Learning

During my first few days in Thailand I seemed to have lost certain abilities that I usually take for granted. For example, I woke on the second morning, grabbed the first white tube I saw and put its contents on my toothbrush. It was only the smooth, somewhat unctuous texture in my mouth that made me read the wording which said, in English, shaving cream. On the same day I went to use the Skytrain for the first time and, again, instead of reading the very clear instructions in English I ignored them and tried to negotiate getting a ticket without help. For some reason I had given up reading.

I was reminded of this initial experience today, when I joined a snorkelling/kayaking trip in the Ang Thouang National Park off the coast of Samui. Expecting the weather to be unforgivably hot I dressed in a t-shirt and loose long trousers, feeling smug that I would thus not get burnt (which is more likely and more painful now that I'm taking doxycycline as an anti-malarial). Alas, we weren't on a gentle, slow vessel but on a speed boat with the emphasis on speed: our driver spent most of the journey racing his friends so that by the time we arrived all of us, bar the luckiest two people furthest inside, were soaked through. So much for my preparations: the t-shirt stayed on over my swimsuit, but the trousers, well I wasn't planning to squelch around in those all day. I was so nervous about kayaking (the last time I went anywhere near a boat, a small canoe somewhere in France, I tipped it over within seconds) that I concentrated on technique. Blissfully happy that I hadn't capsized it in what was, after all, a Gulf rather than a boating lake, I didn't pay attention to the fact that my t-shirt and swimsuit only covered me up so far and that even factor 30 is not necessarily up to the job here. I attributed the discomfort on the return speedboat journey to the hard edges of the boat's seats. Oh if only.

In the joyous salt- and seat-free environment of my hotel room, I noticed that the pain I felt sitting in the boat hadn't faded. In fact, far from fading it was getting worse. The evidence was on show in the full-length mirror: for the first time since I was about six or seven years old, I had burnt everything that wasn't covered up by swimsuit and t-shirt. I have the tell-tale, and so far from fashionable, marks of a day's sunburning on my backside. Remember those Coppertone ads? Well add thirty years and change the colour to beetroot. For some reason I seem to have given up knowledge and have to keep re-learning. Some of the lessons are more painful than others...