It always felt like something was missing from Sydney's beaches.Turns out it was this guy.
Week 3, Thailand
AND YES: so, we're back in the 'Kok. It's been a long crazy week and we're just starting to settle into our new lives here. I start teaching tomorrow (crazy) and don't finish until June 20, which seems quite a ways off right now.
But the start of the week: so we cruised around Sihanoukville for a bit while the Khmers went apeshit celebrating their New Year's, which basically consists of sitting by the side of the road all day with buckets of water so that when a motorbike or pickup truck full of passengers comes past you can hurl the water right into their stupid unsuspecting faces and then laugh maniacally as they careen off the road and try to regain control of their motorbike / pickup truck.
(We made sure not to hire a motorbike during this celebration)
And then at night it consists of everyone getting these long rods - they look like magician's wands - that shoot fireworks out the end, so you can literally stand and point your stick at people and bright red sparkly burning fireworks will spew forth onto them. Which is basically what the Khmers do, all night, for the entire three days of New Year's - walk up and down the beach shooting fireworks at people, especially girls that they like. Why you'd want the girl of your dreams to end up as a burns victim is beyond me, though.
We loved our time in Sihanoukville, which was laidback and friendly and beautiful, but by Tuesday it was time to re-enter Thailand, taking the local bus through the mountains of Koh Kong province to the western border. And you know it's funny: come to Thailand from Sydney and your first impression is just the noise and chaos and smog and dirt. Come to Thailand from Cambodia, and it seems like an oasis of order and cleanliness and safety. Well, except the driving.
In Cambodia, the state of the roads combined with the state of the cars means that I don't remember us ever travelling at over 50km/hr. As soon as you cross the border though, it's 140km/hr, all day every day. Without seatbelts, and, in some of the pickup trucks, without any way of seeing what's going on outside the car. In Thailand, on the open road, you see a fairly gruesome accident scene every hour or so. The road toll from their three-day New Year's celebration was 324 dead, 4800 injured. In three days. The yearly road toll is five figures long.
(In Cambodia, of course, it's a fraction of that, but they make up for it in other ways. Like, their custom during New Year's of just shooting all their guns into the air (Cambodian men will take any excuse to shoot at anything. They even shoot at stormclouds to try and ward them away). Of course, what goes up must come down and quite a few of those bullets end up coming down on the heads of innocent bystanders. Tens of people die each year from falling bullets during New Year's.)
So we ended up at Ko Chang, which you can all see in your head if you close your eyes and say to yourself 'mysterious tropical jungle island with awesome beaches' - whatever you're imagining is probably pretty close to the reality. We hired a motorbike, got a little shack on the beach, and cruised through the next couple of days like millionaire playboys. I loved Cambodia, but it was unspeakably lovely to swim in water that wasn't punctuated regularly with plastic bags, half-eaten pieces of meat and used condoms, floating by like islands of scum.
So those of you who know Edie know that she had a deep-seated, intractable fear of snakes. She went on television, on ABC's Creature Features, and got cured by some psychologist who got her to hold a snake and everything, and that was the end of that. It had to be true - it was on television! Everybody saw it!
...well, not quite. As we rounded a corner on our little motorbike up in the mountains of Ko Chang we came right up to a five-foot rat snake, crossing the road at a leisurely pace. Edie went spastic. She started screaming and crying and doing some weird macarena dance on the back of the bike that had me swerving right into the path of the snake. Which, of course, sent her off more. So she's squirming, trying desperately to get off the bike and run away and at the same time trying to stay on the bike and drive away, and the bike comes to a staggering stop somewhere between the snake and the steep slope into the jungle. The snake turned and disappeared somewhere up the road (thankfully) and Edie cried herself all the way back to town. Afterwards, she would tell me several times how proud of herself she was, since she'd always assumed that she would simply projectile vomit and then faint clean away if she ever saw a snake in the wild. I guess I have to be grateful for small mercies...
And now here, to Bangkok, where we're living with Aaron, one of Edie's friends from uni, who's been living over here for a couple of years now. He's a great guy, this tall (a full head taller than me) skinny white guy with a good grasp of Thai and a great sense of humour. He's a film editor (he worked on 300, but don't hold that against him) and he's been so generous and kind to us, it's really been fantastic. He lives in a beautiful one bedroom apartment in Thong Lo, with a swimming pool and a gym and - I know I sound like the most foul and disgusting type of tourist when I say this but - he has Vegemite! Thank Dog Almighty!
[interesting note: in Bangkok, which is steadfastly Buddhist and which is kinda resentful of any and all attempts to Christian-ize it, alot of the cooler teenagers get about in t-shirts that say things like 'Thank Dog Almighty!' and 'I know Jesus loves me, but I just want to be friends']
And so we went and did the stupid insane shopping thing - inside tip: it really is stupid and insane. MBK and Chatuchak markets and Central World are just whirlwinds of people and stuff and more people and more stuff until you just want to projectile vomit and faint clean away. But they're fun. Anything you could ever want, and a million things you could never possibly need, are all at your fingertips in Bangkok.
And last night was party night. We went to Soi Cowboy, one of about fifteen billion sex districts in Bangkok, though undoubtedly the one most likely to induce epileptic seizures: the place is a dumping ground for every neon light that has ever been cleverly shaped to resemble a naked woman. It's more like entering an amusement park, or Timezone, than it is entering a 200 metre stretch of brothels and dive bars. We met up with Marino, one of Aaron's friends from working at at some film company in the states, who's been over here living it up for the last five weeks. Marino's a sweet Italian-American guy from Seattle, who married a Thai girl here after three weeks (he swears he'd met her at a bar in Chicago years ago, and it was fate). Crazy. So we drank, and talked, and drank, and walked and talked and drank. Marino was a really nice guy but just a bit too enamoured of that whole American gangster image - here are three excerpts of our conversation within one hour:
[walking past a street stall selling BB guns] Man, I was so thinking about getting a mean little BB gun to carry around with me. But then I was like, 'What if some guy comes up and puts a gun in my face? Am I going to shoot him with these little girly bullets?'
[walking past a street stall selling police-style taser guns] Dude, I was considering getting one of those killer tasers and carrying it around. But what if some dude comes up and points a gun at me cos he wants my watch or something? What am I going to do, throw it at him?
[walking past a street stall selling Japanese ninja stars] Oh man! I so wanted to get like half a dozen of those ninja shuriken star things and just fling them at people. But then I was like -
- but i think you get the idea. Anyway so we drank our way through Nana and Little Arabia, ending the night at a pretty sorry excuse for an Irish pub. Some shitty police crackdown over the last two years means that most bars close up at about 1am nowadays (as opposed to never), which sucks balls, but then everyone just heads outside and the street vendors start selling beer from eskis. The Beastie Boys said it best: you gotta fight for your right to party!
So we're living with Aaron for the time being, til we find a little guesthouse that suits us. which is a really nice luxury to have, I gotta say. Except that Aaron's been pretty sick with food poisoning so we're treated nightly to a symphony of squirts and grunts from the bathroom next door to the couch we call home (for now).
Anyway, gotta get ready for school. Love you all, hope everything's brilliant and all the rest of it.
Lachie
NEXT WEEK: Starting school! Waking up early! Coming home tired and shitty! Squirting! Grunting! Projectile vomiting!
No comments:
Post a Comment