Goodbye

We think what the hell, let’s get as much sun as possible because we won’t have any ‘til July back home in The Best Place On Earth. Catfish and I are lounging by The Guesthouse pool, and I’m ogling the last of the female bikinis.

There’s a group of born-again Christians from the U.S. staying here, but mercifully they’re leaving shortly to go proselytize to some perfectly-contented savages somewhere upcountry. Why must Christians enforce the good news?

Next door to The Guesthouse is a spa in someone’s home, and we go in for massages. It costs 250 baht for one hour, but we tip, so 350. Yesterday’s massage at the other place down the street has my bruises protesting, but my masseuse is either inflexible or cruel, or she knows exactly how much manipulating my body can take today. It can take a lot, evidently, because she irons out my spine like it’s a 20-year-old pair of fiberglass pants. I focus on my breath and try to ignore the air conditioner humming away on the ceiling.

My treatment finishes first so I wait in the other room for Catfish. He comes out with his masseuse, both looking all misty eyed. Despite the pain, I feel more grounded, less punchy. Perfect for going shopping.

At the ATM I get dinged with a 20 baht commission fee plus whatever my Canadian bank decides to extort. We walk to the neighbourhood market (khet taalat) where I buy a case of Twin Lotus toothpaste, some Mekong whiskey, and incense sticks. We eat Pad Thai with tons of chilies. I notice another vendor down the block putting out steaming bowls of noodles with pork and fish balls. We’re not famished, but the food is irresistible, so we hustle over to get a bowl.

Now it’s 01:00 and I’m drinking Mekong with Coke on the second floor of The Guesthouse. Catfish has crashed in the room, but I’m still keeping awake, enjoying the warmth and relative quiet. We gotta be at the airport in five hours.

The wake-up call scares me into consciousness.

I grab my two bags and go down to the lobby and tell the front desk guy that I’ll see him next year and thanks for everything. On the street we get into the first taxi that stops and I say airport to the driver. My brain’s foggy, yet I sense that we are heading northeast instead of southeast. It’s still dark, and the taxi’s racing on and off elevated expressways, but I have the feeling we’re going to the domestic airport instead of the international. I bring it up with a woozy, coffee-deprived Catfish who asks me if I’m sure of this. I tell him I’m dead sure. The driver doesn’t speak English but senses urgency in our voices. We can’t fuck around; we must be at the airport by 06:00.
“Don Muang—no,” I say to the driver. “Suvarnabhumi. Suvarnabhumi. OK?”

I keep repeating this until the driver catches on and nods his head and pulls a U-turn at the first opportunity. We just lost 30 minutes so now we’re really flying on and off the expressways. Catfish is relieved, and I don’t know how I knew what I knew, but even the driver is laughing along now. We’re gonna make it.

At Suvarnabhumi International Airport the driver wais and hands us our bags. I breathe the beautifully warm humid air for the last time and wonder if ending up at the domestic airport would’ve been such a bad thing after all.

Almost scammed at the Chao Praya River

Catfish and I exited the Sky Train near Central Pier and the Chao Praya River.

Had we turned left instead of right at the bottom of the Sky Train stairs, we’d have found our way onto the River Express boat, but we turned right and got into a tuk-tuk and said to the driver, Central Pier. He must’ve thought we were idiots ripe for the taking because Central Pier was 50 yards to the left, so he drove us to another tuk-tuk driver who tried to sell us a long-tail boat cruise. We said no thanks, sensing a possible rip-off in the making, and then we told our driver to please take us back to where we started. We blew 100 baht on the fiasco, but hey, you learn.

We followed the locals onto the River Express boat and decided to ride to the furthest pier upriver, Tha Nonthaburi, about 30-or-so kilometers away.

The sun was hot as my eyes strained to take in the scenery. Speeding long-tail boats whizzed around clumps of bright green hyacinths that grew on the surface of the muddy water. Smaller canals called khlongs branched off from the main river. I noticed most of the houses on the waterfront were standing on shaky wooden legs. A few homogeneous high-rise hotels sprouted from the riverbanks.

Off the boat at Tha Nonthaburi we walked a square kilometre and were soon saturated with clothing stalls, dollar store junk, 7-11s, and Thai schoolgirls.

Back near the pier I bought a cup of thick Thai coffee and some delicious pork (muu) skewers. We met B and K, a nice German couple. B sold unicycles back in Germany, and this was his eighteenth vacation in Thailand in the last 20 years.

Sunset on the Chao Praya River, Bangkok

Chinatown, Phahurat, and the touts of Khao San Road

Catfish and I rode a tuk-tuk to Chinatown and met a crazy, drunk Coke vendor who showed us his large tiger tattoo emblazoned on his chest. And then he produced a pair of small bronze saucers, like castanets, and gave us lessons. We attracted a curious crowd who clapped us on even though we were pathetic. Catfish liked the finger cymbals so much that he bought them from the guy.

Hungry, we walked on to the Indian neighbourhood of Phahurat. A helpful security guard at a parking garage asked us what we were looking for; Indian food, we said, so he pointed us in the right direction.
We took dinner at a modest joint, and guess what? It was the best Indian food I’ve ever had.

Later we rode another tuk-tuk to Khao San Road, ground zero for many freshly-landed foreign backpackers.

For me, Thanom Khao San was a letdown; a kilometre-long pedestrian area studded with Western-style pubs, henna tattoos, pharmacies, and temporary dreadlocks (no, really.) Catfish and I postulated that this area has the second-highest concentration of farang (foreigners) in Bangkok, next to the whorehouse districts.

We sat down to overpriced beers at a bleak pseudo-English pub. As we were trying to enjoy ourselves, tenacious touts selling cheap plastic junk worked the tables. Recycling themselves through the tourist throng, the hawkers were relentless in their sales pitching, hoping to catch a hammered tourist well into his seventh or eighth Singha. The same salesman targeted me over and over again, eventually wearing down my will to refuse all offers of stuff I didn’t need or would never use, which explains why I now own a set of fake arm-tattoo hosiery.

I got short changed on the transaction, but it wasn’t much money. I figured this was the farang tax for hanging out on Khao San Road and that if anyone deserves my cash it would be this most dogged individual.

Chatuchak weekend market

Ten subway stops from The Guesthouse was Bangkok’s famed Chatuchak Weekend Market, a bargain-shopper’s paradise featuring 10,000 vendor booths spread over 28 acres. (Other transliterations of Chatuchak are Jatujak, or JJ Market.)

Up earlier than most roosters, Catfish and I started the day by cashing in our remaining traveler’s cheques, and then unintentionally offending our gustatory buds with some incredibly tasteless and overpriced hot beverages from a Thai clone of a big American coffee chain.

After binning most of our drinks we vowed to never again patronize any cafe in Thailand that aspires to be American. And, of course, once we passed through the Market’s front gates we couldn’t swing a scorpion by its tail without hitting a sidewalk coffee jock serving up far superior product at a quarter of the price.

I noticed more Thais than farang at Chatuchak, and the crowds really picked up around 10:30. By 11:00 Catfish and I were fading, so we got some food and water and rested our sore feet and overstimulated brains.

Inching through aisles that were more congested than an asthmatic in a smog sauna, we saw tons of mass-produced junk, but there were also numerous artisan crafts and paintings for sale. A woman was making miniature replica dragons, cats, and snakes from flexible wire and hemp rope, truly amazing work. A few guys were painting sneakers and T-shirts.

Near the horticulture section Catfish and I met a happy young man who was selling limited-run silk screened T-shirts. I slipped on a medium-sized shirt and felt a hand slip onto my chest.
“Large size for you!” the young man laughed.
I was surprised but not offended.

The T-shirt was black with purple Thai writing, and the young man showed me a local nudie mag that featured a similarly-stylized font.
“How much do you want for this magazine?”
“Oh!” he laughed again, “Not for sale. Only sell T-shirts.”

Leaving The Island, back to Trat

Ferry chaos

Catfish and I couldn’t get on the ferry. We were at the wrong terminal.

The right one was a few kilometres down the highway. There was a taxi waiting out on the road, so we confirmed the destination with the driver and hopped in the back with the other passengers who’d already paid to come from the other side of The Island.

When we arrived at the proper terminal the driver demanded 100 baht apiece. Catfish was unnerved, so he haggled her down to 50 baht, and then I tried to really lowball to 40, but she wasn’t going to budge, so I pulled back, embarrassed. What the hell was I doing?

Had I turned into one of those cheap-ass farangs who nitpick over a couple of insignificant dollars? I decided then and there that I would never again negotiate over small amounts while in Thailand no matter what contrary advice I’d been given, unless a product or service was absolutely positively inflated beyond hilarity.

Regardless, the driver readily took our cash, her eyes burning through us into the jungle behind.

Off the ferry and back in Trat, Catfish and I checked into the same guesthouse that we stayed at a month earlier.

City of Trat

Trat is an interesting little place to chill out for a couple of days; the narrow side streets (soi) and large night market are especially good areas to wander aimlessly.

At the night market we ate soup, hot Thai curry, Chinese cabbage, rice, and baby clams, and the food was, once again, phenomenal.

On one of the menus was listed a make-your-choice meal we never got around to trying: An Egg Preserved in Potash OR Ammonia Salad. Doubtless, something got messed up during translation, or maybe we missed out on the culinary equivalent of the discovery of the double helix.

Hippie television

Brenda, a 37 year-old Scot who teaches math in Manila, came by our beach table and bought me and Catfish a beer. And then she sparked up a doobie, called over her boyfriend Alvan, and the two of them drank for two days straight. She never stopped talking for three.

Alvan was a surfer / seasoned toker from the U.S. who looked a bit like Kevin Costner circa Waterworld. An avid outdoorsman and self-described go-with-the-flow kind of guy, he was incredibly intuitive, and I marvelled with considerable envy at his childlike enthusiasm for uncomplicated tasks like breaking sticks for a beach fire.

“They used to say that campfires were hippie television,” Alvan announced to me while snapping dry twigs over the glint of the fire.
“Hey—I ain’t no fuckin’ hippie, man.”
“Whoa, put down the whip! Go easy on yourself, dude,” he replied with repose.

Meanwhile, Brenda was dancing and hollering and on her twentieth bottle of Singha when Catfish suggested she play a Dylan song on the iBoombox, to which she replied: “I can play whatever anything I can find forever and ever because this is my beach and this is my fire and these are my songs oh did I tell you I have 6000 songs here wow so many ain’t that amazing so many songs on this thing woo woo woo woo woo . . . “

The day before Christmas Brenda and Alvan showed up stone-cold sober and somewhat self-conscious at our beach table to announce they were leaving for the other side of The Island.

Alvan gave me a hug and an intricate surfer-dude handshake, and Brenda just smiled, not saying a peep.

It helps to not stand in the fire

Sleeping in a hammock on the porch

I developed a rash on my forearms due to either grit in my mattress or fleas from the vocal beach cat that dragged in dead sand crabs during the night, so for two nights, as a self-prescribed treatment, I slept on the porch in a hammock that M & V from Holland lent me.

I didn’t smear on bug repellent because the Cambodian-made hammock had a built-in mosquito net. As I tied it to the wooden beams of the bungalow I wondered if the knots would hold or if I’d fall out the side in the middle of the night.

The next two mornings I awoke safely within the gentle sway of the suspended cradle, and my neck and body felt great. I couldn’t say the same about my itchy forearms; the patch of fiery red bumps was as conspicuous as the crustacean-obsessed cat’s meow. Nevertheless, the couple of nights I spent sleeping in a hammock in the breeze ten feet from the ocean was definitely fun.

Spiked jungle pig

Ernst, Catfish, and I arrive at the rickety restaurant set on the waterfront at the end of a long dirt road.

There are no walls, the roof is made of corrugated tin, and you sit on cushions on the floor. Hammocks are strung between the beams, and friendly dogs, cats, and longhaired Thai hippies wander about.

The cook is a forty-something Thai woman, and her adorable twenty-something niece assists her in making some of the best food we’ve ever had. The three of us use our limited Thai vocabulary and menu-pointing skills to make ourselves understood.

Catfish and I want something very spicy (phet phet), so our cook brings us a small sample of pork that was prepared earlier in the day. It’s got bite, and the diced chunks of meat are tough and dry. We order a shared plate along with rice. The cook’s niece makes us a couple of pineapple shakes, and I get a large Beer Chang. Ernst orders Pad Thai for himself.

I notice one of the dogs is on his back, his legs in the air. Catfish calls over the other dog and stealthily feeds him a couple chunks of the spicy pork. The girls are laughing, watching us chow down on the pork dish. I’m not sure what’s so funny, but they keep making circling motions around their heads with their hands. Our cook comes over and says, “Pork. Wild.” And then she laughs and gives Catfish–she calls him Papa–a big hug.

It seems we’re eating some kind of Island wild boar.

The adorable niece just sits in a hammock, giggling. She traces circles in the air around her head once again. I notice that the other dog is now comatose, flat on his back.

Catfish and I are feeling a little woozy, and Ernst has to be up at 05:00, so we settle up the bill. The women are giggling like schoolgirls again as they wave us goodbye.

Walking back to our bungalow, Catfish says he is feeling floaty and dissociated, and then I have an epiphany and realize I’m completely stoned. The pork wasn’t necessarily homegrown, but something in the sauce was.

We laugh our way back down the pockmarked road, and Ernst looks on with amusement, unsure of the two kooks he just had dinner with and probably a little relieved that he chose the Pad Thai.

The impotence of being Ernst

Ernst is 47 and from Stuttgart, Germany. He is bicycling solo around Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, and carrying 50 kilograms of gear on his two-wheeled Teutonic trailblazer.

He sleeps in a one-man tent and cooks most of his meals. Over beers he tells me that he spent time in a Buddhist monastery in eastern Thailand but soon grew tired of the routine and the rules. Catfish joins us, and the conversation turns somewhat testy when the subject becomes Mid-East politics.

I call off the discourse so that Catfish and I can take dinner at the waterfront restaurant down the road. We’re halfway there when Ernst comes running up behind us, flashlight in hand.

“Are you upset?” he asks me.
“No, I’m not upset. Catfish, are you upset?”
“No.”
“I will join you for dinner then,” says Ernst.

We agree to let him join us since he seems so lonely and desperate to talk to anyone.

Coconut bombed

Good thing I decided to shave outside today, because a couple of medium-sized coconuts smashed through the roof of our bungalow shower room.

Some folks from The Island Coconut Collective were servicing the palms on the property when the coconut puller mis-yanked and sent two heavy orbs crashing through the woven palm leaf shingles of our beach hut.

Much to the relief of the French proprietor, the shower tiles were left unscathed.

Turning my back on everything

Dead battery

On the southeast side of The Island was a minimally-developed stretch of sandy paradise: no karaoke, no casinos, no internet. Squat toilets, yes. McDonald’s, no.

Catfish and I left our motorbikes on the road and walked a kilometre in tidal pools until we reached The Bungalows.

The French proprietor agreed to rent us a waterfront hut at a decent weekly rate, and if we stayed for more than a week he’d slash the price even further. I asked him if he could put two beds in the bungalow.
“Of course, that is no problem, I can do that,” he smiled, and took another puff on his strange-smelling cigarette.

Our room didn’t have a fan, but I was told that with the breeze blowing through at night we wouldn’t need one. We put down a deposit, and French agreed to pick us up on the other side of The Island the next day.

Back at our bikes, Catfish left his key in the ignition ON position, killing the battery. Lucky for us a friendly Thai elephant trainer with a screwdriver, and two Englishmen with a rental car and jumper cables saved the day.

Ten kilometres down the road I propped my bike on its side stand to take some photos of the ocean vista. When I got back on my bike I turned the key, and . . . nothing. No spark. No noise. Dead.
“For chrissakes, don’t tell me this battery’s gone,” I yelled.
Catfish wanted to walk back to Long Beach to fetch the guys with the jumper cables, but I was positive that somebody would come along to help us out, so we stayed put.

Sure enough, a Thai fisherman came buzzing past on his scooter. I flagged him down, and although he didn’t understand my words, he knew the bike was unmotivated. The man turned the key, looked at the bike, grabbed the handlebars, and turned the key again. Nothing. He hesitated, and then kicked up the side stand and turned the key. The bike started.

The fisherman smiled, and Catfish gave him a big hug, and I laughed, and we all thought it was hilarious. When engaged, the side stand was a failsafe, but the guys back at the rental place didn’t tell me that when they handed me the keys and my ill-fitting helmet.

Somewhere down the road the two Englishmen in the rental car, honking and waving, passed us.

Sunset at Long Beach

Across The Gulf

Catfish and I got into the back of a pickup truck with bench seats (saamlaw) and hung on for our lives as the thing screamed down the highway from Trat toward the ferry terminal where we boarded a no-frills vessel destined for The Island.

As the boat clanked across the Gulf of Thailand I noticed the geographical similarity between this stretch of land and sea and the Pacific Coast back in Canada–save for the clearer water and groves of banana palms, of course.

Upon arrival, we jumped in a taxi going west to the tourist strip and then disembarked at Lonely Beach only to realize that it wasn’t so lonely. Our group, including M from Montreal and C & A from Australia, checked into a rather generic beach hut resort where Catfish and I took an overpriced room for 450 baht (approx. 18 Canadian dollars).

The resort’s restaurant served good food at fair prices on a scenic deck overlooking the sea. Friendly cats were hanging around getting fat off the leftovers. The place wasn’t too noisy, but it still wasn’t quite far enough off the beaten track; we wanted to check out the other side of The Island.

The next day Catfish and I rented motorbikes. Heading east up twisty roads I felt like a young Peter Fonda. Once we left the strip malls and package tourists of the overdeveloped west side of The Island it seemed as though we were someplace else. Spectacular jungle scenery, quaint villages, pineapple farms, and curvy oceanside asphalt whizzed past us and under our wheels.

The paved road turned into jagged rock and gravel somewhere north of Long Beach, and for the next twenty kilometres we might as well have been riding on the surface of an asteroid.

Pissage in a bottle

It took one full day, but Catfish and I rode a succession of buses from Si Saket in the northeast to the market city of Trat in the southeast.

The first motor coach we got into was a plush VIP model equipped with a steward, complimentary water and snacks, Thai comedy on the TV, and a tiny but functional toilet / water closet (hawng nam in Thai).

Eleven hours later we arrived in Rayong to switch buses. With no time for a pee break we were promptly directed onto a much more rudimentary bus by a woman who turned out to be the fare collector.

Forty-five minutes down the highway I realized that it probably wasn’t such a bright idea to polish off 2 large bottles of water and 4 oranges, especially when I noticed with considerable unease that there was no onboard toilet.

I’m sure we’ll pull over somewhere soon, I thought, trying to meditate away the knot that was tightening inside my lower body.
Shortly after, the bus stopped at the side of the road, but it was only a passenger pick up. A few kilometers later it pulled over again. More passengers boarded, students mostly.

“This is crazy. No toilet? I gotta ask the driver to pull over,” I whispered through clenched teeth to Catfish as I rose from my seat.
“Umm. . . Hawng nam?” I asked the driver, trying not to appear too uncomfortable.
The fare-collecting lady, seated to his left, spoke up.
“Hawng nam. OK.”

It sounded as though we were getting close to a pit stop. I went back to my seat and tried to think of anything but the pressing issue–literally–of having to pass water.
Catfish, amused at the situation, pointed to one of the empty water bottles and suggested that I use it as a receptacle.
“Just don’t spill anything,” he laughed.

Briefly considering his boorish solution I looked to the back of the bus, but any privacy afforded by the once vacant rear seats was gone. Raucous teenage students had taken up the row.

Finally, and with a concerned look on her face, the fare-collecting lady walked over and signaled that we were indeed pulling off the road.
“Hawng nam,” she said, jangling her metal coin box and pointing to the blue concrete building materializing out of the dawn.

I stepped off the bus with faux cool and walked four strides towards the men’s room until it was time to run, sandals be goddamned. I was fully prepared to look like the silly farang, and when I returned to the bus I took the students’ smiles and giggles in stride.

With much chagrin I thanked the driver. “Khawp khun khrap, khawp khun khrap.”
“Khrap,” the smiling driver acknowledged as he shifted the bus into first gear and accelerated toward Chantaburi, our final transfer point.

Tratshed

Catfish and I left The Village in early December, destined for The Island on the Gulf Coast. The Thai bus network would take us as far as the market city of Trat, a coconut’s throw from our destination, and then we’d arrange private transport to The Island.

Thailand is a geographically large country, and the possibility that I’d be riding a series of buses in an increasingly zombified state of mind–I can’t sleep on moving vehicles–had never occurred to me. The next twenty-four hours would be experienced through spells of anticipation, frustration, impatience, exhaustion, and finally, elation.

Bus No. 1

We traveled from The Village to the city of Si Saket on a skeletal Mercedes diesel bus, its doors open wide the entire one-hour trip down the highway.

We arrived at noon and took lunch at a sidewalk restaurant. A vendor was serving up delicious bowls of noodle soup called kuaytiaw.
Our bus to Rayong wasn’t leaving until 17:30, so we got some ice coffees and walked around. After a punishing wait in line at Kasikorn Bank, we cashed some travellers cheques and then headed to another cafe where we met a British guy named Alex.

Formerly a judo instructor in the southern Thailand party island of Phuket, Alex works at a private school in Si Saket despite not having any sort of formal teacher training.

Alex spoke pretty good Thai, and when Catfish and I had difficulty ordering our coffees Alex intervened. He talked of the pros and cons of living in Thailand and wished us well on our journey, and then he got on his bicycle and pedaled back to work.

Bus No. 2

On the bus from Si Saket to Rayong a large TV was broadcasting a Thai program that was somewhere between Saturday Night Live, Sesame Street, and The Price Is Right. We couldn’t understand a word, naturally, and the physical comedy wasn’t funny anyway, but most of the passengers were laughing.

I didn’t have enough legroom; the reclined seat in front of me was touching my knees. My seat wouldn’t go back far enough for me to be prone, so I sat scrunched and upright for the next eleven hours. There were so many ruts in the road that my skeleton felt as if it were going to bounce out of my skin.

Bus No. 3

At Rayong a woman firmly directed us to our next bus, a more rustic model, and one hour down the highway I realized there was no onboard toilet (for the shocking details read Pissage in a Bottle). Chantaburi was three hours away; I prayed the bus would be making a pit stop.

Bus No. 4

We arrived in Chantaburi to catch our last bus to Trat.

I was so punchy I couldn’t see straight, yet somehow I managed to stand at the playing of the Thai national anthem, much to the delight of a curious taxi driver who smiled and gave me a thumbs-up.

Arrival

After twenty-four hours aboard 4 buses we arrived completely trashed in Trat and checked into the first guesthouse listed in my guidebook. On my bed in the air-conditioned room I was out like last year’s model.

Later that evening Catfish and I grabbed dinner at the guesthouse restaurant. The food was just so-so, but the convenience factor was high since we were still in pieces from the bus rides.

With enough coal in our stoves for a quick walk through the ‘hood, we chanced upon the delectable aromas of the night food market, and I made a mental note to eat here on our way back through town the following month.

I bought a huge bottle of Archa beer, and we set off down a narrow back street (soi) lined with old teak buildings, restaurants, and guesthouses. We saw a sign that said BOOKSTORE →, but we never got there because we met Max, an old Swiss hippie enjoying a smoke on a patio.

Max looked like Derek Smalls, the casual, contemplative bass player from the movie This is Spinal Tap.

Max talked about the 9-11 conspiracy, the failing War on Drugs, life in Switzerland, and the best places to stay on The Island. As he delved into topics such as remote-control planes crashing into Manhattan skyscrapers, I cut him off mid-sentence to ask about motorcycle rentals on The Island.
“No special permit required?”
“No, only your money and your passport. But your money, especially,” he laughed.

Back at the guesthouse it was lights out for Catfish and me. The next morning I awoke to geckos in my bag of banana chips.

Buddhist shrine near Trat city centre

Leaving The Village

Observations over the last month

A mobile phone is just a phone, a tool.

Life carries on even in the absence of Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Wal-Mart. The Village’s 7-11 store hasn’t put any street vendors (rot khen) out of business. Yet.

Small businesses are the engine of this community, and probably most of the country.

Lovers of muay thai coexist with kathoey lovers who coexist with monks, monkeys, roosters, scorpions, one-legged Germans, and rice farmers.

Balancing act