M: Well, it’s been a week now and we’ve been rinsing our clothes every chance we get, but they haven’t had a good washing yet. It’s pretty hot here. We’ve been walking up and down big rainforest hills with backpacks on. One sweats when one moves here.

It was time for us to do our laundry.

Lonely Beach is tiny, like I said. Most rooms here cost less than 15$ a night. It’s filled with young, beautiful Swedes who got lucky in the genetic pool. Every restaurant is really a bar that just happens to serve a ham and cheese baguette and some very plain Thai food. People come here to meet beautiful Swedes and sleep in creepy cabanas with no windows.

They don’t come here to have their laundry done by a fancy Thai laundry-doer.

So…today was laundry day.

We don’t have a stopper in the treehouse sink, so John came up with the idea to fill up a plastic bag with hot water from the shower and shake it all about. He stood in the shower naked shaking up our dirty clothes (really quite a sight), then rinsing them and I blistered up my fingers wringing them out. Wringing out is a much harder job than you might expect.

We set out our clothes all along the treehouse and waited for them to dry. We realized however that we had washed every article of clothing that we had. There was nothing left to wear but our baby soups. Good thing we’re at a beach.

M: So, since we’re at a lovely beach and there happens to be a smidge of cloud cover, I wanted to take the time to write a little more about Pattaya Beach.

When we were in Bangkok, the street we stayed on was a popular destination for the sex trade. It was definitely obvious and sometimes overwhelming depending on which soi (or tiny side street off the main street) we went down, but it was nothing compared to Pattaya.

We knew Pattaya was a “party beach” but didn’t realize till we were there just how ridiculous it really was. I can count on my two hands the number of western women I saw there besides myself. The rest of the town (its huge though, really a city) is filled with bars and restaurants, mostly bars. And these bars are FILLED with thai prostitutes. Some bars had 20 or 30 girls hanging out. The other guests? Mostly men, mostly older - like 60 or so, all white, all chunky. There were some younger men too, but not many.

Pattaya itself is just ugly. Every single street, every single soi, every single block is chock full of bars with a pink neon light - the calling sign of a sex bar.

The beach is about 6 feet wide but a million feet long, nothing like where we are now. It is not a pretty beach. The thai there were unfriendly, I don’t blame them, there must be something to watching your women get eaten by white men. It’s loud loud LOUD with old 80’s pop tunes (really nothing wrong with that, a little Ice Ice Baby can go a long way).

When John and I went out together it was fun to watch him walk first (there aren’t sidewalks, you have to walk in the streets and dodge traffic) and watch the hookers see him first, proposition him, then see me. They were always really nice, smiling at me embarassingly when they saw me.

I got past the moral and ethical judginess of it all. It seems like a lot of these older men were honestly looking for companionship, iit appeared common to “Pretty Woman” a lot of these girls and keep them for a few weeks as a girlfriend. Also interestingly, the older men definitely picked the less hot of the ladies, while the young men picked the really sexy ones. But we saw the men taking the ladies to dinner, they take them on trips, shopping, the whole shebang (no pun intended).

But it definitely wasn’t for us, this lovely island of Koh Chang where we are now (chang meaning elephant in Thai) is so lovely, it really is paradise, and we’re in this sleepy little backpacker town called Lonely Beach, there are about 10 restaurants, a couple of shops, a few internet cafes, sandy roads and a big beautiful beach that makes me blink my eyes to make sure I’m seeing it correctly.

And the treehouse is ridiculous, two little rooms with a thatched roof. One with a big bed, mosquito netting, a fan, and another with a western toilet (yay!) and a shower. Showering under nothing but a thatched roof is really invigorating.

I’ll write more about Lonely Beach soon, but right now? The sun’s coming out.