Last February my friend Linda and I went vacationing to Phuket. We were both stressed – she had been working too hard at her office, and I survived a bad break-up from my then boyfriend. We were looking for partying dusk till dawn, and sleeping in all of our mornings, and then having some mind-freeing experiences – in a word, something along the lines of the ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ book and the movie that had just come out by then.
After five or so days of scuba diving, bungee jumping and even parachute courses we felt like running out of ideas. But the most extraordinary thing that could come to our minds, slightly twisted by the heat, was stripping down at a no clothes beach, if we were to find something like that in the proximity.
We grabbed at the iPads and tried googling it, but the only thing we found out for sure about naturism in Thailand was that there was no naturism in Thailand as such. No clothes beaches were damn hard to find, none of them were listed in the area where our hotel was, and there were reported cases of arrests for nudism practicing.
I would have given up the idea on the spot, but Linda was not the one to stop in her tracks halfway. We were as good as arrested ever since she got her heart warmed up to the thought of getting exposed on a public beach – exposed to the sunrays, that is! We walked out on the beach earlier than usual that day. Linda decided to do it cold turkey style – before I could gasp, she was out of her pants, and then her bikini top, exactly in this succession. She commented that it was done to avoid the risk of fearing to step out of her comfort zone. I don’t know how she could keep the presence of mind to the extent of quoting her shrink; as for me, I was looking around in building panic and half expecting a local police officer to step from behind the nearest palm tree framing the beach and manacle both of us, me being a collateral and guilty by association.
Despite my dreariest apprehensions, people around us did not jump up to…. read more