Hitching to India: The Hunt, Days 3, and 4

I woke up on the Lunar New Year to firecrackers going off somewhere in the morning, and went back to sleep since I had been out to the wee hours of the morning.

I did no active work trying to find boats. I thought I'd take a couple days off and see if anyone emails or calls me. They didn't. I think the boat situation is pretty hopeless.

I planned on going to the beach and relaxing. As I as putting on sunscreen on the fringe of the beach I got a phone call from a Chinese girl who I met the night before through some mutual CouchSurfing friends. Miraculously, my phone's microphone began working and I could actually talk to her.

We drove, along with Viktar and two other friends, to the southern cape to watch the sunset on the last day of the year. We went swimming on an empty beach in the dark, and we ate Indian food, and laid around on another empty beach, and saw a Russian tourist nearly get knifed by a crowd of angry locals for some unknown transgression.

The next day was equally productive. I met the Chinese girl - Sophie - again, and we saw the Green Hornet in 3D along with an Egyptian CouchSurfing friend. He was all bent up about the uprisings in Egypt, and he was trying to get out of going to the movie so he could go to a doctors appointment, but I just bought him a ticket so he didn't have a choice. Eight bucks per ticket; getting close to US prices. Well he liked it, I knew a movie like that would get his mind off things of reality like strife and uncertainty, and downer shit like that. I don't even know what's going on in Egypt, I should check the news sometime.

I took Viktar out for dinner. We had Egyptian food, coincidentally, and it was truly mediocre. I tried though. I got to bed around 5AM after laying around on the shadowy beach, eating pizza that was suspiciously similar to generic Pizza Hut pizzas, and embarrassing myself on a club's dance floor that was mercifully full of enough darkness and drunk people picking up hookers to notice how poorly I "dance".

It's tough work trying to hitchhike on a boat.

Hitching to India: The Hunt, Day 2

Today I scootered over to Chalong Bay for breakfast. I had some foolish idea I'd catch a bunch of boat owners in the cafes or on the pier, but the place was just packed with tourists milling about in life jackets and cramming themselves onto day charter boats.

Chalong Bay might be a good place to find a boat going towards Sri Lanka or India, but it's just a bay with a shitload of boats floating around. There are no docks to loiter on and try to talk to people, though there is a super long pier and an immigration office.

I had breakfast and waited for Viktar to come meet me, reading "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found" for a bit of research for a country it looks like I'll never get to by boat. Viktar is the CouchSurfer I'm staying with, a Belarussian who's been working for a fly-by-night time share company that has started scamming its employees, not just the customers.

We went to Boat Lagoon, and I talked to a couple people there. They told me the same thing, I'm late by 2-4 weeks. Awesome news. I also began to theorize that the middle of the day is not the best time to hang around docks hoping to talk to people. That's probably when they're inside away from the blistering sun, or out doing fun shit.

Viktar went back home to sleep off a hangover before he spends tomorrow calling up the clients his company is planning to screw - pending payments - so he can screw the company since he was fired without getting paid. He thinks the company might send someone after him, so he's bailing from his apartment to stay somewhere else, but he's giving me permission to stay there, and possibly absorb the brunt of hired thugs who don't care who I am. I picture the opening scene in the Big Lebowski.

I went to the Royal Phuket Marina and found a middle-aged Aussie guy, shirtless with a sloppy barrel of a torso, lightly furred, deeply tanned minus the armpits, hosing down a rug. He's heading out to the Andamans, then Sri Lanka and India, but he doesn't want to take on crew.

"Need anyone to cook or clean or do the grunt work?"

"Nah, I've got a wife for that."

The silver lining is that there is at least one boat still heading west. He mentioned some friends going that way too, but also that they don't likely want to take on crew either.

I followed signs to a pier, but it was all local junk fishing boats, and all the roads and alleys leading to the various docks smelled like absolute shit and the water was full of trash. Not the place to catch a ride across a sea, that's for sure.

I drove to Kata beach and laid in the sun among whale-like Russian couples - I actually think I saw the fattest woman ever to wear a bikini - and topless beauties. Submersing myself in the warm Andaman Sea was like heaven closing around my body. The water is clear and warm and shallow and clean, and the sand is white and pure and visible beneath the water for hundreds of meters.

I realized I hadn't been on a beach for ages. I'm spending tomorrow on Patong Beach, apparently Phuket's version of Hampton Beach, because it's the closest to where I'm staying and I returned my scooter today.

Oh also, what I said in the last post about Phuket not being as bad as I thought: well I take that back after spending the evening on Bangla Road last night. It was like a riot in the bad neighborhood of hell. Entertaining for sure, but the sort of place that makes you glad humans invented nuclear weapons.

Hitching to India: The Hunt, Day 1

I figured, what better place to leave than Phuket? I had a terrible impression of this place for years before I even go here, and I arrived to find out that it's bad, but not as bad as I thought it would be. It's full of Russians and resort hotels and scooters and hookers and cheap food and beer. You win some, you lose some, right?

Anyway, this is the place to hitch my way onto a boat, if I'm going to do it at all. It's a super developed island in terms of tourism and big money options. It has at least four marinas for all sorts of boats: sailing yachts captained by retired couples from San Francisco, super yachts owned by anonymous millionaires with crew that look like models, and yachts run by dirtbag travelers who've matured enough to have a boat.

Plenty of opportunities.

Or so I thought. When I made it to Yacht Haven, my last stop of the day, I finally got to talking to a bunch of people who told me that I was about 2 weeks too late. Everyone they knew left towards Sri Lanka early in January. Favorable winds and weather and whatnot.

Well I hadn't spent all day writing notes to post on bulletin boards and zipping around the island's hell-born traffic and road system to give up. Some other people told me that I just need to ask and I'll find something eventually, and I choose to believe them.

After all, if I fail to get a boat, what am I gonna do? Stay in Thailand? Go south through Malaysia? Or get on a plane, god forbid? Fuck that, all three of them. I want to go to India, and I want to go there on a boat.

I posted 8 notes at four marinas. The notes went something like this:

to INDIA and/or SRI LANKA

crew available

Hi, I'm a 27 year old male, American, hoping to travel to Sri Lanka or India.
I'm trying to circle the globe by land and sea only. I've made it this far from
South Korea.

I'm willing to cook, clean, share costs, play mediocre guitar, do general
maintenance, etc. I can leave anytime and have my visa to India already.

Please contact Ethan at:

cyphecks[at]yahoo.com

or

08-8869-5434 (text only though - the microphone on my phone is broken)

Thanks!

I hope it works. I'm going to go back to Chalong Bay, The Boat Lagoon, and the Royal Phuket Marina tomorrow to talk to more people. I'm not going to Yacht Haven again since I spent the most time there today, and more importantly, it's like 45 kilometers on crowded roads through a low atmosphere of smog.