I could have eaten a farmer’s arse coming through a ditch. A baby’s arm through a wicker chair. I was that hungry.
Today is Day Eight of my seven-day fast. Mostly, I felt dreadful, while others glowed like Christmas lights. The advertised seven days was a marketing lie told to lure in clueless softies like me. The day before, I was only allowed fruit and salads, which don’t really count as food. Today, though I’m supposed to be finished, I’m still only allowed fruit and salad, and had a special bonus colema in the morning. So that counts as nine days of suffering by my reckoning. There’s a German lunatic here on Day Twenty.
And the regimen! So much for sitting on a beach contemplating a changed life.
- 07.00: Cleanse drink (disgusting: pineapple-flavored frogspawn)
07.30: 1 hour meditation
08.30: 6 herbal pills (disgusting)
08.45: 1.5 hour yoga
10.15: (Late for) cleanse drink (still disgusting)
10:15: 1 hour colema (unspeakable)
11.30: 6 herbal pills
13.00: Cleanse drink and clear vegetable broth
14.30: 6 herbal pills
16:00: Cleanse drink
16.30: 1 hour colema (unspeakable)
17.30: 6 herbal pills
17.30: 1 hour chi gung
19:00: Cleanse drink and coconut juice
20.30: 6 herbal pills
21:00: Last pills
22:00: Bed
As for the colemas, which are eliciting reader interest, Spa Samui is the Disneyworld of dysentry. Experience the thrill of cholera in a controlled, safe environment. Buzz, the manager/instructor, is worldweary as only someone who has trained 4,000 strangers to administer a tube up the butt connected to 16 gallons of weak coffee solution can be. He struts about, the (Aussie) Jeff Goldblum of this movie.
‘Here’s yer cappucino,’ he says, pointing at the bucket, ‘I’m off to have a beer and a pizza. Heh, heh. Just kidding.’
It’s very low-tech. We got a plastic catering bucket, a tube, a bulldog clip, and our ‘own personal colema tip’, which connects to the tube. There’s a white plastic board that you balance between the toilet seat and a plastic stool. Lie down. Grease up. Away you go.
I had a pet gecko that stared at me throughout each operation, while I swore at him for not eating the mosquitos. One particularly bleak morning he ran up the wall, all cocky-like, and fell off and landed on his back on the floor. He lay still for a while, then slowly crawled back up and stared balefully for the rest of the time. I think he blamed me.
A large coconut had caused my bathroom ceiling to cave in slightly, so that when the rains started in the afternoons I was pelted with wet leaves. I began to contemplate what an ignominious end it would be to be brained by a coconut, indoors, while pinned to a colema board on Koh Samui. A fitting end for a reluctant New Ager.
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