Extra Juicy Midweek Pop: Hewie For President!

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

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

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!

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")

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

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

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