Chai

Chai, Autumn 2017

I ran into Chai in a club as it was closing up at 6am, we had met at a house party in Sydney the year before. He'd since moved to Melbourne and was living temporarily in Fitzroy in a cheap room found on Gumtree, which turned out to be a room in a Thai massage parlour that also happened to be an unlicensed brothel. One of the walls in Chai's room was floor to ceiling glass that was only partially blacked out in the middle, so you could see the customers' shoes as they walked down the hallway past his room. There was a single mattress on the floor which meant that if anyone crouched down past the blacked-out section of the glass, they could also see him lying in bed. The shop was opened every day at 10am but wasn't as busy as it used to be, which was why they were also leasing out unused rooms to a random assortment of people who needed cheap accommodation. The few workers on shift were shy and didn't question our impromptu photoshoot in their workplace. It was a quiet day for them and my back was hurting so I ended up paying for a one-hour Thai massage (without the happy ending).

Melbourne

  

Melbourne, Autumn 2017

Sydney was stormy and stagnant so I switched homes with a friend in Collingwood and flew south to catch a few rays of sunshine.

Phi Phi II

  

   

Koh Phi Phi, Summer 2016

After missing the last ferry the day before, Rosie and I managed to get out to the Phi Phi islands where bought pre-rolled joints from the bars on the beach and met a lot of cats. The next morning at breakfast, we were hustled onto a longboat out to "The Beach" on Koh Phi Phi Leh. As soon as the shore disappeared from the horizon, the bosslady took off her hijab and shook out her hair in the sea breeze. There was extra space on the boat so she had taken her two teenaged sons along for the trip and insisted we take photos with them pretending to be their foreign girlfriends. At lunchtime, the captain pulled out a handmade bamboo bong and chopped up some weed that tasted like the pineapples he had just carved with the same knife. 

Full Moon Party

 

Koh Phangan, Summer 2016

Shroom shakes on Magic Mountain at the Full Moon Party, which was actually just a lot of people getting messy on a beach with fiery displays, cheap buckets of alcohol and tattoo parlours open 24/7. I took the ferry alone from Koh Samui with a backpack and no accommodation plans and ended up having to stay up all night sober for the first ferry back, and witnessed the vomit-splattered horror that was the end of the party.

Thailand II

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.