The Jabo arrives...Koh Lanta continued
When we got back from the epic snorkeling trip, we went to my aunt and uncles hotel room only to find Jabo sitting on their porch, cigarette in hand.
I made all of the introductions and just like that, he became part of the clan.
That night, we ate at Tony's.
Antoine and Juliette drew him a picture for his collection.
We were the only ones in the whole bar/restaurant.
Tony would come and sit down with us at our table and drink beer with us.
Though he didn't speak anything but Thai, and we couldn't understand a word of what each other was saying, he still hung out and we all had a good time together.
You see, Tony lives and works on the beach.
About 30 yards from the restaurant, there is a camouflaged colored tent at the edge of the tree line. That is his tent. He lives there.
When night set, he would start a fire right in front of his tent, with whatever wood was available.
By this point it must have been our 3rd or 4th night in a row eating there. We had tried other restaurants, but this one was authentic.
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| Tony the bro twirling a stick, just doing Tony things |
We got to change the music to whatever we wanted, and since Charlotte and I both love Jack Johnson, we would put on his music and have our own little singalongs all night long.
They were presents, for us.
He gave my uncle a cowboy hat, Juliette a communist cap, Jabo got a hello kitty cap, Antoine and I got some sort of orange and red bandanna that was originally a skirt and I cannot remember what the others received.
So we gave him things too. My uncle gave him a flashlight and I gave him a flashing American Flag pin. He was so grateful and immediately put the pin on his hat holding the flashlight in his hand.
Then, on the sand in front of our table, facing the ocean, he started to dig 7 small holes.
He put a candle in the first hole, and then handed me a broken CD.
He gestured for me to dig with him.
So I started digging and putting his candles in the holes.
Then he brought out some sort of makeshift stand with christmas lights and random ornaments on it. Everything that man owns was given to him by tourists or found on the beach.
He put the stand on the sand and brought out a couple others.
Then, he grabbed some sort of rings made of wood and set them on top of the stand.
He asked Jabo to light the wooden rings on fire while I lit the candles.
We were all laughing and smiling, enjoying Tony's crazy game.
What the hell was he doing, we had no idea?!
Once everything was completely set up and all the fires were lit, he sat down with us.
Then he tried to explain something. Here's what he did and said:
Sitting down, he points to the fire, ornaments, and candles.
Then he points to himself and then to my aunt.
Repeatedly.
After some guessing we finally understand that he is talking about some sort of wife or girlfriend he had.
When we say "girlfriend" he says "YES!" and nods with emphasis.
Then he points to himself and says "girlfriend" and then he says "motorbike."
He mimics driving on a motorbike and says his girlfriend was behind him on the bike.
Okay...now we're even more confused than before.
We just keep smiling and try to understand。。。
He says "holiday" and then says Koh PiPi.
Okay so him and his girlfriend were on holiday on Koh PiPi.
Then he mimics driving some more and says "Tsunami" and makes huge wave-like motions with his hands.
We get really quite. We're no longer smiling.
He makes a sign of a wave crashing hard onto a moving motorbike.
Then says "Toni, girlfriend, Tsunami."
Then he says "girlfriend" and makes a slitting motion across his own throat, indicating she died when the Tsunami hit.
Then he points to the blazing candles and wood, along with his strange stand made up of found objects.
We're now dead quiet. Toni's fun game, wasn't a game at all, but a nightly religious ritual he performed for his dead girlfriend.
And he liked us, so he decided to include us.
At first we were all quite and somber, but Tony quickly riled us back up by smiling and laughing.
This wasn't supposed to be a sad thing!
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| Toni, with his found objects shrine in the background. |
We took pictures with him that night in front of the fire and ceremony.
I love doing things that tourists never get to do.
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The next morning, we had all decided to go on another snorkeling/boat trip.Once again, we hired one of those long-tail boats and started to head out to something called "Emerald Cave."
Apparently, back in the day, some lucky pirates had seen a underwater cave opening from their giant pirate ship.
I can only assume that after some swashbuckling arguments, the short dude with no parrot, no eye-patch and no peg leg, was chosen to go into the cave.
Those are the only ways to gain respect in the pirate community, this is common knowledge.
Well what this dude found was something out of a Hollywood pirate movie. After swimming through a couple hundred yards of pitch darkness, he emerged into the daylight onto a beach!
Pirates hid their treasures in that cove, only accessible through some crazy sub-sea passage.
Now the pirate cave has been discovered and is a common place for tourists to go.
This once beautiful, remote, hidden gem is now flogged with school children and tourists.
I'm not saying this is Obama's fault, I'm just saying that I never had to share a hidden pirate cove in Thailand while Bush was President.
After about an hour of boat-riding, we arrive to the Emerald Cave.
I randomly snapped a pretty cool picture of Antoine diving into the water.
We had a sort of "tour guide" with us.
In reality, it was just the dude who had been sleeping on our tiny boat next to the other guy driving.
Whatever, in Thailand, everyone is a guide.
We swim up to the cave in beautiful clear blue waters, duck under the cave into a shady region, and follow the guide holding a flashlight.
At first, the light from outside pretty much illuminates the inside of the cavern.
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| This is the last known photograph of these three. |
However, the second we turned the first corner, that light vanished faster than Malaysian flight MH370.
Plunged in total darkness, The Jabo and I immediately got separated by a long line of schoolchildren wearing life jackets.
I also couldn't see my family, and so I simply assumed that the entire thing was a trap, and that the locals were actually going to tie us all on a large stick, and slowly roast us over an open flame.
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| Emerging from the beast's belly |
SPOILER ALERT: none of us were spit-roasted and instead we emerged to find an awesome beach-cove entirely surrounded by steep cliffs.
We snapped a couple pictures, and though absolutely magical and awesome, it was pretty crowded, so we decided to go back to the boat relatively quickly. There was some snorkeling to be done.
Jabo has an incredible ability to sleep absolutely anywhere.
Practically under any conditions.
He would sleep on the ferries, on the loud long-tail boats, on the beach, in buses, planes, trains, outside on the sidewalk like a homeless (Tokyo), anywhere.
It is so impressive, and anyone who knows Jabo is aware that if he "Wakes up" by only opening his left eye, then he is not awake at all. He'll even talk to you, or intereact in another way, but he is not awake.
Before my family left, we snapped a fun picture of my two cousins whispering "GAYYYYYY" into his ears while he passed out on a ferry.
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| Left eye slightly beginning to open... |
Moving on to another snorkeling spot, we encountered the most fish I have seen in my life.
Some people exaggerate and say things like "there were so many fish you couldn't even see" or "I literally had to push the fish away there were so many."
Well that's what actually happened to us.
Look.
These guys were assholes.
They would swarm our bodies as we entered the water.
And they were unsure as to whether or not we were edible, so every now and again, one of these jerks would come and nibble the side of your torso, or a leg.
It was all good fun though, and we'd take turns getting on the boat and throwing pieces of bread onto the ones snorkeling below.
The fish would attack the bread like a piranhas, hurling themselves at the person in the water in the process.
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| Just look at those slimy, beady-eyed monsters....and the fish. |
We also found more clown-fish, and this time they were pretty shallow.
I tried my hardest to get a picture with it, but those guys are kinda sneaky.
I was about to quit, when I simply asked it to tell me a joke.
He said something about a sea-cucumber and before he could get out his punchline, I dove in there and photobombed him.
Classic clown-fish photobomb.
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| Nemo, the BroFish, and yours truly. |
I tried my hardest to find sharks, but no such luck in Thailand.
Just as we were about to pack it in and call it a day, I did manage to see two very rare sea-creatures.
The first was a venomous/aggressive Lion-fish. He was chilling at the bottom on some deep sand, and would flair up his poison spikes when I would get too close.
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| Lionfish |
On my way up from seeing that fish, I caught a glimpse of something no-one had previously seen in Thailand.
Not only is this sea-creature incredibly pale, but he is usually seen drinking Big Chang.
I present, Thailand Jabo.
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| The machine-gun has been Photoshopped out of his hands |
One of the last days we spent on the island, we wanted to go check out Koh Pi Pi, to see the famous "Beach" from the Leonardo DiCaprio movie.
We got a boat to take us all the way out there, and sort of failed.
I mean, we failed in seeing "The Beach."
There isn't really such a thing as failing when you're trapped on amazing tropical islands.
We all hung out on the beach all day, ate some food, went swimming, and Jabo and I tried to snorkle with sharks (no success).
On the boat there (or maybe on the way back), as Jabo snoozed in the back, Antoine and I had meaningful bro-talks for a couple hours.
Catching up is awesome, especially when you each have over a year's worth of material to talk about.
After a long day, we all went to Tony's, had some beers and went to sleep.
Jabo and I went back to our little hut on the beach.
The dude we were renting the hut from, also owned the bar.
To put it lightly he was a hippie.
To put it realistically, he is the type of dude who should have stopped traveling 30 years ago.
Too much of a good thing is bad, ask Heath Ledger.
Anyways, it was getting semi-late on this quiet island, so I brush my teeth and go to sleep, as Jabo smokes a cigarette outside.
I hear him start talking to the bar-owner, and take that time to open an attachment I had downloaded from my email earlier in the day.
Just a few days prior, I had received an email from my mom informing me that my great-aunt / second grandmother had passed away. She had been my grandfather's older sister and had been around my whole childhood.
When I first read the email a few days before, I was filled with a deep sadness, but since I didn't really want to bring down everyone around me, I didn't say anything and kept on acting normal.
We were doing such fun things that took up the entirety of the days that, though I didn't forget, I hadn't allowed the sadness to creep into my mind.
Then my sister wrote my grandfather a letter.
Instead of writing it in an email, she typed it in a word document and sent it to him.
That letter was so well written and heartfelt, that he forwarded it to the entire family and eventually read it out-loud at her funeral.
That is the thing that I decided to read that night.
Within seconds, I start to get choked up.
Then tears start running down my cheeks.
Next thing you know I'm actually having a hard time breathing and am crying like I hadn't since I was in elementary school.
My aunt was a wonderful person and I loved her.
The pain I felt was both for her, and my grandpa, her brother.
Right at the peak of my sadness is when Jabo comes into the room.
He sees that I'm upset and asks for some details.
Seeing that I don't really want to talk, he leaves me alone again.
This is where the evening stops being sad, and starts getting very, very weird and funny.
I think my great-aunt Gabi would have laughed at the whole situation.
Jabo comes back into the hut...with the creepy dude from the bar/hotel!
They are offering me a beer and convince me to go outside on the beach with them.
Jabo had all of the best intentions in getting me out of the room, and he was so chill about the whole thing. But even he couldn't foresee the weirdness that was about to occur.
We sit down on the beach.
It's the three of us: Jabo, myself, and the owner (I can't remember his name so we'll call him Jeffrey).
He makes us try to form a circle, which is really difficult with three people.
Satisfied with our lopsided triangle sitting arrangement, he hands each of us some incense stick things.
He lights his and then hands me his lighter.
As I'm trying to light this thing, he is mumbling something under his breath, and wafting the smoke from his burning stick into the air.
Jabo and I kind of look at each other with a weird look, but decide to accept this as a local tradition.
By the way, Jeffrey is a white American from Seattle who moved to Thailand many years ago. He's not a local.
We each get our incense lit, and as we stick them into the sand, Jeffrey wafts over them as if to gather the smoke and spreads it over himself and us two.
If anyone has seen that episode of FRIENDS where Phoebe "cleanses" Ross's aura by picking away at invisible things surrounding him, this looked similar. But it was much creepier and he was serious.
Dis ain't no sitcom.
Jabo and I were still going along with it at this point.
Jefferey asks me to say a few words about Gaby, and though I felt awkward and didn't really want to, I said a couple sentences.
Then Jeff started wafting more smoke and pulled out some sort of strange smoking apparatus, stuffing something into the bowl. He takes a hit and passes it to me. I decline, as does Jabo. We literally had no idea what this guy was doing.
Then he starts rambling about some sort of crazy universe theory about god-knows what.
Just when we think it cannot get any stranger, this absolutely HAMMERED person comes stumbling towards us in the total darkness. As the shape of this body emerges from the backdrop of the beach, Jeffrey catches the drunkard. He lovingly brings the drunk woman onto an outdoor patio with mattresses, directly in front of our hut, and lays her down.
He comes back and starts preaching to us how he wished someone would do the same thing for someone he loved if ever they found themselves in an intoxicated situation such as the one that lady found herself in.
He keeps rambling about loving every living thing and how the universe has a plan for everything and everyone.
He sounds like when Kanye West rattles about being a genius.
Everyone is listening, but no one has the slightest clue of what he's talking about.
All of a sudden, the drunken, haggered woman comes back from the shadows and we can hear her rummaging through something.
Then, some light hits her face and body.
It is now completely clear that this is no woman at all, but a LadyBoy that is drugged out of it's mind.
The universe-feeling, peace-loving hippie, Jeffrey, stands up and starts CHASING this LadyBoy!
He is running after it hitting his hands together and making noises like you would to scare a wild animal.
This scares the LadyCreature, and the Jeffrey chases it all the way back away across the beach, clapping and snarling the whole time like a gorilla.
Jabo and I stare at each other.
Our eyes are wide.
We're both thinking the same thing.
What the F$%# just happened?!
Jeffrey comes back, and sits down like nothing happened.
He then starts talking about one-love and pure-love, or something similar.
Then he gets even creepier in his low, soft manner of speaking.
He softly grazes Jabo's foot with his and lightly touches my hand while saying something that sounds very deep if you've had 20 beers. Which we hadn't.
Jabo freaks out and we both stand up, saying we need to go to bed immediately.
We lock ourselves in the room and now the roles have shifted.
Instead of him trying to console me, I have to calm down a frightened Jabo who is convinced either the LadyBoy or the creepy owner are going to sneak into our hut during the night.
Pretty soon, we're both laughing uncontrollably, exhausted on our beds.
Jabo managed to turn a very sad time for me into quite a joyous, albeit weird, one.
Thanks buddy.
Completely unrelated, but at one point during the few days we spent in that hut, I woke up because a mosquito had somehow snuck under our mosquito net and bit my hand.
Now this wouldn't normally wake me up, but this mosquito was vicious.
I woke up, with a sharp pain in my left hand.
Since it was completely dark, I forced myself to go back to sleep.
The next morning, the light of day revealed the truth.
It was no mosquito, but a spider.
And this thing had feasted on my hand.
It quite literally bit my entire palm, and all the way up and down each finger.
My hand swelled up and hurt for about 14 days.
All of that, and I didn't even get the super-strength and web-throwing powers I anticipated.
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| Guess I don't get my own movies or comic-book |
While we were all in Koh Lanta together, Jabo would keep telling Antoine how much better he is than him at soccer.
"Little boy, I will destroy you, I'll show you how futball is supposed to be played."
Antoine would respond "Okay, tonight, when we get back to the beach, let's play."
Antoine would respond "Okay, tonight, when we get back to the beach, let's play."
And, everyday, without fail, we would all forget until it was too late.
Until the last day arrived, they played on the beach for a solid 8 minutes.
Within 3 steps, Jabo was out of breath and red in the face, coughing up his smoker lungs on the beach, while Antoine would juggle circles around him.
Props must be given to Jabo, he went out there and gave it his all, but sometimes, it's just not good enough.
Full disclosure: I didn't even try to go out and compete against him, because I knew my PHENOMENAL skills would simply crush my cousin's dreams.
Sadly, my family's time in Thailand had run out.
They were flying out of the airport on Phuket and Jabo and I had no plans.
We decided to accompany them to Phuket and said our goodbyes.
It was one hell of a vacation, and they'll forever have a huge part in my GlobeTrotting adventure.
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| My uncle, fighting the sun, one ray at a time. |
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