A Thai island, plus a strange celebration parade

Ko Samui, Thailand

We had boarded our ship, the Aegean Odyssey, on Feb 19 and then spent the next day and a half at sea. Our first stop, on Sat, Feb 21, was at a small Thai island off the east coast of Thailand called Ko Samui. One of our crew’s goals (as expressed in an announcement the night before), was to arrive and disembark AHEAD of a giant Princess cruise ship carrying 2,000 passengers that was also arriving that morning! Yikes!

We did beat them, as it turns out. And they were just arriving as we were heading for the island. It’s shallow there, so our ship anchored about 2 miles off shore and we rode a tender (smaller boat) into the docks for ‘exploring on our own.’ You could take a taxi to find a couple nice beaches or a waterfall about 30 minutes from the dock (perhaps ‘not worth the effort’ we heard from a couple guides), and decided that we didn’t want to, so we didn’t. Also, I was in a “let’s stay close to a possible toilet” mode, so we walked around the small beach town for a few minutes and then settled in a local café where JB ordered a coke and I used the facilities. Then we caught the tender back to the ship. We were done with that stop.

Before we left, we checked out the town’s beachfront. The narrow beach near the docks had a fair amount of liter; the water was dirty; the small shops were bursting with tourist goodies, but looked in need of vast maintenance. Kind of typical beach city grunge. But, on the bright side, we observed several very frisky brown crabs skittering across the sand, inspecting objects on the beach in short, jerky bursts and then diving quickly into holes in the sand as we approached.

What we missed, apparently, was a local Chinese New Year’s celebration and small parade. One of the highlights reported back: local people marching along with yard long metal spikes going in one cheek, through their mouths, and out the other cheek. Our guides first thought this was some sort of ‘trick’ done with magnets or some such, until they came upon a cluster of people where a man was first prepping folks for getting the piercing or skewering and then inserting the metal skewers. The participants appeared to be in various forms of trance-like states, and they eventually re-joined the parade, where onlookers stuck paper money onto the ends of the skewers as they passed by – not something you see every day. Equally strange (to us anyway), but also part of the parade was a young woman who was walking along apparently licking her own hand with her tongue; looking closer, they discovered that she was actually repeatedly cutting her tongue with a small knife and allowing the blood to drip onto her chest! Oh, the things you miss when you bail out early!