Egoblog feat. me, other people, cities, ruins and monkeys

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The only way to leave Koh Tao for Chumphon at a reasonable time is to take the touristy speedboat, and grudgingly I buy the overpriced ticket. At the pier, hordes of pale-skinned, tan and sunburnt Westerners are waiting to board, most of them looking exactly like the crowd I would imagine on Phuket or Koh Samui. As the boat starts racing towards Chumphon, many a face turns ashen, and as the first chicks start puking into plastic bags, I compliment my strong stomach, put on my headphones, and listen to some grindcore, the perfect soundtrack for this occasion.

In Chumphon, I hop on a local bus to Phetchaburi, where I arrive about four hours later. Or rather, I'm being dumped at the roadside in the dark, far away from the city centre, discombobulated and pissed off at the driver. I walk along the road, trying to hitch a ride to the city, but my efforts are futile. As I pass a house, a girl walks out and asks me in English if I need help, and I say yes, I need help. Her mother and her little brother come out to take a look at me, and I try to explain that I want to go to Phetchaburi. They say this is Phetchaburi, and I say yeah, maybe, but it's a highway, and I want to go to the centre. They invite me in and I get a glass of water, which I appreciate greatly. After some debate amongst themselves, they decide to call a mototaxi for me, which is supposed to cost me 20 baht. When the driver arrives and sees my farang face, he decides to charge me 30, so I say no, and he leaves. I have another glass of water, and after about 10 minutes he comes back, and says ok, 20.

I check into a very basic guesthouse overlooking the River Phet, where I overhear a conversation between a guest and the owner. The guttural 'see you latech' that the guy utters makes me realize he's Swiss, and when he tries to talk to me in pretty awkward English, I answer in German, which seems to relieve him quite a bit. His name is Martin, and he tells me it's his first time out of Europe, and he finds it all extremely exciting. He was so happy that he could afford staying in a 4-star hotel in Bangkok, "with pool and everything!", and he even got himself a tailor-made suit, "for only 100 Franken!". He says he just can't resist buying luxury goods, seeing they're so much cheaper than back home.

The next morning I venture out to explore the town, which has some very nice temples on offer. One of them is up a steep hill, and after climbing it, I enjoy the view and the fact that I'm the only foreigner there, after a bit of an overload on the island. There are quite a few school kids, all snapping pictures of each other like crazy.

I take the train towards Bangkok, and I curse myself for buying a 3rd class ticket when I see how overcrowded the compartment is. I still find a seat, but without any leg room. After about two hours, I switch to one of the seats reserved for monks, seeing that it's free and more comfortable. My stomach tells me it's time to eat, but the vendors trailing the length of the train only seem to be selling dead-animal stuff. Finally I find a lady who sells little bags with sticky rice, and as I roll the rice into little balls and eat them, I see the people opposite me looking at me curiously. "Mangsawirat", I say, to which they ooh and aah as if they just realized I'm a famous pop star. The lady feels sorry for me when she hears I'm vegetarian, and gives me a banana, which tastes even better since it's free. A guy with long hair and a metal-looking shirt decides to be the mouthpiece for the Thais and to find the answers to their pressing questions. He gets up, sits next to me, and asks: "Where you made?", which doesn't make any sense to me, so I ask "Excuse me?", to which he leans closer and says "Huh?", so I say "I don't understand what you said", which prompts him to look at me like I'm insane. "Where you made?", he repeats, and I still don't get it and just look at him. "I made in Thailand. You?", and I finally understand. "Made in Germany", which sounds horrible and wrong, but it serves its purpose.

I miss my stop in the north of Bangkok and end up at the main train station in the city, so I have to buy another ticket to go two stops north. After lots of confusion and a couple of calls and texts, my host Toom picks me up at the station. We take a taxi to his street, and I'm glad I didn't have to make my own way, since the traffic's a mess, there are no street signs, and I carry too much shit with me.
Toom works as a freelance graphic designer, and he lives in a three-storey house with his two brothers Tom and Tam. I reckon their parents must have been either unimaginative or just plain lazy. Toom is a lot smaller than I am, and when I see his hands for the first time, I'm quite shocked. His fingers look as though they were flattened with a blunt object at the proximal phalanges, and I'm not sure if it's a medical condition or if he had some sort of an accident, but I decide not to enquire any further.

I meet his other guests, Emidio from Italy, and Ward from Belgium. We eat a nice dinner at a small eatery close to Toom's house. Emidio speaks very basic English, and always says "for example" and "it's possible to...?". He's on his way to Australia, where he wants to work for a while. I can already see a generic white Australian bogan shouting "You're in Australia, mate, speak fucking English!" at him.
Ward comes from the Flanders part of Belgium. He had a pretty well-paid and stable job back home, but decided to quit because he felt empty. Now he wants to travel for as long as his money lasts, and he has stayed in Bangkok for a month already, "not doing anything, not worrying about anything, just living day by day."

The following day Toom takes me on a boat trip to the city. I'm surprised at how far away from the centre he lives. First we walk for 15 minutes, then we take a bus for 20, walk another 15, then take the boat, which arrives near the centre after half an hour. Before we arrive at the centre, a couple of mixed couples get on. The men look like a father-son team, a young and an older version of the paradigm of an English football hooligan, with crew cuts, stocky, beefed up and aggressive-looking. As a stark contrast, their girlfriends/wifes/prostitutes are tiny, slim and beautiful.

The closer we get to the centre, the more tourists we see. We eat at a street stall, where, for the first time, everything is in English and they have a vegetarian menu. I eat a delicious tom yum, and Toom eats fried rice. Most people around us have dreadlocks, piercings and tattoos. They sport a myriad mosquito bites and scars from older bites. I hear all variations of English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese. Later we walk past manifold street stalls selling used books, shoes, t-shirts, backpacks and other stuff that could be of interest to backpackers. Toom tells me he once overheard a conversation of some Thais in this area about how they 'organize' all those things. Some of them were just left or forgot by travellers in their guesthouses, other ones were stolen from their rooms, plain and easy. Of course, the latest Lonely Planets are some of the most sought after items. They sell them for quite a high price, same with the crappy t-shirts, which have tags of 250 baht on them. Having been to Malaysia, I know that the real value of those shirts should be something like 50 baht.

Toom shows me Khao San Road, the infamous backpacker centre of Bangkok and the whole of Southeast Asia. There are cheap guesthouses, travel agencies, more street stalls selling more crap, tattoo shops, clairvoyants, bad-quality street food, even lower-quality fast food restaurants, aggressive tuk tuk-drivers and touts. I am almost immediately disgusted, and we leave after a quick stroll down the road.

The next day more guests of Toom's arrive, a Belgian couple, Koenraad and Els. Koenraad is a vegan anarchist, who doesn't really work, but makes short films, hitchhikes, and now wants to work in Thailand for a couple of months as a volunteer. They are looking to buy a netbook, so Toom brings us to one of those typical, faceless Southeast Asian megamalls. To my surprise, there's a big flea market on the 6th floor, where people sell all kinds of used goods, from steel helmets to gramophones. There's also a big delicatessen supermarket, where all kinds of imported foods are sold at extortionate prices. Emidio is delighted to find Barilla spaghetti, and he decides to 'cook-a da pasta' for everybody later in the evening.
As we stroll around, some people say something to Toom in Thai. I ask him what they wanted. "They said 'Oh, you have so many customers, you must make a lot of money from them', but I replied 'They're not my customers, they're my friends', which they didn't understand."

As promised, Emidio prepares pasta for dinner, and we all help with the cutting. He cooks a nice tomato sauce with capsicum and aubergine, and we even grate some fresh parmigiano to go with it. It tastes delicious, and I'm happy to eat decent Italian food again after such a long time. After eating, we drink some beer and converse late into the night. At around 1am Toom suggests we go on the roof to light a hot-air balloon. He has a couple of spare ones from the last Festival of Lights, one of the biggest and most magnificent festivals in Thailand, where millions of those balloons are lit throughout the country. Ours is a little ripped, but we fix it with tape, light it, and watch as it ascends and ultimately disappears into the night sky.

The following day, I leave for Ayutthaya, and everybody except Toom decides spontaneously to come along. Toom looks really sad that he can't come, but there are more guests coming in that day, and he has to attend to them. We take the hard-seat train to Ayutthaya, which takes only about one and a half hours. After we arrive, we check into a guesthouse in what is known, as we're about to find out later, as Little Khao San Rd. Later that night we see why that is. As we sit in front of our guesthouse, drinking some beer and chilling out, we see many shady-looking middle-aged Western men walking about. Later we pass a bar where a tipsy Brit tries to entice us to have a beer with him, but we ignore his attempts, which are a bit too tenacious, and go to grab something to eat.

Ayutthaya used to be the capital of Thailand until the middle of the 18th century, when it was sacked by the Burmese. The remnants of its glorious past are still all too visible throughout the city. There are heaps of old temples, scores of stone buddhas and stuccowork, pagodas and chedis, most of them in a good state of repair. We walk through the back entrance of one of the most famous temples, avoiding the fee one has to pay at the main gate. There are some Japanese tour groups, always a good indicator to how touristy a place is. Still, the place is not too overcrowded, and the tourists are not too obnoxious, so we enjoy our casual stroll through the incredibly picturesque ruins.

In the afternoon the others get on the train back to Bangkok, and I make my way onwards to Lopburi, which has some nice old Khmer ruins to boast. I get up early the next morning to explore those ruins, which may not be as splendid as the ones at Ayutthaya, but I'm the only one there, which makes it the more relaxing to visit. As I walk towards another set of ruins, I see monkeys on the footpath. There are mothers with their babies, old fat ones and cheeky young ones stealing food. They sit on cars, roofs and hang from electric wires overhead. On the other side of the street, I see heaps of people crowding around the three prangs that are centered on Prang Sam Yot, originally a Hindu shrine, but later converted into a Buddhist one. I approach to see what all the fuss is about, and all of a sudden everybody looks up to the sky to see a skydiver parachute his way down, landing close to the centrepieces. I find out it's the annual Monkey Festival, where a big feast is prepared for the monkeys living in and on the ruins. As I enter, it's impossible not to see the monkeys crawling all over the prangs, snatching whatever they can from onlookers. Some people get a bit too close to the monkeys to take pictures, and they use food as a bait, which is violently taken by the little critters. I find it all fascinating, but I feel that when people notice me, they start staring at me instead of at the monkeys, and I hear one too many 'farang, farang' (foreigner, white person), which pisses me off. After a while, the hubbub becomes too much for me, and I go back to my hostel, pack my bags, and leave by train for Sukhothai.

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