Sometimes, I find myself remembering my beautiful little island in the Andaman Sea - Koh Poda. There you didn't need to care about the "euro" or the American right or crazy Muslim clerics or the price of bacon. You just took your book and your bottle of water to a shady place on the beach and when the sun got too hot you put your mask on and snorkelled out over the turquoise bay. One afternoon, when I finally raised my head from the salt-water, I noticed that I was a hundred metres offshore and an angry, charcoal-coloured storm cloud had arrived from nowhere. By the time I made it back to the beach, rain was lashing down like no tomorrow. I just stood there laughing, waiting for this sudden tempest to pass. There was nobody else there. My book - "Bangkok - A Cultural History" was completely sodden.
I looked back at my photographs of Koh Poda today. Did I really go there? Was it really me?:-
And on the mainland, in the fishermen's cave at Railay Beach, wooden phalluses had been placed as offerings to some ancient sea god:-
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