Phuket, Summer 2016
I first saw Rosie in an American documentary on cam girls, which I had found doing research for a video on sex work I was producing in Sydney. One year later, we matched on Tinder in Phuket so I took an overpriced taxi from the muay thai district in the south of the island and met up at a trendy night market in Old Phuket Town. After dinner, we went out to Bangla Road with her boyfriend and housemates - all Americans teaching English in Thailand. We were mobbed by street promoters and talked into sports bars, ice bars, girl bars. I ended up spending the weekend with them, and riding around on the back of their scooters, flying through the winding hills and valleys of the island. We went to a rasta bar overlooking the ocean to buy weed and played with the owner's daughters while he rolled joints for us, before spending the afternoon at a quiet beach smoking up and eating street food. The next weekend we decided to go to Koh Phi Phi, and our cab driver decided to stop by his house and bring his entire family along for a day trip, so we ate snacks from 7/11 with his wife and daughters on the way to the ferry wharf.
