As much as I wanted to follow up my yin’d out week at the Sarapatdi Monastery in Thailand with some yang’in by nomading it through the rural Thai countryside, my still broken body was as down with that as a duck with dinner at a patè buffet.

I needed to find a situation with a predictably comfortable bed and a routine that wouldn’t involve bumping around on buses, motor taxis, spelunking, and every other million dislodging things one finds on the road of deliberate displacement. I needed to find a sanctuary, and lucky for me Thailand’s island of Ko Phangan has a place called “The Sanctuary.”

McKenzie of Bookworm Vagabond had recommended I go there when she read one of my lamenting “I’m hurt yo!” posts questioning if I should go ahead with my one-way to Asia. During her time as my roommate, Mckenzie never hesitated when I suggested we wear animal masks and paint the town glow-in-the-dark red, so I knew I could trust her.

Hence, three days after leaving the monastery, I found myself on a boat pulling into Had Tien Bay with a bungalow booked for a week at The Sanctuary.

Because I had no idea what sort of glittery magic I was about to get myself into, I planned to stay at The Sanctuary a week–naive if you ask anyone who’s been there. If you have a flexible schedule, you’ll inevitably stay longer than you planned, as good as an endorsement as a person can give a place.

There’s something unbridling about being beachside. If the reincarnationists are right about this endless cycle of rebirth of our underlying essence, then I’m pretty sure I’ve spent a lot of former lives as an aquatic animal. While there’s a strong argument to be made that I was a crab, I’m pretty sure I was a dolphin, and must have been a dick of a dolphin, diving into my share of the dubious to be reborn as the clearly lower human animal.

In my last audience with the Abbot, he told me, “You have a strong will, so I wonder what sin you must have committed in your last life to be reborn again.” I have one idea. . . Two dolphins . . . one clam shell. . . and a night the pod will never forget. . .

When the bay comes into sight, I breath in all in. Jutting out from the green of palms is a thatched building mixed with a sea breeze and every overused adjective in a travel writer’s tropical-paradise vocabulary. Well, well, well, I think as I step out of the boat–If I’m going to be bruised, this seems like as good a place to be bummed out. And this was before I met the mermaids, found out who was living in the jungle or danced under the full moon with apple farmers from Upstate New York.