Ko Lanta Revisited

 Two days ago on Wednesday, I finally returned home from a trip that was just short of two weeks. On Friday, the 18th of March, two things happened. One was that I got an invitation from Haruna to visit Ko Lanta where she had been. And secondly, all my Saturday classes got cancelled. And so the following day, I got on my motorcycle with two backpacks fastened to my bike and one on my back and I headed for Lanta. I ended up driving through both sunshine and rain to get there. It was about 7pm when I got on the island and about 8pm when I reached the guesthouse. It had taken me about eight hours of driving. That's about twice the time it would've taken by car.

I spent about ten days on the island. Almost everyday, I edited tracks for an upcoming album. Most of the tracks for that album were created in November and December 2021. I was still in Chiang Mai at the time and my copy of Ableton Live 9 had just stopped working overnight. The Live support team told me that it was a surprise that Live 9 worked so long with my current version of macOS because apparently Live 9 wasn't supposed to work with the latest version at all. However, I had used it for about a year with that version and that was confusing. As a soul-ution, I downloaded the free trial of Live 11 and almost all of the tracks for the upcoming release were created in two months.

I had been listening to the dozen or so tracks I created at the end of 2021 for a few months and I had ideas for edits on some of the tracks. I wasn't able to make the edits I wanted with the Standard version of Live 11 I had purchased shortly after the trial version expired. Haruna let me use her laptop to download the free trial again so that I could make the edits I wanted. Almost every day on Lanta was spent making edits on her computer. 

Apart from making edits, everyday was also spent at the various beaches around the island. Every time I was at the beach, I felt more and more drawn towards the island. I started thinking about moving there. And eventually, I decided to make the move a reality. Right now as I write this, a lot of my clothes are waiting for me back in the guesthouse in Lanta because I left them there. I have been preparing to make the big move to the island since I came back to Ko Yo.

Right now, the plan is to make the big move to Lanta on Monday morning. A moving truck will be coming to take me, my motorcycle, and all my things to the island where I already have a new place arranged. I don't want to ride my motorcycle there again because it's too much work. On the way back, I took two separate days to get back because of this.