Travelers' Tales Thailand: True Stories (Travelers' Tales Guides)

by James O'Reilly

  —Phya Anuman Rajadhon, Some Traditions of the Thai

  overcooked and saturated with ketchup. I was polite, but on the way back I bought a shrimp pancake. These are made from whole tiny unshelled shrimp lightly held together with batter and deep fried. You dunk the patty, in which you can see little lacquered shrimp heads complete with tiny black eyes and antennae, into a plastic bag of syrupy but viciously hot sauce that clears your sinuses immediately.

  The next morning I walked snuffling through the fish market, where Thai women squatted, gossiping as they skinned squid and heaped them up in shimmering ivory piles in the blue-rimmed white enamel basins. Kevin picked me up and took me on a boat around the harbor, where we saw Cat and Mouse Islands. To reciprocate, I asked him to go to a wat with me. He said he couldn’t go to places of heathen idolatry. His god was a jealous god.

  That night, while I was reading a Newsweek I’d bought at a stand run by a very pretty Eurasian girl, whom Kevin said had been rescued from a garbage can as a baby by some Thais who then raised her, there was a knock at my door. I asked who it was because there had been a number of knocks over the past few nights by hopeful men. An American female voice answered. I let in a long-legged woman in diminutive shorts. She seemed to just want to talk and get some general advice about places to visit in Malaysia. I started by telling her to wear a skirt. When she left I shut out the light. Again there was a knock. She was back apologizing for waking me but wanted to change some dollars for baht since she was leaving before the banks opened. Then she told me what was really bothering her. She was afraid she had head lice. I couldn’t see anything on her head and suggested she wait a few days, inspecting her head each day before she bought a bottle of Kwell.

  She left. I turned out the light, but in the middle of the night thought I heard someone at the door and turned it on again. As I was lying there, a monster roach, half the size of the universe, flew up from the floor, toward my head. I jackknifed up, flinging him to the other side of the room. I got up and stomped him with my flip-flops with full crunching sound effects. Feeling I should receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for this act, I calmed my shattered nerves with a Newsweek article on Arab terrorism and slept with the light on the rest of the night.

  The next day my cold was much improved and I bought a seat on the night bus to Bangkok. Kevin saw me off, but before we left the police came on with a camcorder and photographed each passenger. There had been a number of bandit attacks on buses in the last month that had included a stooge inside the bus. Better a strange bandit than a familiar cockroach.

  Karen Swenson, a poet and redhead who travels frequently in Asia, won the 1993 National Poetry Series for her book, Landlady in Bangkok.

  On the whole, Thailand is a fairly hassle-free destination for women travellers. Though unpalatable and distressing, the high-profile sex industry is relatively unthreatening for Western women, with its energy focused exclusively on farang men; it’s also quite easily avoided, being contained within certain pockets of the capital and a couple of beach resorts. As for harassment from Thai men, it’s hard to generalise, but most Western tourists find it less of a problem in Thailand than they do back home. Outside of the main tourist spots, you’re more likely to be of interest as a foreigner rather than a woman and, if travelling alone, as an object of concern rather than of sexual aggression.

  —Paul Gray and Lucy Ridout, The Rough Guide Thailand

  STEVEN M. NEWMAN

  Flying Kites

  Dispirited and lonely in Bangkok, the author rediscovers his childhood through a serendipitous experience.

  IN BANGKOK I DISCOVERED, PARTICULARLY ON THE QUIETER SIDE streets and in the less hectic hours of the dawn and late night, that even the modern society was threaded with fantasy.

  As beautiful as they were in the sunlight, the graceful and intricately adorned spires and columns of the more elaborate wats took on a true fairy-tale quality in the late hours of night. Their brightly colored porcelain, ceramic, and gold reflected the lights of both the city and the moon as if they had been dusted by a magical wand.

  In the earliest gray of the dawn, as I stepped noiselessly, almost furtively, along the empty sidewalks, I saw on every block the orange-robed Buddhist monks performing the ancient custom of bintabat, the taking around of a bowl in which to collect the day’s food from the faithful.

  At one market stall, I saw cockroaches on sale for use in cooking, while another offered monkey brains.

  But of all the new experiences that opened up to me, perhaps the most meaningful occurred in a park by the Grand Palace. Tired, soaked, and resigned to the idea that I would never get back on the correct bus, I slumped onto a bench in the shade of a small tree. Leaning back to rest, I saw right above my head a special bit of exotica—kites!

  There were hundreds of them. All fluttering about on the sky’s currents like graceful, long-tailed tropical fish struggling on the ends of fishermen’s lines.

  I wondered if there were any kites to be purchased in the park. There were. So many I could hardly decide what manner of shape and size I wanted my air pet to be. At last I settled on a pink fish.

  Timidly, I released my striking little paper fish into the currents, then marveled at how strongly such a delicate creature could struggle for its freedom. Memories of a windy spring I spent as a child on an old farm in upper Pennsylvania came back to me. That had been twenty years ago. Could I really have gone so long without knowing again the thrill of coaxing a kite into the clouds?

  Abruptly, I was again in Bangkok. My fish was escaping! My kite’s string had snapped.

  Frantically, I zigzagged through a maze of fruit and soda-pop vendors in a futile effort to keep up with my fleeing fish. Breathing heavily in the thick air, I dashed onto the grounds of an enormous wat where I felt sure the kite had come to rest. I looked high, low—and then I started laughing. Cradled in the lap of a golden meditative Buddha statue was my little kite.

  Steven M. Newman is listed in the 1988 Guinness Book of World Records as the first person to walk alone around the world, an adventure he recounted in Worldwalk: One Man’s Four Year Journey Around the World. “Flying Kites” and “Walking South” in Part Four were excerpted from this book. He grew up in Bethel, Ohio, where he began his epic trudge.

  The Thai flag, known as the trai-rong (three colors), can be seen as a symbol of the forces from which the kingdom derives its strength. Two bands of red, at top and bottom, represent the nation, while two white bands suggest the purity of the Buddhist faith; in the center, a blue band, filling a third of the total area, symbolizes the monarchy, still a vital element after seven centuries.

  —William Warren, Thailand, Seven Days in the Kingdom

  MICHAEL MCRAE

  Farang Correspondent

  He’s there ahead of you, testing the beds, sampling the food, finding the bargains, making your life on the road a whole lot easier.

  JOE CUMMINGS FIRST HEARD THE EXPRESSION “WT,” SHORT FOR world traveler, in the mid-seventies. Not long out of college, he had just arrived in Thailand for a two-year stint with the Peace Corps when his colleagues took him aside to warn him about WTs, those seekers, searchers, and scruffy nomadic backpackers who were infesting Asia like lice.

  “I was told, ‘Avoid these people. They’ll rip you off, and if they don’t they’ll ruin your reputation with the Thais,’” Cummings reminisced as our taxi bulled through the gridlock around Bangkok’s Khao San Road, one of the most notorious WT ghettos in Asia. Fortunately for all of those who have since pitched up in Thailand without a clue of what to do or where to stay or eat, Cummings ignored the advice. After a year he quit the Peace Corps, hit the road, and went on to become one of the most authoritative writers on shoestring travel in Southeast Asia and, for that matter, anywhere else.

  Cummings is an area specialist for Lonely Planet, the guidebook company that publishes guides to more than 70 countries, most of them developing nations. His beat extends from Indonesia to southern
China, and since 1981 he has written or contributed to eight of the series handbooks on Asia and has just written a ninth, a Bangkok city guide. His life’s work, however, is Thailand—a travel survival kit. It’s the biggest seller on Lonely Planet’s list—more than 350,000 copies since the first edition fifteen years ago—and has been translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Hebrew, Spanish, and Swedish. He researched that first edition in ten weeks and wrote it in three. Since then, he’s returned to Thailand about every two years to update and expand the book, and the job has become more difficult each time. Last year, five million people visited Thailand, more than twice as many as in 1982, and the tourist infrastructure has expanded accordingly. The first edition of Thailand was 136 pages long; the fifth is 620.

  Everyone consults Cummings, from businessmen in the sex clubs along Bangkok’s Patpong Road to bond traders sunning on the beaches of Phuket to Hilton hippies who fancy themselves to be off the beaten track in Chiang Mai. His core audience, though, is the WTs. During high season on the well-trodden guest-house circuit, there is a copy of his book in every backpack.

  “This is one of Asia’s three K’s,” Cummings explained while our cab bore down on the Banglamphu District, designated a Cheap Hotel Area on the Survival Kit’s city map. “There’s Kathmandu, Kuta Beach in Bali, and Khao San Road.” Cummings was about ten weeks into a fourteen-week research blitz for the fifth edition of the Thailand guide and seemed strung-out. Willowy to begin with, he’d dropped to 145 pounds, which looked positively gaunt on his six-foot-one-inch frame. Not only did he have to canvass Thailand from top to bottom; he’d also wedged in a two-week dash through Burma (or Myanmar, as its now called) to update that country’s guide and had budgeted ten days in Bangkok to research the new city guide.

  Ghettos like Khao San Road take on a life of their own, thriving by word of mouth on the traveler’s grapevine. Yet as pied piper in this particular case, Cummings feels a kind of paternal responsibility for Khao San Road. Some years ago, he went searching for alternatives to the usual digs around the Malaysia Hotel (the then-WT hangout, which possessed a bulletin board displaying the most amazing information and misinformation from all over Asia, Cummings notes) and discovered two Chinese-run hotels on Khao San Road. They were tidy, close to major sightseeing spots, and cheap, and he gave them positive if restrained reviews in fine Lonely Planet style—neither guidebook gushing nor bitchy slagging allowed. After his review appeared, the hotels were soon unable to keep up with demand. Enterprising Thais smelled blood in the water, a frenzy of building ensued, and now more than a hundred guest houses crowd the neighborhood.

  Just beyond the Democracy Monument, a Khao San Road landmark and the site of violent pro-democracy demonstrations that would take place some months later, Cummings signaled the driver to let us out. The traffic noise was deafening, and the air was a yellowish broth of humidity and exhaust fumes. Uniformed traffic cops in white plastic filtration masks looked like extras from Blade Runner, heightening a sense of post-apocalyptic doom. We fell in behind a farang with bleary eyes and bare feet. At the first corner, he turned left and in an instant was swallowed up by the bedlam of trekkers, skinheads, braless women with hair in corn-rows, anxious couples clutching rucksacks to their chests, and hippies got up like harlequins in garish native clothing. Khao San Road was like Kathmandu’s Thamel district, condensed into a space of 300 yards: pirated cassette tapes, paperback books, t-shirts, counterfeit Levi’s jeans, $40 Rolex watches, incendiary vegetable curries, fruit smoothies, ice cream, noodles, you name it. People who had come halfway around the world were packed like rats into some multinational sidewalk sale.

  “Now comes the hot, dirty part,” said Cummings, plunging into the turmoil. His loping, storklike stride and slight backward lean recalled R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural cartoon character, only he moved with the ease of a seasoned walker. Swiftly down the gauntlet we marched—the Hello Restaurant and Guest House, Mama’s Guest House, the Ploy, the Dior, the Buddy, and a succession of crash pads identified by initials: NS, PR, VC, PB, and the particularly obscure PR215.

  “How does it make you feel to know you created this?” I asked Cummings.

  “Good,” he replied smoothly, ignoring my bait, “at least for the local people. They were poor when I first came here, but some of them can afford to send their children to school now. There’s even some real affluence.”

  Whatever ambivalence Cummings felt about the farang ghetto itself—and the whole WT scene that he has helped create in the last decade—he had put aside. For the moment he was on duty, and these were his people. For all their independent-mindedness, the WTs of Khao San Road were relying on him to scout ahead for the real Thailand, the unspoiled part, to discover the deals and sniff out the scams, to test the mattresses and inspect the bathrooms, to sample the food and drink, and see if the buses ran on time. And when he did, they would be right behind, looking cool and experienced, stealing glances at their guidebooks when no one was watching, having, as Cummings puts it, “their private Asia experience.”

  “It’s almost like a huge package tour,” he remarked, “and I’m the leader.”

  The next morning, we were streaking upcountry in the subarctic chill of a “sprinter” train. Outside, a picturesque landscape whizzed by like a video travelogue without the soundtrack; rice fields dotted with white egrets, ox carts on red-dirt lanes, hamlets of teak shanties on awkward stilts. Now and then an ancient, crumbling chedi, a pagoda, would appear through the window, evoking a powerful sense of antiquity.

  Our destination was Phitsanulok, 250 miles north of Bangkok, at the head of Thailand’s central valley, the country’s rice basket. Cummings planned a day in the town, and then we would head west, toward Burma and uncertain intrigue. Government troops there were fighting both secessionist insurgents and mercenaries loyal to various opium warlords. Though we wouldn’t enter Burma, stray mortar shells were a remote threat. Desperadoes had also robbed and killed several lone travelers on the Thai side, but Cummings’s latest intelligence suggested no new incidents of violence since the late ’80s.

  Small upcountry restaurants are sometimes hang-outs for drunken jii-khoh, an all-purpose Thai term that refers to the teenage playboy-hoodlum-cowboy who gets his kicks by violating Thai cultural norms.These oafs sometimes bother foreign women (and men) who are trying to have a quiet meal (“Are you married?” and “I love you” are common conversation openers). It’s best to ignore them rather than try to make snappy comebacks—they won’t understand them and will most likely take these responses as encouragement. If the jii-khohs persist, find another restaurant. Unfortunately restaurant proprietors will rarely do anything about such disturbances.

  —Joe Cummings, Thailand - a travel survival kit

  From all appearances, Joe Cummings leads the kind of romantic life most people fantasize about. He spends half the year exploring places like Burma, Indonesia, and Laos, and the other half writing about them. One of Lonely Planet’s 70-odd roamer-writers, he is one of its most successful. He owns a home in the San Francisco Bay Area and has been married for fourteen years to a woman who understands his compulsion to travel.

  Cummings prefers traveling incognito, but because his photo appears in the travel guide, his cover is sometimes blown. As a rule he avoids WTs, not out of snobbery, but because they tend to treat him like a celebrity. He prefers to travel alone and moves fast, averaging a town a day, carrying only a travel pack, a camera case, and a bright red yaam, a hilltribe shoulder bag. It’s the only vivid color in his unobtrusive wardrobe, which is mostly baggy and black. For a three-month journey he packs just three pairs of pants, four shirts, two pairs of underwear, socks, two sarongs, and a toilet kit.

  Cummings is constantly jotting notes in a meticulous script or murmuring into a pocket tape-recorder if he happens to be driving. After making the rounds of a town’s guest houses, he likes to wind up at the night market to eat and gab with the locals over a pint of Mekong rice whiskey. That is where he
picks up his best information (although Lonely Planet readers themselves are a vast intelligence-gathering network—in the previous two years he’d received 2,000 letters from them, and perhaps 500 contained solid tips.) Before retiring for the night, he might review reader mail concerning the next town on his itinerary (letters are forwarded to him) or transcribe the day’s research into a notebook or a laptop computer.

  Ultimately, everything Cummings collects in the field for each of his eleven guidebooks ends up on disk. His database on Thailand alone is enormous. “I’m conscious of the fact that this is the top-selling book among Thailand aficionados,” he said, “and I’m always trying to live up to their expectations and find new trails to blaze.”

  Cummings speaks Thai fluently (along with Lao, Malay-Indonesian, and a smattering of Mandarin Chinese); has a scholar’s depth on Thai history, art, and architecture; and possesses a gourmet’s taste for Thailand’s fabulously varied cuisine, which he calls “my one great joy.”