Ah Thailand... How I love you so! I could write about you for days, for weeks! Noting here all the regrets I managed to chalk up while exploring your seedy cities and beautiful shorelines. In fact, I love Thailand so much that I have a permanent reminder of my love affair ingrained in my arm.
No, it's not the name of some Thai-lady boy I mistakenly sojourned with after one to many bottles of Chang, nor is it the name of my favourite Thai whiskey carved into my arm with a shard of glass after... well, you guessed it, one too many whiskeys.
Instead...
Wait a minute, just wait one minute. I'm sure that, seasoned travellers that you all are, you are more than familiar with what a Ko Phangan tattoo is; that indelible sign that you have not only braved the roads of that tiny Thai island, but also done so on a vehicle unstable enough (or simply drunkenly driven enough) to crash into some object or another and find yourself with a nasty, bleeding and ultimately permenant graze, cut, slice or wound.
Yes, that is my Ko Phangan tattoo: A big scar on my right arm left there after I managed to crash a motorbike into a brick wall. You may think that is not so interesting, that this in fact manages to happen to people all the time, especially in Thailand where all you have to do to rent a motorbike is wink and nod while handing over a paltry amount of baht (an amount even more paltry when you think of how much a new arm or a week in a coma might cost).
So, why is this regret then worthy of being on my list? A list, might I remind you, that aims to not only outline all my travel regrets, but offer as a guide to others to keep them from making the same mistakes as I.
To answer that perhaps I should give you a bit more background into this fateful crash.
Starting with the beginning, or at least the beginning as far as I remember it, I awoke one morning in my tiny steaming Haad Rin cabin with the kind of headache only a whole day drinking Chang and buckets can provide. Staggering to the concrete-floor-and-tap-in-the-wall room that passed for a bathroom, I found that my right arm was covered in blood. Upon casting my heavy, hungover mind back to the night before, I recalled, among other scattered memories such as a friend stealing a bottle of vodka from a bar, myself jumping through a flaming hoop, and a rather lacklutsre pool party, I also recollected having a motorbike at some point.
No small wonder when you consider the fact that it's pretty hard to crash a motorbike without one.
The only thing is I hadn't had a motorbike. None whatsoever.
Returning to my room and to my equally hungover travelling partner, I told them of my recollection at which point they replied:
"What, you don't remember?"
'Obviously not' I thought to myself with a puzzled look as my only verbal reply.
"You stole a motorbike," my friend replied. "And then drove it into a wall five metres away. After that we had to dump it in a jungle then you vanished."
Three words: What. The. Fudge.
Then, like a song from the 80s, it all came back to me...
This is a country, let's not forget, that imprisoned an Australian woman for stealing a bar mat and here I was guilty of not only stealing a motorbike, but also being intoxicated enough to crash it into a wall five metres away!
I can still remember it now - the bike was sitting there, the keys in the ignition, the alcohol in my blood and the devil in my veins.
Zoom Zoom Bang Crash!
Such was the origin of my Ko Phangan tattoo.
A regret? Well, not really. I'm actually quite proud of my scar, even though I do think about the poor man or woman who left their house one morning to find their motorbike had gone missing and no doubt thought it something a bit more sinister than simply being the victim of a drunken joyrider's poor driving skills.
Still, for me what makes it a regret is that is symbolises my whole time on Ko Phangan, a time when, instead of seeing what the island had to offer, I instead spent most of it drinking the day away and then awaking the next day too hungover to attempt the lone street leading out of the town nicknamed 'death road', a name bestowed upon it due to its steep hills, dangerous curves, lack of cliff-side safety barriers and trucks full of Thai construction workers overtaking you at any and all opportunities.
In hindsight I should have a spent a couple of days off the sauce and seeing a bit more a country that is so much more than confusing young men, ping pong balls and buckets full of who knows what.
But that is a regret that I am sure we all share, the regret of spending too much time partying and not enough time exploring the country, the city, the street that we find ourselves.
I like to think I will learn from this experience... but as you will all see from regrets to come, I didn't.
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