I have just returned from a relaxing visit to Ko Samet, Thailand with my girlfriend and son. I had been there before, but found myself greatly disoriented on arrival with all of the development over the years. As I was walking around looking for a place to stay I met an English guy that had lived on the island for the last fifteen years, coincidentally, the last time I was on Ko Samet was also fifteen years ago.
I said to him, “This place has sure changed, I can’t recognize anything.”
To which he replied “People don’t come here the same way they did before, everyone now is on one week and two week vacations, and the people aren’t like the people that came here before either.”
I remembered back to the old Ko Samet, most of the visitors back then were in their twenties, often many already months into their world travels, Samet was usually just a place people did a stop over to wait for a visa from an Embassy in Bangkok to go somewhere more remote. There was open pot smoking in the restaurants, the men were mostly long haired and unshaven, the majority of the women were topless, Frisbees were being tossed around, and the locals played soccer on the beach. Now it was mostly overweight clean shaven business people laying around trying to get a tan on lawn chairs while consuming alcohol.
One morning way back then, while waiting for my three hippie friends, a french lady, and two British ladies, to wake up and join me for breakfast on the beach, I wrote the following poem:
Bathing Beauties
Bathing beauties on the beach,
I look at you my manners breach.
I want to look but if I’m caught,
My name is Mud instead of Scott
What is this game you play with me?
Drop your tops so breasts I see,
but see them not must say to you.
Escape this madness cannot do.
