Day 36. A big day on the beach. Noot kind of tagged along so I made out with her and we drove all around the area. I discovered Kata Beach is incredibly close. If I've been alone with a trail bike, I could reach it in five minutes. [It is an hour drive to reach it by the inland road. They’ve been building the beach road for twenty years.] Ned is taking it easy but we'll see. That's about it, well, Mamasan gave me a T-shirt. I'm invited to an afternoon party to moral but it's against my principle to drink while the sun shines.
I'm thinking I really don't want to go back [to work]. If I sold out I could be sitting pretty here. What do I need with the bullsh I’ve been putting up with? I could trade it for a whole new brand of bullsh. It's not lost to me that I could, in Thailand, live comfortably off my interest. I leap ahead of my big income competitors back home, for what I propose cannot be done without equity. For every dollar you owe subtract three for every dollar you make, one for interest, one for principle, one for taxes.
[Author's note: I was referring to the fact that people who owe money cannot just pack up and leave, so even people with many times my income could not spend years overseas. They have to stay at work because it normally takes three dollars in earnings to repay one dollar in credit. I had no idea, how years later, this factor became the determinant of most people’s lives.]
Wait, there is something that happened today. That reservoir, Bang Wat. I said earlier you can get around [it]. You can, but be prepared. There is a single motorcycle trail you’ll have to find if you go counterclockwise. There's a 60 foot stretch you slide down the embankment. At the bottom was a plank across a ravine. Make sure you hit it with both wheels. Mercifully, Noot froze so I didn't have to compensate for any weight problems. It was dangerous but hardly fatal. Still, I don’t recommend it.
[Author's note: this description vastly understates the danger of the motorcycle incident. I had turned off the trail onto a footpath that appeared to skirt a few feet into the jungle. The reality is the slope went downward at around 40° to a single 2x12” around 8 feet long thrown across a 40 foot deep gully. If the motorcycle had swerved more than a few inches either direction chances are they would never found our bodies.]
