Word: beachings
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Back home she was a sorority sister, a pre-med student. She dated a guy named Dave who still sends her e-mail about his first year at law school. To Tamara, 23, now stretched out on a beach on Ko Pha-Ngan island, those missives read like what they are: archival records of what has become, for her, a lost civilization. Torts. Civil procedure. What is he talking about? Dave would hardly recognize her now, with her navel ring, Balinese warrior tattoos and baggy Thai fisherman's pants. Tamara, this retiring, freckled brunette with a narrow body and tiny...
...time Alex Garland used it as the setting for his 1997 novel about young travelers in Thailand searching for the garden of Eden, Ko Pha-Ngan was already a legend on the Asian traveling circuit. Garland's The Beach has taken on a talismanic quality here: waterlogged paperbacks pass from bungalow to bungalow. It is the founding myth of this place: you come looking for paradise...
...Ecstasy, a drug that is illegal in the U.S. but quite plentiful on Ko Pha-Ngan, and got lost in the orgiastic besotment of one of Ko Pha-Ngan's legendary Full Moon parties, where trance music blares for days and thousands of foreigners lose it on Hat Rin beach. While she was dancing with friends she had met on the boat trip over and the new friends she was making by the second, she felt bathed in a sense of community and shared purpose that surpassed anything she had felt back at the sorority. What they represented, these kids...
...what is she? "Just this girl on a beach, trying to have a good time. And that's enough here...
...Thai entrepreneurs who owned the prime Ko Pha-Ngan waterfront were, at one point, the black sheep of their respective clans. Beaches were useless: the prime coconut-farming plots were inland. But with the arrival of the sand-loving farangs, a whole new economy emerged. Families like the Thuaycharoens, known locally as the Khaos, grew wealthy building bungalow complexes and beach bars. Mustachioed Mr. Khao is now governor of the whole province. Bespectacled Mrs. Khao manages their real estate empire from behind the counter of her two-aisle grocery store. The kids who buy rolling papers and beer from...