Monday, June 30, 2008

#13: Adventures in the Lost Valley of Middle-Aged Hippies



Week 13, Laos

WELL NOW: we've just arrived back in Bangkok and it seems to be that Edie has come down with dengue fever. Or maybe not. She seems to think I'm being a hypochondriac on her behalf, but it's more to do with the fact that I desperately want to be able to say 'Yeah, I knew someone with dengue fever' like it's no big deal. How cool would that be? In any event she's been fairly feverish and delirious for a couple of days but it's on the wane now.

We never got to Vientiane. We spent a week of pleasant days swinging in low-slung hammocks on Don Dett, an island in the Mekong, a Lost Valley of the Middle Aged Hippies where there are no recognized laws except the International Convention on Passing the Joint to the Left-Hand Side. (The follow-up to that law, the Treaty of 'Whomsoever Mentions Kit-Kats When We're Mashed Has To Go Down to the Service Station and Buy One For Everybody', doesn't really apply since there are no service stations, roads, electricity or, for that matter, Kit-Kats on Don Dett).

But let's backtrack. From Pakse we hopped a ride in the back of a flat-bed truck with about twenty-five Laotians, a couple of babies, a chicken, and two dead Mekong bass, and trundled off down south toward the Cambodian border. This was fine and dandy for a fairly long time, because Laos is spoilt for beautiful things to look at, gorgeous mountains in the distance and the rice paddies in the foreground. Plus, there are plenty of monkeys chained by the neck and hyperactive squirrels kept in tiny cages, which, though cruel and monstrous and all that, do provide some 'Check that out' value after four hours cramped on the back of a grumpy old beast of a truck.

Then, the roads ran out. When Laotians do dirt roads, they don't do them half-arsed. We spent the last hour and a half of the trip choking inside a thick dust cloud that swarmed over the truck and didn't leave. The babies were covered up as best as could be managed, and everybody else choked. When we got there we had - no joke - half an inch of bright red dust covering every surface of our bodies, and feeling like we'd smoked seven packs of unfiltered cigarettes end to end.

At the pier, on the banks of the river, we met German Mark, who owned a bungalow on the island. "Doo yoo wahnt to stae?" he asked (the guy sounded a dead ringer for Governor Schwarzenegger - honestly, every ten minutes we were there I expected to hear him yell "GET TO THE CHOPPER!" or "IT'S NOT A TUMOR!" with all the sincerity and persuasiveness of the great Austrian himself). We did want to stay, and he loaded us into his motorized canoe and off we shot into the Mekong.

Oh, Don Dett! Where there are no roads, just small dirt tracks, wide enough for an occasional moped but mostly only for feet, bicycles and water buffalo. Where everybody grows their own vegetables in patches that dot the island, and build fish farms full of catfish and Mekong bass. Where you get served delicious Lao coffee and baguettes every morning and beautiful stuff like laap for dinner. Where everybody goes swimming in the river (thoughts going through my head as I swam in the Mekong: OH MY GOD I'M SWIMMING IN THE MEKONG) and spends the rest of the day spacing out in hammocks, doing a whole lot of not much, until the last light of the day slithers away on the back of the Mekong, carried off to Cambodia and the Delta.

We had our fair share of hammock-lying but the days were pleasant so we took our bicycles over the old French-built (and Japanese-destroyed) railway bridge, the only railway ever built in the country, meant to connect Vietnam to China. It took us over to the island of Don Khon, and we pedalled around til we reached the western rim, where the normally peaceful Mekong erupts into a frothing fury, with waterfall competing with waterfall and rapids roaring past - it's quite a scene. Down a bit further south, a place we didn't get to, what with all the hammocks and beer, the Mekong drops over the border into Cambodia in a waterfall 14km wide. 14 kilometres! The world is insane.

A few people were saying that Don Dett's on the slow road to becoming a tourist ghetto, but I don't really think so. A few of the old crusty types told us that the island had been promised electricity and running water ten years ago - five buildings at the north of the island finally got power last year but that's as far as it's come. German Mark still has to go to the mainland to buy fuel to run his generator for a couple of hours each night so that he can listen to bad techno music and watch the occasional ultra-violent movie about men in trenchcoats (he is so German). There are a few bungalows now, but nothing that really affects how things are done on the island. I meant what I said about middle-aged hippies, though - one place we went to, perched above a particularly fast stretch of the river, has a long rope that you grab onto and jump off the balcony, into the river. The guy who owns it - a British dropout in his 50's - has built a long stick with a claw at one end with the express purpose of lowering joints to the people on the rope so that they could have a smoke while lying in the current and gripping feverishly at their lifeline. I say again: the world is insane.

We packed up and came home as Edie started to look more and more unwell, but she recovered well enough to go out for her birthday yesterday - we scattered around Bangkok with Aaron, met a girl named German Alice and took her out to our favourite bars for buckets of Mekong whiskey mixed with Red Bull and coke. It was a good party but today I feel like I've been kicked in the balls by a team of vikings and it's probably time for me to go lie down awhile.

Hope everyone's well.

Lachie

NEXT WEEK: Choose a job! Choose something to do on the weekend! Choose life!

Sunday, June 29, 2008

#12: Behind the Technicolor Iron Curtain



Week 12, Laos

SO SO: so I have finally weaseled my way into the Communist heartland, expecting myself to be surrounded by KGB spies with radioactive briefcases and bad hats and metal teeth and pistols tucked into every crevice in their body. Instead I am surrounded by old Laotian men with no teeth and a water buffalo. I didn't really consider toothlessness to be a central tenet of Communism but then again, dental hygiene does seem a bit of a capitalist conspiracy. I mean, toothpaste, mouthwash and dental floss? Seems a little excessive.

Laos, in general, is little more than a parade of technicolor chickens and fluoro-green rice paddies passing by your window.

But I love it so much. Laos is beautiful in a way that Malaysia never was, Thailand never will be again and Cambodia won't be for much longer. We're in Pakse, which is the most important commercial centre of the entire southern half of the country, which might mean something elsewhere but the entire city consists of a couple of dusty unpaved roads circumnavigating their way around some abandoned shophouses. There's quite literally nothing here, and nothing to do but dangle your feet over the Mekong - which, like everything here, is empty, not a boat to be seen along its monstrous length apart from the sunken tour boats strung like an ominous warning to the unprepared all along the riverbank - clutching an ice-filled glass of Beer Lao and watch the woman across the street barbecue some snakes.

I would've thought that watching someone barbecue a snake would have been sort of therapeutic for Edie and her phobia. It wasn't... She'd been having nightmares of cobras falling on to her while she was sleeping - now those cobras are on fire and want revenge.

We're going to run across a snake here - we ran across a second one in Thailand a few weeks ago, on the motorbike again, but I forgot to mention it - and it's actually stressing me out more than it is Edie because I can imagine that when she does her strange, screaming macarena dance she's going to end up in the river, or rolling down a hillside, or something. 'It's just a lizard!' 'It's just a stick!' - yelling these two lines as quickly as I can get them out my mouth, like a Tourette's sufferer, has saved me several times, even though I'm pretty sure it was probably a snake slithering through the bushes / across the street / under the bathroom door.

So we got to Laos from the north-east of Thailand (the region's called Isan), where we'd come with Harriet and the UN Kidz for a weekend getaway. There were twenty of us in a minivan that Harriet had chartered (they were called Lord Tours, and their motto was 'Take the Lord's Name in Van', or if it wasn't then it should have been). So with twenty of us, visiting a region that doesn't get a whole lot of tourists, it sometimes felt a little bit too Kontiki tour but I had a fantastic time nonetheless. Everybody was ready for a good weekend and spending each night sitting at long tables toasting our successes with whiskey and beer felt pretty special.

We visited an area consisting of hundreds of banyan trees interlinking with each other across a swamp, and a ruined Khmer temple sitting atop an extinct volcano - easily the equal of almost anything at Angkor Wat - and met some brilliant people from all over the provinces. A special mention for Phong: Edie and I had left the group in Nang Rong and set off by rattling, wind-blown train to Ubon Ratchatani, near the Laotian border. By the time the train pulled in it was dark, and we were confronted by a line of tuk-tuk drivers advancing towards us with their sinister laughs and menacing calls of 'You want tuk-tuk? Two hundred baht!'. Enter Phong the hero, who came up to us out of nowhere and showed us the bus station. I liked the guy from the start, a fresh-faced, friendly-looking boy who was studying English to get a job in Ubon. When it turned out the buses were finished for the night he told us he'd guide us into town, but his girlfriend was pregnant so we caught a cab instead.

Here's the rub: when the taxi-driver got to where Phong was going, it wasn't anywhere near town. So Phong hired a motorcycle and drove me all over town to help me look for a cheap hotel and then went back for Edie.

We ran into Phong the next day walking through the city - he was dressed in a skin-tight military uniform. Turns out he flies for the Royal Thai airforce. I hope that kid does well.

Oh fuck! I'm a teacher. Only just, but I'm a teacher. I thought I'd gotten through my last week on internship pretty well but as I walked into the room in which my two supervisors were sitting I knew that something was not right. So they sat and tried to convince me that I'd failed the course and I, very maturely, pointed out that they were idiots times infinity plus one no returns. Eventually it worked and I managed to eke out a pass after an hour and a half of consultations and though I totally disagree with that, I'd rather put an end to a fairly ugly period in my life than appeal for a better grade.

But oh! how much prettier everything seems since the internship has finished, how sweet is the air and how the colours of the world shine. I feel fantastic and free, ready to set off again, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Uzbekistan, wherever. Laos is the tenth country I've set foot in; seven of those countries have been ASEAN countries and I only need Vietnam, Myanmar and Indonesia to 'complete the set' as the UN Kidz put it. Or we could travel through Laos to China, down through Tibet to Nepal and India... 'There is nowhere left to go, except everywhere', wrote Jack Kerouac, and even though including a Kerouac quote in a travel blog is about the most cliched undergrad thing I could possibly do, I'm feeling good and those words are ringing in my head like the booming gongs at the temple down the road.

But first, Laos. We're heading down south to some islands in the Mekong tomorrow, and will probably fall off the map for a few days. Then up to Vientiane and back to Thailand by overnight train to see out our lease, and then onwards. The future is beautiful.

Hope everything's going real good for everyone

Lachie

NEXT WEEK: Rice paddies! Rice paddies! Water buffalo! Rice paddies! Dude with no teeth! Rice paddies! Rice paddies! Chickens! Rice paddies!

#11: A Coarse Onslaught of Hatred and Nipple-Biting




Week 11, Thailand

OH ME: oh my.

The end is near. It's so close I can smell it.

Two more days...

Two more days...

In two more days, this three-and-a-half year odyssey towards getting a degree comes to an end. So, never being the one to let up a chance to be spiteful and petty, allow me to reel off the things that have made me so miserable over the last nine weeks.

I hate the early starts. 7:00? What kind of a teacher starts work at 7:00? I hate the lunches, pre-digested piles of sloppy meat and weeks-old veggies in a sauce that tastes like it was distilled through a sewer grate. I hate the way the school only hires white people, because it's better for business; I hate the way Thai people prostitute themselves by working for these assholes as assistants and cleaners. I hate the way the school is built to receive maximum heat from all angles; that nobody uses any of these expensive facilities (science labs, cooking rooms, art studios) because they're on the fifth floor and nobody can be bothered walking that far.

I hate the way that no parents ever come to pick up their kids, ever. They send the maid. I hate that no-one seems to care what the kids are doing so long as they're doing it quietly. I hate the way kids with no English at all are just sat down in the classroom and expected to, I dunno, pick the language up by osmosis or something. I hate the way there are kids with obvious special needs, behaviour problems, speech impediments, and nothing is done about it. They just get in more trouble than the other kids. I hate the way the school accepts kids who are just on holiday from their regular Thai school, who come for three weeks, say not a word - because they can't speak English - and then depart into the void.

It would be overly harsh to say that I hate the staff or the students, and I don't. But I look after a kid who was breastfed until he turned six. His mother would turn up at lunchtime and stick her tit in his mouth. He turned up one day with a black eye after he bit down too hard. When the school banned the mother from coming, the maid would be sent with KFC for him to eat. The parents were banned from doing this. Now the maid turns up with fried eggs and chicken fried at home.

It would be otherwise obvious that the kid has Asperger's syndrome, or mild autism. But with that upbringing, who knows what the cause is?

And then I have this other kid who... But no, I've ranted enough. I feel a lot better. Cleansed. I've been letting it all bottle up for quite a while now.

Edie and I have been checking out Ari, the suburb we're in now. It's a little harder to find things to do than it was at the last place and there are less good-quality cheap-ass food places to go, but there're a couple of cool little bars where the locals sit smoking thick Marlboro reds under the No Smoking signs and they invite you in to watch the soccer and then you all boo the Italians together, because, you know, everybody hates the Italians.

And there's a massive park, Suan Rot Fai or Railway Park, nearby and that place: that place is magnificent. Imagine a park as large and beautiful as Centennial Park in Sydney, with hundreds of people riding those old-school 50's bikes that you see in nostalgic American films, and a big lake in the middle with a fountain and dozens of people in canoes floating by.

In the middle there's a big kid's fun park and a bike park with traffic lights and street signs. To the back there's a massive butterfly garden and to the left, a bocce court (yes, you heard me: a bocce court. Does your local park have a bocce court?). Scattered all over there are basketball courts, soccer fields, takraw nets, outdoor weight-lifting areas. Couples everywhere are slapping shuttlecocks back and forth with badminton racquets and couples in the cars lining the border of the park are slapping shuttlecocks back and forth, too. That was a gross thing to say, but: it is strange to see Thai people making out because public affection is so rare here. The park's got such a 'meet you up at make-out point' 50's thing going for it, as well as an 1800's European feel. I love the whole thing.

Wait - have I explained takraw yet? How remiss of me. Takraw is the pinnacle of human sporting innovation. It is the greatest game ever invented. It is: no-handed volleyball.

That's right. No hands. Feet, elbows, head: yes. Hands: get the hell off my takraw court. So you've got these lithe Thai athletic types everyday down the park with this little rattan ball that they have to kick to each other over a net, like Extreme Hackysack, except the way they do it involves way too many cartwheels, somersaults, backflips and general Russian-gymnast-style chicanery to be of any potential pursuit to me or anyone I know. Still, I got myself one of the balls, because I'm hopelessly deluded and easily led into a sale. But, remembering the lesson of a friend from school, who would walk up and down the beach with a surfboard he'd never used to impress girls, I plan to walk around Bangkok with my takraw ball subtly peeking out from under my bag. Who's to say a giant, sweaty, half-blind white guy couldn't be doing somersaults that very afternoon?

Aaron's gone away to Istanbul (not Constantinople) for a couple of weeks so we're hanging out with his friend Charlie, from the states. He's awesome. I know I say that a lot, and I really tried hard to think of another word for him, but that one is the only one that fits. We're also hanging with Harriet, from the UN, who's taking us on a trip up to north-eastern Thailand (plus possibly Laos) on Friday after work.

Oh my god I just said 'Friday after work' and I got so excited that I peed myself right here in the classroom. I have to go make myself a new pair of pants out of crepe paper.

Lachie

NEXT WEEK: Oh shit I just peed them again! Next week! Next week! Next week! Next week!

Saturday, June 7, 2008

#10: Buddhist Rock Stars




Week 10, Thailand

BAH, HUMBUG: I never liked them anyway.

I'm all alone this weekend, wandering Bangkok like some lonely orphan looking for porridge. See, the thing about drinking and staying up all night every night is that it's sort of reliant on you being able to sleep in the next day. You can fake it for a while, but eventually things start to crack.

A week of five-hour sleeps, stumbles, bloodshot eyes, spewing on the kids and yelling profanities at my colleagues (minus the last two) culminated in a really awful observed teaching session on Friday, and I decided to settle down for the weekend. Of course, Aaron's father flew in from Hong Kong on the same day so I got roped into a marathon drinking and sheesha-smoking sessions (you know, those big hookah pipes they have in Turkey and so on? Tasty but mean) that ended up at Kill Time where we chatted away until 3am. In Bangkok the entire interval from 9pm until 2am doesn't seem to exist. I've never looked at my watch and seen the time 10:32 or 12:47 - you pick up a beer at 9pm and when you next look it's past 2am. It's an amazing natural phenomenon.

So during the course of the evening everyone decided they'd fuck off to Ko Samet for the weekend. Bastards. Well, I mean, they invited me. But they could have waited til next week, surely. I knew the weekend would not be sleep-friendly so I had to stay. I'm not going to re-do an eight-week unpaid internship. Like eating fish-head soup, some things you will only go through one time in your life.

Edie and I just moved into our own place in Ari, just a little north of central Bangkok, which should mean that I'm allowed to go to sleep before midnight and wake as late as 6:30... Sweet. The place is cool, very cheap (about $30 per week), with a nice balcony and everything. A good base to launch the next phase of our plan - making some sort of income. I don't know how long that'll take, but the whole 'leaving Southeast Asia sometime soon' topic is starting to rear its head and we need some quick cash. I tried to sell my body on the streets for a while but there were no takers. Are they insane?

Aaron has raised the idea of he and I having a bit of a jam session at one of the multitude of cheap pay-by-the-hour music studios in Bangkok. Aaron's a mean guitarist; if I were cooler I might say something like, 'He shreds that shit up', or whatever it is people with guitars say about other people with guitars. Loves his blues, his Robert Johnson, his Ledbelly, his Howlin' Wolf. Somehow Aaron found out that I used to play drums, so he's keen to get me onside.

But I'm an awful drummer. Not just a false-modesty-Oh-I-haven't-played-for-a-while-let-me-see-if-I-remember kind of awful. Capital-a Awful. Awful awful.

Last time I played drums was more than ten years ago. My friend Jacob and I lived deep in the bible belt of Sydney, under the hulking behemoth of the Hillsong Church. In one of what would become several confused episodes in his life Jacob had become born-again and roped me in to playing in a christian rock band. This was not a good thing.

Our name was Templar, as in 'The Knights Templar'. Like most fourteen-year olds we thought the Knights Templar were cool, because they were knights and knights had swords and swords were cool. That was about as deep as we went into it. We eschewed the standard happy-clappy christian rock of Hillsong in favour of the sullen, whining sludge-rock usually preferred by fourteen year-old boys.

The church did not give us a gig, despite our back-catalogue (stretching the entire six months from April to September of 1997) featuring such classic staples as "Jesus is Just Dyin' To Meet You" and "Ain't No Holes in the Holy Spirit" (take that, Richard Dawkins!). Strains started to appear. The other churches in the area, to our surprise and outrage, didn't host bands. "Support local music!" Jacob shouted at them. I submitted some more, ahem, secular songs that I'd written, only to be told, "You're the drummer. You don't get to write songs." The bass player suggested we try Buddhism, since they were allowed gold idols and stuff, which I suppose he thought they would pay us with. The band broke up the next week.

That's the extent of my drumming experience. We'll see how it goes.

From next week I can start the countdown on this internship, with only ten schooldays to go. I can't say it's been the best experience of my life, or that I learnt alot, or even that they provided nice lunches, but I can say: it's almost over.

Lachie


NEXT WEEK: New apartment! New clothes! New stuff! New Idea!

#9: David Gopal's Nepalese Blowjobs

Singapore's Mer-Lion: Officially recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as 'The Lamest Country Mascot of All-Time"

Week 9, Singapore

HE SAT: down opposite me, shook my hand, said his name was David. David Gopal. He was from Nepal, Kathmandu, but lives in Malaysia. He was dressed in a sharp security guard outfit, but that was the only smart-looking thing about him; the rest of him was all wrinkles and yellow teeth and paunch. He was maybe in his early sixties. He worked in the building across the road, was over for his break. Could he have cigarette? Of course he could.

He lit it up and looked at us. Were we married?

We were not.

All good christians should marry, he said. Were we christian?

We were not.

Ah, but Jesus loves you so much more if you are married!

We looked at each other. We'd been through this before.

And, he said, when you are married, then you get the sexual life! He formed his thumb and forefinger into a circle and poked his other finger through repeatedly. Sexual life, he said, you know what this is?

We knew what that was.

My wife, Mrs Gopal, she is sixty-three, he said. People say, Oh, you are old! But we still have the sexual life five times a week! In the morning, in the evening, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, in the garden... Sometimes when I work nightshift, I wake her up to have 4am sexual life!

He waggled his finger. I tell you, he said, 4am sexual life is the best kind of sexual life!

He laughed heartily. We did not.

He looked at me. You know how to give sexual satisfaction?

He looked at Edie. He knows how to make sexual satisfaction?

Let me give you tip, he said, I am old and I have learnt many things. I love to give ladies sexual satisfaction, it is best part. Watch carefully. All you do is...

At this point David Gopal raises his eyes to the ceiling, covers both of them with his palms to represent Mrs Gopal's crushing thighs, and then opens his mouth and frantically tongues the air for a good three minutes. Like, seriously, three minutes. And it's not just frantic tongue movements - occasionally he bites or kisses the air. He really gets into it.

Then he says: You know what happens then? He giggles. You know what happens after that?

We try to avert our eyes, but it's too late. We're out for our one night in Kuala Lumpur, and right across the table from us an elderly, yellow-toothed, uninvited Nepalese man is slowly, deliberately, inserting his thumb into his mouth, rolling it around, looking at the heavens and moaning as if in orgiastic pleasure. When he pulls it out a thin cord of saliva continues to connect it to his bottom lip.

You give sexual satisfaction, he says, you get sexual satisfaction.

It's been almost a week since then but every time I even start to think about sex now the image of that thumb burns its way into my brain. It's like a Pavlovian response, like those dogs that drool when someone rings a bell. It gives me douche chills just thinking about it. I am doomed to be forever haunted by David Gopal's Nepalese blowjobs.

Spew.

So yes, we've just returned from our quick whiparound of Malaysia and Singapore. The judgement: Malaysia is beautiful and the people are friendly and honest to a fault. For instance: walk up to a tour desk in Bangkok, or anywhere in Thailand, and ask when the next bus is to some other destination. The Thai guys will insist theirs is next, theirs is cheapest, and then you'll pay way too much and spend five hours trying to get to a place 30km away.

But in Malaysia, go up to the same tour desk, ask the same question and you get: 'Well, you could buy a ticket from us. But we tend to overcharge, because we take a commission from the buses. You're probably better off going to the bus station, where you have a few options and it's much cheaper. Do you know where the bus station is? It's down that way and turn left... Actually just let me draw you a map. Do you want me to hail you a taxi?'

It happened all the time. Those people just cannot or will not lie about anything whatsoever, even when it costs them lots of business.

Also, I'm going to come out in defence of Singapore, even though Edie hated the place. Yes, it's expensive (still cheaper than Sydney, however) and yes, there are plenty of areas of town that just look like an overgrown Darling Harbour and yes, the top tourist attraction, Sentosa Island, is just like taking all the crass commercialism and tackiness of Disneyland and then removing any trace of fun or excitement.

But if you hole up around Little India or the Arab quarter, and DON'T MOVE, EVER, no matter how much you're tempted to check out Orchard Rd or any of the other things that are supposed to be cool in Singapore, just DON'T MOVE (DON'T MOVE!! DID I JUST SEE YOU MOVING? DON'T MOVE!!), stay in those two areas and you're almost guaranteed to have a really great time.

The first night in Singapore we ate brilliant Moroccan food and then stumbled over to an Australian pub where a band was playing on top of chairs and on the bar, doing a really blues-y version of 'Hit Me Baby, One More Time' and basically just having a good time. After that first night we started trying to explore the city, and that was a mistake. It was all downhill from there.

But it was great to see Kenny, who's really got a good thing going over there. It's like that LCD Soundsystem song about being in your 20's: 'You spend the first five years trying to get with the plan / and the next five years trying to be with your friends again...'. Although he complains about the heat and the transport over there, I'm sure if he ever comes over here for a visit he'll get those things in perspective. Strange thing, though, meeting an old friend in a foreign country, talking about all the old stuff that's gone on and all the new stuff going on: it's a good feeling. Away from the rut of living in Sydney and going through the motions with friends you see every second day, it's much easier to make your conversations count, to appreciate the time.

We're currently bunking down at Aaron's place again while we scour the city for a new apartment. They're easy to find but I'm being a little selfish. I'm sick of the 6am wakeups and I'd love to find a place a bit closer to school, where I can wake up at oh, 6:40. 6:40 would be real nice. Though I've only got two and a half weeks to go anyway, before I graduate and become a real person.

Anyway, I really should be working right now. Hope you're all well and the winter chills haven't set in too deeply. I've been miserable almost every Sydney winter I've lived through, but it still seems more appealling right now then this awful lifestyle of scuttling like crabs from one air-conditioned building to the next. so appreciate it. See you next week.

Lachie


NEXT WEEK: Waking up! Going to work! Coming home! Drinking! Sleeping!

Friday, June 6, 2008

#8: Wetting Your Pants in an Internet Cafe


Week 8, Malaysia

HEY THERE: from Penang, Malaysia, where the sun is bright and the people amazing and the beers cold and the sea covered in some gross, thick, oily scum that makes swimming an iffy experience. But we can't expect everything.

School holidays! Being a teacher is the closest experience I've had to being a student - I try to look like I'm working when really I have no idea what is going on; I bitch and whine about what I'm made to wear; and most of all I look forward to the weekends and holidays. Like, I think I was pushing small children out of the way to get to the door at the end of Friday's lessons. Then i untucked my shirt and ran down the hallway screaming 'Down with homework!' at the top of my lungs.

Friday arvo we caught the train from Bangkok to Surat Thani, then bus on to Krabi - you know, I never saw myself as a train-traveller sort of guy. Back when I was fifteen I took the Ghan (or maybe the India-Pacific? They're all the same) to Adelaide and while it was nice (I say that in the same way your mum says that about your friends that she doesn't really like - 'Frank? Oh, yeah, he's... nice'), overall it just seemed a bit quiet and sterile and dull. I mean, most of the world seems quiet and sterile and dull when you're a sullen fifteen year old but still...

- I digress. The point is that Thai trains are awesome, loud and jangly with little seats and massive open windows that send you billowing back into your seat, and hawkers with warm beer and cold curries stalking up and down the aisles, apparently sold on the idea that the best way to convince your customer that they want your product is TO YELL AS LOUD AS YOU CAN AT THEM THAT OF COURSE THEY WANT YOUR COLD DAY-OLD CURRIES ON POLYSTYRENE PLATES. And then to assume that they probably want to be horrendously over-charged while they're at it.

Those giant open windows were a blessing: I'm sure that plenty of ten-year olds have lost arms or heads or whatever else they supposedly stick out of windows so often that Sydney trains have had to be converted into glass-and-metal fishtanks, but the breeze was amazing. What is travelling without the wind in your hair? We were hoping to catch some light in the afternoon and watch the countryside pass by; a late departure meant it wasn't to be but instead we got the inky-black silhouettes of swaying palm trees up against the purple-bruise sky. It was like the creepiest scene from the best Vietnam War movie you never saw. Then after a couple of hours of backgammon, warm beers and cold curries the Bed-Nazis came down the corridors in green fatigues and surgical masks and converted each of the seats into a bunk and covered the windows with awful metal grating. Very army-style.

We woke early and watched the sun rise over the jungle. Can I say that again? We woke early and watched the sun rise over the jungle. Who the fuck am I, Doctor Livingstone? But that's what we did. By afternoon we were in Krabi, where giant limestone formations jut out of the ground at every opportunity. Inspired by my dad, who - along with my uncle - accidentally jumped a couple of hired motorcycles into a river in outback NSW a couple of weekends back, we hired another moto and spent a fairly pleasant weekend riding around the beaches and caves and little pools and waterfalls that dot the region. I think that's all a person needs to lead a very happy life, actually, just two simple things - a motorcycle and a map. A means to go, and a reason to stop.

Yesterday we thought we'd try and beat the travel vendors, who were offering the nine-hour trip from Krabi to Penang for the faintly outrageous sum of 650 baht. So we resolved to make our own way across the border. We rode in buses, mini-buses, taxis, boats, and in the backs of pickup trucks. It was a half-success. We got here for 250 baht less than they were offering, but it took fifteen and a half hours. Fifteen and a half. That's, like, 930 minutes. It's a long time. But it was a pleasant way to waste a day, and sitting on the ferry watching the bright lights of Georgetown approach slowly it felt like the longest pilgrimage anyone's embarked upon in, let's say, forever. We made Marco Polo look like a pussy.

And Malaysia is what I never imagined it would be, which is to say, brilliant. It's very wealthy - it more closely resembles Australia than it does Cambodia - but the people are so friendly and funny and cheesy (right now, in the internet cafe I'm sitting in, which is on a beach, there's a sign that says 'Don't Sit Down With Wet Pants! And Don't Wet Your Pants in Here! :) Haw Haw Haw' - like, they even wrote the cheesy laugh to their own cheesy joke, with a cheesy smiley face to top it off). Perfect strangers would walk up and start conversations with you in Thailand but they would always end with 'So... you want to buy a suit from my friend?' or 'So... you want tuk-tuk?'. Over here people are actually interested in our well-being, will stop from their busy day just to make sure that we know where we're going, how to get there and how much it should cost, or even just stop us just to say hello and ask us how we are. And that's nice, being said hello to.

So two more days on our whirlwind tour of Malaysia (bleh, the only thing I hate more than people who go on whirlwind tours is people who use the phrase 'whirlwind tour') before hitting Singapore to meet up with my good mate Kenny for fun-filled days of trying to avoid being fined and moaning about how we can't afford to do anything in Singapore. Good times!

Lachie


NEXT WEEK: Melaka! Laksa! Tofu sambal! Singapore! $500 fines for not flushing the toilet!

#7: The United Nations of Gettin' It On



Week 7, Thailand

PEOPLE SAY: that 'There's no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole'. To that I would like to add a corollary: 'But not even god can save you when you're packed with fourteen Thais into the back of a Tarago and driven at 180km/hr over the mountains of southern Thailand'.

See, when we had our first encounter with high-speed driving in Thailand - shooting out to the airport on the way to Phnom Penh, some six and a half weeks ago - Edie was a nervous wreck while I emerged fairly calm and satisfied. But over time, our roles have reversed, as her philosophy has grown into 'Well, if it hasn't happened those other times, it's not going to happen now', while I tend to think of it more like playing darts while naked and blindfolded: do it enough times and somebody's going to get hurt.

So on days like today, catching the van from one province to another, Edie's happy to just put her head against the window and fall asleep, while I succumb to my overwhelming paranoia and desperately scan the upcoming road for signs of trouble while simultaneously - SIMULTANEOUSLY - formulating brilliant strategies to ensure Edie and I emerge unscathed when the inevitable crash finally comes, when I hear the desperate scream of metal tearing metal.

Like, if we clipped a big truck while trying to overtake it, and we begin to roll, I will have seen it coming, will have seen it coming because I am eternally vigilant and always prepared, and I will grip tightly onto the seat in front of me and shove my body against Edie's and we will both be held safely against the wall because of, let's say, g-forces or whatever.

Or if like, if the van hits some gravel turning a corner and plunges over a cliff (little bit less likely but we've gotta plan for every contingency), then I'll simply turn around and kick the guy behind us through the back window - which is a shame, you know, but you can't save everybody - and then Edie and I, we'll sort of, we'll kind of just drop, out the back of the van because the van will be falling faster than us (that's how gravity works, yeah?) and then we'll assume spread-eagle skydiver positions, because we'll be prepared, we'll be ready, and our descent will be slowed slightly, and then while we're falling we'll be looking for somewhere soft to land, like a haystack... A haystack? What's softer than a haystack? A pillow maybe? Feathers? FEATHERS! We'll land next to some sort of chicken abbatoir, in the open pen where they store the feathers. Or whatever. In any case it's a big cliff and we'll have plenty of time to decide where to fall, and if we don't have time then we'll just settle for the damned haystack. And we'll land, whoomp, and stand up and dust off ready for our next adventure. Safe as houses. I think I may be giving myself an ulcer.

So anyway, when we arrive two hours later Edie wakes up refreshed, stretches, says something stupid like 'Are we there already?' while I blink and twitch and generally give the impression of having been awake for five days on a steady diet of amphetamines and energy drinks.

But so: the provinces. We didn't plan things properly this week (which doesn't sound like us at all) and ended up missing out on any opportunity to fly to Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos to renew our visas. So instead we breezed in to southern Thailand and figured we'd just coast over the border to Malaysia. Didn't quite work - we'd overstayed the visa by three days and they'd tripled the fine for just that offence since last year - but it couldn't ruin the weekend, which was pretty perfect. The southerners are very laidback, and we've barely seen another westerner here, which is definitely not what I expected. We stayed last night in a tiny beach village called Hat Pak Meng, which had these giant limestone formations rising sharply out of the water just a couple hundred metres offshore, and the people - both the locals and the scattered Malaysian tourists - were just so friendly and lovely and basically bursting with the milk of human kindness.

We saw a crocodile this week! At Lumphini park in Bangkok - the most family friendly park in Bangkok, similar to Sydney's Centennial park - we were just wandering along by one of the ponds, and Edie says 'Look at that' and she has this I-just-shat-myself look on her face, and there in the pond is a goddamn five-foot crocodile. And while we walked away as quickly as dignity would allow, all I could think of is all those baby crocs and alligators we've seen at Chatuchak markets, and wondering where else they end up. Paul Kelly once sang that 'From little things, big things grow', and I guess that principle's just as true of baby crocodiles as it is of blisters, gambling debts and grassroots political movements. They may look cute now, kids, but in a couple of months...

In other news, I'm now halfway through my school placement, which is great as it opens up the prospect of getting paid sometime in the not-too-distant future. And while it's nice to work purely for the love of yelling at small children, some money might be helpful, too.

In Bangkok we've started hanging with a bunch of young guys and girls working for the UN (in a stroke of nicknaming genius, we call them 'the UN kids'). Liam the photographer's brother Darren works over here; he's working for the UN through the Australian Youth Ambassador program. So we've met all of them, the Italians, the Greeks, the Japanese, the Australians. The first night we headed out to a bar to meet them with Aaron, there was a girl named Harriet, from Melbourne. I tell you, it was on. It was so on it was almost exciting. Sparks were flying every which way. Edie and I had to leave after a couple of hours because the level of sexual tension at that bar went from 'cute' to 'last scene in Before Sunset' very quickly. But good for Aaron. Anyway the UN kids function as a sort of nexus meeting point for everybody from everywhere and it's been great for our social life. Which is almost bad, really, because talk of settling for six months or a year in Bangkok has entered into the conversation and I already really miss drinking cheap red wine. Over here I have to make do with the most delicious beer in the world and $2 bottles of whiskey. I hate the world.

Okay, that's it for this week. Missing you all lots, hope everyone is really happy and let me know if you're not, really, I'll do my best to fix it (I'm not real good at giving advice but my massages are fantastic). Hope to hear from you all and next time I email I will probably be back in this very same town, on my way out to Malaysia and Singapore. See you then,

Lachie

NEXT WEEK: School's out for summer! School's out forever! P! A! R! T! Y? Cos we gotta!

Thursday, June 5, 2008

#6: A Saga of Pain and Suffering, in Two Parts

Edie, looking sympathetic about the fact that her boyfriend is a whiny asshole who might just be dying, right now, maybe.

Week 6, Thailand

LONG WEEKS: are hard to bear. And last week was a long, long week.

I felt a rumbling when I was barely off the bus back from Ko Samet last Monday, and by the next day I was doubled over in my room, my face pressed against the cool wooden floor, feeling ever so sorry for myself.

Food poisoning!! In Australia, if you get it, you've at least got a generally good idea of where you got it from: 'Oh, maybe it was those prawns I left in the boot of the car all summer!' or 'I'll bet it's from that time when we sacrificed a live chicken, left its carcass in the sun for two days and then ate it raw. But goddamn that was delicious!'

Over here it's a different story. Perhaps it was from that brown stuff that was sprinkled over the red stuff, that one time? Or maybe it had something to do with the white goo pouring out of that weird dog-shaped cake that looked like it was covered in raw egg. Who knows? The street stall or the restaurant? The food on the bus? The food at the school? No-one is to blame and everyone is to blame.

And where was my beautiful girlfriend while I lay clawing at my gut like a mangy dog?

Well, Edie decided to stay in Ko Samet a couple of days after I left, since the sun only came out on Monday and it was glorious. I'd ring her up at night after I'd grown tired of moaning and grimacing: 'Oh, it's so cool! I went out drinking with these British girls, then I met up with this Israeli guy and the bar was giving me free drinks all night, then I had to sit listening to this boring fucking Finnish businessman for an hour, but then I went and sat on the beach with a cocktail and the British girls came down and they were totally vomitous but fuck them it was an awesome night, I'm having such a great time.'

'Yeah?' I'd say, 'I just pissed a couple of litres of brown stuff out my ass. I can't go more than eight feet from my bathroom door. How's that for a killer party?'

Yes: making people who are having a much better time than me feel bad about themselves is a particular gift of mine. But Edie arrived back to Bangkok Thursday, tanned, smiling and stunning, and I arrived back from work the same day looking like I'd just escaped from twenty-four years in an Austrian dungeon.

But things turn around. Edie is getting some expensive dental work done over here (well, expensive in Australia: over here a $2000 operation is only about $250. It's kinda tempting actually - I looked into it, and it turns out I could buy a facelift, lipo, penis enlargement and sex reassignment surgery and still have enough left over for dinner and a movie), and by Friday she had a toothache that left her crying on the wooden floor (while I laughed at her and called her names, as is my god-given right). The dental nurse gave her a rainbow of hypercoloured painkillers but it was only on Sunday that the dentist realized she'd screwed up the procedure and fixed all of Edie's pains in two and a half minutes.

Apart from all that, we decided this weekend that in pursuing the Holy Trinity of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, we'd been sadly lacking in the rock'n'roll department. We set off on a mission from god to find out where the cool kids were hiding, since they obviously weren't into riding mechanical bulls these days. We'd found Pisces, but that was more a cafe. We'd found Saxophone Bar, but that was a little older and a little whiter than we were hoping. We'd found Kill Time - and that was awesome - but even there we had to settle for endless games of Jenga over any sort of live music.

On Friday we found the Lullabar, and everything changed. In a tiny rundown terrace house, a big, sad-looking dog sat at the bar. There was no other bartender. A band named Girlfriend From the Internet was playing in the next room, a room so small that band members had to stand apart, in between different tables, and the bass guitar kept smacking innocent diners in the face on every solo. They played a bunch of covers of all that British dance-rock from last year - you know, Klaxons, New Young Pony Club, Kaiser Chiefs, Dogs Die in Hot Cars, Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, etc etc - and you know, that scene was fun (if totally forgettable) when it was big a year or two ago, but bursting from sloppy college guitars in a rundown college bar, screamed by a singer with big hair, big chains and a cultivated sneer: it sounded like the thing you'd spent your whole life waiting to hear. It sounded perfect.

We woke in the afternoon on Saturday, pottered around until it was time to go out again. Then off to a reggae bar near the river, which advertised a 'ska band' - that should have been our first warning. We let the singer limp her way through 'Don't Look Back in Anger' before we retreated to the blues bar down the street, Ad Here the 13th. Great music but the tiny place was packed to the gills and we could do no more than stand outside and glare at everyone inside. So across the river to Phra Athit, where we found a little roadside stall that had grown into a massive party since a local 21st birthday had come to celebrate there. We downed a mean bottle of Sang Som whiskey, sang along to a far superior version of 'Don't Look Back in Anger' along with about fifty others, drunk as monkeys, and got hit on by the birthday boy (who'd had a little too much whiskey, judging by his hand appearing and disappearing from my thigh like a rabbit from a hat three times over the night). We stumbled to a nearby rasta bar, where we chilled out with a South African soccer player playing in the Asian Champions League (cool) and his Thai girlfriend (not cool, as it quickly became apparent that neither could understand a single word the other said and they needed Aaron to translate).

So we did it, found the rock in the 'Kok. Sunday we watched the rain fall onto the river in bucketfuls (a beautiful sight) but whiskey does no-one any favours and we didn't get much done otherwise.

My, this has been a long and meandering post. Congratulations on making it this far. The longer Edie and I stay in the one place, the harder it's getting to make my life sound interesting in any way. But whatever. Hope you're all doing well and happy Mother's Day to all. I'll be halfway through my placement at the end of this week, then one more week before the half-term break, then off to Malaysia and Singapore to meet my mate Kenny, in the city in which you can be fined for not flushing the toilet. We shall see.

Lachie


NEXT WEEK: Cambodia? Laos? Vietnam? Gotta go somewhere cos the visa's expired!

#5: The Juicy Pop of the Bojangle


Week 5, Thailand
I'M SORRY: that this post's a bit late but I've been lost for several hours twice in the last two days and it's eaten up a lot of my allotted 'sitting in the internet cafe like a sad fat schlub' time.

See, it was a long weekend this weekend so Edie and I thought we'd get away to the bright lights and white sands of Ko Samet island a couple of hours south of Bangkok. All was well and good until we arrived, at which point we discovered that the island was full. This is a big island, mind you - seven kilometres long, hundreds of gueshouses and whatnot - but nothing. Every place on every beach and in every village - even the funky beaches that smelt like guy's underpants do after you've worn them for a couple of days but then forget whether you've worn them and so make the fatal mistake of giving them a quick sniff to check - everything was full. We wandered up and down and back and forth, ended up getting lost in the jungle in the middle of the island for a couple of hours. I kept irritating Edie (as is my habit) until she came within inches of strangling me to death (but with the way I've been eating and drinking over here, my chances of leaving behind a beautiful corpse were slim to nil, so I had to talk her out of it - 'Wait until New York, when I'll be poor and starving and beautiful and have that whole heroin-chic thing going for me!').
So eventually we resolved that we'd just sleep on the beach, and at that exact moment some guy came up and offered us a tent at a ridiculously low price. So we spent the night on bamboo mats in this guy's tent, and it was awesome.
We would have done the same yesterday, but it's the start of the wet season now and when it rains, it pours. We found ourselves a bamboo hut by the beach and decided that we'd try and be a bit hardcore and walk from one end of the island to the other. Except that with me being me, and Edie being Edie, we didn't get our shit together until mid-afternoon and when we arrived at the southern tip after several hours walk we realized that there were not - as we had assumed - lines of taxis waiting to escort us back to our bungalow. In fact, there was little more than a steep dirt road and mounds of ants that made a weird hissing noise. We tried to walk back but it got dark and we got lost and eventually saved by a guy in a pickup truck who took us back.

And that's that.

So:

In answer to a question asked by many of you: no, I have not had the chance to see one of Bangkok's famed Ping-Pong shows. I mean, it's definitely on the cards, but it's pretty expensive, so I haven't yet had the opportunity to hear the juicy pop of a small plastic ball bursting free from some girl's bojangle. But: I did get my grubby little hands on a laminated 'menu' of things that you can get the girl to do with her vagina, which includes:

* Inserting, and removing, a full set of darts

* Opening a beer bottle

* Smoking a cigarette

* Peeling a banana

Is it just me, or is that shit fucking amazing? Do girls even need their hands anymore? From Thailand to Cambodia, Vietnam to the Philippines, Southeast Asia's top scientists and erotic dancers are working together to develop vaginas that can do everything - drive a car, write an essay, play goalie for the Socceroos. Soon evolution will take its course and women will walk around with little flippers where their now-useless arms once were.

I mean, a penis is good for, I dunno, doing tricks and stuff to impress your friends and co-workers, like 'the wristwatch' and 'the hamburger', or for wrapping a hotdog bun around and splattering with ketchup and mustard for a funny photo to send the folk back home. But practical uses? Forget about it. The vaj is where it's at.

But more on that next week. In the meantime it's been a process of settling into life over here. Like I said, the wet season's just starting up, so we sit and watch Bangkok explode with lightning every evening. And the rain: Thailand has the most amazing rain in the world, it just falls in thick globs that splatter over your face, and cools everything down if only for ten minutes. And Bangkok has even started to cool, a little, with temps at 34-35 instead of the constant, insufferable 38 degrees of April. Hot fashion tip for the summer: ass sweat is not a good look.

And there are the first few rumblings that I may be offered a job after my placement (five full-timers are leaving), which is nice, though I doubt I'll take it since the new school year doesn't start until late August, and I'd have to stay at least six months from then, which is a long time. But I'm happy to take it as it comes. We've been spending our time just going out and watching the breakdancers do their stuff outside our house, or wandering down the different neighbourhoods, or hanging out drinking with Aaron (who continues to be the most amazing, generous guy in the world) or Liam (a photographer from Macau via Canberra: also very nice and awesome), or Aaron the 2nd and his girlfriend Molly-Ann (ditto), which means that I have nobody to make fun of in this email, since they're all very cool. And the food continues to be wonderfully good, and the beaches continue to be spectacular, and the people continue to be completely bizarre and unpredictable.

Like the bikers we met the other day. We were at a cool little blues and jazz bar near Victory Monument, when a couple of beautifully modified choppers pulled up and some bikies strolled in, with arms as thick as my head and tattoos stretching from one wrist to the other. Now, I've had a bit of a complex about bikers for the last couple of months, ever since I was out driving with an intellectually-disabled client named Kelvin, when we pulled up at a red light next to some fully decked-out and mean-looking Bandidos. Kelv, who generally speaks very fast and mispronounces nearly every word - 'You sleaze!', he'll shout, every time someone sneezes - gently leaned out the passenger window, looked the head bikie right in the eye and said, slowly and as clear as a bell, 'Get a haircut, lady'.

The bikie looked at Kelv, then at me, then his forehead began to crumple like a car in a head-on collision and I actually saw his eyeballs fill up with blood and hatred, and I sat there and looked back at him and quietly shat my pants.

So nowadays, bikies make me nervous. They sat down and ordered drinks, and then started grooving along to the music. This was odd, because although the bar had had a fantastic blues band earlier in the evening, the guitars had been packed away and the saxophones had come out and the place was full of some awful soft jazz crap that would have been rejected by an elevator company. But the bikies seemed to like it. I can't imagine the Hell's Angels cruising around to the sounds of 'Baker Street', but maybe I'm just naive.

So anyway the night continues. The bikies talk and sing along and then the biggest and meanest of the pack leaps up from his chair, walks over to another member of the gang, and puts his hands around his neck. Here we go, I think -- but then he starts to give the guy a massage. Soon all the bikies are massaging each other, to the soothing music of Kenny G. And that's Bangkok, really, in a nutshell. Everybody here, deep down, is a Soft Jazz Massage Bikie.

But sometimes I think Bangkok is like that city in Pinocchio. You know the one? Where all the boys go, and it's full of everything they like - rollercoasters and lollies and whatever else, and it seems like it's all fun and no consequences forever and ever, and but slowly and surely, one by one, they transform into asses. The only difference is we were all asses when we arrived here, and nothing much seems to be changing.

Lachie

NEXT WEEK: Ping! Pong! Ping! Pong! Oh, and a visa run! Maybe!

ps, full acknowledgement to Kathryn for use of the word 'bojangle' - I've always been a plagiarist at heart.

pps, thanks so much to everyone for the emails, I love reading them even though I don't get as much time to reply to them as I'd like (there's a lot of beer over here that needs to be drunk, after all. And who's going to do it? You?) but I swear I'll make a much bigger effort over the next few weeks now that I'm settled. Hope everything's going well for everybody everywhere.





#4: Everything You Can Think of is True


Week 4, Thailand



OH, THE HORROR: the horror.

Now, I realize that waking up at 6am to go to work each morning is an everyday reality for many, if not most of you, but for a person as lazy, self-absorbed and prone to whingeing as myself it seems like an insufferably cruel demand to make of a man - especially when I'm also expected to wear a shirt and tie and long pants, leaving me stumbling around in the tropical heat like some giant sweaty moron.

Yes, I started teaching at the school this week; it's not too bad. It came as a bit of a shock to the system after several weeks of doing pretty much whatever I pleased, and I was almost ready to quit after only two days there - "I could do it somewhere else!", I would tell Edie, "Like London! Somewhere where I don't end up panting like a dog just from the thirty-second stroll from staff room to classroom. We could spend this time just hanging out, exploring, living it up! Doesn't that sound nice?". Edie looked at me sadly and replied with something like, "Grow some balls, loser", which was fair and accurate and exactly what I needed to hear. So now I'm sticking it out.

And we have an apartment! Right on Sukhumvit Rd, the road that acts as the elongated spine of the city, from which all the cool little districts and laneways branch off. Next to all the big shopping malls - all connected by walkways 50ft above the ground, such that you can walk all the way around our neighbourhood without ever touching your feet to street level - and right in the middle of all the transport, where we can catch the skytrain up to brain-melting Chatuchak markets or down to sex-crazed Silom, or east out to Lumphini Park, where everybody picnics and does tai-chi and sculpts their tiny Thai bodies in the outdoor gym.

Fifty metres from our door there's a pier in the little canal from which you can catch a riverboat through the putrid, stinking black water to the disgustingly touristy, vaguely arty suburb of Banglamphu, where we began our travels a month ago. Opposite us is the National Stadium, where there's a swimming pool and squash courts and where breakdancers and beatboxers practice their moves til the break-a break-a dawn.

This weekend we've been trawling the city's bars and alleyways til the early morning, drinking in bars with names like Kill Time, scoffing the Mint Slices and Tim Tams that my parents sent me for my birthday last wednesday (thanks mum and dad!), and sleeping in til afternoon. Met Edie's friend Jack, from the ABC, who's great fun. We went out to the markets at Chatuchak yesterday, and found stalls where one can purchase snakes and tortoises and squirrels and albino hedgehogs and fucking lemurs! LEMURS! So we're weighing up the option of buying ourselves a lemur and then training it to do our bidding. Yet to find a monkey or elephant for sale but there's still plenty of time.

So of course I knew all the stuff about eating fried insects in Asia; grasshoppers and crickets and grubs and so on, even spiders (though I've got to say that even with preparation, the sight of someone chowing down on a bird spider bigger than your hand is pretty rough). I mean, I've eaten Bogong moths - they taste like nuts - so I've no problem with any of those things - except the giant madagascan cockroaches. Everywhere sells these fried giant madagascan cockroaches that look like the worst nightmare you've ever had, and everytime I see them I shudder deeply. Can you imagine that thing crunching between your teeth? Oh, god, I think I just threw up inside my mouth a little bit...

And so: on Friday Aaron took us out, with a couple of other friends visiting from lands beyond: Carly, a surfer from France (they have those?) and her professional-violinist boyfriend Franc, with whom every single conversation goes something like this:

"Oh, did I tell you I recieved a prestigious artist's residency in Silom this week? It's very prestigious. Only one in every ten thousand applicants gets it. Very prestigious. I feel great that my gift is being recognized in this way."

or:

"Oh, did I tell you about the concert I'm playing in Prague next year? It's a very prestigious honour. David Bowie himself is going to make an appearance. Can you imagine? David Bowie! Very prestigious. I feel great that I'm being given an opportunity to share my gift with the world in this way."

Blech. Totally nausea-inducing. But anyway, Aaron took us out to - surprise, surprise - another sex district, this one with the slightly inappropriate name of 'Nana' (fortunately they pronounce the name 'nah-nah' here, since the phrase "I'm heading down to Nana's for a bit of sex" has a distinctly Mount Druitt kind of ring to it).

And we wandered through the legions of scantily-clad girls (though a good proportion were probably scantily-clad boys, actually, if anyone had cared to check) upstairs to a little hidden bar. It was a strip club, yes - just like every other bar in Nana - but in the centre of the floor was some big shadowy object around which people were clustering to get a better look.

And that was how, two days after my birthday, I ended up perched on top of a mechanical bull in a strip-club in Bangkok, being tossed around like a rag doll while a half-naked girl screamed and whipped both me and the bull with a twelve-inch black rubber dildo while middle-aged white men in bad suits clapped and cheered at me from the sidelines. And as I got thrown over the bull's horns only twenty-two seconds later, sailing through the air toward the red rubber mats below, while the strippers did a badly-choreographed lesbian-shower scene on the stage nearby, I could hear only the words of the great Tom Waits drifting through my head:

'Everything you can think of is true'

It's been an interesting twenty-five years.

Lachie


NEXT WEEK: Lopburi! Monkeys! All work! No play! Makes Jack a dull boy!