We got on the ferry 40 minutes early. We wanted to make sure there was no problem with the bikes on the fairly small boat. It was a good idea. Lots of people showed up and it would have been hard to get prime deck space along the rail to strap the bikes.

While we waited a young Thai woman named Mooey approached us. We knew she was trying to sell us something but we didn't care. She was disarming and had a good smile. She told us about Charm Beach, just 2.5km from the pier. She suddendly had a photo album in our hands. It had pictures of a pretty beach, and bungalows, inside and out. It had a picture of a telephone too.

She really had us. In five minutes we were convinced that Charm Beach was the place to go. We're adept at brushing off touts after Indonesia but she did an excellent job. A few others tried for our business but we quickly dropped all of them.

We arrived at Charm Beach at the same time as a pickup truck full of tourists from the same boat. Mooey's charm worked wonders. Joan was quick to get Mooey's attention before the herd in the pickup knew what was going on, so we got the first choice of bungalows. (Joan: actually, I made us race to Charm Beach because I knew Mooey would probably pick up lots of other people from the boat).

Our bungalow sat between the beach and the restaurant, about 20 yards from each. In front of our bungalow three hammocks hung from huge, shady trees. We stayed four nights and didn't venture very far off this route.

I finished F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" while we stayed there. After awhile I felt like I was one of his rich characters hanging out on the Riviera.

The beach looked nice but was too shallow for swimming. The water didn't get more than knee deep until you waded about 100 yards from shore. There was no surf. All that was OK with us, since the water was warmer than bath water and so not especially refreshing. We were happy just to walk in it, and watch the crabs scuttle away ahead of our feet.

A dog came with the bungalow. It slept all day on our porch and when we took our evening walk down the beach it followed us. The more we ignored it and made fun of it, the more it liked us. These dogs are used to much worse. You can make a friend out of a dog here by not kicking it. Eventually I liked the dog except at night when it got together with the other dogs and ran around barking and fighting and trying to wake all of Fitzgerald's characters.

A couple of Americans from LA got the bungalow next to ours. They came around the world the other way, with stops in Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, India and Nepal. Just about all the tourists we meet in Thailand have been travelling at least six months. The LA couple said they had started with an open-minded, tolerant view of Muslims, but after Egypt, and Pakistan they had a hard time not finding Muslim distasteful. They couldn't find a way to tolerate the women were treated.

Later we met a Swiss couple who said they had tried to understand and find common ground with the Muslims by talking for nearly an hour with a woman at some kind of Muslim information center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The woman they talked to gave a sensible-sounding explanation of the Muslim culture but then handed them a brochure with a title something like "Freedom for women through Islam." The brochure said some horrible things about Western religions, like how women are never respected, only used and cast aside. (The brochure said the multiple-wife system of the Muslim religion was much better because it gave the mistress legal status). That made the Swiss very angry. The Swiss woman told us that she was especially disappointed since she had invested time in trying to understand Muslims. "If that's what you think of me, than to hell with you," she said she thought, after reading the brochure.

We found another internet place. After a dispute over the very strange pricing system (there's a posted offline rate that's cheaper than the online rate, but if you can't get the offline rate a) during the morning, b) if you plan to use a floppy disk, or c) if you plan to cut and paste what you type into an email message later), the manager offered to kick Joan out. We have more trouble in inet places. Other than that we had a relaxing time in Ko Pha Ngan.

Some evenings at Charm Beach's excellent restaurant, we saw the tout Mooey who so easily beguiled us into coming to her place. As on the boat when we met her, she managed to be friendly but detached. We liked her but respected her time. She had worked for Charm Beach for three years, riding the ferry back and forth between Ko Pha Ngan and Ko Samui twice a day, seven dayas a week. When we pressed her on this rigorous work schedule she did admit to getting some days off--ironically in the high season when there are so many tourists they don't need to tout every day.

Memories of Ko Pha Ngan: late night dog fights; the movie Witness on the restaurant TV; thousands of sand castles built by entrenchintg crabs, a glorious hammock, a Crazy Eights card came where we made up all sorts of weird rules based on the pictures of Irish castles and lighthouses on the cards.

We stayed two nights longer than we planned. When the day came to leave we had three hours to kill in the morning so we wandered around the town near the ferry dock. We met another cyclist - a woman from England apparently travelling alone. She said she had ridden around a lot in China. We talked for about 15 minutes about the usual things bike tourists talk about when they meet: where we've been, where we're going, what's this or that country is like, equipment. Later Joan and I both felt like this women was missing a few cogs in her mental gears. We didn't get that idea from anything she said, just the intense way she looked at us and moved around examining our bikes.

The ferry took us to the next island in the chain, Ko Tao. We didn't plan to stay there. We just wanted to transfer to a ferry to Chumpon. The last to Chumpon left at almost the same moment ours arrived. We saw it leave as we waited to get off our boat.

Deboarding was not easy. We had to lift the fully loaded bikes about two or three feet up to the level of the rail then hand them across and down a few feet to someone on the dock. Lots of people pitched in to help though. After us they unloaded a large motorcycle the same way.

No touts attached themselves to us and we felt insulted but relieved. We rode about 1km down a sandy path paved as wide as a sidewalk. We stayed at an especially friendly place. The bungalow had a great view over some big rocks down to the ocean. We watch the long, dynamic sunset as a dive boat maneuvered around to anchor for a night dive in front of us.

The next morning we got the noisy slow boat to Chumpon. It took four hours in light seas. I wonder if the engine's noise gave me any permanent hearing loss.

We met a Swiss couple as the four of us struggled to get our bikes on the boat. We had a nice conversation going before the engines revved-up to full speed. After that we couldn't talk at all.

From the ferry landing we rode 10 easy kilometers to Chumpon where we stopped at the Montana bar. It seemed so unlikely to find such a place, we had to try it. The Swiss came riding by and I ran out on the plank boardwalk in front of the bar and hailed them just like a cowboy. The bar had lots of varnished wood, antler chandeliers, antelope skulls, lanterns, American flags and wagon wheels. It looked a lot like a tourist trap in Jackson Hole. Thais like cowboy stuff.

We stayed in Chumpon at the same guest house the Swiss did so that night we went to the market together for dinner. We found out that he is an engineer and she is a journalist just like us! They had been bike touring for two years with no end in sight. Their trip started in America. They rode from Atlanta to Montreal, took a train to British Columbia, rode down the coast to San Francisco, then across California to Yosemite and Death Valley, the Grand canyon, and Zion, then into Mexico just long enough to renew their visas and back north through San Diego to LA, where they caught a plane to Hawaii. Since then they've ridden much the same route as us Maui, (they also did Hawaii, the big island), NZ, Australia (they rode through the Outback, while we mostly canoed), Bali (they skipped Java and Sumatra), Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand.

We stayed up late that night talking to them.

That night we unwittingly got involved in a budding romance between a couple of Thai teenagers. Our room door and window opened onto the driveway. The window had no glass, just a sceen so we could hear every outside noise. At 3:49am we heard a something. Someone was saying, "On." It sounded exactly like that, "On." He said it with no urgency, no tenderness, no whisper or other expression we could decipher. Joan said he could have auditioned to sing "Number 9" from the Beatles' White Album.

I tried to remember if I knew what "On" meant in Thai. Actually first I tried to ignore it but he kept saying it, "On...On...On..." so we couldn't ignore it. Joan was scared. The last time someone woke us up in the middle of the night in a foreign country it was five surly policemen in Sarawak.

Finally I got out of bed went over to the window and pulled the curtain aside. Just outside I saw a well dressed young Thai man. About 10 feet behind was a larger man with a mustache sitting on a bench smiling. "What is it?" I asked.

He said a long sentence in Thai.

"What?"

He said another long sentence that I thought ended in "Sorry." He walked over to join the other man and I went back to sleep. I had a dream that I heard something outside, got out of bed to see what it was and saw the young man and his friend walking away unhurriedly with our bikes. I tried to yell but my voice didn't work. I saw the Swiss sitting at the bench across the driveway and whispered to them as loud as I could, "He's stealing our bikes!"

In the morning we found the bikes untouched, We told the woman who ran the guest house about the late night "On" incident. It turns out that On is the name of a young woman that lives in the house and works at a shopping center. I wondered if they sometimes rendezvous there and if we had blown the whole thing open by telling the owner, who was her aunt, we think. We saw On walk out but she wouldn't look at us.

Next: Eric gets to play "Scotland the Brave" three times in one day.

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