I woke up to what I thought was an alarm but was in fact a steady rain hitting our window. Our suite was up on stilts in the jungle with a large porch overlooking the lush island. I never wanted to leave this moment in our comfortable bed in the jungle, receiving a concert from the clouds above.
The jungle rain was a drug for me. It helped me think, it soothed my mind and soul, and it seemed to lower my stress levels. I know some people say that constant rain depresses them, but it has the opposite effect on me. The rain heals me and provides steady background noise for me to calm my thoughts. Ash and I took this opportunity to plan our last week, as there was nowhere else we could go but this breakfast hut on the beach.
Ko Tao would be our last island, and it was supposed to be the best one. The smallest of the three and the farthest from shore, it was truly a slice of earth in the middle of nowhere. We decided to spoil ourselves and book a really nice place for our final destination. The idea of this being the end depressed Ash immensely. She started to break down a little at the thought of only booking one last Airbnb, so we decided to get off the resort and venture into town.
Our trek required going up a very steep hill in the beginning and then down a steep hill right into town. We could have taxied here, but it was two hundred baht; we preferred to just get two big Changs at the 7-Eleven halfway there for one hundred baht and get some exercise.
It didn’t take long for us to discover that these were some of the strong Changs, and we would be drunker sooner than we wanted to be. You see, Chang Beer, like many other things in Thailand, is unregulated. This means that despite the twenty-one-ounce bottle saying it is only 5 percent alcohol, many can be even twice that amount. With beers in hand, we looked for places to eat. We read restaurant signs until we saw the word hacienda in big letters. My god. Mexican food.
More than burgers, BBQ, steaks, or Bojangles’, we missed Mexican food. I was salivating like a hungry dog as I looked over the menu of quesadillas, nachos, tacos, and burritos. The lone white guy sitting at the bar on his MacBook came over to take our order. He then walked back into the kitchen, relayed the message to a woman, and went back to work on his laptop. I assumed he was the owner.
It wasn’t the best Mexican food we’d ever had, but it still hit the spot and gave us the fix we needed. After dinner, Ash decided to get a pedicure, and I left to get a massage at a different establishment. We split off across the street from each other and pampered ourselves. I say pampered because it had been at least three days since our last massage. This was a long stretch for us. Not compared to the twenty-six-year stretch I’d had before that.