Japanic Attack 24.04.10

Whoever is planted in the Tao
will not be rooted up.
Whoever embraces the Tao
will not slip away.
Her name will be held in honour
from generation to generation.

Let the Tao be present in your life
and you will become genuine.
Let it be present in your family
and your family will flourish.
Let it be present in your country
and your country will be an example
to all countries in the world.
Let it be present in the universe
and the universe will sing.

How do I know this is true?
By looking inside myself.

Tao te Ching - Chapter 54

I’m completing this in the future and much has happened that colours my writing. I have contemplated what and how to write about Japan. I have come to a couple of conclusions. I am very likely to sound racist or culturist or something when I write about my observations and thoughts. I hope to be able to pre-empt your arriving at the conclusion that I dislike the Japanese. I don’t. I admire them greatly and am in awe of them and the way they conduct themselves individually and as a nation. One of the things that will influence my writing is my hunger. They say you shouldn’t go shopping on an empty stomach. I will posit that you also shouldn’t write commentary on an empty stomach. And I am always hungry in Japan except when I am feeling nauseated after eating a meal that didn’t agree with me – and that is not as infrequent as I would like. So while my writing has often been critical I have usually felt that it had enough bonhomie infused that it wouldn’t be mistaken for vitriol. I am not sure, because of the weird chemistry that my body is experiencing that I will not write something that parses as mean or dismissive. Please give me the benefit of the doubt. Japan is a mostly wonderful place with fantastic people.

Today, the 22nd, is our first full day in Tokyo. After we got to our hotel last night we dropped our bags in our room – well, closet would be more apt but I won’t get started on that just yet. By the time we got out of the hotel to seek sustenance it was about 9 pm. Amazingly as we walked along the main streets most restaurants seemed to be closed or closing. Oh oh. We were really hungry from a day of sitting in a plane, then on a train without anything but some noxious jelly-like sandwiches with catfood in them. I think Soph had the Salmon Supreme while I had the Seafood Delight. The indescribable desserts or perhaps ink blotters with bean paste that came with the airplane meal were passed over – sorry, I know it’s a sin to leave good food on the plate but I will use the word ‘good’ as my escape clause. So we are ravenous and in search of a delectable meal in one of the greatest cities in the world – and it’s closing up before our eyes. Suddenly a leisurely reconnoitre for comestibles shifts to a panicked jog looking for a place that a) doesn’t serve moist Whiskas on Wonderbread and b) still has its metal security door up. We found a little eatery off the main mall to a nearby temple. It promised grilled food which, while not exactly what we had in mind, seemed a pretty good second best.

Anyone who has visited Japan will know what I am referring to here but the first thing that happened when we ducked under the little flaggy thing that they hang in their doorways was a great expostulation of ohios and goyzimusses and other words. I thought they either mistook us for familiars because of the enthusiasm of their voices or that we had just happened in on a robbery and we were being told to flee before we became part of it. Nope, that is just what they do. It’s actually a charming custom that makes all patrons feel wanted and welcome. Except when you are just stepping in to look at a menu or ask if they serve anything that doesn’t have pork, it kind of makes you feel committed even though you were feeling pretty uncommitted. One time we stepped into an ‘Italian cafe’, Soph wanted coffee and I felt like tea. The maître’d looked offended to think that an Italian cafe would serve tea. Oops. That was our first brush with the sort of fascistic control they exert on their integrity as a particular type of restaurant. In other words, noodle shops are noodle shops, sushi are sushi/sashimi. Meat and nothing but meat if you get my drift. A vast array of restaurants might only yield one or two that are favourable to your (my) needs or tastes. Anyway, back to the tale...

The mood was quite congenial. We had a fractured conversation with one of the cooks who had spent a year in Vancouver. It was our first meal in Japan and we were working hard to recognize customs and protocols for ordering and eating. We selected a few dishes that appeared delicious and they were prepared right before us with a precision and artistry that was quite beautiful to watch. The portions were a bit small for our shrunken stomachs but we smiled politely and nibbled on our repast. I was thinking perhaps I should buy a magnifying glass so that while I eat I can imagine that I am eating a portion made for a human. Do you remember those toys you sent away for from comic books? One had a great sense of anticipation waiting for a battleship game with gigantic battleships as depicted in the cartoon illustration. Likewise (often) with Japanese portions. It took us a few days to realize that the stacks of food depicted on the 2” x 3” photos in the menus posted outside are actually 1:1 scale. Luckily my tongue rooted out a little shred of scallop stuck between my molars when I was exiting the restaurant and I increased my intake by 1/3. We had dropped $50 and were perhaps hungrier than when we entered because trying to pick up atom-sized pieces of food with chopsticks consumes an incredibly large number of calories. As a rule of thumb the only time that this portion deception doesn’t happen is when you order a bowl of something and it is a gigantic, greasy, way-too-salty, carb overdose of starch in a broth with a raw egg in the middle. Then you slug it down hoping to at least get back, calorically, to the low waterline mark on your stomach. Alas that wasn’t salt you fool. You have just gargled back a couple of canisters of Accent – and the MSG hallucinations start to kick in before you turn the first corner. Somebody get those visegrips off my temples!

So this is the first day. I am feeling kind of queasy from my first food experience but I am game. Once bitten and all that...out we venture after a night of a bizarre dream about a woman forcing a wolf into her womb. The streets are clean and orderly. Little flower pots and rocks with immense character are in the doorways of each residence and establishment we pass. People are out, bent over clipping tidy hedges and wee bits of foliage with nail scissors. The sidewalks are just a bit dangerous because they are shared with cyclists who, though they ride slowly, are as quiet as a ninja and only announce their presence with a bell when you can already feel them with your neck hairs. I never thought I would see anyone bow while riding a bike but I can now cross that off my to-do list.

We choose an Udon/Soba resto nearby. It’s cheap and the dishes look appetizing. It has a few patrons who are quietly reading or texting someone or SMOKING. We are confident that there will be some vegetable material in the bowl though it doesn’t seem to be visible in the photo. We step in – Ohio Goyzimus!es from three directions (ah, I’m starting to get used to this) and we sit down. One of the staff catches our attention and directs us to a large rectangular box by the door with about 150 buttons on it. We realize that we have to select our food from a machine and they will bring it to us. But we don’t read Kanji or Kana and there is no English so the fellow helps us choose – we point at our selections on the menu outside and he tells us the number that corresponds to the buttons inside. We drop in a few thousand yen and hey presto! It issues a little green ticket. We present him with a couple of these and he receives them very formally with arigatos and a bow and Bob will soon be our uncle.

Yikes! Salty and weirdly sweet noodles in MSG sauce with a raw egg in it. I am getting a bad feeling about this. Oh yeah, about the vegetables. Apparently they exist, just not for food. I think they are used for photographic purposes. They do eat some grown material but they generally have to subject it to strange torture like brine or salty pastes before they can eat it. (I have some photo evidence to be uploaded to facebook). Usually they also have to wrap it in plastic. As a remarkable contrast to the abundantly fresh and cornucopic markets we saw in Southeast Asia the Japanese markets smell like saran wrap and dried fish. Tiny portions of things are put out singly on shelves – a carrot for 100 Yen ($120), one hot-house tomato, same price. Five stalks of large asparagus $7. Is this a joke? Where is the soylent green? I am going to starve in this country. I am surrounded by hectares of restaurants and there is almost nothing I can either afford to eat or be able to digest. And only 27 days before I return to Canada. Can you hear the girding of my loin? I form a survival strategy that if I chew very thoroughly and eat small amounts my stomach will shrink and I won’t feel hungry. Useless theory – I discard it the next day when my growling stomach frightens an old woman on the subway train and she moves to a safer perch. She needn’t have worried; she looked much too stringy to eat though I considered it briefly. I am not getting enough calories to survive. New strategies include theft, eating shrubbery, eating paper and begging. Soon I start looking for whey powder in stores. I might as well be looking for deer in a shrine.

I will write a blog on shopping. It won’t be flattering but it has to be done.

Tale of Three Cities 23.04.10

It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times.

We needed to idle a few hours away before we left Phnom Penh. We walked to nearby Wat Phnom where we were surprised to see a large troupe of baboons. I think they are baboons. In any case there were lots of them and they liked to play/fight with each other. The first one I saw was an old Grandpa with breasts as big as mine who was nursing a nasty bite on his tail. It looked like it needed about 50 stitches but he was not likely to get attention. Apes sure can look sad – they have ‘depressed’ locked down in the expression department. There were a dozen or so juveniles tussling and rolling around on the grass. I got the impression that they liked the attention they were getting from me pointing my camera at them because they got more aggressive and intense as I stood and clicked. It started to turn into a monkey melee so I stopped and moved on. We visited the Wat temple, got our last taste of the strange brew of Hindu-tainted Buddhism (Buddha sitting on a dragon) and then meandered back to the hotel to meet our Tuk-tuk driver.

As we sat in the tuk-tuk on our way out of Phnom Penh I felt a weight lifting off my shoulders. I had arranged to get to the airport, uncharacteristically, about 3 hours early. The poverty and prostitution, the decay and deadbeat farang and the universal decrepitude of the old city all contributed to me unease about the place. – instead of wanting to stay and contribute something I wanted to flee.

We passed huge new government buildings along the road to the airport; gleaming marble and glass castles that probably represent the squandering of international loans and empire-building bureaucrats. It would have been nice to see Ministry of Health and Welfare but these were Departments of Security, Armed Forces, Military etc. We were jockeying with other tuk-tuks, bicycles, scooters that buzzed and dithered like sparrows around the large, glossy, black SUV crows. The underclass is huge here and the canyon that separates them from the uber-wealthy is enormous. The airport is clean, modern and of a nice scale.

Truth to tell we barely scraped Bangkok this time through. I scrambled through the immense Suvarnabhumi Airport trying to get a JR Rail pass for cheap train travel in Japan – you can’t get them in Japan, only outside – Contrary to Lonely Planet info the airport office wasn’t offering them and their downtown affiliate was closed because of the civil unrest. SOL. So we caught the shuttle to a nice airport hotel. We saw soldiers in fatigues with automatic rifles idling around barricades along the highway on and off ramps but the trouble seemed to be at a great remove. Downtown Bangkok was just a yellow glow in the distance. The decision not to stay downtown was just practical – the traffic is horrendous and it would have added hours to our commute. Another shuttle returned us to Suvarnabhumi Airport in the soft, blue morning light. Easy-peasy on to the plane and off from tropical climes to spring in Japan. We had missed cherry blossom time but were still looking forward to a more Canadian climate.

Japan didn’t disappoint. We arrived late afternoon and caught a train into Tokyo from Narita. It is a pretty long trip on the Limited Express(?) which was sort of like a GO Train, stopping along the way at some but not all stations - $20 cheaper than the high-speed. The trees were beautiful in the dimming dusk. It was raining gently and the viridians, Prussian blues and Nile greens laid against a Wedgewood blue sky blending to ultramarine were like a drink of cool, fresh water to our eyes that had been looking at dry, desiccated landscapes for nearly a month. Navigation was not too difficult. The wayfinding systems of Japan are usually very well designed. They have a notoriously amazing public transportation system. One of the first things we noticed when we rose out of the subway station on our street was the near absence of traffic. Either everyone takes public transit or this place is like something out of a John Wyndham novel – Day of the Triffids or The Midwich Cuckoos. The streets are eerily quiet. The silent, sturdy Toyota taxis are common enough but compared to the swarming, honking, weaving onslaught of motorbikes, scooters, tuk-tuks, taxis, cars, bicycles, Buses etc. of Southeast Asia we felt like we had fallen into a miniature train set. Perfect little trees were everywhere. Lines are straight, everything is tidy. We were disoriented with respect to north and south so we asked a mature woman on a bike at a street corner if she could help us orient. She spoke very good English and this first encounter lulled us, temporarily, into the illusion that communication was going to be a breeze. We had no idea what we had just gotten ourselves into but we were about to find out

Phnom Penh 19.04.10

In harmony with the Tao,
the sky is clear and spacious,
the earth is solid and full,
all creatures flourish together,
content with the way they are,
endlessly reapeating themselves,
endlessly renewed.

When man interferes with the Tao,
the sky becomes filthy,
the earth becomes depleted,
the equilibrium crumbles,
creatures become extinct.

The Master views the parts with compassion,
because He understands the whole.
His constant practice is humility.
He doesn't glitter like a jewel
but lets himself be shaped by the Tao,
as rugged as common stone.

Tao te Ching, Chapter 39

You know what you’re going into when you reach for the balcony doorknob and it’s almost too hot to touch. It’s 8 am. Open the door and suck in your first breath of the oven. Below motorscooters loaded with 3,4,5 riders buzz along under the young trees on the esplanade. The river shines like a ribbon of sun, doubling the blinding glare from the east. Last night’s troubling scenes of hookers and toddlers roaming the street in the orange sodium vapour light are cicatrice memory.

I fall back into the fluorescent glare of the tiny room, get dressed and descend to seek some food that doesn’t nauseate. Thailand, Lao and Vietnam were fantastic for food. The establishments weren’t always pin-clean but the food was lightly cooked and robust in complex flavour, texture and colour. In Cambodia I have begun to grow weary of the sameness of the heavy curries and the oily cooking. For the first time in months I am contemplating Western food.

As we walk out of the hotel a mid-30s Aussie fellow is leading a not-quite-young but gamefully smiling Cambodian woman up to his room. He winks archly at me. He’s hugging a few cans of Foster’s to his chest. I will see the pair the next morning at nearly the same time. They will be leaving the hotel. She will definitely not be smiling – appearing more a captive than a lover. He looks grim and tired, impatient. Although it is morning the flesh trade is 24/7 in Phnom Penh. The johns are fiercer looking here. Lupine ex-biker types with denim vests and long stringy grey hair. They sport formerly impressive arms with sagging tattoo work. They are often seen wearing bandages and grinning with hockey-star teeth. The game must be more volatile here. A half-crazy Brit was shouting at the young woman who tends the front desk. He said he’d been beaten and robbed. He looked the part but he might have blown his bundle in a binge. He stinks of beer-sweat and he’s abusively instructing her to get him a visa for Vietnam while accusing her of ripping him off. He says he’s down to his last $200 or so. Sounds desperate.

We find an English-style buffet down the road a bit. We load up listlessly with calories – tepid eggs and decent pineapple, chaser of strong coffee and we head out for the mandatory trip to S-21 or Tuol Sleng – the Pol Pot interrogation (torture) facility – and then to the Killing Fields. Suffice to say that the trip was often fragrant. Open sewage canals run parallel to and cross the road. Houses on stilts perch like drunken Herons over the scummy brown soup. For the 10,000th time I silently pray, ‘there but for the grace of God go I’.

Tuol Sleng is a grim place with palpable ghosts. The spare, nearly empty rooms of the former school building seem to echo with screams. Each classroom has a single iron frame bed placed in the centre – an article: manacles, chains, ammunition canisters rest on the bare bed surface as testimony to the room’s purpose. Some walls have a palimpsest of graffiti – a few have planks of wood painted green bearing faint traces of chalk that whisper school lessons from a better time. Ironic that these items look down upon the torture beds – Pol Pot was trying to pound Cambodia back to the stone age by eradicating knowledge and education. The visual experience of this is numbing but what stabs the soul is a gallery of photos of the doomed inmates of Tuol Sleng. They were mostly very young adults – almost children. They stare at the camera defiantly, angrily or displaying fear, uncertainty. Some are focused inwards, perhaps contemplating a strategy for survival or worrying about their siblings or relatives they have been parted from. Of the thousands that were processed here only a handful survived. Those few had skills such as bookkeeper or photograper that made them too useful to exterminate. The faces of these people brought the reality home where the ‘set-piece’ torture rooms could not. I will post a little photo essay in Facebook.

Then out to the Killing Fields as they call it. It is a former orchard where over 2,000 bodies have been exhumed though they haven’t dug through the better part of the property. A shrine displaying thousands of skulls and bones sorted according to estimated age are piled in a dusty glass case that ascends through the centre. Perhaps more disturbing are the glass cubes of half-rotted garments, many of them children’s clothing – if they killed the parents they murdered their infants. There are reports of soldiers swinging babies against trees. It is too horrible. Over a dozen shallow craters pock the earth making it appear like an enlargement of a golf ball. Many of the pits are near a large tree where loudspeakers were hung to play music that would drown out the screams and groans of the victims as they were being buried alive or brutally murdered. It is midday and the loud electric burr of cicadas is the tension track to the otherwise silent grounds. The crime that these men, woman and children committed was being upper or middle-class or being a professional, teacher or even for wearing glasses and therefore, potentially, being learned.

There are photos here too; taken during the four years of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime. They are displayed chronologically. Each successive year shows the victims in worse and worse physical shape. They were starving even though Pot had relocated most people from the cities to rural areas for farming. Many thousands would die after his ouster due to widespread famine. We are informed that several of the key perpetrators of this genocide are still being tried – their trials having now stretched into years. Only one of them has admitted guilt and been contrite.

On the trip back we are silent – space needed for processing. The eternal question – why does this keep happening?

Shell Crater 18.04.10

The Master has no mind of her own.
She works with the mind of the people.

She is good to people who are good.
She is also good to people who are not good.
This is true goodness

She trusts people who are trustworthy
She also trusts people who aren’t trustworthy
This is true trust.

The Master’s mind is like space.
People don’t understand her.
They look to her and wait.
She treats them like her own children.

Tao te Ching – Chapter 49

I’ll return to Siem Reap in a later blog. We spent five days there and I stood in awe of the creativity of man and the destructive power of time and nature. And at the destructive power of man and the creative power of time and nature.

We are in a bus heading south to Phnom Penh, once dubbed the Pearl of the Orient. Perhaps anus would be more appropriate now. No offence meant. The bus is jam-packed, which means the seats are all occupied and there are half a dozen young girls sitting on buckets in the aisle. The bus ride will last about six hours. The girls flagged the bus down on the highway and seemed to bargain with the driver for a few minutes – time for them to get back to school in Phnom Penh after Songkran. I am the only whiteface on the bus and I notice people are sneaking looks at me. I cannot guess what they are thinking. The young girl sitting on the bucket next to my seat tries to sleep. She has grabbed the armrest and wrapped her fingers around it. She has long, dark blue glossy fingernails and she sighs and presses her sleepy face into her knuckles. After an hour or so I remember that I have a long thick kromar (a traditional Cambodian scarf) in my bag so I fold it into a facsimile of a pillow and offer it to her. She accepts it without saying a thing but a smile briefly appears and there is a word in her eyes.

The highway is flat. The country is brown. How many times have I written the word dusty in these blogs. The sun is somewhere straight above in a sky that is cloudless but so uniformly bright that it feels more like fluorescent than directional light. The air conditioning is struggling. Every couple of hours the bus driver pulls into a rest stop and spends about 20 minutes flushing or filling something at the rear of the vehicle. Perhaps they use water for coolant. At one of the stops we clamber out of the bus to a smouldering-hot eating area under a metal roof. There are a few concession stands. One vendor is selling the much-anticipated cockroach-in-a-bun, without the bun – a few locals are sampling the delicacy. At another stop Sophie points to a lady with a bowl on her head offering another amuse-guele: fried tarantula. Mmmm-mmmmm! My stomach fails me and I decide that eating bugs isn’t going to be one of my tales.

All along the highway there are houses. For hours on end we pass a single defile of homes ranging from huts to block and brick houses that line the road. I suppose the farm properties extend back from the road like some seigneurial (?) system. I don’t know. The houses are tiny; squarish with thatch walls and often thin, rusty corrugated steel roofs. They are on sturdy stilts, probably 8 feet above the ground. Some are well kept with swept dirt yards and the obligatory chicken, rooster, chick trifecta. Dogs are everywhere and there seem to be a lot of white cattle. Not Brahmas, more like a western-looking animal but probably very drought tolerant. There are tall haystacks in many yards. I mean tall; maybe twenty feet. and varying greatly in shape despite their common constituency. There are tall cones or broad-shouldered boulders of the stuff with one or two or three lobes they appear like hairy cartoon monsters crouching just off the margin of the road - massive beasts squatting on low wooden palettes – why the palettes? Moisture prevention? To discourage snakes or rodents from nesting? Probably some reason I can’t even guess. It wasn’t until I saw a couple of those bucolic paintings by Millet in Tokyo (yes, I am well ahead of this journey in time and space but that is a different matter) that I suddenly realized why they seemed so familiar yet so strange. In those 19th century paintings Millet showed scenes of peasants with thick arms, blonde hair, white blouses and florid faces enjoying the simple bucolic life in the company of the same damn haystacks. We don’t see anyone languishing or raising a stein around these stacks and you can forget the autumnal fields and verdant hills. Too, there are properties whose yard is all at sixes and sevens a pick-up-sticks jangle of jerry-built coops ad pens and fences and God-knows-what. Bits and fragments of plastic lie everywhere like a bomb went off in a toilet paper factory.

I couldn’t take a successful picture of it from the bus but we passed miles of a table-flat land whose only feature was an infinitude of palm trees. They stood a good distance from each other. Against the brilliant hazy distance they appeared like black needles, each with a massive eagle’s nest of foliage at the crest. I thought they were like tall, frozen. anorexic mushroom clouds.. They spread across the horizon as far as the eye could see on a chessboard of fallow, dun rice fields. The visual effect was profound, like something other-worldly - maybe Biblical.

And then, incongruously, in a sudden flush of dense foliage there appeared a series of houses with clusters of gigantic white statuary out front. They must be artisanal businesses specializing in stone sculpture. There were lions and Buddhas in various stages of completion, some emerging like Michelangelo’s caryatids (but meditating, not struggling) from massive blocks of roughly quarried stone. The sight of these stark white forms after a numbing array of tawny, stilted houses came as a brief shock.

Has anyone ever written a thesis correlating the ratio of tread to riser as a indicator of a civilization’s consideration for the common man? I thought the stairs in ancient Angkor were a strange choice for royalty. They were perhaps 5 inches wide and anywhere from 10 to 20 inches high making for a challenging climb and a death-defying descent especially where they were broken or missing altogether (the Angkor buildings are to wheelchair accessibility is as Stephen Harper is to the Arts community). The stairs to these Cambodian farmhomes are likewise very steep. There aren’t any faces to the risers per se, just treads that vary from a series of narrow planks or bamboo to a solid piece of wood. The stairs are often painted bright colours, blue, yellow and green. Some have handrails. How do the elderly and the crippled climb up and down? There are no icebergs for the feeble to be set out upon. What is the tropical equivalent of death by ice floe? Probably just death.

Many hours and impromptu stops later Phnom Penh rises like a mirage in the waxy fug. At first it is white and modern looking but as we become more engaged in the urban core I see the same stuff as in the poorest of the cities we have visited. Ruined sidewalks and tangles of electrical wires, walls with mould and mildew and a nicotine haze of half-burnt fuel. People walking, working and sitting wherever you look. The constant cacophony of horns and poorly tuned engines. It is poor. We are told that in Siem Reap most workers are paid approximately $25 per week. That’s a good meal for two with beer in one of the tonier restos that are common in the downtown tourist track – and a fraction of the price of one night’s stay in one of the Tourist Hotels that line the road from the airport. Tuk-tuk drivers rent their machines here by the day. It will cost them $5 to sit on a corner and harass the passers-by. They may or may not get one ride a day. In this season tourists are outnumbered by tuk-tuk drivers by a sizeable margin.

In the old city it is crumbling decay with rank, fetid smells and soot-blackened windows – a patina of grime around things that people touch – doorknobs, handles and tables. When we first arrive there is a scrum of tuk-tuk drivers at the bus station. They were literally climbing over each other to get the attention of the handful of passengers who seemed inclined to hire a ride. We chose a fellow with an honest face. His name was Mony and he was ecstatic to have won the short contract for $3. Like the approximately 2000 drivers that we would encounter in the next three days he asked us if we wanted to visit the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng – the one-way ticket internment facility from Pol Pot’s reign of terror. There seem to be four things that one can see in Phnom Penh: The aforementioned, the Russian Market and the Royal Palace. The drivers offer up this menu like a little ditty. Running the gauntlet of drivers is like passing through a forest of birds all chattering the same song.

Our hotel was depressing - one of the recommends from Lonely Planet – ostensibly charming because of its proximity to the river. A word of advice to fellow travellers: if you absolutely have to visit Phnom Penh do yourself a favour: avoid the hooker bars and shabby hotels of the Riverside – at least near Wat Phnom. I don’t know where good accommodation can be found but it ain’t here.

Phnom Penh pretty much stopped my writing until now. I felt like I fell into a shell crater and some part of my wit and words got left there. Each time I ascended to our humble room I climbed up the musty-carpeted concrete stairs with unusually high risers and short treads I thought of the short, brutish life of the common folk back in the ‘Golden Age’ of the Khmer Empire, the horrible fucking-over the Cambodians took under Pol Pot and the onerous and dysfunctional life that most citizens experience today. The way up is steep and tiring; the descent might be lethal.

Rail Travel – Part 3 Bangkok to Aranya Prathet 15.04.10

Fame or integrity: which is more important?
Money or happiness: which is more valuable?
Success or failure: which is more destructive?

If you look to others for fulfillment
you will never truly be fulfilled.
If your happiness depends on money,
you will never be happy with yourself.

Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.

Tao te Ching, Chapter 44

We decided to take a train from Bangkok to the Cambodia border. It was a broiling hot morning already. I have no doubt that many Thais were already frying eggs on the sidewalks as we sidled around the antique Terminal. I looked around the cavernous hall for signs of dreaded redshirts but aside from some red hot chilli pepper Hawaiian-variety shirts there were a statistically puzzling absence of red shirts. I suspect that people generally didn’t want to be mistaken for the troublemakers but I am guessing.

With a few hours to kill before getting on the train Soph and I decided to take a walk around the neighbourhood to check out the local scene. There is a law written somewhere about environs adjacent to train terminals in developing nations. The ambience is generally of a downmarket variety if you catch my drift. There was a paucity of anything remotely like a restaurant or store that one would want to look into but we went offroad as it were into some sketchy looking alleys and lanes. There is rich life there, people cooking; eating at rough looking food stalls, Butchers chopping meat in the fly-riddled heat, men tinkering with small motors, women laundering and many people languishing in the brutal oven of Bangkok in April. The omnipresent funk of charcoal and rotten vegetables; a strange admixture of delicious meat and spice and the noxious fug of septic lines.

Then we headed off to a nearby temple to pay a visit to the Golden Buddha Temple. Goldie is an especially revered one and he resides in a lovely confection of white marble a few blocks from the station. This large-ish fellow has a generous beak, much more birdlike than most Buddhas we’ve visited. He confers great luck on those who pray to him and his temple was packed with busloads of Thais and foreigners trying to snag a piece of kismet by stuffing money into all available donation boxes, firing up clutches of joss sticks and placing garlands of exquisitely rich lilies-of-the valley on the alters.

There is something perversely thrilling about the prospect of taking one’s sandals off in the blaring sun on shiny black marble floors. Bets are on whether the soles of your bare feet stay stuck to the stone after a quick sauté sans lubrication. One is tempted to feel positively yogi-like after stoically waltzing over the surface betraying no distress despite the searing pain.

Back at the station and I had bought a couple of tickets for the border. I was pleased that they were only $3 per but my Scottish DNA had clearly interfered with my logic center – that’s just too little to pay for a train ride. It turns out that there is only one train to Aranya Prathet and that is a 3rd Class coach. We got to the platform with about 15 minutes to spare; there is no reserve seating and we wanted to be in a good spot in queue so we had our choice of seat. Queue? What a maroon! What a gullibull! The platform was filling but there were no queues, just a maelstrom of Thais anxious to return to their home villages to celebrate Songkran, their New Year. Soph and I were labouring with our heavy backpacks and other bags and we were easily pushed back by the mob that was growing exponentially by the minute. We were bounced to and fro like Brazillian beach volleyballs. Child’s play. As hard as we pushed we were like asthenic salmon migrating in turbulent water. We made negative progress for about ten minutes and were last to board except for an elderly blind crippled gentleman who I neatly sideswiped with my backpack. Have at you! I learned years ago in St.Peter’s square on Good Friday that short people have great advantage in crowds, they somehow squeeze in and under the elbows no matter how viciously you whack at them. Those satanic nuns were the worst – killer penguins who nearly crushed me into a spot of ointment on the Vatican grounds. Those robes conceal great rippling sinews of ropelike muscle. The eldest are surely the cruellest – they would put most Australian Rules Football players in hospital in minutes. I had fantasies of returning the next year with Ben-Hur chariot wheel blades fixed into knee guards to get them as good as they give.

When the dust settled Soph and I were standing in the aisle of (another) poachingly hot coach. The train sat on the tracks for half an hour before it crept forward in a cruel, teasing game of psychological terror. After a sweltering hour and a half of travel a woman got off and graciously offered Sophie her seat, For a little more than 3 hours I stood, balancing on the grimiest hand-ring that you could possibly imagine. There were faint traces of its former whiteness but you had to use imagination. All was good though – I know now and so do a few unfortunate strangers that my sweat glands are all in perfect working order and I have a lovely Popeye lower arm muscle from dangling on the swaying train. We purchased some ice coffee from a vendor on one of the stations along the way – of course it was a milk run, stopping at every cluster of houses from Bangkok to the border – after I gulped my icy brew down (I was falling asleep holding on to the ring and was concerned about collapsing on one of my neighbours) I suddenly awoke to the fact that the ice used was most certainly not sterile. Ah, the prospect of a nuclear gut on a washroomless train – enticing?

The ride was actually a great experience: I played peek-a-boo for about half an hour with a little Thai child who must have thought I was the strangest creature she had ever seen and we had a very simple conversation with a young woman and her boyfriend who was...of course, a redshirt. Actually a nice enough guy. There are shit-disturbers and militants in the organization but I also think there are young people who somehow believe that, (speaking of Tenshin(?)) ‘he’s bad but not really bad’ and that his being elected represents their only prospect for the rural poor getting some much needed money. They are more than willing to overlook the fact that he siphoned off billions of Baht when he was Finance Minister.I am told that he controls all the media because of his wealth so all the new reports are favourable to the ‘plight of the redshirts’ but the people we talked to were not buying what he is selling. We felt we had had a great exposure to the common Thais – something that won’t happen on Khaosan Road or in an Airport Terminal.

The countryside was quite beautiful heading east to the border. There are distant rounded mountains that look like bodies hiding under a green blanket. There are extensive tree and bamboo plantations and the fields seem to be impatiently waiting for rainfall. The land levels to table-flat along the way, with brick-red soil seamed by occasional canals, many with very low water levels. The train chugged on, lessening its load until it got to the border where the last few dozen got off. We descended into a melee of tuk-tuk drivers all shouting to draw attention. It would have been like falling into the mosh of the TSE trading pits in days of yore.

We were told that the Thai/Cambodia border is a tough go. One has to be alert to touts who pretend to be customs people or travel agents who provide bus service to Siem Reap, but will just take your money and disappear. We were too late to get across the border that night so we rented a tuk-tuk and sailed into the charming little town of Aranya Prathet. I have written a blog called Sign Language that describes what we witnessed that night at their Songkram celebration.

There is perhaps one thing worse than trusting everyone in this world and that would be trusting no one. She who is centered in the Tao can go wherever she wants without danger

I Hate it When She's Right 11.04.10

On traveling days sometimes timing is everything. Well, let’s admit it, in life timing is everything. I was SO SURE that I knew which ferry we were supposed to get on this morning. The whole ordeal had, as usual, begun roughly. We were packed and ready on schedule, waiting for the 10 am taxi to the port town on Koh Phanang. Except, ooops!, they had canceled the 10am taxi. We didn’t understand that ‘10 AM Daily Taxi – wait here’ carried an option. So I quickly sprung into action (that is like bre’r wolf pullin’ on the old tar baby in my current energy state – you could hear the gears grind). Miraculously, within a few minutes I had secured a ride from a local for less than the Hotel taxi (yay!). Meanwhile Soph – by not lifting a toe, had arranged a cheaper ride yet from one of the staff (boo!). But I had actually contracted mine so up the road we staggered to meet it – full packs 35 degree heat, 100% humidity (boo!). The truck was air conditioned (yay!) but she was doing a laundry run and pulled into a few places to pick up or drop off – threatening to make us miss the ferry through lateness. (boo!)

When we got to the ferry dock there was no signage, no information about which ferry and where among a few wharfs, one was to meet it. There were about 150 tourists milling about. A large ferry slid into the next wharf and unloaded its manifest but no one moved from our little pen of people so I ASSUMED (that’s called a setup) that it was not ours. Sophie wanted me to check but I swept my arm around, ‘Do you think everyone here is wrong?’ You’ll have guessed the punchline. Several minutes later they raised the huge iron door and were just casting off when a lady I showed my ticket to pointed to the boat, now spewing gouts of black smoke and revving its engines, churning up the harbour surface. ‘Run fast!’ she urged. I whistled, shouted and waved my scrawny white arms,probably looking, from those lofty decks like some pallid insect scuttling across the wharf. There was an exchange of shouts – In Thai of course – I couldn’t tell if they were saying ‘Hurry up, get going. they’re almost here!’ or ‘Wait for the stupid Farang,’ A stevedore smiled benignly at us, nodding, and the Friendly Giant drawbridge dropped to receive us (yay! We win!)

Disaster narrowly averted but Sophie is staring at me through sceptical eyes, critical that I didn’t heed her suggestion. And, the really hard part; she’s right, dammit.

Of course the real punchline is ‘Be careful what you wish for’, because one thing always leads to another, and so the next 24 hours were less amusing than gruelling.

Sign Language 15.04.10

Touring in Asia is much more challenging than Europe I think. Probably the most significant factor is language. I’ve said previously that tone-based languages are very tough for me. The alphabet is different in every country and I can only usually understand a few character sounds. Different too are the expressions and nuance of body language. There are facial and body signs that I am certain I am misinterpreting (or waitresses are particularly stony here). Some cultures here use ‘face’ to create visual red-herrings. So trying to get enhanced understanding by watching for signs is problematic.

One activity we have tried to engage in is watching live performance. Folk Dance and Classical Dance are popular here – especially in Cambodia and Thailand. During Songkram celebrations – the Thai New Year – we watched an elaborate and complicated staging of the Ramayana Epic (We think it was that anyway). Many gilt and glitter-encrusted actors appeared stage left, sang, wooed or duelled and then departed stage right. Lacking language and any meaningful understanding of the saga we were left without context, swimming in a spectacle of, what seemed to us, highly repetitious action and stage-craft. As soon as one cluster of lover/sibling/parent/enemy/wrathful God Creature left the stage another would appear from the left. After an hour or so of watching the theatrical equivalent of a Flintstone interior with Fred chasing Barney around (lamp, door, window, lamp, door, window etc.) we retired, not much the wiser but enriched somewhat. Later, in Siem Reap we attended an Apsara performance. Apsaras are those angelic dancing figures that are to be found everywhere on Khmer structures in ancient Angkor. They employ very formalized hand, arm, neck, head, foot and leg (torso?) to narrate and express the content of their dances. Most dances are apparently expressions of thanks, praise, courtship and fealty. To our eyes it is beautiful and evokes thoughts of ancient times and circumstance. We can enjoy the artistry and elegance but it lacks much emotionality because we have no comprehension of the significance or the meaning of the gestures which to the Cambodians have such profound resonance and familiarity.

These thoughts crystallized as I was visiting a silk manufacturer in Siem Reap. I entered a quiet workspace where young adults were engaged in various phases of hand-painting on silk. They seemed to be working with deliberation and focus. Then I saw two of the artisans sign to each other. I looked up and there was a Thai chart for sign language correlating hand gestures with alphabetical characters. I realized suddenly that conversations were in fact happening all around and this was a training center for deaf artists. Lacking the skill or language I was unable to participate or comprehend the conversation but ‘words’ were silently flying all around me.

We blunder through the world using sound as our primary medium of communication. Yet there is much more abundant information available to us in subtle conscious and unconscious forms. The vocabulary of facial and gestural nuance is often cultural though there are many universal expressions. I remember reading that a New Guinea aboriginal people perceived a forced smile as a sign of aggression. So they summarily killed all the first Westerners who showed up. Higher primates flex their eyebrows when they meet another ape they recognize. I often smile when I catch myself arching my eyebrows when I encounter someone familiar – that is hardwiring my friend! We raise our hand in greeting – historically, we are told, we did this to show we carried no weapon. Scratch the surface.

But anger, frustration, insult, nervousness might be expressed differently in the countries we are visiting. There are enough ambiguities and mismatches that it generates a wariness when engaging the local people. What is lost, mangled and perverted by our mutual inabilities to communicate fluidly with each other? What fantastic things might be gained if we could break Babel and truly connect?

The one thing I am certain of: when two strangers meet - regardless of age, gender, culture, nationality or religion – a sincere smile, with crinkled eyes and a gentle opening of spirit, sent across space means ‘I see you, namaste’. And that means everything.

Rail Travel - Part 2 13.04.10

Travelling by train in many countries is, for me, a slightly embarrassing experience. The discomfiture is a sort of sympathetic reaction to the indignity that one is witness to. It seems that most people focus their attention, when presenting a public face – property-wise that is, on the front of their dwellings. So rail lines, which often proceed through the backs of properties and in the tangled and neglected public marginalia that most people don’t spend time or imagination upon, give us visual access to the arse end of things. To put it crudely, it’s like inadvertently glimpsing someone’s soiled underpants. At once one wants to turn away but the damage is done.

As we travel from Surat Thani, winner of the 2004 Homeliest City in Thailand Dingy Award (see Facebook entry soon to be published) , we pass countless rural and urban properties. There is a kind of sameness and a kind of uniqueness to each one. The cast of props includes but is not exclusively: very large jars which are cisterns used for holding potable (?) water – they are of Scheherezadian proportions; each one would hold about 15 thieves and a donkey or an Aladdin. There are usually four to six of these at the front or side of the house . There is a clump of fruit bearing trees either at the side or back – commonly coconuts or bananas but we have seen mangoes and tamarind (I think). There will be laundry on a line or frame somewhere, a bench, a smoking fire – perhaps a steel drum barbecue or a rusted metal box. The house might be mean – woven thatch or coco leaf walls on 8 foot poles of stripped tree or they might be fancier – stuccoed block or brick with bright green or pink walls and white trim. Dogs will be lying in the precious shade, often in clusters – they seem to like each other’s company – and who doesn’t? We will roll on past these iterations of domesticity.

There are an extraordinary number of people in Asia. This will sound absolutely banal to some of you but I am constantly struck by the number of people. Everywhere. People and people and people. There are incredible numbers of kids. Babies in hammocks, infrants sandwiched in between parents on motorscooters. toddlers squatting in the dirt and babes hanging on to mom or dad or grandmom. children by fires, youngsters by cisterns, kids chopping sticks with machetes, kids kicking dust at other kids. Kids on their way to school and on their way home. Kids trying to flog some useless book or set of postcards or trinket. Kids begging. The population of Asia is frighteningly huge. All along the rail lines we see families at their homely chores. It looks like some kind of Playmobile fiction or overpopulated Richard Scarry storybook it is all such a set piece. You might drive along a highway for an hour and not find a stretch of road longer than 300m that has no house on it. Usually houses are quite close to one another, not more than 50 feet, often less.

If you look carefully you will see people in almost every house. People sitting, reading, mending or tinkering, people resting, sleeping or pacing. Are the houses much more transparent? Yes, in a way because they are often open to the street. One can see into homes that are like little theatres where countless dramas are being played out every day, hour by hour. Perhaps it is not polite to look into a home but I have been doing so. I am fascinated by life here. Babies and men and women in their senescence and everything in between. The scenes are so human. Instead of saran-wrapped life in tight houses life flows out and around and spreads everywhere. I have hundreds of photos of people taken from tuk-tuks and buses, motorcycles and walking. I don’t know why I take them. I am trying to solve this feeling. Perhaps more about that in a later blog.

As we roll from rural to exurban to urban along the steel ribbon we begin to make more stops. It is still early day and people are lined up at crossings, waiting on their scooters and bikes and on foot. We begin to pass stations with large platforms filled with food stalls or selling other goods, each vendor offering pretty much the same as his or her neighbour. We see happiness and joy on faces but also fatigue and pain. It’s life, but nothing like ours in Canada.

Soon shanties and crude houses crowd right up to the track in places. Corrugated galvanized sheets are feathered together to make a shelter. We are moving along at reduced speed so for a split second you see a frame of people’s lives. They are often less than twelve feet away so there is a quality of intimacy despite the fact that their image is riffling by like playing cards. Snapshot Intimacy . A mnemonic token of retinal persistence. Dark and disorder is everywhere. Families are sitting at a simple breakfast, an old woman is stirring a black iron pot over a charcoal brazier. You smell food and coalsmoke hanging in the air. The smells flicker by too. Garlic, oil, lime, meat, smoke and spice.

The walls are scabbed together wood, plastic sheeting, vinyl signs with torn images of politicians? Actors? Smiling babies. Proclaiming something. Selling something sometime in the past, now providing shelter from sun, rain, wind, dust. Glass windows are uncommon; as often as not they are broken shards of glass in reclaimed windows kluged into the chaotic walls. These people live with trains in their lives. In waking, sleeping, argument, celebration, illness and childbirth there are trains clacking, squeaking, thundering by at intervals possibly known to them in body memory. The western mind (mine) thinks: germs, spoiled and rotten food, flies, disease.

Blaring light and what seems like silence in comparison to the fierce aural reflection of the shanties. Space suddenly leaps open and we are 30 metres from newish concrete block buildings. Leprous jigsaw sheaths of gaudy laundry, antennae, dead plants, piles of plastic bottles, junk. Dead vines hang like discarded fisherman’s nets from the crazy musical staff of electrical wires stretched approximately from pole to pole. We return to a shanty town but this one has been mauled by something. All the houses adjacent to the track are levelled, or nearly all, somehow some residents have resisted the bulldozers for now. They cook or launder, sweep the rubble from here to there for God’s sake - or idle in their half-ruined homes as if nothing unusual had happened. We see rebar and wood forms, they are building some aerial pathway here – will it be another Skytrain or another Rama superhighway? Bangkok has horrible traffic problems but they are fighting to modernize, trying to peg lengths of highway into the old matrix. Curiously, though the dwellings are demolished the ubiquitous temples - the votives house that grace every dwelling no matter how humble, where each family offers gifts of fruit, juice, sugar, candy, flowers or incense - are still standing, so amid the rubble and wrack there is a golden, red, green or white pagoda, resplendent by comparison. What do the Gods make of this desecration? Is it superstition, custom or respect that prevents the wreckers from demolishing these proxy houses?

Slowly grinding into the Bangkok Train Terminal. It is right out of the Leninist Russia – once noble or at least with a conceit of grandeur it too has rusted and carbonized and looks kind of lethal – tetanus and trench mouth. Gotta get out of this town. The redshirts are rioting we are told (mostly by our relatives). In fact its pretty quiet here but we want out. Out to the other side, to Cambodia, Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. It seems logical to book a train passage rather than try to go a klick or two to the bus station in morning rush hour. Next instalment: Don’t Take the Train to the Cambodia Border.

Rail Travel 12.04.10

We are travelling, in two sprints, along the rail lines in Thailand, on our trip from Surat Thani to Bangkok at night and thence to Aranya Prathet which sits on the Thai-Cambodia border. The first train we booked was a sleeper, second-class, which we were told by many travellers, was a very satisfactory experience. While it was significantly better than the Vietnamese variety it was somewhat less than luxe. The linens were clean and the car quite well maintained so I should have nothing to complain about. But then I wouldn’t be me would I? The coaches seem to date back to the sixties; white-grey arborite tables and vinyl tile on the floors, square chrome legs and supports custom-designed to bark the sturdiest shin. Surfaces have been scoured, cleaned and re-cleaned until the black substrate is revealed – so while they are clean they appear quite dirty.

The night was reasonably uneventful. I took the smaller, upper bunk, hoping to be mistaken for a mensch and looking to earn brownie points or Karma. There are stiff rubberized canvas curtains that shield each occupant from the thirty or so others that share the coach in common. Please God let it be Sophie who snores loudly tonight. Note to self: upper berth’s curtains don’t go all the way up to the ceiling to block the light from the 6000 watt fluorescent fixtures, so are ideal if one likes bagging z’s on tanning tables, otherwise just a tad too bright. I am not one of your seasoned railway sleeper specialists so, just an aside to others who probably know better, when sleepers are arranged with human head to toe aligned with the length of the coach the rocking motion of the train is much more intense than when they are arranged perpendicular to the rails. I only mention this because I had noted the vertical straps attached from ceiling to bases of bed to prevent one’s rolling out during the night and smacking down a good 6 or 7 feet later onto hard floor. At the time I thought it highly unlikely that those straps would be necessary but a night at sea on the sleeper convinced me otherwise. Not recommended to those with stomach motility issues.

In the morning we woke around 6 or so and felt restless, we’d been in bunk since about 9 the night before. Soph suggested that we walk up to the dining car. Again, several people we have met in our travels said they food weas good and cheap. We had visions, or at least I did, of cutlery and china, maybe not Spode, but, you know, plates and such.

The trek was like changing channels near the mystery/horror/sci-fi region of cableville. Each car had a different and surprising appearance. We first went through first-class sleeper, which appeared to have more linen though I couldn’t really see much difference. It felt brighter and cooler in that car – I froze my ass off in ours so no points scored. Those lazy first classers were barely stirring - upper class twits to a man I say. Rubbing their eyes and making big yawning noises, blinking at the interlopers who should have had more sense and climbed alongside the outside of the car rather than disturbing them. Picture them with colourful sleeping masks with cute animals stitched into them.

We crossed the treacherous funhouse threshold to the next car, straight into a roaring, clattering Sahara. The air was stiflingly hot even though the windows were open – I forgot to check if the glass was tempered to be able to resist the blast-furnace heat. The chairs were arranged airplane style, in rows facing backwards at the rear end, then reversing to forward. The occupants had spent the entire night sitting (basting) in naugahyde recliners, no drip-pans Richard. They looked absolutely spent; with a febrile sheen to their skin - it felt like walking into a cholera ward. Many wore sunglasses because it was so bright – there were no curtains nor berths to block the blaring morning sun that shone horizontally through the car like some infinitely long explosion – which I guess it is in fact. Some clients looked at us curiously; probably few farang venture this far into the heart of darkness.

When we arrived at the dining car it initially seemed like a cruel joke. The passage seemed blocked by a wall, but it was the kitchen taking the lion’s share of the car, a narrow corridor led around a blind corner to our Eden. Well, not precisely the Biblical description; a couple of sweat-stained officers are sitting, smoking cheroots or Marlboros. One is talking in a voice so loud it would shake the windows if they weren’t already banging back and forth from the rough rails. The aforementioned arborite tables are fastened to one wall. The walls are that horrendous green that is the universal symbol for vomit. It’s the green one sometimes sees just before blacking out. We modified our imaginary order of steaming porridge or noodle soup to coffee served in mismatched chipped mugs. Still, Marj would call that an adventure.

And so we returned to our sleeper car for a few more hours before Bangkok. The early morning mists were long ago burnt off and the fields were grey and dry though everywhere the trees bore verdant foliage: palms and banana trees, jackfruit, mango and many deciduous types that seem to be cultivated in vast tracts, pin-straight and limbless for perhaps 25 feet, they stand, ordered like soldiers – a dense clump of green rests like a bearskin cap at their crests. Rainy season is still a month or so off I believe so this is the driest season and the general appearance can be summed up in one word, dusty.

Sanctuary 05.04.10

If you want to shrink something,
you must first allow it to expand.
If you want to get rid of something,
you must first allow it to flourish.
If you want to take something
you must first allow it to be given.
This is called the subtle perception
of the way things are.

The soft overcomes the hard.
The slow overcomes the fast.
Let your workings remain a mystery.
Just show people the results.

Tao te Ching – Chapter 36

On the left hand corner of the modest beach in Haad Thien, on the south-eastern corner of Koh Phangnan there is a cozy little spa nestled into the age-softened boulders and coconut palms. It is chocolate-brown with a thatched roof and its rooms are open to the sea and sky. At first it seems a perfect idyll. From the various levels of the cool restaurant/bar one looks out into a lovely horseshoe bay with steep headlands of charcoal-grey rock. The trees are full of the electrical, buzzing whitenoise burr of cicadas and sharp, sometimes screechy, sometimes melodic birdsong. Occasionally you hear the moop-moop of macaques that forage invisibly in the treetops. There are many kinds of tall trees and the gardens are dense with flowers – hibiscus, amaryllis and many species I can’t name. The beach slopes comfortably to the sapphire sea as benign rollers crush themselves on the shore with a steady, soothing rhythm. The beach is mostly made of crumbly coral fragments; twigs and chunks of white coral bits – walking on it feels like it would if you walked on Lucky Charms cereal ( a LOT of the cereal). You can mould the coral duff nicely to make a meditation cushion for a bit of silent contemplation of the perfect view. The air is deliciously warm with a nice feathery breeze wafting in. Perfect. Eden.

I am reminded from time to time that my blogging has swung often to the critical side of my experience. Mea culpa. I suppose that, like the evening news, the notable, uncomfortable, remarkable things in life get the most attention. So, in an attempt at balance I will state that Thailand is simply beautiful. This won’t come as a surprise to most. But its geography and climate, its natural endowment of heart-tugging beauty and the incredible work of its people especially notable in its religious and state buildings and artistry are profoundly moving to experience. The weather has been excellent – usually a hot but not torrid 25 – 30 C and though a bit of rain might have been nice (I would love to see Bangkok during monsoon – makes me throb just to imagine it) who can complain about such perfect conditions? (besides me of course).

Sure there have been a few nasty moments along the road but that’s just pepper for the dish right? Gotta have spice to accentuate the sweet. We have met some kind and gentle souls along the way. Travel makes many people more open and sharing – of experience, consideration and advice.

In The Sanctuary, a place that offers yoga, meditation, cleanse-diets, even colonic irrigation for Pete’s sake, I anticipated a sort of Erewhon experience of good nature, openness, you know, granola gentility. Instead, from the moment we made landfall I have detected a palpable chill from the clients. Almost everyone averts the gaze as if we are all spectres sharing the same space but not the same time. It’s almost a shock I feel as the ‘cut direct’ is repeated wherever we go. (the management, a lovely German couple with a sweet, earthy little girl, are very nice). In Eden, it seems, the serpent has started to whisper. We start to theorize about this. There is negative energy here – the vibe is wrong. For one thing the layout is weird, the paths aren’t intuitively laid out and one keeps finding oneself turned around or in the wrong place. The bungalows don’t relate well to each other – they’re sort of higgledy-piggledy and face in the wrong directions. Could that be it or is it just strange chemistry. The world shows up as a mirror, perhaps we have arrived with the wrong energy. In any case, after a few days nothing changes, so it’s time to move on.

There were some nice moments at Haad Thien. We walked up to some bungalows managed by a gentle fellow. He had a tiny monkey that fastened himself to Sophie, wanting nothing at all to do with me. The owner said he only likes women. He protested with screams when he was finally pried off Sophie’s shoulder. There was a beautiful, tame hornbill that perched calmly atop structures nearby, one of the residents tossed fruit up maybe 20 feet to the bird which elegantly caught it in its long, narrow bill – a lovely ballet of sympathetic action. I created a few illustrations in coral on the beach. I am a bit starved for creative expression. The photography experience, or photo-ops as Soph calls them, is nice but I really miss my guitar and playing with friends. Live music is altogether missing here except for a strange night of Thai Blues back in Chiang Mai.

Back by Longtail to Haad Rin, the scene of Bacchanalia under the full moon, back up the serpentine coastal highway to Thong Sala in search of something that fits the soul. We don’t have a destination, just a desire for a better groove. In the taxi we meet Aly, a British woman who has spent the last three months in Haad Thien getting her yoga certification. She says that she got the same feeling about The Sanctuary; never felt comfortable there. There were a group of nice people who left, like monarch butterflies. for Bali a few days earlier and the spirit of the place sort of soured after that. So our sentiments are confirmed but not explained. She recommends a beach on the northeast corner called Haad Mae Haad - thither we go.

The beach is more generous there. Talcum powder soft. There is a coral reef that is easily accessed by a narrow isthmus that connects the village to a tiny island, Ko Mah, just 300 metres or so offshore. We splurge($30/day) on a beachfront bungalow and immediately connect with a couple who have rented the next cabin. Laughter and interesting stories form the soundtrack of a shared dinner at a delicious little eatery nearby.

So it goes. It is so difficult to know if it’s one’s personal energy or the invisible working of the Tao that flows effortlessly or not at all with an infinite array of influences. Both are one.

I am finally, after many weeks of trying, able to connect with my mom on Skype. I’ve missed her daily phone calls mightily since I left Toronto and I suspect she feels the same. Balance, loving sentiments and ease are restored. Hi mom.

Bus to Surat Thani 04.04.10

She who is centered in the Tao
can go where she wishes, without danger.
She perceives the universal harmony,
even amid great pain,
because she has found peace in her heart.

Music or the smell of good cooking
may make people stop and enjoy.
But words that point to the Tao
seem monotonous and without flavour.
When you look for it there is nothing to see.
When you listen for it there is nothing to hear.
When you use it, it is inexhaustible.

Tao te Ching - Chapter 35

Live and learn. We read in guides that many tourist agencies that arrange for bus trips in these countries are often overpromising and underdelivering. And so it was with our bus trip from Bangkok to Surat Thani on the east coast of southern Thailand. We had arranged a VIP bus which typically means comfortable chairs, air conditioning and an on-board WC. The vehicle had wheels and windows but aside from that it failed to measure up to all other specs – it had a WC but the plumbing seemed to be running the wrong direction. A sleepless, smelly, hot and stuffy bus ride may not rival the discomforts of travel in the 19th or earlier centuries but we spoiled westerners are not accustomed to really tortuous treatment. Perhaps that is overstating it a bit but, combined with the customary games of chicken that these vehicle drivers love to engage in, experiencing 12 or so hours of these privations can make one a bit testy. I wasted several hours in the wee hours plotting revenge on the travel agents who stuck us on the Beelzebub Express. I should have slept. For who profited from my anger and blame? Not I.

But, paying heed to the Tao, I am reminded to be more equanimous (this is several days after the trip so I can afford to take the long view). Small miseries make the achieved goal much sweeter I think. One wants to feel one is moving toward a special experience. This flies in the face of Buddhist teachings which tell us that living for the future or dwelling in the past are sources of suffering - one of the most difficult things to keep in balance when one is on the road, in search of adventure and meaning (and comfort), is being in the present.

When I pull up some positive memories from the ride: we passed some incredible things in the night – a tremendously large Wat loomed above us on a hillside. In the middle of the night a towering golden Buddha statue rose like some miraculous vision, high above, surrounded by inky black. A gibbous moon rose and hung over the wrinkled sea, casting down its pearly path while we sped past market stalls with intense fluorescents displaying beautiful mangoes, papayas, bananas, fish and raw meat (contrast). We passed a truck full of cattle - a few young men rode in the back of the van, swinging in hammocks or clambering up and down ladders while the truck hurtled along – probably an age-old vision here but quite striking to my eyes. Dawn found us in a flyblown bus terminal, with nothing edible on offer, at the margin of a brackish canal. There were the requisite flea-bitten dogs with running sores and spotty noses knocking each other about in the cool(er) grey-blue air. The locals were surly and not one of them could answer my hostile questions about whether our bus was a VIP one (they all lost their ability to understand English when I cornered them). For all this it was picturesque in a sort of Old West kind of way. One can choose to see character or homeliness – it’s just a state of mind. Can I perceive the universal harmony?

The day continued to go badly; after about an hour we were bundled back on to the bus and we drove for another hour and a half back up the highway to a ferry wharf. We waited there in the now-smouldering sun for another hour until a few more tourist buses showed up. This was not part of the charter we had agreed to. Positive experiences were: watching three dolphins, two of them albino, swim calmly about, hunting fish, only a few yards from the wharf. Dark, lean men cast heavy nets off the wharf to catch who knows what because the nets always came up empty. A couple of older fellows were pulling crabs out of traps, disentangling them from the webbing carefully – the moment they were free the slow-deliberate action turned into a sort of keystone cops dance as the liberated crab used all its strategies to bounce and skitter away. Fishermen 2, Crabs 0.

On the ferry at last and into the beautiful white-blue Sea of Thailand heading for Koh Samui and then our island, Koh Phangnan. The boat is crowded with 20-something kids, feckless and spoiled-looking. Ohmigod, is the island going to be crawling with such as these? I don’t dislike young’uns but these were hardcore party types, you could smell the depleted whisky/redbull fumes on their breaths. A couple of rows forward a two American-psycho lads with modern-day mullets with white Rasta dreads woven in (truly a fashion faux-pas) were showing their latest loot. One had bought a taser in Bangkok and fired it off to the great delight of their entourage – an incredibly loud, intense clicketing sound. Scary as shit. The other pulls a bowie knife with a 10 inch blade, one of those carbon-steel jobs that looks like it could skin you from a few feet away. Please God let them get off on Samui. (prayer answered).

And finally Phangnan. Pretty little island – as usual the port town ‘has character’ and we get out as soon as we scarf down some oily fried rice – first meal we’ve had in about 16 hours. We bicker with a Sangthaew driver to take us down to the tip of the island, famous for full moon parties. We have chosen to be here in the dead time but we are told that 5 to 10 thousand kids show up to the monthly vice-fest to get drunk, stoned, insane, copulated and whatever your imagination might fill in. The beach is maybe 500 meters long and the tide is high. The sea, we are told is full of horny, drunk rockers consuming vast quantities of booze from their ‘fuck-buckets’ (check Facebook for the Koh Phangnan 1 installment) and shitting and screwing in the shallow waters. Yum.

From there – and at this you might be asking yourself ‘Why? Can’t you read the signs?’ we run into the Longtail Mafia – a consortium of angry gangsta-types who will ferry you out to resorts and bungalows that are not accessible by road. They charge any price they want to perform the service and they demand what in this country is a ridiculous price. I ask a few different ones but the fix is in. Same price all around. I ask, jokingly/testily what happened to good old free-market. Unsurprisingly, no answer. In for a penny as they say. We get dropped up the island a mile or so at a bay called Haad Thien. It is lush, tropical, bohemian – sort of – and we stagger up the beach and drop our bags on the sand and our butts into a seat where we must consume our reward. Thank Buddha for fermentation and refrigeration.

Probably as good a time as any to stop this blog. I will write a few thoughts about this strange community tomorrow. It was my brother’s 60th birthday this day. I failed to connect with him but some part of him will know that I was thinking often about him. Good thoughts.

The Tao te Ching - Chapter 32 01.04,10

There is no point in adding anything to the Tao today. I find it remarkable that a book written 2500 years ago is lacking nothing in wisdom. It is unlikely that Lao-tzu used the word electron but the ancients understood on some intuitive level or through some other means of divination that the cosmos is infinitely small and infinitely large.

The Tao cannot be perceived.
Smaller than an electron,
it contains uncountable galaxies.

If powerful men and women
could remain centered in Tao,
all things would be in harmony.
The world would become a paradise.
All people would be at peace,
and the law would be written in their hearts.

When you have names and forms,
know that they are provisional.
When you have insititutions,
know where their functions should end.
Knowing when to stop
you can avoid any danger.

All things end in the Tao
as rivers flow into the sea.

Peace

Bangkok 02.04.10

There’s really no word for it. After the relative quiet of Chiang Mai – which on any given weekday is three times as busy as Toronto except during Pride Week – we’ve dropped back into ‘the shit’. If Toronto were a basketball team and Bangkok were a basketball team we’d have 20 baskets scored against us before we looked up from our shoes. It is fast, intense and complicated. At least at first blush.

The airport is world-class; meaning there are kilometres of cool, shiny corridors with beltways that ultimately arrive at shiny metal carousels where people crowd like cattle at a feeding troughs even though their bag is nowhere in sight. Ok, time to air an age-old gripe. Why do people do that? If we all just stood two paces back until our bags appeared there would be ample space for all at the carousel. Is it me? Am I just too Winnipeg? For instance, in a country where one is obliged (good idea by the way) to take one’s shoes off before entering a space (room, dining area) why do most people just step out of their shoes and leave them in the center of the stairway or doorway as a stumbletrap. Are they unaware that there are people with poor balance, bad eyesight, good manners? who recognize that a clear stairway is safer and more practical? Already I’ve digressed. I don’t have this blog roughed out so it might be a bit too fast and loose. It looks like this might be a gripey one. Let’s see.

Bangkok is a wonderful, cacophonous, complex, vibrant jigsaw of all sensory input – all dialled to 11 . Blast-furnace hot so everyone has a glossy sheen to their complexion. At night the streets bristle with neon signs and intense, white linear neon tubes that frame food vendor and market stalls. Oh, oh, Blade Runner again, or is it Dune? The colours are absolutely deluxe, to use a friend’s term. Cyan, magenta, yellow, tangerine with garish citrus green being a foundational hue. Lovely. I saw immediately that this was a treasure trove of nighttime photography. One of my first thoughts was that Shannon Wong would love this place – maybe not the cleanliness but the light – oh man. Totally Shannon. Huge billboards along the highways with unintelligible messages for what? Air con? Family values? Shampoo – I can’t tell what most of them are trying to sell. Real Estate for sure. The coloured lights play off the glossy, dark and tanned flesh in the marketplaces creating Tretchikoff fantasias that would have made my dad have to lie down and take a nap. For those not familiar with the artist – you will likely have seen his work – sort of crass, black-velvet type images of exotic brown women with cyan light limning the cheekbone or a tangerine fill dancing over impossibly beautiful cheekbones, the dresses are Thai-baroque sarongs of teal and gold. Alastair was a fan.

Once we oozed out of the airport bus into the filthy, greasy Thunderdome streets of Khaosan Road we drifted along, trying to align with the vibe. Young road warriors with massive rasta locks, loose Thai trousers and gauzy cotton tops. White dudes in sarongs, complex tattoo work everywhere covering significant acreage on their bodies. Laughter and adventure are in their eyes and on their faces. Their bodies poised for the impossible promise of a night in Bangkok. So that’s what?... Matrix 2 – just start the right beat and everyone will launch into a tribal groove. The path is narrow on this wide street because the vendors nudge all the way in. Food, t-shirts, wigs, corn-row and braiding, Thai massage (what a surprise!), sunglasses etc. are offered. The buildings are alive with crowds of Europeans and Aussies gulping down Singha and Leo beer at 80 baht per bottle. Perfect, slender Thai girls in skintight sheaths with brewery logos on them are enticing the passersby to sample.

The theme music of Bangkok would be Madonna – we hear her everywhere. The Queen of lurid, fetishist sex with a chaser of material consumption. The concepts seem hardwired into Bangkok’s urban microcircuitry. The next morning outside our hotel; soft strains of Ludwig Van’s Moonlight Sonata seems an unlikely choice at first but it sort of seems oddly right for the post-coital spunk of the place. Soon things start to wind up again, through cheesy classics by Dolly Parton through Kenny Rogers and on to some CW artists I am not familiar with. The Buddha bar lounge doesn’t catch fire until late afternoon. Like Caban: musical form = function.

Tuk-tuks and motorcycles nudge their way into the narrow soi outside our hotels, adding their funk to the morning clarity. Vendors stalls unfold like ungainly insects stretching their wings in the morning sun. One gets the sense that you could buy anything. Anything. In Bangkok – if you had enough money. Rent boys vogue along the margins of the road. Callipygian B-Girls walk with rolling gaits, striking the pose from time to time.

The river is the backbone of the city. It is a generous meandering waterway, perhaps 300 metres across. Chocolate brown and dotted with floating debris and excrement it winds easily through the megalopolis. It visits the more famous Wats and Temples. Narrow Klongs or canals extend laterally like ribs to permit smaller boats access into neighbourhoods not immediately adjacent. There are crocodiles in these calm waters, and children swimming and playing. ????????? There is a fantastically efficient bus system of ferries that operates through the river that is by far the best way of travelling through this part of town. 13 Baht to get on makes it a fantastic bargain. That’s about 40 cents and you can take it for miles. There are also immense black barges that look like something straight out of Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ they are about three stories tall and half a city block long, chained together like some Bratwurst sausage with a thyroid condition. They would be packed with a royal household’s belongings and folded into space in that novel, don’t know where they’re going in this one.

Walking through a Chinese Market that specializes only in fabrics, trinkets and accessories (plastic jewellery). It is perhaps half a kilometre long. Though technically it is a laneway or soi the entirety is covered with a patchwork of tarpaulins and plastic sheets. Now and again some ancient pushes a fruit or ice cream wagon straight into your thigh. One has the sense of being indoors, so when a young fellow on a motor scooter nudges past on the sardine-packed aisle, parting it begrudgingly like the Red Sea it is a bit of a shock. You will find images of this and other experiences on my facebook page in the days to come. I am woefully behind in my postings but I assure you, the material has been recorded.

Late in the afternoon we have taken a taxi to the Baiyoke II – the CN Tower of Bangkok – its tallest building with a down-at-heel revolving promenade on top. It’s full of us turistas who have spent 200 baht( $7) for a look and a lousy drink on the 82nd floor. The sun sets over this extremely sprawling beautifully polluted city. The orange light cools rapidly to grey-blue and as the light from the relentless sun dims the pinpricks of light from the city flare and rise to add new linearity and geometry to the city below that descends from orange to grey and then to ivory black.

So back to Khaosan Road. We have to plead with a Tuk-tuk driver who doubles the rate because no one wants to drive all the way back downtown. Bangkok is both super-modern and ancient. It is a melange of ultra-poor and uber-rich. The ride back is kind of unworldly to a north-American. Such a tapestry of contrasts of light, activity, streetlife and functionality. It doesn’t parse to my mind at least. But I have to admit, it works for them. Back in Khaosan Road, the mecca of young, western tourists, we see a beggar couple – he is blind, singing sweetly to the tunes of a sort of boombox hung over his neck, he sometimes toggles through tunes, creating a weird mashup of unrecognizable songs – is he seeking the right vibe or is he taking a station break? We have seen this same couple miles away so we assume they have a set pattern of begging and we happen to have mirrored their map. I give him 20 Baht which apparently is significant because it occasions a profound thank you from his accomplice – an old woman who guides him through the throngs by holding his shoulder and thus instructing him to slow, speed, veer to starboard or port.

On our next night stumbling along Khaosan Road we have a completely different take. Is it familiarity, bad beer or does it change every night? In any case, we are on to the islands of south Thailand – eastern side. Will it be restful or just another scam. Guess. I am already there.

There are more tales from day 2 in Bangkok but these will be the stuff of future blogs.

Saibadee Kraph! (Good day from a male)

Energy 01.04.10

We were discussing the political situation in Thailand today with a woman who owns a beautiful little shop in Chiang Mai.

When I first stepped into the store she had her back to me. I made a little sound to alert her to my presence and she spun around, a bit surprised. She looked me up and down quickly and said ‘Richard?’ I thought perhaps she was expecting some fellow named Richard – I’ve been mistaken on a couple of occasions with my friend Richard Peachey but I didn’t think this was likely in Chiang Mai. I replied that I wasn’t Richard. ‘No.’ She said, pointing to the red bandana that I sometimes wrap around the band on my cheap Viet hat, ‘Red shirt’. She was teasing me, suggesting I was one of the protesters that are demonstrating in the streets of Bangkok. The redshirts support an exiled corrupt leader and the yellow shirts support the current administration.

This started a conversation about politics, the economy, ethics and Thai people – as well as a few reflections on how that compared with Canadian experience. Though there is a sensitivity to speaking about politics and such she was very thoughtful and candid. She sold new and antique materials that were particular to her part of the country – the north-east. The store was arranged in a tastefully cluttered fashion with small surprises to be found everywhere. We enjoyed poking around, having conversations about this piece or that, listening to her describe its provenance or significance or her attachment to it.

Sophie has pointed out to me that there is a different type of Buddhism being practiced in Thailand as opposed to Vietnam. One feels that there is something different but it is not entirely clear from the casual observer. Each country has a different architectural aesthetic so one might assume that that explains the difference in their temples or their choice of decoration. I ain’t no specialist and I am not going to get into it here. If you want more information ask Soph or pick up a book.

But there is a different energy here in Vietnam and it might be attributable to the people’s religious beliefs and customs though it certainly won’t be that simple. Vietnam and Laos have experienced the shock of a devastating war or wars, Thailand has not.

In Vietnam the citizens would offer propitiations to Buddhas, Boddhisatvas and ancestors for good luck (to the casual westerner observer there seems to be a lot of idol worship in SE Asia). There are enormous temples with relics and monumental statues to Buddha and other figures as well as urns or containers for the remains of ancestors. Incense is burned everywhere and fake money is put to the torch everywhere as well. At first I thought women were selling lottery tickets but they are selling sort of replica money that one buys to throw on the flames in some gigantic censer or cauldron. The effort, I understand, is to buy favour from the gods or powers that be. In other words – and I am simplifying – money is the ticket – make it, spend it and use it to fashion a smoother path in this world and the next.

In Thailand – once again I offer a disclaimer of my ignorance that I speak the truth with any degree of accuracy, these are assumptions and gleanings from my being here – there seems to be a strong historical underpinning of animist religion that has fused itself with Buddhist practice. Everywhere, as in Vietnam and Laos, there are small structures or replica houses where each home owner or business owner places a mango and a vial of some sweet wine or drink, perhaps a circlet of fragrant flowers, candy or some other perishable for the spirits that dwell within or thereabouts. Up on the mountain in Doi Enthanont, south of Chiang Mai I watched as a mature soldier in full uniform, stepped up to one of these structures, placed some delicacies on the shelf, stood back and prayed quietly and with great focus. I am sure this is a universal experience in Thailand but to my eyes, the military garb and the silent, spiritual commune seemed incongruous but lovely. The Thais often greet or say goodbye with hands held in a prayer gesture - compared to our lives there is much more presence of attention to the spiritual or divine. Useful.

At the temples there is much less torching of money, I get the sense that a difference between the two forms of Buddhism may have to do with relating good action with karma as opposed to buying favours from the Gods (Catholics and divine intercession.) In our experience the Thais seem a little less interested in stripping you of cash. Perhaps it relates to their more evident immersion in spiritual practice. In animist belief that the world replete with invisible energies and spirits. One ignores them at one’s peril. There is spirit in all things; for instance, the relationship of certain geographical features will generate the construction of a Wat or temple. (this is also true in Vietnam). There is also a strong influence of Hinduism in Thailand – the magnificent Royal Palace in Bangkok has a staggeringly long mural that depicts many of the stories in the Ramayana epic. (check my spelling) Which makes the whole understanding of their religion difficult – I thought Buddhism was mostly like the precepts of the writings of Buddha that I have read. Attention the material and worship of objects seems opposite that that kind of thought. Anyone who would care to enlighten me on this subject is more than welcome.

When walking through an exhibit of the history of Chiang Mai I was struck by how much attention the founders paid to site selection. Did anyone scout around near Washington D.C. looking for a particular relationship of hills, rocks, water and indications from the Gods or did they just build a jail next to a bar and then later a courthouse to deal with the mess? In Chiang Mai the Ping river curves around nicely, affording practical defense. The Doi Suthep mountain rises precipitously in the west – a good sign apparently. They built their largest and most important Wat at the navel of the square city they designed. One negative feature was the relationship of the northeast gate to the environment – so they dug a mighty hole and redirected a stream to form a like which solved the evil spirits problem. Very Feng-Shui neh? And it seems to have worked. Chiang Mai has led a sort of charmed existence from all accounts. I think I heard that their river changed direction at some point. I need to find out more about that.

The streets of Chiang Mai seems quite safe, we have wandered nearly deserted streets late at night and there is no creepy sense of danger. Perhaps a tranny hooker at a corner shoots a quizzical look but nothing more – he still huskily offers directions to our street, wobbling just a bit on those stilettos. So is there a greater harmony of Tao energy here? The only really negative aspect is the presence of western males prowling about the busier streets and seamy bars. But it’s time to go. Off to Bangkok by air.

The Johns of Chiang Mai - no particular date

A few portraits of fellows seen on Moon Mueng Street - denizens of the meetup bars.

Deep wrinkles – the signature of a life of sun-worship. Walnut-coloured kopf, steel-rimmed spectacled German lone wolf. Graven expression of dissatisfaction might just be a ‘don’t even think of talking to me’ face. Heavy-lidded water-coloured eyes looking at the back of his skull. Grey, freshly brushcut hair. Hunched over his boiled potatoes and sausage, rolling his jaws like a ruminant, drawing slowly, continuously on his Marlboro with jaundiced fingers of his right hand.

Grizzled, ectomorphic Brit with a half-hearted comb-over that hovers like a chinook cloud above a corduroy brow. Sucking unconsciously on his snaggly, ancient-ivory teeth, nursing a Chang beer. Legs crossed prissily, leaning capaciously back, looking for all the world like a failed playboy – David Niven era. Armpits hooked around the chair back. Thousand-yard stare that occasionally snaps to a saccadic tracking of a nubile Thai girl passing by. The faint lip-curl; is that ennui or disapproval or is he a woman-hater looking for a woman he can hate?

Angry Cockney in a morning cafe with his cronies. 60-somethings. He with a once-upon-a-mullet. Long, stringy kinked hair to his shoulders. What’s missing is the roof - something reminiscent of a Bozo the Clown tonsure rises like a feathery grey-brown flame above his shiny pate. He has a large hook nose and deepset eyes, looking for all the world like Fagan might have - except tanned. He has a serpentine vein bulging on the right side of his towering brow, pulsing in the warm, golden morning light on Ratchamakan. Gigantic eyebrows flex and wave as he talks angrily to his mate – two peas in a pod, these fellows. Every second word is ‘fuck or fucking’ but he’s not talking about conquests, he’s angry about some compatriot who has bagged his broad. ‘Fuck ‘im, ‘e can ‘ave ‘er if ‘e wants ‘er!’ Lots more where she came from.’ Though he broadcasts his voice for at least 20m he hunches forward conspiratorially to his friend, looking up regularly to see if he is being overheard. When a tiny young girl; perhaps five years old, who clearly knows him, appears, he changes his demeanour altogether, smiling and teasing the child, passes her some small money – brings out an instinctual reaction of fear and aggression in me.

Baggy-eyed dissolute American, 50-something and the same number overweight. Glistening with sweat and breathing audibly though he his only effort in the past 5 minutes has been raising a glass. He sits in a nook next to the bar, tucked into a little niche where he can watch but is not easily seen. His shirt is stained from perspiration under his arms and near the folds of his gut. Three-button poly-knit striped golf jersey circa 1985. He sits drinking doubles of Jim Beam, scratching his thready scalp in abstract contemplation – of what? His face is the colour of smoked salmon, three-day growth. He occasionally tries on Archie Bunker grimaces to no one, clearly carrying on an internal dialogue; with mother, wife or super-ego?

Younger American leaning hungrily or angrily towards a homely, pudgy Thai woman. Heavily tatted arms, wearing a grimy white wife-beater. Burn-victim eyelids with no eyelashes, like he got caught in a tank in Afghanistan or something blew up in his face. His face doesn’t quite work correctly but I can’t decide what’s wrong. Not enough muscles working? He has a sort of frozen rictus - may be an attempt at a smile. He’s gesturing much too aggressively with his hands and arms, leaning in from time to time as if to head-butt her - so the face and the body-language don’t match. When he laughs it’s more like the bark of a fox. She is forced-smiling, trying to appear to enjoy his conversation – her fingertips play softly on the top her bottle of beer but I suspect she doesn’t understand much of what he says. She nods or answers monosyllabically from time to time. She is turned ever-so-slightly away as if she is prepared to bolt if something lights his fuse.

These men have travelled a very long distance for cheap sex – assuming they don’t get ripped off. Western society doesn’t accommodate the needs or wants they have. Sex is dirty, sinful, forbidden where they come from. In truth one can purchase sex anywhere on earth. So what is the reason they’re here. Is Thailand the Zellers of the sex world? Are they far enough off-radar that they feel safe? There are very many sixty-something lone-wolves here – one wouldn’t describe them as happy-go-lucky types. Do they come here to retire and drift around, spending their mean budgets on an occasional rub and tug?

What is the legacy of this? Thailand must owe a significant percentage of its GDP to the working women who perform their services for the comfort and pleasure of Western males. What do the young Thai males think? Is the famous Thai smile an endangered artifact?

Khabkun Kraph.