Taking the Scenic Route

“Ellen Cherry understood then that religion was an improper response to the Divine.
Religion was an attempt to pin down the Divine. The Divine was eternally in flux, forever moving, shifting shape. That was its nature. It was absolute, true enough: absolutely mobile. Absolutely transcendent. Absolutely flexible. Absolutely impersonal. It had its god and goddess aspects, but it was ultimately no more male or female than it was star or screwdriver. It was the sum of all those things, but that sum could never be chalked on a slate. The Divine was beyond description, beyond knowing, beyond comprehension. To say that the Divine was creation divided by destruction was as close as one could come to definition. But the puny of the soul, the dull of wit, weren’t content with that. They wanted to hang a face on the Divine. They went so far as to attribute petty human emotions (anger, jealousy, etc) to it, not stopping to realize that if God were a being, even a supreme being, our prayers would have bored him to death long ago.
The Divine was expansive, but religion was reductive. Religion attempted to reduce the Divine to a knowable quantity with which mortals might efficiently deal, to pigeonhole it once and for all so that we never had to reevaluate it. With hammers of cant and spikes of dogma, we crucified and crucified again, trying to nail to our stationary alters the migratory light of the world. Thus, since religion bore false witness to the Divine, religion was blasphemy. And once it entered into its unholy alliance with politics, it became the most dangerous and repressive force that the world has ever known. –Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

Well, hello there. Regrettably, I had to leave Indonesia (NO, I was not deported), but happily, I am now in Thailand once again, land of smiles and cheap beach side bungalows. Lake Toba was a pretty spectacular place, though at some times it felt a bit deserted. Not that I mind having the thing to myself, but it’s really sad to see such a beautiful place with what was formerly a thriving tourist industry now just very quiet. I actually felt a pang of guilt when I was leaving, like my patronage was vital to the local economy. While this is not exactly the case, it is nonetheless not a feeling I’ve had before.
From Indonesia, I took a string of long bus and boat rides back up to Thailand, stopping in Malaysia for only a day to catch my breath. On one of the bus rides, I meet a woman who recommended a place to me called Railay Beach. While I’ve never heard of it, I don’t really have any other plans, so I head there. Once off the boat, I spend considerable time and effort lugging my pack around, searching for a reasonably priced place to stay. Eventually I meet Erich, a backpacker from Berlin, equally dismayed by accommodation, and we end up splitting a bungalow.
Railay is a pretty nice place, even if one of the beaches turns to a landfill at low tide. The rest of the beaches are clean and the water inviting. Also, it’s a sort of mecca for rock climbers, with cliffs and jungle-like hiking everywhere, so there’s plenty to do. If you climb up the side of one cliff via frayed and questionable rope, supposedly, you then may descend into a hidden lagoon. So Erich and I attempt to find this place, but there are too many paths and not enough maps. So who needs paths, right? To my mind, if the lagoon is in the middle of the mountain, then one should be able to scale the thing-path or no path-and thereby reach said lagoon. So we go off road. It was no small feat, but we did make it to the top…only to find no lagoon in sight. Oh well, at least we can brag about climbing the thing in unsuitable shoes and without ropes or hooks like those pansy professional climbers. So then we go back down, get lunch, and climb the mountain again, vowing to find the lagoon or die trying.

This time we have a better idea of where we’re going, and do eventually find the lagoon. It was…lagoonish. Quiet and peaceful enough, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something lurking beneath me when I went out into the water.

The next day, I booked a one-day snorkeling tour on a speed boat around the islands of Phi-Phi (I still giggle every time I say it). It was good snorkeling, but I did get a little sea sick, so I was lucky that there was a girl on my boat who had pills to fight it. The tour took us, among other places, to the beach where “The Beach” was filmed. I never actually saw the movie, but for anyone who did…yeah.

That evening marked my first and hopefully last experience with taking a “shortcut” through the jungle in the darkness with naught but my puny Swiss army knife flashlight to guide me.

At this point, Erich and I part ways, but I haven’t gotten quite enough sun (or so I thought) so I head to yet another beach, Ko Lanta. Here, for reasons I cannot guess, I am stricken with a bout of nausea and exhaustion so strong that I spend 72 hours virtually unable to move from my bed. When I do attempt to go out for water, I am unable to take more than just a few steps without puking. Attractive. Yesterday, I felt better and finally saw something resembling an appetite, which is good because a lot of today will be spent traveling back towards Bangkok. I’ve already spent about 2 hours on the minibus from hell. I’m not kidding. This driver was so terrible, you’d have thought he came from Cairo. But that is behind me now, and I have 4 hours to kill in Krabi, where I will probably rent a motorbike once again and go checkout a place called Tiger Temple. Grr.