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Published: June 18th 2008
“Farang Song!”
The words proudly rolled off the tongue belonging to our most recently acquired Thai friend, with the excitement of a child learning his first dirty word in another language. It took only a second for my attorney to realize that our 5’6” middle-aged companion had stretched his inadequately short arm over both of our laps and into the glove box. Retrieving from the glove box a tape labeled Biggest Hits of 2000; he popped it into the stereo.
“Tom Jones?”
“Yes. Tom Jones!” our driver proudly proclaimed, but he was already off in his own world doing an extremely entertaining personal kareoke session to Tom Jones’s super-uber-mega hit, Sex Bomb. Exchanging quick knowing glances, the two farangs in the tiny two person truck, instantly realized that this was just one of those situations that you would never find yourself in, if you had just taken that sweet paying position back at home. Getting to where you want to go is sometimes more fun than the actual destination turns out to be.
How did the two of us find ourselves hanging out with a forty-something Thai dude with an affinity for creating smooth paved roads, picking up strangers, and
Sunrise over the Mekong
Sunrise at Pah Taem N.P. overlooking the Mekong and Laos on the other side.singing along to washed up pop idols? It really is a funny story, but it is probably one of those situations that you just had to be there for. The Benn and I had just spent the better part of the day getting to and exploring what we could, of Preah Vihear. Situated just on the Cambodian side of the Thai/Cambodian border, the Angkor ruins are some of the best we’ve seen and with the most spectacular view. To get to the ruins, we had to hire to motorbike taxies from a tiny village called Phum Saron. My captain, other than missing a few important teeth and smelling a bit like fish, had no features that caught my attention. The Benn’s on the other hand was a different story. Other than having impeccable style, this man must have been only a step away from attaining the label of “little person”. It soon became my mission to get a photo of myself with what must be, my long lost brother.
Enter Sex Bomb:
The Benn had already been chatting up a guy in a yellow road work truck, when I pulled up, focused on getting a picture with mini-me.
Mini-me
A pic of the author and his long lost twin. Notice the matching headbands. Proof. It didn’t take long for me to convince the little one to pose for a photo with me, but as soon as the picture was snapped, Sex Bomb (we call him Sex Bomb cuz we never really figured out how to pronounce his name), in a fervor, jumped out of his truck with camera in hand. He grabbed the hand of the newest freakishly tall giant in town (me) and proceeded to lead me about 100meters down the road. It must have been a funny sight to see the two ouf us holding hands, walking down the road. Turns out that all Sex Bomb wanted was a picture of himself with me, infront of his recently completed road surfacing project. Who was I to deny him of that?
Sex Bomb not only gave us a ride back to Kantharalak, but gave us a full tour of his office and fed us sugar coffee and alphabet crackers. When it was time for us to mosey on, he snapped his fingers for a truck to pull around. The three of us then piled into the two person stick shift cab.
Enter the Biggest Hits of 2000:
Sex Bomb took us to
Baboon...I think.
I keep calling this a Baboon cuz he looks kinda like the animals I saw in Africa, but for some reason, nobody could give me a straight answer. the bus station , but a bus had just left for Ubon Ratchathani and the next one wouldn’t leave for another 45 minutes. To top off Sex Bomb’s generosity, he decided that we couldn’t possibly wait around the bus station for that amount of time, so he crammed us all back into the tiny cab and took us out to dinner.
His choice struck me as odd because he chose the Thai equiviant of Walmart, called Tesco. I know, dining out at Walmart sounds like as much fun as…well…eating at Walmart, but this meal was surprisingly tasty. After slurping down a plate of fried noodles, we still had some time to kill and Sex Bomb knew exactly what to do. It was time to show off his new foreign friends and try to hook us up with all the pretty Thai girls. Hell, being 27 with no wife or kids, just had to be remedied. With the two uf us in tow, Sex Bomb walked around to all the booths and not so discreetly pointed out all the “very beautiful girls, yes?” He would ramble off something in Thai, the girls giggle and avert their eyes for a second, and
The Explorer
The Benn at Pah Taem N.P. the two of us would turn a new shade of pink. Later, sitting on the bus back to Ubon, I had to wonder which was more fun; seeing ancient ruins or spending a few hours with a character like Sex Bomb.
Our being unmarried with no children at our ripe old age, seems to be a recurring topic ‘round these parts. It was just the next day when we found ourselves riding on top of an industrial truck turned people mover, with a new Thai chatter box who called himself Mr. Piboon Chai. My attorney and I had decided that we would do a few days of camping in a fairly remote national park on the border of Thailand and Laos. We had been told over and over that it was just not possible to get all the way to the Pah Taem National Park on public transportation. Of course this only deepened our curiosities to see if we could actually get to the park without getting stranded along the way and thus ending up as kibbles for some wandering tiger or rabid sun bear. Like a super hero, Mr. Piboon Chai came out of nowhere to fend off
Benn and Mr. Piboon Chai
On the top of a truck headed to his house. the evil tuk-tuk drivers and point us to the correct truck. Being that we were in a very rural part of E. Thailand, there is not a whole lot of transportation and the truck filled up rather quickly. This of course left us dangling off the back of the truck with all of our possessions strapped to us. It wasn’t until the truck made an abrupt stop on the side of the road to care for an elderly woman having seizures and spitting up blood (as far as we could tell, she was okay), that we got to climb on top of the truck. Te whole ride seemed to consist of Mr. Piboon Chai chatting away to us in broken English while we feverishly nodded our heads to indicate that we understood ever word coming out of his mouth. Near the end of the truck ride, we had been able to extract the important information that we needed about the possibility of getting back to civilization. We also found out that he had invited us back to his house for some food and water before hiring a couple of his compadres to take us back to the park. We thought,
The Benn after Leechs
Guess what is in the bag. “okay, this may be a pretty cool experience. Let’s roll with it and see what happens.”
Before long, after a wonderful meal of rice and eggs, it became apparent that he was trying to proposition one of us to take his oldest daughter back home with us. Deciding to play it smart, The Benn mentioned that his girlfriend, emphasis on girlfriend, would be coming in less than a week. His full emphasis now shifted directly to me. As Mr. Piboon Chai talked her up, he slipped me a somewhat embarrassing photo of what looked to be an 18 year old girl dressed up in a catholic school girl uniform and made up like a china doll. All I could figure out to do was to politely as possible, tell him that in my country, I have no money and can just barely support myself. A confused look crossed his face momentarily, but it must have been just the right thing to say, as the conversation came to an awkward halt. All was good because just then, our moto divers rolled up, siphoned gas from one tank to another, and proceeded to whisk us away to the relative safety of
The Leach that got away.
Here is a leach that fell out of The Benn's pants after we got back from our jungle hike. Notice the trail of undigestable blood slime coming out of him. Sweet! Pah Taem National Park.
Bloody Ankles McBeergut. My attorney has yet another new nickname. He seems to have more talent for picking up new nicknames than Paris Hilton does at picking up headlines for doing stupid publicity stunts. This particular new title arose after one of our days exploring the unforgiving jungles of Khao Yai National Park. An absolutely stunning monsoon rain forest covered mountain range on the outside, but something sinister and purely evil crawls within. Khao Yai N.P. Is crisscrossed with hiking trails that range from well maintained, relative superhighways, to as we found out, poorly marked foot paths that seem to lead absolutely nowhere. The thing about this park is that when you arrive, you instantly notice everyone wearing what look to be knee high gaiters. They are actually, what they call in the business, leech socks. These are the front line of defense for keeping the little ground vampires from sucking the sweet blood from your ankles. For some reason, be it that we are just cheep and didn't want to pay for the socks, or that we are just plain too cool for school, we decided to use our own leach protection. This so-called
Extra leeches
Just sucking the blood out of The Benn's pants. protection consisted of The Benn using his regular debris gaiters over his boots. I decided that tucking my pant legs into my boots would do the trick. I have included a few pictures that I think do a wonderful job illustrating how well our alternative methods worked. Besides the two day leech parties that my attorney and I held all over our bodies, the rest of our experiences in Khao Yai were superb. We got lost about fifteen km. Deep in a jungle filled with several different species of Hornbill, Gibbons, Baboon-like creatures, endless amounts of flying and terrestrial insects, and even got charged by a protective Siamese Freshwater Crocodile! Not eating for two days was just a side bonus. Perhaps the native residents of Bangkok will be a little more friendly. More later.
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Nana
non-member comment
Yuk!
Dear Aaron, I have been itching ever since seeing those darling leeches! Please don't go out without your leech socks! I will hope for more pleasant news forthcoming. Love, Nana