In Continuum.

If there is a single reason to visit Thailand, it shouldn't be the shopping or the beaches - though they are, by themselves, very good reasons - it should be for the food, because everything in Thailand just tastes so good. There is something about the way they cook very ordinary dishes like porridges or french toasts that makes everything so perfect. Nothing is too sweet or too salty, everything was carefully calibrated and measured in order to achieve some sort of perfection no other countries I have been to can achieve. We were at Freedom Bar that morning, and it was our first time viewing The Beach in broad daylight, and everything just seemed a little different from the first encounter we had last night. Everything was shrouded in shadows in the evening, but when the sun came up and brought light over the lands, we realized the abundance of restaurants and hostels all along the roads, though all of them looked like a high class slump one way or another - which is not saying a lot even though they are high class. People started waking up from their own slumbers, and the first thing anybody would notice about The Beach, or the whole of Krabi, would be how there are more Caucasians than locals. They are everywhere almost literally, in the restaurants and in the huts, at the beaches and in the sea - everywhere.

It was the best omelet I had in a long time, and even the water tasted a little different on the Beach. The islands in the distance and the little boats floating about to the waves gave me a lot of rooms to imagine the kind of possibilities we'd get for the trip. Three things were on all our lists of to-do when we arrived on the island. Number one, to eat and eat and eat whenever we are not doing something other than eating our heads off. Number two, to bake ourselves in the sun till nobody can recognize us when the school starts, and under that line on his list, Kevin probably wrote in italics "Must turn purple!". Number Three, which was what we did that day, was to climb the rock walls all around the beaches. I wasn't into climbing, and didn't promise them anything. The other four of them were pretty enthusiastic, especially with Jonno being the real climber in our league, it was impossible for them not to test their hands on those limestone rocks. Though most of them were mostly amateurs, they were still willing to try their hands, literally, on those ragged rocks even though they have only trained on hand holds previously. So after breakfast that morning, we decided to climb our first wall down at The Other Beach. To begin, we hiked.

From The Beach to The Other Beach, you need to hike over a small hill of sorts that divides the two. At low tide, it is possible for us to walk around the boulder to the other side, but the same cannot be said about high tides unless you want to risk your head being bashed by those razor sharp rocks polished by the salted sea. So the hike began, and we found ourselves squeezing through narrow paths between rocks and roots to cross over to the other side, all the while climbing slopes that are 45 degrees or more in gradient. It reminded me of the good old army days for a while, but I knew that the misery wouldn't last for long especially with the beach on the other side waiting for the lot of us. It was quite a climb, but jumping down from the last piece of bounder and onto the sand, the beauty of The Other Beach revealed itself to us. There were people everywhere, lying on their straw mats, swimming by the shores, naked kids running about, tourists taking pictures and falling asleep in the shades. It was the typical sight of a beach in Singapore, but the only difference was probably the view from the edge of the sands. From where I was, the land ended by my feet and the ocean began there. From there, the waters stretched out into the seamless horizon, interrupted only by the random islands in the distance like giant rocks thrown out from the shores and being stuck on the ocean floor. We could see the waters gradually deepening in its color as it moved away from the shores, and fishes greeted us as we walked through the shallow beach. It was as amazing as amazing gets.

It was just a great place to turn our heads off from the reality of things at home. It's the kind of place you would imagine how Heaven would look like, but perhaps without the kind of skin cancer inducing sun they have in Thailand. It felt great just to sit in the waters all day long, allowing the currents to push you about like a seaweed, and feeling the fishes swim about your body like you are some giant coral of sorts. It is indeed a place for one to escape, because I don't know any other place in Singapore with the same kind of gratification at all. It is possible for anybody to sit there in the sands and forget about everything in Singapore completely, because nothing here compares to what they have over there. I mean, the beaches in Singapore are artificial and imported from Indonesia. Everything at the beach is fake - so to speak - save for the water, which makes everything just a giant illusional bubble so to speak. In Krabi, human intervention has only reached so far into the paradise, and everything else just felt like looking upon a beautiful woman without her make up, a kind of wordless beauty in its nature.

After the beach, we made our way to Another Beach through a maze of expensive resorts and pass a dozen swimming pools - which was strange because Krabi has some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, and people are using the swimming pools? The Another Beach felt like a lesser cousin of The Other Beach, because of the bunch of marshes that lined the coast on that side. Mangrove trees lined the edges on one end of the beach, with all the spiked roots sticking out of the ground like toothpicks. But that was where we headed as soon as we landed on the beach, because that is where the guys decided to start their very first climb, since that part of the beach had some of the easiest walls in the whole of Krabi. So a wall was found amidst a whole bunch of experienced climbers that day, and the first person to go up was - none other than - Jonno. He made it to the top in no time, came back down with the rope anchored, and then it was time for everybody else to try out the route. But here's where the problem surfaced for them.

What is easy for Jonno may not nearly be as easy as a piece of cake for the rest. It was their first time on the rocks, and the rocks were pretty damn sharp and hard to grip for the most part. I was lying down on the map down below most of the time, and I watched the three others struggle to find another hole for their fingers while they were up there. Not to say that they were bad climbers or anything, but I don't suppose rocks are for everybody to climb especially when you are that new into the sport. Azhar managed to come within five meters from the top, and he remained there for about an hour while I fell asleep down below. Kudos to his determination, but even he - the more experienced of the three - did not make it to the top. Kevin and Joel got stuck about three or four meters off the ground, in the same place without a proper foothold and almost always succumbing to the loss of strength. It isn't their fault at all, and I daresay that I wouldn't have done a better job than them. It looked like hard work, something which I wouldn't have done better than anybody, for sure. If Kevin and Joel was stuck at just four meters, I would have been stuck on the second. Seriously, rock climbing really isn't my thing. Besides, I like my fingers to be callous free.

The rock climbing thing lasted the better part of the whole afternoon, and we were all tired by the end of it. Jonno and I had a great time trotting about in the marshes trying to catch crabs poking their heads out of the holes in the wet mud. With one giant pincer, they looked like tiny little Spartans holding their shields, only not nearly as courageous or smart. They were pretty damn fast though, a hundred of them disappearing into their holes before Jonno and I got within three meters from them. Still, some of the bigger ones didn't manage to squeeze into the smaller holes, and that was how we caught most of the crabs in the plastic bottle. However, for every crab that we caught, we probably killed like six others because they'd break their pincers to avoid being caught. I just hope that they'd grow back as I have read long ago in an encyclopedia. We dared Azhar to eat the crabs alive, and as the crazy person as he is, he actually contemplated for a split second. The dare was dropped, and the crabs were set free - yes, we are nice people despite the crab massacre.

There are two things I was pretty unhappy about Krabi - aside from the sun. The first of all came to mind after the incident with the stomachache at Another Beach. It wasn't something I ate, but just a routine pain I suppose, and I was desperate for a toilet to use. Only, the nearest toilet with a seat couldn't be found, and I had to look everywhere for one with the stomach being flipped upside down a dozen times. The nearest available toilet didn't have seats, and the only seats were in the female toilet, which tempted me to use it while nobody was around. But morals set in, and I didn't want to be arrested in a foreign land for a reason as stupid as this. So I tolerated some more, and managed to grab hold of a local walking out of a resort for a toilet, only he didn't know what a 'toilet', a 'bathroom', a 'loo', or a 'W.C.' was. In the middle of the street, I had to pretend that I was pissing with my fist at my crouch, how embarrassing. But when I found the toilet, it was probably the best feeling in the world. 

The other thing that ticked me off was probably the customs over at the airport which I failed to mention in the first post. I think two planes worth of passengers got off at the same time, and the queues at the customs were really long. Despite the human traffic, only four counters were opened, and everyone was queueing up without a visible queue in sight. We were all funneling into the same counter, hoping that things would work out sooner or later towards the end. The people at the customs worked so slowly that I actually started to time every single one of them, and they took on the average of two minutes on every single passenger, and there were hundreds of us. The wait at the customs for our passports to be stamped was actually longer than the trip by plane from Singapore to Krabi, imagine that. Probably the worst queueing experience I have ever had. 

Anyway, everything was redeemed at night with the traditional Thai massage. Those ladies at the parlor were really really good, and they even had certificates pasted on the walls as they pushed and pulled our limps and muscles to the strange soap opera they were showing on television, which involved people with nicely dyed hair and make up living in kampong - strange. Azhar's back, which was never cracked by anybody, was cracked by the lady at the parlor, and he was deeply grateful for that and promised to come again. They were all really friendly and hilarious, always trying to speak Chinese to us one way or another. She knew how to tell us to relax, and also asked for tips in Chinese, which I found to be hilarious. I couldn't stop laughing as the lady landed on top of me to twist my back because she was just that hilarious. When she asked Azhar to turn to his side, the fat lady actually posed like a FHM model next to him, I was laughing uncontrollably at that point in time, and I would have paid them extra for the entertainment they provided.

The night ended soon after with a change of rooms, Joel and I ended up in one while Jonno stayed alone in the other at the end of our resort. It was a good night because we all fell asleep in no time. A lot of possibilities awaited us in the days to come, and that was what I thought about moments before I drifted off with a smile on my face and the smell of the massaging oil lingering in my nose.