Amen to the cavemen

Hustling and weaving through the impregnable wall of attentive touts hawking bungalows we force our way out of this flesh prison, birthed unto the Phi Phi islands finally. Bungalow secured, we were keen to explore the hype.

I don’t know a man alive that didn’t see ‘The Beach’ and dream of island paradise, though I was instantly skeptical. To be fair, we had arrived during the wet season, evident in the streets paved with water and, of course, that peculiar moist substance falling from above. Derp. Obvious references aside, it seems there was a pattern developing. Wherever there are too many Western tourists, our vices and exclusion from our societal norms tend to incentivize the locals into situations that don’t benefit them long-term. Again, we could not get a packet of crisps without being accosted by prostitutes, the sea was awash with plastic bottles and walking the streets was a breathe-through-your-mouth exercise.

It’s hard to believe it was only 7 years ago that a tidal wave came through here and washed it all away. Men, women and children, pets and houses. Dreams, or at least memories. Though if you were not told about it you would not know, as it had only taken the industrious Thai’s 3 years before they had rebuilt their infrastructure and begun the upswing back into a tourist hotspot. Now all that was left for us was to judge first impressions for ourselves by becoming part of the problem. We grabbed a few bottles of Thai rum and whiskey and began our experiments.

Thai spirits are an experience unto themselves. They taste like they have been bootlegged in a bathtub out the back of a shack illegally, after Prajuk and his 4 kids have all bathed in it. The 2012 bathtub vintage, a hearty flavor, full of rich aroma and brewed in only the finest Thai porcelain. I swear I seen a pubic hair once, but such testimony cannot be relied upon, with the alcohol content being unregulated in these cheap bottles of muddy delight. Smeared memories, a panorama of echoing laughter, booming bass, sand, strobes and sexuality, plus the insecure feeling of not knowing where my pants had gone.

We didn’t meet too many people we didn’t already know in Phi Phi, despite the heaving droves of drunken youth in a dizzying nightlife spectacle of unbridled puberty. This extreme inequality of a male/female ratio necessitates deployment of an intense social defense. Males revert to a cave-like state with clenched fists and short tempers, whilst the girls scrum together in closed circles, tactically blocking the advances of potential suitors with effective collaborative body language. Necessarily, as the intoxication of the whole event leaves the males a side step away from clubbing women on the head and dragging them back to a cave. Play by play analysis of the whole spectacle is tiresome when all you want to do is sit around a table making new friends and laughing about life.

A visit to the beach where Leo pranced about stealing girlfriends and murdering marine life was an obvious inevitability. I counted 27 of us in a teak longboat, packed as sardines, juddering over the chaos of the ocean channel. Mounting obstacles into the cove itself, it’s obvious what all the fuss is about. Man could not dream of such things, our slumbering imaginings could never compare. I hope there is such a thing as in intelligent creator, just for the wide-eyed awe she may garner from admirers such as I in her creating something so beautiful. I’d definitely throw a few pennies into the hat.

But like most tourist traps, there is consequence for too many humans in one space. I had to remove myself from the water soon after we had begun snorkeling, the decimation of the ocean ecosystem cutting me deep. Snapped coral is such a shame. And then there was Monkey Island.

I don’t traditionally like monkeys. At best, they are nimble, inquisitive marvels of nature’s evolutionary process. At worst, they are angry little humanoid idiots capable of malice without remorse or compassion. Plus they throw their shit at each other. That’s psychopathic, and these island monkeys have been shaped by humans as such. The meeting of man and his evolutionary forebears was heralded with flying sand and rocks. Not without provocation, as the monkeys grew angrier and more bashful the more time we spent in their dominion. I stood close to Laura on the boat in a silent protest against this sort of thing, praying for our side to lose the war. I longed for a cause and effect that would leave one of these cruel boys riddled with bite marks. Is that sadistic? Maybe so. Mess with the bull, you’ll get the horns. Or more appropriately, mess with the monkey, you’ll get the rabies.

So that is my experience of Phi Phi. Sorry if it sounds a little pessimistic, but it wasn’t the most fun I’ve had, and I’m okay with that. The paradise lost destinations that guidebooks and internet message boards steer us away from are built on secure foundations of experience. One would be tempted to run head first into the place with the most people to be social and meet friends, but this is just not the way life works. Villages are friendlier than cities and pubs are friendlier than clubs. Maybe we lose a piece of our humanity with the over stimulation and poorly administrated gathering of multiple social tribes, too many animals competing for a wide range but limited supply of different objectives and resources. It’s probably quite a lot for our primal brain faculty to compute at one time; so many assessments of friend or foe in the darkness of a place unfamiliar. And all whilst intoxicated by freaky Thai bath whiskey…… Lord, the body truly is a marvel.