Monday, September 22, 2008

#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



Tuesday, September 16, 2008

#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

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

#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