The night-train from Bangkok to Surat was tremendous fun. (There wasn’t much call for night-trains where I come from. Ireland is 160 miles top to bottom.) Train staff came by at 10 p.m. to put sheets and pillows on the beds. As I climbed into my top bunk and drew the curtain, I felt like Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot though likely I looked more like Jack Lemmon. At six we were awakened for Nescafe before making the boat transfer to Koh Samui.
I shouldn’t have had the coffee, of course. I’m here to do the famous Spa Samui 7-day clean-me-out. If anyone had asked, I would have had to ‘fess up to a diet of cappucinos, noodles, spicy pork sausages, and left-over Kit-Kats in Bangkok, instead of the prescribed week long preparatory program of lightly-cooked vegetables and liver-flush drink. But they didn’t ask, they simply presented me with a bucket, a colema board, a battery of supplements, and some icky drinks. No food for seven days. Yikes.
On day one, I was hungry—what a rare sensation. And headachey, nauseous, and cranky, too, though reluctant to admit it here since I didn’t bother with the pre-cleanse. I’m suspicious of the fake science here, and feel like a Regency-era lady taking the waters in Bath. I have qualms about paying not to eat in a part of the world where people do it for nothing without a choice. But more than half of the people here are return visitors, and they don’t appear to be nuts, so I shall wait and see.
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