I woke my friend up at 3:30 in the morning (no easy task, I assure you). By the time we were out the door it was about 4:00 (the delay was mostly because of the first part--waking my friend, who protested very much, even though he had agreed willingly enough the night before... but that was before he stayed up until midnight).
"Have you gone outside yet? If it's cloudy, I'm going to kill you," he said.
"No. I've been too busy! You finish getting ready. I'll be right back." And I go outside. Sure enough, we're socked in with clouds. I take a deep breath and go back inside.
"Okay," I say. "So... it's cloudy. But--" I say, before he can say anything, "if it does clear up, I don't want to be here," at my friend's apartment in the city of Hua Hin, Thailand, among the streetlights. "So let's go. You can sleep there if you want. You ready?"
So we climb onto the motorbike with a backpack and a blanket and ride out to a temple north of the city where we find an old man wide awake and eager (I should say overeager) to accommodate us when we ask if we can sit and look at the stars. The first thing he does is to switch on the decorative lighting on the shrine. I groan inwardly and thank him for the display and then politely ask him if he can switch it off again.
We spread out the blanket and sit down gazing up and looking for meteors through holes in the clouds, and the man comes back with a lantern and boxes of milk for us to drink. When he leaves again I put out the flame and lie back on the blanket. We've got 90-100% cloud cover tonight, but I'm determined.
The man comes back again. "Do you like dogs?" he asks. And he holds out a squirming little puppy, so young its eyes haven't even opened yet. This one is a welcome offering, and I cuddle it on my chest as it explores my neck and hair with its little nose.
With the company of the puppy, and my friend quietly dozing on the blanket until the first rays of dawn, I counted three or four meteors through the clouds. A bit of a disappointment--but the clouds made for a lovely sunrise, and I can't say it was a bad way to start the day.
