Road To Civilisation

13 september - Woke up to a torrential downpour - not terribly unwelcome as it is my last day and these downpours don't have a habit of sticking around very long.
Went out for a final night on the town in KPG to Haat Rin - the party side of the island. Like many of the tourist epicentres it's a smaller version of Khao San Road - that seems to be the model of a traveller's retreat within Asia although none of the imitations come close to emulating the crapulence of the original. After the delicacy of the day's motorcycle ride and the fact that I now knew how precarious the ride to Haat Rin was I decided to take a taxi. I had to wait a go go bar for a while before a german man offered to give me a lift on the bike. I was a bit uncertain as I was specifically avoiding two wheels, if i'd wantned to go on a bike I would have ridden myself. He convinced me ohis prowess and I relented then on the way he started telling me how drunk he was and I noticed whiskey on his breath. Getting him to stop was a bit arduous but I got off and wandered through pitch black streets until I was finally picked up by a saemlaw (think that's what it was called). The road was worse than I thought in the daytime so very glad I got away from the german. Felt a bit silly getting on - never in a million years in Sydney would I do that but in Asia it just seems a bit more normal.
Drank with some irish (including one that just returned from Australia with the face of an angel and the voice of a chainsmoking whore) for a while - not as hard nor as fast as they did obviously before getting overcharged to get back into Baan Thai.
The next day I checked out with some and took the motorcycle back to the shop. There was a little bit of damage from the falls that i'd experienced and they charged me for them - I was a bit affronted - i'd suspected that they would do that but the quote they gave me was actually pretty reasonable and much less than what an Australian place would probably charge (although i'm not sure that a Australian rental company would be giving an unlicensed rider the keys to a moto). Still, it did feel like they were adding insult to injury. My wounds are not that bad but they're more inconvient - one palm is slashed up and the other elbow which means I can't lean on my palms or my elbows (very bad for travelling on the top deck of a boat) and my great toe is a bit cut and also a scrape on my foot which makes my sandles very uncomfortable to wear (well, at least i'll be leaving the world of sandles soon enough).
At the pier in Ko Phagnan there's a woman who sells sandwiches who has a very distinctive selling call, 'Sandwich Sandwich' in high falsetto followed by 'Cheap Cheap!' before she giggles to herself about how silly she must sound before doing it again and giggling. The self deprecation would be a little bit more convincing if she didn't do it every day i've seen her (and that's a few days). It certainly seems to work because she outsells all the other women combned.