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Published: November 8th 2006
1. Kismet Means "Fate"
It was a pretty random series of events and coincidences that led me to where I was when I met Chelly for the first time last Sunday night...
- My neighbor Kirra came in from Seattle, prompting me to make a rapid trip from rustic Laos back to bustling Bangkok.
- She arrived a day later than I thought. This allowed me time to acquaint myself with the real people of central Thailand and develop an interest in the way they live.
- The hotel we shared for the first two days was quite far away from the Khao San road and all the backpacker things I'd associated with Bangkok. I got time to think about where I was and to work through a little depression.
- Nevertheless, we decided to make the move over to Khao San. This threw me back in the middle of the tiredly familiar backpacker world, but also surrounded me with intriguing, new, and exciting possibilities.
- By Sunday night, I was living for those exciting new experiences.
- The two German girls I'd made a date with for Sunday night ditched me. Maybe they
forgot, maybe they got distracted, maybe they got run-over by a car.
- I went out with some friends, but I got quite bored quite quick. There were no single girls there anyway...
- So I started to wander the streets, hanging out with Thai people in back alleyways, checking out new bars, and just walking the Khao San Road, people-watching.
2. The Best Night in Bangkok
I was watching a lot of people go by and they all looked exactly like people I'd already met or had run-ins with: not the same people, but cut from the same mold. Molded, cookie-cutter travellers. So that's when I saw these two gorgeous black girls from across the street and they stuck out. Shit, here I was in Thailand, by myself, looking for adventure. One of these girls looked really amazing to me and there weren't many people walking around and maybe they were from America anyway... I'd hate myself if I didn't go talk to them.
So I did.
They were walking the opposite direction from me, which made things a little awkward--or maybe it just made things obvious. I opened up with some
standard traveler-questions and learned pretty quickly that they were actually from Kenya. They were looking for a place that was still open where they could go dancing. Cool, me too.
Now what?
I'd basically run out of things to say already. One of the girls didn't have very good English anyway, and the one who was talking was kinda knocking me out with her beauty and bearing. I knew I needed to stick with them, but I wasn't sure how I was gonna pull it off. Wasn't I walking the other direction just a second ago, anyway?
"So, are you starting your trip or ending it?"
That's a good one. One of the Top Six questions that you hear as a traveler, especially good for opening conversations around the Khao San road area, where everyone seems to be either coming or going from the airport. It turned out that they were only in Bangkok for one night. They actually worked in nearby Sriracha, at the Tiger Zoo, training juvenile tigers. I then learned that their names were Chelly and Poni and that they shared an apartment near the zoo. They both spoke Swahili and English and
Chelly actually spoke Thai, Chinese, Korean and Spanish as well.
These were not cookie-cutter travellers.
We got to the end of Khao San and they were about to cross and go down an alleyway. If I was gonna follow, I better secure an invite quick. So, I asked them what their plans were and they said they knew about an all-night club somewhere across town and they were just going to change their clothes really quick before heading there. I could come up to the room and then share a cab with them if I wanted to go...
Hell yes.
I was about to go dancing until dawn in Bangkok with a pair of beautiful Kenyan Tiger-tamers. And I said that out loud, "So, I'm about to go dancing until dawn in Bangkok with a pair of beautiful Kenyan Tiger-tamers?"
They laughed and said I better believe it.
Anyway, so that's what we did. After the girls changed, we grabbed a Tuk-Tuk to the club. It was a good distance away, out from the toursit neighborhoods and entertainment districts, hidden in a secured industrial compound amongst dusty warehouses. We got out of the Tuk-Tuk
and were pointed to a blue door with no lights and no sounds and just the faintest hint of music coming from inside. There was hardly anybody there, the music was awful for the most part, the DJ was crap, and the beers cost seven times what they would have at a regular bar.
But these girls didn't care.
They were fun-loving and exciting. They went out for a good time and they were gonna have one and they weren't gonna hear any complaints. And in the end, they were dead right. I never even got a chance to pay for a single beer 'cause they were buying every round. The place filled up as the night went on and by the time we left you couldn't even walk through the place. Even the music got better, or at least we got used to the same ten songs they had on rotation and jsut didn't care anymore.
And then there was the dancing.
I hadn't really had a good time dancing anywhere I'd been in the last month. The clubs here rarely seemed to have a real dance floor, and when they did they were filled
with tiny Asian girls dancing way to fast and without any rhythm. Then there were the European girls with their crazy snake-charmer arm-shaking. And the guys all looked like this was par for the course: they either stood and watched or did a little sway by themself, or they did the Aussie-style hippie mud dance thing. I just wanted some good old-fashioned American Freaking.
I found it.
It started out with Chelly dancing by herself with a beer in her hand. Then I stood up and started moving, then Poni followed. I swigged some Singha and felt myself working up the balls and before I knew it, Chelly and I were dancing together just the way I like. We danced so long and so close that my white shirt was stained from the dies in her clothes. Seriously.
Best night I ever had in Bangkok.
3. It's Like How You Always Find the Prettiest Sunsets When You're Waiting For Your Friend to Park the Car
The wildest part about meeting this woman at this particular moment in time is that she's exactly who I've been looking for.
The girls here are always asking
me what kind of woman I like. Usually I say, "Thai Girls," maybe it's, "Isaan girls," or, "Lao girls," depending on where I am at the time. This always makes them smile and tell me how handsome I am, but it isn't my real answer. Actually, I was hanging out with a bunch of Thais the Saturday night just before this story took place, listening to Carabao and sipping Sang Som and snacking on Tom Yam soup, when I got this question levelled at me again. I gave that girl the real answer:
"I like women who are intelligent and introspective, but who are also confident in themselves, independent, and resourceful."
Of course, this is only part of the portrait of my ideal woman. I'd described another part to Kirra when we were both laid-out in bed feeling sick two nights before, talking about life and love:
"Right now I'd like to meet a woman who's in the same place in her life as I am. I want to find someone with the same emotional maturity, someone who is questioning her place in the world, someone who is trying to grow up a little and follow her
dreams."
Incredibly, Chelly is both of these women. And she's my type even on a purely physical level. I'd described this 'type' to my friend Mike--when we were travelling through Laos together--as:
"Small, Brown, and Round."
This was a catchy way to say that I like petite, curvaceous women with good dark color to their skin. Physically, I really get spun off women that are smaller than me but shapely--and carrying it all in the right places--with skin darker and smoother and softer than mine.
Of course, if you're cut out at all to be in a relationship with someone, you have to compliment one another. This means you have to be different enough in most ways so that you level one-another out, but not different in ways that make you clash. I'm having trouble believing it, but even after the first day it was obvious how well Chelly and I fit together.
I'd been writing the description of my perfect woman in my head, and there she up and walked right into my scene.
4. Pinch Me
I spent the night in Chelly's hotel room, and we spent the next morning
cuddling and talking. At some point we got up, had some breakfast, and I introduced her to a couple friends. Later we went shopping.
People are rude enough to you when you're just a random Farang bumbling around, but imagine being a white guy and a black girl holding hands in the street in Thailand. Got nothing? Well let me tell you, people are rough. It's not only the Thais cracking jokes and staring at you, but a lot of the other travellers are hard on you as well. We got a quick crash-course in it that morning, but at some point I started to fall head over heels for this girl, and I didn't even notice all that shit anymore.
In the afternoon, we went and picked up her friend Poni across town and had some lunch. We ate way too much food at a great soup and salad place, and it was on me because the girls had spent almost all of their cash the night before on expensive beers.
They were planning to stay another night, so we went to an ATM.
Card Denied.
We went to a bank and they couldn't
fix it.
We went to two more ATMs, card didn't work.
And just like that, plans changed. The girls had just enough money to get home on the next bus and hope they had some cash in the room for dinner.
We took a cab back to the Khao San Road and I guess I was just gonna walk them back to their hotel and say goodbye. Chelly promised she'd give me her email and phone number and she said that if I was ever in Sriracha near the Tiger Zoo, I could pop in and stay a couple nights.
We got out of the cab and stood on the sidewalk for a while. I couldn't take my arms from around this amazing woman and she couldn't stop kissing me. Poni couldn't stop smiling as she watched the two of us, and you would've smiled just as big.
At some point Chelly asked me if I would come home with her right then and live at the Tiger Zoo for awhile.
I had plans for the next couple days. I was gonna move in that evening with Michael from the U.K. and we had
clubbing plans for the nightime. Then the next day was Halloween: the whole neighborhood had massive parties planned and Kirra and I were supposed to see a Thai Heavy Metal extravaganza at the Immortal bar. After that, I was thinking about doing some urban backpacking east across Bangkok and the suburbs, then hopping on a bus back to Pattaya to visit a friend. From there, I was gonna go to Trat and to Koh Chang to see my friend Nina, then by sea to Cambodia, up to Phnom Pen, up the river to Angkor Wat, then further north into Laos, see the 4,000 Islands, then come back through Isaan in northeastern Thailand...
But all that disappeared in an instant as a flood of heavy metal lyrics, passages from great novels, scenes from romantic comedies, bits of poetry, and images from 80s hair-metal ballad videos went crashing through my head.
"Yeah, yes, yes, of course. Lemme go get my bag. I'll meet you at your hotel in five minutes. Wait for me."
I guess her sarong had loosened up while we'd been locked together kissing on the side of the road, 'cause as soon as I let go
and started running down the street her skirt fell to the ground and exposed her smooth, round backside to the entire street. But I didn't catch any of that because I was too frantic to get my bag and get right back to her.
I poked my head into southeast asia's "Greatest Internet Cafe", posted a quick note in this blog, and shot off down Soi Rambuttri to the MyHouse guest house.
As my bizarrely finnicky luck would have it, the french guy, Manu, who was holding my bag was nowhere to be found. After some botched detective work amongst the patrons of the MyHouse restaraunt, I gave up and decided to try his room. I knew he was in the last room on the front left, out towards the balcony. Problem was, I couldn't remember which floor he was on. So, I went to the first floor and tried the room there. No answer. Shit.
Maybe it wasn't this one. Maybe it was. I could waste no time, so I went out to the balcony and peered in the window.
There was Manu, asleep in his bed, three feet away from my backpack.
"Manu,
Manu! I'm moving in with the Kenyan girl in five minutes and I need my backpack!"
That woke him up and he came bleary-eyed to the door.
He said goodbye to me in his halting, heavily-accented English while I hoisted the bag to my shoulders, "she's quite a pretty girl, I hope you enjoy this adventure."
Will do. Peace.
I ran out into the street knowing that there was no way I was gonna run down to Khao San and make it to the far end of the road, then down the alleyway to their hotel, and be there before they left to catch the bus home.
In my desperation I started waving at Tuk-Tuks. The first two were with passengers and honked their horns loudly to show their annoyance. The third was searching for a fare. I told him to take me to the Burger King at the other end of Khao San as fast as he could and he grossly overcharged me.
We raced along Soi Rambuttri, dodging food carts, monks, and confused Farang. Then we got out onto the main drag and sat stuck right in the middle of rush-hour traffic.
Shit. He banged a U-turn and tried to take some crazy side-streets. It seemed like the gamble would pay off at first, but no, we got stuck in it even worse. Moving at a literal snail's-pace for god know how long, I gave the guy half-fare and jumped off, jogging down the side of the crowded street with my massive pack tilting from side to side.
I found the far side of the alley the girls' hotel was on and raced up it. I got to the lobby panting and red and looking around like a madman, but they were nowhere to be seen.
Maybe the staff recognized me from the morning or from the night before, or maybe it was just incredibly obvious to anyone around with any sense. It was only a moment before someone said, "the African girls just left."
"The African girls?"
"They leave just now."
"They already went?"
"Just left."
Holy crap. No, it can't be. I wasn't gonna let her get away that easy. Not without a fight.
So I dashed out to the end of the alley and looked around.
They could have
gone anywhere. The sidewalk was crowded in every direction and the street was choked with cabs.
And now it was time for some serious panicked thought. If they had decided not to wait for me, they were already in a cab and headed to the bus station. In that case, I would have to grab a cab myself and try to get there before their bus left. If Chelly DID still want to take me with her, she was walking down Khao San right now, hoping to find me on the street or at my guest house. Thing is, the Tuk-Tuk had taken me on a wild loop to get here, and if this was the case, she could already be at my guest house by now, not finding me.
So I started to really pick up the pace. Remember, I still have the same clothes from the night before, and it's a 70lb bag, and my hair is getting long and wild, and it's gotta be 100 degrees down in the streets of Bangkok, and I'm trying to make a good pace while also darting my eyes around one of the busiest streets in the world--crowded with
people from every corner fo the globe--scanning for a pair of petite African girls who may or may not even be in the same part of the city by now.
And I'm thinking that maybe they thought that I ditched them. And maybe they got a cab and they're already on a bus right now, jilted. And maybe I'll have to catch the same bus tonight and sleep in the bus station or on the side of the street somewhere in Sriracha tonight. And then I'll show up the next morning at the Tiger Zoo and tell her that I didn't mean to ditch her and look how romantic I am that I came all the way there and showed up in spite of everything.
But that train of thought stopped right away when I saw the girls up ahead, walking slwoly away from me, doing the same kind fo crowd-scanning that I was.
"Chelly! Poni!"
They turned and she saw me running and she jogged up to me and the middle of the Khao San Road seemed to clear out just for a moment, just for us. She gave me a big kiss and my
sweaty hair settled around me face and my bag stopped wobbling on my shoulders and we soaked up the moment.
But nobody pinched me and I'm still here in this dream.
5. Sriracha
By that point we were pretty stuck on one another. We caught a cab to the bus depot, caught a bus to Sriracha, and didn't let go the whole time. We got into the small shopping-mall town and bypassed the noise and excitement of the half-moon car show, stopping at a quiet little roadside soup-vendor to eat some chicken and gaze into each other's eyes. Poni was somewhere else, knowing instinctively how best not to be our third wheel.
And then she took me home, and I moved into my new apartment. Chelly'd been there for a year and a half, and Poni for just over a month. It was a small room a lot like I'd seen in the project-houses, but with a better porch, less neighbors, a nice bathroom, a working TV/DVD/Stereo steup, and two beds on frames. The place was tidy and the girls kept it looking clean and smelling pretty. With Swahili words flying through the air, pretty
soon I thought it was Africa, and that made me happy and comfortable and lulled me to sleep.
6. The Tiger Zoo
My second day in Sriracha, Chelly took me to the Tiger Zoo where she works.
She was supposed to be in with the tigers all day, but she got her co-workers to cover for her and she spent the entire afternoon escorting me around the expansive grounds of the Sriracha Tiger Zoo.
The place that I'm living next to is home to over 400 tigers in various habitats, a tiger museum, tiger shows, some amazing tiger statues, and a couple tiger gift shops. However, the name "Tiger Zoo" is probably not the most accurate, as the place is also home to camels, donkeys, kangaroos, rabbits, snakes, iguanas, oranguatans, elephants, pigs, and thousands of crocodiles.
We got to take some adorable pictures with some of these animals, and we got to explore the way they live here. Most are in group living environments: pretty nice accomodations in fact, considering where we are. Most interestingly, in my opinion, they have several groups of tiger cubs, piglets, and puppy dogs being raised together. They call
these the "Happy Family" exhibits, and they show such fantastic things as:
- Piglets nursing at Tiger teats.
- Tiger cubs nursing at Pig teats.
- Puppies and Tiger Cubs and Piglets napping side by side.
- Piglets cleaning out the nostrils of full-grown Tigers without any fear of becoming dinner.
- Full-grown Pigs, Dogs, and Tigers living together as siblings.
That's all kind of cute, but it's not realy ground-breaking stuff. And that's pretty much how the whole place goes. This definitely isn't a zoo that keeps things up to U.S. standards, but I'm sure that the economy here prohibits ticket prices that would give them the budgets they need to keep the place up to date and looking spiffy. The bright side is that they seem to spend a vastly disproportionate amount of money on breeding and feeding, giving them a huge population of well cared-for animals, even if the exhibits have gone to shit.
They have a lot of shows here. Though some aren't that great, other could be the highlight of somebody's trip.
The first show we saw was a Pig Race. You'll see this at any state fair back home and
most rodeos, but putting it in Thailand adds some kind of special sauce. First they bring out a big, huge, mama pig, billed as the "Counting Pig" or some nonsense. Then they have members of the audience throw random addition or subtraction problems at the pig, and the pig picks the number with the correct solution our of a line-up, to great applause and the reward of a snack. Finally she picks the winner for the coming race. The race last only about 45 seconds. They get a group of hungry pigs all riled-up and teased for food, then they let them run from one end of a track to another, run 'em in a semi-circle, then send them back down to where they started and give them some food. Because they're going through gates and crossing a finish line, it looks like an impassioned race to all the laughing elderly Koreans who took tour buses to watch the show. I just liked feeding the piggies.
The next show we saw was the Crocodile Show, which does add some serious drama by having a tiny Thai woman put her head down a croc's throat. Other than that, it's just
a bunch of sleeping crocodiles getting tapped in the teeth and dragged around by their tails. The best part was coming home at night to find that the Croc girl lives across the hall from us.
The last one we saw together was the Tiger Show, then Chelly had to go back to work. This was kind of like what I'd imagined a Sigfried and Roy show to be, with tigers jumping through flaming hoops and dancing around with their arms on a man's shoulders. My favorite part was seeing the young, angry one show us all his sack and take a dump on the pedestal. Punk.
But the absolute pinnacle of the day's entertainment was the Elephant Show. It's great fun because they start out with a can-can line of dancing elephants, who finish the song and each take a bow. Then the most limber two start playing basketball. Honestly, you've got two Asian Elephants up there, fighting against a clock, picking up basketballs with their trunks to see who can score the most baskets and win a treat. It's great. Then they bring out some real showmen, Elephants who can do headstands or who can walk
on their hind legs all the way across the stage, more dancers, more bow-ers, and at some point there was even an Elephant tight-rope walker. These guys are not only smart, but cheeky, and in peek physical shape. Eventually they asked for two volunteers from the audience: one man, one woman.
I ran up there straight away and was told to lie on the ground with a pillow under my head, facing the sky. They warned me to lie perfectly still, and then they brought in the Elephants. At first it was just a big show of grinning Elephants stepping gingerly over us, hamming it up for the crowd like they were gonna lose their balance and crush us to death. Then they brought in the big guns. A huge, be-tusked elephant walked up to the woman volunteer and stepped right on her butt. However, instead of crushing her, he just gave her a comically suggestive massage, bowed to the crowd, and carried on to me. Now here comes this elephant, trunk waving in the air, and there's me lying on my back. Yup.
They went for the low-comedy and the goon started rooting around with his prehensile
nose, trying to tickle my member. It got a seriously uncomfortable squirm-and-grimace out of me and quite a laugh out of the crowd. I later had an older Malaysian fellow tell me that I was great in the show, as if I'd written the material.
The best part for me was watching the Elephants up close. They really eat this stuff up, looking more like eager circus-clowns than trained work-beasts. Every one of them had a face-splitting grin and a penchant for slapstick. I watched as they took the relatively-narrow steps over me, dragging it out for effect and dangling their monstrous legs right above me like they were gonna slip and topple, then chortling to themselves as they set down on the other side of me and went on to try to scare the piss out of the woman.
But the best part about coming to the zoo was meeting Chelly by the gates on the way out. Her smile, her glow--I like this one a lot and wouldn't mind seeing that face every day for the rest of my life.
7. Meet Chelly
Her name is Chelymore Perpetual Daia, but I'm not sure
I know how to spell it all right.
She's got a fantastic smile.
She's was born one year and 6 days after me, on February 24th, 1983. That makes her 23 years old and it puts her birthday and mine less than a week apart.
She's smart and funny and she can keep pace with anything I'm talking about.
She's fluent in Swahili, English, Thai, Spanish, Mandarin, and Korean (or so she tells me, I can only vouch for the first four).
She went to college for computers and web design and might go back for nursing.
She's got the kind of "old eyes" that my great-grandmother said I have: indicative of an old soul that has seen a lot and learned a lot and held a lot of wisdom even before inhabiting this gifted individual.
She was raised out near the forest in Mombassa, Kenya, the middle of three sisters wedged in between four brothers, making it a big, loving family.
She thinks alot about her past and her future and her place in the world, and she wants to live a full and happy life.
Right now she trains
Tigers in Thailand, but she could be anywhere and take care of herself and succeed at what she's doing.
She's down to earth and doesn't bullshit. She isn't hung up on surface things, but has strong values about honesty and love and living to the fullest.
She can make even the most frustrating times enjoyable.
She's about 4-foot, 11-inches at the most, and weighs around 100lbs, but if you crossed her you'd swear she could kick your ass.
She's a great cook and she keeps her house clean and she loves romantic comedies.
She wakes up in the morning and puts on either Shakira, or Bob Marley, or a pop Rap mix-CD, and then shakes it while she gets ready for the day.
She knows that love and affection are for giving away where it counts and not for holding inside.
She's stacked and she's shapely and she's got the smoothest, softest skin.
She makes friends everywhere she goes and she takes care of them like she was their sister.
When she comes home from work in teh evenings, I want to melt--just look at the kind of sappy shit I'm
writing about her and she doesn't even know it.
8. Our Lifestyle
Living in Sriracha reminds me a lot of living in Sedro-Woolley: country roads, bedroom communities, the smell of cow dung from the farms, jacked-up pickup trucks, and good home-town cooking.
There isn't much for me to do in the daytime, other than workout and clean house. I have to take a Sangthaew (the rusty old pickups used like a public bus system) into town if I need to do any shopping or use the internet. But, when the girls get home after work, we go to the markets or go bowling or go see the crowds at the mall or maybe settle in and watch a DVD.
I'm perpetually smiling.
9. I Was Wandering Around the Mall...
I took one of those Sangthaew into town today, in fact, and I wandered around the mall. Somewhere in there I saw some inspirational phrases written high up on the wall. One of them said, "believe in love at first sight."
I took a picture and then got chased off by a crusty old security guard: there's a lot of places in
Thailand where you aren't supposed to take pictures, and I guess malls just made the list. I took off quick though, because I wasn't gonna let him erase the picture. I wanted you all to see that this was really written up there and that all this incredibly romantic hoo-haw that's going down in my life right now isn't make-believe.
It's Kismet.
10. Ten Chapters
Anthony Burgess gave the British edition of his book 'A Clockwork Orange' 21 chapters because of the significance of the number 21 to maturity and male rites of passage in the modern western world. In a similar fashion, I've given this blog entry about the most amazing woman I have ever met 10 chapters, and you should be able to figure out why.
You might have seen me last Sunday night, as there were a lot of people around. I went dancing until five A.M. with a pair of beautiful Kenyan women who work with tigers. My shirt is still stained from the clothes of the girl I danced with so closely for so long.
If you didn't catch the scene, don't worry, 'cause I think you'll be seeing
a lot of us together.
In the future...
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anonymous
non-member comment
Me Nic... U Chelly!
Sabaidii, You go Nic!! It's great to see two wandering souls meet up in far away land. It's almost like the movie. Congats to both of you!! Soke Dii