Koh Samui, Pensacola of the East.

I found that there was a pickup point for the bus to the ferry just around the corner from my hotel, so I walked over to the station and bought a ticket, by my good fortune there was a bus leaving in just ten minutes.

The journey to Samui from Surat Thani is not a short one. First you spend an hour on a bus, then you spend 90 minutes on a giant ferry boat that seems to have been perhaps manufactured in (or rejected by) Greece. On the sundeck is a play area for children, completely with a giant turtle that seems to be humping the passenger area. There is also a copy of the Venus De Milo, her torso garishly painted to give her fire-engine red nipples. No I don't know why.

The views off the boat, however, were fantastic, the sort of surreal South-China-Sea visuals that always make Americans think of spice islands and natives wearing coconuts and living in grass houses.

In fact, Samui is a modern island no larger than St. Martin, but with one main hospital and six international clinics, two seven elevens, and a bustling tourist trade. It has seen more and more development just in the last few years, and has become a hotspot for European tourists. New hotels are springing up all over what used to be a quiet paradise with more coconuts per square meter than most other islands on earth.

When I arrived there, I used my phone to call a local, named Kavi (names have been changed. So there). I'd looked Kavi up via Couchsurfing while I was still in Indonesia and we'd exchanged numbers. He is a Bangkok native, and he had mentioned he would be in Samui this week visiting his family and that he could host someone on the island. I didn't want to intrude, and I wanted to get a feel for him first, so I planned to stay back in Surat Thani that night regardless, but meet up with him on the island and at least get a chance to chat.

Kavi met me at the local 7-11, and turned out to be a lithe Thai with the soft skin of a 20 year old and a scruffy chin. We chatted for a while and he deliberated about what I should do while I was there. I told him I was planning to head back to the mainland that night, and he suggested that maybe we'd get his mom to pick us up and drive us over to the Big Buddha on the North side of the island. Kavi doesn't drive, because he lives in Bangkok, where owning a car would be about as easy as owning a giraffe, and about as useful, and he's never taken the time to learn while he's back visiting his parents here. This made perfect sense to me.

We hopped in his mom's Toyota and she told him (as she doesn't speak any English) that she'd be happy to drive us around the island for the afternoon. This sounded like fun, so I agreed, and off we went.

On the way I found out more about my new friend. Kavi was studying International Relations in school, and hoping to get an internship working with the UN or perhaps UNESCO. He was helping start up an activist group in Bangkok and he spoke half a dozen languages (among them, German, Spanish, Danish, English, and of course Thai). His English was perfect, and I found out he'd lived in Denmark and also visited friends in Europe for several months, which was one of the reasons his language skills were so strong.

He said that his wanderlust made him the black sheep of the family--his parents never traveled. His father was a doctor, and ran his own practice, as well as working with one of the international clinics on the island that are tuned to deal with the typical tourist maladies like fixing a sprained ankle and getting your insurance to cover you from 6,000 miles away. His mother was a nurse, and they both rarely travel further than the distance between Samui and Bangkok--just a day's journey.

Kavi is actually half Chinese. His father is Thai-Chinese, and they--much like the New York Jewish--are put under social pressure to marry other Chinese. However, he was the 16th so there was little pressure on him since his brothers and sisters had already cleared the way with their successes. This was how he could get away with marrying Kavi's mom, who is Thai-Thai.

We walked around the big Buddha on the northeastern corner of the island, and I took a few pictures while we talked about Europe and Asia, and Kavi's plans. He has two years left of university, and he's hoping that an internship will pave the way to a profession in international affairs. He certainly has the language skills for it.

After the Buddha, his mother asked him if I'd like to try coconut ice cream. I said sure, of course, and they asked me if I wanted in a bowl, in bread, or in a cone. It was at this point that I spied the hot dog buns in the little vendor's card, and I said "In bread!" as that was obviously the odd way, and Kavi signaled that it was the way Thai traditionally ate it. Indeed, they gave me what was in essence a small coconut ice cream Sunday (which is delicious) complete with nuts and chocolate syrup (and just a dab of condensed milk) all in a hot dog bun. It was delicious, and as long as you ate it before it melted in the hot Siam sun, it was a very easy and clean way to eat ice cream.

Neither of them had any, and his mother paid, but I resisted my instincts as a poor American to protest either of these things. I'd been warned that the Thai and Vietnamese (and other southern Chinese cultures) take hosting a guest as a very serious thing and--much like those of us who swear by southern hospitality--will make sure that you are not allowed to pay for anything while you're in their charge.

I thanked them and we continued around the island. Eventually, Kavi admitted he too was hungry, so after we had walked out and looked at a few of the better views of pristine beaches and laughing tourists, we went to one of the smaller waterfalls. It was little more than the rocky area of a stream, and reminded me a lot of the area near the old damn and swimming pool near my own home. There was a small eatery nearby, and Kavi ordered for us, a smorgasboard of half a dozen small dishes and piping hot white rice in small plastic bags.

We ate a delicious papaya salad with a heavy kick of Thai chilis and crab legs that you had to pick out as they were only added for the flavour. We also ate a couple of things I couldn't identify, including one that was little fried things that felt like biting into the joint at the top of a chicken bone. They were edible enough though, once you got over the odd "I'm not sure this is food?" reaction that the western mouth had to texture.

Kavi and I talked about the tourist influence on the island, and how strange it was to see the new hotels springing up. I told him about my experiences growing up with frequent visits to Pensacola beach, one of the last places in Florida untouched by much development, which has finally seen, in the last ten years, the inevitable spawning of sky rises and the demolishing of many of the older one story beach hotels and cheaper homes.

When we had finished, they dropped me back at the dock in time to catch the last ferry off the island and back to the mainland, as I'd left my bags at the hotel there anyway. Kavi asked me to come back, and I decided I'd come back and spend Thursday with him on the island, then we'd return to Bangkok together on Friday. He had some recommendations for Saturday that he said I should check out, and on Sunday he wanted me to come work on an all day event with him and his activist group on the outskirts of Bangkok. He said it would bring him some additional prestige for the group if foreigners are seen as involved, and help with recruiting. I'm more than happy to help out, and I'm sure it will be an interesting day.

The last ferry pulled away from the docks at 1800, which left me with some of the most remarkable views of the island as the sun set. The sun seemed to turn the water into a shimmering blade of gold that stretched toward us from the horizon, and the island looked more peaceful somehow, bathed in the golden light.

I could imagine it as it was before the tourists came--before there were full moon parties and bored Scandanavians to fill "Sweden Bar" and laughing Australians and Brits to purchase trinkets in the kitschy tourist craft huts near the overlooks. I thought of Manhattan island, bought for $24 in glass beads, and how now we go only to visit these places we consider rustic or savage instead of settling them, but beads and baubles still change hands for money whose worth is told us by governments who cannot curtail their own spending.

I went below deck, still lost in thought, after we had sailed into nightfall, and the clouds had billowed up before the ship and filled with distant lightning that made them glow and pulse, as if lit from within by the fire of tiny, short-lived suns, or as if a battle raged within them, and the cannonfire of heaven was being brought to bear.