Where in the World is Garry?

Paradise Lost - Koh Samui, Thailand, January 2006

Transition

Sucked through the Vortex of airline travel, buffeted and bullied like so much flotsam, the journey itself a thin layer between one world and the next, one month in Preston to seven in Asia brought about in the relative blinking of an eye; I spill, dazed and confused, onto the sand in Samui.

Preston and its cold, grey, wet streets are like the last vestiges of a half remembered dream. The bright sunshine, palm tress, dusty roads, scooters, taxis and the teeming life of Koh Samui an all too vivid reminder of my current reality. I don't remember feeling so disorientated on past trips. Normally I wouldn't dwell on this (people cross time zones every day), but the intention of this journey inked in pen and not pencil, the return sometime in the future and not just a few weeks hence, the play set in just three locales and not twenty or so when I last came from the West to the East; all this just leaves me breathless.

As with all things the wanting is so much different to the having. On the drive from the airport I have to pinch myself. So many months, years even, of talking about doing something, here I am, actually doing it and I'm still the same person. No magical personality panacea administered whilst in the fog of jet travel. Of course, instantaneous personal growth was never the expectation but I think what really hit home, hard, was that I no longer have any excuses for not living the life I wrote to Santa and asked for. It was under the tree out of reach until Christmas Day, today is Christmas and I've opened it, there's no going back and only time will tell if by Boxing Day I find out that it wasn't really what I wanted.

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The Beach

Breakfast