Put More Jungle in the Jungle

29 th

Today I had breakfast and coffee wit Solep and Dehwehwim, the Burmese workers who are also living at Sanom Beach. It was really nice, and delicious. The sauce was tomato, onion, oil… over rice. Then there were these big hunks of beef (think beef jerky) that were soaked in oil and spices to sort of rehydrate, and you pulled strips of the meat off the block with your teeth. I taught Solep some phrases in English. I spontaneously wrote a good poem. In town, I wrote some stuff for Udall, worked more on poems and went around with photos for a while. I met up with John and talked over lunch about what it is like to retire in Thailand. I snorkled off Sanom beach again (hoping to see the small shark) but it was very murky conditions because of the quite drastic tides from the nearly full moon so I didn’t see much of anything. I lay down on the beach to write, my first intentional exposure to the sun on the trip and suddenly I feel rain falling on me. I look up and there are no rain clouds, just whispy white smudges, but it keeps raining. Fine! I shout to the sky. I see, no sunbathing! And just then I look out at the water and a strange fruit is floating towards me in the surf. It’s a kind of lumpy rainbow pineapple. When I pick it up it looks very much like a pineapple, with brown wilting leaves at the top, but big fat sections that stick out like molars. The ends of the sections are yellow with brown dots, the middle parts are green and inside the crevices is bright red. The meat, where the skin was torn seemed papery and white like a… honey comb or sugar cane. The elements apparently say no sunbathing, but pineapple is O.K.

I went out for dinner and found a new place that is quite lovely. It just re-opened a few days ago. It is a bar/restaurant on the beach, made and decorated with driftwood and other beach found items. There are Pringal cans with lights in them along the celing, tree roots made to lanterns, walls made of glass bottles and cement (the nozzles sticking out). Everything it seems is made out of stumps, or drift wood, decoared, and covered with pillows. There are bottle caps mosaics on the pillars. The food is really really delicious (the best I’ve had on lipe) and cheap (before I got a discount), the guys who work there are friendly and kind. I interviewed one with long decorated dreadlocks, named Mut (moot), about the bar. It was a nice interview because it was (a. in english) and b. I got a few different answers that normal. For instance, he said

“I think that if everyone took… if you have your home and you take care in front your home, beside your home, that is enough. If you are thinking you want to help everything in the island, too much, because you cannot do by yourself alone. But if you have one home, your home, make nicer, make something clean, make a small tree, coconut tree, or something, you can do… I have some land too in the jungle and it grow up everytime when I go to the jungle. I put more tree like the lemon, the coconut, I grow chilis, pumpkin…put more jungle in the jungle…if everybody do, Lipe will be beautiful.”