Teeny Thai-ny Travelogue

‘Why don’t you move over there?’ directed the couple beside me. I skulked into the aircraft toilet to inspect my crumbling façade of necrotic flesh. Nineteen days of Thai island (Koh)-hopping immediately before embarking on year-long Swedish Erasmus was decidedly self-destructive.

To obsessive-compulsives, Thai toilets’ primitive flush functions are confounding, surrendering inevitably under unprecedented extremes of tissue usage. First stop Koh Lanta established an ever-present irony, immovable stew of toilet deposits being shuttled by dead of night into a nearby ditch. Worse, for pasty landlubbers beach holidays in exotic climes present repugnant health hazards. Days later, wheeling away a Crabbe layover on scorched highways, my moon-white skin caught flame. It’s only rainy season, I reassured my resultant chars.

Arriving in Koh Tao with neither rucksack (this being pseudo-rough stuff…) nor flip-flops (unventilated Vans being more snug) I wheeled my suitcase agonizingly onwards. Trudging towards the beach-view huts, across sinking sand and forested ascent, sweat pearled in my eyes, straining to glimpse presumed idyll.

Affliction accelerated after crashing my rental scooter. Debts mounted, wounds festered and burns frothed, sea water stagnating beneath protuberant blisters. Clothing became unbearable. Henceforth clad only in running-shorts, blood streaming and flies gorging, I bar-crawled like a genetically misplaced Mowgli, grotesque limping advertisement for penicillin and SPF 50. Clotted excrement’s perpetual waft denied somnolent refuge, merely enticing further faecal contributions from nature’s bed-sharing incontinents.

Kayaking to ‘Shark Bay’ claret-streaked and unable to swim, seabed peace beckoned. Sharks unbaited, I drifted atop the saltwater - towards the scooter’s costly recompense, towards lonesome departure… With Sweden days away and no accommodation secured I left my companions to Laotian hedonism, boarding an overnight bus despite legitimate vocal objections to my odorous presence.

Flight cancelled, too passive to procure the next, I marinated one final afternoon, venturing outside for internet only to fry. Fortuitously re-routed, my infected wounds found attention at Qatari airport hospital, before I cried my man-child way homewards through BMI’s sympathetic missed-flight agent. Infections arising from sunburn necessitated two doctors in three pre-departure days. ‘I’ve heard about you’, said the second. I did not tan.

Yet consoled by hapless endurance, giddied by fatalism, liberated by disfigurement, I felt perversely uplifted: distracted from pressing concerns, assured of place. Marching leper-like through Gothenburg-Landvetter Airport’s statuesque parting passengers, eyes straining into a sunny afternoon, I knew things wouldn’t be easy. But I’d survive. There’s affordable healthcare… and winter is coming.