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Published: June 21st 2010
Me Love Southeast Asia Long Time
Three months of pointing and laughing at the funny little brown foreigners: Emile’s Big Southeast Asia Adventure™ travel blog, for your reading pleasure.
Day One It was a dark and stormy night.
As I made my way to Heathrow Airport to set off on my Big Southeast Asia Adventure™, threatening-looking thunderclouds were gathering above me. Now if I was the kind of person to see an ominous portent in that, I probably would have seen an ominous portent in that. But I’m not, so I didn’t.
In my philosophy, ominous portents are up there with superstition, religion, cults etc., and if I I was that way inclined then I’d probably have got the God urge long ago and believed in talking snakes and 900-year-old men and all that sort of thing.
And I don’t.
So I wasn’t unduly bothered by London’s grey stormy skies as I made my way to Heathrow's Terminal 2. And hey, sure enough, soon after, the skies cleared up and out came the sunshine.
I was secretly relieved at this good omen, because let’s face it, unlike our
religious counterparts, us atheists are never entirely 100%!s(MISSING)ure we’re right.
Before I'd even left London to set off on my Big Adventure™, I had my first thrill: those airport walkways that help you speed across the terminal and make you feel like some fleet-footed Hermes. If you just stand on them, it's like a slow mosey, but if you walk on them, you zoom along like Hermes, lending a total thrill (I’m easily pleased).
Since I'd by now traded my trusty yet hideously uncool suitcase (see previous blogs, underneath the cat) for a proper backpack, I now did just that, and Hermesed merrily along the lengths of Heathrow's Terminal 2, smiling at last with anticipation.
Adieu l'Emile, je t'aimais bien
This, of course, was in England (20 degrees C, 68F), back when I was young, naïve and innocent of life's darker side.
Arriving in Thailand, i realised one thing. It has four seasons: monsoon (stifling heat, humid); dry season (stifling heat, flies); wet season (stifling heat; humid; mosquitoes; flies) and the sweltering season (stifling heat, flies, humid).
The best time to visit is between 14 and 16 April, between 4 and 6 pm, when there's a refreshing
Just plain weird
Even by Asian standardswave of merely awful heat between the excruciating humidity of March and the gut-wrenching heat and humidity that arrive around May, together with swarms of mosquitoes the size of dogs that feed on tourists.
So as I stepped out of the gorgeously air-conditioned airport in Bangkok, I walked into a solid WALL of dense, muggy heat.
The Lonely Planet travel guide (despite its faults still easily the best one out there, I think) helpfully listed the buses that I could take into town. But since it was dark; I had absolutely no idea where to get off; and I suspected that people who take the bus don’t speak much English, the idea of splurging on an air-conditioned cab was an appealing one.
I wonder whether the cabbie thought he was doing me a favour by putting on the local smarmy, syrupy Thai pop station or whether that was just his taste in music (in his fifties I’m guessing, he didn’t seem the bubblegum pop target demo). I was tempted to offer him an extra 50 baht ($1.54, £1.04, 0.23 peasants) to turn it off.
Day Four I love London. So what am
I doing in Bangkok? So far, sweating, mostly. I've been pretty much incapacitated the last few days because of the heat, so I've been lounging around my dollar-a-night fleabag hostel, sleeping, hanging out, sweating, waddling over to the gorgeously air-conditioned 7-11 on the corner (open all night here in workaholic Asia, despite the name) and smelling like a Frenchman. Even the locals are having trouble coping with this heat wave.
If you’re ever going to follow in my illustrious flipflopped footsteps and ‘do’ Southeast Asia, here's my advice: go in winter, when it’s a little less ridiculously hot. Winter is high season, but I suspect it’s worth the hassle and added expense.
Another advantage to the ubiquitous 7-11 stores that dot Thailand (3,000 of them in Thailand alone!) is that they play local radio stations. The 'Engrish' here in Asia is truly in a league of its own. An ad on local radio encouraged listeners to “Be like a player! Sit big! Sit strong!”
Day Five
Good fun guessing the mystery-offal soup I had for lunch today. Some bits of pork in there, I think. One bit looked like gristly chicken. Some dragon.
This one bit looked like liver, but if it was then it would be a liver much like mine, because it was positively falling apart, perhaps from overcooking. Delicious though.
It's good fun exploring all this new food, but the culture shock is huge. I've been to some exotic places before, but I've never been anywhere quite so alien. I can't read a single sign; don't speak a word of the language.
Southeast Asian people (who I'll be calling Charlie from now on, for brevity) generally don't speak a word of English (or anything else either, apart from fluent Charlie), so I'm having to point at things a lot. Maybe it's the end of the heat wave (just my luck, arriving on the hottest day of the year) and my mood has improved remarkably, but I think I'm getting better at it; even starting to enjoy it.
At one of the ubiquitous roadside food stands in Bangkok, I pointed at a few things and made this sweeping motion with my hand to indicate that I wanted a mix of everything, and the girl actually understood! She served me a delicious mystery-offal soup, with the usual exotic vegetables
and unlimited ice water for a paltry 30 baht ($0.93, £0.62, 13.8 peasants).
Be careful when Charlie suggests "fly lice", though: usually you'll be OK and you'll get fried rice, but you may actually get flies and lice.
I don't speak any Thai, apart from a few words and phrases:
Me love you long time GI,
Me so horny, etc. So the best way to make yourself understood is to forget about proper English grammar and go all pidgin: “Bono estente. You selling tacky tourist tat good price, cheap cheap?”
When riding in the back of a tuk-tuk, the notorious motorised scooter/trike contraptions that pollute their way through any decent-sized town in the region (the name an imitation of the tinny little two-stroke engine sound), shouting something like "You go waterfall, good price, cheap cheap?" at passing farangs (fellow foreigners) never fails to make them smile. (I'm easily pleased.)
Even more striking than suddenly finding a Tesco in the middle of Bangkok is running into Thailand's famous ladyboys. They’re everywhere, and bizarrely, in this basically quite conservative society, no-one seems to give them a second glance. Some of them are barely out of their teens. I
even saw one in school uniform, which creeped me out a little.
Day Six Don't tell Mum, but I'm drinking the tap water and I'm right as rain. Living like a humongous slob back home readies your immune system for anything these guys can throw at you, and I’m smiling. Charlie doesn't have the same hygiene standards as us (or you, I should probably say), but a little preparation goes a long way. Take heed, all you women, Americans, military types and other clean-freaks out there.
Day Seven It's Bangkok, and there are riots going on. But this whole martial law situation gets a bit blown up in the foreign press I think. It's dodgy in the one or two bits of central Bangkok where the troubles are, but the rest of the city is fine and perfectly safe. It's a bit like the way everyone thought there was a revolution going on in Paris a few years ago (2005), leaving locals mystified.
Don't tell Mum I'm still in Bangkok; she thinks I'm perfectly safe up in the Opium Triangle, dealing heroin.
One good thing to come out of the troubles is that Thailand's relatively free of tourists right now. I took one of those
canal tours in a long-tail boat (the ones shaped like a scorpion) and I was the only one on it. I saw the usual sights: houses on stilts, food vendors on the shore waving catfish at me in a vaguely threatening way, etc., but it all felt a bit strange without any other gaijins around.
We pulled up to the floating market, which consisted of ONE barge, count 'em, ONE; with the usual overpriced herbs and spices and tourist tat sold by a lady in the obligatory ethnic conical hat.
Day Eight The weather doesn't piss about in this part of the world: savage thunderclaps followed by oceans of furious rain. If this was England, there'd be flooding everywhere.
So I’m sat in my hostel reading the History chapter of my trusty Lonely Planet guidebook (the famous Yellow Bible that kicked the whole Lonely Planet enterprise off way back when). And I’m wondering: how did Thailand manage to remain the only uncolonised country in the region throughout centuries of Western imperialism? What's their secret?
Well, the short answer is: they didn't. They lost huge tracts of territory to the French, who incorporated
Zoo
Good to see Britain's quality publications exported around the world it into Indochina. Now, to what extent those bits of what are now Laos and Cambodia were in any sense 'Thai' is debatable, but the Siamese (Thai) did use to run the place before the evil smelly foreigners ran them out.
Which leaves the rest of Thailand, and the mystery of why it never got colonised. My theory? I think the Western colonial powers just didn't bother.
It's just too damn hot to be going around conquering things, for a kick-off. And once they ventured more than a few miles, the evil Western colonial armies probably got lost. Not in the jungle, mind you, but in the cities. Apparently I am now in a place described as "Pinklao, Charan Sanitwong Amadamadingdong".
OK, I admit, I made that last word up. But in a place with genuine street names like "Borommaratchachonnani Soi Atsawin, Khet Bangkok Noi", I hardly needed to, I think.
I swear, Thai syllables breed overnight if you leave them together. You wake up the next morning to find street names even longer and more convoluted than when you left them.
Day Whatever, I Lost Count
Made my fist inroads
into a glamorous modelling career today as a photo crew came into my hostel to take some pictures of backpackers for a website. Made 400 baht out of it, too. Ka-ching!
They also wanted pics of us dancing, which was a bit of a worry because I dance like a white guy. Fortunately, there was no-one dancing in the bar we went to, so the Thai photography crew took pity on us, and they just took some shots of us drinking, something I’m much better at.
Chiang Mai And so it’s off to Chiang Mai, up in the north of Thailand.
Chiang Mai is a pretty little town. It's especially nice at night, when the streets are embellished with all sorts of purely ornamental decorations like lights, lampoons, cycle paths, zebra crossings and traffic lights.
You get used to the traffic chaos pretty soon, though, once you realise that apart from the legal nature of the shiny trinkets mentioned above, Charlie's concept of lanes is equally vague. Here’s a narrow stretch of road: is it two lanes? Three lanes? Four, five, eight lanes? It's all good.
Burp
Bangkok
For Bangkok, turn left at Gomorrah One of the things Thailand is justifiably famous for is the food, so I found myself walking around the market with a wee wicker basket in my hand, collecting ingredients as part of a cookery course. It was a very manly basket though, I hasten to add, and a very manly cookery course, natch.
Fire in the Disco, Fire in the Taco Bell
I was as surprised as you probably are to find that most of the food here is really quite mild. They serve chillies etc. on the side as a condiment, so you can make your noms as fiery or as mild as you like.
The only exception I've found so far is the cafés (as opposed to roadside stalls), where you do the usual
farang thing of pointing at one of a dozen or so dishes on display and smiling awkwardly. I made the mistake of pointing at a delicious-looking red pork curry, and suffering for it. It was so ridiculously hot it literally made me nauseous. Plus it was cold too.
For those of you who know me well, imagine how insanely spicy it has to be for even
Khao San Road
World's premier backpackers' ghetto me to have trouble with it...!
Me Give You Good Price my Friend
One thing about the Third World that I’ll probably never get used to is the simple act of commerce.
Nothing has a fixed price, and they just don’t understand why someone would simply want to browse without buying anything. Here in Chiang Mai you see all sorts of products and services advertised (mostly trekking tours and moped rentals), but never with a price. That annoys me. The answer to the question “How much?” is not “Sit down, let’s talk”.
I hate heat and haggling, so obviously I’m going to Southeast Asia. Go figure.
I always thought that in Asia it’s rude to look people directly in the eye, but Thais have no such qualms. Even in relatively touristy places like Chiang Mai, locals stare wide-eyed at this tall white devil with his big-ass backpack like I’m from another planet. Which I almost am.
Chiang Khong Anyway, after Chiang Mai, I'm off to the border town of Chiang Khong now, on my way to Laos.
As the temperature plummets to a positively Arctic 34
Bangkok
Khao San Road is the place to go if you need 20 knuckle dusters and a bunch of shurikens in a hurry degrees (93F), the locals have started wearing jackets. What is wrong with these people?
To my pleasant surprise, the nice lady running my hostel in Chiang Khong, on the Thai-Laotian border on the Mekong, lent me her bicycle free of charge. Small towns in Thailand are like that; it's all so laid-back, it's horizontal. The bike didn't have any kind of lock, because you don't need one.
I was delighted to see that it had a wee basket (see pic); this is starting to become a theme on this trip I think, as you'll see later.
In Chiang Khong, Charlie makes a range of god-awful local spirits distilled out of God knows what, because let’s face it, there’s not much else to do here. They give the stuff bizarre names like Obama (see pic).
Laos Nice as Chiang Khon was, I was on my way to Laos.
So, wiith the Laotian visa office manned by two people who just take your passport and visa application form and hand them over to one of the three visa processors sitting behind them, one of whom was asleep, plus an extra five staff or
so for non-visa passport control (one whose role remains a mystery), another one to change money and yet another guy to check your passport to see if the visa lot had done their job properly, it’s no great mystery to me how the Laotians make their unemployment statistics look good.
OK, so get this: I'm a millionaire. How many times in your life do you get to say that? But here in the Glorious People's Democratic Republic of Laos, a million kip gets you 120 dollars or so (£82, 3,887 baht, 90 peasants).
And so now I’m on a slow boat sailing down the Mekong. How many times in your life do you get to say that?
Some of the earnest traveller types (more on these later) have taken to pronouncing the name of the country as "Lao", without the S, which is how it's pronounced in the local language. It's like saying you're flying to Roma with a stopover in Paree. It makes you sound sophisticated and cosmopolitan, and not at all like a complete twunt.
Luang Prabang Arrived in the beautiful town of Luang Prabang (which the locals inexplicably pronounce
Discreet
Khao San Road is the place to go for that fake ID, driver's licence, CELTA certificate, etc. “Lo Ban”).
First things first. Here in Laos, I’ve taken a liking to the local grog: 45%!A(MISSING)BV (90 proof) rotgut distilled from sticky rice. It tastes like sticky rice. Stuff’s absolute rocket fuel, but costs pennies a bottle. I like Laos.
It’s traditional for all of us white devils to get food poisoning at least once on a trip like this, and I’m proud to say that I didn’t let the side down. So much for my slob immunity theory. Six imodiums soon took care of that though, and I didn’t have a crap for a week. Great stuff.
Day Deux
Hooked up with a friendly Quebecker couple on the slow boat over here, and we arranged to meet up again in Luang Prabang to go see the famous waterfalls.
They described themselves as living 'near' Montreal, but when pressed, they admitted was a good three hours' drive. Canadians use the word 'near' liberally. The guy told me he used to work on his uncle's farm, which turned out to be half the size of my whole damn country.
I’m terrible with names, so I’ll just call them Frog 1
I do not like green eggs and ham
They have pink and green eggs here, for some reason. and Frog 2. Nice people, very friendly, don't get me wrong, but they were the complete antithesis of me, travel-wise, especially the guy (Frog 1).
He had the entire trip planned to the very second, I swear. We met up in a cafe at 0830 hours, which I thought was a bit early and they thought was a bit late. Then we spent 15 minutes or so haggling with various tuk-tuk drivers for a good price to get us to the waterfalls (on which more later).
We finally got a decent price, hopped aboard and found ourselves on the town's main drag five minutes later, waiting around while the driver tried to pick up more passengers (they all do that here). This was taking valuable minutes, so Frog 1 started arguing with the driver. In the end we just got off, and I joined the waterfall trip that my hostel had arranged, leaving them to haggle away.
Just outside Luang Prabang are these amazing waterfalls where you can go swimming. Terrific day out. Even seasoned travellers are impressed by the Kung Po Falls or the Phu Qoph Falls or whatever they're called; I forget.
The park
Bangkok
Houses on stilts along the canals is also home to a sanctuary for rescued bears, where you can watch the deceptively cuddly-looking predators chewing bamboo and messing about on their jungle gym-style apparatus from behind a chicken-wire fence that would be suicidally flimsy if they weren’t fed regularly.
It's weird how innocuous bugs and spiders look all scary, and dangerous creatures like bears look all cuddly. You'd think evolution or God or whatever would have sorted that one out.
There’s also a sanctuary for tigers, but the last tiger died recently so it’s empty now. There’s probably one for dragons too.
On a more serious note, I seldom give to charity (I just heard another horror story just today in fact about a Thai who had simply pocketed millions of aid money destined for the 2004 tsunami).
One exception is the bear people (WSPA). I watched a documentary once on the way bears are treated in Turkey, and it was true evil; literally sickening to watch.
So apart from the thrill of seeing Asian black bears frolicking about on their jungle gym-type apparatus, it was gratifying to see that some of them are being rescued and cared for.
Anyhoo.
Bangkok
Houses on stilts along the canals One of the waterfall basins has loads of tiny fish that nibble on your feet. Dead skin flakes are like salt-and-vinegar-flavour crisps after a few beers to them, and they go for you in great numbers. It tickles.
In another, I found a humungous spider, which, being a card-carrying boy, I poked and generally annoyed in a Steve Irwin kind of way, till, to my delight, it darted off across the water like greased lightning.
It was the reincarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, I swear, the way it just skipped across the surface of the water, scaring all the girls out of the water. Good fun.
Speaking of animals, I’ve noticed that the dogs here in Laos are much friendlier. In Thailand, if you try to pet one, they get all suspicious on you, not used to affection. They run off or yap at you in a nervous kind way if you call one over.
But here in Laos they're a little more relaxed. They're still not used to humans giving them affection, but they let you pet them in a bemused sort of way.
Hostel workers in Laos are, to a man, friendly,
Bangkok
Houses on stilts along the canals courteous and not too bright. I checked out of a hostel here in Luang Prabang, and the only guy in attendance at the moment was visibly reluctant to help me. But as he was the only one here, he had no choice but to make up my tab and check me out.
He asked me if I'd already paid for the laundry I'd had done. I answered honestly that I hadn't, though I could easily have lied and got away with it.
He asked me how much it was, and I had no clue so I said three kilos, which seemed about right. He then asked me how many nights I'd spent, and I said two, which he misunderstood as three. Much hilarity ensued.*
Then came the painfully awkward phase of watching him calculate 2 x 32,000 kip. Watching him struggle with pen and paper, I didn't know whether I should just put the poor guy out of his obvious misery and just give him the answer, or to let him save face by working it out for himself, the way you're supposed to let stutterers finish rather than interrupt them. I decided on the latter, and
Bangkok
Kids swimming in the canals he got there in the end.
*Charlie smiles and laughs when he’s embarrassed (as opposed to amused), which is most of the time. He’s a lot like the English that way.
Another hostel attendant in LP (Luang Pradang) slipped on my flip-flops (over his socks), thinking they were his. I later made the mistake of asking him for the wifi password, which was clearly beyond him, so he had to find someone to explain what the hell I was talking about.
Another peculiar thing about Laotian hostels is that they always seem to have a bunch of locals hanging around all day. They don't speak any English (which has now almost completely replaced French as the lingua franca in Laos these days), and they're not cleaners or anything, so it's a bit of a mystery what they're doing there. Maybe they're family.
In Asia, because of the unfamiliar languages, it's common for Charlie to use vaguely Western-style nicknames, which are semi-official here.
But since they don't share the Western background of history and (pop) culture, their choices can often seem quite bizarre to us. A Chinese-Malaysian fried of mine in London calls himself Spike Lee
Bangkok
A scorpion boat all to myself with a straight face, and I'm told that in China, it's not uncommon for people to call themselves Hitler. The guy running my hostel in Luang Prabang, Laos, introduced himself as Mr Shampoo, with no apparent sense of irony.
Vang Vieng Took a minibus from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng, about six hours south.
This German guy had ‘reserved’ the last available proper seat, which he pointed out to me with that typical easy-going friendliness we’ve come to expect of these people when I moved his bag (figuring I’d move down to the end to let other people on board more easily).
“You’ve made a friend there,” one of the other passengers remarked drily. I now know why Helmut was so keen to have that particular seat: after six hours on the collapsible fold-out seat in the aisle, my arse was as sore as a big bag full of sore things.
It’s fair to say that Vang Vieng isn’t the undiscovered backwater it once was. I swear one of the locals greeted me with a "Hello, money".
Vang Vieng, Day Three
Had a good laugh today walking down the street. I saw a
Bangkok
Bangkok police need all the help they can get to enforce the curfew during the troubles little girl on a bicycle (with a wee basket), maybe 10 years old or so, cute as a button, with a little pink hair clip in her hair and everything, and as she rode past I noticed she was wearing a shirt that said FUCK THE WORLD in bold capital letters. Amazing what you spot when nobody in town speaks much English.
That’s it for now my little dim sum dumplings; Vientiane next, then Vietnam.
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eva maguire
non-member comment
charlie? who is charlie ? i want to cry