Purple Rain (to be continued...)

I've been in Ko Tao for a number of days now. The sea between Ko Samui and Ko Tao was especially turbulent the day that I left, which produced a scene of absolute horror inside the ferry. As the ship careened off of white-capped waves, the ship's crew walked down the aisles handing out plastic bags: which is not a good sign. The entire cabin was suddenly transformed into a high school girl's bathroom at lunch time the week before prom -- barf city. Of course, this bulemia en-masse could have been triggered by the movie Be Cool, which they were showing, just as easily as by the heaving seas -- sorry, bad word choice.

To escape the chunk bunk I went outside, on top of the mighty vessel, where I was joined by my French-Canadian friend Jean-Paul, who stood at the railing laughing like some deranged sea captain, howling into the froth and foam which exploded over the deck. The Gorton's fisherman after too many freeze-dried fishsticks. Soon, other French people showed up and we were all smiling through the salt and grime of the ocean, a far better option than braving the wretched (sorry again) passenger compartment below.

Arrived in Ko Tao and found an amazing place to stay. It has electricity and everything. You learn a bit more about yourself on a trip like this than perhaps you would like to know. First of all, I have become a lot more familiar with the functions and byproducts of my body. See, the toilets here don't flush like regular toilets, they require you to dump bucketfuls of water down into them. Every day, well, to be honest, every 2-3 days, I must battle my toilet with great torrents of water, force-feeding it that which I choose to offer.

Moving away from waste management for a moment, I have learned a lot about my musical tastes. Absolutely suffering without music, I went and bought a little CD player. CDs are cheap enough, about $2 for a copy, but I don't want to carry too many around with me, so I basically had to ask myself, "if you were stranded on a desert island and could only bring 5 cds, what would they be?" With my limited options I ended up with 5 greatest hits cds:

Prince
Pearl Jam
Peter Gabriel
Manu Chao
and John Denver

I don't know how John Denver snuck in there, but I only listen to it when I clean my gun and shave my legs.

Diving was just as fantastic and amazing as I thought it would be. I ended up signing up for lessons on a very motivated impulse -- something which is rare for me, someone who takes 20 minutes to decide which grocery line to enter before eventually deciding not to buy anything at all -- so I followed that rabbit down its little hole.

My instructor was a former Portuguese MD, or, current Portuguese, former MD. His accent sounded enough like Jacques Cousteau and he looked enough like my friend Angelo to make me trust him. The other two people in my class were a British couple, some of the nicest people I've met on this trip, though there was a bit of a miscommunication when I said that my wetsuit didn't provide much ball room: "ballroom dancing?" the girl said. "No. A different kind of ball room ... he he."

My underwater experience was spectacular. Go into the woods for 30 minutes and you're lucky to see chipmunk; you certainly won't see a mountain lion tackling a deer, two rams locking horns, or a teddy bear picnic. But the underwater world is teeming with the most fascinating and bizarre life forms I've ever seen. When I first swam through a school of zebra striped fish, I was certain that I had entered an imaginary puppet world, or that the Nitrogen Narcosis had kicked in early.

By far my favorite aquatic creatures were the little flower-like things that grow on large coral spheres. These little green red and blue handkerchiefs would wave at you as you floated and bubbled past, when you moved your hand over them, they immediately ducked into their little puppet holes.

Goddamn, I'd love to talk more about this but the internet connection here has wiped way a good 2/3 of this post so I'll have to continue it later. My apologies for not spell checking either, I'm lucky to get this thing up at all.