Travel
Totally Thailand - Sunday, Nov-15
It’s about 90º in balmy Bangkok, and as humid as a hot shower. I am sweating in places I didn’t know had sweat glands, but I’m too ladylike to mention them to you, dear reader.
The taxi ride from Suvarnabhumi Airport is never dull. This time I had a chatty driver who taught me some useful Thai phrases that I promptly forgot the minute I stepped out of the hot pink taxicab. My driver speaks marginally better English than my ability to speak Thai, which is limited to sawatdee-kaa (hello), khop khun-kaa (thank you) and mai phen rai (nevermind.) I can’t even say yes, no, count to 10, or ask for a toilet, but I hope to change that over the next few days. But perhaps it won’t matter at all. By next week I’ll be in Laos where I’ll have to learn a whole new set of phrases to forget.
I find Thai challenging to pronounce and hard to commit to memory. It’s a language I must learn phonetically, given that Thai uses a different alphabet, one that looks like lots of lowercase n’s, squiggles, and curlicues. Beautiful, but meaningless to my visual way of retaining information. Vietnamese, on the other hand, uses the Latin alphabet, and I discovered it was easy to learn because I could read it. It’s a tonal language, but each diacritical mark shows whether the tone rises (acute), falls (grave), rises and falls (circumflex), or stays flat (macron.) As long as I can ask for ca phe sua nom (hot coffee with sweet condensed milk) and a toilet, I’m in my comfort zone. In Saigon I quickly learned how to read the signs pointing to the ladies room when the universal icon was non-existent, following a surprise encounter with Vietnamese dong, and I don’t mean the currency.
The thak sii pulls into a tree-shaded soi off Sathorn, Bangkok’s embassy row. It’s a short alley that leads to two high-rise towers and the secured, gated entry to the Malaysian Embassy at the very end. The guards salute as we drive into the complex, and my driver laughs.
“You very important lady!”
A security guard escorts me upstairs to the 31st floor, where I am greeted by my friend Dale. We wai each other, palms together, and utter a nasally “sawatdee-kaa” or “-krap” as befits our gender. We both burst out laughing and hug each other tightly. It’s good to be in Bangkok again. His partner Cameron is on his way home from the airport. He’s been at a spa in Phuket cleansing and detoxifying, and getting in touch with his poop for the past five days. It’s the inevitable consequence of cleansing. I don’t know which Buddhist monk, lama or smart aleck said this, but the only reality, he said, is shit. Everything else is an illusion. Another reason why Buddhism speaks to me on a spiritual level. We Spaniards are fascinated, if not obsessed, with shit. We may not have the richness of synonyms of the English language, but like the Inuit’s multiple words for snow, we have dozens of words to describe a good crap. Hard, soft-serve, stuck to your shoe, the Castillian language has it covered.
Cameron arrives less than an hour behind me, and at 6 pm we taxi down Silom to an art gallery across from the Mariamman Hindu temple off Thanon Pan. In typical Thai fashion we remove our shoes to enter, a practice I like very much but can never adhere to at home, and we proceed up the steep and narrow stairs to the gallery space, past the kitchen with its ubiquitous rice cooker. Upstairs are photographs of old monks, posed to resemble the Buddhist saints one finds on amulets. The images are heavily blurred, dark, and mysterious.
“They all look like Gollum,” says Cameron.
Afterward, we walk across the street to the Hindu temple and go inside. The richly-decorated gopura dominates the block, constructed in multiple tiers above the main shrine. It looks like a gaudy supermarket birthday cake, the kind with DayGlo icing that makes your teeth hurt just by looking at it. The gopura is sculpted and carved with gods and goddesses in a variety of themes derived from Hindu mythology and folklore. Devotees circumambulate the shrine, including a tranny worshipper in white shalwar kameez, while a childlike soprano chants a mantra on an endless recorded loop: “Om pi yoo, om pi yoo, om pi yoo…”
We walk down the street to a shopping center, known for its art galleries and jewelry stores, and though most shops are closed, we find one gallery featuring paintings of monks — again — posed in unusual ways. One painting resembles a pietà minus the Virgin Mary, and in another, a screaming monk is depicted in profile on a huge canvas, his neck veins stretched and bulging. The paintings are huge and powerful, painted in rich, dark reds and gold leaf.
When we arrive at the condo, we find Roger, Cameron & Dale’s household help and friend, busily cooking a meal for us. Cameron is still in detox mode and relegated to clear soups and fruit, but Dale and I enjoy a delicious meal of ginger chicken, stir-fried squid, and mixed vegetables, each dish artfully plated and delectable on top.
By 10 pm we toddle off to our respective bedrooms, tired, well fed (except for Cameron), and ready for a good night’s sleep. Such simple pleasures remind me I’m living the life I always dreamed about.
10 things to do 10 days before I travel
Only 10 days left until I hop a plane to spend 4 weeks in northern Thailand and Laos. I’ve got everything I need, but I still have a few things left to do:
Be a storyteller. Add photos of my family to my Moleskine. My family being my husband, and my two cats, Buddy & Dottie. People always ask about your home and your family, so now I’ll have pictures to go with the stories. Usually, when people ask me about my children, I say I have two: a boy and a girl. Then I wiggle my fingers atop my head, like two ears, and say “meow.” It’s good for a laugh in any language.
Train or plane. Figure out whether I’m going to take the train back from Vientiane (Lao PDR) to Bangkok, or just save time and fly. This can wait until I get to Thailand. I have a whole month to book my return journey. Taking the train thorugh Isan, Thailand’s eastern province, sounds interesting enough to me to deserve some consideration. One of my friends who has done the trip more than once didn’t think it was all that exciting, but did offer good tips on booking the right berth in a sleeper car. His perception of Isan and its surrounds may have been colored by a terrible bus ride departing from Bangkok’s infamous Khao San Road, the backpacker mecca and source of all things cheap and quite possibly bogus. Tourist scams abound, but the scrum still flocks to this enclave of budget guesthouses, expat pubs, and sketchy tour operators.
Get it copied. Make copies of all my personal documents, like itinerary, flight ticket, passport, and credit card info. This last one is crucial. I lost my credit card in Chiang Mai last year, so reporting it was easy. Getting another card, however, was a different matter. Thai political protests shut down both major airports, and even FedEx couldn’t guarantee when my card would arrive in a timely fashion.
Wash my travel pillow. It needs washing and the innards need fluffing. It’s looking pretty loved. That is to say, if the subject of said affection was an unwashed hobo.
Get traveler cheques. After getting raped by my bank last year for ATM fees in Thailand, I’m sticking to the old-fashioned way of carrying money abroad.
Find currency. Grab all the Thai baht from last year that I didn’t spend. I’m sure there’s enough to take a taxi from Suvarnabhumi Airport to my friends’ home.
Pay my bills. In addition to taking care of phone and DSL, I need to leave my husband a to-do list of the things I usually do around the place that he might forget, like watering the plants or changing the cats’ water dish every day.
Last-minute gear. Determine if my flashlight is good enough to use in a darkened cave, or if I should upgrade to one of those extra-bright LED ones. My husband has an LED headlamp and I’m coveting it. It looks totally dorky on, but I bet it’s a minor miracle of engineering for hands-free exploring.
Be a welcome guest. Bring gifts from home for old friends and new friends. San Francisco souvenir t-shirts (3 for $10) are always appreciated. And stickers. I love giving stickers to kids. It’s better than candy and won’t rot their teeth.
Gather art supplies. I’ve got a lot of time on my hands for the next few weeks, so I’d like something fun and easy to keep me occupied when not stuffing my face with street food, getting massaged, or visiting wats. I like to write, and in addition to keeping a journal, I’m bringing a few supplies to make some mail art to send to my friends. I have a glue stick, some postcard-sized card stock, and put extra colorful embroidery floss in my sewing kit. The rest will just be found objects and local ephemera, whatever can be sewn and/or glued on.
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