Walking, Swimming, Sleeping and Biking
In March, a day before I left Sydney, I purchased a bike lock from Bunnings Warehouse. Whilst I wasn’t travelling with a bike, I got the lock as a safety precaution. In the past when I’d travelled alone, hostel language storage hadn’t been the most secure. “Just put your bag on the couch,” they’d say or “throw it under the stairs” or “drop it off in the room with no lock that’s open all day.” Whilst the contents of my luggage was never too valuable to anyone other than myself, these security measures left a little to be desired. If I arrived before check in, I’d drop off my bag and spend the rest of my day worrying that my bag was in the midst of being stolen and I began preemptively organising how I would purchase new clothes later in the afternoon. So for this trip I thought I’d take a small lock which could, at the very least, lock my bag to a pole and give me the piece of mind that my bag would still be there come check-in time.
Once I arrived in Ko Tao, bike locks were far from my mind. In fact, given the relative safety of the countries I’d visited in Asia before Thailand, the lock resided under sets of shoes at the bottom of my travel pack.
A bit further into the interior of the island the food was better. A restaurant that I waited over an hour to get food at (the lady I ordered from warned me that there were four tables in front of me, I did not think much of this when I ordered) served an excellent stock-based mushroom curry. A noodle shop two kilometres inland sold excellent boat noodles and yentafo, a pink-coloured sour soup with fishballs and morning glory.
Naturally, the island had an assortment of snorkel-ready beaches along the coast. Despite the lack of large hotels claiming beaches as their own, locals had taken up the opportunity presented by tourism and claimed some of the beaches, charging fifty baht or more to visit. Once you passed the scary old lady with the money box, these beaches were yellow-and-blue, coconut-tree-laden paradises.
I was excited. For once I was going to have a normal-person holiday. One of those holidays where you didn’t spend all your time schlepping from one site to another. One of those holidays where you didn’t have to take a holiday when you were done. I could sit at a beach, read a book and relax while a man cut open a coconut for me. Yes, Ko Tao was ready to be my relaxing, normal-person holiday place.
Two days in, I found myself stressed. I was stressed that I wasn’t relaxing. I was trying my hardest to do all the relaxing I could but it wasn’t working. The thing about travelling on a small Thai island is that having a motorbike or scooter really helps. For those of us who are motor-enginely-challenged, this can cause some difficulty. Taxis around Ko Tao were sparse and overpriced. This didn’t stop people from claiming to be taxis. Whenever I walked along the side of the road, it wouldn’t take long to hear someone yelling ‘taxi’ from their pickup truck, indicating that they were willing to take me somewhere for payment. However, in the same way that declaring the word ‘bankruptcy’ is itself not a formal declaration of bankruptcy, simply yelling ‘taxi’ does not make you a taxi. This was hitchhiking for a fee.
Instead, I resorted to doing what I am used to but what is sometimes odd to other people, walking. I walked around the island for the first day and a half getting to the most easily-accessible areas. After a long walk, I would get to a beach and go for a swim. I’d maybe even snorkel for a while, though on the second day I managed to scratch myself a bit on some oysters. After getting out of the water, I’d remind myself that I should relax but then I’d see a coconut on the beach and feel enticed to open it using whatever I could find lying around. On the second day I got really good at this and opened three coconuts in a row. The third coconut, about the size of a basketball, was much older than the first two and took a lot more effort to open. By the time I got it open, my hands were covered in blisters and scratches but at least I had some sweet coconut water to show for it. A Spanish couple observed me doing this, prompting them to order a cleanly-macheted, young coconut from the beach bar.
So on my third day I thought it was time for a change. No more walking. I was going to relax and no one was going to stop me. I decided to rent a bicycle. No motor, no worries. Despite every other shop having motorbikes for hire, not many places seemed to rent out their analog cousin. I could find two places that rented bikes on the island and one was near the new hostel I was moving to. So on my third morning I walked for half an hour to the new hostel, dropped off my bag and headed to the bicycle rental shop, which also rented motorbikes, did laundry, sold ferry tickets and dispensed gasoline.
“All broken.” There were ten bicycles hanging on the wall but the owner was certain that none of them were in working condition. “You can hire a motorbike,” he explained. I didn’t want a motorbike, I wanted a bicycle. Why was this so difficult? I asked if there was anywhere else nearby that rented bicycles. He responded, “I see them sometimes on the island but I don’t know where they get them from.” Well that was helpful.
The one other place that I thought had bicycles was on the other side of the island, past the old hostel I had just left. So I walked back there. It wasn’t ten in the morning and I’d already walked over five kilometres on my day of no walking. I managed to hire a bike for two days, which came with a helmet and a red bike lock. I quickly realised why it was so hard to hire a bike on the island. The hills on the island were very steep. In fact, all the places accessible by pushbike were also the places I had walked to on the previous day. I also was way too tired to ride anywhere. So I rode the bike to a beach just past the new hostel, parked it and opened a coconut. I didn’t ride anymore that day.
The next day I planned to go to another beach that, though it required a bit of uphill riding to get to, was still not too bad. In many other parts of the island, people were falling off of their motor scooters because the gradient was so steep. This place didn’t seem like that. So I road uphill for about twenty minutes, parked the bike, walked down to the beach and snorkelled around for a while. I even saw some small sharks in the reef. Things were looking up. I was feeling more relaxed. I had had a nice morning and had a nice downhill ride to look forward to.
Back on my bike, I raced down the hill in about three minutes and pulled into a place to get some lunch. The plan next was to ride a short distance to an easily-accessible beach and read a book under a palm tree. So relaxing. That was the plan, at least. A few minutes after lunch I was riding and heard a clicking noise from the bike. I looked down and the clicking noise stopped. In fact the clicking noise wasn’t the problem, the red bike lock that came with the bike was the problem. It was missing. I’d lost the bike lock.
I pulled over and considered continuing on, but quickly decided against it. The rental place had my passport as a deposit and would likely charge me an exorbitant fee to replace the lock. I’d only travelled a short distance since I last had the lock, surely I’d find it.
An hour of searching up and down the hill I had so quickly raced down found no lock. It was gone. I’d have to return the bike sans lock. But then I remembered the lock I had been travelling with since leaving Sydney. I could give them that one instead. It travelled with me through over sixty cities in the past six months, though I was willing to let it go in a heartbeat. I headed back to the hostel, got the lock out of the bag and headed back down the road to the rental place. I still had the bike rented for another eighteen hours but I didn’t want it. I was getting rid of the two-wheeled stress-inducer.
The employee at the rental place called his boss and I managed to convince him to take my lock. Otherwise, he was going to charge me five hundred baht to replace it, the equivalent of two nights' accommodation at a hostel on the main strip. I got my passport and walked straight to the nearest beach, refusing to even look at the horrid bike. I lay down in the sand as the afternoon breeze rustled the palm fronds. A coconut fell from the tree and landed a few feet away from me, but I didn’t open it. I fell asleep to the sound of a receding tide. Without the bike, I was relaxed.
