Khao San Day 2

I wake up at 7:45am. I walk around Khao San in the daylight. Many vendors aren't open yet but I manage to get myself a pad thai breakfast with a mango fruit shake (100 Baht / ~ $4).

I book a tour to the Floating Market and Rose Garden for tomorrow and then check out the vendors. I end up buying a tee-shirt, two bikinis, and an ankle bracelet. I try on countless pretty but ill-fitting and poorly made summer dresses. Every food stand catches my eye. I'm feeling really tired and hot and sticky so I go back to my room for a shower.

(Image taken from the web)

After the shower I make the mistake of lying down. Before I know it I'm asleep for several hours and now it's 7:30pm. It's the heat and jet-lag. There goes my plans for sightseeing temples and going on a little bike tour.

I get up to face the evening. Khao San on night number two is even busier because it's Saturday. The density causes the night-life to lose whatever charm it held yesterday. I get myself a bowl of street soup. As I'm eating it I notice that its main ingredient other than water is cubes of congealed blood. Um...yuck...I eat it all anyway because I don't want to waste it. The cubes were gross but the broth and noodles were divine and perfectly seasoned.

(Image taken from the web)

I take refuge from the bustling streets in a little alleyway that leads to a lounge bar called Hippie de Bar. At first I thought that it would be full of hippie backpackers, instead I am surprised to find that it was full of Thai university students and there were barely any tourists. They were all drinking and talking in a relaxed and animated way. The decor is eclectic, and looks like comfortable hip found furniture. The rafters have the names of flowers hand painted on them - hibiscus, camellia, geranium etc - and the tablecloths are screen printed with the definition of hippie on them. The music was familiar Britpop, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, Guns and Roses etc. I pick a seat and ordered a Bangkok Delight, and hope that I haven't ordered a prostitute. A Delight, beer and two hours later, I end up with a drawing of an octopus and girl and some ramblings in my notebook. I think I may have a slight obsession with cephalopod imagery these days. The t-shirt I bought this morning had an octopus on it..
Beautiful fashionable Thai women are everywhere. I'm getting a bit desensitized to the surface beauty. I wonder if people in Toronto will seem ugly when I get back because my threshold for beauty has shifted.

Time to go back to the Siam and to my third shower of the day before bed. It's really hot and sticky in Bangkok. I feel like the embodiment of mango-sticky rice (which by the way is delicious from the vendors.)

(Image taken from the web.)

Bangkok and Khao San Road!

About 22 hours after I take off from Toronto, I'm in Bangkok. I can't even process the craziness of this act - what would Marco Polo think?

The taxi driver takes me from the airport to the trendiest district in Bangkok - Banglamphu - and to an area called Khao San, a place that is arguably "the most high-profile bastard child of the age of independent travel" according to the Lonely Planet Guide. At midnight I find myself in the Siam Oriental Inn after a fruitless and tiring search (my baggage has tripled in weight) for another recommended Guesthouse. I have a room for two with a private bathroom cause that was the cheapest they had left - still only 280 Baht / ~$10 per night.

Though it's late and I'm jet-lagged, tired, and my body aches from the plane, I am drawn outside by the glitz and energy of Khao San. It is a mixture of cheap eats, accommodations, bars, clubs, shops and street hawkers, riddled with tourists from every nation and walk of life. Hippies, gap-year kids, soft and hard-faced backpackers, and semi-permanent tourists and expats. They all seem beautiful, tired, boisterous and slightly apathetic - part of this is the heat and part is the effect of being a tourist in Khao San. There are hordes of them looking for cheap beer, strong liquor, and a good deal, and they outnumber the Thai. The locals are the vendors - they run the food stalls, restaurants, massage and nail parlors and other services. There are street musicians and pad thai cooks with sizzling woks on the streets. There are sex trade workers, all lovely and gorgeous - some impossibly so - and many of them transvestites. There are drunken and sober men walking arm in arm with these fantasies. There are maimed beggars on the streets, and face-masked locals that sweep up after the detritus of the tourists.

I am sorely dehydrated and go for two slices of watermelon and mango-pineapple fruit shake. The pad thai temps me but I settle on three spring rolls instead. As I eat these from a carton with a large toothpick, I notice a group of Thai kids, maybe 13 to 16 years old, sitting in the gutter. One has a guitar and they all begin to sing some catchy English song with gusto, they begin to dance and sway and get really into it. They put on a little show. I can't help but smile and bop along to their enthusiasm.

As I'm enjoying their performance I notice something odd about my spring rolls. There is a bright red dot shining on them, and it doesn't matter where I move the carton of rolls, the dot follows. I imagine my spring rolls being the target of a sniper. I look up and around but can't spot my opponent. Finally I spy a group of tourists on the third floor of a bar above. I see them and they smile, wave and laugh. I think they beckon me to join them, but I was feeling fine and wanted to be a part of the street life instead. I see Thai artists selling paintings. I am drawn to one and have to resist buying it. I always want to buy art when I travel, but it's not the most practical thing to buy large paintings when you're backpacking.

Walking around I've met several tourists. They have mixed feelings about Khao San. Some hate it, some love it. This Israeli man who had been in Bangkok for six years told me he loved it and there was no better place to be for women if you were a bachelor. This guy from South Africa kept on looking at my breasts as he asked me the typical male questions - it was a deja vu of Cuba. A nice woman gave me the skivvy on the prices for street food - she prevented me from paying a 500% mark-up! I "talked" to this old Thai man and he gave me leads to find a bike for tomorrow - even a place with free bikes. A tourist told me it was too dangerous to ride Bangkok - I am not surprised, but I see many locals on bikes going slowly, without helmets of course. I will take my cue from that.

It's almost 4am. I take a cold (but that means luke warm near the equator) shower and fall asleep like a stone, and Khao San is still humming.

(Image taken from the web)

My Tribal Brain

I've landed in Tokyo and am in Narita airport waiting for my connecting flight to Bangkok. I’m feeling a bit disconnected. It’s the sheer structure of the airport. Who built this? How did they know what would be needed? The pathways, bathrooms, kiosks, currency exchange centres, movators, stores, terminals, windows, seats, light fixtures, appropriate carpeting and countless other items that all combine to form complex interconnected systems. When the flow of time and the human factor is added to the mix, the complexity skyrockets. Where is the repository of foresight needed to create this hive structure? All this human-made complexity is overwhelming my tribal brain. The airport laughs smugly at the notion of a pastoral redemption.

When Aldrin, Armstrong and Collins took pictures from the moon, humanity saw Earth for the first time from space - and we were awed and humbled. This beautiful blue-green marble looked beautiful, wondrous, fragile and finite. The borders were clear finally. A lonely sphere - spaceship Earth, with all of us creatures its witless and intrepid passengers. A spacecraft gave us this gift of perspective.

Now an aircraft has given me more. Every time I fly, I am disturbed by my overhead perspective. The surface of the planet has been terraformed by us. Perfect circles and squares of manicured and cultivated green, monocultures of course, interspersed with grey-lifeless swaths of concrete, steel, asphalt and glass. Lonely islands of hemmed in wilderness sprout up here and there like broccoli heads. What are we that can make these things? We are prodigal, amazing - enfant terrible. I cannot help but feel that we will get our comeuppance in some epic way. What can be more epic than extinction? One big difference between us and all other creatures that have gone extinct before, is that we can see it coming - like a chill in the room, we can see the breath of it in the air, but we refuse to acknowledge the need for a sweater.

(All images in this post taken from the web)

Up Up and Away!

Every time I’m on a plane, and it’s taxi-ing on the runway, I always try to capture that particular moment when the plane goes from being terrestrial to airborne. I am amazed that an object so large and heavy can just “lift” off of the ground. I am even more amazed that the moment of lift-off is so hard to feel on a plane. Sometimes the only way I know the plane has transitioned is because the horizon begins to shift away from the horizontal. This time, shortly after it does, I hear a bunch of squeals from some kids in the plane. It must be their first time. Their response is in sharp contrast to some of the adults on the plane who already have their window shades down and have gone to sleep.

And as always the ascent into the clouds thrills me. I am in a freaking cloud! Some of them have fantastical shapes and seem dense, like whipped cream, and some are barely there like smoke.

A Little about Thailand

Thailand is in the middle of Southeast Asia.

It is bordered by Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia and Cambodia and shares waters with Vietnam.

Bangkok is Thailand's largest city and its capitol, centre of political, financial, cultural and commercial industries.

Most of Thailand's economy is based on exports and tourism, and it is rapidly industrializing.

It is the 20th most populous country in the world with 63 million people. 75% of whom are ethnically Thai, 14% are Chinese, and 3% are Malay. They are devoutly religious and 95% of all Thais practice Buddhism, specifically Theravada Buddhism.

It is slightly larger than Spain making it the world's 50th largest country with 513,000 square km of land.

Thailand is a constitutional monarchy ruled by King Rama IX who is the longest ruling monarch in the world. Reigning for over 1/2 a century. He is now 82 years old and held in very high esteem by the Thai.

The currency is the Baht. And 1 CAD = ~ 30 Baht


(All images in this post taken from the web.)

The Calm Before the Storm

Tomorrow I leave for my summer vacation. I’ll be gone for 7 ½ weeks. The majority of my time will be spent in Laos at a school my friend Ramsey has helped found and build. Its mandate is to help educate poor Laos youth within a philosophy of environmental, social and cultural sensitivity and sustainability. I don’t really know what my role will be there, or how my presence will impact the ecosystem of the school, its teachers, students and surrounding community, but I am sure I will find my niche when I arrive. My presence will disrupt, but hopefully add something positive as well.

As well as experiencing Laos and the school, I also intend to travel to Cambodia and Vietnam, and a bit of Thailand. On the surface, this seems a commonplace enough vacation, but things have taken an unpredictable turn as of this morning. My mother has just phoned and given me the contact information of someone in Hanoi - capitol of the north of Vietnam - who might be able to help me find my father. I haven’t seen him since I was two years old, when my mom divorced him, and took her and me out of the country. All I have is a light bulb/possible fake memory of him throwing me up into the air as an infant. Evidently, I also have a half brother. I have never seen or talked to either of them and my mom has never wanted me to contact my father. She doesn’t talk much about him, but I know things went down really badly between the two, things she’ll never forgive him for, but she agrees now that I have a right to know him and my brother. I don’t know what to feel really. The worst thing will probably be to look for them and not find them. We’ll see.

I’m hoping to not trip off any landmines and avoid the more treacherous of the parasites there. I haven’t taken any shots nor any preventative pills with me - just some mega garlic pills and some grapefruit seed extract that is supposed to create an "unappealing intestinal environment" for the parasites. You can say I told you so if I come back with malaria, dengue, or if I just don’t come back. This trip is going to be fun and intense. I can’t wait. I am beside myself with excitement, nervousness and a bit of fear. Wish me luck. I miss my bike already!