place like this existed in Texas it would be called Addison.

In Bangkok, the Thai equivalent is Khoa San Road. But on Khoa San Road beer is only 3 bits and rooms are only 5 bucks and people bathe every third day or so and tie-died is still in so of course it is more “exotic”. The best spot along this strip is the Lucky Bar; partly because of the Pad Thai and partly because the beer is actually cold but mostly because of the manager. We ended up calling the place “Jimmy Wah’s”. He didn’t wear a shiny green suit but the rest of the act was perfect. (Rent “Good Morning Vietnam” - see Thai scenery and meet Jimmy Wah).

Down on Koh Tao, off  the east coast of Thailand, myself and 2 new friends (Chris from North Carolina and Phil from Scotland) invented a new sport. Watch for it on ESPN. It’s called Xtreme Mopedding. It’s amazing and scary as hell what you can do on a 10 horsepower scooter! Straight up radically vertical dirt roads followed by controlled freefalls down the other side. Whew! I shudder, now, to think of the risks we were taking at 15 miles per hour. A beer at a small bar among the palm trees prepared me for the next heat of Xtreme Mopedding but not for the dead body on the beach. One doesn’t run across human remains on the beach all that often. Not even in Thailand.

When Phil walked up and asked me if I knew much about human anatomy and I said “A little”, I thought I was being called upon to settle a bet of some sort. I figured all those hours of staring at my own X-rays would finally be of some practical use. As I approached Chris and Phil, they held up a bamboo shaft that had dangling from it a pelvis, a femur, a spine and about 2 square feet of pasty white flesh holding it all together. We felt pretty confident this wasn’t a bald water buffalo that had tried swimming from Cambodia. The local response would seem to have been either “Do not worry about it. Something has already been done or said” or “Do not say or do anything because it is not something to worry about”. So we kind of figured “When in Thailand, do as the Thais do”. We let the matter lie, so to speak.