The Juicy Pop

#39: Viva Vietnam

2009-01-01T22:26:00.000-08:00

Week 39 - Lao Cai Province, Vietnam

AND SO: we made it to Vietnam. After resigning ourselves to our Back to Malaysia! Tour '09, we made one final assault on the Vietnamese consulate in Kunming and... got our visas in two days. So here we are, at the border town of Lao Cai, tired and hungry and cranky and forced to wait another seven hours before our twelve-hour train to Hanoi. Grand.

We meandered around Chengdu for our last couple of days, hanging out at lots of really nice little bars and taking full advantage of the first decent hot showers since - uh - since Australia, actually. Chengdu continued to impress even as it got colder, and we're making plans to move back here to work in 2010, when, hopefully, we'll be able to deliver on our commitment to make it through Tibet, Nepal, India and on toward Iran.

In the meantime, we headed back south, to Kunming. There we found another city suffering from extreme pleasantness - and this one with a bit more warmth into the bargain. I know - pleasant? Lots of words spring to mind when you think of Chinese cities, but "pleasant" isn't one of them, unless it's part of the phrase "as unpleasant as a colonoscopy performed by a student doctor with unsteady hands". But while I can't speak for the gargantuan colonies of eastern China, Chengdu and Kunming are both extremely nice places to hang out and cry yourself to sleep over how little money you have left.

But they are cities, and they are in China, so one still walks around to the musical accompaniment of men and women, young and old, spitting noisily onto the footpath or out the window of the bus, or (slightly less commonly) vomiting into the gutter. One still gets elbowed in the face by wrinkled grandmothers with bony elbows trying to get onto a bus that's half-empty anyway. One still gets run into by silent electric scooters speeding down the footpath. One still has to physically pick up old men in big hats who push in front of you in the forty-five minute queue for train tickets and then set them down gently somewhere where they won't bother you. Incredibly frustrating at first, it eventually becomes sort of fun: it's every man, woman and child for themselves in China, no niceties or formalities, biggest asshole wins. And I can be a fairly big asshole when I set my mind to it.

New Year's in Kunming was fairly low-key: we trawled the bars and cafes around the uni and then settled on our hostel balcony to watch the sky fill with Chinese lanterns floating slowly past like dead jellyfish. It was a great way to spend an evening, even if it wasn't quite sweatily-dancing-on-the-sands-of-Bondi-to-DJs-until-collapsing-at-10am level of awesome. But if New Year's Eve was lacking in energy, New Year's Day was a cranked-up adrenalin-fuck of epic proportions. People swarmed into the city from across the province; leaving the hostel was like joining in a rugby game with no ball, no teams and with points going to those who shopped for cheap household appliances with the most gratuitous violence. I got rammed repeatedly from behind by a young mother with a big trolley; Erin ended up fatally impaling a guy with a 30% off umbrella while laughing maniacally. Or thought about it more than was healthy, anyway.

We left that night on a sleeper bus bound for the border. The bus crawled along in fits and starts, stopping every twenty minutes before finally dying a slow death at about three o'clock in the morning on a lonely stretch of dirt road in the mountains. The driver and a couple of other helpful souls jumped out to fix it; we lay wide awake to the sounds of clanging and swearing til five o'clock, when the bus finally rumbled back to life.

But the damage was done. We would miss the only morning train to Hanoi, watching the clock tick as the Chinese border officials quizzed us endlessly on ridiculous questions about our passports (to Erin: "In this photo you have a piercing! Where is your piercing now? And why are the edges of your passport rough?"; to me: "In this photo you are wearing glasses! Why aren't you wearing glasses?", and so on). Then the customs official confiscated two of our books, claiming that they are forbidden in China. "But we're not going to China! We're leaving it!" we protested. "Doesn't matter," he said, and stood staring us down until we skulked away miserably.

So now, we sit and wait for the 6:45pm train, which will drop us in Hanoi at the enchanting hour of 4am. Good times. We are armed with some two and a half million dong, which is about enough money for a concert ticket back home. But wads of cash are always nice to fondle, regardless of how worthless they may be.

But tomorrow we will be in Hanoi; in around two weeks we will reach Saigon. And, looking around me now, at the quiet streets and friendly faces and speeding golf buggies (Lao Cai's tourist gimmick is replacing cars with electric golf buggies; go figure) I think that after a big sleep and a nice big juicy cheese and veggie baguette, I'll enjoy Vietnam quite a lot.

Hope you're all well,

Lachie

ps, Episodes 1-11 are up for viewing, and our techniques get more and more subtle - just what does the Pink Elephant sequence in Episode 10 mean? That's some straight-up impenetrable David Lynch shit there. The next few episodes will trickle through slowly as we're all split up, but we'll get there. Oh, and we busted the video camera trying to film ourselves on Dance! Dance! Revolution! machines in Chengdu, so expect the quality to drop even further from that point on. http://pingpongkapow.wordpress.com/

#38: Dead Goat Christmas

2009-01-01T22:20:00.000-08:00

Week 38 - Szechuan Province, China

THE HIGHWAY: continued to beckon to us in Litang, where I last left off. Litang was a stunning little town, but the altitude of 4,000m was just too much - doing up our shoelaces became an Olympic sport; walking down the street a marathon of endurance; sleeping in our beds a cacophony of noise as our hearts beat furiously to keep up with the demand for oxygen. We would have adjusted within a few days, but lacking the time we decided to push on to Kangding.

The ten hour ride thereafter was the worst we have experienced on this trip. It wasn't just that it was dangerous in places (it was) or unspeakably dull in others (it was) but that we sat up the back under the air vent half a foot above our heads, which served the twin functions of giving us something to smash our heads against going over each bump in the road (and the road was pretty much one long bump) while simultaneously spewing clouds of choking dust over us constantly, so that our hair and clothes were thick and crunchy with the stuff after an hour or so. In the morning, with the road blanketed in ice and snow, the driver swerved around clifftops and left Erin staring fixatedly out the window with exactly the same expression on her face that you see on young children watching Bambi when the mother gets shot. In the afternoon, with the roads dry and dusty and the landscape flat and featureless, the driver slowed it down so that we could feel every bump, inhale every dust particle (as well as those tasty tuberculosis particles floating around from the other passengers), and get the maximum amount of enjoyment from the whole thing.

But we made it. In Kangding, a fairly large city squeezed into a deep valley, we met up with a Portuguese-American for a couple of nights of cheap Chinese liquor to defend ourselves from the cold - and oh my, it was cold. Kangding lies at an altitude of 2600m, but it was far, far colder than anywhere we'd been, higher or lower. It was so icy that even wrapped up in all our layers it was only possible to spend about twenty minutes outside.

Strangest thing about Kangding - remember this is a large, completely modern city - is that, walking around one day, it started to snow a tiny bit. This was pretty exciting, as although we'd driven through acres of packed snow, it had never snowed on us before. So we walked around feeling pretty Christmas-y, with tiny flakes falling on our faces, when we started to feel a stickiness under our feets. We looked across the street, where, on a bridge in the middle of the city, was a small herd of goats and yaks. People were picking the ones they wanted for dinner that night. They were being slaughtered and skinned, right there on the street.

We were walking in a flowing stream of goat and yak blood, quickly congealing and freezing under our shoes.

(apparently that was China's way of saying, "Merry fucking Christmas, foreign devils!")

From Kangding we started on the last leg of our journey, on our first proper-sized bus in China, to Chengdu in the northeast of the province. Perhaps it's the results of spending a while at altitude, but Chengdu seems like a perfect city. It's compact and clean, quiet (all the motorbikes are electric), choc-a-bloc with great bars, great food, and friendly people (well, friendly in the standard Chinese pushy-and-rude sort of way). Erin and I came within inches of deciding to stay and work here; in the end it was only our continued memories of working in Bangkok and the promise of an Australian summer that dissuaded us.

Adam left us in a puff of smoke; we spent our last couple of nights getting drunk and silly and then, early Christmas morning, he was gone. Off to Nigeria by way of Bulgaria by way of Hong Kong, Adam was an absolute joy to travel with for the last three months, an ace at keeping the energy levels up and the excitement flowing, and we're going to miss him a helluva lot.

Subsequent to that, Erin and I suffered a harsh lesson in the importance of planning your travels in advance. With Tibet out of the picture we'd planned to waltz across the border to Burma. But from China, permits to Burma cost more than permits to Tibet, so that was out. Vietnam was another option, but two weeks to obtain our visa is two weeks that we can no longer afford, money-wise. So instead we've planned a Great Railway Bazaar, travelling by train from here in Chengdu all the way to Melacca in Malaysia (with a bus interval in Laos, seeing as though that country has precisely 13.5 metres of railway track, all on a bridge in the Mekong, left by the French after their planned Vietnam-China railway fell through).

It's an exciting plan, as it gives us more time in Malaysia - the one country that it felt like we rushed through. We leave today, for a 19-hour journey on the 4:10 to Kunming.

Hope you all have a fantastic new year,

Lachie

#37: From Here We Go Sublime

2009-01-01T22:12:00.000-08:00

Week 37 - Szechuan Province, China

BIG NEWS: this week is that we have made the decision to turn back from Tibet, with not enough time on our visas, too much money for the permits, and too much general hassle. Plus, we're currently at 14,000ft and feeling a touch of altitude sickness - Tibet rarely drops below 18,000ft. So, instead, we'll be continuing north as far as Chengdu, which we should reach by Christmas. Adam will then fly out to meet some friends in Bulgaria while Erin and I will loop back south to cross the border into Burma. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It was about a week and a half ago that we left Dali for Lijiang. Both are stunningly beautiful cities, full of the cobblestone alleys and gushing canals that most people assume disappeared from China with the first Coca-Cola sign. To walk around in during the day, wrapped in sweaters, jackets, scarves and beanies, surrounded by cherry blossom trees, they were exceptional.

But they're also complete tourist traps. Lucky we were here in winter: we were told by a couple of people that Lijiang, in particular, gets so crowded during the summer that people are habitually shoved into the canals by the force of the mob. Even in winter, it was a little disconcerting watching the endless groups of Chinese tourists obediently trotting along behind a tour guide armed with a large coloured flag and a megaphone. And nightlife: forget it. Cheap beer in Lijiang ends at sunset, after which you pay a ridiculous $9AU for a small light beer. After a couple of nights we caved in and spent $27 for three; two minutes after finishing we were told to order something else or get out.

We got out. Dali and Lijiang are one-day towns; their appeal is reliant on you not having time to notice the shit between the cracks. So we pushed on north to Tiger Leaping Gorge, where, surrounded by snow-capped peaks of 20,000ft or more, we trekked for two days along the ridge above the gorge. It was spectacular; we were covered in dust and our feet ached from the long climb but reaching the peak of the ridge and staring out into a 16km long gorge framed by those mountains was indescribably beautiful. China gets more and more beautiful at every turn; usually there are enough annoying aspects to match the good things but not here: alone on the track apart from the occasional goat-herder or trader carrying his goods by pony (plus a couple of Swiss backpackers with whom we had a drunken, stumbling night of draining bottles of cheap Chinese liquor), we felt the kind of peace that we had assumed China was incapable of giving.

From there to Shangri-La, at 10,000ft, where Tibetan prayer flags strung from hillsides and temples littered the countryside; where yaks replaced the cows in the paddocks and feral pigs replaced the feral dogs on the street. Crested by a massive monastery filled with dancing monks, people swinging prayer wheels, and lurid hypercolour murals of the gods and spirits, Shangri-La marked a massive difference from the China we'd seen so far. And we had it all to ourselves; even the beautifully-preserved old town was a ghost town with the freezing weather. Unfortunately, we weren't really in the mood to notice it: we were cold, we were tired, we were nauseous and breathless from the altitude. Basically: we were lame. So we stayed indoors, chewing on Tibetan bread ('baba') and tea eggs and rice porridge.

Then we thought: Hey, why don't we go somewhere even higher and colder?

Which is how we ended up here. We set out two days ago on a road infamous as one of the most dangerous in the world, the Szechuan-Tibet highway, little more than a dirt track skirting narrow ridges with sheer drops of a kilometre or more on either side. For ten hours on the first day we tried to act manly and not whimper and cry "OhgodfuckI'mgonnadienopleasefuck" as the bus grunted its way through passes layered heavily with snow, surrounded by mammoth peaks in every direction.

I tried to pass the time solving problems (as in, "How many flimsy-looking pine trees clinging tenuously to the cliff face would it take to stop a 4-ton bus of screaming passengers from rolling down that cliff?", or, "How many times can the bus roll down that hill before one of those giant pieces of heavy jagged metal that they've loaded into the aisle is certain to fly around and decapitate me?"); and eventually made it into the town of Xiangcheng with my dignity intact and my pants comfortingly dry.

Our dignity didn't last long there, however. Xiangcheng is less a town than it is a bunch of people working a vast transport scam. Namely, the woman supposed to be selling bus tickets onto Litang refused (illegally) to sell them to foreigners (we had been told by an expat in Shangri-La that this would be the case; this woman also happens to run a far more expensive - and therefore profitable - taxi service to Litang). We then tried to wake up early in the frigid morning and bribe / blackmail / violently coerce the busdriver into letting us on the bus, but he was having none of it, and when Adam and I tried to kick some ass he quickly subdued us with the "Seven Dragon Fists Beating the Shit Out of Weak Crying White Men" technique. How were we to know that he knew Tai Chi? Our language was no help; Erin and I haven't come far enough in our Mandarin studies and even Adam's skills aren't good enough to say "Holy Fucking Christ why are you doing this to us?".

In any case, we eventually ate a big serving of humble pie (tasting a lot like rice porridge) and shelled out the extra money to share a minivan with a Tibetan man whose breath smelt like all your worst nightmares, a Chinese man who inexplicably whimpered on every third breath for the entire trip, and an irritating German who couldn't tolerate the locals smoking in the van and so opened his window to a -16 degree breeze that cut through us like a knife covered in thick poison which is, itself, covered in rusty steel barbs which are then cursed with infinite misery.

At least the road was paved this time. It wound over endless arid plains, looking more like the scenery you'd expect to see in Iraq or Jordan than here. On each side frozen rivers wound by like white ribbons threading across the boulder-strewn landscape. It was a breathtaking 5-hour journey (in more ways than one), and left us here, wheezing and dizzy in Litang.

If Tibet gets any more Tibetan than this town, I'd be surprised. It's quite rare here to see a Chinese face, or to hear Mandarin spoken (unfortunate, since we know absolutely nothing in the Tibetan language). Yaks wander the streets; the motorbikes are ridiculously pimped out with streamers and flowers and psychedelic mudflaps; walnuts and dried apricots have taken over as the market food item of choice, and we are continually mobbed either by friendly faces shouting "Hello! I love you!" or robed beggars (some with demonic face-masks) chanting something that sounds like the word "Ziggy" over and over again, like "ziggyziggyziggyziggy". The beggars here are the most prominent and persistent since Battambang in Cambodia, which seems odd as the Chinese government now gives welfare and beggars have been thin on the ground elsewhere in the country.

We go to some hot springs today for a bit of blessed relief from the biting cold, then we continue our meandering way down the highway to Chengdu, which with some luck we shall reach by Christmas. Hopefully there will be showers there (showers having disappeared somewhere around Shangri-La). I will hopefully write again by Christmas, but in case I don't: Merry Christmas to each and all of you, hope it brings all the peace and happiness and video game consoles that you just know your parents got for you.

Lachie

ps Episodes 7 and 8 are now up, covering our last few trips around Thailand. We're going to try and push through as much as possible before we split up, so expect an onslaught of Ping Pong Ka-Pow-age over the next week or so. http:\\pingpongkapow.wordpress.com

#36: Into the Belly of the Beast

2009-01-01T22:04:00.000-08:00

Week 36 - Yunnan Province, China

CHINA IS: everything you think it's going to be. It's loud, it's dirty, it's smelly, it's smoggy. It's crowded, it's beautiful, it's utterly frustrating. It's: scratched kung-fu movies on sleeper buses, it's: old communists sitting calmly with a cigarette watching the dream die, it's: young women on tiny mobile phones in expensive boots and scarves. It's: plump middle-aged couples playing mah-jong in the park, it's: grim-faced men spitting on the street, it's: families huddled around outdoor tables hosting a gargantuan banquet of every edible thing known to man. It's: neon lights. It's: traditional temples with endless whirrs and clicks of cameras. It's: stunning mountains and streets lined with cherry blossom trees.

What I didn't expect, though: it's all happening at once, one massive enthralling mashed-up stir-fry of cliches and surprises.

Our last few days in Laos passed in a rush - from beautiful Luang Prabang north to Luang Nam Tha, past innumerable villages of bamboo huts staring out across the valley. In Nam Tha we paused awhile to sit by the river and smile at the young children who approached cautiously with shouts of "Sabai-dee!" and then ran screaming when we turned and replied. A couple of nights in a Chinese-run guesthouse graced with large portraits of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin while I overcame a stomach bug, then onwards. From the jungle we caught a rumbling bus over a Chinese-built road that had completely collapsed in some areas, leaving gaping holes that tumbled over nerve-wreckingly high clifftops.

At the Chinese border I expected trouble - a bag search, a bribe, a full-body inspection. Instead, the official quizzed us endlessly on what each part of the Australian coat of arms represented - not because he was suspicious of us but just because he was interested. We made some stuff up - "Um, I think that thing represents our greatest poet, Banjo Lawson..." - and then we were in China.

From the border town of Mohan on to Jinghong in an air-conditioned minibus cloudy with cigarette smoke (I have never seen a people as determined to smoke in every place they can possibly dream up as the Chinese - and that's coming after "Of course you can smoke in the cinema" Cambodia. Adam reports that one can still light up on some Chinese planes.). We crossed the Mekong - the fourth country in which we have sat by that river - into Jinghong and wandered around town, taking in the smells of hard work and industry and then coughing it up later in black snot and phlegm. It's certainly odd being around people who are constantly working after the "Maybe tomorrow" countries we've been living in for the last eight months. China seems absolutely full with things and people doing things. Erin and Adam, hyper with the excitement of a new country, buzzed about the streets exclaiming "Look at that!" "No, wait, look at that!" while I dragged along behind, tired and cranky and struggling to breathe in the smog.

From Jinghong we took a seventeen-hour sleeper bus - a delightful cornucopia of smells and sounds, let me tell you - to the old city of Dali, towards the northwest of the province. To give you some vague idea of the size of China: we have been travelling in modern buses, on modern highways: we have had more than twenty-two hours of straight travel: and we're still only halfway through the lowermost province.

After a long period of travel you can feel like you've been living on a constant diet of spicy squid-flavoured potato chips and sleeping pills, so here in Dali we shall rest up for a few days. It is a beautifully-preserved old town, strung with restaurants churning out stunningly-good food and criss-crossed with canals and lines of cherry-blossom trees. It's surrounded by mountains and is perched on a large lake - the air is crisp and cold and the spectre of winter has kept it empty of non-Chinese tourists. But it is freezing - we've bought some cheap thermals, and gloves, and a second layer of jackets, but I don't know how well they'll last us - and it's only going to get colder from here.

Our Mandarin is coming along much more rapidly than I had supposed it would; after three days we seem to have most of the essentials covered - introductions, bargaining, ordering food, and locating toilets. Though the latter is something we try to avoid, since Chinese toilets are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the worst toilets I have come across anywhere in the world. Papua New Guinean toilets were generally nothing more than a hole in the dirt, but at least most people seemed willing to aim for that hole. Going to the bathroom here is like running into a burning building to save a child: cover your face and get in and out as fast as humanly possible.

But in both its good and bad aspects China is absolutely captivating. A lot of people I know - including myself, up until a couple of months ago - have no real desire to travel to China. It seems crowded and dirty and pushy and polluted, and whatever seems beautiful about it one can find elsewhere - in Nepal, say, or Mongolia, or Vietnam. But that misses the crucial element that one only finds by coming here, which is that you simply cannot take your eyes off the entire dirty, noisy, perfect mess. This is a mammoth country, larger than you can imagine, and yet it's entirely filled - things are constantly happening or on the verge of happening; there is always something to see or to do or to have done to you.

From here we travel north to Lijiang, from where we make the crucial decision to take the hard road through Shangri-la, across icy roads traversing the snow-capped mountains of Szechuan to Chengdu; or whether we retreat to Kunming, to the comfort and convenience of the Chinese railway. Are we mice or men? I'm hedging my bets.

Lachie

ps, Episodes 1-6 of Ping Pong Ka-Pow are all uploaded; we'll try to churn another out over the next few days. pingpongkapow.wordpress.com

#35: Guns, Babes & Sticky Rice

2008-12-16T01:10:00.000-08:00

Week 35 - Luang Prabang Province, Laos

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

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

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

After the sun sets, however:

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

It doesn't end there.

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

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

And: it still doesn't end there.

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

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

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

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

Hope everyone's well,

Lachie

#34: The Long Goodbye and the Stuffed Penis

2008-12-16T01:02:00.000-08:00

Week 34 - Vientiane Prefecture, Laos

1. THE LONG GOODBYE

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is where things got ugly.

2. CLENCHED ANUS, STUFFED PENIS AND OTHER CULINARY DELIGHTS

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

He looked at me gravely.

"Mmm. Five kilometres," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lachie

#33: Don't Happy Be Worry

2008-12-16T00:56:00.000-08:00

Week 33 - Mae Hong Son Province, Thailand

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

Job done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was time to leave Pai.

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

Lachie.

#32: Whistlestop Tours With the Ambassador's Wife

2008-12-16T00:51:00.000-08:00

Week 32 - Mae Hong Son Province, Thailand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lachie

#31: Gerard the Belgian

2008-11-04T23:23:00.000-08:00

Week 31 - Chiang Mai Province, Thailand

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

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

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

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

"So, what made you leave Dublin?"

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

Okay then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope everybody's well,

Lachie

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

2008-11-04T23:09:00.000-08:00

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

Week 30 - Bangkok, Thailand

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

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

Such grubby, guilty hands.

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

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

Cambodia is so much fun.

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

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

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

*It's cheaper
*It has a free pool

*It has a free pool table

*It has a free gym

*It has a free laundry

*It has free internet

*It sells alcohol

*It has a book exchange

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

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

*It has a good restaurant attached

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

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

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

Hope you're well,

Lachie

#29: The River

2008-10-25T22:35:00.000-07:00

Week 29 - Battambang Province, Cambodia

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

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

So:

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

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

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

...But...

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

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

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

Lachie

#26: Good Housemates

2008-10-22T01:33:00.000-07:00

Week 26 - Bangkok, Thailand

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

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

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

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

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

That doesn't happen elsewhere, right?

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

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

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

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

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

Lachlan

#28: The Sizzled Lizard

2008-10-15T22:25:00.000-07:00

Week 28 - Phnom Penh, Cambodia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ping Pong Ka-Pow,

Lachie

#27: Bangkok Sinking

2008-10-08T22:52:00.000-07:00

Week 27 - Koh Chang, Thailand

AND AWAY: we go...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope you're all well,

Lachlan

#25: Chased by Wild Elephants Through the Jungle

2008-09-22T07:04:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

"Chang moho! Bpai! Chang moho!"

Finally, he turns to us to explain.

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

"Oh" we say in unison.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We picked up the pace.

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

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

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

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

Lachie

#23 & 24: The Dengue Daze

2008-09-16T21:18:00.000-07:00

Weeks 23 and 24, Thailand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lachie

#22: The Angry Mop

2008-09-03T07:30:00.000-07:00

Week 22, Thailand

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

Hmmm, I thought.

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

"Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeemergenceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...."

Hmmm, I thought.

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

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

"What? Why?"

"There is a mop!" she cried.

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

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

"A mop?" I asked again.

"Yes, an angry mop!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lachie

#21: It's Revolution, Baby!

2008-08-26T21:14:00.000-07:00

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

Wow, Bangkok looks pretty exciting at the moment.

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

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

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

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

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

"Hey! There was a coup today!"

"What? A coup! Really?"

"Yeah!"

"Wow."

"..."

"So..."

"How was work today?"

There's not much else to say.

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

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

I'll wait here while you read that again.

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

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

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

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

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

Viva la revolucion!

Lachie

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

2008-08-20T03:53:00.000-07:00

Kill Time: Still the coolest bar in Bangkok

Week 20, Thailand

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

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

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

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

GROUP AEROBICS:

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

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

THE WET SEASON:

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

THE WHISTLEBLOWERS:

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

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

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

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

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

THE EDUCATION SYSTEM:

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

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

"I ahm goo-ing too tha supahmahkut."

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

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

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

"Oh-kay, guhd, but wee-"

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

"Noh, noh, dot rupeet -"

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

FOOTPATHS

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

THE DREGS OF SOCIETY

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

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

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

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

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

Lachie

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

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

Extra Juicy Midweek Pop: Hewie For President!

2008-08-14T21:11:00.000-07:00

THAI POLITICS: is a subject I've avoided so far, because a) I don't consider myself enough of an authority to comment on it, b) it hasn't had a massive effect on our time here and c) south-east Asian politics are, in general, awful, like the best joke you've ever heard except that the punchline is the lives of millions of people - like, did you know that the 'democratically-elected' prime minister of Cambodia for the last twenty years has been a one-eyed ex-Khmer Rouge general? How funny is that! How about the fact that US Marines who are charged with rape in the Philippines can just sit at their base without fear - if they go a year without being found guilty they are considered automatically innocent! Hilarious! A laugh riot! That's what you get for letting the U.S. write your constitution for you! Zing!

But time to tackle the beast. Here's our cast of characters:

THE KING: We love the King. We love the King. Sometimes living in Thailand can remind one of that Simpsons episode with people in robes with blank eyes walking around blandly muttering "We love the leader". "We love the King" is written everywhere; it's a legal offence not to stand when the king's song is played at the cinema, before the start of a movie. No shit: this isn't one of those trivial, haha-look-how-antiquated-it-is sort of laws - people get arrested frequently for refusing to stand during the song, and you can get quite serious jail time. As a foreigner, you're unlikely to get arrested, though you will almost certainly be removed from the cinema.

But all this hardcore propagandizing is remarkable, really, because the king is actually a really cool guy. Without doubt, the coolest monarch of our time, and the only real moral force in Thai politics. It's a guarantee that you will be unable to find a Thai person willing to say a bad word about the king, who has stepped into the political realm a couple of times - with no legal power except the blinding respect and loyalty that all Thai citizens afford him - in order to "encourage" certain politicians into exile when they've done something incredibly vicious to the Thai people. Plus, he's an accomplished jazz musician who jammed with Louis Armstrong and several others during the 60's. He's in his 80's now, though, and though his influence on the Thai people remains massive, his ability to control it is waning.

THAKSIN "FRANK" SHINAWATRA: The villain of the piece, Thaksin is the ex-Prime Minister and Manchester City F.C. owner who was removed from Thai politics by force a couple of years ago. But Thaksin's not really an evil man; it's more that he's just a cold businessman who saw it as a good business move to become the leader of some sixty-million odd loyal customers - wait, did I say customers? I meant citizens.

A former corrupt police colonel turned telecommunications billionaire, Thaksin's major legacy was to make Bangkok miserable by enforcing a 1am closing time across the city, to restart the Southern Troubles (see below), and to claim the hearts and minds of taxi drivers everywhere by promising free money. During his [ahem] leadership, he announced that he would monitor surveillance tapes at the casinos along the Cambodian and Burmese borders to watch for civil servants; any he saw cavorting there would be immediately terminated. Now, of course, Thaksin owns a string of casinos along the Cambodian border.

Recently charged with tax evasion, 'Frank' was, for some reason, allowed to leave the country on bail and now refuses to come back (surprised?). Now living in England, where, apparently, the authorities consider him more significant as a Premier League club owner than as an international fugitive.

PRIME MINISTER / TV CELEBRITY SAMAK: When Thaksin was removed by the army, somehow one of his cronies was picked to replace him as prime minister.But surely they could have found a better cronie than this idiot. Samak considers it his national duty to lead these sixty-million odd viewers - wait, did I say viewers? I mean customers. No, citizens. Citizens!

Samak is a TV chef. Let me repeat for those in the back: a TV Chef. That's like letting Hewie run Australia, or letting Gordon Ramsay have a stab at Dowling St. And don't think my present tense was unintentional, either: Samak is a TV chef. As in, on top of his international obligations, he finds time to present a weekly TV show about how gorgeous the aubergines are this season. He also has two other weekly TV shows, one a typical Third World-dictator-ranting-at-his-enemies production, the other a 'classy' talk show called Talking Samak-style.

Well known for drooling during speeches and occasionally interrupting himself to give a 'bushman's blow' (gotta keep those synuses clear!), Samak is, as the old saying goes, about as useful as a one-legged man at an arse-kicking competition.

THE P.A.D.: The only real opposition, though as far as I can tell they're not so much a party as they are a group of unemployed students who congregate down near Democracy Monument everyday. Looked as if they were going to take Parliament House during a rally a couple of months ago, but they failed and the entire movement's fizzled a bit since then.

Just because they're the opposition doesn't mean they're any better, though. The PAD (People's Alliance for Democracy) shift their stance so often that they could be playing Dance Dance Revolution: they always appear wherever the poular breeze is blowing and were a main player in fuelling the ridiculous Cambodia crisis (below).

THE DEEP SOUTH: Um, does anybody realize how many people are dying in Thailand's south at the moment?

A lot. I'd almost be prepared to compare it to Baghdad. Everyday, people are shot by gunmen on the backs of motorbikes, killed by roadside bombs, kidnapped and beheaded while innocently sitting at tea-shops. It's insane. A couple of months ago, we took the train down to Hat Yai, which, despite the occasional bombing, is as far south as you can go and still be considered safe. Two weeks later the same train was ambushed by rebels who laid logs across the tracks and opened fire on the train with machine gunes, killing four people.

The reasons are the same reasons as everywhere - the people down close to the Malaysian border are of a different religion to the rest of the country and feel (with some justification) that they are being badly mistreated by the government. On top of that, however, is the fact that a lot of the violence is just teenage boys with guns, which translates into a high proportion of principals and schoolteachers being assassinated, as well as schools being torched.

The media here downplays the situation as much as possible because it's bad for tourism; but what's much worse is that politicians almost entirely ignore the issue - perhaps because they have no idea how to solve it. Several people are being killed violently every single day, yet the Thai government would prefer to focus on: The Cambodia Crisis.

THE CAMBODIA CRISIS: So exhorbitantly stupid that I can't even believe I'm wasting space writing about it, the Cambodia crisis boils down to this: Cambodia managed to get one of its temples put on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Thailand got jealous, and because the temple is close to the border, they claimed that Cambodia was trying to steal 4.6 square km of their land. Suddenly, everyone went mental.

Now, the land in question is disputable, but the Cambodians have had a market there for thirty years. Plus, did I mention it's 4.6 goddamn square km? It's jungle. Give it to them. Instead, the temple was closed and both countries amassed hundreds of armed troops at the border and started arresting each other's citizens when they crossed into the disputed zone.

The entire thing makes no sense because the big catch is: the temple is inaccessible from the Cambodian side, because of the abhorrent state of Cambodian roads. Oh, you can get there, but it'll take two or three days of hard travel from Phnom Penh, and you'll probably have to travel by ox-cart some of the way. What does this mean? That the only people to benefit from the UNESCO-listing would have been Thailand anyway, because all the tourists would have had to travel there from Bangkok. But now the temple's closed, the tourists have been scared off, and there was almost an armed conflict. Both countries lose everything.

But it only serves to demonstrate Thailand's complete inability to lead by example. Thailand is a wealthy country surrounded by some of the poorest countries in the world, but instead of being a guiding light for Southeast Asia it prefers to keep its neighbours poor so that they don't provide threats. When cyclone Nargis battered Burma, the Thai response was a gigantic, lazy "Meh". They provided supplies to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia throughout the 80's and 90's because it suited them to keep Cambodia weak.

Really, Thailand just wants to keep things the way they are. They want a weak, pliant Cambodia as a buffer between themselves and Vietnam; they want a weak, pliant Laos as a buffer between themselves and China; they want a weak, closed-off Burma as a buffer between themselves and India. And they want Malaysia and Singapore to do what they've always done, which is to say, to stay out of regional politics altogether and try to make everyone believe that they're not really part of Southeast Asia.

I guess that we don't have the same sense of history as peoples in other parts of the world. Nobody in Thailand has lived under Burmese occupation, much less under Cambodian control - but still they remember, they remember that those things happened before and could well happen again. During recent negotiations with Cambodia, the Cambodian leadership reminded everyone that "We must be good neighbours for many tens of thousands of years to come".

Tens of thousands of years? Has anyone ever heard Kevin Rudd saying that to Helen Clark? That's the way things are considered over here, though, as one long continuum.

No beginnings, and no endings.

#19: Bangkok Rising

2008-08-13T21:07:00.000-07:00

AND BUT: so we are hanging out the windows of the southbound train, the wind is rushing through my hair, our clothes are getting stained with all the many varieties of black gunk that line the windowsills but god who the fuck cares because the wind is in our hair and we are hanging out the windows of the southbound train. We are smiling and this is what we're here for and the train is crowded with no room to sit and so we are sitting on the windowsills, leaning out. Aaron gets slapped in the face by a big wet fern charging toward him at 80km/hr; Edie and I manage to duck inside. We are alive and it is fantastic.

And Bangkok is rising from the swamp, slowly at first, in fits and starts; a collection of shacks little more than a pile of corrugated iron; the brown and green slowly shifting into black tar and grey cement, glass and traffic lights and people with old sneakers looking at their watches.

We are coming from Ayutthaya, the city of crumbling temples, the former capital sacked and ruined by Burmese armies two-hundred and fifty years ago. It is another public holiday. We are tired after a long day riding pushbikes around beautiful ruined temples poorly restored with cheap cement, tired and happy to have wind against our face after the long humid day.

We rode and looked and looked and rode that day, through the old streets, through grassland with giant millipedes the size of football hotdogs creeping past. Then an arched bridge over a river; I reached the top only to hear a snap and here is Aaron, his chain snapped, and if ever there was a face that said "How could this happen to me again what the hell did I do wrong why can't I ride a frickin' bike without something going wrong, huh?" then he was wearing it at that moment. We tried to fix it - by which I mean, he tried to fix it - but succeeded only in covering himself with grease. He tried to wash the grease off in the river but succeeded only in falling into some kind of sinkhole and losing both his thongs in the sucking mud, which he then had to dig through to find said thongs, which subsequently left him much dirtier than he had been originally, still with grease on his face and stuck in the middle of a new city with a bike with no chain (to add insult, the wheels of the bike were now covered in mud and refused to turn). He decided he wanted to be alone for a while, which I felt was quite mature, since in the same situation I would have a) blamed everybody there for what had gone wrong with much frantic gesturing and reddening of face, b) cried like a little girl, and c) shouted "I WANT TO GO HOME!!!" at the uncaring sky whilst shaking my fist in existentialist fury. So I was very impressed.

There are some places in the world that make you tremble with divine awe, send shivers down your spine, deliver on your wildest fantasies. Ayutthaya is not one of them. But it does make for a pleasant day cycling and a pleasant night of drinking with the local jazz band while bad Thai pop plays in the background and for noisily waving your beer or whiskey about while shouting "Chon dee!" (cheers) at everyone repeatedly.

But Bangkok rises always in the background, the great mother-beast whose grimy womb we must return to each week. I am still teaching; I still do not know the name of my school or of my head teacher, but that's the nature of the machine. So here's how it works: you turn up to a dusty old building, with no materials, no lesson plans, and no real idea which classes you will be teaching that day (your roster will change frequently, depending on who gets fired that week). You have no idea who will be in the staff room, because the school is notoriously fickle and tends to fire foreign staff at the drop of a hat, without reason. When I started two weeks ago, I began talking with Max, a "senior staff member" who had been at the school a whole two months. Yesterday I replaced him; he has been shifted to another school. Expect the Thai teachers to assume you know nothing of their language and to bitch about you mercilessly in front of your face. Expect not to last very long.

Unless you're an awful teacher. Then, the world is your oyster. The teacher I originally replaced had spent his six months at the school throwing things at the students and turning up to classes drunk; he gave students worksheets with questions like "Do you think I'm handsome?" (I have forty copies of this worksheet, which were in his desk, if anyone wants one), and he smoked out in the playground. They finally dumped him because too many students complained.

"It's a shame," said my head teacher, "because apart from that he was a very good teacher..."

The head teacher will tell you she wants to hear more speaking and listening in the classroom; you spend five hours doing only that and at the end of the day she'll say "No, I wanted you to do speaking and listening". You say, "But that's what I did". She says, "Do it more".

As for the kids themselves, well, it's sort of like trying to teach a lynch mob the finer points of racial sensitivity. There are fifty-odd students per class, for starters; you're handed a microphone and expected to basically just yell over the top of them. No choices for punishment: tell them to listen and they'll ignore you; tell them to stand up and they'll pretend they don't understand; ask them to move to another chair and they'll ignore you while pretending they don't understand. Tell them to leave the classroom - well, then you've got problems. Within seconds you'll hear the rumbling footsteps of a Thai teacher charging toward them, who will then proceed to cane the shit out of them.

Yes, the cane is still in force here. Another teacher at my school, Bill, was mucking about with the kids one day and saw that one of them had a basketball. So he threw it around for a bit, gave the kids a break from their learning, fair enough. But the moment he turned back to the chalkboard to begin writing, one of the Thai teachers happened to walk by and saw the kids with the basketball. She charged in and began caning everyone like a whirling dervish. The kids looked up at Bill with their big puppy-dog eyes, begging him to take the blame, but Bill was too busy shitting himself at the sight of the cane and froze up like a rabbit in headlights.

So anyway, we're surviving, Edie and I, and beginning to claw our way out of the gutters of this city. As we slowly draw to a close our time in this monstrous metropolis, I hope that I can take a more generous eye to it, but at the moment all I can think about is the wind through my hair as I hang out the window of the northbound train.

Lachie

ps, Thanks to Aaron for the photo. You can see more of his amazing photography at http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamteale/sets/72157606735957219/ and check out his much more professional blog at http://adam.lumanation.com. Wait, does that give away his real name?

pps, You can also check out more of our photos at our Flickr site, http://www.flickr.com/photos/29217988@N02. Okay, so there are only six photos there at the moment, and they're all out of date. But it will grow. What, you've got a problem with that? Sue me.

ppps, Don't sue me.

pppps, Ajarn.com has a fairly funny overview of white teachers in Thailand here: http://www.ajarn.com/Banter/farangteechers.htm. Warning: this could possibly be one of those instances where someone thinks something is funny because they're involved with it, but to everyone else it is incredibly lame. I can't tell.

#18: The Universal Dream

2008-08-07T23:38:00.000-07:00

Week 18, Laos

JUST DON'T: shit on the train. That's the main lesson I'm taking away from southeast Asia. See, we can debate all day about whether or not squat toilets are good (I'll win: they're not) but they're generally a pretty minor part of the day. Unless we've just eaten a burning-hot papaya salad followed by something warm and squishy and milky and are stuck in snarling traffic in Bangkok, in which case the squat toilet may become the most important thing in our day - it may even become our makeshift home for the next few nights.

Edie likes them, for some obscure reason which I haven't yet determined (when she tries to tell me I stick my fingers in my ears and shout 'Lalala! Lalala! Not listening! Not listening!'). For me, the whole having-to-exercise-while-shitting rubs me the wrong way, as does the never-being-entirely-sure-whether-you've-got-yourself-aimed-over-the-bowl-rather-than,-say,-the-floor,-or-your-leg factor. But I deal with it.

But catching the train back from beautiful Vientiane, flush with our new visas ensuring us another three months of stressed-out bliss in Bangkok, I found myself running with exquisite fervour to the squats at the back of the carriage, where the hole opens directly on the tracks below. I lowered myself tactfully. Remember when I first described Thai trains several months ago as 'jangly'? Well, let's replace that with Beijing-earthquake-esque. The train tossed and turned like an insomniac, bouncing over each piece of track and jerking dramatically in wide zigzags. It was impossible to keep my ass still and I quickly became a garden sprinkler, a poo helicopter spreading the fruits of my labour in all directions.

I repeat: don't shit on the trains.

But we've got our visas. Like I said: nothing stands in the way of Destiny. Not only did we get the visas and keep our jobs, but a delay at the Thai Embassy dealt us five tough days of chilling out by the Mekong with a Beerlao in hand. Vientiane is a beautiful city - it perches on the Mekong, hugs right up to its banks. The buildings are low and spacious and from a third-storey bar you can see out across the rooftops of the entire city. And everything's so French: is it wrong to talk about colonialism like it was a good thing? Who cares: French food and culture mixes so well with the south-east Asian mindset that it's a match made in heaven. Waking up to fresh baguettes with poached eggs and wine and going to bed with a spicy-hot curry washed down with beer: surely this is the Universal Dream.

It's getting chock-full of tourists now, little Laos, but the people are still wonderful. And naive. In the centre of town is a massive monument based on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris - it looks just like it, from a distance, though up close it's basically just blank concrete. The Laos call it 'the Vertical Runway' because the government used all the concrete that was supposed to go towards a runway for the airport, in its construction. The best thing about it, though, is the marketing: on the biggest and most tourist drawcard-y attraction in their town, the Laos have erected a plaque which says, among other things, 'From a closer distance it is even less impressive, like a monster of concrete'. Genius.

So, times were tough. We hired a motorbike ('that'll be $7, please), got a hotel room on the Mekong ('that'll be $6, please'), went for a herbal sauna ('that'll be $1, please') and massage ('that'll be $3, please') at the forest temple on the outskirts of town, and generally just toughed it out eating French food and drinking the Lao moonshine (called lao-lao) mixed with lemon juice and warm honey.

Vientiane's odd in the fact that there are almost zero beggars, absolutely zero child beggars, no touts, no mahouts walking their poor mistreated elephants about the town, few yaa baa addicts, and few prostitutes (in fact, it is illegal for a foreigner to sleep with a Lao without marriage or special dispensation from the police). Odd because it is by far the poorest country in the region, and odd because it's been a fact of life in Thailand, Cambodia, even (to a far, far, lesser extent) in Malaysia. Odd, also, because Laos has just the kind of burgeoning tourism scene that attracts alot of those people to the city. Maybe it happens up in Vang Vieng, where backpackers tube down the river from beer stall to beer stall. We'll wait and find out.

Everything's working out, now. We have visas; we have jobs. As of Tuesday, we've been paid our monthly wage and gotten our first new money into the bank accounts since March. So now we can look ahead. By the end of September, we will have left Bangkok to hit the long road north; by mid-October, we should have left Thailand altogether. And then? Laos, Vietnam, China perhaps? We haven't decided. But right now, everything's good. Hope everything's good with you.

Lachie

Extra Juicy Midweek Pop: Photo-a-Go-Go!

2008-08-04T01:02:00.000-07:00

ALRIGHT SO: this is the first of what will probably be a whole lot of midweek Pops, generally covering things more esoteric, obtuse, irrelevant, dull or self-obsessed than the subjects I'm generally covering, and really serving only to add to the giant pile of informational refuse that is the Internet.

But first: photos! Credit where credit's due - I'm a standard point-n-clicker if every there was one, so most of the great photos that have been taken so far have been Edie's, who has a great eye for a shot and is generally a far superior photographer/artist/person than me in every respect. Here are a few of our favourites that I haven't yet had an excuse to insert into the blog:

Okay, so you'll have to turn your monitor on its side - fucked if I can be bothered learning how to make it display the right way, right now, it's really goddamn hot here, you know, and I'm tired - but here in all its glory is Phanom Rung, the ancient Khmer temple atop an extinct volcano.

On the train to the Laotian border. Check out the size of those windows.

Okay, so this would only be notable in assessing how completely ridiculous my Indiana Jones delusions have become (a straw fedora? Really?) except for that moped in the back of the canoe, which they drove - drove, mind you, not pushed - into the middle of the Mekong, with water up to the rider's knees and the motor somehow not flooding with river scum, at which point German Mark and the Thai rider lifted it into the canoe and took it to the mainland. How lame is the entire rest of the world? This is in Si Phan Dom, Laos.

From now on there will be a steady, if irregular, flow of photos to the Flickr site that I've just set up right now, literally right now as you were sitting here reading this. It's here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29217988@N02/

You're welcome.

Lachie

#17: Don't Dream it's Over (or, "Don't Dream: It's Over")

2008-07-28T00:04:00.000-07:00

Week 17, Thailand

OKAY, SO: we're perched on the precipice of a potentially trip-ending complication. And it was all starting to go so perfectly...

I am, finally, employed. It took two more interviews, but I got there. I'm working now at a high school who's name I cannot pronounce or even spell, for a principal who's name I do not know, without a contract or any official looking document, through a woman whose name I do not know even though I'm on the phone to her every day (it's gotten to that "It would be really embarassing to ask now" sort of phase where I'm thinking up complicated schemes to get her to blurt out her own name). But it's a job. It's easy, the hours are good, the pay is shit but live-able, and the school's close by. So I'm happy.

The first interview I went to last week, however, almost broke me. I walked into an office, was handed a form to fill in in a different room, sat down and wrote my details. When I finished I walked out to hand it to them and -

"Get back in the room!" barked some Thai guy from his desk.

I retreated.

I sat in the room and stared out the window for about fifteen minutes when in walks this Thai couple, all shy smiles and giggles. They sit, and stare at me.

I sit, and stare back.

Finally, they say: "Um, could you introduce yourself, please."

Uh, okay. "I'm Lachlan, and I'm a teacher from Australia." I felt like I was at an AA meeting.

They nodded. We chatted for a while as it became increasingly clear that they couldn't speak English very well, and couldn't understand my half-assed attempts at Thai. The interview became a symphony of "What?" "What?" "What?" in three different voices. I'd had enough, and started to wind the interview up, when they asked:

"Would you be able to do a demonstration class?"

"Sure!" I exclaimed like a boy scout.

They stared at me. I stared back. After two minutes of staring I asked, "Uh... When would you like me to do the demo class?"

"Now," they said.

"Oh. I haven't got anything prepared."

"A teacher doesn't prepare. You must teach from the heart."

I didn't realize I was being interviewed by Confucius, but there you go.

"Oh, okay. Where is the class?"

They looked confused.

"There is no class, is there?" I ventured.

They shook their heads.

"So, you'd like me to stand up, in front of two fully grown adults, with no preparation or plan, and pretend those two adults are actually fifty eleven-year olds for one hour, with no resources. Is that correct?"

"Yes, please," they chimed together.

I walked out. I told myself I'd try one more, and that ended up being the jackpot, in that everybody involved could almost be mistaken for a regular, run-of-the-mill human being. So that's all good.

But perhaps it's all for nothing. Visa talk is boring, so I'll keep this simple: for the whole time we've been here, we've been able to walk across the border into Thailand, and they've given us a free 30-day stamp. No visas, no costs, no hassle - the only thing we had to do was get ourselves back across the border each month to reset the 30 days. The advice we had was that we could continue to do so, ad infinitum.

Turns out our advice is a couple of years out of date. So we rumbled down to the Cambodian border on Friday with no intention to do anything except get a stamp and run back to Bangkok. It's six hours each way, so it's no small journey. When we got there we were informed by a very nice military-looking guy that we had exceeded our 90-day limit on the stamps, and if we crossed the border to Cambodia he would not be able to let us back in.

Shit.

I tried my naive-white-guy best to bribe him, all raised eyebrows and "Is there a special fine we could pay now to get this done? Like, an express fine so we don't have to travel to Phnom Penh and wait a week for a visa?" Nudge, nudge, wink wink. He didn't budge. Border guards are scum; just when you need precisely their breed of complete corruptibility, it evaporates before your eyes.

So, we're back in Bangkok, our stamps have expired and we're racking up a $40 bill for each day we stay here. There are three broad directions this could head. Maybe we go to Laos tomorrow; everything works perfectly; we get our visas in two days and come back to Bangkok where our jobs will welcome us back with open arms. That's what we're banking on.

Or: Maybe we go to Laos, but the visas take longer than they should and we come back to Bangkok only to find that two equally inexperienced and underqualified Westerners are working our jobs. Which would mean that we'd have to start again. Which, in terms of our current bank accounts and mental states, is a potential trip ender.

Or: Maybe we go to Laos, to find out - as has been suggested by some sources - that we will be barred from re-entry into Thailand and not allowed a new visa for another 90 days. Since we are dirt poor and all our stuff will still be in an apartment in Bangkok, completely inaccessible to our greedy little hands, this would almost certainly be a trip-ender.

We don't know how things are going to pan out, but we're hoping for the best. And somehow, deep down, I believe it's our solemn destiny to spend the rest of our lives swinging in hammocks over the Mekong with straw fedoras pulled lazily over our heads, waiting for someone to bring us a beer.

Nothing stands in the way of destiny.

Lachie

#16: Chuck Norris Pipe Dreams

2008-07-21T21:57:00.000-07:00

Week 16, Thailand

CAMBODIA OR BUST: that was the plan. We were to cross the border at Poipet, jump in a pickup for the ride over nonexistent road to Sisophon, then onto the little bamboo train (built by villagers and powered by a boat engine) to Battambang, for the long jungle river ride out to Siem Reap, where I sweated out a nasty mushroom pizza four months ago. That's where I'm supposed to be, telling you all about our grand river voyage.

Didn't happen.

We missed the train, then the bus, then wandered around like you do at 8am on New Year's Day when the Stay Out vs Go Home debate starts to turn the corner from one conclusion to the other but your brain and body aren't quite in sync yet so you sort of walk a couple of steps in one direction, then turn and go in another, until someone slaps you. That's what we did, for a while, like scattered amnesiacs, until at some point in the evening we ended up heading west, in a taxi bound for Kanchanaburi.

Kanchanaburi! Don't even try to say it. The Australian accent makes it almost impossible for any of us to pronounce properly. If you really need to give it a go, put on your best Rooty Hill bogan-with-more-VB-singlets-than-teeth accent and say the following dialogue:
'Can't ya?'
'Nahh, Brie'
There you go. That's pretty close. Now practice in front of a mirror for three weeks.

Never mind the pronunciation: Kanchanaburi is really just the River Kwai. as in, 'Bridge on the...', and the bridge in question is still standing in the middle of town, ferrying gawking white tourists back and forth across the river by train. But it's not much of a drawcard, being fairly small and unimpressive and surrounded by large stages and river barges filled with overweight Thais belting out karaoke classics.

THE 'I HATE KARAOKE' SIDENOTE: I hate karaoke. Not generally, you understand, just here. I enjoyed it in the Philippines, for instance, where it was drunken fun, or in Sydney, where it was also drunken fun. Over here, it's drunken seriousness. People here - or, okay, men here - belt out these awful, awful Thai-pop staples with all the grave solemnity of a funeral dirge. That would be okay, but they do it so loudly and for sooooooo long into the night that you start to get these Chuck-Norris-martial-arts fantasies while lying in bed, in which you walk down to that stage in your boxer shorts and totally belt the shit out of all the singer's henchmen and then down the man himself with a mean right hook, before picking up the microphone and giving them a taste of 'Eye of the Tiger' before spitting out some witty one-liner and dropping the mic on the guy's head (I haven't thought of the witty one-liner yet). Also: they play karaoke DVDs constantly on the long-distance buses, except in all of Thailand there must be - let's see here - oh, three karaoke DVDs. That's the impression I get, anyway, after having sat through one particular DVD with a denim-clad douchebag proudly displaying 'Nescafe' logos all over his set while crooning about how he wants to 'soop' my 'ong-ka-chaat' at least five times over the last couple of months. Again - very loudly and on repeat for long enough that the Chuck-Norris fantasies reoccur and you can almost feel the way the driver will scream when you give him a swift and lethal karate chop to the neck.

Kanchanaburi's a lovely little town to sit by the river and waste a couple of days but since we're a bunch of fist-pumping, fast-driving, carpe-diem-shouting, techno-music-listening-to adrenaline junkies we decided that the only thing for it was to rent a couple of the fastest motorbikes in town and burn up and down the highways. So we found a couple of mopeds and sped off at an insane 63km/hr. Because we're crazy! Because nothing can stand in our way! Then Aaron's bike broke down; we had to go back; we got yelled at; we said we were sorry; we got a new bike.

The moment we left Kanchanaburi the landscape exploded into great long, spiky mountains rising sharply in every direction, carved apart by wide brown rivers and softened by long, golden cornfields pocked here and there with a shining red-and-gold temple. We visited a ridiculously large waterfall with seven tiers, each tier massive and filled with swimming Thais and big fish that bit the ankles the moment we stepped in. We showered under the waterfalls; stayed the night in a cabin that floated out on the river, held up by empty oil barrels, the rocking motion gently counteracted by several Singha beers.

We rode around a lot that weekend. When it rained - and it rained - we would become wretched, ragged creatures, our bodies the consistency of wet socks, our mouths alternating between thick cursing and spitting water. When it stopped, and the mountains were strung with mist like tinsel around a christmas tree, it was beautiful. And when the clouds parted altogether and the mountains sung with light and the cornfields glowed in almost radioactive magnificence: then it was one of the all-time highlights of this entire voyage away. We went to some geothermal hot springs not too far from the Burmese border: they were, unsurprisingly, quite hot. Fortunately they were placed two metres from a cold river that snaked its way through the forest, so we were able to jump from one to the other. Lying in those sweaty springs while sweet thick tropical rain poured down on our heads, though: that was also one of the best moments I've had away. Truly excellent.

I'm still struggling on the job front and starting to feel more like a pathetic loser with each passing day. But there's an opportunity around every corner. Like, maybe I could be a crazy bag lady? Or one of those dudes who looks for coins on the beach? They must have it good, check out all that expensive electronic equipment they own. Or, like, I heard about this one website that buys toenail clippings from people! I can make those! Or I could sell my hair to a wigmaker. It's pretty fucking nice hair. Plus, I had a really great 'Desert Storm' trading card collection when I was young. That must be worth a fortune! I hope mum's kept it, or else she'll owe me several thousand dollars... I could collect recyclable paper! The opportunities for an enterprising guy like me: limitless.

Lachie

#15: Where the Wild Things Are

2008-07-21T21:25:00.000-07:00

Week 15, Thailand

ON A SIGN: for a particularly classy-looking massage parlour downtown, with the particularly classy-sounding name of 'Teen Smile Massage', there is a large list of prices. The regular at the top - Thai massage 350 baht; foot massage 200 baht; oil massage 350 baht. Then as you work your way down, things get interesting - oil massage with testicle massage 600 baht; foot and testicle massage 500 baht, sexy testicle massage 800 baht, happy sexy testicle massage 1000 baht. Maybe it's me: while imagining a 'testicle massage' all I can picture is a brutish Swedish woman named Helga manhandling my scrotum with iron fingers, and it's not a particularly pleasant image (in fact, it tends to make me sort of dizzy and nauseous and I usually need to sit down afterward). But different strokes for different folks, I guess.

So: it turns out that the reason I have had more trouble than Edie in getting a job over here is the Filipino Factor. Edie got a call from her boss Shane last week, who's also trying to locate a job for me:

HIM: So I'm trying to get your boyfriend a job at a school.
HER: Cool.

HIM: But, um...

HER: ...

HIM: ...Um, where's he from?

HER: Australia.

HIM: Oh, great, Australia.

HER: ...

HIM: ...

HER: ...Was there anything else you wanted?

HIM: No. Yes. Um.

HER: ...

HIM: ...

HER: What?

HIM: ... Um... What race is he?

HER: He's white.

HIM: Oh. Cool. That was all they wanted to know.

In a nutshell: my resume says that I worked for a couple of months in the Philippines, so all the employers immediately assume that I am, therefore, Filipino. They then assume that because I am Filipino, I am not white, and am thus only suitable for cleaning jobs. What a fucking circus. There are plenty of ads for teaching jobs which say, clear as day: NO FILIPINOS. IF YOU ARE FILIPINO YOUR APPLICATION WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED. It's pretty gross.

So I inserted a photo of myself into my resume and, of course, got offers for interviews immediately. I went to a job interview across town for a Catholic girls school and was interviewed, coincidentally, by a Filipino nun. She was tiny, no higher than my hip, a little hobgoblin who, when I told her that the school was probably too far to travel to each day, said, 'Maybe you should get your own apartment, then, over this way. Away from your girlfriend. Ever heard of abstinence?'.

And that, as they say, was that.

The job-hunting thing is a fairly depressing affair, generally, as job-hunting often is, but it was alleviated a bit last week when Edie and Aaron and I decided to hoof it into the jungles of Thailand a few hours north of Bangkok. Utterly magnificent: vines and butterflies everywhere, the long siren-like hoots and hollers of the gibbons in the jungle, massive waterfalls plunging into cold water - we swam at the waterfall that they used in the film, The Beach, which might mean something more to me if I had actually watched that film at some point. But I have now swum in the same water that Leonardo diCaprio once swam in. That's gotta count for something.

And we decided to go off on a jungle trek, unguided, for a few hours. That sounds hardcore but every time there was a rustling in the bushes near us, Edie would shout 'SNAKE!', Aaron would shout 'TIGER!', and I would shout 'AAARGH!' (people screaming scary animal names terrifies the shit out of me) and we would all pelt off at different directions into the jungle, and then have to find each other again. It's actually surprisingly nerve-wracking walking through a jungle in which there are known to be tigers and leopards and wild elephants and the like; even though they're extremely rare and avoid humans and all, and you know that you have a better chance of stumbling across an undiscovered civilisation of small blue men than a man-eating tiger, you can't help but silently plan out which way you're going to run when the roar finally comes and some massive bundle of orange and black and teeth is bounding toward you. My eventual plan was elegantly simple: hide behind Aaron. It's not often that I have the luxury of having someone taller than me to use as a human shield, and I planned to exploit that circumstance as far as possible.

But the walk was pleasant, the air was cool and there were monkeys swinging through the trees every so often. No shit: those are clumsy animals. They can climb better than I could, sure, but they make a hell of a lot of noise when they do it. A couple of monkeys swinging through the trees makes about the same level of banging and rustling as a charging bull elephant. Some lemur-looking thing crossed our path, too, scooting up a tree when we approached; there were deer with beautiful dark patterns across their throats wandering up the paths; a freshwater siamese crocodile paddled lazily down a stream. Too bad that not a single one of us had a camera, since Aaron's and Edie's were broken and I'd forgotten to charge mine. But now it feels like a secret: the day was fantastic and the three of us will be the only ones who knew what it looked like.

And the people we met there were so lovely; no public transport in the jungle so we had to hitch rides in the backs of utes going back and forth. Everyone would offer us a lift, go out of their way to take us where we wanted to go. It was superb. It was surreal waking up to the smog and grime of the city after being in such a pristine place but all things must pass, as George Harrison said (except I think he swiped that from the bible? Maybe?). And anyway we're heading off again, this evening, it being yet another long weekend (the Thais have something like fourteen public holidays per year). Back off to Cambodia to sail down the river and live out my Martin-Sheen-Apocalypse-Now fantasies. Be warned, extremely-obese-Marlon Brando! I'm on my way, and my axe is sharp!

Lachie

#14: The Bloated Scrotum of Bangkok

2008-07-07T03:10:00.000-07:00

Week 14, Thailand

DEEP INSIDE: this city exists a whole other freakshow, thrilling and nauseating, thick with scum and puke and chili. When you dig right under Bangkok, trawl under its skin, you find... well, you find nothing, except more Bangkok. There is no hidden layer, no sudden change of direction: the smells just get stronger, the sights more bizarre and the tastes more ass-burning. The place is the same from the bottom as it is from the top, from the left or the right, from the inside or the outside. It's just a question of how weird you want things to get.

The week started off with a storm. Not just any storm, mind you - this was the End of the World. We walked out onto the balcony and the sky was green. It was eerily silent too - and Bangkok is never, ever quiet. The only sound we could hear were flags flapping in the wind atop a building several hundred yards away. The clouds were moving fast, as they used to when I would go bushwalking in the mountains, but they weren't just moving across the sky - they were pushing up and down as well. We could look straight up and it looked as if a massive column of cloud was pushing down toward us. Everywhere these columns of cloud were pushing up and down. I thought we were in tornado country, and started freaking out, then I remembered that scene in Independence Day where the spaceships turn up (for those of you who have sat through that piece of trash: that is exactly what the clouds looked like) and I started shitting my pants, then Edie said it looked like Armageddon and I completely lost my shit and started running around the room shouting "Allah! Buddha! Jesus! I'm sorry!" and trying to remember snatches of Catholic prayers from school scripture lessons ("Um...We thank you for our daily bed?") and tossing the water in the sink over my head as if it were holy water.

The green clouds passed after a few minutes, followed up by a white sheet of rain. Not even acid rain, or hail, or rain with fish in it, or rain red with the blood of sinners, or anything. Just regular, anticlimactic rain.

Things would only get worse. Later in the week, jobless and bored, we decided to check out the forensic museum across town. We'd heard that there were a few funny things in there, and, okay, that was sort of true. In a cabinet to the left, there was the bloodied t-shirt of somebody who was stabbed to death with a dildo. I'm going to say that again, because it makes me giggle: stabbed to death with a dildo. But it steadily descended into a bizarre, macabre conveyor belt of horror and depravity. I didn't mind the jars full of internal organs pierced with bullets or crushed by cars. I was even okay with the six (count 'em) fully-intact leathery human corpses - rapists and serial killers who were executed by the state and then placed on full display to the public. That was okay. Even when we found a severed tiger's foot placed randomly among the otherwise exclusively human organs, we were okay. But the place was full of things so much more grisly - bodies melted in explosions, pictures of people crushed by industrial accidents, and dead babies in jars - so many dead babies in jars - too many horrors to mention, all neatly catalogued and displayed for the viewing pleasure of giggly high school students and dirty old white men in Chicago Bulls singlets.

Next door, the parasitology museum. We both felt pretty nauseous and disgusted in ourselves after an hour at the forensics museum, but we figured the parasitology museum couldn't be any worse. And, apart from a few grotesque photos of tapeworms and such (I'll spare you the details): apart from that, it wasn't too bad. Except for the centrepiece, which is as great a monument to Bangkok as I've ever seen: in the centre of the museum, taking pride of place, is the gigantic, mammoth scrotum of a man with elephantitis, floating in a jar of preservatives. The Bloated Scrotum of Bangkok: I've tried for a while to think of something of a similar size to compare it to, but I'm struggling - let's just say it was much, much bigger than your head. Like, at least four times as large. It was in the shape of a cube, for some reason. Suddenly, the two dollars we'd paid to get into the medical museums seemed well worth it.

After that whole experience we decided that we'd had too much time on our hands and it was time to get serious about getting jobs. We each got an interview over the weekend, and the circus continued. My interview was with a man from Pakistan named Matt, for a job teaching English at a high school; from the moment I walked in he spent the hour-long interview listing reasons why I shouldn't take the job. There's no air-conditioning, he said. The school's an hour away by bus, and there are fifty students in each class, he said. Not only that, but the students can't speak any English and don't respect their teachers whatsoever. You get only three days sick leave per year, he said, and the students have no study materials except the ones you make yourself. There is only one computer for all the staff to share, and it doesn't have the internet. Also, he said, we suggest that you try not to talk to other staff, as the Thai teachers dislike the foreign teachers and vice versa, and some of the foreign teachers don't like new teachers and will try to get rid of you.

On and on it went. I'd never heard a spiel like it. I thought, this has gotta end with him saying something like "But if you get through it, you get $5000 a month with an end-of-year bonus". It didn't.

"Oh, and we can't pay you well. $1200 a month. No bonus. Do you want the job?"

I weighed it up. As awful as he'd made it sound, we were running out of money and I just wanted an easy job that I wouldn't have to think or care about too much. And the money was enough to cover our living expenses, if nothing else. Then came the kicker.

"What hours do I teach?"

"You teach classes from nine to three. Sometimes you finish at 2:30."

"Oh. Cool. That sounds good."

"..."

"What? Did you mutter something?"

"...extra hours...come in early..."

"Speak up, what are you saying?"

"Um... You have to come into school by 7:30 each morning. And you don't leave til four."

"What? Why?"

"...parents..."

"Stop mumbling! Why do I come in at 7:30 if I don't teach til 9:00?"

"So that the school gets to show off all the white teachers to the parents."

Aha. I thought poor Matt was going to cry when I told him I couldn't take the job. Edie's interview was even more surreal. She walked into the chaotic office of Shane, a British agent who finds teachers for schools:

"Ah!" he said, "You're white. Great. When can you start?"

"But -"

"I've got a school that needs a teacher from next week. Can you do that?"

"Um, yes, but -"

"Here's your timetable. I'll email you some lesson plans. Okay?"

"Um... Did you want to look at my resume?"

"Oh yes, suppose I should, let's see here..." [3 seconds later] "...all seems in order. Great! Welcome aboard!"

"You know I've never taught before, right?"

"Oh, it's nothing. Piece of piss, really."

"And that I have no qualifications to teach, at all."

"Quite right. If you did, I'd be sending you to a school for white kids. But you'll be going to a Thai public school."

"Oh."

"Starting Monday. Enjoy!"

So: that's the way it is over here, apparently. In any case, Edie's got a job lined up for next week and I've got a few more interviews to make before the weekend. It's all a goddamned three-ring circus, and it's kind of degrading even being a part of it, but we need that cash if we're to push any further into Asia or Europe. So we're going to have to dance like bears on hotplates, be the big clowns riding the tiny little bikes, and just play whatever little games the city has in store for us. Hand me my over-sized clown shoes. I'm going in.

Lachie.

NEXT WEEK: National parks! Tigers! Monkeys! Hiking! Sweating! Collapsing!

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

2008-06-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

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!

#12: Behind the Technicolor Iron Curtain

2008-06-29T00:28:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-29T00:28:00.000-07:00

Week 11, Thailand

OH ME: oh my.

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

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!

#10: Buddhist Rock Stars

2008-06-07T22:17:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-07T21:15:00.000-07:00

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!

#8: Wetting Your Pants in an Internet Cafe

2008-06-06T00:19:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-06T00:03:00.000-07:00

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!

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

2008-06-05T23:35:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-05T22:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-05T22:27:00.000-07:00

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!

#3: Snakes on a Moped

2008-05-21T00:17:00.000-07:00

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!

#2: Stoned Temple Pilots

2008-05-20T23:58:00.000-07:00

Um... Like, wow.

Week 2, Cambodia

BUT NOW: it´s getting past that sunset-y time of day when the shops start to close and the bars start to open, so no guarantees on whether I´ll get through all this...

Edie and I are, at this very moment, living it up on the narrow sunny beaches of Sihanoukville, on the coast of Cambodia. We´ve rented out a motorbike (for the grand sum of four dollars per day) and spend our days and nights wandering like smiling zombies from beach bar to beach bar, downing beer and curries and wading in water that´s as clear and warm as a bath.

So: Siem Reap. We hit Siem Reap last Friday, bunkered down in the bar district and waited for the heat to pass while we knocked back tequila sunrises and white russians. It didn´t pass. By Sunday we decided we´d better brave the Angkor Wat temples anyway, though in the end it became something of a disaster...

Okay, so the night before we tackled the temples we decided that we´d try one of the marijuana-laced ¨happy pizzas¨ that are available in every seedy district of every town in Cambodia - because, hey, when in Rome... - but when it arrived, we prodded it and sniffed it and nibbled it and eventually convinced ourselves that we must´ve ordered it wrong, that we´d gotten just a normal pizza. So, of course, being a disgusting pig, I stuffed my face with it.

As it turns out, we were right. We didn´t have a ¨happy pizza¨. I must´ve stuttered because instead we got a ¨happy special pizza¨, a pizza stuffed to the gills with magic mushrooms that left us both trapped and crazy in our airy little room at the guesthouse, convinced the walls were going to eat us. We giggled and screamed and talked shit all night, but when Edie dropped out of the race at dawn I was still thundering on, and spent the day at the temples as vague as a lobotomy patient, meandering brainlessly around the jungle and forgetting everything that was said to me within seconds of it being said. Being out of my head in a wilderness full of ancient temples and monkeys and elephants and wild boars, it felt like the entire country was being eaten by the jungle. I wasn´t entirely wrong about that.

Anyway as to the Angkor temples themselves: spectacular. There´s not a whole lot more to say, except that if you have even the slightest interest in archaeology or the slightest illusion that you may, in fact, be the reincarnation of Indiana Jones himself (does anyone else think this whole new Indiana Jones movie thing bears a striking resemblance to the plot of Weekend at Bernie's?)then they´re pretty much unmissable. Actually, scratch that: everyone should see this. We spent three days wandering up and down these temple staircases, staring at impossibly complex engravings and statues, suffering through the heat that by 11am just makes you dizzy and leaves your legs weak and useless. We would catch motorbikes in, watching these giant mounds of rubble in the distance gradually forming themselves into real shapes, watching the sun set from the central tower of Pre Rup temple.

And Siem Reap - the town closest to the temples - buzzes with life and movement, with sound and colour and taste... Oh the food! Yeah, apologies to those who don´t hold any great interest in food but I´m just going to rave for a paragraph or so: the food here is brilliant. Bangkok was pretty much fuelled by flavour; you could not walk anywhere, anywhere at all, without smelling some food at every turn: some delicious, some rotten and totally vomit-inducing, but always there lurking in the background. In Cambodia it´s different; the food isn´t always present, but it´s always cheap and yum. Yes, it´s true, they sell crickets and spiders on street corners, and fried frogs and snake barbeques are available at most restaurants, but that´s just the initial shock. The real shock is how good everything tastes. Khmer food is a bit different to Thailand or Vietnam; if it´s closer to either it´s probably Thai, but with less spices and a helluva lot less chili. They do a type of cooking called amok, where they cook fish or beef or pork or tofu - usually fish - with lemongrass and chillies and curry paste inside a banana leaf. I tells ya, it´s a magnificent thing to behold.

And hey, while I´m recommending stuff in Cambodia, check out the capital. We caught the bus back to Phnom Penh on... um... Tuesday? Maybe? Can´t really remember but in any case we stayed on the banks of the mighty Mekong river, watched elephants go by with their touts from the street corners, and just soaked it in. Away from the ghetto around Boeng Kak lake - where we stayed last time - Phnom Penh just drips with crumbling french villas and dark little bars with not enough fans. It feels like a forgotten city - nearly all the other westerners there seemed to be crusty French colonial types who just couldn´t let go - but it´s here and it´s alive and it´s exciting and shabby and friendly and hot. Catching an old cargo boat up the Mekong under a setting sun was just dreamy (which put me in mind to propose a boat trip down the Mekong from China to Vietnam for maybe 2009 or 2010? Anyone interested? It´ll be just like Apocalypse Now. I can even organize a big fat white man for us to kill with an axe at the end of it).

In the end, the heat beat us, and now we´re here. I say to you people: come to Cambodia, but probably don´t come in April. I mean, it´s not like you can´t do it (obviously), but that the heat just saps at your energy and motivation, and unless you´re one of those self-motivated, type-A personality types (and if so: what are you doing here? Go punch yourself in the face. You´re ruining it for the rest of us.) or you´ve got someone awesome like Edie to patiently prod you along, you´re really not going to make it past the first town, particularly if you find a place to swim there. Between the hours of eleven and two it´s just too hot to do ANYTHING. So on Thursday we came to the only real beachside town in Cambodia, Sihanoukville, and we´ve been swimming in the warm lusciousness ever since. And right now I´ve got an appointment with a kid named Sahm, who we´ve been playing pool with for the last couple of nights. He´s only eleven but I´m telling you: the kid´s a killer. I cannot get a shot past him. Anyway, I hope you´re all really well. I´m thinking about all of you, whenever I´m cool slash sober slash awake enough to think about anything much at all. Let me know how you´re doing.

Lachie

NEXT WEEK: Khmer New Year! Ko Chang! Islands! Monkeys! Malaria!

#1: Cat on a Curtain

2008-05-20T22:45:00.000-07:00

Turns out the mosquitos here love my ass even more than the people do

Week 1, Cambodia

AND SO: here we are. It's been a week since I left now, and I'm writing to you all from beautiful, stifling Siem Reap in Cambodia. I thought I'd started to acclimatize by the time I left Thailand on Thursday but here I am sweating a small lake onto the floor of the internet cafe. The staff can see I'm struggling; they've brought me two small fans already and they keep shooting glances at me like they're wondering how many people it's gonna take to lift me after I pass out from heatstroke.

Yeah, it's hot here. Not so much in Phnom Penh, where there were nice breezes over the lake into our ramshackle cabins. But here and in Bangkok, whew. Like in Good Morning Vietnam: "it's HOT and WET. Which is okay if you're with a LADY, but it's no good if you're in the JUNGLE...".

But I'll stop bitching. Bangkok is magnificent. It opens out as far as the eye can see in every direction, and then it folds up into such intricate detail that every city block has more to do and see than entire suburbs in Sydney. I'm going to be teaching in a school that's a little bit out of town, but still fairly easy to reach on the subway (which, by the way, is fantastic - I hope I get the chance sometime to write about how awesome the subway is, but I don't have the stamina right now), only thirteen kids in the class, swimming pool and gym for staff to use as well as free lunch daily - I'm laughing. The teachers are all in their late 20s and British, but the kids are almost all Thai (though a lot have one white parent - I'll give you three guesses as to which parent is white).

We drink Chang beer from giant bottles at every meal and wake up with hangovers that could kill lesser beings. We sleep in small dark rooms with fans and no mirrors and paper-thin walls, with empty bottles of water accumulating hourly. We wander the streets through Chinatown, Huamlaphong, Banglamphu - we catch longboats up the river, Bangkok rarely looking better than from the water. The signs on the longboats - on all the public transport - say "Leave space for monks", and people do, though it's funny seeing the young fashion-conscious monks who have bought orange Havaiana thongs to match their robes. We eat at little stalls, pad thai, green curry, other things that have no english labels. We eat fresh fruit each morning, pineapple and mango with sticky rice and guava and paw paw and dragonfruit and durian (which is most delicious of all, I think). Occasionally, it goes wrong and we come within inches of shitting our pants, but hey, that's Bangkok. We wander from temple to temple, because despite the hustle and the hustlers and the ping pong shows, Bangkok is very very Buddhist.

So why then are we in Cambodia? Mainly because Jetstar made us - told us at the airport that they couldn't let us go to Thailand unless we could prove that we were leaving Thailand. So we had to run from Melbourne airport to the Hilton and book a flight to Cambodia. And so on Thursday we jumped a cab in Banglamphu who then raced us to the airport, topping out at 145km/hr on a crowded freeway - which left Edie sweating and crying, but didn't bother me so much after The Melbourne Incident...

The Melbourne Incident

Okay, so: we left Albury for Melbourne on Sunday, planning to get there in the afternoon at which time I'd hang out with an ex-girlfriend of mine for a little while, not having seen her in several months. Meanwhile, Edie would see her ex-boyfriend in Melbourne, or so the reasoning went. But of course the train got trapped in the hideous village of Violet Town for some two and a half godforsaken hours, so we were very late and my ex was pretty shitty. I went to hang out with her and we chatted for a while but things degenerated fairly quickly and next thing she's storming back to her car to drive off. It's at this exact moment that I suddenly remember that my passport is in my backpack and my backpack is in the car, where I left it because, well, I'm lazy. I run to the passenger side door and pull it open, just as she hits the reverse and comes straight at me. I do the only thing I can do: I jump onto the open door, clinging like a cat to a curtain. Either she doesn't see me or she was really angry at me; because she then pulls out into Melbourne's main street doing 80k/hr, with me flapping back and forth against the car screaming "Ohgodpleasestopstopstopohshitpleasestopohgodstop" before we finally come to a halt, some two hundred metres later. No injuries, but I did cry like a little girl.

But back to our main story...

Anyway, we fly to Phnom Penh, which is a whole different ballgame from Bangkok. Dusty little streets full of crumbling old french villas, the roads awash with a sea of motorbikes, bicycles and pedicabs going every conceivable direction. We found a little guesthouse down by the lake (well, okay: we got out of the cab and were physically pushed, by by two competing mobs of touts, into a completely random guesthouse on the lake) which had a rickety old pool table and a well-stocked bar and a deck overlooking all the villages. We put our stuff in our room while our host, a rather camp Cambodian named Jerry, told us about the place, about the check-out time and the restaurant and then -

"And, of course, just tell me how much marijuana you want with the room and I'll go get it for you."

and then -

"Tomorrow maybe I take you down to the shooting range and we shoot AK-47s and M-16s? We can shoot targets, plates, beer bottle, maybe a duck or a chicken or a cow?"

and then -

"If you go to our restaurant and pay $1.50, we put magic mushrooms on pizza for you, my friend."

Welcome to Cambodia: the land where anything goes. It's a harder, crueller place than Bangkok - we've been ripped off twice already - but the people are beautiful and it's all extremely pretty and as we sat out on that hazy deck and watched lightning peal down across the other side of the lake, the geckos barking in short yelps and the children next door laughing and screaming, for a moment in our wretched little lives we were perfect, immaculate beings in the jungle, on the lake, under the stars.

Lachie

NEXT WEEK: Angkor Wat! Sihanoukville! Beaches! Buses! Diarrhea!