by Frank Kusy
I also smiled as I recollected meeting up with Dave again a few days earlier. I had chanced upon him at a small café in Bangkok, which had had the temerity to give him only one nut in his chocolate nut sundae. ‘So sorry,’ the waiter had informed him. ‘This not season for nuts.’ Well, Dave hadn’t liked that. ‘Whaddya mean, this is not season for nuts?’ he’d screamed. ‘Next time, I’ll bring my own nuts – this place is the pits!’ I had had to reach over the counter and get him a second nut before he sparked off an international incident.
My smile began to slip with my next thought. Dave would be going home soon. His surfer chick mum and bankerly dad would be reunited with their perky prodigal son once more, and I would be left here alone in Thailand for three more weeks. It was not a happy prospect.
Before we embarked on our last set of adventures, however, I took Dave to task over something that had been bothering me for some time.
What is it about you and cockroaches?’ I lectured him. ‘Wherever we go, they seem to know you’re coming and run out to meet you!’
‘Tell me about it,’ sighed my harassed young friend. ‘I just had a wildlife experience in the shower.’
‘Again?’
‘Yeah, again. I get down to the shower, and I look around, and – you know those two cockroaches I killed last night, only one was still there. So I think, “Oh well, no problem,” and I get in the shower, and hang my towel and shorts on the blue hook there, and I go to turn on the water. And all of a sudden, the place where I had my hands was cockroaches an inch and a half long! Scurrying around on the walls, burning down to the floor, smoking between my legs – it was awful! Meanwhile, I’m trying to smash them with the soap dish, and they’re like moving and shifting from side to side, and then they dodge behind the squat toilet where I can’t get at them. So I think “Phew, that’s okay, they’re gone.” But they hadn’t. I dipped my head under the shower for a little bit, and I get this feeling like I’m being watched. So I whip around, and they’re coming back at me, going up the walls! I hit out with the soap dish, and beat them to the back of the room. Then I start washing my hair, and I’m just starting to settle down, and I feel this wiggling between my toes, and I look down, and there’s a gecko! It’s sitting there between my toes, sharing my shower!’
I laughed. ‘Well, that’ll teach you for wiping out countless roaches with your flip flop last night, won’t it? Direct cause and effect, man!’
‘You mean I should stop doing it?’
‘I mean, every time you embark on your one-man mission to destroy every roach in Thailand, you damage the same foot – the right one – which the roach-killing flip flop came from. So far, we’ve had the exploding sink in Samui which fell off the wall when you laid your toothbrush on it – crushing one of your toes – and then we had you walking onto a pointed stake at the entrance to the King’s Palace in Bangkok, crippling you for three days. Not to mention all the coral cuts you said you’d got in Koh Pee Pee.’
Dave stood back to ruminate.
‘You may have a point,’ he said at last. ‘I’m using the other flip flop from now on!’
*
From Chiang Mai, Dave and I moved south by train to Ayutthya, home of the Thai kings before Bangkok became the capital. The place was quite denuded of tourists, we were surprised to find, but I did get my horoscope done.
‘Oh, you get number 26!’ said the wizened little priest, rattling some wooden sticks and studying them as they fell to the floor. ‘It’s not so good, you know. Buddha says you must get sick, you must lose a lot of money…’
Dave’s braying laugh echoed around the small Chinese temple. ‘Ha!’ he declared. ‘You die a slow, painful death on November 26th!’
The diminutive astrologer ignored him. ‘You must be careful around yourself!’ he continued sternly. ‘Too much of the thinking! It’s not so good for you, you know! But…what is this? Yes, you must marry two women at age 41. Then you will be very happy! For one year. Then, at age 42, one of them get jealous and shoot you in the head!’
*
Dave wasn’t very happy when I insisted on a second trek, into the Khao Yai National Park.
‘Oh, man,’ he grumbled. ‘Haven’t we suffered enough?’
He had a point, so I gave him a little reward. Leaving Swit in the small frontier town of Chiang Rai, I hired us two 125cc Honda motorbikes and we roared off on in search of the Golden Triangle. We wanted to visit Mae Sai, which is as far north as Thailand goes before hitting the Burmese border, but the roads were negotiable only by jeep, not by motorbike, so we turned back and came to Mae Chan instead. ‘Not much here,’ said Dave, scanning the one main street and sleepy covered market. ‘I wanna banana milkshake.’ Well, he couldn’t have one, I told him, but he could, if we got there, have a delicious campfire meal at the Akha Guest House halfway up Doi Tung Mountain.
We never made it. Even as we struggled up the hills east of Mae Chan, our bikes were beginning to fail. ‘You don’t see many cyclists round here, do you?’ observed Dave as we got off and pushed up a particularly steep slope. But just then we did see one – a poor local farmer wearing a look of total despair.
A path to the left led away from the hills, and taking it we soon came to a |Kuomintang village – well, a Shan shanty-town – only 3kms from the Burmese border. Here, we dined at the highest Chinese restaurant in the world and I decided to have my eyesight checked. I thought the lady owner was trying to sell me cotton socks. They turned out to be thick, ropey noodles!
Back down at Mae Chan, we forked north to Chiang Saen and then up to the tiny village of Ban Sop Ruak, which is the focal point of the Golden Triangle – the place where Thailand, Burma and Laos meet at the confluence of the Mae Khong and Ruak rivers.
‘Is this it?’ said Dave, clambering off his bike and surveying another one-bullock village. ‘Where’s the poppy fields and opium smugglers?’
‘Yeah, I know, mate,’ I told him. ‘I was expecting more too. Let’s see what’s up this hill path behind the police booth…’
Fifteen minutes later found us standing in a small viewpoint pavilion looking over the confluence of the two rivers.
‘Oh, so this is what it’s all about,’ said Dave, gazing across to Burma and Laos. ‘Kinda cool, huh?’
Even cooler was the tiny hilltop temple we climbed up to from the pavilion. This crooked, crumbling structure was inhabited by an aged maechee or nun. I placed a few baht in her donation box, and she leapt up (well, as fast as an octogenarian nun could be said to leap) and thrust a small Buddha amulet into my hands. Then, a minute later, she returned with a banana.
I didn’t think she got many donations.
‘Hey, Frank,’ said Dave as we prepared to leave. ‘Check out the awesome sign round the back of this temple!’
‘Ho! My God!’ said the awesome sign round the back of the temple. ‘Sightseeing Ruin! Going be memorious, be trustful when Coming. Go forwards, not be Back. He who thinks himself wise, Oh Heaven! is a great fool!’
*
‘Are you ready to suffer again?’ I asked Dave the following day.
‘Bring it on, dude,’ replied the ever-energetic Canadian. ‘What’s up next?’
Next was the Khao Yai National Park, a vast acreage of tropical jungle, dense forest, and green hills which supported all 195 of Thailand’s species of protected wildlife. I couldn’t wait to explore some of it: according to all reports, this was somewhere one could really go off the beaten track.
But then I went so much off the beaten track, I nearly died.
The first night was fun. Shortly after we moved into our primitive dormitory room at Ghong Ghaew, the rain came down in sheets. It transformed the forest into a dank, eerie swampland of dripping, ghostly creepers and damp foliage crawling with ants, leeches and molluscs. A spotlight was attached to our hire jeep and we went out elephant spotting. There were supposed to be 200 wild elephants roaming Khao Yai, but we didn’t see one. What we did see
, hiding under the tarpaulin on the jeep roof against the driving rain, were hundreds of species of moths attracted by the spotlight beam. ‘Elephant go, moth come,’ was Swit’s summation, and we nodded at him sagely, as though he had just uttered some great wisdom.
The trouble about Khao Yai, and I only found out the next day, was that while all the jungle trails were colour-coded – red-painted trees for Trail One, blue-painted trees for Trail Two etc – if you got lost and didn’t go back to the last marked tree to try a different direction, you could plunge blindly on and disappear…forever.
‘We go red path,’ said Swit. ‘Red path is good.’
‘No,’ I said contentiously. ‘I don’t want to go red path, everybody else going red path, I want to go blue path.’
Swit looked at me long and hard, and then shook his head. ‘Too much rain. Blue path now big danger. I no go there.’
‘Okay,’ I said, pig-headed stubbornness in my voice. ‘You go your way, I’ll go mine. I’ll catch you later.’
Dave’s eyes flitted nervously between Swit and me. He was trying to decide between recklessness and safety. And for once, his sense of safety won the day. Shrugging apologetically, he turned his face from me and followed the agile little Thai guide to the next red-marked tree.
‘This is great!’ I silently exulted. ‘Now I’ve got the whole park to myself. Blow Swit and his cowardly ways. I was fed up of following him all the time anyway!’
My joy turned to dread about half an hour later. Following the blue marked trees brought me back to the dormitory bungalow. I couldn’t believe it. Even worse, the rickety wood bridge we’d come across to reach it the previous night had been washed away by the torrential rains. I could see the next blue-marked tree on the other side – all I had to do was reach it.
But pride comes before a fall, and a minute later I found myself wading thigh-deep through leech-infested rapids. ‘This is no good,’ I thought in panic. ‘I’ve got to turn back!’ But as I did so, I lost my footing and was swept along by the rushing waters to the edge of a raging, surging waterfall. My rucksack got snagged on a jagged branch – that saved my life – and I began screaming for help.
Suddenly, just as the strap of my rucksack began to give way, and my life really did flash before my eyes, a thin ray of sunlight pierced the dangling creepers like a sharp sword cutting through an ancient cloth of green. And there, as if by a miracle, stood Swit. ‘This way!’ he was calling as he summoned Dave to his side. And two minutes later, I was back on dry land, coughing my lungs out like a very noisy landed fish.
‘How on earth did you find me?’ I croaked gratefully, when I got some air back.
‘We never lose you,’ grinned Swit. ‘I know you will die on blue path. We follow close behind.’
‘Had enough “suffering”, Frank?’ quipped Dave. ‘Man, oh man, that was exciting. Can we go again?’
*
The following evening, safely returned to Bangkok, Dave stormed into my room in a state of high agitation. He’d been wandering around the red-light area of Patpong, checking out fake Rolex watches, when he had somehow been lured into some gay hairdressers for a manicure.
‘I shoulda figured something was wrong,’ he complained bitterly. ‘Because they made an awful job of my nails. They clipped off a bit here and a bit there, but their mind wasn’t really on it. There was this one guy standing at the door, preening himself and playing with his hair, and he kept winking at me. After a while, he nods at the guy doing my nails and says to me, “He RIKE you! He RIKE you very much!” “Really?” I said, taken aback. “Well, that’s nice. Tell him I like him too.” This was obviously not the right thing to say, because the door guy comes over and plumps himself down and gets out this pot of Vaseline and starts rubbing this stuff into my fingers, massaging each one up and down with a wet cloth. “Vaseline!” he informed me meaningfully and I said “yeah, comes in handy, don’t it?” Meanwhile, his friend had grabbed hold of my foot and was working on my toes, which I found pretty strange. But Mr Vaseline didn’t find it strange at all. He just pointed at the foot guy and said: “He WANT you. He REDDY boy!” Well, I was out of there like a shot, man. That place was really weird!’
I laughed.‘What’s a reddy boy?’
‘I dunno,’ said Dave. ‘But the Thai people kinda have problems with their r’s and l’s, so I guess he was trying to say lady boy, or transvestite. Whatever, it was a freaky experience. Cool, but freaky, you know?’
Chapter 16
Joss
‘Pah!’ said Joss when I told her about my recent trekking experience. ‘That is not a trek. That is a walk in the park. Let me tell you about a real trek!’
I knew enough about Joss to expect something spectacular. For one thing, her name was a complete misnomer – ‘joss’ meant lucky in Chinese but Joss was anything but lucky. She was in fact the clumsiest, unluckiest person I had ever met. Tall, big-boned and Dutch, she bounced around Asia like a chunky, happy-faced puppy-dog, attracting misfortune wherever she went.
Only the previous year, shortly after we’d first met and then parted ways in India, I had received a scrawled postcard from her. ‘Dear Frank,’ it read. ‘Sorry if this hard to read. I am writing with my teeth. The rest of me is in traction. I go to sleep on bus to Kathmandu, fall off roof and down mountain. They bring me up by mule. Every bone in my body is broken, but I will be fine in few months. See you in Bangkok?’
Well, I had seen her in Bangkok, and had been amazed. Not only was she miraculously restored to rude good health – all her busted teeth replaced by shiny new caps, only a slight limp betraying her fractured hip and left leg – but her previously manic energy seemed to have doubled. ‘Let us do Patpong!’ she suggested brightly, and dragged me off to Party Night in Bangkok’s famous red light area. This did not go well. First she let loose a two inch cockroach from a matchbox in a packed transvestite cabaret – ‘Ha ha, look at everyone running to and fro – that is so funny!’ Then she decided to become a pole dancer.
‘I can do that,’ sniffed Joss dismissively, as she watched all the bored Thai girls swinging round poles in the aptly named Pussy Galore club. ‘Nothing to it.’ And with that she stripped off all her clothing, brushed aside the protestations of the frightened manager, and clambered heavily onto the stage. The doorman couldn’t believe his luck. ‘Come quick! Come quick!’ he shouted through his megaphone. ‘Dutch lady in the nude!’
Now Joss was back in Bangkok, and telling me about the worst trek in the world. It knocked my own jungle jaunts into a cocked hat.
‘This was not a good trek,’ she told me in her strange interpretation of English. ‘First, we go onto elephants. There are two German ladies on one elephant, an old French guy on another elephant, and me on a third elephant. My elephant go crazy when I sit on him, I don’t know why, maybe he doesn’t like Dutch people. He run off into the jungle, stop to fill up with water, then spray it all over me. It is a very bad elephant. Next, we are going on river rafting, and the raft falls apart and the two German ladies fall in the rapids and nearly die. Oh, and the French guy is left hanging out of a tree. Then I think”‘These are crazy people, I will go back to Chiang Mai on my own.” But I do not know where Chiang Mai is. I am wandering through the jungle, sometime on my hands and knees, for two days and not a sign of one human being. Then I come to this village and ask: “Where is Chiang Mai?” and they say “over there’. But ‘over there’ is on the other side of a deep….how you say...ravine. And the only way across this ravine is a wooden seat which this village puts young girls in and then swings them over to the village on the other side. Then all the unmarried men of the other village line up and she has to choose one of them as a husband. “I must do this?” I say with long face, and they nod and say “Yes. If you want go Chiang Mai, you must do this.” So I get in the seat, praying that the rope will not snap and plunge me one thousand feet to my death, and point at some guy at the other side. He is very pleased to be chosen, starts
making ‘jiggy jig’ motions with his fingers. Well, I don’t want to make jiggy jig, he looks and smells like dirty buffalo, so I dope his drink with Valium and he go to sleep. After that, I run, walk, crawl for six hours more through the jungle…and come to Chiang Mai.’
There was a brief pause, as all twenty of so travellers dining around us digested this story, and then there was a hurried scraping of tables and chairs as they all rushed off to book the very same trek. Days later, the Bangkok Times was full of their stories: some had been thrown against trees by rogue elephants, others had been dashed against the rocks by disintegrating river rafts, and one or two had gone the full Monty and wandered into Laos by mistake and been kidnapped by bandits who held them hostage for big ransoms.
Joss was perplexed. ‘Why these stupid people go on this stupid trek? Do they want to die?’
‘No,’ I said with a chuckle. ‘They just want to get “off the beaten track.”’
Chapter 17
Behind the Veil
The 16th of May 1989 will remain burned in my memory for a long time.
‘This copy you’ve just sent me about the sex trade in Thailand,’ Paula moaned down the phone, ‘it’s rubbish!’
‘What do you mean, “rubbish”?’ I retorted hotly. ‘I’ve been up and down Patpong, Bangkok’s red-light area, interviewing every “working girl” I could get my hands on. And that was bloody uncomfortable, since they invariably had their hands down my trousers.’
There was a pause and a sigh at the other end of the line.
‘Well, it’s not good enough,’ concluded Paula. ‘You say 70 per cent of Western tourists to Thailand are out there for the sex which they can’t get back home. But is that a good thing to write about? Won’t it hurt sales of the book if the other 30 per cent read it and think “Oh dear, I’m going to be surrounded by a load of pervs and sickos. I’m not leaving my hotel room!” I’m sorry Frank, but you’re going to have to address this issue head-on. You’re going to have to go in!”