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Published: March 24th 2022
In the immortal word salad of George W. Bush, “Fool me once, shame on … shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.” By which he clearly meant that the first time you do something, you can be forgiven your ignorance, but if it’s the second or sixth time, you have obviously failed to learn from previous experience. And yet, here we are again, moving overseas with a cat. Evidently George isn’t the only one with questionable mental faculties.
Rewind to three years ago: we left Bangkok with a kid and a cat. Then Covid happened, and we got Covid stranded in middle America. This was very tolerable despite the rational assumption that nothing in middle America is very tolerable. We took walks, enjoyed fall colors and winter snowfall, puttered about the yard, built fairy houses, and stayed home. Virtual kindergarten was ridiculous, but life was relatively pleasant. Getting back to Bangkok, on the other hand, was definitely not.
It started with the garden variety irritants of airlines, visas, and embassies. While this is a hassle anytime, adding a cat to the equation transforms the merely annoying into an inscrutable Kafkian labyrinth of frustration. To get
a cat overseas, you need vaccines, vaccination records, implanted microchips, a time sensitive veterinarian checkup and a health certificate which is then overnight expressed to the State capitol and stamped with an official seal, import visas, several duplicate forms, pictures of passports and pet, a little luck, a lot of money, the horn of a unicorn, and a vial of the tears of the innocent. There were also the expected hours wasted on hold with airlines, unanswered emails, and tickets that had to be cancelled and rebooked simply to appease the petulant airline gods. The silver lining was that for inexplicable Covid reasons, the Thai quarantine protocol had mandated that visitors with pets had to quarantine on the island of Phuket rather than in Bangkok; this Brer Rabbit punishment would force us to fly to Phuket and spend a week on a tropical island instead of spending it trapped inside a Bangkok high-rise hotel.
Although exasperating, none of this was unexpected. This isn’t our first rodeo with the cat. We have done this before, with several airlines, in several languages, on several continents. Bobo Tsunami was born behind the public library in Kansas City, Missouri in the winter of
2004. Since then, he has traveled from middle America to Chile to Ethiopia to NYC to Thailand, back to America, and now back to Thailand. He has survived a stick beating and met the cat whisperer, gone blind then miraculously recovered, terrified veterinarians irrespective of race, gender, or nationality, had a long and sordid romance with a stuffed monkey named Sweetheart, foiled Asiana Airlines best effort to strand him in JFK, and most importantly, repeatedly survived the ordeal of flying around the world in the belly of the airplane. Bobo is a survivor.
Once we get to the airport in Kansas City, Missouri, the American Airlines agent asks a few perfunctory cat questions, takes our money, and promptly forgets about the cat. That was obviously way too easy. It takes about two minutes for the other shoe to drop.
Pushing her glasses back, the frumpy middle aged just-trying-to-make-it-through-the-day-so-I-can-drink-a-bottle-of-rose-and-watch-my-shows American airlines agent focuses her profoundly well-past-caring-eyes on us, and sighs.
“Yes sir, I can see this letter is from the Thai embassy. Yes, I agree that the embassy is the official representative of the government of Thailand. Yes, I see that the letter says a doctor certifying your
daughter is recovered from Covid-19 is valid for entry into Thailand. Yes, you do in fact have a letter from a doctor that says exactly this. However, MY system says we only accept a negative PCR test for entry into Thailand. Oh, you assumed American airlines wouldn’t recognize the authority of the embassy of Thailand so you brought a negative PCR test anyway? Splendid. Uh-oh. Sorry. You must have a P.C.R. test to travel. YOUR test says ‘molecular’ not ‘PCR’. No sir, you can’t write it on the test.”
While I hyperventilate unhelpfully, Carly explains that a molecular test is a PCR test; they are the SAME thing. Alas, her screen cannot confirm this. Luckily, Carly possesses librarian powers and the esoteric knowledge of how to wield the almighty interwebs to vanquish ignorance. Once confronted with a screen confirming a molecular test really is a PCR test, the agent’s resistance crumbles, and we are permitted to board our flight. . . to Dallas.
In Dallas, code sharing Qatar Airways – who clearly thinks American Airlines is incompetent- makes us do the Covid test dance again. Then for good measure, they make me wait 5 hours before checking in
the cat. Merely wasting time, however, isn’t noteworthy; after all, wasting time is one of the primary functions of airlines and airports. When all is said and done, the cat is on board, we are on board, and everyone flies to Thailand to live happily ever after sipping coconuts and eating mangoes.
Twenty hours later, we arrive at Phuket International Airport. The airport is teeming with blue PPEs, alcohol hand disinfectant stations, and menacing biohazard signage. The unmistakable scent of officiousness and seriousness wafts through the frigidly conditioned tropical air. Arriving passengers are corralled and then herded into lines where papers are examined, shuffled, and stamped as if paperwork might be an antiviral medication. After passing through customs, we gather our mountain of bags and the unhappy, but very much still living, cat. Then a woman at a long table bestows on us a special QR code, imparts unclear quarantine instructions, and sends us on. Before leaving the airport, we get a final cotton swabbing of the frontal lobe. Having run the health protocol gauntlet, we are free to go.
Alas, this isn’t a story about the click clacking of the coconut palm fronds in the tropical breeze,
the gentle lapping waves of the turquoise Andaman Sea on the golden sands of Karon Beach, or the rigors of quarantine in a 5-star hotel with a rooftop lap pool ringed by flowering pink papery bougainvillea and creamy frangipani trees. Rather, this the story of an old, black cat.
After arriving in Phuket totally healthy, Bobo comes down with worms 2 days later. Translation: diarrhea. Kanoon, unfortunate woman number one at the hotel front desk, calls a vet who motobike delivers worm medicine, but by that time, the cat has spent several days barfing, so he gets a luxury stay in a vet hospital with an intravenous drip. 24 hours later, he is eating, bodily functioning, and scratching strangers. All is well. Now that Bobo is again clawing the hotel furniture, we can buy plane tickets to Bangkok and resume a more civilized quarantine of beers by the pool and coconuts on the beach. The next day, I call Bangkok Airways to check in the pet for our flight to Bangkok. It goes poorly:
“Sorry sir, as of January 1, pets are no longer accepted on flights from Phuket to Bangkok. It’s a new policy, so online information
is not up to date yet. So sorry. Also, it’s not just Bangkok Airways. None of the airlines are accepting pets. Yes, that’s correct - there is no way to fly from Phuket to Bangkok with a pet even though Thai quarantine protocol mandated pets arrive in Phuket instead of Bangkok. Also, your tickets are non-refundable. Have a good day.”
I head downstairs to the front desk and unload my problem on Kwan, unfortunate woman number two. She makes a lot of calls and finally finds someone to drive us and the cat to Bangkok. Instead of a 1-hour flight, we get to spend 12 hours in a conversion van driving up the peninsula of Thailand.
Two drivers arrive at daybreak. We load our moving-to-Bangkok number of suitcases and the cat kennel into the van and start the long road home to Bangkok. One driver doesn’t speak a word of English and has a bad leg he drags around him like a lifetime of regret. The other fellow has teeth like a beaver with a bad case of gingivitis and big sunglasses. He speaks about as much English as I speak Thai. After establishing the words for bathroom in both languages, there is little more that has to, or can be, said. Our morning is spent staring out the window. Theirs is spent yelling into cell phones and happily chewing on kratom leaves. Kratom is a mild stimulant and has been illegal in Thailand since the 1940s. Apparently, its use was cutting into opium consumption, and consequently, government tax revenue. Although opium use is now frowned upon, kratom remains illegal. Nonetheless, chewing kratom leaves is still widespread, especially in the south, and it seems entirely justified if you’re driving 12 hours to Bangkok and then turning around and driving right back to Phuket.
Apart from some needle like karst formations that look like Chinese watercolor paintings and the occasional glittering gold and red Thai temple or 25’ high gleaming marble Buddha statue, the highway is mostly undifferentiated green interrupted by non-descript concrete semi-urban ugliness. Just beyond the highway is the Gulf of Thailand and hundreds of kilometers of stunning tropical beaches running all the way to Bangkok, but none of this is visible. Humanity huddles near roads and ruins the view with the unattractive commercial pursuit of living: the scenic tour is mostly unscenic. Then two hours up the road (ten hours from Bangkok), Eslyn gets car sick. We just can’t win for trying.
A very very long time later, we cross the bridge over the Chao Praya River and roll into the glass canyonlands of neon lit central Bangkok after nightfall. We quickly discover that we have paid for two drivers but no navigators. Although the driver’s phone is sing songing directions in Thai, he hands me the phone and asks where we go. Using Thai google maps (good luck figuring out where to turn left on ขอยเมรีนิเวตม้) and taxi driver Thai (the sum total of remembered phrases being ‘turn left’, ‘turn right’, ‘go straight’ and ‘here’), we somehow take the correct exit off the interstate and are on vaguely familiar ground. And then somewhat miraculously, we are on our street, Soi Methi Niwet, and in front of our apartment. The gate swings open and at the end of the drive, the spirit house twinkles under the banyan tree. It is very surreal to be back “home” in Bangkok. Spilling out of the van, we wai (bow) and sawadeekap (say hello) our way through the landlord’s and the maids’ families, stuff a wad of money in the driver’s hand, and release Bobo into the apartment that will likely be his final resting spot.
Surely this is the end. Surely, we won’t do this again. Surely.
All of this is the living overseas crap that doesn’t make the pre-packaged tour brochure. It rarely matters how carefully you plan for contingencies, things almost always go sideways. You find yourself with an intractable problem(s) and some combination of no transportation, no working phone, no internet, no money, no functioning ATM cards, no idea where you are, no knowledge of how or why things work the way they do, and no one speaking a language you understand. The naive call this ‘adventure’, but people with a cat and a 6-year-old call it a pain in the butt and think wistfully about how easily this would’ve, could’ve, should’ve been. Then, because you have to, you figure it out.
And so it goes. Chapter 2 of life in Bangkok begins.
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Gideon de Beer
non-member comment
Life and all
Good luck in your new chapter! Greetings from a well deserved retirement. Keep the good news