Only sixteen more hours to go.
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This is where I spent the last few days of my trip to Cambodia - on the sandy shores of Koh Rong and Otres Beach. The sparkling clear water gives you the inescapable feeling that God got stoned one afternoon and decided to just start Photoshopping shit. A stroll along the beach exfoliates better than the pumice-wielding hands of a thousand old Asian ladies. There are dune buggies and fireshows and seafood BBQs and cabana massages. There are happy pizzas, happy shakes, happy brownies, and happy enemas (if you know whom to ask). It is the perfect place to 'relax', 'chill out', 'take a break', or 'unwind'. It is an environment in which, as David Foster Wallace once noted, you are practically obligated to have a wonderful time.
I had plenty of time to consider this as I lay curled in the fetal position, searching for the elusive center of my papasan chair and trying not to vomit at the sight of another hairy old European wolfing down his bangers n' mash.
We travel to places such as these for one motive, and one motive alone - the pursuit of pleasure. And there is a large and very diligent team of researchers who work tirelessly to discover new pleasures we haven't even considered yet, but will happily pay money to experience (provided the brochure is colorful and we don't have to wake up too early). As human beings we teem with desires, many of which go unmet on a daily basis. So it's perfectly understandable that we indulge the living hell out of ourselves while on vacation - after all, we deserve it. But what happens when paradise can no longer offer us pleasure?
The Fish
It is about 10:00 pm, and I'm starting to feel a bit queasy. Nevertheless, I convince my Irish friend to join me for seafood barbecue a few hundred meters down the beach. I am a recent convert to seafood, which makes me feel more cosmopolitan and cultured. So every opportunity for fresh fish must be seized immediately, like the handbag of an unsuspecting tourist on the streets of Saigon. It proves my street cred.
We settle on the 'Malin', which I assume is supposed to mean 'Marlin'. I am excited to eat a fish that is also the mascot of a professional American baseball team. In any case, the fish sets in motion a Rube Goldberg series of events that begins with mild hallucinations, proceeds to severe nausea, and culminates with me lying on a bench with my hands folded across my abdomen, staring sadly into the night sky like Ferris Bueller's buzz-killing best friend. After that it all went blank until...
The House Music
House music is , objectively, the shittiest music ever made by human beings. I use 'house' as a general term to encompass trance, dub, dubstep, industrial, art-tec, and every other form of shitty music which involves more switchboards than instruments. No other form of music has ever managed to be so vacuous, repetitive, and singularly mind-numbing than house. Ever asked a Hooter's waitress to explain her thoughts on healthcare reform? That is house music, with more imaginative vocals.
From midnight until 6:00am, the house music blared on. It blared and blared, each indescribably awful song blending seamlessly into the next. It blared like a dying mule with its hooves attached to bass drums, occasionally offering a moment of blissful silence before another crescendo of pointless noise. I tried to soothe my rage with fantasies of supplying all those dancing idiots with heaps of brown acid.
The Day After
Here is a brief list of the minor catastrophes that occurred the next day:
1) All the buses back to Vietnam were booked solid.
2) Our beachfront bungalow kicked us out.
3) My attempt to eat half a baguette resulted in some truly spectacular projectile vomiting all over the neatly trimmed shrubbery of a very nice German couple. This is the PG-13 version of the story. The unabridged version would ensure that nobody would ever invite me to their house parties again.
What I Learned
Before 'The Fish', I had enjoyed a very pleasant and traditional backpacker's holiday. To borrow PADI's slogan - I went places, met people, and did things. All of this in the name of pleasure; not necessarily in a greedy sense, but perhaps opportunistic. How often does one have the chance to play miniature golf on a course that looks like Angkor Wat?
Once I was sick, though, none of that mattered much anymore. Simply put, I had a desire for which there was no immediately available pleasure-remedy. This is an odd phenomenon in paradise. Happiness is always available, for a price (cheaper if you sign up with a group of four). In a land of hedonism, I was an unwilling ascetic.
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All I really wanted was to lay my head in her lap, to hear her softly say that everything will be alright, and to complain about the sand in my trunks.
But paradise can't offer that.
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