Off the Beaten Track

by Frank Kusy

  I had simply dyed my beard.

  But that wasn’t the end of the story. That sudden knock at the door had caused my razor to slip as I was trimming my temples, and a big ridge of bare flesh had opened up above my left ear. ‘Oh dear,’ I thought. ‘That doesn’t look good. I better even that up with a bare right temple.’ And before I knew it, I had evened up my whole head and left it quite bald. Which turned out to be a good thing, because when all those fellow guests looked around for the murdering idiot who’d ruined their sleep over breakfast, they didn’t recognise me at all.

  Chapter 3

  Outward Bound

  Ian, the leader of the tour group I joined in Bangkok, didn’t like my shiny dome. ‘Is that because you’re a Buddhist?’ he said distrustfully. My reply – ‘No, it’s because I couldn’t think of anything better to do at two o clock in the morning.’ – didn’t seem to satisfy him.

  The other thing that didn’t seem to satisfy him was that I was an ‘observer’; I wasn’t officially part of his group. Paula, my publisher, had cut a deal with an up-and-coming travel agency in London, Trailfinders, and I was to both write her a book and plug the 15-day ‘Router’ tour that Trailfinders were trying out between Bangkok and Bali.

  Ian was particularly concerned at the small Walkman I kept shoving up his nose. ‘Don’t quote me on that,’ became his familiar litany at the end of each discourse he gave the group, and he made me swear on my Buddhist bible not to put his name in the book.

  Not that his discourses were lewd or unsavoury or politically incorrect or anything. He just knew that some subjects – notably prostitution in Thailand – were very sensitive and ‘bound to be misinterpreted.’

  ‘So you’re a Buddhist?’ he taunted me our first night. ‘Do you meditate on your navel, then, and where’s your begging bowl?’

  ‘I’m not that kind of Buddhist,’ I said stiffly. ‘I chant to improve myself and for world peace.’

  ‘World peace?’ scoffed the tall, squinty-eyed naysayer. ‘That’s an infinite amount of bullshit. I mean, there’s an average of about 46 wars going on around the world at any one time. How are you going to stop that?’

  What I should have said – and hindsight is a wonderful thing – was: ‘Buddhism is reason. Well, our form of Buddhism is, anyway. We recognise that a third of the planet will always be addicted to the three poisons of greed, anger and stupidity. But it is our hope, that if one by one people do their “human revolution” and change themselves for the better, there will come a day when the other two-thirds of the planet are either Buddhists or supportive of Buddhists. Then the cycle of war will be broken forever.’

  What I actually said was, ‘Well, I’m doing my best, innit?’

  Which really got Ian on my case. In fact, he wasn’t happy until he had trapped me into denouncing Zen (a type of Buddhism I had no knowledge of, or interest, in) as intellectual, narrow and without meaning.

  ‘Call yourself a Buddhist?’ he said with a wicked grin. ‘How can you be so judgemental?'

  *

  The next morning, I met the rest of the Trailfinders group, and what an interesting collection of people they were. First, there was an elderly American called Paul who looked exactly like Cecil B. De Mille. ‘Uh,’ he said as he reached the hotel. ‘Wut’s the mechanics of checkin’ in?’ Paul was accompanied by his smiley, balding son Andy, who seemed to be some kind of CIA operative. ‘My business is artificial intelligence,’ he told us secretively. ‘But I don’t want that in my passport.’ We asked him why not, and he said ‘I don’t wanna be stuck on a plane somewhere and hijacked with the word “intelligence” in my passport.’

  The rest of the group were all British – two nurses (Alison and Janet), one doctor (Tracy), one teacher recently returned from India (Bridget), and a mild-mannered English accountant called Hugo, with whom I would be sharing digs.

  I liked Hugo. A tall, awkward figure with horn-rimmed spectacles and a slouching, gangling gait, he had never travelled outside London before and was naiveté personified. ‘Is is okay to drink the tap water here?’ he asked innocently, and I said, ‘Yes, if you want to die. Did you check the colour of the river on the boat over to our hotel? It gives brown a whole new meaning.’

  We were back on the Chao Phaya river for much of the first day – running up from the elegant Oriental Hotel to the rather less elegant Thonburi Snake Farm in a smelly petrol boat which puttered in and out of the narrow klongs (waterways) like a slow, meandering bee. I diligently took notes as we did the standard tour of Bangkok – the touristy Floating Market, the even more touristy King’s Palace and Temple of the Golden Buddha – but my heart wasn’t in it. ‘This stuff’s been done to death by all the other guidebooks,’ I thought, suppressing an inner yawn. ‘When are we going somewhere not crawling with tourists?’ Even taking up a dare to have a large cobra draped over me at the Snake Farm failed to move me. Its fangs had been removed and it was no danger to anybody.

  My interest began to pique a little when we caught the 6.30pm train from Bangkok’s Hualamphong station up to Chiang Mai, 700 kms to the north. ‘This is more like it!’ I silently rejoiced. ‘I’m going to meet some hill tribes!’ But Ian did not share my enthusiasm. He was sitting with a German traveller he couldn’t stand. So he came over talk to the rest of us and to give Hugo a small, green chilli pepper. ‘There’s no entertainment on the train,’ he said. ‘So we’ll watch Hugo sweat over his chilli for 15 minutes.’

  Poor Hugo. He hadn’t the sense to refuse Ian’s kind gift, and he had no idea that our malevolent leader had hand-picked a particularly strong phrik kii noo chilli pepper. Downing it in one, we all watched in horror as the pale, white accountant’s face went a bright beetroot red, and his knees started jigging up and down under the table.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Ian chided him. ‘We won’t be able to play Scrabble.’

  Scrabble? Was he serious?

  Well, yes he was, and before too long there were seven people playing at once, excited shrieks of ‘You don’t spell algorithm with a “y”!’ and ‘There’s no such word as kumquat!’ filling the air. At one point, I found myself simultaneously eating supper, deflecting Ian’s racist jokes, listening to Alison’s advice on how to win at Scrabble, comparing notes on Indian thali meals with Bridget, taping information for my guidebook, talking to Hugo about Buddhism, and getting sozzled on a huge bottle of Mekong whisky...before adding a ‘q’ to the word ‘at’ to clinch final victory.

  ‘What’s a qat?’ said Ian, a look of profound doubt on his face.

  ‘It’s a flowering plant native to East Africa and the Arabian peninsula,’ I replied, mentally thanking my mother for this trivial piece of information. ‘I thought everybody knew that.’

  *

  As we drew into Chiang Mai the next morning, Hugo woke me with a well-aimed pillow to the head. My alarm had gone off, but my earplugs had stopped me hearing it. Then he put aside a yellow-lined sleeping bag, a pair of vermilion socks, and a pair of trucking boots – the items he’d decided to ‘donate’ to the needy hill tribes we’d soon be meeting.

  Looking out the train windows, the scenery was spectacular – a ghostly vista of misty mountains, glistening paddy fields, and motionless water buffalo, broken only by the occasional palm tree or raised house on stilts. ‘Yes, this is definitely more like it,’ I grinned to myself. ‘Not a tourist in sight.’

  But then we got into Chiang Mai proper and it was simply heaving with foreign travellers. I was shocked. Disco bars, ping-pong palaces, all-night parties – it was like a mini-Bangkok! ‘What’s going on here?’ I asked Ian, and he said, ‘It’s been like this since the 60s, when the Americans turned Chiang Mai into an R & R base from Vietnam. Put up with it, it’s the last taste of civilisation you’ll have for the next few days.’

  Last taste of civilisation? That cheered me up. I even did an impromptu Ramwong circle dance on the stage of the Old Chiang Mai Cultural Centre, I was that happy.

&nb
sp; The following morning, we drove out to Mae Yai waterfall – 200 feet of beautiful cascades and rushing water – where we began our big trek. ‘Will there be spiders?’ asked Hugo nervously, and Ian comforted him by saying, ‘No, but lots of snakes.’ Indeed, as we plunged into the lush, vivid-green jungle, our guide Pang – who was going ahead – could be seen flicking lethal green snakes off the rocky path with his stick: first impaling them and then hanging them to die on branches. ‘It’s like the final scene of Spartacus,’ I commented to Bridget. ‘I wonder if Pang was Crassus in a former life?’

  Every so often, the dense forest tree-line broke to reveal a cluster of wooden village huts, out of which swarmed hosts of shy, giggling children with Mongolian features. They were of the White Karen tribe, and they were deliriously happy to see us.

  They weren’t happy for very long. Later on, after we’d washed off in a nearby stream and moved into the large hut on stilts provided for us, those children wanted to sing us some songs. Then they wanted us to sing them some songs back. All went well until it came to my turn. I should be able to sing, I was born on the same day as Dean Martin and Barry Manilow. But no, I can’t, and when I stood on the table and broke into my rendition of ‘Old McDonald had a Farm’, the faces of those dear little village children began to crease and crumple and their eyes filled with tears. ‘Here a piggy, there a piggy, everywhere a piggy, piggy,’ I croaked with gusto, and then I did my ‘Oink, Oink’ piggy noises and half my frightened audience ran off screaming.

  ‘Here come taxi!’ said the headman the next morning, announcing the arrival of our elephants. Huge, hulking beasts, they were, with independent, strong-willed natures. My elephant was called ‘Flash’, which was a complete misnomer. Flash never moved faster than an exhausted snail. Hugo’s elephant, by contrast, alternated between spraying him with river water (it was a very hot elephant) and running off into the jungle looking for tender shoots to eat. Hugo eventually managed to control his beast by gripping his red socks and jamming his jackboots into its head. It looked very uncomfortable. As for Tracy, well, all we heard from her were regular bleats of alarm which rose to an orgasmic ululation as she forgot which ear to jiggle the elephant under (to get it moving) and sent it stampeding off at a gallop. About the only person happy with their pachyderm was Bridget – ‘What scenewy!’ she lisped. ‘Twuly wesplendent! And it was true, because on top of our elephants we could see above the foliage and take in the beautiful valley beyond – a picturesque combination of woodlands, mountains and exotic greenery. Colourful clusters of butterflies floated up to us, and the air was alive with the sound of bees, hornets, dragonflies and cicadas.

  At the next village, Pang set up an opium session for Hugo, Bridget and me. A furrow of concern etched itself into Hugo’s forehead. ‘Opium?’ he said. ‘Do you think I’ll need to take my contact lenses out?’

  We wandered up to the headman’s hut and found a man lying in a foetal position, packing the resinous poppy pods into a thin clay pipe. Hugo was the first to try it. ‘For once, he doesn’t look like an English commuter,’ said Bridget, a wry smile on her face. ‘I’m in training,’ retorted Hugo. ‘All the top accountants in the UK are into this stuff!’

  Later, mildly intoxicated, I found myself on the head of the lead elephant, called Speedy Gonzales, who raced ahead, had an enormous crap on the path, and then wandered off to munch bamboo in a shady glade while everybody else caught up.

  But not everybody else was catching up. Andy was spread-eagled over his elephant in an attitude of crucifixion, and Janet had been plucked off her beast by a branch and was hanging out of a tree. The only person who eventually drifted up the join me was Hugo, who had got back on his elephant and who was wearing a milky-eyed look of contentment.

  He’d had the extra pipe.

  *

  I was beside myself with happiness. ‘What an adventure!’ I privately exulted. ‘Just about anything could happen out here. I can’t wait to write this up and share it with my readers!’

  But my happiness was short-lived. The next village we came to, we found a party of package tourists already there – all clicking away with Nikons and peering into private family huts.

  ‘What happened to your “last taste of civilisation”?’ I tackled Ian with more than a degree of annoyance. ‘It’s like a bloody convention!’

  It was the first time I saw the stoic tour leader’s cool slip.

  ‘I was afraid of this,’ he confided darkly. ‘There are over 100 trekking agencies in Chiang Mai, and as soon as we open up a new trail they come along and find us. It’s getting to be a real problem.’

  Problem? Well, yes, it certainly was a problem. How was I going to recommend an area which was rapidly being taken over by swarms of tourists? I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but one day, I determined, I would be coming back here to blaze a trail of my own…

  *

  By the time we got to Tha Ton, close to the Burmese border, we were like Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians. Old Paul had gone home with a bad cold, Anne was limping from a sprained ankle after falling down a ditch, Bridget was having a fit of anxiety after losing her purse in a Buddhist monastery (of all places) and Hugo, Alison and Tracy had been struck down with diarrhoea. I mentally congratulated myself on only drinking Mekong whisky the previous night – the village water had looked decidedly dicey.

  By nightfall, only Andy, Ian and I were left unscathed. And that didn’t last long either, because as soon as we checked into Thip’s Travellers House, Ian got mauled by Mrs Thip’s ‘pet’ mountain cat after trying to make friends with it. ‘Who’s next?’ I joked to Andy, and he said, ‘Probably me. Have you seen the size of those mosquitoes? Pass some of that repellent over, I’m gonna goop up my legs before they eat me alive!’

  Mrs Thip was a force of nature – a small, squat, wide-grinned woman with more drive and ambition than Napoleon. She’d tried farming, like 80 per cent of Thais, but it hadn’t paid. So she’d begun setting up river-rafting trips down the Kok River and then setting up a guest house here in Tha Ton. It was Mrs Thip’s goal in life to take over the whole of north Thailand. ‘I go far,’ she told me. ‘First I get video, then sky is limit! I am business woman, I look far. I am good Buddhist, so not allowed to kill. But I am allowed to kill other guest houses with business!’

  Mrs Thip may have been an old pirate, but she was red-hot on information. ‘River fed by mountain water,’ she informed us. ‘Good for swimming – no crocodiles!’ While we were thinking about that one, she said we must visit the Morning Market, which was the place to buy ‘mountain food’ like wild pig, snake and iguana. ‘You can have dead,’ she chirped cheerfully, ‘or you can take home and kill yourself!’

  I couldn’t quite work out why Ian had taken us to Tha Ton. Okay, it was a scenic little spot, surrounded by dense jungle and rolling hills, but he wouldn’t let us go river-rafting – ‘The water’s too choppy, half the rafts don’t come back’ – and he wouldn’t let us watch any of Mrs Thip’s blood-curdling Chinese videos, to which she was addicted. Instead, he made Andy and me climb back up the steep staircase to the Buddhist monastery to recover Bridget’s purse. Fortunately, we found it. Unfortunately, a big party kicked off up there – local youths playing strange jungle music on modern drum-kits – which went on till midnight. Then, at 4am, an immense gong woke up the monks and everyone sleeping within a one kilometre radius.

  Chapter 4

  Buddha and the Coca Cola Lady

  It was back in Bangkok that I discovered that I was on the wrong tour.

  ‘What do you mean I’m on the wrong tour?’ I asked Ian.

  ‘It’s news to me too,’ he said, scratching his bald head. ‘Trailfinders are running two experimental tours – one to North Thailand and one from Bangkok to Bali. The latter one doesn’t start for another three days. I guess they thought you – and they – could benefit from giving you a taster of both!’

  Well, I wasn’t too upset, I’d enjo
yed a bit of rough in the North. And as it turned out, it was the only bit of rough I was to experience over the next 15 days.

  Unless, of course, one counted Ian’s ‘leaving party’ down in Patpong, Bangkok’s famous red-light area.

  This was an experience none of us would forget in a hurry. The first club we visited, tellingly called ‘Pussy Galore’, had all the girls squirming in embarrassment and Hugo staring into his beer glass, where a ping pong ball had just landed. The deliverer of the ping pong ball, a happily smiling go-go dancer with her legs wide open, was most pleased with her aim and indicated that she could do it again.

  ‘Well, this is interesting,’ I told myself. ‘I guess I ought to start doing some research for my book.’ But I was not looking forward to it. My own experience of strip clubs was limited to a single visit in Soho, London, when I had dragged my brother John in for a laugh and had left in complete embarrassment. The stripper had spotted our adolescent shyness and had begun imitating it, much to the amusement of the other punters.