The Dance.
We stayed two nights on Ko Libong. Because we were with John, the British guy taking a break from his British life who lives at his resort , we hung around with the staff of the resort:  the boat drivers, the cooks, their families, all the kids - a really nice local flavor as there were only a couple of other couples around and they were off doing couple stuff in the romantic spaces.
The first night we were there we were drinking some cheap local rum Janice and I brought from the 7-11 on the mainland. Because of my completely unsophisticated palate - my favorite restaurant is Swiss Chalet - I found the rum to be of exceptional quality and not the like gasoline that others seemed to equate it with. The Thais on the island speak very little English so nearly every conversation involves some aspect of Pictionary. Usually either charades or drawing or just saying yayaya often and pretending you are having a conversation.
While we were sitting around yayayaying, kids and young adults started to emerge from the thick jungle to buy beer and liquor from the owner of the resort. We learned there was a dance in the neighboring village - a Monday night dance, celebrating something too difficult to Pictionary. Apparently the loud music roared through the night, seeping through the bamboo sheeted walls, but I missed that part, perhaps due to the consumption of the exquisite Thai cocktails. You can imagine my disappointment to learn that it was indeed a long and active party, on our island, in our neighborhood, and I missed it all.
So......next evening, we are sitting around playing cards and the jungle starts to expel more kids in search of alcohol. The party is continuing and I have a chance to make up for my oversight and attend.
A lovely British couple was the only other guests at the resort that night and although they said they were up for adventure, they did not rise to the occasion when Janice and I decided to head into the jungle, to follow the music and see what lay at the other end.
When I say jungle, I actually mean jungle. There are scorpions - some inside the huts:  I was told to ensure all my packs were checked before leaving , as they like to crawl into bags only to emerge on minibuses or hotel rooms off island. Snakes, wild monkeys that come to the beach at dusk every night, huge monitor lizards and so on round out the neighborhood.
Janice and I grabbed our headlamps and a bottle of cheap rum and headed into the jungle darkness to find the party. It had been charade that it was a dance so, being the huge dance lover I am, and having invested all that money over the years in lessons, I was totally excited. We found our way to the main road and through a number of yards before we saw the lights of the party. We had heard the music long before we saw the big pack of parked motorbikes and cooking carts.
As I said in the last blog, a lot of the south, and many of the islands, are Muslim - so different from Buddhists. On Ko Libong the women wear headscarf's and long dresses, some of the children do as well and it has a different vibe. Much more traditional.
Most Muslims do not drink alcohol - it is against their religion so when the young kids had come in search for alcohol, we thought it was just kids being kids, pushing the social norms.
The first thing Janice and I saw in the darkness of the fringe of the party were two young girls, dressed the same in matching mini mini skirts, pink t-shirts, bobby socks and running shoes. They looked like little American cheer leaders at first. Then we saw them dancing provocatively in front a group of old men who were sitting in the requisite plastic lawn chairs. Behind the men were a group of older women, laying about on a raised platform, also common everywhere in Asia, in their colorful burka like robes with their hijab (headscarf's) covering their heads
It was the oddest sight - the jungle, small Muslim fishing village on a largely deserted island, loud blaring music from a massive set of speakers and two little cheerleaders grinding inches away from old men's faces while their wives watched.- all in public.
Neither Janice nor I could believe what we were seeing. We looked at each other trying to come up with an alternative explanation to what we were looking at. We then looked through the parking lot of motorcycles and saw a big open ring of people - the women totally covered up in their traditional wear - many wearing fancy headscarf's fitting for a party, and more dancing girls, identically dressed in the cheerleader outfits - maybe 20 of them, in the middle of the dirt floor circle, with 20 plastic chairs lined up in two rows between the massive speakers that spewed the Thai rap music continuously.
The girls were dancing singularly, some in twos, the same sexual grinding dance - including lap dancing gestures, to individual towns' people, mostly men or boys but sometimes groups of women and big groups of little girls. I have to use the British word 'gobsmacked' because I can't think of a better term for us. We were gob smacked. And baffled, and confused and disgusted. We searched for an explanation. I know I am sounding dramatic here but it really was one of the oddest things I have ever witnessed - so bizarre in all of the contrasts and improbabilities, in one setting.
What we saw was, at the end of each song the girls would come back to their chairs and sit down. Someone would approach the girl with a paper ticket - hand it to her and she would go with him to where he was standing with his friends and she would do a sexual dance in front of him. The song would end and she would go back to the circle and do it all over again. If he had multiple tickets he could keep the one girl or trade her in for a new one. The rest of the village stood around watching and eating food the older women were selling. No alcohol could be seen but it was obvious that many of the men were drunk and many of the younger ones really stoned. (Lots of drugs everywhere here - weed, opium and kaba? - new one on me)
If all of this wasn't s bizarre enough, groups of 6 and 8 little boys would gather in a pod - sitting on the ground, one would give a ticket and one of the dancers would come and do the very same sexual dance to the little boys - grinding up against them and rubbing themselves against the 6 and 8 year olds. Even some little traditionally dressed girls bought themselves a dance.
We tried to desexualize it all but could not.
Between each song, a guy who obviously was running all the girls, would come around to each of them and grab their tickets from their hands and keep them moving to the next customer. Just after we first got there - he came up to Janice and I, we were hovering far in the background trying to reconcile what we had just seen with the old men, pushed the paper tickets in our hands and dragged me up to the center stage - into the middle plastic chair. I hadn't figured anything out at that point so politely declined and hightailed it back to the back row for viewing. That action allowed everyone to see that there were 'farang' at the party. As we moved around, people kindly moved away so we could see more and be in the front viewing area.
The dancers were terrible - had the same look as all the young sex slave girls - bored and dancing the same dance as you would see onstage in every 'boom boom' room in Bangkok or Phenom Pehn. They were aged from 12 or 13 right up to 40 or 45, plastered with white face geisha girl makeup, red lips and lots of eyeliner. They all wore the same skirts, the same pink t-shirts and the same little white socks. Some were tough as nails and others just little prepubescent kids from who knows where - in the jungle, in the middle of the night, on an island, lap dancing for a village of dressed up Muslim men and women. I still cannot believe what we saw. I tried to take a few pictures but it was very dark. Making eye contact with some of the elegant, beautiful young women of the village I saw some looks of "how horrible is this?" but mostly everyone just watched, quite bored with the whole affair.
It was not that these dancers were the most provocative or skimpily dressed because they were not for any other place in Thailand. For Libong, which is so traditional and also the monks were staying at our little resort that night, the whole study in contrasts was extreme.
The music lasted until 3 or 4 in the morning, two nights in a row. Then it was all over. Once we got back into Trang we were able to ask a friend of Janice's who owns the dive shop at the resort and now has opened a restaurant in the city - WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?????
The party was a fund raiser for the school. The girls??? Are hired often for these kinds of events, most often for weddings, so more people will attend - if the men come (no pun intended) the women come as well. He says they are girls from the cities - doesn't think they are prostitutes, understood why we thought it so distasteful, especially for children to see and participate in, yet just laughed and said that is how things are. Entertainment is entertainment. So degrading to everyone involved, and so bizarre to see in a sleepy Muslim village on an island that only has electricity from 5 pm to 6 am. The circus came to town and we got to go. Sort of wished we hadn't.