In November 2014, I left La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain). Quite unfortunately, because I really enjoyed my stay there and would have liked to permanently live in the island, but I simply didn’t manage to survive financially.
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So, I decided to go back to Thailand once more, this time to teach English. I secured a teaching position for both a primary school and a high school in Bang Saen, and I was happy to have found work there because of the proximity to the beach.
Bang Saen is a town situated in the Chonburi province, in eastern Thailand, about 108 km southeast of Thailand’s capital, Bangkok. The beach is very popular among Thai people, but regrettably heavily visited and polluted on the weekends. Foreigners, by the way, are rarely seen in Bang Saen.
I had the weekends off, and that was exactly the moment the Thai from Bangkok (Bang Saen is the closest beach town to Bangkok) flocked the beach causing kilometers of traffic jam coming into town and littering the beaches during their outing. A really sad phenomenon, and an absolute no-go to visit the beaches on the weekends, but that’s all a whole other story.
Anyway, just before Christmas, I got two weeks of holiday, and I decided not to stay in Bang Saen but to do a one-week Vipassana meditation retreat in a Buddhist monastery on an island nearby.
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The island’s name is Koh Sichang (also written Ko Si Chang), a small island just a bit off the coast and about an hour and a half in total from Bang Saen. Basically, you go further south to Si Racha, which is about a half an hour or so drive with public transportation, and then at the pier you take a ferry or speed boat to the island, which takes about 45 minutes.
On the island, you’ll find several Buddhist temples, but the temple I went to was Wat Tham Yai Prig, which is a Vipassana Buddhist monastery where you can have free meditation courses with lodging and food included. It’s up to you what you donate to cover the costs.
The temple is situated very nicely on one of the summits of the island with beautiful views: perfect to meditate. The daily regime was quite tough (for me, anyway), that is, waking up around 3:00 a.m., chanting and praying at 4:00, starting alms rounds in the village around 5:00 to be back at 6:30 to do chores around the temple, while waiting (being very hungry) for breakfast at 8:00 a.m.
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After breakfast, there’s work to do in the vegetable garden or around the various shrines, caves, and temples, etc. Then around 11:30 a.m. you’ll have lunch, which is the last meal of the day, followed by resting and meditation time until 2:30 p.m.
From 2:30 p.m. until 4:30 p.m. there are again many types of tasks to do. You then have time to shower and such, and to meditate on your own. At 6:00 p.m. you gather again in one of the main praying halls to have a last snack, followed by Vipassana meditation training, which lasts until about 8:00 p.m. The day is then over and done, you’ll go to your (private) hut, and well… sleep, to get up again at 3:00 a.m.
Well, it was surely an interesting non-Christmas experience, after which I spent a few days on the island itself (I stayed in a guesthouse) to enjoy some hiking and the beaches, and then returned to crazy Bang Saen, which I used to call “Bangsanity” in my own words.
