All the world's a stage . . .

I've called Koh Samet "Hippy Island", although its more "Aging Hippy Island". All sorts, from all parts of the world, end up in this place, a beach somewhere outside time and space. The Real World seems light years away, which is the whole point of the holiday, I suppose. There's the tattooed East London gang, baring their bottoms to the howls of mock outrage of their wags, dunking glasses into a large plastic bucket of a nameless frothy pale cocktail at three in the afternoon. There's the quartet of Swedish bikini scraps on the sunbeds in front of me every morning after breakfast (funny how that happens). The German family of doting parents and three bemused toddlers making pyramid sandcastles by the water's edge next to their parked hi-tech transformer pushchairs. The bronzed, ponytailed hippy strumming a miniature pale blue guitar who looks as if he came here a year ago and forgot to leave. The scrawny, old German woman jerkily striding up and down the bay every day and night whose blackened leathery skin suggests she's been out in the sun waaaay too long. The endless chorus from the peripatetic Thai women: "Hello, you want massage? 200 Baht!" while you're three quarters through a more engrossing copy of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The licenced fruit salespeople balancing a ton of produce on two baskets at either end of a bamboo shoulder pole (I watched the diminutive Thai woman offer a statuesque English thirtysomething woman a chance to pick the pole up on her shoulders; she couldn't get both baskets off the ground!). At night, ultra-fit seven year old boys and their older brothers would come up to your beach tables at dinner time and cartwheel flaming sticks around like propellers, chucking them in the air, and generally splashing burning petrol around the beach. It doesn't do to have a table too close to the shore even if the scene of Chinese lantern-lit wavelets on the hard sand against a black sea is worth the effort to get to your chosen restaurant early. All in all, everything and nothing goes on here at any given moment. The only difference is whether, as I have done, you leave your brain in a pickle jar for the duration.