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.
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