Boonya

When I first started traveling, that summer of ’69, I carried the guidebook Europe on $5 A Day. And I pretty much lived by it and got through a significant amount of southern Europe on that much and sometimes even less. I slept in very cheap pensions in Spain, shared rooms with fellow travelers in Italy, had a cot on the roof of a guesthouse in Athens, and used my sleeping bag for a mattress in my cave in Crete. I ate local food in tiny restaurants where you pointed to what you wanted in the kitchen. I drank local wine, made sandwiches from meat and cheese purchased in local shops, took the bus or hitchhiked from one place to another. It is interesting how things changed once I got to India, though. No one said to go to India to live the bourgeois life you completely rejected at home. But that is what invariably happens when you are now able to live life at less than $1 a day. Now you can have a mattress on your bed, the use of an entire house, fresh fish and vegetables for dinner every night, unlimited hashish as well as a variety of every kind of drug available anywhere in the world. And someone to come in the morning to clean up the mess you made the night before. You may have come that far to seek Nirvana or inner peace or maybe just a place to get away from the madness of your home country. But here you are among people who literally cannot dream of the life you have back home, who have never even seen a movie depicting the life you have left behind and who are grateful for every rupee you bestow on them and so have given up their houses for you and become your servants in their own homes. And we got used to it rather quickly, as I recall, and pretty much took it for granted. We weren’t the first to arrive but we were pretty close to it. The village was already changing, the hippies taking the houses that were becoming more accessible as people saw the way the wind was blowing. You could make more each month on the rental of your house to a group of western hippies than your husband earned in his time on a fishing boat, away from his family. So the villages became ours and we, of course, polluted our wells and gave one another hepatitis. But that is another story. This story is more about the bourgeois life and the pursuit thereof. Because I write this on my iPod that sits on a concrete table alongside the pool in the shade of a pink-flowering tree at Boonya Resort in Koh Chang, Thailand. My hippie days, the things I’ve learned traveling, serve me well to this day. Ruth and I walked through the grounds of a five-star hotel that borders the beach last night and I said, “You couldn’t pay me to stay here.” Well, maybe if it was to write about the place for some travel magazine. Maybe then I would consent. If I were on assignment, as it were. But to live there? No. Here at Boonya we have the most deluxe accommodation in the place and it’s as simple as can be, with a large bed, a small TV and air conditioning. The bathroom is not worth a photograph for your Facebook page. But there is a lovely pool and the breakfasts are “western” and plentiful and the other guests are friendly and the owner delightful and very interesting. I will get back to that later but what I’m working on here is that notion of a fairly bourgeois life at a very low cost if that is what one is looking for. If I were alone here I could probably have a room that would suit my needs at half of what Ruth and I are paying and I could make my own breakfasts and lunches and dine out every night and probably get by on $25 a day. The ocean, the pool, a breeze at night, the palms, fresh fish, a pizza, long beaches for walking, someone to make the bed and bring fresh towels, clean air, sun, a massage every few days, fresh cut pineapple, a hike up a mountain, a boat ride to another island, pasta, a swim in the ocean, the sunset over the beach. $25 a day. Yeah, Social Security will cover that.