It’s business as usual on a Saturday night in Bangkok’s Khao San Road and the meat-market is on electro-overdrive; the attitude is tough and every body is dressed to kill but I am not excited far from it I sit and watch and drink a beer I have the weary traveler’s blues aand find all this ultra modernity démodée the long shiny fingernails the booze-by-the-bucket sex sex sex will tear you apart will eat you alive (those cock-sucking porn-star lips have teeth), the 24-hour mercury sunsets the shifting tatoos of rock’n roll fantasies laughing gas jokes for hedonistic bombshells small & fast thais and big clumsy foreigners like in some B-movie about Nam (but where are all the drugs?!!) fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck cheap girls pulling cheap tricks, cheapcheaper than cheap, somewhere in the twilight zone, so thin. come here. come to me. now. I let my mind do the talking I merely sip my drink and courteously fend away two working girls who come my way. One offers a “thai massage with a happy ending”, with the other I chat for a few minutes: she is pretty and in her eyes are sweetness and an unfathomable sadness too. She comes from the north. I would like to talk more but I don’t want to take too much of her time. Time is money.
Somewhere in Bangkok there is an alley called Soi Cowboy, a small red district with strip joints and motels (and V.D. clinics). It has been there since the days of the Vietnam war, when soldiers came to Thailand to spend their money on pussy and brown sugar. A small souvenir left by the American presence in Indochina.
*
My traveler’s fatigue extends itself to sightseeing the next morning as I walk around Ratnakosin, the royal palaces and temples, with their long queues of tourists and guides and taxis and touts. I have absolutely no wish to go inside so I rather wander about the city in the general direction of Chinatown and the central train station thinking to myself that what I am suffering is an India-withdrawal syndrome. As everyone who has been to India knows, everything outside of India feels fake, for a while, artificial and tasteless. I walk down an avenue which could be anywhere: China, Japan, the US, even Mexico. I find refuge in second-hand bookshops, like I always have, everywhere. I feel cosy and serene, with the promise of a million stories ready to be unfolded before me. Most I wouldn’t want to read (I have my standards, and my tastes), but I enjoy the possibility given by their presence.
I still haven’t solved the credit card mystery, so I exchange a few dollars and walk down the river and get a ferry across to the Wat Arun temple and monastery. It is built in the very baroque Khmer style that reminds me of mahayana buddhist temples in India. In an attached shrine I find a very smiling golden buddha and I sit in silence for a while, feeling peaceful really for the first time since I came to Bangkok. As I sit there I see the rituals of the Thai worshippers, who kneel and bow down and make offers of incense, lotus buds, and 20 baht notes attached to long wooden leaves; they then take a small silver cup of water, put it to their lips and forehead and pour it on the lotus flowers. Nice to find little oases of nirvana in this very samsaric city.
I cross back with the ferry to the other side of the river and eat a big bowl of noodles with seafood in one of the many food-stalls. Food is good and cheap in Thailand and as usual better on the street than in the restaurants. Like Japan and China, it is a story of variations on a noodle: green noodle, hakka noodle, string noodle, dry, soupy or fried, with vegetables, seafood, pork or chicken. A good meal costs about one dollar, and I haven’t tired of noodles yet, for the variations are many.
*
I give up on sight-seeing altogether and decide to hang-out in the neighborhood instead, sitting on a bench in a park by the river, reading, writing and drinking the occasional cup of coffee or bottle of beer, wandering down alleys that go nowhere, suddenly. I have mixed feelings about Thailand with its overtly tourist-friendly attitude where everything is for sale, with a smile, for the right price. I feel like I’m in the Costa Brava, or Cancun, and I miss the tough roughness of traveling in India or Pakistan, where every little thing is a challenge that rewards you with the pleasure of accomplishment, where travelers greet each other with the warm solidarity of accomplices, or long lost friends, and where the curiosity of the encounter between traveler and local is mutual. So far I find my relations to the Thais shallow and commercial, and I hope to change this view as quickly as possible. It’s terrible to feel like a gringo in Puerto Vallarta. I am trapped in my own loneliness, the fortified castle of my thoughts and emotions, and although it is already four days, I haven’t yet had a conversation with anyone. Five, if I add that strange Friday at the Hyatt in Bombay. But I don’t mind, it is like doing a little vipassana in the middle of the maddening crowds.
No comments:
Post a Comment