Ao Nang: Where Nin Threw a Party for the Wrong Month

I spent most of my time at Ao Nang in a hammock on the beach, which is a statement I want to land without apology. I had been moving continuously for nearly nine months. The hammock was correct. I took several massages at the small places along the waterfront, where Thai massage is offered at prices that make the London equivalent feel like a protected art form, and I made Skype calls back to Barnsley with the sea in the background, which produced the specific kind of guilt that feels almost worth it.

On the third of August, our guide Nin began asking for my passport. She had a reason she wouldn’t disclose, a smile she couldn’t quite suppress, and the air of someone managing a plan. That evening, before dinner, she handed it back with a card. The card had been signed by everyone in the group, and it was a birthday card, and it was for me. My birthday is the third of September. Nin had written it down wrong and organised the whole thing a month early, which she discovered only when she checked the passport date. The group had spent the day signing a card for a birthday that wasn’t happening for another thirty days.

She decided to continue with it anyway. The restaurant played birthday music. A cake appeared, which she had made herself, alongside a second cake from the kitchen. Other tables began to clap. I sat there for a moment in the particular variety of British embarrassment that occurs when you are the centre of unsolicited public celebration, and then accepted it with what I hope was grace.

We discovered the following day that it was actually Nin’s birthday. She had said nothing about it, had arranged everything around mine without mentioning her own, and when we found out and organised an impromptu return surprise at another restaurant, she drank one bottle of beer and became the most cheerful person in the room. One bottle of beer. That is either impressive self-knowledge or a very efficient metabolism.

The Andaman coast around Krabi has been recovering from the 2004 tsunami in ways that are visible if you know to look. The warning signs pointing to higher ground, the evacuation routes marked on every beach road, the rebuilt infrastructure that is a fraction newer than the surrounding landscape, the guides who have worked these waters long enough to remember what happened to them on the twenty-sixth of December. The tourism that has returned since is the economy that keeps the reconstruction viable, which puts the tourist in the position of being both the beneficiary of the recovery and one of its financial mechanisms. This is not a comfortable position to think about too carefully, but it is worth thinking about.