The Whisky Diaries - day 11

Okay my apologies about the absence yesterday. I have an excellent reason. Not quite as good as the gigantic snake one, but almost. Here it goes: I ate a whole pizza then we watched the third Aliens movie and fell asleep.

I know! Good excuse, right!

So here's what I wanted to talk about yesterday:

 

 

 

 

It's our little collection of things! You know, when you're staying by the beach for a long time and you just kind of pick little interesting things up as you see them and then put them on the table on your balcony. Well this is our motley collection so far. There are shells and coral and a big seed thing that fell down in front of us one day, and my personal favourite:

 

Doesn't it look like a small bone! Like the femur of a child or something. I saw it yesterday while I was running along the beach at dawn and it really struck me. It seems to be some kind of plant matter, but for the rest of the run I couldn't stop thinking about how little we know about the ocean. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle explores this idea a bit too, maybe that's what got me thinking about it. Anyways, I was thinking about how maybe all these things that wash up on the beach are actually the remains of a gigantic civilisation living deep underwater - and they know as little about us as we do about them. And when they get rubbish landing in their cities they all just think it's some kind of baffling but natural bi-product of the strange things that happen up on land. And like we don't realise these shells and coral and unidentifiable things are actually parts of them and their life, they also don't realise that about the tons of crap that humans put into the ocean. 

Yeah it sounds crazy, I suppose. But humans know more about space than we do about the depths of the sea. They even reckon maybe there really is a gigantic squid/monster thing down there too. Who's to say this isn't the bone of some kind of sea creature? Not me. 

This is my other favourite:

I think if I could get a close/better photo you might be more impressed, but essentially it's just this piece of coral kind of stuff that gives you creepy prickles on the back of your neck when you look at it for too long. It has the appearance of minuscule honeycomb kind of holes in it and then lots of strangely perfect round holes that do and don't go all the way through it. I'm serious when I say it's creepy. Seriously. It really irks me so I never look at it for too long.

And that's all! The pizza was SO TOTALLY ABSOLUTELY AMAZING and later I'll tell you all about the Aliens quadrilogy. This is embarrassing, but for some reason I thought it was a trilogy? But now I see there are four, and it's just because I missed seeing one of them when I was younger that I thought there were only three... The third one that we saw last night was totally new to me. Anyways, more about that later. I'm going to have some jam on toast for breakfast!

  

The Whisky Diaries - day 10 (on Haruki Murakami & The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

Where am I right now? Sitting on a balcony in the jungle with my nose full of mosquito coil smoke (perhaps I love it more than any other scent in the world) and a steady windless rain falling all around me onto, then through, the canopy of trees (isn’t rain just the greatest in summer!) with a steady drip of water coming from a little hole in the roof, falling down through the air, then landing on my shoulder and trickling down my front (like the rain is tapping me, saying: “hello”) and the last flavours of a vanilla Cornetto leaving the deep rivets of my back molars (but in reference to that earlier post, I still officially prefer chocolate  Cornettos) and thinking about the pesto spaghetti I will soon partake in for early dinner.

About half an hour ago, though, it was sunny with now rain, and I was somewhere different. I promptly stood up from my swing, dug my feet into the sand and screamed in rage and pain towards the ocean, flinging a heavy book as far as I could and watching it sail downwards and land awkward and bent with a thud into the soft sand. Phuong snapped her attention to me out from her own large book, and I just stared intently out to the water – it rippled and sparkled in the setting sun as if it was laughing at me. 

     “Hah hah hah, little one. Paper must not rile you so! I’ve seen an eternity that could not even by conceptualised by this Murakami tormentor.” It spoke to me with a voice like the Cheshire Cat. Its creeping tide like a big lazy tongue. Me standing on its great big beard of a beach.

     “AAAGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.” I replied.

     “I’m guessing you just finished?” Phuong inquired, not really alarmed.

     “Yeah. And it fucked me over, man. It fucked my brain hardcore. I can’t believe he did it. I can’t believe he would betray me like this. After all the hours I spent and invested in this book, and I get to the end, and he just kicks me in the face.”

     “Hmmm.” Was Phuong’s response.

Hmmm indeed, Phuong, hmmm indeed.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a one-of-a-kind book. I’m certain of that much, but not a whole lot else. The entire thing bashes reality and dreams and the subconscious together until each of the three are so mooshy and broken that they are forced to occupy the same space. It sounds abstract, but that’s exactly what this book is – constantly forcing you to remain detached from the characters and from the truth. Not revealing itself until the last ten percent of the pages. Keeping you in the dark both literally and metaphorically until it wants to reveal itself. Like a shy bird. Like its dickhead of an author.

But Murakami is not a dickhead of an author, obviously, I mean, it’s clear that I’m more annoyed at myself than I am at him. I skulled this book, thirsty for answers, when it’s actually more of a fine wine whose taste needs to be coaxed into the mouth and the mind, savoured to be understood. I’m given to understand that it’s a complex and strange book even for the brightest of minds and this does bring me some comfort. He just raises so many thousands of different questions on every page! Every sentence is so full of possible meaning and yet so vague and unfulfilling! I cannot imagine anyone who could, on their first read, simply stroll through it. No, I don’t feel guilty really. More just intenself baffled. Yes, that’s it.

I’m intensely baffled by The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

I haven’t done any research into since beginning or finishing it, and I only just now even read the blurb, so you can be sure that I don’t have any kind of special insight that an non-ordinary reader might have. I’m going to go Google the shit out of this bitch as soon as I’m done writing this post. You can be sure of that. What you can also be sure of, is that I want you to read this book. It may seem strange to notice, but I felt like this book treated me a like a smart adult. I also noted on numerous occasions that Murakami’s narration was profound. Like, I’m talking, really profound. I probably even missed a lot of the awesomeness of it because I was so damn keen to speed to the end of answers. But the awesomeness that I did notice, well, it was really fucking awesome.

Do it, dude. Just read it. Fling your brain off that cliff in an act of trail-by-fire literary adventure. You’ll get all ripped up in the cortex, but you’ll come out the other side with all kind of understandings about things you never realised had any significance. Do it because if you can even come close to understanding Murakami’s genius, then you yourself will therefore be genius. Do it so that you can tell people you haven’t only read IQ84.

  

  

(Totally unrelated image, but proof from Phuong's
camera that I can ride a scooter.)

 

I’m going to go now. On an adventure into the depths of the internet, and I hope I return just before dinner time (yum pesto) with the answers to a lot of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’s questions. Wish me luck, and in the meantime, please read it then scream and try to throw it into the ocean only to be relieved a few moments later that you weren’t strong enough to fling it that far and then pick it up lovingly and stroke it because it trapped you like Stockholm Syndrome. And then you too should also eat pesto spaghetti. 

   

The Whisky Diaries - day 9

I woke up early again today! Even earlier than yesterday! I got up and was out the door at 7 am for a walk then jog, and it happened again! I saw the bestest things!

First, I was along a particularly nice strip of the beachside and there were a few local people out exercising, and one of them was this dude in his forties who was jogging along the sand wearing a Grateful Dead band t-shirt, with these crazy thai pants, he had a bum bag full of jingly things around his waist that shook and jingled with each step, and he was wearing loosely laced converse chucks and had a ponytail of hair down to his lower back and a wolfy face full of sideburns and scratchy bristles! It was the craziest damn thing I ever saw!

And then next, about ten minutes up the road, I saw a pack of dogs, about eight or ten of them, all different sizes and breeds and ages and levels of scruffiness, just all wagging their tails and barking together and trotting around and generally being entirely happy with themselves. As I got closer they took absolutely no notice of me and simply continued on through a jungly path that led to the beach and I swear it was like these were all the dogs on the island, off on their morning no-owners-allowed beach swim and they were chatting and laughing with each other and just totally being the bosses. If I hadn’t seen that strange man just minutes before, I would have sworn that THIS was the darndest thing I’d even seen.

Then I got back to the little restaurant and ordered fruit and yoghurt for breakfast and it was mighty tasty and I saw that ocean eagle again! And then I turned my laptop on and it was just working again! Totally miraculously! I took the opportunity to transfer any important documents to my harddrive and in doing so, came across this mini-essay I had written during my eleven hour stopover at Singapore airport. It’s a little gloomy and awfully self-reflective, but I remember feeling really profound at the time and realising a lot of opinions I had developed about the world around me. I won’t be at all offended if you skip past it, but if you’re interested in relativity of countries and the world around you, then maybe put some minutes aside for it.

I’m sitting at the Starbucks of Singapore airport’s terminal 1 sipping on a mindblowingly good Americano coffee and polishing off the last strawberry in my horrendously overpriced fruit salad. I’ve read the first half of my recently-purchased Vanity Fair February issue, and after I’m finished with the glossy pages I’ll move on to start reading my treasured International Herald Tribune today’s-print newspaper. I got off the from-China plane at about 9:00 am and I won’t get on my connecting to-Phuket flight until 8:00 pm tonight, and for these sweet sweet eleven hours in between I’m just sitting here letting the western world ease itself back into my pores.

I am so fucking happy right now.

The “western world” gets a lot of crap. Most of it is justified in a lot of (read: most) ways, yeah yeah yeah, we all know all of the arguments and I’m not going to try and deny it – but before I go on any more rants to people about how desensitized the “west” is and how materialistic and meaningless it all is, I’m gonna try and stop for a moment to remember how sweet these eleven hours were.

When I paid 17 Singapore dollars for this Vanity Fair and began reading it, I was assaulted by brainwashing advertising and shiny ideals and covetable brands, but you know what else I got? A free fucking media telling me a whole shitload of things I didn’t even know I didn’t goddamn know. Yeah, I hate the fact that ads for Burberry make me feel ugly because I have these things called hips – but what I hate even more is that I just spent a year in a country that doesn’t believe in the truth or in intellectual freedom.

When I went to the pristine, potpourri scented airport bathroom and had some state-of-the-art technology automatically sterilize everything I had to touch both before and after I touched it, I stopped and thought about how this kind of thing has maybe gone too far and that “developing countries” are just too germophobic now, but I also didn’t have to worry about getting Novovirus again! Yeah, I’ll lobby for these expensive soap dispensers if they might save me from another trip to the hostpital’s quarantine ward.

And to get back to my beloved comfy Starbucks chair, I passed the fancy airport shops so of course I stopped to see what pretty new things had been released in my year of absence. Oh boy oh boy this world we live in sure is beautiful… I was thinking about spending a lot of money to buy YSL’s new perfume (read: I’m smelling my wrist now where I sampled some, and it does smell very very good) but I walked back out of the Duty Free shop empty handed. Why? I only left China yesterday. Of course I thinking about what that money could buy for a person back there, and as I was deep in my philosophical thoughts, I almost ran into a woman that was loaded with bags and looked a little like Donatella Versace for all the plastic in her face. I was almost offended by the visual spectacle that she was – with her face and her bags and even her fake nails (read: talons). It took me a moment to regroup and realise that that not everyone in this airport had just arrived in from living in China for a year.

Another short moment after that, I realised what a massive douchebag I was. I looked down at my (grossly overweight) carry-on luggage, and the separate bags for camera and laptop, and the headphones around my neck, and the Dr. Denim jeans and the Moleskine stationary. And it has all led me to the conclusion that, quite possibly, there is no relativity in life.

Relativity (in a social sciences sense of the word, so in this case, the relativity of life between two very different countries) is a difficult concept to come to terms within even the most normal and simple and (ironically) detached of situations. To try and understand it we usually remove ourselves from the picture entirely and therefore almost defeat the purpose of the discussion. Why? I suppose a big reason is that one must think on a fundamentally larger (read: super big-ass) scale when considering international matters of any kind, but I think that’s often just an excuse. The real reason, for me at least, is that when I’m trying to work through a gritty concept, things can get awfully messy and confusing when I try and actually factor myself in. Add any kind of emotional juggling to the mix and I kind of give myself a bit of a mindfuck. Such is humanity, that our emotions and logic so often ram tusks against each other. It is human nature to consider each one of ourselves as exceptions to the rules and this makes honest inquiry within one’s own brain rather difficult. Yes, I buy sneakers made from sweatshops but, like, I mean, you know, it’s totally different for me because of these three reasons. LOL. #lyingtomyself. But I digress.

My point was/is, that for me right now, it’s all muddy. The task of figuring out what I have learned about ‘relativity’ in my year away seems all the more difficult and intensely immense because I’m literally (seriously dude, literally) in the middle-zone between two different worlds. These eleven hours are the limbo of the year in China and the paradise that lies after it - the home shores. To sit at this, one of the most critical junctures of my life to-date, and think about relativity between those two places, is to question everything. And with so much emotion swelling so near to my skin, the conclusions should be elusive as ever, but this sultry YSL scent rising from my wrist has indeed brought me some clarity.

I have been out of China less than a full day and by the five senses plus osmosis, I am already absorbing the comforts of this almost-home life so much, so as to push out the intensity of memories of what I left behind. People talk of globalisation in the 21^st century, but I’m not seeing different countries here, man. I’m seeing different worlds. This is an airport where people hop to opposite equators of geography and GDP and life expectancy in a matter of hours. It is impossible for humans to accurately imagine a life other than their own – we each live a combination if what we’re given and what we make. If that involves perfume and headphones then how can we imagine existence without it? I am no exception to the rule. I’m seeing people who spend thousands of dollars on plastic surgery who, even if they visited other countries, are still essentially in their own world. And it’s not even just about money! I’m seeing that people in different places define ‘truth’ and ‘freedom’ differently and things are so much more complex at every turn than I ever could have imagined. Perhaps I can’t ever even accurately take a stab-in-the-dark at just how deep my ‘depths of ignorance’ are - and it’s so annoying!

A long time of trying to make sense of the world around you - only to finally realise that you don’t know anything. Not a damn thing. A long time spent trying to understand how the ‘other half’ really lives, only to decide that perhaps the concept of relativity itself is totally false.

And so this is where I find myself now. The coffee is finished and there are still eight more hours of limbo to go.

 You know what? Honestly. If I really think long and hard and tough. Maybe I don’t actually feel guilty at all for enjoying a relatively luxurious lifestyle here and now, and that I like smelling expensive fragrances and sipping well-brewed coffee and not having to turn on my own tap because it’s JUST SO FUCKING NICE. It might be that simple. I mean, I feel so great right now! With all these great, nice things! I believe the innate human endeavor for general betterness should never be discouraged, but how do we find the balance between that wonderfully constructive want-for-more and the idea of enough. No, the more I think of it, the more it becomes clear that there is no such thing as this ‘relativity’. The decision to buy this perfume or not has turned into some kind of east-meets-west battle for my soul. The east side is relativity – and it’s fighting to make me remember that such frivolity is a waste of hard-earned money and that this kind of dumb materialistic pursuit doesn’t lead to true fulfillment or happiness. The west side is kind of like, well, if you still actually want the perfume then clearly you couldn’t truly comprehend the idea that it is just stupidly excessive and therefore after this entire year you still cannot understand any world other than your own, and therefore there is no such thing as relativity. And this is only the economic side of the argument.

Do you follow? I’m not sure I do. I’m going to take a nap then have a blueberry muffin.

Well folks, I took that nap and when I woke my laptop wouldn’t work. So I read and had that muffin and completely lost this train of thought. And right now I’m sitting here so happy! In such a damn fine mood! Still laughing about that kooky guy and that happy chappy pack of mismatched island mutts. I’m making the choice to not return my consciousness to that limbo place in order to finish the idea in my mind. I’ll get back to it later, once I’m settled in back home and in a comfortable place from which to evaluate the whole thing. Which, in itself, is extremely ironic. Hahahha sometimes I hate me and sometimes I love me. What I love right now, though, is this Pina Colada. Now we’re going swimming, and then I’ll try and figure out what this dude in Murakami’s book is doing down a well. Literally. Anyways, until tomorrow, amigos!!!

The Whisky Diaries - day 8

I've always been a nighttime person. I wake up late, and I stay up until the wee hours of the morning. Doing things. I like doing things. Lots of different things, to be precise.

But it makes me insecure. I think about all the things that rush past in the early hours and I wonder what I'm missing. That I begin every day a little behind everyone else - it can lead to questions and doubts.

So I set myself the goal of early-to-bed and early-to-rise for these two weeks, and on this, the eighth day, I feel like I'm getting the hang of it. I go to bed at around midnight and wake up at around seven. And I must tell you, this morning my wary suspicions of missing out were fulfilled - I was putting my sneakers on to go for a walk, and I looked up to see a squirrel in the treetops! A squirrel!!! And then another one appeared a few moments later! TWO SQUIRRELS!!!!!!!

So it's true. Great things do happen in the mornings. I wonder how many squirrels I've missed all these years. (That's a metaphor, by the way.)

Then later on, I had returned from the hour-long walk/jog and it felt so good in the strong morning sun. I washed my face in the bungalows shallow basin, sat on our small steps and spent some minutes picking grass seeds from my white socks. It was a consuming task, and I was focused and I was succeeding. The moment I finished I was shocked with a wave of such happiness. That for those moments, the biggest worry in the world to me were some tiny seeds of grass collected on a sock! How far I have come in the past few days, that I am truly happy enough to consider grass seeds a concern.

I saw a large eagle flying over the ocean while I was eating breakfast, too. I read and then napped and then painted for most of the afternoons hours. I'm deciding a lot of pleasant things in these hours.

The Whisky Diaries - day 7

I hired a scooter/motorbike this morning and taught myself how to ride it. It wasn't a real motorbike, but neither was it an actual scooter - it's just one of those half-half things you find in kooky countries. Nevertheless, I felt pretty badass. I mean, it's really not that hard. But still. Cool.

I practiced by myself for about twenty minutes and then Phuong jumped on the back and I drove us around the entire island. Literally. We did a loop around the whole sandy lump. It was really lovely, passing through the forests of rubber trees, then the flat rice fields, and back to the edges of the bay where men were making boats. Our side of the island easily has the nicest beach, but I didn't realise that Koh Yao Noi had such a large residential population. It isn't just a tourism island, it really is a home for a large community of people.
 
 

 
 
We spent the afternoon reading, and I'm enjoying a lot of this real Thai food while I can. The Som Tam (green pawpaw salads) are easily my favourite. I learnt how to make them back when I waitressed for a Thai restaurant in my teens, and I know how to make them, but boy oh boy, they taste like heaven here. Of course it could have something to do with the beautiful views and the sea breezes and the general awesomeness of my life here right now. That is also entirely a possibility.

The Whisky Diaries - day 6

I taught Phuong how to ride a bicycle today. She’d never been on a bike before at all and I thought that was something very embarrassing and silly, and something that needed to be addressed. So we addressed it. I think it took about half an hour of guidance until I was happy with her progress enough (read: she could go for a bit and then stop without smashing her face open) to mosey on over to the grass and read while she did laps along the straightest section of road we could find on the island. 

  

  

    

 

As I sat on that grass, in the shade just before the sand of the beach began, I thought of the last time I really taught someone to do something. It was about two years ago when a twenty-something year old Thai immigrant friend of mine confessed to me that she couldn’t swim. She was raised in a village far from the ocean and had simply never learned. It struck me as quite dangerous, and my family home in Brisbane has a pool, so I agreed to give her lessons. In return for lamingtons, if my memory serves me correctly. It took two weekend sessions until she had all the basics to be able to teach herself the rest in the slow lane of the public pool and she was ecstatic. I’m given to understand she’s even an avid swimmer these days. 

  

  

  

 

But anyways, my point is, I began thinking about what you get for yourself when you teach somebody else something. It is occurring to me that there might be some actual reason people have children or become teachers or pursue any profession in which children small monsters are involved. Maybe. Although I do think older pupils (surely?) must make for less painful lessons. And as I sat there looking at the ocean and thinking about how deep it is, I decided that I wouldn’t worry about what I left of myself in this world after I died. I will not have children in order to remain unforgotten, or to create some kind of extension of myself. It seems equally as absurd as wanting to be buried and have a tombstone, except even more selfish. I will not force myself or my works into any kind of permanence unless it is requested by someone else. What I see on this planet around me is far more remarkable than anything I might be able to scar its surface with. This ocean and these jungles and this shaggy dog. I don’t want to change them at all! I want to teach somebody how to bike ride around and appreciate it all. I want to help someone be able to swim in this beautiful ocean. To heighten the human experience in these ways, that they might be more able to engage in all this remarkableness. I think I might try to just teach people more things more often. Real things. Like how to swim and how to ride a bicycle. These are important things. If I could teach somebody how to read some day, or even how to write, then perhaps I could happily feel like I had made some kind of really great permanent mark on the world.

   

   

    

 

In other news, this afternoon I really got stuck into The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and I'm on page 111, which is about one sixth of the way through. In my passionate hatred/distrust of blurbs, I did not read the back cover and so far, I still have absolutely no idea what the whole book acutally going to be about. Murakami is so great though - he's gifted me with so many memorable literary experiences that he deserves my trust on this matter. If I still don't know what's going on at page 300 then I'll be a little concerned, but for now I'm just enjoying the writing and the characters and how abstract and kooky it all is. I'm un-learning that reliance on plot we find ourselves stuck in as readers sometimes. It's nice. And a perfect task for hammock times.

  

The Whisky Diaries - day 5 (on Star Wars)

Where to begin. I don’t know. I just finished Return of the Jedi for the first time ever and I’m feeling all of the feelings. I’m not ashamed to say that a cried a little when I saw Anakins force ghost at the very end. He was easily my favourite character and I never, not once, looked at Darth Vader without picturing a tortured Anakin inside.

After having watched them all in the proper narrative order I can say withoutadoubt that Star Wars is a masterpiece of both conception and realisation. I am fully aware that this is not a unique or individual opinion in any way, but what I want you to understand is that this saga truly impressed me. The depth of characters, the levels of the plot, the human themes – everything. I am just so stoked by all of the awesomeness.

I had seen all three of the prequel trilogy a fair few years ago, and only one of the original trilogy so many years ago that I couldn’t even remember which one I’d seen. I had this crazy idea in my head that the new prequel trilogy were actually far better than the old sequel trilogy, then after watching IV - A New Hope and V – The Empire Strikes Back straight after each other, I decided they were totally absolutely way better. But now, after having only just finished the final instalment, I can no longer separate the two sets. Honestly. I see them all as one big line in a massive generation-spanning story. I feel lucky to have been able to really watch them all for the first time as an adult in their proper narrative order.

Favourite character is Anakin. Hands down. The more I think about it the more I like him. I had massive soft spots for Ewan McGregors Obi-Wan Kenobi, and I thought Princess Leia was the maddest chick in all the lands – when she strangled Jabba the Hutt!!!???!?! #holyshitsoawesome – she’s officially my new girlcrush/hero. In terms of non-humans, I totally dig R2D2 (and HATE C3PO) and also love, duh, Chewbacca. What a loveable guy – when he hugs Hans... awww just the best. Speaking of Hans, I feel like I should like him more than I do, but when I look at him I just see Indiana Jones and Indy was always too much of a womaniser to do justice to Leia’s love and that’s something I can’t seem to get past. I know, I know, shoot me now.

So why do I love Anakin so much? I think it’s because he was just trying really hard the whole damn time, and his friends let him down, and the Jedis let him down, and even Padme let him down. They must have been able to see he was struggling with his powers and his visions and they all ignored him. His love for Padme drove him crazy and when he thinks he killed her, it was the final straw of him (almost) truly turning to the dark side. I feel like he was just so damn lost all the time and all people told him to do was ‘be patient’ even though he couldn’t sleep because of nightmares of his mother and his lover dying! Jesus christ, people, give the boy a hand. They weren’t even going to train him if not for Qui-Gon Jinn’s dying requests. So what, they were just going to kick a kid out whose father was literally midichlorians (read: the force)? Yeah, go back to being a slave. AGH. Jedi council, I hate you sometimes!

There are a couple of little problems I have with the whole saga, but most of them have already been voiced before. Primarily, I mean, how did nobody see that Padme was massively pregnant that whole time and that Anakin was obviously the father... I also just hated C3PO with a passion that grew and grew with every scene I saw him in. I seriously can’t stand that motherfucker. On the flip side though, I do REALLY want a little braided rat tail of hair on the bottom left side of my head.

I’m not sure what more I can really say, other than how damn awesome these movies are. There is also a special Wikipedia website for it all called Wookieepedia which can answer all your questions and also is extremely humorous.

If you haven’t seen them for a while, do yourself a favour and watch them again, man. Had by all, good times will be.

The Whisky Diaries - day 4

Today I stumbled upon a rather problematic, and frankly troubling, idea.

Phuong and I were on the long but oh-so-lovely walk back to the bungalows when we decided to stop for an icecream. There was a simple choice between Magnums or Cornettos, and although I would always choose Magnum were I alone, Phuongs Cornetto choice swayed me and so I also bought one. This is where the problems began. Phuong had purchased a vanilla one, and I the chocolate. I sked her how she could possibly make such a horrendous mistake and she responded by saying that when given the choice of either chocolate-on-chocolate or original/plain/vanilla-on-chocolate, that she would always choose the latter.

Now, in the case of cookies and biscuits I am in total agreement. A chocolate chip cookie is almost always better than its overt counterpart - the double choc chip cookie. But is it possible that this paradigm also extends to icecreams? I was shaken. Had I been making the infantile choice that more chocolate must equal better, and thus preventing myself from enjoying a higher plane of icecream enjoyment?

Needless to say, I am deeply troubled by this latest development.

What I'm definitely NOT troubled by, however, is how fucking awesome the fourth and fifth Star Wars are. I must admit I didn't accurately remember them since first seeing them in my distant youth, and I was genuinely under the impression that I preferred the new three movies compared to the old three. Yeah, I know, it's embarrassing. Clearly I have now recognised the error of my ways, and hereby swear that if I ever get a dog that is remotely shaggy, I will name it 'Chewy'. We will finish the last of the six movies tomorrow and I think I'll write about them all shortly after that.
 

The Whisky Diaries - day 3

The lateness of this post is due to a gigantic python.

I'm not even kidding. Totally serious.

Let me tell you the story...

Phuong and I were sitting quietly on our bungalow balcony, staring in rapture at the tiny laptop screen playing the third piece of the Star Wars saga (we were only up to the part when Padme tells Anakin she's pregnant, and despite the obvious lack-of-chemistry-or-acting-skills we were already completely absorbed) when I heard a loud rustling in the scrub from the back side of the bungalow. I leaned back on my rattan to inspect, and caught a glimps of a very long, very shiny, very thick tail. It was awkwardly slithering through the dry leaves and roots of the steep slope, but struggling and slipping -
     "Phuong! Look! A gigantic snake!" I said to her, slapping her arm to get her attention, and as soon as she leaned back to follow my gaze we heard a loud kind of thump-slap, and the snake had fallen from the steep hillside and down under the stilts of the house so that it was directly below our feet. In that moment we were frozen - watching this massive thing through the gaps in the bamboo slats of the floor as it was panicking and hissing and crazy slithering. Phuong started panicking and then we realised that it was coming up over the railing, just a couple of meters from us. I pushed Phuong behind me as I watched it heading into the bathroom area and as its tail disappeared through the doorway, I crept forward for a good look at our villain with my heart pounding and when my eyes rounded that corner I really saw it in full for the first time and let me tell you this motherfucker was no joke. Three metres long, give or take a couple of hundred meters, a shiny silver that I-shit-you-not was like the moon, and it's body the thickness of an English breakfast muffin. The moment I saw it there it also saw me and it did that freaky thing snakes do when the breathe really loudly and hiss and say "Fuck of or I'll mess your shit up." So that's when I decided that we should probably fuck off, because there was a good chance that if we stuck around this babe would really mess our shit up. (Read: by 'mess' I mean 'bite / kill' and by 'our shit' I mean 'our faces'.) We made our way down the steps to get to the bottom of the hill where reception was, listening to the thing knocking shit over in its slithery bumbling confusion as we went.

We were laughing by this stage, you must understand. The release of too much adrenaline into the body in not-so-serious situations results in humans feeling wack and so the receptionist was quite alarmed when I declared that there was a "big-ass snake in our bathroom". She took us relatively seriously and yelled out something to the nearby gardener in Thai, then turned back to me and simply asked "how big?" My reply was a little less laughter-filled as I held my arms up as far apart as I could - and that's when things went into action-mode.

Suddenly everyone (read: all the Thai people) were yelling out to one another, and motorbikes were pulling up with dudes carrying long poles. I turned back to the lady and she told me that she had seen one five days ago. "It was black?" She asked me.
     "No, it was a shiny kind of creamy white." I replied.
     "Oh." Her brow furrowed.
We both paused. Silence.

Well this is greeeaaaatttt, I thought to myself. This place is pretty much a big snakey party town.

So Phuong and I stood around and just waited. Occasionally breaking out into nervous giggles, and occasionally laughing at the other, poor, unsuspecting visitors who were walking up the jungle path to get back to their own bungalows - blissfully unaware of the monsters lurking in those deceptive afternoon palm tree shadows.

So about fifteen minutes later we saw the hoard of heroes slumping back down the steps towards us. No snake in their hands. "It is gone now." The lady said to me.
     "Oh yeah. Okay. Well. Um-" I was entirely unsure whether this was supposed to be a good or bad thing.
     "We not see it." She said solemnly, "but we know snake can be problem right now."
     "Yes. Snakes, I suppose big snakes can be a bit of a problem." I replied. More silence followed. "So can we go back now? Do you think it's safe now?" I asked.
     "Yes should be okay now. No snake there now."
     "Alright!" Phuong and I just looked at each other and laughed, and headed fearlessly (read: we were giggling like idiots again) back up the steps. There was a man with a gigantic broom sweeping the forest floor all around our bungalow, banging the butt of the handle on the ground and on the bamboo walls occasionally. He had really gappy teeth and no English, but was intensely cheerful and rambled at us in completely incomprehensible, but surprisingly reassuring Thai. We made a quick sweep of our surroundings, decided for ourselves that we had no reptilian company and then simply sat back down, hit spacebar, and watched the rest of Star Wars whilst the gardener "swept" around the area.

Oh wait - Phuong updated her Facebook status to mention the event, which prompted a frenzied call from her mother about 2 minutes later. Then we finished Star Wars. I mentioned the event in an e-mail to my mother later that evening and received an informative response about the snakes currently residing in our house out in the Australian countryside, and about the kinds of snakes my mum and dad used to encounter all the time when they were younger and lived on an island in Papua New Guinea. Yes I know what you're thinking, and yes I do have the literally the coolest parents in the world.

So now the story moves on to later in the evening.

We had finished the movie, and I decided to go for a run. Phuong and I agreed to meet up at 7:00pm for dinner at the restaurant, which we did, and then we went together to return to our bungalow. The evening was warm and our bellies were full and we were discussing the plausibility of chemistry between Padme and Obi Wan Kenobi. We kicked off our thongs at the edge of the steps, climbed onto the balcony, and Phuong pulled out the key to open the door with me talking about something to do with Anakin's hunger for power, when my ramblings were interrupted by Phuong screaming "SNAKE SNAKE SNAKE!" Then I heard her slam the door, then I heard a loud thump from inside the bungalow, and then I saw a screaming, panicking Phuong run towards me and grab me and say "What do we do!?"
     I looked at her seriously and said "Calm down. Okay focus, Phuong. Are you sure it was a snake?"
     "I think so."
     "You think so, or it was?"
     "I think it was."
I made an angry/serious face at her, "What did you see?"
     "I opened the door and I saw it's body slithering around the corned of the door, then I slammed the door closed."
     "Did you drop anything or did anything fall down?" I asked.
     "No."
     "Because I heard a thump-"
     "You heard a thump?"
     "I heard a thump."
     "Okay."
     "So there is a gigantic snake inside our bungalow?" She paused. She looked at me.
     "Yes there is," she replied - and we both started giggling stupidly again! But then I realised we should probably get going, so we bounded down the steps once more and announced ourselves puffing and laughing at the desk, that "the big snake is back and this time it's inside."

Well, you can imagine the ruckus this time. The owner came to talk to us and explained that the snakes were in mating season and so extremely active, and as men with all manner of poles and bags passed us heading up the steps, we were offered a change of bungalows to something a little more ground-level and seaside and generally less-jungly. There was apparently something special about our particular abode that attracted the damn thing, and so if it wasn't caught we'd have to move, lest we be killed in our sleep. Literally.

Ok. Cool. No worries! They catch it, we go back. They don't catch it, we move to a seaside bungalow. Simple enough. We sat down at the restaurant chatting and bursting out into sporadic laughter at the absurdity of our dilemma. It took a long time until the men came back, I think about half an hour, and when they did they were empty handed. Far from silent, though, as one of them walked back into the kitchen and announced something loudly in Thai to which there was great uproar and response.
     "Who sleep on the bottom?" The lady at the desk asked us,
     "I do," Phuong replied,
     "You are very lucky girl tonight! The snake sleep near your bed!"
I burst out laughing and Phuong quickly joined in. Somehow the whole situation just kept getting funnier.
     "So you saw it this time?" I asked her,
     "Yes," she nodded vigorously, "we have lot of people but it too big. Gone up and away again. It too big."
More laughter from Phuong and I. But then silence. What now?

The owner joined us again after a few minutes and essentially begged for us to move to a different bungalow, and of course we felt obliged to oblige. You know, just because she asked us. A man escorted us back up to the bungalow to get the things we absolutely needed and his level of alertness and wariness gave me a bit of a hint that perhaps we should be taking the situation a little more seriously than we were. Nevertheless, we quickly grabbed pyjamas and toothbrushes and just as we were about to leave, the man shone a light towards a small gap between the wall of the bungalow and where Phuong's mattress and mosquito net were placed. "That is were snake is," he said, "you are very lucky tonight." And so she was. And so goes this story, of Phuong the 'lucky girl' who might have gotten into bed beside a big-ass python.

The seaside bungalow has superior hammocks and a dinstinct lack of reptilian infestation, and unless the moony beast is caught, we'll be moving there for at least a few more nights. I'm struck by the amusing idea that all of this trouble is just because Mr. Snakey can't get a girlfriend and I'm tempted to draw parallels between this saga and that of Star Wars, but I think that would signify a consumption of too many coconuts on my part... if you catch my drift.

So that's what happened on day #3! I'm writing to you having just finished a delicious fruit salad and Americano coffee, and as I'm also just about to order a fresh coconut. Tonight we'll go for a walk to get a wood-fired pizza and then watch the fourth Star Wars - but I'll tell you all about that a little later.

The Whisky Diaries - day 2

Our morning began with an hour long walk along the island's roads, and then a twenty minute swim in the most beautiful section of ocean we could find. We ambled back to the bungalows for a light breakfast then went up to our balcony and read and napped and chatted until a delicious dinner and the second Star Wars movie. And now I'm in bed. Looking out of my open windows, through the palm fronds, and up into the starry sky. 

I've been working on a submission for Stilts and Phuong has been recording her recent trip to Europe. We've also been discussing the nature of feminist criticism in super-pop culture and the effect appearance and presentation have on someone's ideas being taken seriously. Late last night we talked about what a lot of our old highschool class mates were doing now, which isn't something I often think about but turns out to be incredibly interesting and an excellent way to measure your own relative "success". We also worked our way through the difficulties young people (not me personally, THANK GOD) face when raised by really conservative parents. I reminded Phuong about how Stephen Fry used to do cocaine to increase his enjoyment of crosswords, and she informed me about what people actually define as a "hipster" these days - dispelling my concerns that I might be labelled one on my return. 

It was an excellent day.

 

The Whisky Diaries - day 1

Hello and welcome to Phuket! Koh Yao Noi island, to be precise. It takes a damn long time to get here but it would be worth an even longer trip. Seriously man, this place is like The Jungle Book meets Gilligan's Island meets nirvana. It is fair to say that the mosquitos are the size of small dogs, and that there is more moisture in the air than actual oxygen, but geckos are my friends and I do believe that humans were designed for this climate. At least I know I am. My hair coils itself into a bun, I have perfected the loose-shirt-over-tight-singlet combo, and with all this sun eventually I will have so many freckles that they will connect and (perhaps, if I'm lucky enough) resemble a tan. This is the tropics, dude, and you can't be afraid. 

  

 

  

  

We're staying at one of the coolest places in the universe - Sabai Corner - in our own private hilltop bungalow amongst the forest trees about 300m from the beachfront. We have a hammock on the bamboo balcony, a cold shower with a stone floor, a lit mosquito coil whose scent reminds you of all of your best holidays, and a growing collection of cool things found on the beach sitting on top of the table I'm at right now. I can't see into the dark forest night in front of me, but I can see the lamps from the little bar down below that we'll soon be frequenting, and I can hear the intermittent rumbling of the motorbikes speeding along the narrow island roads with their pinprick headlights flashing through the small gaps in the trees. We're listening to the best kinds of music and we've been eating the best kinds of foods and we're watching the best kinds of movies and we're reading the best kinds of books. Beginning tonight, we're also going to start trying to write our best ever words. 

 

 

  

 

I'm still a little bit woozy from the massive change in locations, not to mention mindset, but what I can honestly say right now is that my bones are beginning to thaw from the long China winter (that's also a metaphor, by the way) and my mind is beginning to recuperate. I have several recent newspapers to delve into and through, a constant and free (both politically and fiscally) internet connection and a location that could heal even Hamlet's wounds. And I have almost two weeks of it all. Yeah I know, I know, it's awesome.

  

 

  

  

Our general plan for the days ahead is early to bed early to rise - because we want to be healthy wealthy and wise. I hope to write every day and I also have a bit of an overhaul planned for poise that I'll be working through provided my laptop chugs its way through this wet heat. I hope to shed a few of the "dumpling kilos" (thats what I call the weight that expats gain when they live in China) so that I can actually wear the clothes I packed away from back home. I also have to teach my friend and current travel companion Phuong how to ride a bicycle (LOL, PHUONG HOW ARE YOU 20 AND STILL DON'T KNOW HOW TO RIDE A BIKE?!?!?) and I think I'm gonna try and play my clarinet a little more. Big plans, I know, but I'm feeling good.

We have embarked upon a serious Star Wars marathon (going in the story's chronological order instead of order of release, which we know is rather controversial, but bitches that's just how we roll) and we have already drunk from coconuts and already wet our hair in the wide pacific ocean. Phuong is reading 'The Hunger Games' by Suzanne Collins and I'm going to start on 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' by Haruki Murakami while I lay under my mosquito net tonight.

  

  

  

  

At the risk of sounding like a total douche and once again taking this metaphor too far, I feel like my house is way too open plan right now. Like people are sleeping in the laundry and pissing in the kitchen. I think two weeks is just enought time to sort my head/house out and rebuild the walls to re-define and organise my thoughts. I have absolute faith in the right concentrations of island hibiscus and vanilla cigars and ripe pawpaw and good company. 

  

  

 

 

Feel free to stick around for the next two weeks.