From One Island to Another

"Ten dollars on number six," I slur, smacking a bill on the bookie's counter. Weaving back through the crowd with a beer in hand, I have finally, for the first time in three days, forgotten about The Beach.

I’ve written and then immediately deleted three different introductions to a post about our month working at The Beach. But I'm done. I give up. I simply can’t find a way to explain our time there and how the experience affected us without sounding cheesy and cliché. To give you an idea in as few words as possible: I cried when we said goodbye to the people we worked with on the island, and cried a second time when we reached the mainland.

And now, on another island, the completely- and I do mean completely- different island of Hong Kong, I'm drowning my sorrows about leaving our beautiful, tranquil, intimate paradise with a combination of German beer and gambling.

Only a three hour flight from The Beach, yet a world away: Hong Kong was a blast. A luxurious, expensive blast, which we loved for the exact opposite reasons we loved the beach. We adored its craziness, its anonymity, its worldliness. Adored its cosmopolitan mix of cultures and people, the way it was at once totally international, yet undeniably Asian.

In order to be able to afford a couple of days in the notoriously expensive city, we used a hotel voucher that my ex-coworkers generously gave me when I left my job in Switzerland. As a result, we were able to stay, for nearly free, at a very nice hotel, complete with complimentary slippers. Fancy stuff indeed.

We were so proud to be living the high life while staying within our backpackers’ budget. That is, until we celebrated our cleverness by going to Happy Valley, Hong Kong’s famous horse racing track, and blowing two days-worth of expenses on beer and betting.

You know, because we are such responsible adults.

But you can’t blame us. We were enjoying our first day in Hong Kong when we saw an advertisement for “Oktoberfest at the Races.” How could we resist? Within a few hours, we were eating German sausages, drinking ridiculous amounts of Hefeweizen and betting on "lucky" horses. 

Of course we didn’t win anything. Of course we spent way too much money. Of course we got drunk and celebrated our losses with complete strangers, staggering home at 2:00am, a grease-soaked bag of McDonald's in hand. 

But we had fun. And really, isn’t that the point of this whole trip?

We definitely don't know these people

When we weren’t drinking and gambling, we were exploring Hong Kong’s diverse neighborhoods, mostly by way of their restaurants. To get a taste of the local flavor- literally- we stopped into one of the city’s typical old-school dim sum restaurants, where customers squeeze around communal tables and order mystery dumplings and buns from women pushing carts of steaming bamboo baskets through the crowded room.

It was chaos. When a cart with a more popular item- like BBQ pork buns or shrimp dumplings- would emerge from the kitchen, people would jump up from their seats and run across the dining room, pushing each other aside to be first in line to order from the cart. We had no idea what was going on, no idea what we were ordering and even less of an idea of whether or not we were doing any of it correctly. But did we care? Hell no. A little confusion is a small price to pay for a plateful of pork products. 

Confused and amused at dim sum

We also made sure to indulge in Hong Kong’s famous international dining scene. One day, we had an incredible pizza in the neighborhood of SoHo, which wouldn’t have been out of place in any big Western city, and that night, we ate a mind-blowing bowl of Japanese ramen noodles with pork neck, the broth thick and glistening with fat from the meat. Hong Kong is one of the most international cities in the world, and we took full advantage of that fact with our stomachs.

This is Asia?

 

On our last day in the city, before an evening flight to Nepal, we took a cable car up to The Peak, one of the steep hills that overlooks the city and the rest of Hong Kong Island. From high up, we could see the expansive cityscape on one side of the hill, and, even more impressively, the undeveloped, forested hills and sandy beaches of the south side of the island. We had always thought of HK as just a city when in fact, a vast part of it is wooded countryside and long stretches of peaceful beach. We were only fifteen minutes from the center of one of the world’s most populous cities, but up here on the peak, we were able to stroll along a wooded path in complete solitude, with nothing but the sound of the birds for company.

 

To top off our afternoon high above the craziness of the city, we had a romantic little picnic of paté, French cheese, fresh bread and red wine- products that we hadn’t been able to easily find for the four months we had been in Asia, but that were readily available in the local grocery store next to our hotel.

Dim sum one day, cheese and wine the next- all within a three-hour flight of our favorite place in the world?

This might just be our new city.

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In Defense of Bragging

No one likes a braggart.

No one really wants to hear how amazing your life is, how happy you are, how incredible is whatever it is that you are doing. Good news is rarely interesting.

The problem, of course, is that sometimes there is no bad news. Sometimes life is just f-cking extraordinary and gives you one good thing after another. Sometimes things are perfect.

But no one wants to hear about those times.

No one wants to hear about the tiny, undeveloped tropical island off the coast of Cambodia, where we spent ten perfect, peaceful, relaxing days living in a bungalow on the beach. No one wants to know that it was the paradise everyone looks for- but rarely finds- when they book a holiday at a beach resort. They don’t want to hear that ours was the only establishment on an island with no cars, no crowds, no internet or TV- no distractions or disturbances of any kind. That the resort, at capacity, only housed around 50 people at a time and that we never shared the place with more than about 30 other guests, often half that. That the only sound day and night was the crashing of waves and the wind rustling through the palm and pine trees that lined the beach. No one wants to know that the soft, golden sand of the same beach was nearly always empty, that the turquoise water was as clear and warm as a kiddie pool, that when the sea wasn’t as smooth and calm as glass, it had rolling waves that were perfect for body surfing.

Rider on the storm...

People don’t want to hear that our rustic, private bungalow had a heart-stopping view of the sea, which we would gaze at from the two hammocks on our porch. That we shared the whole peaceful scene under our thatched roof with nothing more disruptive than a few innocuous geckos. That we slept with our door open every night to let in the sea breeze and woke up to that view, that postcard perfect view, at our feet every morning. They are not interested to hear that day in and day out, the most stressful thing we had to do was decide what to choose from the menu of the impressive restaurant. That I didn’t put on a pair of shoes, or pants, or a watch, for a week and a half. That it was easily the most perfect, relaxing getaway I’ve ever experienced- positively luxurious in its simple, uncomplicated rusticity.

Gary the Gecko, our bungalow's mascot

Gary keeping me company in our bathroom

I pretty much didn't leave that spot for 10 days

A classic, mostly ineffective, way to kid oneself into thinking one isn’t bragging is to shift focus on the negative aspects of an experience to downplay the positive: “Yeah, I won the lottery, but it was only 20 million, and you know, after taxes it’s really not that much.”

So I’ll give that tactic a try: our bungalow was very basic. Generator-powered electricity only after 6:00pm, no hot water or fan, toilets you had to flush manually with a bucket of water. The tap water came from a nearby stream, so drinking water had to come from bottles (although we ended up drinking the filtered stream water that the local staff was drinking). The wooden beams of the bungalow wall were spaced enough to let any number of bugs in- we slept under a mosquito net and counted on our resident geckos to keep our home spider-free. It rained a little bit, forcing us in off the beach to drink wine, play Scrabble and wait for the clouds to pass. And at $40 a night, it was the most expensive place we have stayed in since arriving in Asia.

So, you know, it really wasn’t all that great.

Only it was.

In a previous post, I apologized for abruptly neglecting my blogging duties for a week and a half without warning. Now you know why. We arrived on the island with the plan to stay for four days. Four turned to five, which turned to seven. On the sixth day, the manager offered us two free nights, so our four day mini-vacation turned into ten days of languishing denial that we would eventually have to leave.

The same manager has tentatively offered us a job there in October.

Nepal or Lazy Beach? We have a decision to make…

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