The incident with the sex tourist

This is the second of two stories from my journal about events which took place during my time on Koh Pi Pi and which were recorded a week later during my stay in Bangkok.

Friday 22nd October, 1pm
Location: Khao San Road, Bangkok

Now, the thing I've noticed about Sangsom buckets is, when you're into them, you tend to get into trouble much more easily. Well, that's obvious, you might say - you're drunk on eighty percent proof rum. True, but it's much more sinister than, say, your regular common or garden variety of Stella Artois drunkeness. The shadow of it is over you well into the following evening - at least. In my experience, it actually has the effect of altering your personality - as was the case with Claire, I think. We met Claire on Koh Pha-ngan - a lovely girl - but after five or six nights on the bounce on the buckets on Koh Pi Pi (such foolish bravado) all her good qualities seemed to take a backseat, and all the bad ones were somehow magnified. Consequently she fell out with us for reasons that are still a bit of a mystery to Steve and I.

The point of all this is to say that, after two nights out in a row, certain of the more sensitive aspects of my personality had become a little frazzled, certain other attributes - ones that, shall we say, I'm not so proud of - were in the ascendancy. This does have some relevance to the story I'm about to tell you.

The afternoon after the ambush Steve got up before me, having finally shaken off the worst of his all consuming hangover, and went out for breakfast. Not long after he left I dragged my sorry hungover ass out of bed, stuck my head under the shower for a minute, pulled on some clothes and wandered out into the sunshine in search of my own breakfast, which I resolutely believed was going to 'sort me out'.

As fortune would have it, I bumped into Steve in an Italian restaurant close to our guesthouse which was unique in it's practice of playing eposides of Friends back to back all day to an bizarrely sober clientele. We passed a pleasant couple of hours in there, eating pizza and chortling happily at the antics of Joey, Ross and friends. Then we hit the beach. The other beach. The one that we didn't know about. The one I had been on the previous evening during the ill-fated ambush which was two minutes from our guesthouse and not twenty minutes away on the other side of the island. It was our last day on Pi Pi and we had only just found the best beach. So clever.

We swam out past the coral into the open sea and immediately I felt perkier. When we returned to the beach I noticed a very unusual looking fellow lolling about with a bottle of beer in about six inches of water. He was fat, bearded and distinctly purple in colour. Steve noticed him too. You couldn't really miss him. A little while later, Steve and I were sat at a little bar by the beach. Steve was reading his book and I was thoroughly spaced out. Not entirely away with the fairies, out of the corner of my eye something caught my attention. A group of Thai children who had been playing happily on a swing hanging from a nearby tree had been ushered over by the fat, bearded, fifty-something westerner and now appeared to be drawing pictures with some coloured pencils which he had produced from his bag.

For a couple of minutes I observed without comment, then I nudged Steve. "What's going on over there, dude?" I asked.
Steve raised his eyebrows, "Something dodgy," he said, "Kiddy fiddler."
"That's what I thought," I replied, "But it's sad really, to be so cynical and assume the worst. It could be perfectly innocent."
Steve agreed and presently he returned to his book. I continued to observe. After five minutes or so the children's mother appeared. She said something to the children and they followed her off down the beach. Now that the swing was unoccupied and it's small residents departed, I decided to make use of it. I sat down, precariously balancing a can of Sprite, an ice lolly and my first cigarette of the day, inadvertently dislodging a fat-bottomed girl from her sunbathing spot a couple of metres from the swing. Whether she thought I was checking it out, or she was simply embarassed by the size of her ass, I don't know, and it doesn't have any relevance to the story, but you know, it's the details that count. She moved off down the beach.

I swung aimlessly for a minute or two, drinking my Sprite, sucking my ice lolly and smoking my cigarette. Then the children came back, clearly perplexed that a grown up had taken ownership of their swing. However, they seemed particularly friendly and open to strangers, seeming to lack the mistrust and agelessness that you see in the eyes of so many of the Thai street children. They showed me some drawings that they had in their tiny hands - a variety of beach scenes of a very high standard for children of their age. "Did you draw these?" I asked, slightly incredulous.
The fat man called over, "You see, I draw pictures for them and they draw pictures for me." He had an upper class English accent. Had he not been English I probably wouldn't have wandered over to talk to him. But he was, and not only was I interested to see the pictures the children had drawn, I was interested in the fat man himself, and his motives.

I looked at the pictures. Pictures that children draw are always interesting, as indeed were these, but they were wholly unremarkable in terms of the fact that children of their age in a hundred developing and developed countries could have drawn them. In that sense there was nothing unique or interesting about them.
"I think they're interesting," the fat man said, "I like to compare them to the pictures that the children in England draw."
He made this assertion at least three times in the space of about two minutes, and I remember this thought crossing my mind: methinks the fat man doth protest too much. In a second the thought was dismissed - I wanted to give the fat man the benefit of the doubt.
"Are you a teacher?" I asked. A good question, I thought.
"Yes," he responded, but did not elaborate.
Well, we ended up talking generally, as travellers do, about travelling. Where have you been? Where are you going? That sort of thing. The fat man told me he had been to Thailand on fifty separate ocassions - at least three or four times a year for the last fifteen years. Had I been in a slightly different frame of mind at this point, this fact may have set alarm bells ringing. I may have asked, "What attracts you to Thailand?" But as I said, I had already given him the benefit of the doubt - he seemed like a well meaning and charitable fellow.

I eventually lost interest in the conversation, bid the fat man adeiu and promptly returned to our guesthouse. I crashed on my bed, falling almost immediately asleep.

A few hours later, when Steve and I were wandering around looking for somewhere to eat, I brought up the subject of the fat man.
"Oh yes!" Steve exclaimed, "I completely forgot that you talked to the fat dude. What were you talking about?"
I broadly outlined the conversation we had had, and went on to say that whilst at the time I had not come to any conclusion about any sinister motivation on the part of the fat man, I had subsequently re-evaluated the situation and had come to the conclusion that he was, in fact, dodgy as f*ck.

By this point in our conversation we had sat down in a restaurant that we had been attracted to by the fact that there was a huge, very dead swordfish on ice outside. An impressive beast indeed which was suffering the final humiliation of having a tomato stuck squarely on its nose. Whilst we both examined the menu, I recall I outlined the case for the prosecution against the fat man. I went into some detail. We continued to look at our menus. The food looked good. We concluded that we would order some fresh fish. I was talking loudly.

At one point I looked over at the food that the guy at the next table was eating - a rather exotic dish - a pineapple stuffed with some kind of fish and sticky rice. I said to Steve, "Check that out," and returned to my menu. A moment later, Steve's menu was up beside his head, shielding his face from the adjacent table. "Dude," he hissed, a look of horror on his face, "Is that him?!"
Immediately my menu was up and my heart was in my mouth. The scale of the situation I had found myself in quickly dawned on my as I replayed in my head the conversation Steve and I had just been having. Had we been accusing the fat man of being a paedophile while he sat, easily within earshot, at the table next to us eating dinner with his Thai girlfriend? I couldn't bear to look. My menu came down a few inches. I peered over it. Yes, we had. The fat man looked gutted, like maybe he had lost his appetite. So had I.

When faced with an embarrassing predicament of this magnitude, you learn (I learned, pretty much instantaneously) that there really is only one thing that you can do: get the f*ck out of there.
"Dude we've got to leave. I can't stay here now - I'll never be able to eat my dinner!"
Steve concurred, and in a vain attempt to bow out gracefully, said in a loud voice, "Ahem, I don't think I like the look of this place after all."
Meanwhile, I bolted for the door and didn't look back.