#35: Guns, Babes & Sticky Rice

Week 35 - Luang Prabang Province, Laos

AS CAPITAL: cities go, Vientiane is pretty hard to beat. It's practically empty (less than a quarter of a million people), full of smiling happy faces, French gardens, good food, roundabouts that nobody here can seem to work out how to use, and the shimmering Mekong slithering around it in endless magnificence. We went out to the temple for herbal saunas and massages, took bikes out to the decrepit circus gifted to Laos by the Russians during the 70's ("Where is hot plate for to put dancing bear, Dmitri?" "We send hot plate to Laos already, Ivan, you son of a whore! Now make bear fight four dogs and a one-legged Chechnyan!") and somehow ended up at a shooting range.

That place was a little scary; they had a delightful selection of live ammunition, mortar rounds and explosives from the Vietnam war and the van outside sported a massive windscreen sticker screaming "KILL THEM ALL!" (we, meanwhile, pulled up on bright pink bicycles with baskets on the front that we had hired from our guesthouse). So we shot off some rounds into a target (Adam wanted to shoot a Colt .45, but the lady at the counter took one look at our skinny white arms and decided that we were far too sissy for anything bigger than a 9mm) while the lady held our hands in the right position - this place was literally in the middle of the city and had no roof, so a little caution was necessary, I guess. We were given the target as a souvenir, and rode off on our pink bicycles as total gangsterz.

From Vientiane we caught a bus over meandering mountain ranges to Vang Vieng, the party capital of Laos and easily the most surreal and ridiculous place I have ever had the mixed fortune to visit. But let's not get ahead of ourselves: first I have to say that Vang Vieng has perhaps the most stunningly beautiful natural setting of any town anywhere in the world. It lazes by a picture perfect river while jagged, monstrous limestone formations covered in thick green forest surround it on all sides. And, before the sun sets, there is a world's worth of things to do there - bicycles rides to little villages, motorbike rides into the nearby mountains, white water rafting, kayaking, all kinds of caving, swimming, rockclimbing, and floating down the river in the inner tube of a tractor tyre.

After the sun sets, however:

Vang Vieng falls in prostrate worship to six gods. Their names are Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe and Joey. Friends is not just a TV show on the main street of Vang Vieng. It's a way of life. Imagine, if you will, a row of bars stretching for a couple of hundred metres on either side of a main street. The bars are not large, but there are lots of them, competing for your business. Now imagine that every one of them - every single one - is playing Friends on several large screens. No games of pool, no live bands. Not even any goddamn Seinfeld or Simpsons. Every bar with a different episode of the same show, each night, all night. Welcome to Hell.

It doesn't end there.

Vang Vieng is freezing this time of year, especially at night, but wander down a side street away from the Friends drag and what do we have? Ah, bars full of half-naked eighteen and nineteen year olds dancing drunkenly around campfires in their bikinis, falling over logs and threatening to sue the bar owners, yelling at each other about how 'wicked' the Man U v Hull match was (these wild, beautiful, loud, stupid children being almost inevitably British), and just generally being young and boorish and tour group-y. This side of Vang Vieng reaches its peak on the river, where hundreds each day pick up their inner tubes and begin to float down the river, taking in the peace and tranquility.

Wait, did I just say "peace and tranquility"? Oh. What I meant was "giant motherfucking rave parties on each side of the river with techno music from 1997 blaring into the valleys below, copious amounts of Lao whisky being drunk from plastic buckets, mud baths and waterslides, massive cranes from which these pretty young things fling themselves into the river, and hundreds of other teenagers, just as drunken and horny and undressed as themselves".

And: it still doesn't end there.

Find your way past the Friends brigade and past the teenagers revelling in their Spring Break Girls Gone Wild-athon, and one comes inevitably to The Island in the middle of the river, which every night becomes a giant ship adrift in a sea of cheap opium, cheap magic mushrooms, cheap methamphetamines, cheap marijuana, and expensive beer. Here the people huddle around campfires muttering things to themselves and vaguely asking each other, like, what's the deal with, you know, stuff. We all tried out the mushroom shakes: I held a telepathic conversation with a tree for about an hour, Erin made friends with a skeleton who hid inside the wall and told her to burn things, and Adam composed a song on ukelele for a whale shark inside our room which was later revealed to be a broken air conditioner. Later, after an opium shake, I spent several hours with a stupid grin plastered to my face belting out "We Built This City (On Rock & Roll)" from my manically writhing hammock. It wasn't a pretty sight.

Out from behind the looking glass, we caught a bus over zigzagging hills and cliff-edge villages for six hours north to Luang Prabang, the great temple city of Laos. We had decided to stay only a night or two; Luang Prabang is a beautifully-preserved city ("and it's full of fucking hipsters," as we were told by 19-year old Jarred), but there doesn't seem much to do at first. Give it time though, and the city becomes vital and exciting; it is the top of the loop for most travellers on the Thailand-Laos-Vietnam-Cambodia circuit and thus functions as something of a gathering point - here we met up with people we'd met all over the place, most notably Canadian Ben and Christine from Chiang Mai, who dragged us along with a few more buddies to a sticky rice festival at a nearby Hmong village.

We drank and danced; we danced and drank. And then we were molested. Erin found herself cordoned off by a bunch of teenage Lao boys who rubbed suggestively against her hips as if it was a Year 5 school disco or something: one even tried to trap her with the old wrap-your-scarf-around-her-waist-so-she-can't-get-away trick. Meanwhile, a group of teenage girls dancing with me were getting increasingly close, and one kept pinching and pulling at my shirt. I backed away a little, and all of a sudden she sort of launched her face at my crotch. Which was embarassing.

And now we are finally ready to leave for our final destination in Laos - the jungle city of Luang Nam Tha. We face an eleven-hour bus ride tomorrow (to cover a paltry 200km) over what will invariably be more scenery which is so beautiful it makes me want to cry but which I will never, ever, be able to adequately describe for someone who hasn't been here. So be it. By the time I next write we will be inside the great red monster on our maps. Next week we will be in China.

Hope everyone's well,

Lachie

#34: The Long Goodbye and the Stuffed Penis

Week 34 - Vientiane Prefecture, Laos

1. THE LONG GOODBYE

IT'S TIME. After eight months - thirty-four weeks - we have left Thailand for the very last time. An end to the heat and humidity and crowds and smells of Bangkok; an end to the mountains and beaches and parties and soft breezes of everywhere else. A final end to circling and backtracking; we are aiming ourselves on a straight shot to Tibet, through Luang Prabang, Kunming, Shangri-La, Chengdu, Golmud, a dozen names both mythically familiar and wilfully obscure. We are on the great north road and only poverty or frozen-to-death-ness will stop us.

Our relationship with Thailand has been a turbulent one; she flirts with us, showing us wild jungle and beautiful people and islands that you thought only appeared in dreams. She gives us food heaving with spices and flavour, mountains crisp with cold air, train rides full of light and wind. But Bangkok looms constantly in the background, that ominous vacuum, and she drags us through its smog-filled cesspits and recesses each time we get too close. But I could ask for nothing more of my experience in that country: I was amazed, I was frustrated, I was ecstatic, I was awakened, I was sick with Dengue fever, I was chased by wild elephants, I was thrown off a mechanical bull at a strip club. I shat on the trains, rode rings around the valleys, swam in the lush clearness of the ocean, bathed in the warm breeze as I hitched rides in the back of pickups. And just because I hated Bangkok does not preclude me from having loved it as well - the food and the action, the people and the noise. Thailand was our everything and now it is banished to memory. We do not leave her easily.

Kevin flew in from Singapore to visit us for our last week; there are few better feelings than seeing an old friend after many months adrift. And after some seven years of university the guy's full of sage-like wisdom: we spent most of the week listening with slack-jawed awe to his explanations of everything we thought we knew about the world. What can I say? Dude's a genius. He should change his name to GoogleKev, or, at least, use his brains to con elderly pensioners out of their life savings. He just knows everything about everything.

Together the four of us headed north to the river town of Tha Ton, where we had planned to commandeer a bamboo house-raft complete with a cook and a guide for three days. That turned out to be a little optimistic; we only had the money to jump in a long boat for the day as we floated down the majestic river through rocks and rapids, stopping at temples overgrown by jungle and hill-tribe villages surrounded by water buffalo bathing in the thick mud. Some ninety kilometres downriver we were dropped at a set of hot springs where we bathed in the heat under the incessant buzz of fluorescent pink dragonflies, ignorantly dropping their larvae into the pool where they quickly died and sank to the bottom.

We planned to stay with an Akha tribe in a nearby valley, and attempted to hitch a ride there with a friendly Japanese man who drove by. He drove us for several kilometres to the wrong village, whereupon it was revealed that he was actually a Christian missionary building a church for the heathens. Oh. So, basically, he was a fuckwit, and we wanted no more to do with him. Except: he was our only way out. So we spent a while chatting to the village girls (who spent a while trying in vain to get Adam to hold a chicken; Adam has a weird phobia about those kind of things) and watching with smug grins as a large crucifix brought to the village was thieved by a snotty three-year old and used to dig canals through the mud. And then we asked to be taken back.

We made it there in the end, to the Akha village in the valley, and spent a couple of truly amazing days bathing under ice-cold waterfalls, working up great sweats walking up and down the hills of the tea plantations, trading swear words and bad jokes with the tribespeople in a variety of languages, and just genuinely loving everything about Thailand. And then the comedown: we arrived in Chiang Rai, a blurred dullness of a city, all overcast skies and roaring traffic and glaring light. We had planned to spend a couple of nights there but after about three hours we were aching to leave; the next day we caught a bus back to Chiang Mai.

Which is where things got ugly.

2. CLENCHED ANUS, STUFFED PENIS AND OTHER CULINARY DELIGHTS

SO LET'S: just say that Thailand's public transport system is not terribly forgiving to what we would consider normal bodily functions. Case in point: on a different bus to Chiang Mai (to pick up Kevin from the airport), I had what you could call a rumbling; I did precisely what I'd done for the previous eight months and put it to the back of my mind. An hour later, still without having stopped, it became a little more serious. A lot of clenching went on. Twenty minutes after that I approached the bus driver and, in sheepish, faltering Thai, explained that it would be really, really great if he stopped the bus soon so that I didn't shit all over my seat and the small lady sitting with her groceries beside me.

He looked at me gravely.

"Mmm. Five kilometres," he said.

I sat down with the look of a man who's been told the date of his execution, while the bus driver turned to the Thai women behind him and explained the situation in hoots of laughter while pointing with hands that should really have been on the steering wheel. I stared straight ahead as five kilometres came and then went. The Thai woman turned to me and said, "Ten minutes."

By the time we stopped I was tightening every muscle in my body with so much effort that I couldn't even walk. It was another half hour until the trembling ceased.

So, like I said, not very forgiving. This time, coming back from Chiang Rai to Chiang Mai, I'll spare the buildup. Let me just say that all four of us were suffering from bloated bladders, and that, at one point, Erin turned around in her seat to the sight of me, seated in front of an orange-robed Buddhist monk (I swear, I didn't know he was there), desperately trying to stuff my penis into the neck of a plastic bottle I'd found on the floor of the bus while simultaneously trying to cover up the entire wicked deed with Erin's nicest sweater. Not my proudest moment; it didn't even work. I still had to wait the two hours to the rest stop.

SIDENOTE: I have no idea what I planned to do with the bottle after I'd finished peeing. It didn't even have a lid.

We arrived in Chiang Mai, one way or the other. We spent a couple of lovely days motorbiking around the province as we had on our last visit; we got the cheapest massages we could possibly find and then complained that they weren't very good; we got viciously drunk at a rooftop bar and ended up at a place called Mike's Burgers, where I only remember using my Cheezy Fries (TM) to scrape as much of the disgusting, goopy Cheeze (TM) out of my Cheezy Fries (TM) box as I possibly could and dripping it all over my mouth and shirt in what was possibly an even lower moment than the stuffing-my-penis-in-a-bottle thing.

SECOND SIDENOTE: We also ran into Gerard "Not-Gerard" the Belgian. This time, he was sporting a mysterious foot injury, he invited us to play World of Warcraft with him at 3am (who knew James Bond is actually a fat thirteen-year old with no friends underneath that suit?), and the Thai Boxing Stadium was promoting an upcoming bout with a picture that looked suspiciously like him. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser...

Kev flew back into the bowels of Singapore (and props to him - it was great fun having him out here for a week and we all enjoyed his company immensely); and we loaded ourselves up on beer and antidepressants for the twelve-hour bus ride to Laos.

And now we are here, back in perfect Vientiane, where we cycle the wide boulevardes to the gentle bubbling of conversation erupting from the cafes and spilling out over the streets. We drink wine, we eat fine French food (at $2 a pop), we watch the sunset over the Mekong (again).

Laos is the guy at school that nobody ever says a bad word about; he never dates your ex-girlfriends, he always brings beer to parties, he thinks that your taste in music is excellent and he covers for you in front of your parents without even having to think about it. Laos even does your homework for you when you're feeling sick. Basically, Laos is a total fucking dreamboat.

We love it here, but we've got to be going. Tomorrow we head to Vang Vieng.

Lachie

#33: Don't Happy Be Worry

Week 33 - Mae Hong Son Province, Thailand

THE FESTIVAL: was a jubilant ejaculation of light and sound as hundreds of Thais, Burmese and various hill-tribes converged on the town to show their thanks to the Water Goddess by chucking as much plastic and styrofoam shit into the rivers and lakes as they possibly could. Then they shot off some fireworks, made the sky into a fiery sea of floating lanterns, bought some more plastic stuff, threw the packaging into the lake, and went home.

Job done.

By the way, "Water Goddess"? Um... I didn't know they had one of those in Buddhism. Er. Ahem. Well. Well, they don't, per se, but Thai Buddhism isn't so much "hey, let's study the Buddhist teachings and live our lives by them" as it is, "hey, let's use the most ridiculously superstitious parts of Buddhism, pile it in with some Hinduism, Chinese astrology, numerology and good ol' animism, and see if we can win the lottery with it". Hence: the commitment of most Thais to Buddhism is bringing eggs and flowers to the temple when they've done something wrong, and then putting more eggs and flowers in the dollhouse outside their home to appease the house spirits (every single building in Thailand, from the lowest shack to the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, has such a spirit dollhouse). Up north, the superstitiousness is strongest, and people continue to put scarecrows outside their house to ward off ghosts and make sacrifices to the Rice God.

Digression aside, Mae Hong Son was a perfect little town. The festival was fun and full of colour, and I got to throw my $1 bag of fireworks around like an eight-year old with a year's supply of red cordial coursing through his veins. The air was crisp and cold and excellent for long walks up the terraced walkway scaling the mountain to the temple to watch lanterns being launched into the night sky, and teenage monks clad in their orange robes surreptitiously gambling with their friends behind the cover of trees.

Wheeling motorbikes about the hills the day after, wrapped in beanies and sweaters, was something incredible. The road took us out along narrow ridges and across jagged ledges; we stopped at a cave full of sacred fish who are believed to be vegetarian - Thai families line up to throw them carrots and lettuce. Best of all was the English sign above the cave - "The cave is teeming with a crap species of fish" (presumably they meant "carp"). From there out past small villages full of screaming children to the last village on the map, Ban Rak Thai.

Ban Rak Thai was originally Mae Aw, and was basically a settlement of anti-communist Chinese soldiers arriving into Thailand as refugees after being booted by Burma several decades ago. The change of name (Ban Rak Thai means "The Village That Loves Thais") was probably a publicity stunt to save a bit of face. Nowadays it's the last town on the road before a sketchy dirt track leads out to a 'No Foreigners Allowed' border crossing with Burma. It remains a very Chinese sort of place, and we sat for endless cups of Oolong and Jasmine tea before the encroaching darkness and freezing temperatures sent us rolling back down the map. Past the screaming children, past Shan villages of solemn women in traditional clothes and grim-faced men with large knives strapped to their backs, past national parks of peaceful lakes surrounded by cliffs and forests of pine, back to Mae Hong Son and a warm bed before our morning ride to Pai.

Pai is the kind of town you get in every country - the Byron Bay, the Vang Vieng, the Queenstown - a drawing point for travellers of all kinds, where you trade great parties and food and nightlife in exchange for relentless Americans with bullhorn voices and all kinds of tacky, shitty merchandise being shoved at you from all angles (though the 'Don't Happy, Be Worry' climate-change-awareness t-shirts were a highlight).

Unfortunately, our trip unintentionally co-incided with the cremation of HRH the Princess, who died a year ago and whose body has been on display to the public since. Now, since she was getting cremated, HRM the King decided to declare a dry weekend across the nation. No alcohol. Enforced sobriety. In the town where the nightlife was the only attraction. Balls.

We did what we could. Erin and I enrolled in a cooking school and spent the days whipping up gigantic bowls of green curry, pad thai, kao soi, laab tohu, panang curry and mango sticky rice - Erin with her trademark elegant artistry, me with my hand held with increasingly frustrated force by the lady teaching us in her back kitchen. Adam hired a bicycle and set out to get lost among the rice paddies, finding his way to another ex-communist village and a waterfall in the jungle.

We got by. And by our last night, cracks were appearing in Pai; alcohol was slipping through, to great rejoicing and gnashing of teeth. Wandering the streets late at night, we were adopted by Pom and her sister, who had started a campfire in the middle of a frontyard that didn't belong to them in the middle of town and were busy drinking and cackling around it like wild children. Pom was excellent; she had emerged from a tragic past of dead husbands and divorce to become an awesome force of drunken destruction. She was a fantastic combination of the cool girl from Chasing Amy (her standard greeting was "Hey, fuck you, man") and some sort of Russian transvestite (addressing everyone as "honey" or "dah-link") and just sweated class as she stumbled about the campfire with a whiskey bottle in hand, complaining of how she couldn't see the stars and dreading going to work at her massage parlour the next day.

The night got out of hand. Adam went through a fence and fell five feet onto his back. We somehow ended up attached to a Thai rastafarian who couldn't speak a word of English but whom we knew as The Pixie Child; he passed out onto Erin's lap before disappearing in an explosion of fairy dust. Then an extremely drunken Irishman went to hit Erin on the head with a blue rubber flipflop after an impassioned argument about Catholocism; the thong made it within inches of Erin's forehead before the Irishman slowly and gently teetered over on his side, falling straight to the floor and taking several beer bottles with him. Then a Scotsman yelling at us because we hadn't heard of some religious lady named "Anoon"; eventually we worked out he was saying "a nun". He settled down. At some point, we went home.

And awoke, a couple of hours later, to a cacophony. Behind our bungalow, at the Muay Thai gym, pasty Brits with exaggerated fantasies of themselves as Thai martial arts superstars were throwing each other around the ring and making exaggerated grunting noises while the clanging of flab against metal echoed off our thin bamboo walls. Off in the fields, a symphony of roosters were competing for the title of "Rooster Most Likely to be Violently Strangled by Lachlan". And, just to add a touch of surrealism, a hidden man had set himself up in the reeds by the river with an alto saxophone and was shooting through his particular rendition of the classics with as much volume as he could muster.

It was time to leave Pai.

So. Soon: I will collect my friend Kev from Chiang Mai airport. Then: an adventure.

Lachie.

#32: Whistlestop Tours With the Ambassador's Wife

Week 32 - Mae Hong Son Province, Thailand

AND WHEN: they were only halfway up, they were neither up nor down. Which makes for a nice song, but is not so much fun when you're stuck halfway up the highest mountain in Thailand, with no public bus up the 47km road to the peak. And being laughed at by national parks officials for believing the rumour that such a bus existed. After three hours on tuk-tuks, pickup trucks and motorbikes, it makes one feel pretty dejected. So we stood, and waited for something to happen.

Of course something happened. Something always happens, especially here, high above the humid plains. This particular something was a manic middle-aged Thai woman named Lanna, who proceeded to load us into the back of her ute and charge up the mountain at a furious pace, swinging wildly around corners beyond which postcard-perfect mountain vistas loomed with smug satisfaction.

Lanna was a beautiful, kind person. But she was also mental. She had some kind of connection to Thai embassies; she was keenly fluent in English, French, Thai, Japanese, Mandarin and Cambodian - a fact she showed us (to considerable applause) every time she spotted a suitable tourist sitting about. She had lived in Japan, France and the Cote d'Ivoire. She was travelling with her Japanese friends, showing them the sights; she said that she picked us up "out of love" and spent the whole day talking about our newfound friendship. And at every place we'd stop, she'd watch us wander around the waterfall / summit / visitor centre, and then, with a timing that seemed to have no relationship to whether everyone had finished looking, or whether people were in mid-sentence conversation with her, she would bark, "Okay! Let's go!" and everyone would pile silently into the back of the ute like we were illegal migrant workers being trucked to our next cleaning job.

She left us in much the same dazed confusion in which she'd found us, deserting us on a street corner in town with vague directions to a bus, barking "Okay! Let's go!" to her Japanese friends before blazing away down the dusty road. By the time we knew what was going on, we were on a bus to Mae Sariang, in the far northwest of the country, not two kilometres from the Burmese border.

It had been difficult to leave Chiang Mai, though we'd all been there a fairly long time. The city was a great, vibrant place to spend your nights, and the countryside around was bursting with perfect green valleys filled with mist. The day before we headed to our fate with Lanna, Erin and I hired a bike and went up the slopes of Doi Suthep, the mountain which lurks behind Chiang Mai like a beautiful criminal. Past the temple that crowns the peak of the mountain, where stalls were selling cups of fresh strawberries; past the Winter Palace, where the royal family will soon be in residence. Past all that, over potholed roads, then gravel roads, then dirt roads, then a barely discernible track of mud and rock, to a tiny village clinging to the slope.

Towards the edges of northern Thailand, the populations of all the neighbouring countries begin to bleed together; you start to see villages of Lao and Burmese peoples. On top of that, there are the hill-tribes - the Shan, the Karen, the Lisu, the Hmong, and many others - people of the fourth world, who belong to no nation, without Thai citizenship, wandering from China to Myanmar, Thailand to Laos to Vietnam. The people in this village were Hmong; they were mostly kids, chasing skinny chickens around the spare wooden houses and riding motorbikes about the rough-as-guts dirt tracks that circumnavigated the settlement. We hung out for a while, wandering about the village (noting that here, on a mountain and several hours ride from any settlement of note, was the first Christian church we'd seen outside Bangkok - hill-tribes are one of the very few places in Thailand that missionaries have had any impact). Then back, stopping along the dirt track at a coffee plantation owned by an eccentric Californian who owned several parrots, including a 40-year old macaw as large as a dog. Below, the Hmong women picked coffee beans in their traditional tribal dress, all shy waves and toothless smiles.

In Mae Sariang - a tiny town squeezed elegantly between the mountains and the river - we hired bicycles and rolled aimlessly through villages alive with the sound of country music blasting loud and proud from tinny radios. In the evenings we wrapped ourselves in whatever sweaters and beanies we've been able to gather together - Erin lost her gloves in Chiang Mai and Adam's beanie flew off on the way down Doi Inthanon - and drank whiskey by the river, while (of all things) gangster rap played over the deck and fell into the lapping of the river along the shore.

The mountains are spectacular: it is thrilling to feel cold again, for the first time since - oh, let's see here, August 2007? - and our eyes are blazing, and the blood is pumping thick through our veins, and today we are in Mae Hong Son, by the lake, and it is the Loi Krathong festival, celebrating the Goddess of Water, and there are blazing lanterns flying through the air, and candles floating in the lake, and we have a bag of fireworks for which we paid a dollar and which I am itching to throw at something.

And everything is great, and I hope everything is great with you.

Lachie

#31: Gerard the Belgian

Week 31 - Chiang Mai Province, Thailand

GOING NORTH: felt great. The train ride was beautiful (if three hours late), dramatic mountains wreathed with mist, scaled with rice terraces; villages flooded by recent rains, the water level nearing the top of doorframes. (My train was the last for nearly twenty-four hours, as the track was washed out at several points). It was cold, and wet, and miserable, and perfect.

It was beautiful. It was just too bad that I ended up in Phrae. Well. That's a little harsh; Phrae was a pleasant place to walk around during the day, with a large moat around the old town and old cobblestone streets lined with teak mansions and temples. And, for a town on the highway, the residents didn't seem terribly used to Westerners - people screamed when they saw me; babies cried; dogs barked; birds swooped at my head. Which was nice. But I was travelling alone, and wanted to go out and have a beer, meet some people. There wasn't much to do in Phrae, and by 9:00pm, everything was closed. So the next day I upped stakes and headed to Chiang Mai to meet up with Adam.

Good decision. Chiang Mai is amazing. It is everything Bangkok should be, but isn't. Nestled in the mountains, it's a beach town with no beach, an alpine ski resort with no snow. It's lovely, and relaxed, and fun.

The people here are young and cool and fond of a party, so we've done a fair amount of that. But some of them... Like, I spent most of a night talking to a cool young Irish girl straight out of Dublin, doing a few months in Asia before hitting Australia. We were having a great conversation until I asked:

"So, what made you leave Dublin?"

"Oh, you know," she said, "Too many fucking Pakis. Can't stand them Muslims."

Okay then.

And Gerard the Belgian: now there's a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a question mark. What can I tell you about Gerard the Belgian without having to kill you immediately afterwards? This guy is quite something.

We met Gerard at the guesthouse, hung with him for a night. Something was definitely odd about him: he was living on a very tight budget, but made it clear over the night that he was very rich. He also made several casual, mysterious references to his "offshore accounts" and "offshore companies".

Mysterious, but no big deal. I figured that after another night out with him I'd know what he was all about - but after one more night with him, I had to run straight home and grab my notebook and pen. This is what I wrote:

16 Things We Know About Gerard the Belgian (According to Gerard the Belgian):

1. Is very rich.
2. Is good friends with the head of organized crime in Uzbekistan (!).
3. Worked for the UN in Burkina Faso, Eritrea and Iraq.
4. Has a habit of threatening the Belgian tax department.
5. Has wiretaps on his phone.
6. Used to drive a $100,000 convertible around Compton, Los Angeles.
7. Has no discernible income.
8. Owns a hotel in Nicaragua.
9. Gerard is not his real name (it's a fake one to confuse the government).
10. Will not tell us his real name.
11. Has a credit card scanner on his laptop (!).
12. Parties with the son of the Belorussian President.
13. Has a credit card with no name on it.
14. Knows how to kill a man with his bare hands (or a broken beer bottle - not kidding here: Gerard gave me a rather graphic demonstration of how he would beat a Muay Thai boxer in a fight, by, in his words, "ripping his damn throat straight out of his neck!")
15. Is possibly James Bond.
16. Or insane.

Really - do people like this truly exist? Common sense tells me no, but a lifetime of watching bad action movies (hello, True Lies!) screams 'Yes!'. I hope it's all true. That would restore my faith in humanity. And my faith in ripping the damn throat straight out of humanity's neck. I will let you know what I find out, if I am permitted to live after receiving the information I currently possess. I'm practicing my kung-fu to ward off potential assassinations attempts. I am the Man Who Knows Too Much.

Adam and I also hired some motorbikes to hit the mountain roads around Chiang Mai. Well, eventually, anyway: after a long, tortuous battle with our hangovers (involving several civilian casualties) we finally got our shit together at 3pm, which meant we were navigating most of the treacherous pot-holed downhill hairpin turns in complete darkness, while copping mouthfuls of various insects. But before that sun set behind those mountain ranges it was honestly one of the most beautiful rides I have ever embarked upon. The scenery is just stunning; a few times we just wordlessly stopped the bikes and stared. It was also bloody cold, which became more of a problem as the sun set. None of us have any tolerance to cold weather - I have no idea how we're going to get through Tibet and Nepal.

Erin finally arrives up here tomorrow morning after trooping through her final days at work like... well, like a trooper. And then: no more commitments, no more attachments. The world is our oyster sauce.

Hope everybody's well,

Lachie

#30: Rice-filled Plains, Bamboo Trains & Capsizing Automobiles

[just a quick note to let you all know: Ping Pong KaPow! has moved site, and can now be found at pingpongkapow.wordpress.com. Episodes 2 and 3 are up for your viewing pleasure (or otherwise)]

Week 30 - Bangkok, Thailand

REAL POVERTY: is something one sees fairly rarely, unless you go seeking it. Which makes Battambang all the more heartbreaking. Don't misunderstand me here; the grinding evidence of poverty in Cambodia is breathtaking in its pervasiveness, no matter which part of the country you're in. But in Battambang it hits you hardest, comes right up to your table at the run-down little food stand, dirty plastic bag in hand, begging for any scraps you may have left over, a sip of water, a cigarette. And that's just the kids.

Battambang was among the provinces hardest-hit by the Khmer Rouge, and among the current community polio is even more rampant than the land mines. This means many people between twenty and forty are amputees or cripples, and that people aged over forty are close to non-existent. We saw one older person the entire time we were there - a lady of about sixty begging for change from passersby. It can be a very depressing place, at times. Still, the people are very nice and easygoing, and the town itself is wide and pleasant. There aren't too many things in the world better than a morning stroll to the bakery for hot crusty baguettes, even if from the moment you buy them you are surrounded and assaulted by a scrum of street-children trying to get it straight out of your grubby, wealthy, suddenly-extremely-status-conscious hands.

Such grubby, guilty hands.

It rained constantly - not the usual, dreary, guy-in-the-street-pissing-on-an-old-mattress long-term rains we're used to, but a punishing, pummeling, endless tropical downpour, a sudden and infinite wipeout that killed the electricity supply and flooded the streets and made me wet myself in fear (allegedly). Wouldn't you know it - just when Captain Planet dubbed into Cambodian was going to come on TV, and the power goes. Of all the rotten luck...

During one of the brief periods of sunshine we jumped a tuk-tuk to a cave, twenty kilometres out of town, where the Khmer Rouge massacred some ten thousand of their coutrymen. We were advised against a tuk-tuk, but there were five of us (a couple of Canadians we'd met came along) and we thought it would be cheaper. Two kilometres from the town centre I finally bore witness to the roads Cambodia is infamous for, running past glorious rice fields through massive, freight-truck-swallowing mud holes, puddles that would eat you and everyone you care about, given half a chance. Those twenty kilometres took one and a half hours, each way. The tuk-tuk broke down after four kilometres, was repaired, and then came within fractions of a degree of overturning with all us in it. And then it happened again. And again. And we didn't even find the goddamn cave, after trekking up and down massive flights of stairs, having to bribe the tourist police, watching a French tourist being attacked by a monkey (to describe this I would require a word that means "scary and awesome at the same time"), coming to a mountaintop temple, and being stalked by a young Cambodian man asking for money (in appearance and speech he closely resembled Gollum from Lord of the Rings). And then we had to pile into the tuk-tuk and stave off vomiting for another one and a half hours.

Cambodia is so much fun.

The following day we headed out again, this time to the bamboo train, a small carriage made by villagers powered by a small lawnmower engine that runs up and down the (now disused) train tracks. There was a time when you could catch the contraption as far as Sisophon, near the Thai border. Now, according to the moto driver at our guesthouse, "you can only ride for to get your funnies" - it only runs for fifteen kilometres and is basically a tourist thing. But that doesn't stop it being goddamn fun. After that it was time to come back...

...to Bangkok. Yes, a mere three weeks after swearing that I would never return to this city, here I am. I should really avoid making bold pronouncements from here on out. Erin is working until next Wednesday, when she will abruptly leave her job forever (she has spent the last two weeks preparing 'fuck off and die' speeches for her boss of such length, complexity and profanity that my lower jaw has been constantly attached to the floor). Adam is gone already, and is currently living the sweet life in Chiang Mai. And I have my train booked for tomorrow, when I will shoot up to the old city of Phrae, with a moat and old cobblestone streets and a rare tribe of... [here Lachlan spends copious paragraphs making up details of a city he knows absolutely nothing about. He's basically going because he likes the name].

In the meantime, I'm trying to enjoy Bangkok, though all I seem to do is notice the massive mistakes I made last time around. For instance, here is a list of the reasons why the guesthouse Erin and I are staying at would have been a much, much better place to stay than our apartment:

*It's cheaper
*It has a free pool

*It has a free pool table

*It has a free gym

*It has a free laundry

*It has free internet

*It sells alcohol

*It has a book exchange

*It's full of cool people from around the world

*It's closer to where both Erin and I worked

*It has a good restaurant attached

*There are no group aerobics sessions next door playing retarded techno remixes of retarded Christmas songs

*Did I mention the group aerobics retards? Those guys were retards.

Ah well. What that saying the French have? Pont neuf monsieur Gerard Depardieu baguette bonjour piscine avec allez croissant. That's not actually a saying, just a bunch of French words that I know. Next week may finally see us all being cold enough to wear a jumper at night, or even use a blanket while sleeping. Or maybe it'll be much the same. For the answers to these and other essential questions of life, tune in next week. Same juicy time, same juicy channel.

Hope you're well,

Lachie

#29: The River

Week 29 - Battambang Province, Cambodia

PHNOM PENH: came and went before our tired eyes in a whirlwind of heat and orphans and hardness and lightning and poverty and wild-eyed men chasing us down the street screaming "Tuk-tuk! TUK-TUK!". I still love Phnom Penh, though nobody else seems to share my viewpoint: it's an awful fucking city, admittedly, but it's wild and unpredictable and full of that crumbling French elegance which I find myself becoming more and more attached to. This city, for example, has far more beautifully maintained green parks scattered across the city than Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur combined, despite the fact that most Phnom Penh residents couldn't afford to even use the toilets in either of those cities. The people, too, maintain a little of the old French arrogance - try ignoring the endless parade of tuk-tuk drivers and drug pushers and you'll get a stream of abuse: "No, thankyou! That's all you need to say sir - NO, THANKYOU!". It matters not that they're harassing and exploiting you - there's no excuse for bad manners.

The riverfront against which Phnom Penh pushes like a tide was experiencing a major construction project - to stop the river overflowing into town each wet season - which meant that the city's best asset was covered in a three-metre tall green fence, which didn't help our experience. So we jumped a bus for Siem Reap, and spent the next six hours in absolute misery. In the van from the Thai border to Phnom Penh, the trip took twelve hours rather than the five that were advertised; it was crowded and hot and they spent an hour stuffing palm-oil machinery weighing several hundred kilograms into the back while the other passengers stood around eating icecream sandwiches. But none of that mattered because it was fun. Buses, as a rule, aren't fun. I hate air-conditioned buses for the same reason I hate planes: they're squashy and poorly lit and either too hot or too cold or both, and unsociable and somehow deadly silent at the same time as being deafeningly loud; it's the same way that chicken carcasses and human corpses are transported. What's the point if there's no breeze on your face? Fuck air-conditioning. Open your windows. And throw rocks at Australian buses and trains until they re-open theirs.

So:

Siem Reap buzzes; I think I wrote that last time I was here but there's really no other word for it. We were the only people staying at our decaying wooden guesthouse so we had the run of the place like we were in The Shining or something; but two blocks away the bars and pubs heaved - Siem Reap, more than any other town, serves as the nexus of the Thailand-Laos- Vietnam-Cambodia travel circuit. We spent the days and nights chatting with Italian lion tamers and French journalists; Scottish vixens and British RAF soldiers fresh from Iraq and Afghanistan, over games of pool or rounds of 75c beers.

Adam went off to Angkor Wat to poke around the ruins; Erin and I spent the days doing... very little, except wandering here and there, like leaves blown about before a storm. Eventually we made our way down to Phnom Krom, a peaceful and deserted Buddhist temple placed elegantly atop a hill staring out in all directions at Tonle Sap, the biggest lake in South-East Asia, a magnificent blue haze that reaches out to the horizon and is specked with stilt villages and floating villages that change location depending on the water level and currents. It was a brilliant view, but an awful climb - the Cambodian sun is a cruel beast; it doesn't care that even Bangkok has started to cool, recently, it's still a daily 38 degrees out on the Cambodian plains.

After a good few days in Siem Reap, we woke at some ridiculous hour - 5:30am, or so - to catch the riverboat to Battambang, to the west. In a low-slung longboat we pushed out across Tonle Sap lake, through the wetlands and up the river. It was spectacular: in the wetlands we had several hundred birds - white storks and others - pushing ahead of our boat like a vanguard heralding our arrival. Up the river naked children playing in the fields waved and screamed and threw each other in the water, while serious-faced adults looked out silently from their floating huts. In the narrowest sections, we crashed up against other riverboats and had to wedge slowly past each other while the splintering wood of the creaking boats screamed as if in pain. And out on the lake, we could look out at nothing at all; just water pockmarked by reeds, as far as the eye could see.

...But...

...but after seven hours on a narrow wooden bench with no room to move, water slowly seeping through our pants and backpacks, we were very goddamn happy to see the end of that boat. And that is how we find ourselves in Battambang, a large town full of colonial buildings eroded by a half-century of disrepair, about which we know absolutely nothing, but of which I can make four observations: 1) everything is very cheap 2) it rains alot. Not just alot. An insane amount. Biblical proportions, and all that 3) electricity is, at best, unreliable here 4) the kids are very cute, but have a habit of trying to take things from your plate while you're eating or standing by with a plastic bag waiting to seize your leftovers. Which is crushingly depressing, and guilt-inducing, and makes me want to cry.

In a couple of days we will re-enter Thailand so that Erin can complete her work commitments in Bangkok, and that will be the last of the ties that bind, severed and forgotten. Then to the north, in a race with the Tibetan winter. We will either win or end up as icy-poles for the vultures.

Our videos are slowly getting better: episodes two and three will be up shortly. We're still trying to find the right site, so at the moment their are two addresses for your delectation:
www.pingpongkapow.tumblr.com
www.pingpongkapow.wordpress.com

Lachie

#26: Good Housemates

Week 26 - Bangkok, Thailand

AND WE'RE: out, out of our nice little apartment with our shit stuffed into baskets and backpacks, and on into Adam's apartment, where we sleep on the couch and eat all his food and piss in the bathtub and play the music too loud and set fire to the rug and drink the milk straight from the carton and generally just make good housemates of ourselves. Erin's very sick with the flu and spends most of her time expelling greenish-tinted bodily fluids at high speeds across the room. It's great.

It's nearly over, all this Bangkok stuff: we leave next week. It's the most confused schedule of all time: Erin finishes work today (the 3rd) but has to restart on the 3rd of November and finish again on the 5th; I finished on the 19th but started again on the 1st and finish on the 10th (possibly the 8th); Adam finishes on the 7th (possibly the 4th) but starts again on the 12th and finishes on the 15th... Good times. But we are going to Cambodia, and that's all that matters.

Of course, as is the way of things, everything gets good the moment you're ready to leave; I'm now working at a wonderful school with fantastic teacher and absolutely no work to be done. They sit around and talk shit all day until they think they've stayed in the staff room long enough to go home. I tells ya, it's a revelation.

We have lived a pretty charmed life here, for all my bitching, but the stasis keeps us miserable. We came over here to move, continuously, and more and more we've found ourselves bound to Bangkok because of money or friends, and though it thrives during the night, this city, during the day it can be a very dull place to be, little more than an unpleasant melange of humidity and traffic noise and crowds and cracked pavements. Having to wade up to your knees across a streets when it's raining: that kind of thing is awesome fun when you're here for a holiday, but when you're coming home from work it's usually just frustrating and kinda gross. And so you get petty and notice the little details (like the peculiar Thai habit of stopping for absolutely no reason at the top and bottom of crowded escalators) and forget the big picture.

The big picture is that this city is surreal and fantastic, a never-ending carnival dedicated to the gods of paid sex and cheap whiskey. Nothing about it makes sense, and so at times you fail to notice just how ridiculous the whole thing is. Like: a telegraph pole exploded above me today while I was on the motorbike ride to work. And when I say exploded, I mean it; a massive blast of light and sound, followed by the burning sensation on my neck and shoulder as a fountain of sparks poured down upon my un-helmeted head.

That doesn't happen elsewhere, right?

And: Adam's disembodied voice haunting us each day on the train. Somehow, a few months ago, Adam sort of fell into doing a voiceover for a commercial. How? Who knows? In any case the ad was picked up by the SkyTrain company, who have televisions on all their carriages playing ads. Now, every day we get:

Paul (Adam's boss): Your talent is a gift! The whole world is depending on you!
Adam (in a deep, throaty yell filled with sincere longing and desperation): I'll never do this to you again!
Thai lady whom we don't know, but apparently represents Kasikorn Bank: Yaht min koo doo let min khat...

This kind of thing is odd, right? It shouldn't be the case that in a city of ten million people who all speak another language that our friend should be the one on television, right?

Last week I was electrocuted by an egg (long story, the moral of which is not to pour eggs into a sandwich press, even if they do make awesome triangular shaped eggs). Erin is being stalked by a girl who is trying to force her to take a well-paying job at a Thai university (long story, the moral of which is never to be nice to anyone. Ever.). Wait, have I mentioned the being-chased-by-wild-elephants-while-hitchhiking-with-a-gun-toting-golf-player story? What about the nearly-dead-through-tropical-fever-induced-liver-failure story?

This stuff is happening, every day. Except this week, for some reason, which is why this is such a meandering email with no real point. Next week we will be gone! I'll write again then. Hope you're all well.

Lachlan

#28: The Sizzled Lizard

Week 28 - Phnom Penh, Cambodia

SO WE: trundled back into Cambodia yesterday, rolling over the border in the early morning. Then we argued with the van drivers until midday, trying to get a reasonable price to Phnom Penh. After an hour or two I finally realized that for the whole argument I'd had the exchange rates mixed up in my head and had been offering them just over a dollar to take us some three hundred kilometres. So I felt like a knob and spent three hundred kilometres getting sniggers and icy stares from the Cambodians in the car.

Whatever: the drive was spectacular anyway, over mountains and rivers, as empty of people as any place in Australia. The occasional labourers walking home in their rags were the only people for several hours, then a few ox-carts, carrying fruit, then a town on the bank of a river, where an old lady was lugging a large, freshly-caught shark up to her stall. And then Phnom Penh: the giant, spastic, chaotic, rambling dustcloud disguised as a city, where the troubles began. In the space of an hour we were harassed, ripped off, driven in circles, given free beer by the Thai Minister for Justice (?), and offered endless amounts of drugs we couldn't afford, and we ended the day tired, hungry and shitty, in a guesthouse over the lake while a massive lightning storm played out in front of us. Apparently a couple of months in Thailand has softened us up quite a bit.

Or perhaps it was starting our travels with a week on a tropical island, which is about the most softening travel experience you can go through that doesn't involve a cruise ship or actually physically transforming yourself into a sponge. We spent the days on Ko Chang waking up late and lolling about in the warm clear water until lunchtime, when we'd join the other travellers getting happy shakes at the Treehouse and return hours later blissful and double-glazed. Glassy-eyed, we'd sit around staring at the geckos chasing flies across the ceiling or hold meandering debates about the relative merits of The Cosby Show versus Saved by the Bell. And then it would be nighttime, and some bar along the beach would have a full moon party, or a half moon party, or a three sixteenths moon party, and that would carry us through until it was time to wake up and go swimming. It was, without hyperbole, the toughest experience of my entire life.

The beaches were filled with fish and frogs and giant beetles that flew into my back at such high speeds that I thought I was being punched; up the road from our bungalows, a troop of monkeys hung out on the power lines, having gladiatorial contests to knock each other off the poles and racing each other along the thick black cables. At one point while swimming a large lizard surfaced only a couple of metres frome Erin and I. We watched it dive for fish among the rocks - an amazing experience until the Thais on the beach spotted the lizard as well and immediately dropped everything they were doing to pounce on it. The lizard ended up on the barbecue at the bungalows that night.

It's been about six months since we last came to Cambodia and I'd completely forgotten the massive amount of difference between the two countries, which is obvious from the moment you cross the border. The difference is simple - Thailand has money, Cambodia doesn't - but it's profound nonetheless. Seeing the naked toddlers playing in the toxic goo that fills the gutters, the pavement hairdressers, the razor wire around poles to stop people stealing the power cables for cash, the ox-pulled carts, the large cauldrons along the main roads that serve as public bins and which are burned each night, the way people driving down the road will just fling bags of garbage out of their windows as a matter of habit - this is the naked life that goes on in Cambodia, disgusting and thrilling and miserable and ecstatic. And addictive, which is why we've come back for more. Tomorrow we head to Siem Reap, which Adam has not seen before, and then we head into lands unknown - Battambang, Sisophon, rivers, jungles and bamboo trains.

Hope you're all well and enjoying the warmer weather (Phnom Penh is, as ever and always, stifling) - oh and the first episode of our TV show is up and running: www.pingpongkapow.tumbler.org!

Ping Pong Ka-Pow,

Lachie

#27: Bangkok Sinking

Week 27 - Koh Chang, Thailand

AND AWAY: we go...

There's blood in the streets of Bangkok again, and once again you'd never know it unless you read the paper and / or received frantic calls from friends and family. Two people are dead this time; eight more had limbs blown off from ping pong bombs or tear gas canisters. The leader of the PAD is in prison; the prime minister says he wants to quit; the police are getting malicious; and the army chief - who, bizarrely, has assumed the role of The Voice of Reason - is being bullied into another coup.

It's time to leave Bangkok and never look back.

Two days ago Ronald, one of the teachers I work with, got drugged and robbed. He went to a coffeeshop, pulled out his paper to have a read and next thing he knows, it's morning, and he's awake face down in the gutter several miles away with no wallet. Worst part is, he's already lost everything once: he used to own a hotel in Phuket, pre-tsunami. Now he's working shitty teaching jobs just to get by, and he's lost everything he saved. He spent the next couple of days vomiting copiously after the massive dose they handed him.

Telling the story brought on an avalanche of other desperate tales. Marvin, another teacher I work with, took a girl home to his apartment. They were stark sober, but after one bite of his dinner he lost all memory and woke to an empty apartment. Security cameras showed that she had remained in his apartment for an hour and a half, rigorously cleaning the apartment of every one of his belongings.

Maxwell, one of Clarice's friends, also took a girl home. He didn't get drugged, but did fall asleep. He woke to find her swiping his laptop, and chased her out through the corridor, catching up with her in the elevator. Whereupon she promptly stabbed him in the chest, puncturing his lung.

Also: it's time to leave Bangkok, and never look back.

Aaron left a few days ago, on the bus down to Ko Chang, and waited out the week swinging in a hammock with an evil grin on his evil face, clutching a cocktail with an evil claw and cackling his evil cackle, evilly, as he thought about us slaving away at our braingrinding jobs.

And now we're gone too, off on the Grand Adventure. We've met up with Aaron in Ko Chang, which is, if anything, more perfect and idyllic and sunny and warm and gorgeous than the last time we were here, in April. If all goes well we should be in Cambodia in a week or so. And then: onwards and upwards.

Hope you're all well,

Lachlan

#25: Chased by Wild Elephants Through the Jungle

AND BUT: then we round the corner, thick trees on either side, and Doc slams the jeep to a halt. The jungle is screeching. Ahead, there are three 4WDs in front of us, sitting idly. A face pops out of a window of the car in front.

"Chang moho!" he cries, waving his hands frantically at us.

And now Doc slams the car into reverse and starts backing up the road - the only road out of the jungle - at a fair speed. There are cars behind us. Doc leans out the window and yells.

"Chang moho! Bpai! Chang moho!"

Finally, he turns to us to explain.

"There is an elephant coming." He raises his eyebrows meaningfully. "An angry elephant. When people beep beep - [he motions beeping the horn] - elephant does this - [he motions the elephant crushing the car and murderously chasing down and slaughtering those who crawl, bloodied and screaming, from the vehicle]".

"Oh" we say in unison.

He nods at us. We have been hitchhiking with Doc for the last hour. "Safety first," he says, pushing the car further up the road, and lifts a handgun onto his lap - unbeknownst to Edie and I, but seen by Aaron, who thereafter has the distinct look of a man who knows his body will never be found by the authorities.

At that moment a soldier dressed in dark fatigues comes pelting round the corner like the vanguard of a horde of Japanese people fleeing Godzilla. He jumps onto the back of a truck, screams for it to go faster.

But we can't go faster. The cars behind us are trying to turn around, rather than reverse any further, and now everybody's stuck for a few minutes while the blockage clears. And now, round the corner, the great bull elephant lumbers. He's a fantastic beast, with magnificent tusks, and he looks stressed and frightened. The road's designed to keep the wildlife off it; but once they're on it, it's very difficult to exit because of the side trenches. So he keeps marching toward us and we stumble backwards, each car trying not to collide with the next.

This surreal chase, which lasts for another fifteen kilometres before a ranger's truck finally forces the elephant from the road, reaches its peak when we are all not only being chased up the road by a wild elephant but also trapped in our cars by a troop of about fifty large red-assed monkeys, who surround the cars and seem playful from the window but screech and bare their teeth as soon as a door is opened.

Mental. But really the incident saved the weekend, which at that point was seeming like a bit of a blowout. See, we had a great time at Khao Yai jungle last time, all trekking and waterfalls and watching monkeys swing through trees and so on. So we decided we'd come one last time before we leave the area, forgetting one key factor: the wet season.

Yes, after all my bitching the wet season began in force a couple of weeks ago. At school I had to wade through shin-deep water; the road outside looked like a river filled with a thousand Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bangs. It entailed all the wading and gnashing of teeth that I'd thought it would. The temperature has even got significantly cooler. It's great.

Until you get to the jungle. It was raining lightly, and cold up in the mountains, and so the waterfalls were a write-off. As for the trekking - well, most of the tracks were closed because of flooding, especially the longer ones. So we decided to join together a couple of the shorter ones, get a good walk in, and head back to town.

We got ten metres down the track, when I heard Edie's voice behind me. "What's that on the ground?" she asked, ominously. Twenty more metres, and Aaron pipes in, "Is that a leech on my foot?", and then, the call from Edie after another twenty metres "They're everywhere!".

We picked up the pace.

Actually, we ran the entire way. There was literally a carpet of leeches on the ground, thousands upon thousands of the little bastards waving their little tooth-filled heads at us mockingly. Luckily we were on the shortest track, a 1200m circular 'Nature Trail' so that we were back at the visitor centre inside of twenty minutes. By that stage, we each had at least a dozen leeches on each of our shoes, with more of the little fucking creatures burrowed inside our socks and ankles. I'd never seen anything like it. The lighters came out in force and at one point we accidentally set Aaron's shoe on fire. For whatever reason Edie got away unscathed, but Aaron and I marched around the rest of the day looking as if someone had gone at our ankles with a hacksaw.

So the rampaging bull elephant really was an improvement on our day. Even better: the handgun-wielding air-duct installation man we were hitchhiking with offered to take us out to dinner with his friends. We agreed - they couldn't speak much English and we couldn't speak much Thai but several bottles of whisky saw a rapid end to those concerns. We garbled our own languages, let alone the other, and spent most of the night making extravagant gestures with our hands. It was a fantastic night, and we ended it back in Bangkok on a high.

I should mention that Edie has become something of a whisky monster over here. The fact that you can buy a bottle of the meanest whisky in Thailand (Mehkong), plus soda, cola and ice for around $4 altogether (to paraphrase that stupid song nobody knows the name of: Ain't no party like a $4 party!) has released something bestial and broken-beer-bottle-wielding in Edie. Or maybe she just likes it alot. In any case, if you're mixing the drinks, better make sure you get the proportions exactly right - and DO NOT forget to give a last little 'jush' with the spoon to mix it up. Otherwise you might just get a broken glass to the face, followed by a shouted, "Shhhhhh!! Stop crying!!! [hiccup] Whaddayya say we don't [hiccup] tell the cops about this, hey? How about we jus...Zzzzzzzzzzz"

Two weeks-ish til we leave this accursed city, though I finished work last week. Still, I've found that life in Bangkok is vastly improved by a) not working and b) locking yourself in the apartment and playing Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" at full volume on repeat all day even if you're supposed to, like, maybe, do the dishes or take out the rubbish or something. But whatever, don't be a, like, fascist. I'll do it this afternoon! Jesus! Lay off!

Lachie

#23 & 24: The Dengue Daze

Weeks 23 and 24, Thailand

WELL, WELL: this was uncalled for. I am currently coming to the end of a week-and-a-half-long battle with Dengue fever, which has left me battered, bruised and sorta sleepy. My fingers are still swollen (it feels like I'm mashing at the keyboard with a set of cold football hotdogs), my muscles still ache, I'm as weak as a day-old kitten, and my head is still very fuzzy, so this may not be the most coherent letter that I've ever moose apple bulldozer. But I'm improving, at least.

Dengue fever is not nearly as much fun as I had thought it would be. I'd thought: instant cred for the price of a week lying in bed flipping through magazines in my pyjamas. Sweet deal, I thought. Not so. Instead I spent a week staring at a small patch on the ceiling and trying very, very hard not to move. Any movement - any at all - and I was off into dizzyness and nausea for the rest of the day. I couldn't eat, I couldn't drink; I couldn't sleep; I almost went through liver failure. I glowed red day and night and my hands and feet swelled up like balloons. My motivation to do anything was shot: all I wanted to do was lie and stare at the ceiling - and that's all I did, all throughout the day and night in my apartment; then, when the doctors told me I was no longer healthy enough to stay at home, I stared at the hospital ceiling.

It was a truly boring disease. I didn't even get hypercoloured fever dreams about decapitated cattle. The closest I came was when I convinced myself at 4am one morning that I was a businessman from eastern China and that it was absolutely imperative that I work out what number one gets when you multiply all the numbers on a Sudoku board together (it's 3, 265, 720, incidentally). Even my fantasies were boring.

Hospital was fine, and I even kinda got used to pissing into a jug. Started to enjoy it, really. I'm considering getting one for the apartment. A large sign above my bed announced to the world that I was a "Bleeding Precaution", which made me look pretty hardcore to the other patients, I think. Well, those that could read English, anyway. The man next to me had a young son who came to visit him regularly, lugging along a videogame thing-y that made loud, ridiculous noises every few seconds. That boy died a million gratuitously-violent deaths in my head over the time I was in hospital, deaths which usually involved him being forced to eat that stupid videogame thing, or having it otherwise inserted into his body painfully.

The fever baked away any last remnants of Thai language that I still carried around with me and so I was left to communicate with the nurses in garbled sign language and monosyllabic directions. The doctor just said "Cannot go home yet" while she watched my bank account disappear; when there was nothing left to take I finally got "Okay, you go home now".

And I finally emerged into the light and quickly retreated back into the dark of my apartment. Now I've got to make a desperate scramble to remake some of the money I lost so that this time here hasn't been wasted because of a mosquito. (Back at work today, this is what passed for co-worker sympathy from Jack the Canadian: "Dengue fever? Where the fuck do you live, man? In a hammock over a swamp?")

In other developments, the Thai PM has finally been sacked - for illegally making money from his cooking shows while acting as PM - so the protests should dry up fairly soon out here, although the people they've put up as his replacements look like an even bigger bunch of clowns.

Anyway, I apologize for the short update this week but as I said, I'm still fairly weak and it hurts a little to look at the computer screen. I hope you're all doing better than I'm doing, and I'll catch up again next week with what will hopefully be better news.

Lachie

#22: The Angry Mop

Week 22, Thailand

OH BOY: things are getting strange. It was last Friday, as I was leaving my last class, that I heard a low whining sound, like a long "Eeeeeeeeeee".

Hmmm, I thought.

I rounded the corner, still with the "Eeeeeee" buzzing in my head, and saw down the other end of the corridor one of the Thai teachers running toward me at full pelt. She was making the low droning sound, and, with a look of panic in her eyes, spat one word at me as she passed:

"Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeemergenceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...."

Hmmm, I thought.

I continued down the corridor, walked into the staffroom, which was mysteriously empty and looked like it had been deserted hastily. I slumped behind my desk and looked out the window at an empty playground. I heard a stamping of feet, and a Thai teacher racing down the stairs spotted me through the doorway. She rushed in.

"We must go home!" she cried, "School is being evacuated!"

"What? Why?"

"There is a mop!" she cried.

"A mop?" I asked, confused. She took my repetition as evidence that I had understood.

"Yes! A mop is coming toward the school! We must go!"

"A mop?" I asked again.

"Yes, an angry mop!"

And with that she fled. I sat, shuffled some papers, thought about going home and then what the teacher had been saying finally hit me: Oh, an angry mob. Oh. I grabbed my things and ran full pelt toward the front gates, pushing children out of my way and making a low "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" sound.

In the end that turned out to be a false alarm; there was rioting and a lot of injuries but it didn't come within 500m of my school. But things were obviously on the slide so Edie and I decided to bust out of Bangkok for the weekend, trying to flee the angry mops, head down to the beach for some much needed R & R. But the PAD, in its protests, shut down the trains, the buses, and the planes, and we found ourselves trapped inside the city.

If you can't beat them, join them. The next day Aaron and I headed straight into the mouth of the beast, heading out to Government House to hang with the protesters behind their crudely built barricades of car tyres and old bicycles, their tinny loudspeakers and their ratty tents and sweaty headscarves. It was exciting, though we felt a bit like outsiders having made the ill-informed decision to come wearing black (the protesters are almost exclusively decked out in yellow, which isn't the greatest fashion statement but is quite a thing to behold). We made it all the way into Government House itself, allowed through a small breach in the gates by a couple of smiling protesters, to where hundreds more people of all stripes are permanently camped out in a bid to bring down the government. It was there I got a phone call from my mother.

"Uh...Hi mum."
"I'm just calling to make sure you're safely away from all this unrest that's going on."
"Ah, actually..."
"Actually?"
"Actually, I'm at the protest now."
"No you're not."
"Yes I am."
"No you're not."
"Yes I-"
"No, you're not, because you're not that stupid. And even if you were that stupid, you're definitely not stupid enough to tell your poor mother that that's where you are..."

Some of the protesters were obviously a bit suspicious that we were reporters; some asked us bluntly and others fled with a nervous laugh if we asked too many questions. But on the whole they were very friendly, wanting to involve Aaron and I in the story of what was going on, showing Aaron photos of the riots, shaking our hands and just generally being pretty cool guys and girls.

Since then, of course, things have progressed downhill. The police, who have maintained a permanent presence near the protest since it began in May, mysteriously disappeared on Monday night, just in time for an angry pro-government mob to clash with the PAD, in the course of which fighting several guns were fired, fifty-odd people were wounded, and one man died. The PM announced a state of emergency several hours later; the PAD announced a civil war (later retracted); the army general was placed in control of the city; our schools were closed down; and we are now banned from having public gatherings of more than five people. Good times.

In the meantime, in a bid to end our boredom, Edie and I have been catching buses all around Bangkok. The buses - crusty, ancient clattering machines with wooden floorboards and large open windows - were always a bit of a mystery to us, their destinations in Thai script whizzing by us before I could decipher them ("Uh...that says Pa-ra...Is that a G or a D? Um... Pa-ra-ga- Oh shit it's gone...") but in the last couple of weeks they've opened up a new world to us, taking us to places almost impossible to get to without a stiff taxi fare otherwise. We catch them to places we don't know, to buzzing night markets and streets filled with cut flowers, to bridges filled with giggling high school students hanging with their friends, to Chinatown and Little India, where we eat sickeningly sweet Punjabi lollies and stuff ourselves on chapati. It's a whole new side of Bangkok, and I find myself falling back in love with the city, almost in spite of myself.

I'm pretty sure things will settle in the next week, though I've been saying that for more than a week and it hasn't happened yet. But the army's in control now, and once they decide on which side of the fence they fall, it'll come to a head fairly quickly, for better or worse, I think. Until then, we have only to avoid the angry mops and pray that our schools remain closed. And practice lying to our mothers.

Lachie

#21: It's Revolution, Baby!

IT FILTERED: down to us very slowly, as usual. By the time it reached me, dripping sweat and staring at the wall from my desk, the manic shouting, the slogan-chanting, the clash of sweaty singlets against riot shields, had decreased to a murmur. The first thing I noticed was that the Thai teachers had the television on in the staffroom. The sound was off. They'd had it on occasionally when the Thai boxers were competing in the Olympics, but never otherwise. Odd, but not anything worth investigating. Then, later in the day, an email from a friend in Singapore:

Wow, Bangkok looks pretty exciting at the moment.

What? No it doesn't. I followed the links and there it was: the People's Alliance for Democracy had taken Government House and the government TV station, and blocked all highways into and out of Bangkok.

Now, I've made my thoughts on PM Samak known elsewhere in the blog; if the protesters succeed then good riddance to bad rubbish (just to recap: he's a television chef. The prime minister of a significant nation has two - count 'em - two cooking shows each week, as well as a celebrity talk show). Will it succeed though? Probably not, because the army isn't willing to back the protesters, and nothing ever happens in Thailand without the army weighing in. Let's hear it for military dictatorships posing as functioning democracies to receive millions in US funding and snap-happy tourists! Hip-hip!

But what amazes me is the Thais' deep love of a good coup.

Bear in mind, this is a land in which, if it weren't for the blare of traffic whistles and the whine of two-stroke engines, the roads would be almost silent - no-one ever, ever dares to use their car horn. A land in which people never, ever raise their voice, except via a karaoke machine. Where conflict is simply bad form and to be avoided at all times. It's simply not done. And yet, and yet: they're not just willing, but eager, to congregate en masse every couple of months to depose and behead the current political leader.

I had always wondered what it would be like to live through a coup, attempted or otherwise. I imagine that in a smaller town with a more excitable populace, say Phnom Penh or Port Moresby, that the reverberations of the revolt would ripple instantaneously throughout the city. But in a metropolis the size of Bangkok, with a people as fiercely, stubbornly calm as the Thais, the coup basically boils down to a few half-excited conversations with friends around the city:

"Hey! There was a coup today!"

"What? A coup! Really?"

"Yeah!"

"Wow."

"..."

"So..."

"How was work today?"

There's not much else to say.

We didn't make it to the jungle last weekend; instead we went out with Jen and Clarice and a few others, celebrating Jen's birthday at the Flying Chicken outside of town. This place - it is easily the restaurant most likely to end my long stint at vegetarianism.

Not because the food's particularly good, you understand - it is very good, but so are most places in Bangkok - but because when your chicken is cooked, they cover it in brandy, light it on fire, put it in a slingshot, and fire it to a waiter waiting on a unicycle, who deftly catches it with a spike on the top of his hat.

I'll wait here while you read that again.

Done? Yes, it's amazing - more amazing because there are several choices as to how your chicken is caught, including having a second waiter on top of the first waiter's shoulders (who, just to repeat, is on a motherfucking unicycle), more amazing still because we didn't get to see it at all. We missed the entire affair, as we were subjected to VIP treatment (read: locked in a karaoke room and subjected to endless balloon animals from a drunken Thai clown).

Still, it managed to be bizarre. The Thai clown was amazing with the balloons, creating really complex designs like a small piglet wearing sunglasses (!) or a poodle wearing sunglasses (!) - well, okay: the truth is he did all the standard designs and then used a small balloon to make sunglasses for them. It was pretty enthralling after a few whiskeys, though. And we chucked on a good mix of mopey Thai karaoke dirges for the Thais in attendance and the 'Ghostbusters' theme song for the rest of us ("I AIN'T AFRAID OF NO GHOST!"). And when the chickens were finally delivered to us after their flight, they were presented standing up like little dolls, with a flower where the head should be, and a little American flag in their little roast chicken arms. It was creepy.

Sunday we hung with Aaron, who informed us that he is, after much debate, leaving his job and joining us on our long road north. Excellent! My dream was always to lead a communal trip, picking up people along the way - I watched The Muppet Movie far, far too often in the lead-up to this trip (sing it with me now: 'Movin' right along, dun-de-dun, dun-de-dun, footloose and fancy-free...'). Our last month in Bangkok is upon us, the road stretches before us like a dream, and soon we will be carried along it like leaves in a stream.

But for now we work, and watch events in Bangkok unfold. On Tuesday, the day of the revolt, my last class was interrupted after twenty minutes by a loudspeaker announcement; the children stood suddenly and ran out; and, mystified, I retired to the staff room, slumping in a heap behind my desk. Bill, a veteran of many years teaching in Thailand, turned around to me and smiled.

"I love it when they have a coup," he said, "We all get to go home early."

Viva la revolucion!

Lachie

#20: Bangkok I Love You (But You're Bringing Me Down)

Kill Time: Still the coolest bar in Bangkok

Week 20, Thailand

HAVE I: been a bit down on Bangkok, recently?

I haven't meant to be. I guess it's just something that comes with spending a long time in one place; the ugly bits tend to stick out and poke you in the eye a bit more than earlier, when you first arrive, smiling, clutching closely to your ideas of what the place should be like with the breathless optimism of migrants and Barack Obama. And being poor: being poor is a grinding dullness that can make a mockery of any city's nightlife. Add to that a boring job - a job with the kind of crushing paralysis that sees you sitting at your desk furiously trying to work out how many cents you are earning per minute, or wondering whether dogs hear sound the same way fish do, or spending hours staring at the clock trying to work out if the second hand is moving slower than it was a few hours ago. Suddenly you're trapped and bored all day by the job and trapped and bored all night by your inability to spend money. So, in the words of 90's relationship guidebooks: It's not you, Bangkok. It's me.

And I should be fair to Bangkok, even though I agree with Theroux when he calls it "a preposterous mixture of temples and brothels". This city is cool. The young guys with cigarettes hanging limply from mouths surrounded by ambitious facial hair, pouring whiskey for their friends at run-down little college bars. The old ladies doing tai chi in the morning and preparing their alms to give to the monks wandering past in a sea of wide grins, saffron robes, and hands pressed together in thanks. The fat men behind the food stalls, hazy with chili smoke and laughing with grease stains down their chest, each one a consummate master of the only dish they have ever made or will ever make. The slimy canals that criss cross the city, filled with boats; the evil laughs of tuk-tuk drivers; the hammocks over train tracks filled with labourers escaping the midday heat; the endless games of bottle-top checkers and makruk; the children shouting "Hello! I love you!" and the young guys and girls anxious to find out everything about you and all your thoughts on Thailand. And the food! There is an unspoken rule in Thailand that the more one spends on food here, the worse it will be, and vice versa. Beautiful, tongue-scorching, stomach-filling meals are available everywhere for less than the cost of a Paddle-Pop, in Sydney.

But just as Bangkok has many brilliant sights, tastes and sounds that are found only here, and nowhere else in the world, it also has its bastions of shittiness, the things that seem deliberately tailored to make your day a little harder. So, in the interests of getting everything out on the table, a few of the lamer aspects of living here:

GROUP AEROBICS:

So, even though Thais are genetically the slimmest people on earth, they nevertheless are determined to rub our faces in our own fat arses by exercising constantly. Parks come with every conceivable sporting arena - tennis, badminton, bocce, basketball, soccer, futbol, pools, running tracks - plus huge areas of free exercise equipment, weights and dumbells and stationary bikes and that one where you press your arms together and another where you spin your arms in opposite circles and another that makes you look like you're practicing having sex, which is really funny.

Every large corporate building has a stereo system out the front and every afternoon (you guessed it) they unite in their spandex glory to do an hour of aerobics. This would be more goofy than annoying if they hadn't decided to set up one such aerobics arena right outside our window, so that now we suffer through two hours of techno remixes of "Jingle Bells" and "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" (I wish I was kidding) filtering into our apartment. I've got enough on my plate, what with all this blogger-ing (?) and surfing (?) the inter-web (?) without having to listen to music that sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks dropping some pills and buying a drum machine. Lame!

THE WET SEASON:

Aka, the Most Disappointing Event of My Life. Each week since June, we've doubted ourselves, saying, "Oh, maybe it'll start next week", but I'm ready to call bullshit on the whole thing. Wet season? Where? I'm expecting lightning, floods, screaming, sandbags, being trapped in our apartment block, much gnashing of teeth, old men with long beards measuring things in cubits. Instead, we get a half-hour storm every couple of days. Meh? Sure, hundreds of people are dying in mudslides and flooding in Laos and Vietnam, but here? They should rename this the Mildly Damp Season. Lame!

THE WHISTLEBLOWERS:

Traffic in Bangkok is bad, it's true. But it's not so bad. It's rare that you're stuck in the one place for more than fifteen or twenty minutes; the subway and the SkyTrain have taken alot of pressure off the roads. Some roads would almost be kinda pleasant to sit by. Almost, that is, if it weren't for the Thai obsession with blowing whistles at anything that moves.

A car reverses out of its driveway - BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP goes the security guard on his whistle.

Put your foot over the yellow line on the SkyTrain - BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP goes the train guard.

As for traffic cops, just forget about it: they will sit on their whistle going BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP even if they're not doing anything. It's mind-numbingly constant but no matter how much you hear it, it's always just as irritating as the first time. My "punching the goddamn whistle out of their stupid goddamn mouth" fantasies have proceeded to boiling point, but they're lucky, because these violent fantasies always start with me going "The next person I hear blowing a whistle..." and since the sound never stops, it's difficult to work out who that person is.

Plus security guards and policeman wear uniforms that are skin-tight, so even while they're irritating you, you're forced to imagine them naked. Lame!

THE EDUCATION SYSTEM:

Learning by rote is so lame. Here's how my lessons go:

"Okay, everyone, repeat: I am going to the supermarket."

"I ahm goo-ing too tha supahmahkut."

"Good. Now say: I will buy some milk."

"Guhd. Nao sae: I will bay sum mik."

"Okay, good, but we don't need to say good..."

"Oh-kay, guhd, but wee-"

"No, no, don't repeat everything I say..."

"Noh, noh, dot rupeet -"

Sometimes I want to scream "STOP COPYING ME!" like a five-year old getting picked on by an older brother. I'm totally going to have a temper tantrum soon. Lame!

FOOTPATHS

Everybody here is smaller than me. So I hit my head on everything - poles, lightbulbs, roofs, electric wires. Plus, they seem intent on making footpaths into obstacle courses of potholes, sudden steps, dead rats, dogshit, and wandering babies. I've never been what you'd call the elegant, graceful type, but over here clumsiness is a life-threatening condition. Lame!

THE DREGS OF SOCIETY

Look, I'm not one of these anti-whitey whiteys. A lot of backpackers will make a big show of trying to avoid other travellers, expats and well-known places (god forbid a place should appear in a guidebook), but it's all bullshit, really: without other English-speakers we'd have no-one to inflict our mind-numbingly boring stories on (even the Thais have limits to their 'nodding and smiling politely while white guy talks about his adventures' behaviour).

I don't mind tourists and ultra-touristed areas; they have their good sides and I won't go out of my way to avoid them. But here in Bangkok: well, it can be a struggle. Bangkok attracts a certain type of person, and, not to put too fine a point on it, that person is either:

a) a drunken, overweight Australian man in his fifties, here for the promise of free sex, no matter how ugly you are.
b) a muscular German with glasses in his mid-forties, here for the promise of free sex, no matter how boring you are.
c) a drunken, tattooed British guy in his early thirties, here for the promise of free sex, no matter what a brain-dead slobbering moron you are. [You can tell these ones by the way they drool while shouting "She showed me her booby!" to their mates on the phone.]

Sex for sale is nothing new, and the girls here make a good living from it, with little of the shame and violence that happens elsewhere. And the way Bangkok's reputation collects all these people who couldn't make it anywhere else, like a beach collecting driftwood and dead seaweed: it's nothing new, either - Goa and Laos act as just as much a magnet for failed hippies as Bangkok does for sex-deprived middle-aged men. But none of that stops it being the most depressing sight on earth, sometimes. Plus, it makes every conversation with a Thai girl feel more like a possible transaction than a chat. Lame!

Phew, so that's all off my chest. Now I can get back to the good stuff. According to current plans, we should be heading back to the jungle this weekend. See you then.

Lachie

ps, My brother Daniel has just started his own blog, obviously looking to cash in on the limitless wealth and fame achieved by this one. Since he's five years younger than me, it will automatically be at least 17 time more dynamic, relevant, edgy and youth-y than this one (O young people! Tell me your secrets! Like, where is this so-called Timbaland, and how do I get there? Can I take the bus?).

I suggest we all jump ship immediately. http://modern-day.blogspot.com/