Bus Trip Continued, First Days in Kata Beach

Hello friends!

So this entry is going to be entitled “Jonos Emergency Phuket Root Canal and Things You Should Not do While Drugged Up Afterwards.“ This story began two years ago when I ignored the dentist's advice to seek treatment for my tooth, one that already had the nerve exposed. I was fairly sure that I was invincible, and sure enough, the pain went away.

I learned later that the throbbing was being subdued by a thick lining of puss that covered my nerve.

Fast-forward to a week before departure. I start getting horrible pain once again, but try to convince myself it will go away. False. Beginning with our Lebua rager night, I was unable to sleep unless I liquored myself up to the point of unconscious inebriation. Waking up that morning, I was in the foulest of moods, which continued for the next forty-eight hours.

So imagine this. We are getting on a bus at the commencement of a twenty-four hour trip across Thailand. I am unable to go ten minutes without washing my mouth out with water (which later turned into whiskey), the only remedies that are slightly relieving the stinging and throbbing in my mouth. We drive through a night that I do not get a second of sleep, and arrive at this horrible excuse for a rest stop at six in the morning. We sit on plastic chairs for an hour, then are shuffled onto 'transport vans', where I am literally hanging off the edge of a teetering metal bench attached to a vehicle traveling well over 100kph.

Oh yes, this story gets even better.

Although we have well overpaid for our VIP transportation, we get thrown on this decrepit old city bus that looks like it has been through an earthquake and a few drive-by shootings. As the driver struggles to change gears, we are all thinking 'this bus engine sounds like it is going to just explode'. Oh, fucking right it does. An hour into this trip, we are turning back to shitsville, where we wait another hour for a mystery bus to show up and take us south. Finally, a beautiful coach pulls up and we are told to load on.

There cannot be another catch, can there?

Oh yeah, there are only enough seats for five of the twenty people on the previous bus, so us lucky fifteen get to stand in the aisles for the majority of the remaining seven hours on the road. Steve was lucky enough to make some poor Thai child cry behind him, so the kid vacated his seat, and the four of us spent a few hours rotating between one single seat. Oh yeah, and my tooth? My tooth is worse than ever.

The rest of the trip is marred by the bus picking people up at every single hut along the mountain highway and listening to the broken English of European dudes talking about how incredible they are at life.

So skip ahead to the morning of root canal day. Once again unable to sleep, I get up at six in the morning and start searching for a dentist. The funny thing about Thailand is that the entire country doesn't fucking open until nine. I take a taxi-bus towards Phuket, and find a place called 'Dente Smile' off the side of the highway. Walking into this office is like transporting into the year 2150. Everything in lit up by coloured tooth-shaped florescent lights, there are machines churning up strange liquids, and every surgery room has cameras and an LCD television attached to the patient chair.

I book my appointment for the afternoon, and after milling around Kata Beach for a while (oh yeah, that's where we set up shop the night before), I take this Tuk-Tuk bus back to the office with Steve. After this entire episode, the most boring part is the surgery itself. Imagine the sketchiest scenario (pretty much what you think of when you hear 'Thai Root Canal'), and take the opposite. For 5000 Baht ($150 Canadian), I got my tooth rebuilt, the infection completely removed, and a filling. In other words, I spent $150 for a root canal from the future, rather than paying $3000 for a worse job done by a guy in Toronto that speaks worse English than my dentist in Thailand. Not bad.

Now here is where things got fun.

Feeling a little funky from all the medication they gave me, I was pretty jacked up to do something exciting. My partner in crime is always up for the same. Under Steve's watchful eye, we flagged down some motorcyclists who did not speak a lick of English. We decided that the coolest thing we could possibly do coming out of any doctor would be to play with firearms, so we told these gentlemen to take us to the local shooting range. They did not understand, so standing in the middle of an intersection on a Thai highway, we begin gesturing at them with our hands in the shapes of magnums until they understand.

We fly on these motorcycles across town to the range, where we are greeted by some fantastic gun-advocates who are more than happy to guide us to their selection of rifles, handguns, and high-tech bows. Steve and I decide to live in the shadow of a legend, and decide that if Hunter S. Thompson's weapon of choice was a 12-caliber shotgun, ours would be too. We were brought to the field, and appropriately enough, we took aim at silhouettes of humans (both in the adult and child forms). After firing off a few rounds, we jumped back on our motorcycle chauffeurs, who were more than happy to take us back to our Chooporn Guest House.

We met up with the other two guys, who spent the day lounging on the beach and watched some sports and chilled out for the evening. We headed to a great restaurant on the beach, known for their seafood dishes. We were all exhausted and called it an early night back at the place.

- Jono