So, in hindsight, the combo platter of ribs and chicken might have been a bit too ballsy. I suppose you live and you … Well, this is the third or fourth time I have gotten sick over consuming something stupid, so I suppose I’ll just focus on the living part. I spent the entire night violently throwing up. Just another night in Thailand. Every time I went to sleep, there was about a fifty-fifty chance I would wake up and have to empty my stomach.
Our breakfast on the porch was a somber one as we said good-bye to Ned and Heather. We had loved having them as neighbors and friends, and this place wasn’t going to feel the same without them. Ash and Heather had a particularly strong connection, and I feel like Heather was Ash’s spirit animal and vice versa. To put some context to this, Heather was a sweet Southern woman who just happened to have a thick British accent. Ned and I bonded over our business minds and political interests. We were sure to be in touch as soon as we got back to the States.
As we sat and tried to determine what to do today, we settled on Aow Leuk again. It was going to be hard to beat, and with only two days left, we wanted to spend them somewhere we knew was amazing. We hit up our taxi brother Pong and rode over to Aow Leuk. He told us he would be back at five when the beach closed and to just pay him for both rides then.
We threw on our gear and floated into the land of scales. For some reason, Ash and I were not on the same page, and we kept bumping into each other as we treaded water. The last thing you wanted to do when looking at huge fish and fearing sharks was bump into someone unexpectedly. We both became irritated quickly, and Ash finally headed in after cursing me out in bubbles.
We had been struggling a lot lately as we prepared to go home. I think we were both just so scared to take on life after this journey that we were taking it out on each other. I had not planned to even make it this far. Not that I thought I was going to die; I just didn’t have time to think this far ahead with so much planning to do for cities only days away. Like I said, when we’d discovered that our final Airbnb was booked and our planning was over, it had Ash pretty rattled. She always coped with leaving a city by looking forward to the next one. It was easy to leave Berlin when Prague was next. Saying good-bye to Croatia was hard, but we had Italy and Greece right around the corner. Now we had come to the realization that we weren’t just leaving Thailand—we were leaving our journey.
Around 5:00 p.m. it looked like it was going to start to rain, and Pong was waiting patiently for us outside the beach. He beat the rain on the way home and stopped so we could grab pizza.
When we got home, I took a shower. And it was when I was in the shower that I noticed the apartment felt hot.
“Hey, Ash, what is the temp set to?” I yelled through the water, quickly spitting it out so I didn’t get sick again.
She responded with the five worst words since the woman at the ferry kiosk in Croatia said, “The tickets are sold out.”
“Our air conditioning is broken.”
We called Alan and Heidi, and they told us they would have a guy come first thing in the morning. Back to the days of fans and open windows with screens. We didn’t have AC in Denver, either, but it wasn’t ninety-five degrees and humid in Denver. Tonight we would be sleeping like the locals.