#34: The Long Goodbye and the Stuffed Penis

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

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

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

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

[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

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

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