Passionfruitcowgirl

Sting of dread jellyfish, creep of long-fingered yoni botherers, plague of Jedi gigolos and dangerous doses of frog venom…. becoming a whole woman is one magical adventure after another on the rosy quartz isle of Koh Phangan, deep in the Sea of Siam.

*This is a fairystory, and it is not bite-sized. It is a story meant for lingering upon, and reading over slowly, as the light turns into dusk, and you are getting all soft and sleepy, and you find its really time to pour yourself into a … Once Upon a Time sort of vibe….

… and for Chapter Two, please FOLLOW ME...

 

Silvery trails left by yeasty genitals glitter on yoga mats all over the pretty isle of Koh Phangan as dawnlight breaks in orgasmic waves. But none of this tantric femme power stuff is working for me.

Which is why I was brought here in the first place.

My female empowerment freakwencies have been noticeably off of late. Which is how I got the call, in the dead of a Bali night, to get my ass over to Koh Phangan… toute de suite.

It was Eric le Frog – a strange and dark manifestation of peculiar mythical forces reserved for the making of Good Women on Earth who summoned me. I was in for rude and crusty medicine.

It costs $2000 to kill a man on the idyllic little island of Koh Phangan, in the lovely Sea of Siam. Slightly less for a woman. As I am to discover.

But death – metamorphic – if that is what you require, is sometimes provided for free.

It was one of the first things I was told by my host, a portly, grey-toothed Parisian ex-SCUBA diver turned cheap whiskey glutton, conceited bigot and raging insomniac. Eric le frog, was rather yellow-around-the gills with nicotine, red-eyed from mean-thinking and going toady with booze. He had invited me to his Thailand lily pad for a holiday. To uplift both our spirits.

He is a good frog, mostly. With a fierce protective streak. He is the physical manifestation of all that can be achieved by poisoning oneself on the toxic secretions of the giant Amazonian leaf frog, in a ceremony known as Kambo (or Sapo)- without the vomiting and the scars. He has a loathing of infidelity (due to his vast experience in such matters) and a dread of anything but croissant and the lowest grade of instant coffee before 2pm. He has gone ferociously nocturnal since he gave up diving to the bottom of the world pond, where rest the fallen golden balls of every princess in fairyland.

He offers the dark, ancient frog medicine of deep dives into murky waters, soul retrieval and toad kissing with a grumpy, warty, poisonous flair these days. His love punches more at the guts than it sucks at the gusset. Like his totem, the poisonous Giant Macifrog,  he offers the rare, fairy craft of brutal medicine which he delivers by artfully bullying, abusing, shoving and poking the few chicks who ever find him on their way to becoming women, wild and whole.

Oui, Le Frog is a dread oracle of rites that make real women. And he is hurting from the absence of fare hearts, good souls and Skywalkers in Fairyland, which is lately overcome with weasels, whores and wankers.

 

Even the Thai authorities are sick of what’s been going on with spiritual tourism. They recently sighed and told the South China Morning Post that if women didn’t want to be groped, molested, licked and drooled over, then perhaps they could just keep their tops and panties on?

There is quite a lot to say in Thai Buddhism, as it happens, about the spiritual consequences of being a brazen hussy in this lifetime, and the rather bleak afterlife dividends of messing about with other people’s partners.

So… nevertheless, and because of all this, Eric le frog is all bellyache and acid as he does his special work as a sort of Yoda – redeemer of Jedi royalty, and vanquisher of stupid horny imposters… with which his island home is horribly afflicted.

He is a marvellous conversationalist, because he knows everything: from the secret thoughts of Great White Sharks, to the actual facts of the creation of life on Earth. He is especially lucid while sharing from the platter of existential miseries he feasts upon during the collapse of his liver, his youth, his scuba diver street cred and biodiversity on Earth. It’s a French thing. They do so tend to think their misery is a dish best rubbed in as many faces as possible.

Eric has become alarmingly discoloured and buxom since I last saw him on a remote island in the Indonesian archipelago seven years ago (when, I belatedly recall, he was in a similar state of gloom and booze-indulged smuggery). He has perfected since then several more of the less endearing French traits.

He is a dreadful host; rude, late-rising, mostly drunk or angry, and opinionated. He encourages a procession of obnoxious young yoga gigolos to come by at all hours, to indulge in magical fairyland rites and flash their anuses and perineums about as they dangle off the walls and furniture. But he is also charming, in a way that only a scientific-minded person like me, with a precise eye for the teeniest tiny glimmers of hope and goodness in others, can likely appreciate.

Besides, I am a jaded Jedi princess come to retrieve the silver ball of my soul from a rather dark existential canyon at the bottom of the deepest deep, and scuba diving frogs with deadly powers of femme initiation are very hard to come by.

There are five main choices for recovery of a woman’s mojo and initiation into the … ‘wombspace?’... of Female Empowerment on Koh Phangan – which is all the craze of late.

 

• 1. Agama Yoga 
  

  You can step into the glowing-white orifice of Agama Yoga and its various offspring, where Tantra, sacred orgasm, exchange of lusty fluids and the occasional ‘initiation’ by the flabby self-appointed Master guru, Swami Vivekananda Saraswati, have created a very large juggernaut indeed.

 

The swami is a toad of quite a different sort: huge, drape-joweled, imperious, moomoo-clad in white and orange bedsheets, he claims ‘brilliance’ and extensive mystical powers over the third eye and genitals, is accused of ‘initiating’ countless numbers of neophytes with his sacred member, and makes a rather massive profit as well.

Agama is taking a rather fierce kick to the root chakra right now for sex abuse, predatory conduct, tax evasion and other stuff… which is hardly really very unusual out here in yogaland. And the writer who is outing him, anyway, is quite the devious pot-stirrer him/her self.. as it happens.

Anyway, Agama, through the ancient and misappropriated wisdom of Tantra, and good old fornication, with some ritual broohaha! thrown in, promises to elevate you above lesser mortals and give you that ‘I am an initiated sex goddess cum empowered woman’ sort of irritating glow.

Your ’empowerment’ thus rests heavily on the popularity of your vagina and giblets, which could be considered not really that much of a giant leap really, for surely … oh.. well… whatever…

 

• 2. Unconditional love puddles   Opportunities to explore the wilderness of ‘open relationship’, sex beyond safe and sensible boundaries of ordinary care and respect, and break the petrifying shackles of dread monogamy are a sure-fire way for a woman to contact her divine feminine essence – obviously. 

A woman’s power rests in her knickers and her gynaecology. And learning how to be a ‘sacred sex goddess’ instead of a silly hussy who is going to regret it later – based on gross misinterpretations of the role of Mary Magdalene in the life and work (and not just at the end of the penis) of Jesus – is the whole thrust of female empowerment in 21st Century gringo yoga. Great!

The island literally heaves and groans with seedy, hairy men, and scary, lecherous women eagerly competing to assist freshofftheboat cash dollar carrying female power-seekers to eye-gaze meaningfully, hump, thrust and generally defile themselves on the well-polished cocks and clits of its ‘intimacy workers’.

Option 2 is, basically, a dog’s breakfast at which you will be the main dish, as well as the top bitch – for about a week, until the next unsullied thighs turn up and you are cast aside to relish the deeper wisdoms of dabbling in ‘unconditional love’, which include feeling used, abused, defiled, betrayed, and all spectrums of jealousy, self loathing and shame. That’s female empowerment for ya!

 

• 3. Orgy and Initiation by Idiots Parading as Tantric Jedi Sex Warriors and Mystic Wizards, using the Magic Transformation Wand of the Cock to empower women.   Seriously! I just have nothing more to add about this.

 

• 4. Yoni massage and stuff like that... whatever!

 

• 5. The Sacred, Terrifying Woman-Making Rites of the Poisonous Cult of Eric Le Frog.  This path of initiation is invitation only. There is no money on Earth that could pay for what he provides, but it is advisable to pick up something at Duty Free. It will be deeply unpleasant, desperate and messy – with no sex, chocolate, eye gazing or certificate provided.

I chose path 5, because I have done path 1 and wouldn’t touch paths 2 – 4, even with plastic gloves and a bucket of KY.

We struck a wonky balance on the strange and lovely isle of Ko Phangan, did Eric and I. I longed to just have a lovely time resting, cooking, sharing stories and tapas. He was mean and nasty in ways that were so bad they were actually funny, and was constantly not dying despite daily acts of overtly suicidal recklessness involving alcohol, motorbikes, provoking scorpions and leaving sharp knives where I could find them.

After 3 or 4 days of this what remained of the pleasing, patient young woman in me ran about bewildered, in a flurry of confusion and father wounds, weeping and fretting and crying out on Skype for help.

This, I saw later, was the true genius of Eric le Frog. He was playing the role of dark demon, on the side of good. He was the fierce initiating force that had dedicated itself to my transformation by providing the exact conditions required for me to fall apart completely, and then find the force within me. Or was he?

Le frog settled gleefully into his role as Jaba the Yoda; puffing himself up to grotesque dimensions, gloating en francais and strutting his gross amphibiousness in outrageous displays of machismo and narcissistic abuse. While I withered like a ripening passionfruit, he developed quite a radioactive sort of glow.

“It costs 50,000 Baht to kill a man on Koh Phangan,” he reminded me, glaring with milky eyes through his swollen froggy bodysuit. “And you!… have absolutely zero idea of how to conduct yourself on this island, or anywhere in the world!!!” he would tell me. “Zero! Eeet is incredible!”

“You talk too much! Dont you realising? Nobody understands nothing you say. Nothing!” he would encourage. “Aarrrgh!”

But still, the wise and dreadful frog, retriever of lady’s lost souls, and larvae-form of handsome princes, helped me.

“Eet cost 50,000 baht to have somebody keeelled here,” he told me several times. “And the whole planet it doomed! DOOMED! And nobody gives a fuck!” he muttered crankily, stabbing out his cigarette and scratching his balls and staring at me in a yellow-gilled, sickish sort of way.

Eric seemed to think it was important: to my fairystory on this island of frank magic… to know the basics of the Thai economy. To know the limits of Thai hospitality. To know that great white sharks are like puppies, and have been horribly mistreated. To know that almost all people are idiots, that Jedi are CELIBATE! and that the best thing for life on Earth is a rapid end to humanity.

I felt safe with him because of this careful guidance he sometimes gave me. I felt confident that when dread disaster did unfold (other than that which he was causing himself) he would see it coming, and know exactly what to do.

I put his gloomy, abusive, gluttonous tendencies down to a general state of bitterness over the staggering and tragic destruction of reef, ocean wilderness and every type of fish that he has witnessed in over 9000 dives across the notasblueasitoncewas planet these last 3 decades. And to his deep ancestral commitment to irritate others, which is part of French pride, he tells me, with a long, polished look of withering disdain.

A lifetime as a diver had given Eric frontline exposure to one of the greatest travesties of human recklessness and stupidity in the history of the world. He had exclusive access to the deep green room for the horror show we have caused to the ocean and her wonders, watching reefs petrify and die before his eyes – watching the fish stock dwindle, feeling a creepy warmth wash over the polluted shallows, seeing living things hauled by the trillions out of the ocean for use as lawn fertilisers, pet food, romantic dinners.

While the politicians argued, the scientists wrung their hands and Greenpeace activists dangled off things, divers were watching, in their space suits, quietly, as one of the most exquisite of ancient living systems was betrayed by human greed in three decades. That sort of thing could make a man mean. I understood it.

I chose to overlook his dark moods, dread humour, spiky jabs, rampant misogyny and severe issues with booze, cigarettes, pot, porn, fornicators and women as just a superficial constellation of peculiarities that tend to afflict the traumatized, and perhaps especially, the (sort of) charming French.

“Eeet costs 50,000 Thai Baht to get rid of somebody here,” he said, exhaling a tribe of grey-swirly hoola dancers riding Camel smoke. What he meant, I thought, was that Thai people have limits.

That was easy to believe. Within a few days of being on Koh Phangan, with its magical granite boulders, its (alleged) bedrock of rose quartz, which causes (alleged) heart openings and (alleged) cascades of bliss and grace and spontaneous healings all over the place, I had begun to learn about Thai limits.

There is a limit, for example, to being bothered. This limit is a national craze. It has resulted in no end of dilapidated, rat-infested, grime-patinaed hovels posing as shops, restaurants, bars, brothels and cafes, all spilling over with heavy junk, dead coconuts, fat women and ragged dogs.

There is a strict limit to hygiene too. Resulting in some of the world’s most memorable toileting experiences. A limit to patience, asserted with extreme national pride by the fierce, dagger-browed women who trade in cheap synthetic clothes, ratty accommodation or spicy meals, stirred and drowned in a tragic flow of palm oil, still scented with the misery of the last surviving orangutans on the planet.

These ladies, thick-calved and mallet-fisted from lives of kick boxing practice and whatever else they do, will scream at you as soon as look at you. Their idea of customer service is a fusion of boot camp bully tactics and outright racist loathing which results in surprisingly fewer purchases than your cheerful tourist day shopper thought she might have made when she set out.

But the Thai, at least here, on this lovely island, said to be the darling of their beloved ex-king, and a Rubicon for the strange and secret animist superpowers of Thailand’s long and legend-soaked Kingdom, don’t care.

They don’t care about your cash dollar. They don’t care about your feelings. They don’t care about customer service. And they do not care about whether what you want to buy actually fits you. They appear to be sick of tourists. Sick of hospitality. They are famous for pulling tricky stunts to rip off scooter renters, barking nastily at window shoppers and getting very fed up indeed with the bad manners and vile habits of people like me; falang!

For example: I tried to buy a bikini, but was forbidden from trying it on. Which is… inconvenient, really. And irrational. The shop lady concerned snatched the swimsuit out of my hands, still pinned to its hanger, when I asked where I could try it, screaming;

“No! No! No! What you? Craaaazy?! De next person coming here not buy if you try.”

“But I will buy this, if it fits, and then there wont be a next person,” I explain, carefully.

“No! You want buy? Or no buy!” she scowled a me with a do you know I can kill you intensity to her eyebrows.

She pressed up awkwardly close to me, dangling the bikini top like a limp Siamese jellyfish, saying I could test it for size over my dress and jacket, right here, at the cash register. I said I would prefer to see for myself, “in a change room, perhaps? With a mirror?”

She made a rough citizen’s arrest, and hoisted me off by the elbow toward the disarray at the back of her shop. I could look in the mirror, fully dressed, and place the bikini top over my clothes only if she and her staff member, a shy, googly-eyed dwarfish woman who smiled maniacally and hid among the clothes racks, could watch.

That’s Thai hospitality.

In my first week on Koh Phangan I nearly committed the heinous sin of stepping into a store without removing my flip-flops. I was hovering on the step, unsure if I wanted any ‘health care products’, when the Thai owner barked, “Take off shoes!”

“Oh, I’m not going in,” I decided.

“I can kill you.” She said.

“What?”

“Me can have you killed. Extra cheap.” She clarified.

“Oh, go on then.” I sighed. And held my arms out wide to give her an easy shot.

Despite Koh Phangan’s share of tourist deaths, mostly blamed on poor Scooter management and the low-lying Burmese refugee population, who take slave wages, live in hovels and take the rap for everything… the place is rife with the same yoga creeps that have mainged Southeast Asia’s garland of paradise islands over the last decade. They undermine the traditional values, ruin other people’s daughters and rake in vast sums of cash and swaths of thigh, but have apparently not yet hit the $2000 tolerance threshold.

These do-it-yourself ‘health care experts’ turn a lucrative trade in ‘healing’. Their arts are yoga, yoni massage, intimacy workshops and a tangled driftnet of mystic nonsense with which these ratty pirates trawl the seas of consciousness, plundering from endless schools of tourists, kids, life changers and sick, anxious or depressed pilgrims that beach themselves across Asia.

They have irritated le frog to degrees of extreme inflammation. They buzz like flies at the rotting edges of the crack where the (alleged) light can get in. They are a sure sign you are in the right place, if you manage to get past without tasting their rotten honey or catching their strange and bewitching strain of fairyland typhoid.

Here on Koh Phangan, the ‘spiritual entrepreneurs’ are a lot less chic than in Australia or Bali. They tend toward a fray-edged dress code featuring shabby waist coats which appear to have been fashioned from bits of old sack, and scraps of road kill. And drawstring pants. They have long, waxy dreads, muttony biceps and horrible teeth.

The women wear a mesh of recycled dental floss and haughty, come hither pouts with a slight tinge of panic, or of predatory malice, that shows through on three month cycles,  when the botox wears off.

They all plot ways to make big cash dollar and an abundance of greasy orgasms out of the boat loads of enthusiastic things that spill onto their island lair during high season, from July to January. There are  sophisticated moral codes about what must be said and done to secure said loot.

Professional endeavours here must result in liquid, tax-free cash, for one thing. And lots of unattached, preferably public and multitudinous sex. Orgies are a big deal. As are workshops to activate your orgasmicness, empower the goddesss in your labia and play the ukulele with your scrotal sac.

All of which are vital investments of cash dollar and bodily fluids into becoming superior to boring and outdated normal people, and important steps toward what is known here as ‘unconditional love’. Unconditional love – the greatest advance in alternative healing, personal growth, self empowerment and spiritual ascension known to mankind (at least here, in the gigantic puddle we float in, known as the Gulf of Thailand) … according to those who make a living from it.

Yes, orgies do abound in Koh Phangan. And so do depressed, disoriented, inappropriately dressed bimbo tourists. There is a flourishing trade in macramé bikinis. And barely any market at all for underwear or engagement rings.

It was this sort of thing that I thought the relatively cheap, and widely advertised ‘kill fee’ would remedy.

Surely the Thai, famous for their kick boxing passion, their immunity from colonisers, severe manners (despite the charming propaganda expounded by their national airline) and extremely prissy ideas regarding even the faintest glimpse of breast, gluteus maximus or the underparts of feet, would fiercely defend their tiny islands from wanton  gigolos and their zombie hussies?

Even if they had failed to defend it against the destruction of their irreplaceable marine life, clean rivers, native wildlife etc?

But Eric was right. I know nothing of the world. It’s a miracle I am allowed to remain in it at all.

Just this very morning, while he slept the sweaty off-white sleep of the professionally miserable, I set off to the soft sea for my dawn swim in a rapture which could only have been damaged by a box jellyfish or a human being. And so it was.

Two loud and feral-looking yoga-types were splayed out on the sand, sucking the guts out of a couple of mangoes. She was not wearing panties. As anybody within 100kms was encouraged to notice. They laughed and rattled on in Russian at maximum volume, cluttering up the bliss-quiet of our fair Saturday.

And then they both stripped starkers. And strode into the water. To do it. In front of all the gentle fisherwomen, and the little Thai babies, with their fully clothed mothers at play in the shallows. It made me feel a bit queasy. Swimming in all that ‘unconditional love’. It caught the eye of a Thai dad, who whisked his bouncing toddlers and sun-proof wife away from the waterfront. I wondered what he thought. I wondered what would happen if this was Bondi. Or Byron. Or Lacanau, or Los Angeles. What would happen?

Nothing happened. There was no arching of eyebrows. No dangling of bikini tops. No outrage over defilement of custom, culture, boundaries or decorum. There were no limits enforced at all. Nothing.

And so the couple wriggled awkwardly about in the water, then marched out in front of everybody, oozing liquids – him dashing coyly for his fisherman pants while she flashed her plucked yoni and its swollen entrails for a lot longer than seemed necessary.

Back at Casa Del Frog, things were getting very slimy indeed.

Eric le toad was turning up the frog magic. He screamed at me for making him lunch – “Thees is deeesgusting!” he bawled, his flabby throat sacs trembling with white rage. “Orrible! It is orrible and deeesgusting to even see thees, to smell thees disgusting food in the morning (it was 2pm, but…ok…). French must only see le croissant, and le cafe au lait in de morning! Blah! Spit! Fizzle!”

He asked me to paint him a mural over the crackmarks where termites were busy  devouring his house. “Blah! Eeet is Orrible! Disaster! Deesgusting!” he cried when he saw it. “You come here! You ruin my house! You selfish and stoopid! Now what? I must spend more money, to buy paint, to cover this crap!”

He rubbed my face with every insult, abuse, humiliation and neglect he could think of. And his cat dragged a squirrel in beside my bed where she killed it, cracked its skull and sucked out its brains and organs noisily, leaving a putrid skid mark of vomit on the sheets and a bloody slipper of a carcass for me to step into at dawn.

Toxic and possibly hallucinatory frog venoms were stirring. The arrival and prolific online activities of one Shaft, a Tantricorn – Jedi somethingorother caused a severe flare up of rage, and a quickening of radioactive oozes from le frogs sacred lymph nodes.

“Theees fuckers!” le frog declared, peering darkly at the Jedi’s latest exploits on Youtube. “Idiot! Bastard! Steeeewpid…..!” He called in the anus-flashers and they gathered together to scowl and beat chests and rant wildly about the idiocy of the island’s orgy scene, and the blatant moronic plagiarism of an obvious himbo, daring to use the holy term Jedi for his cringy misadventures.

 

The cretin lords of fairyland cracked another pint of whiskey, and a pucker of perineal-activating yoga mudras. They looked upon me darkly, if they noticed me at all. Then they fired up their 250cc scooters and tore off into the night, leaving trails of silky island sand behind them, and little tufts of pubic hair, drifting on their wake.

My initiation rites were wearing thin. It was getting time for transformation.

Yes, things were moving toward transformation. It was time for me to do something of truly Jedi proportions……