When Geckos Pee and You Eat Too Much: Ko Phangan

Look at this place. It’s paradise! Sure, it was one hell of a trek to get here, but Great Odin’s Raven, was it ever worth it.

And I don’t care what you say, nothing ruins paradise more perfectly than the words “gecko” and “pee”.

“I got peed on by a gecko.”

Wait, what?

Who gets peed on by a gecko? I mean, come on. How does that even happen? Let’s be serious.

Apparently if your name is Peter and you’re from Switzerland, your chances are higher. Sucker!

He warns us on arrival that we’d do ourselves some good to be aware, because the smell of gecko-urine isn’t exactly sublime. Duly noted, Peter from Switzerland. Duly noted.

Peter's peed on face

I digress. We’ve just finished our long-haul (boat, plus bus, plus broken bus, plus boat) to Ko Phangan from Ko Phi Phi.

We’re exhausted when we get there, not to mention dying of hunger (strangely enough, Peter’s warning has not thrown off our appetite). So when we arrive at the Haad Tian Beach Resort, at the northwest corner of Ko Phangan, it’s to a welcoming committee of the world’s friendliest staff, a bench covered in mysteriously disappearing ants, and a ceiling swarming with said urinating geckos. The place is all but empty; it’s low season in Thailand, which makes us a bigger deal than we normally are, which is to say, a very big deal indeed. ;)

So anyway, the next week (yes, we stayed for almost an entire week in our lovely private beach-side bungalow that we paid the equivalent of $6/night for) we spent doing absolutely nothing but eating and drinking, sleeping and eating, and drinking and eating. We sat on the beach, we walked the 20 feet from bungalow to restaurant, and usually we complained about walking back. We played frisbee in the pool with a frisbee I “acquired” from North Van Rec (don’t ask questions).

We ate and drank ourselves into absolute oblivion and it was exactly as amazing as you might imagine. So much so, in fact, that when Joanne’s birthday arrived, we all had some serious issues zipping up the dresses that, I do swear, actually used to fit at one point in our gluttonous lives. I blame the incredible Daeng and her exceptional problem of being an unacceptably good cook.

We ate ourselves silly, really. Think of the most amount of food you’ve ever eaten. Now multiply that by, oh, 450. Yeah. It’s all we did.

And here I’m going to tell you something that you may have difficulty believing (I mean it’s one of those things you really have to see to believe), but since you, unless I’m otherwise very much mistaken, were not there to witness the event firsthand, you’ll just have to go ahead and take my word for it – and I swear to you it’s  not a word of a lie.

Picture this:

It’s a dark, blustery evening. The three of us girls retreat to our bungalow to get some well-undeserved shut-eye. And we do! Oh, yes. We sleep for a few very solid hours, awoken only by Jo’s crazed sleep-talking blathering nonsense, followed by her immediately sitting bolt-upright and the electric flash of her torch scanning the dark room like a lighthouse searchlight, and then it’s off, and we’re lulled to sleep again by the soothing sound of the pounding monsoonal rain on the tin roof.

We have just enough time to escape to our dreams again, when all of a sudden I’m having some serious trouble breathing.

There’s something… canvas? Yes. In my face.

I roll over. Whatever.

But the canvas becomes insistent and it’s really determined to be in my personal space, and I give in, because, well, the canvas is wet and it’s all sorts of unpleasant, plus it’s bringing a howling wind and a heavy sheet of rain into the bungalow with it, and this I simply do not appreciate.

At this point the obnoxious canvas, which I’ve now identified as hammock (more specifically, the hammock from our front porch) has insisted on waking Melissa as well, and the both of us grumpily (yes, I said grumpily) and drowsily (yep I said that too) reach blindly to shut the heavy wooden shutter which is now completely soaked in a mixture of ocean water and monsoonal rain.

We’d barely managed to close the window and shut out the suffocating killer hammock when – BAM! – there’s a huge crash and an empty space where the door used to be.

All three of us, bolt upright in less than a second. Where the shit has the door gone?

And then our eyes adjust and there it is, six feet across the room, quavering against the metal laundry rack.

To this day, I swear it’s our own fault. We ate ourselves into Three Little Piggies. And then the Big Bad Wolf came and blew the door in.

It flew six feet, clear across the room. And I don’t care who you are: outside of fairy tales, that shit ain’t normal. ;)