Bangkok

I have been sucking at this lately, so my Year of the Rat resolution is as follows: be a better blogger. If it means anything to you, I am constantly chastising myself for not posting more and am often afflicted with a vague sense of dread and self-loathing for shirking my responsibility. It’s like a steady low-grade fever, which I believe is also a symptom of malaria.

Anyway–doings a-transpirin’. I’m using the free wifi in Singapore’s futuristical Changi Airport right now as I wait to catch a flight to Melbourne. I’m going to meet with my editor there before heading to New Zealand to write for this guidebook. I’ll be covering the entire North Island, which includes, among other things: the cities of Auckland and Wellington; geothermal oddities like geysers, exploding mud pools, and volcanic lakes; and an attraction called Sheepworld.

I left Vietnam ten days ago and have been in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and even Indonesia (for a half day) since. It’s been a fantastic, if wallet-destroying, time & I will write about it all in the next post.

Just one other thing to mention for now: it almost passed without my noticing it, but in the midst of all the Tet/Lunar New Year festivities, February 9th marked my own new year–one year since I left New York and started traveling. It’s not even a trip anymore; I don’t know what exactly to call it, but it’s been real interesting.

Suvarnabhumi Airport, Bangkok, 2007

As I was passing one of the many clothes/assorted junk/used CD street vendors in the Khao San Rd. orbit last night, I noticed the CD of some Finnish guys I know from New York. I did a double-take and ended up getting into a conversation with the vendor, A. (I’m not doing the Victorian-era literary conceit this time. That was his name. He later introduced his younger brother as B.). He and his friends seemed cool and they invited me to join them for a beer on the sidewalk. After a few minutes, A. turned and offered me a 7-11 Big Gulp cup. “Here, I want you to try this,” he said. It was very cold. I took a tiny sip to be polite. “Do you know this?” he asked. “It’s called . . . it’s called . . .”

“Sure, it’s a Slurpee,” I said. “They have these in America, too.”

A., however, was still finishing his sentence, looking for the word. “It’s called . . . methadone.”

Dang, they have everything at 7-11.

“No more methadone-laced Slurpees for you, young man!!”

I’ve worked out a way to compress and post the videos I’ve shot on my camera. There aren’t many, and they’re not of very high quality, but I’ll upload a few and dump them on the new Videos page. Now that I know how to get vids on the site I want to shoot more–when I get my camera back, that is. I dropped it off last week at a big chain electronics store in the MBK Center in Bangkok, and was happily surprised when they returned it all fixed in a couple of days. I soon discovered, however, that in fixing one problem they created another; I could move my lens again, but they screwed up the the autofocus.

I’m supposed to pick it up tomorrow; I’m also scheduled to receive my visa to Myanmar. We shall see. Neither the Myanmar embassy or the PowerBuy superstore left me soaring on wings of confidence. PS Can we take up a collection to buy an air conditioner for the Myanmar embassy? In the meantime, I’ve posted many new photos–all of which were shot post-accident and thus at the same middle-distance focal length. It was an interesting challenge to take pictures without relying on zoom or wide-angle. I leave it to you to judge the results.

The first video is 1:48 of young monks chanting at a wat in Luang Prabang. . . .

Again. Songkran (April 13-15) was the second New Year in two months that I’ve celebrated in Bangkok. And just when I was getting used to 4705. Well, Happy 2550 everyone.

Songkran is a kind of karmic spring cleaning; traditionally, houses are tidied up, Buddha statues are washed and doused with lustral water at the temples, and elders’ hands are sprinkled with water in a sign of respect and renewal.

Practically, though, Songkran has turned into an insane, multi-day, nationwide water fight. Everyone, young and old, is in on it, armed with water pistols, cannons, buckets, and hoses, as well as plaster made from talcum powder. There is no escape. In Bangkok, the water festival went on for four days straight; in Chiang Mai, Songkran is said to last a week or longer. It was fun for a couple of days, this drenching and getting drenched, but by the fourth day I had hung up my water pistols like a grizzled Clint Eastwood character and just stayed inside my guesthouse. No more damn water.

Can you even begin to imagine what a disaster this festival would be in the US?

Das ist the title of a trashy-looking German novel I saw lying around in a guest house a while back.

Well, I too am alone with the angst here in Bangkok. L. has returned to Germany, and I am temporarily camera-less. (I dropped my Kodak P880 off to get repaired and won’t have it for a week or so–it was functional but the lens was stuck in one position after the big moto crash.)

What to say about L.? It’s hard to describe, and still hard to believe, how intensely our paths collided and converged, how much we experienced together over such a short time. As she wrote to me when she got home, it’s like sharing a secret that neither of us can ever fully explain.

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 I’ve been a little under the weather the past few days; I don’t know whether it’s all the Mekong River water I ingested while swimming, or the monkey bite, or just the air quality in Southeast Asia, which, as I think I mentioned, is lethal. Northern Thailand was declared a disaster area a few weeks ago, and the haze over the region is the worst in 14 years.

(This monkey really did bite me, by the way, but he didn’t break the skin and he only did it because he was scared and he is still my future sidekick.)

Anyway, I find myself back in Bangkok. Wha? The day before yesterday, in Don Det, I changed my mind 3 times within a couple of hours about where I going. First, I wanted to take a bus to Phnom Penh. Then I decided to stay another couple of days in Laos, in a city called Pakse, to recuperate a bit. Then, on the minibus to Pakse, I overheard people talking about the beaches and islands of Thailand and decided to follow my friend L. there for a week or so. (We’re heading down to Koh Phangan on an overnight train later today). I’m starting to feel like the electron in a quantum physics demonstration. But I really do like the idea that instead of choosing among, say, baked, mashed, or french fries, I was choosing which of three countries I wanted to be in.

One thing that didn’t factor into the decision at all was travel time. I can’t believe how accustomed I’ve become to insanely long bus rides–something like 8 or 9 hours is starting to sound short to me.

It’s rare that the reality of travel meets your expectations, especially when those expectations are founded upon some of the most tired and obvious stereotypes. But riding the buses across a poor, developing country like Laos really lived up to everything I imagined. I crossed the Annamite mountain range three times, and in addition to the previously-mentioned blind curves on high mountain passes, we had: flat tires; overheated engines; comical, clown car-like overcrowding, with passengers sitting in the aisle on tiny plastic chairs; frequent stops to deliver mail and run errands; live animals on board; hill-tribe villagers throwing up; impenetrable fog high in the mountains; and oh so much more. It was both funny, and truly scary. At some point during each ride, fear was tangible; it was another presence in my body, limp and white, like ectoplasm from old seance photographs.

What to do in such cases but be a good Buddhist and accept your fate? Traveling makes the balance between volition and chance so much more obvious than it is in everyday life. You choose to get on a bus, or go to Thailand instead of Cambodia and you set a series of events in motion that you soon recognize you have very little control over. It’s like some kind of crazy story with 40 possible endings or something.

You were nighttime and smoke and the sound of motorcycle engines and the boatman’s whistle. You were the orange of monks’ robes and the black-and-white of school uniforms. You were exhaust and perfume. You were stray dogs and child beggars and pushing crowds. You were unbelievably kind and gracious and laughed all the time and tried to hide your sadness. People hate you and they can’t leave you and maybe sometimes they even love you but they don’t forget you.

I was waiting to see a movie at the luxe Siam Paragon shopping center and somehow wandered into a press conference and performance by Tata Young. I had no idea who she was or what exactly was going on. I just followed the sound and the lights, and I think everyone assumed I was another music journalist. I stood around drinking a free soda while she answered some questions in Thai and then performed a couple of songs. I had to ask a magazine writer who she was, and he informed me that she was only Thailand’s biggest pop star. I also learned that the point of the press conference was to announce that she’s planning to break into the US market–so there you have it, first-hand reportage from me to you. I’m sad I wasn’t carrying my camera. By the way, her current hit single is called “El Nin-YO!”

The film I saw was King Naresuan. It’s the biggest blockbuster in Thai history, the first part of a nine-hour trilogy about the 16th century king who liberated Siam from Burmese control. I wouldn’t recommend rushing out and trying to find it, although there were some fairly spectacular battle sequences and lavish sets and costumes. What it did offer for me, mainly, was insight into the Thai national identity. For one thing, I see the reverence for their king a little more. Bloodlines are very important in this film, as is a mythical connection between the people and their land, the blood and the soil. The king here really is more than a figurehead, but a living link to the land and to Thailand’s greatest historical heroes.

You also get a sense of the deep-seated Thai/Burma antagonism. The Burmese king is not an entirely unsympathetic character, but almost all the other Burmese are arrogant, sneering, and duplicitous. I’m not sure if this film was more overtly nationalistic than similar Western epics; it just might have seemed that way because I was seeing it without much built-in context. But it was basically a Thai propaganda film, for Thais. It’s very interesting to hear the stories a culture tells to itself.

I did a pub quiz the other night with Lyndsay and the expat crew at a place called The Dubliner. Our team, “The Lyndsay” came in second. (Out of four teams. Shut up. Like you know how many yards are in a furlong.)

“The downside of reverence” is the note I scribbled to myself as I was watching the third of the three Thai rock bands I saw one night on Phra Arthit (”Bangkok’s answer to Greenwich Village”– Lonely Planet). What are the cultural conditions necessary to create good rock music, I ask? These bands all had a similar sound–kind of emo at its sappiest, with very syrupy pop harmonies.

Still, everyone was having fun and people were friendly–toasts, shouted attempts at conversation over the music, dancing next to me, etc. (PS on the youth culture tip, I would say the dominant look of the kids here is early 2000s, Strokes-era NYC–Chuck Taylors, shaggy hair, skinny pants.) I’m sure there must be more going on here music-wise than I’ve been privy to? I haven’t looked very hard. I will say that most of the music I’ve heard in the background is from the US or the UK. (Song I heard a few days ago that has been stuck in my head: “We’re Going to Be Friends” by The White Stripes).