by Frank Kusy
Looking for somewhere to stay for the night, I checked into the imaginatively named Khorat on Assadang Rd…and then checked out again. Loud moans were emanating from the hotel’s massage parlour, and there was a bizarre sign in every room saying ‘No guests accepted with leprosy or other zymotic diseases.’ I finally found refuge in the Siri, which had a ‘prepare party place’ (a roof with a view) and…oh, my lucky stars, a manager who spoke English.
‘Where is the tourist office?’ I quizzed him, ‘I’ve been looking for it for hours!’
He laughed. ‘We do not have a tourist office.’
‘Oh, and why is that, then?’
‘Because we have no tourists.’
How thin on the ground Western tourists were became evident the next day, when I gave up on the idea of seeing sights in Khorat (it didn’t have any) and visited the atmospheric ruins of Phimai instead. Phimai, the hotel manager informed me, was Thailand’s answer to Cambodia’s Anghor Wat, so I expected it to be swarming with foreign tourists. Not so. He was right, there were no foreigners at all. Instead, I was surrounded by an army of inquisitive children who found me far more interesting than the ruins. ‘This is amazing,’ I thought, as they all jostled to touch and speak to me. ‘I feel like Gulliver amongst the Lilliputs. And how friendly and welcoming they all are, how different to the jaded, painted smiles of Bangkok!’
It was at Phimai, courtesy of a chatty monk, that I made an important addition to my Thai vocabulary: Mee manu neung kob mai krab or ‘I want some food with no frog in it.’ Frog, I had discovered by now, was on every menu of every restaurant in the region. In Khorat, the Chinese style Seoy-Seoy near post office had not just FRIED FROG and SWEET BATTERED FROG, but even TOMATO SAUCE BAKED FROG. I took one look at the kitchen, which had skinned frogs floating about in a washing up bowl, and made a hasty exit.
There was a power cut that night, and I was plunged into darkness for hours, with only my torch and a book I’d already read twice to keep me amused. I looked around for the hotel manager but he had gone home to his own residence, which probably had a back-up generator. Boredom set in quickly, and with nothing else to do, I quaffed two Kingfishers and a Sominex and retired to bed early.
As I drifted fitfully off to dreamland, I had just one thought in my head: ‘I’d kill for some interesting company.’
Well, I got interesting company alright. The next day found me on the 1.30pm bus out to Udorn Thani, sharing a seat with a local witch-doctor. This sinister-looking individual wore opaque shades, a set of pure gold teeth (he’d lost the originals in a motorbike accident), a chest full of tattoos, and strings of Buddha amulets adorning his neck and arms. Before I could stop him, he grabbed hold of my left hand and let out an exclamation of shock. ‘Ah, you are Monkey Man – guru or crazy, I don’t know, maybe you are both!’ I gave him a shiny new one pence coin, which he wanted, and he gave me an ugly little black Buddha amulet, which I didn’t. Then, for some reason, he took a shine to a photograph of my father, and when I wouldn’t give him that, he got upset and whipped out his tarot cards and showed me the picture of Death. ‘Why are you showing me that?’ I asked him rather nervously, but he just grinned and turned his face to the window and didn’t say a word the rest of the trip.
Trust the first English-speaking travelling companion I’d had in three days to put the willies up me. I’m not normally a superstitious person, but I’d seen a Sumatran voodoo driver resuscitate a dead bus – not just once, but several times. What had that witch doctor done to me? Had he seen my imminent demise? Had he placed a curse on me?
Fortunately, none of these things, because it was not me who died, but my Sony Walkman. As I made my tour of Udorn Thani’s budget hotels, which were gross (one had a performing cockroach on the shower rail, another had a used condom sitting in the sink), I clicked on my trusty pocket tape recorder…and nothing happened.
‘Oh my God,’ I silently panicked. ‘I’m in the middle of nowhere, with half the North East left to cover, and some spooky witch doctor has killed my Walkman!’
I shook it, and rattled it, and took the batteries out and replaced them with new ones, but still nothing. Then, in an act of desperation, I began praying at it. ‘Oh pleeeese work again!’ I told it. ‘If you don’t work, I’m going to have to write all my notes in long hand, and nobody, not even me, can read my handwriting!’
But that was only half the problem. My Walkman was not just a 5 x 4 inch piece of plastic. It was my constant companion. All those long, lonely bus journeys, all those even longer, lonelier nights in backpack hovels it had talked to me or soothed my mind with music. It would have entertained me the previous night too, had the batteries not run out. Okay, it was often just me I heard talking back to myself – accounts of the day gone past, perhaps, or funny/sad interviews I’d had with hotel staff or other travellers – but for months it had given me the illusion of having a best friend and without it I felt bereft and horribly alone.
My mood was glum when I took the two hour songthaew trip out to Ban Chiang the next day. Okay, so this prehistoric site had some of the oldest skeletons in the world, but so what? I couldn’t report on it, so what was the point of going? Even the beautiful scenery – the colourful local fishermen wielding hand-operated Chinese nets, the lush paddy fields shimmering a glorious green – failed to move me. But then a beaming farmer got on and began proudly holding three muddy bags of fish in the air for everybody to poke and admire. That got a smile out of me. And as everyone else started smiling, I noticed the young saffron-robed monk in reflecting sunglasses happily grooving to U2 on his Toshiba ghetto-blaster. ‘Fix Sony?’ I said hopefully, and when he nodded shyly, I gave him my Walkman.
I don’t know how he did it – maybe his magic was more powerful than the nasty witch doctor, or maybe his ghetto blaster had given him superior insight into Japanese technology – but one minute later he returned my precious word recorder to me in perfect working order, its little whirring wheels purring away like a contented kitten.
The first thing I did when I got my Walkman back was to whisper into it a warning not to share buses with local witch doctors…and not to show anyone in these parts a photograph of one’s paternal relatives.
The second thing I did was to whisper into it something which I had just found in my Buddhist prayer bag. It was a quote from my mentor, Daisaku Ikeda, and it seemed particularly appropriate to my current circumstances:
The times when I have most intensely felt and experienced the inner reality of creation have been those times when I have thrown myself wholeheartedly into a task, when I have carried through with that task to the very end. At such times, I experience a dramatically expanded sense of self. I can almost hear the victorious yell of victory issuing from the depths of my being.
Well, I wasn’t quite there yet. My yell was still more of a subdued whimper. But after four months of travel, and two books nearly in the bag, I was on the home straight now.
I could almost see the finishing line…
Chapter 20
The Wackiest Wat
Nong Khai, the final destination on my whistle-stop tour of the North-East, turned out to be the best. Which was ironic since I had heard nothing good about the place, and had my eyes set on getting into Laos instead. I wanted to visit the famous Lao city of Vientiane, home of the revered Emerald Buddha, which was only 24 kilometres to the north of Nong Khai. Unfortunately, the Immigration Office near the pier was not encouraging. ‘Can I go to Laos?’ I asked one of the officers, and he said, ‘Yes, but you no come back!’
So, I had to settle for spending a whole day in Nong Khai itself. Which turned out to be a good thing. A small, neat cheerful teacher called Prem adopted me as I was strolling down the road and insisted on taking me sightseeing on his motorbike.
I thought I’d seen enough temples for a lifetime, but no, I hadn’t. There was one destined to restore my interest – and my sense of humour. Situated 5kms out of Nong Khai, Wat Khaek was surel
y the wackiest wat in the world, a fantastic Disneyland of bizarre and spectacular statues in the most incongruous of poses. Looking around me in the large open compound I saw towering, beak-nosed Buddhas, nightmarish nagas, eight-armed Kalis, and dogs wielding dinner forks and machine guns. All this reflecting the eclectic philosophy of a Brahmin shaman called Luang Pu, who had been driven here by the Communists twelve years earlier. And if I thought he’d already realised his triumph of the imagination, he was only just getting started. All round me more and more of these Easter Island-like statues were going up, the workers inspired by music and sermons from a blaring tannoy.
At the end of the building, I was introduced by Prem to Bhu Lua – the resident ‘master’. It was hard to miss Bhu Lua. He was the guy wearing dark shades and dealing out tarot cards under a mountainous sound system. First he showed us round one of the weirdest collections of ‘art’ I’d ever come across – a two-storey ‘shrine’ choc-a-bloc with Hindu-Buddhist antiques and photos of Luang Pu. Then he introduced us to the giant catfish in the nearby lake.
These were no ordinary catfish. They were huge. And instead of throwing them one of the small bags of popcorn on sale at the picnic landing, I made the mistake of dropping in a large bun. There was a sudden, boiling surge of water, and a fully-grown catfish the size of a small shark nearly took off my finger.
Nong Khai may have been fun, but my feelings of elation were undercut by a sobering realisation: I had had enough of living on my own. Even as I said goodbye to Prem (what a nice man, he would accept nothing in return for his hospitality, seemed content just to practice his English on me) and trudged my way back to yet another lonely night at a guest house which doubled up as a knocking shop, I reflected that I hadn’t seen a white face in five days. Even with my faithful Walkman safe and snug back in my pocket, I was beginning to crave Western company again.
But why was this? Why was I suddenly missing the company of my own kind when the people here were so curious and smiley and welcoming? Listening to a tape I’d made right at the beginning of my trip, when Hugo and Bridget all the rest of the Trailfinders gang were setting off to Chiang Mai – their cries of joy or despair filling the train carriage as they won or lost at Scrabble – made me think. I didn’t particularly care for these people. I would probably never see any of them again. They were all just part of the temporary and very unique bond that travellers shared when on the road. Thousands of miles from home – away from all our loved ones, away from our comfort zone – we were all of us in that train as eager as each other to make relationships with people we could share our special experiences with.
This eagerness to meet with other travellers, I was also coming to realise, seemed to increase with the distance one got away from home. And also with the ‘alien-ness’ of the country one happened to be travelling in. I hadn’t felt like this – been this desperate to meet other Western travellers – in Europe, or Israel, or even in Australia. But here in the outback of Thailand, where nobody spoke English and everybody looked different to me, I really did feel like an alien. It wasn’t that I wanted to see white faces, I just wanted to see and meet somebody like me. Somebody who spoke and looked like me, and could relate to me, rather than look at me as a farang or a different species.
And just as I was ruminating on all this, someone turned up.
On the way to the Udomrot restaurant, I fell into exact step with a bearded German guy called Wolfgang. Born on the same day as Kevin from my India travels, Wolfgang had the same reckless fascination with the forbidden as did Kevin and nothing pleased him more than to find a track off the beaten track. We hit it off right from the start.
‘Now, what shall we start with?’ I said, as I surveyed the Udomrot’s menu. ‘How about FIVE THINGS SOUP IN FIREPAN? Or STEWED DEER GUT?’
‘Ho, ho, ho,’ roared Wolfgang. ‘And then we can enjoy FRIED FROG CUTLETS and LUCKY DUCK as the main course!’
We settled on the Udomrot’s speciality – ‘Fried Mekong River Fish’ which was advertised as ‘fish you eat today, slept last night at the bottom of the river.’ Since the restaurant was perched right on the river-bank, looking out to Laos, we felt pretty certain it could live up to its claim.
*
Wolfgang should have been on the early train back to Bangkok. It was quite a surprise to see him, much later on, on the late one.
‘What are you doing here?’ I said with a chuckle. ‘I’ve had a whole day of touring temples. Did you change your mind and decide to see some too?’
Wolfgang looked sheepish. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I got waylaid by Rama’s Pastry House and had so many cakes, pastries and milk shakes, I completely forgot the time.’
The journey passed quickly, Wolfgang regaled me with eye-opening tales of his sexual misadventures in Bangkok. Then he showed me the two bags of ‘earth from the banks of the Mekong’ which he was taking home for a professor friend. We soon found ourselves in an empty compartment. That Mekong earth smelt like dog shit.
Off the train in Bangkok, I found myself famished. Seven days of barbecued chicken and not much else had me holding my trousers up with one hand – I had lost so much weight! Leaving Wolfgang to his own devices – I still hadn’t forgiven him for finding a pastry house in a region so big on frogs – I headed straight down to Ko Sahn Rd and packed away three American breakfasts in quick succession. I had a lot of eating to catch up on.
After that, and I was secretly dreading the result, it was time to hit the GPO to see if there was any news from Nicky.
Well, there was, but the three…ahem…‘explicit’ photographs that floated out of her letter had me blushing to my roots. Oh my word, did we really do that back in Bali? I hurriedly scooped them from the floor, hoping nobody else had seen them, and read the words I had been waiting for all this anxious time.
There weren’t very many words to read, actually – just twelve.
‘Dearest Ludwig,’ said the letter. ‘Just to remind you of what you’ve been missing. Nicky.’
Well, I guess I deserved that. I grinned on the outside at her impertinence – she knew I hated my middle name – but inside I still felt bad at cruelly dashing her hopes of a joyful reunion six weeks earlier. Those stupid words ‘It’s my job’ were still ringing in my ears. I hoped she didn’t have some kind of punishment lined up for me.
I had no idea.
Chapter 21
Back Home…to Trouble
Bangkok is a pretty clean city nowadays, but back in ’89 – before it went lead-free and biodiesel – it was quite a different story. I returned to the capital to find smog and pollution hanging over it like a heavy blanket. The exhaust fumes of a million scooters, cars, motorbikes and samlors had clogged the early-morning atmosphere up with deadly, stifling fumes.
In amongst this, I spied an old man standing in the middle of the road, patiently waiting for the packed crush of traffic to part momentarily and allow him to wheel his small trolley – equipped with an umbrella, an assortment of fried foods, a teetering mountain of aluminium pots and pans, and two gently smoking tea kettles – to the opposite kerb. He waited, standing like some bemused gargoyle – his wide blue trousers flapping round spindly matchstick legs, huge white cotton shirt flapping around sunken chest, wide-brimmed coolie hat jammed tight over beak-like nose – for fifteen minutes under the sullen, smog-shrouded sun of Bangkok.
Behind him, manning the pavement, were two street salesmen. One sat in a hunched squat, vending two packs of Marlboro cigarettes, which were mounted on a wooden fruit box. They were still there, as was he, five hours later. The other hopeful, an eternally optimistic character, was manically winding up tiny toy monkeys and sending them cart-wheeling across the broken pavement stones. One of them fell down an open sewer. He seemed curiously unmoved. He wasn’t doing any business either.
Out of the soupy haze came a shaven monk holding a flower and a begging bowl. He looked at me apologetically as if to say, ‘Don’t blame me for all this. I only l
ive here.’
I looked to my left, and there was the city’s first McDonalds opening up in Sukhumvit Road. I crossed over and shook Ronald’s big, plastic outstretched hand. ‘Welcome to Bangkok,’ I told him. ‘I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of you.’
I guess I was sorry to be leaving the City of Angels – it had been a fun ride.
But by far the larger part of me was looking forward to going home…
*
My journey back to the U.K. was a nightmare – I never thought I’d make it. The plane failed to take off, we were stuck in a roach-infested ‘five star’ hotel for 32 hours, and my co-passenger on the plane we finally got had a bad reaction to his chicken korma and threw up in my lap.
But then, finally, after 138 days in the Southeast Asian wilderness, I stepped onto home soil again at Heathrow. And there she was at last…the love of my life, Nicky.
We hugged and embraced, and then we kissed…and I knew right away something was wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something had changed. Something was different. There was a small, dark place in her heart that was closed to me now. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was there…
*
‘Who’s Simon?’ I said with suppressed fury as Nicky came in from work a few days later. ‘What have you not been telling me?’
I watched as my loved one’s face paled and then went white with shock.
‘Simon? Which Simon?’
‘Which Simon?’ I echoed hollowly. ‘The Simon you spent two hours with in a locked room at a party last month. Graham just told me about it.’