Travel really starts feeling like travel after a month goes by. You wake up in a bungalow without that where-am-I moment and realize that this is home for the foreseeable future. It feels good.

Lindsie and I start feeling this way on Ko Lanta, where we pass an agreeable nine days or so swimming and wandering and watching tourists tan themselves to the colour of fried chicken. Sure, we spend time in the sun ourselves and are going a nice toasted-sourdough hue ourselves, but these people are fanatics. They burn hell out of their face and chest all morning, then flip over and somehow lie on the seared flesh while their backs cook. We walk by in awe and reapply sunscreen.

I have a couple of books to edit, which takes up a substantial amount of my time. I am, after all, flashpacking. The project is for a favourite client and is a labour of love, though of course I’m well remunerated for it as well.

After a week of billable hours, along with some jungle trekking, scooter rentals, sunset walks, pierside shopping, and a rousing evening at the bar with a young Connect Four master who shouts “Pop! Pop! You lose!” whenever one of us is six moves away from a defeat, we move on from Koh Lanta. It would be an acceptable spot for a quick resort-style vacation and fried-chicken tanning session, but the beaches are so developed and the locals so grouchy that there’s just no point staying longer. Our bungalow is run by a gang of surly teens who shrug when we tell them we’re out of toilet paper and say they don’t have any more. We buy it ourselves at the corner store and take it out of our final payment. No tip for you.

We do catch a great impromptu fire spinning show on our last night, though.

My dad is staying in Ao Nang, a seaside town in the bay between Phuket and Railay Beach, so we buy a boat ticket and head north to visit him at Green View Village, a little Thai-run hillside resort where he winters every year since his retirement. Our boat from Koh Lanta winds between beautiful limestone islands that tilt and tower over the water, so angular and improbable that they look like they were dropped into the Andaman from the sky. We pass the cliffs of Railay, sheer and massive over white sand beaches backed with palms and casuarinas.

Heh.

We’ve heard Ao Nang is a bit seedy, so are bracing ourselves for the worst, but soon find it to be one of our favourite spots so far. There’s a seaside boardwalk built after the tsunami that has a California feel to it; it’s very touristy, but once the road turns away from the beach and ascends a hundred meters or so, you find yourself among the locals with only the occasional farang joining you.

Fortunately, this is where Green View Village lies, right across the street from a half-built mosque and a 24-hour 7-11. Old meets new — I stop and listen to the beautiful and haunting melody of the Muslims’ evening prayers on my way to buy a Slurpee. (Passionfruit flavour!)

Green View is a super deal at $600 baht/$18 Cdn nightly (we get a weekly rate of 500 baht/$15 Cdn) for a rustic, private wooden bungalow on stilts with comfy bed, big porch, tiled bathroom, forceful shower, flush toilet (I no longer take these for granted), all set in gorgeous landscaped grounds with a cozy outdoor restaurant and a huge swimming pool.

The beach is ten minutes away and nothing to write home about, but there are boat tours to some of the world’s best snorkelling and dive sites.

Days melt into weeks, and before we know it, a month has drifted by. It’s easy to feel at home here. The number and variety of places to eat within a five-minute walk from here is mind-blowing: restaurants, streetside stalls, noodle carts, even tuks that drive by with hot soup simmering over a gas burner or fried chicken over an open charcoal pit. I discover, to my surprise, that Muslims make the best fried chicken I have ever tasted, and also a desert pancake with condensed milk and honey that’s to die for. We try dozens of soups, at least five types of noodles, a world of curries, plus chicken, pork, fish, crab, shrimp, oysters, burgers, sandwiches, pizzas, coconut waffles, and chocolate banana pancakes.

Many of our meals cost somewhere between $1 and $3 per person. I begin to understand why Thais eat about five times a day — it’s less about sustenance and more about grazing through the astounding variety of hot, fresh foods available everywhere.

Then there’s the fruit: heaven’s own mangoes, watermelons, pineapple, papaya, bananas, served up sliced on sticks, diced in bowls with yogurt, or blended with ice in a shake or lassi.

We swim in the pool, seek out new delicacies, and buy bags of ice in the evenings so we can mix cold drinks to sip on the porch. We drive a rented scooter to Klong Muang and Taep Kak beaches and slip discreetly into the gorgeous and ultra-luxurious Amari Resort before sunset for a (perfect) Manhattan and a glass of wine that cost about what we paid for the previous day’s meals.

We scoot off to Krabi, encountering the most preposterous Seuss-style vehicle we’ve seen yet — a man with a house’s worth of wicker furniture balanced on his scooter. Past Krabi, we visit the Tiger Cave Temple, perched atop a mountain with 1,237 steps leading up to it. In a fit of temporary insanity, we bound up the lower steps before realizing we haven’t brought anything to drink. It’s 40 degrees Celcius and before step 400 we’re both panting and soaked in sweat. Parched, dripping, and feeling like fools, we somehow make it to the top, where in the spirit of infinite compassion, the Buddhists have installed a faucet with drinking water.

The view is astounding, with the Andaman coastline and Krabi town to the west, a ring of spectacular mountains and cliffs to the north and east, and plantations of bananas, coconuts, pineapples, and rubber trees to the south. A massive golden Buddha surveys the scene, looking wise and serene and benevolent. I look at the fluffy white clouds drifting by and wonder what this place would be like in a thunderstorm.

On our way down, the local monkeys put on a show.

It’s the start of the hot season, and on many evenings thunderstorms pass directly overhead, lightning striking the cliffs near our bungalow. It sounds like a shotgun going off a few inches over your head, or like a tree snapping in half while you’re leaning against it; it’s impossible not to jump or flinch or shout in surprise when it happens. We get out of the pool when we hear the storms approach.

We take a longtail tour of four nearby islands, stopping to swim and snorkel around the amazing beaches and coral reefs. The marine life is like nothing we’ve seen, with curious fish approaching to inspect us as we swim among them. We spot barracudas, sea snakes, angelfish, and hundreds of others we can’t identify.

We go elephant trekking with an outfit called Nosey Parker’s, which appeals to us because of the way their brochure goes on about how kindly and humanely they treat their elephants. The creatures certainly seem happy, and we clamber aboard from a platform about fifteen feet off the ground and lurch and sway our way over a river and into the jungle.

Our guide, a chirpy and annoying Thai kid, is 14 years old; the elephant is 44, and we wonder if she finds the kid as annoying as we do. We ride through the shady jungle, feed the elephants, and watch as they take a bath in the river. They’re beautiful animals and it’s good to see them frolicking happily in the water.

We take a speedboat tour to Koh Phi Phi and are astounded by the beauty of the reefs and marine life. Endless schools of fish swim over and under and around us; at one point Lindsie and I are surrounded by a curtain of silver fish swimming around us in an endless vortex. We see Thais harvesting swallow nests from cliffs, monkeys eating crabs, and schools of fish leaping to escape pursuing barracudas.

Another tour boat passes slowly, towing a tour operator who holds the life jacket of a motionless Thai woman. Our guide calls out to them and they exchange a few words; she tells us that they found her floating in the ocean, dead. As Buddhists, they don’t want to bring the body into the boat because they think it will bring evil spirits with it. Feeling shocked and confused and helpless and awful, we watch as their boat continues on its way past, pulling its tragic cargo.

Back in Ao Nang, we start meeting locals and forging all manner of sweet, if casual, friendships. The desk clerk at our resort mends Lindsie’s pants on her sewing machine. We eat dinner a few nights in a row at a sidewalk cafe selling noodles, curry, and chicken, and as we turn to leave, the owner says, “See you tomorrow!” We get massages from a girl named Nok who spots us a few days later and waves us into a bar where we play pool with her friend, an adorable preteen pool shark.

The Song Kran festival arrives and turns all of Thailand into one huge water fight. Ever prepared, we have bought pump-action squirtguns at a night market. Trucks go by with dozens of people in the back tossing buckets of water at everything that moves. Nobody is safe — shopkeepers, people on scooters, children, the elderly, animals. Everything is soaked and everyone is smiling.

Lindsie gets a bucket of ice water poured down her neck. Thais slap a minty talcum paste onto our faces, allegedly to ward off evil spirits; we watch them slap the stuff onto cars, clothing, whatever. The day is long and utterly wonderful.

We buy a lantern, make a wish, light it up, and watch it fly off into the night sky. A few nights earlier, we had seen lanterns rising off the beach into a thunderstorm — magical.

After more than a month of settling in and feeling at home, it’s time to move on. My dad’s time is up, and on a monsoon-like afternoon we get drenched loading his backpack and bicycle into a truck that will take him to a taxi headed for Krabi, from where he’ll fly through Bangkok to Vancouver and then bus back to sleepy Powell River just in time for the start of a Canadian summer.

Not everything is perfect in paradise, of course. Our beloved waterproof Pentax Optio shorts out when a few drops of water enter through a dirty seal. We have a backup, my cute little 4-megapixel Olympus, but we still mourn the possible demise of the Optio. We’ll take it to Kuala Lumpur this week and see about getting it fixed.

I also come down with a mother of an ear infection — outer and middle ear — that fills my right ear with fluid and wakes me in the night with stabbing pains. My ear canal swells until I can’t fit a hearing aid into it. (I have profound bilateral hearing loss and wear two Widex BTE aids.) By the time I get to the medical clinic, the infection has spread to my left ear, so I get a couple of antibiotic injections, spend a few days on painkillers, and start a two-week course of heavy antibiotics and decongestants. No swimming or diving, which SUCKS — I feel like an idiot leaving the Andaman Sea without diving here. Well, we’ll always have the snorkelling.

The infection starts subsiding within a few days, which is reassuring, especially as we’ll be on a plane next Monday. This Thursday we hop a minivan bound for Kuala Lumpur. And then we fly. Where? To Bali!

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