To give you an update, yesterday my sister Katharine and I left The Sanctuary. I can see how easy it could be to stay there indefinitely but Katharine rightly said it was time to see more of Thailand. The Sanctuary is wonderful – there’s interesting people, the place has a bay to itself, the food is amazing and the staff bend over backwards for you (and they’re not the yogis). It brilliantly caters for people who are interested in detoxing, alternative therapies, yoga and spa treatments. It also could be a great place to get material for some new-age sketch show or parody. I heard both these comments on day one:
“Do you actually like the taste of wheatgrass?”
“My dream is to set up a commune. Wouldn’t that be the coolest thing ever?”
One girl had a daily ritual of topless hula-hooping on the beach whilst doing a great impersonation of whalesong. Another seemed to ethereally float around the place and, instead of saying hello, she’d serenely smile and slowly close and open her eyes and glide on by.
One morning she tried to separate two cats who were fighting outside her bungalow and they turned on her. She was covered in bruises and bloody scratches. This prompted a debate about whether she should jump in a boat and go to nearby Had Rin for a tetanus jab. Katharine, with her obscure medical knowledge, shared how if you contract tetanus your entire body seizes up – hence it also being known as ‘lock jaw’ disease.
The girl decided not to get the jab as she didn’t like the thought of anything unnatural in her body. She saw the cuts as a physical manifestation of the inner torment she’d been feeling over the previous few days. As you do.
At The Sanctuary there were also many women who wouldn’t have looked out of place in Primrose Hill or Chelsea. They had that hippy-chic-effortlessly-cool-yet-bohemian-yoga look. Some of us can only dream of looking that amazing in a mosquito-infested jungle doing yoga in humidity that leaves you a gorgeous shade of beetroot.
Katharine and I discussed the need to invent a word to describe this phenomenon. “We need to smoosh the words ‘yoga’ and ‘glamorous’,” said Kaths. She then had the brainwave of ‘glamoga’. I took it one step further and ‘yo-glam’ was born.
Usage
As an adjective: “she’s very yo-glam”
As a noun: “there’s loads of yo-glams here”
Feel free to incorporate as you see fit. I believe that if a word is used in common parlance by many people for a few years (note my use of specific details) it’ll enter the Oxford English Dictionary. Let’s make it happen people.
We left The Sanctuary yesterday on a dinky ferry for Thong Nai Pan Yai further up the coast. Kaths said goodbye to one guy who looked like Robinson Crusoe. Peeking out of the top of his ever-present drawstring bag was a bamboo flute. I never found out whether he could play it. “Where are you heading next?” Kaths asked him. “Erm well, I think it’s more important to live in the present moment. I’ll let the universe decide,” came his reply.
I love The Sanctuary.
Read my previous post about The Sanctuary from when I was there before my training course.