. Small spaces between seats I can just about understand in a country where everyone is 30cm shorter than me, but I just can't understand why Asian people seem to feel the need to refrigerate their buses in a way that transcends mere air conditioning.
Call me stupid, but I still feel there's something fundamentally wrong with a system that requires blankets for travellers when the outside air temperature is close to thirty degrees celsius. It's just one of the many unanswered questions that go with travel in Asia.
Others include
- When do we leave?
- When do we arrive?
- Will I ever walk again after this journey?
- What is happening?
- Why have we stopped (again)?
I've never had a satisfactory (by which I mean accurate) answer to any of the above. Reality always seems to be at odds with other people's interpretations of it, so now I just adopt a 'wait and see' policy. I guess it's a Zen thing... speaking of which, I had an interesting philosophical adventure in Bangkok, which I refer to as 'Schroedingers Bag'.
The last time I was there I decided to make a short detour to the USA, intending to return in a few months. I had more stuff than I could comfortably carry so I left some of it in the storage room of a hotel, fully intending to pick it up again on my return. Of course it didn't work out that way. The best laid plans of mice, and all that. What with one thing and another the bags languished in a state of indeterminacy for nearly three years.
Obviously, no one can realistically expect left luggage to remain left for that period of time. Especially not in a corrupt, disorganized, third world country. However, Thailand is actually not that disorganized or corrupt. They have different ways of doing things (such as keeping bus passengers comfortable) for sure, but I was prepared to believe that the bag could still be there. In fact I put the odds at 50-50. Indeterminacy, neither one thing nor the other, with Heisenberg postulating that the outcome of the experiment is influenced by the act of observing the event.
So the bag enjoyed equal likelihoods of existing or not existing, so long as I didn't go and look. But, being in the city, I couldn't resist arriving and presenting the luggage receipt that I've been carrying around out of sheer bloody-mindedness since 1999.
Care to venture an opinion? Was it there? Or had it gone to the great reclaim in the sky? Or do I need counselling? I'll refrain from publishing the result for a couple of weeks to give you time to reply.
In the meantime people have been busy in Koh Tao. They've been building. They're still building. And they're planning more building. The place is still not that bad, and is still recognisable - but barely, and I don't want to see what they do to it in the future. You truly can never go back, can you? Fortunately my list of places to go just keeps on getting longer.
The diving was pretty good tho', and I was pleased with the outfit that I went out with - Asia Divers (The last time I dived from Koh Tao was the occasion I had to flag down a boat to rescue me and my buddy, after towing her for over an hour. That was a different company.) We always had small groups, good briefings from extremely likeable dive leaders, and the dive sites seem to be holding up pretty well considering all the traffic. There was quite a lot of interesting life, especially on the night dive where I came face to face with a very sexy moray eel, and the coral was spawning too. I've never swum in sperm before, but I recommend it to everyone.
We were only there for three days, but it was three days of lounging around (when we weren't in the water) in bare feet, with the only effort required being the raising of an arm to summon good food and drink at pretty reasonably places. There's something fundamentally right about being able to wander around half dressed with nothing more important to do than watch the sun set over the ocean. What a sad and lonely life I lead.
Just for once the transport connections back to Bangkok worked out so that we didn't have to waste any time there before flying out to Hong Kong the next morning, although the boat stopped every half an hour or so for the crew to fiddle with the fuel system. I was at the pointy end and could smell the petrol from there, but we arrived safely and the bus was right where it was supposed to be. Unusually it also had tons of leg room. I literally couldn't touch the back of the seat in front without leaning a long way forward, I spent the overnight trip down to the port experimenting unsuccessfully in search of a comfortable position, and on the way back I reclined in spacious splendour. Why this should be is just another of those little Asian mysteries!
