You are sitting on a night bus watching the city of Hat Yai sprawl past in the dusk hues. The day had been unbearably hot and the sleeper train you had envisioned as your saviour is fully booked for 2 days. You have bartered with travel agencies for seats that don’t seem to exist. Money changed hands and you followed a guy you didn’t trust who’d laughed at you through back streets and got tetchy when you ditched him, refusing for some time to give you your money back, saying he had a bus in the morning. But you’re determined not to stay in this fly-ridden inland inferno. You’ve had 2 hours sleep, already an 8 hour mini bus journey on which you left half your stuff only to watch it disappear into the bowels of Thailand’s transport system. ‘Lost Property’ is not a familiar concept here, and you don’t know the Thai for ‘Jumper’ anyway. And you’re hungover to shit. You don your ineptly loaded rucksack and sweat your way through a labyrinth of contradictory directions and nameless streets in search of an Internet cafe to try and get some travel advice. That idea misfires and costs you valuable body hydration, so you take to prowling the travel agencies for spare tickets. But it’s Chinese New Year (who knew?) and the whole of Asia is on the move. Finally you’re ready to dig out a hostel-room-cum-sauna.
Suddenly there is a last ticket available from a lady who smiles. She directs you to a restaurant where the lady owner tells you how to buy cheap water for the journey and personally escorts you there, showing you how to haggle over the price of some ear phones along the way. She’s delighted your going to Vietnam as her son is there and she proudly shows you the postcards. It’s cool in there and the food is just sublime – yellow Massaman Chicken curry with sliced baby corn and courgette. 5 tedious hours later and you return to the bus station. The same lady is still making calls all the time though it’s 8pm. She’s been on since 8am at least. All the markets are open and folks of every age are rolling into the night. Outside your bus window the streets are cooled at last but still ablaze with activity. The ‘work and play’ divide seems redundant. Life is incessant here and tough in a way your soft Western sensibilities can’t imagine. From 5am in every town you see see a flurry or hands chopping, peeling, sorting, wrapping, scrubbing, all crouched down together amidst volleys of banter. Then you pass a bubbling restaurant, plastic roadside chairs filled with old friends grinning and slapping each other. You watch all this trundling past your window. And you think what a thing life is. ‘What a piece of work is a man’. And it lifts you on a breeze of gratitude. Just to be a part of it.
it takes an ocean 