Winter Trip to Thailand

Christmas, 1996

Wednesday, 10:20AM, December 18th Surat Thani, Thailand

What can be said about public transportation in these times when the great trains and luxurious ships have given way to speed and cost? We are cattle, shipped from point to point, glassy-eyed and packed without even the comfort of the killer's hammer at the end of the trip. Oh lost Cunard Queens, oh faded Orient Express, we would have you back, but then turn on our heels for speed and price.

Some forty hours ago, the beginning flight from Prague to Frankfurt was the stuff for which planes are made---quick, comfortable, efficient, courteously cared-for and reasonably fed. Frankfort airport is becoming its own adventure, a European hub so complex and sprawling it required a bus and sky-tram to eventually locate Concourse D, the departure point for the Quantas flight to Bangkok. Fortunately, there was an hour between flights and even then, the plane was boarding as we arrived. A closer connection would surely have been a problem.

Quantas did their best to make us comfortable, with an attentive crew and good food, but a fully-booked L-1011, every available seat occupied, makes the ten and a half hours to Bangkok test the limits of patience and all the subtle thresholds of pain. The human body is meant to stretch and flex---the human mind needs peace beyond ten channels and two grade B action films. There should be a rule banning Arnold from the air---special un-Schwartzeneggered flights. A premium could be charged.

Once delivered to Bangkok airport, Misha and I debate---a day of rest in a good Bangkok hotel, hot shower and needed sleep, or push on to Koh Samui and island rest? Island rest wins, probably a good choice. The streets outside the airport are choked with drive-on-the-right British style traffic and swarms of scooters and light motorcycles. The kids on cycles are "cruising," California-style, going nowhere in particular, satisfied to be pumping themselves through the arterial streets, hanging out and setting the standards of a mini-bike hierarchy by their dress and the model they ride. 250cc is the king of this hill. An elevated pedestrian walkway, the corrugated pattern of its steel steps worn smooth by a hundred million sandalled Asian feet, carries us over and downward into a jammed food-market---street-food in a thousand varieties, flowers, tee-shirts, Nikes and milling humanity---a first-rate taste of Asia and the smells are at once repellent and overpoweringly tantalizing---perhaps a contracted metaphor for this part of the world.

The train station is hard to find, nothing more than a corrugated iron ticket booth and two narrow-guage tracks. Waiting on benches, we see the first of what we have come to call "Thai dogs." In a variety of colors, they are characteristically tall and narrow, pointy-nosed, with a tail that curves up and over the back. They are everywhere, seemingly ownerless and benign, equally at their ease in city or country and particularly with each other. Without snarling or fighting, they seem at peace with circumstance, whatever it may be---perhaps another metaphor.

The train is courteously crowded and wooden-seated comfortable, a commuter line it seems, its ancient cars with window glass removed and the interior gleaming in new varnish. The faces are fascinating to my western eye. An old lady sitting next to me ties plastic packages of deep-fried variously colored chips to the overhead luggage rack, I suppose on the way to where she will sell them on the street. They wave gently in the breeze from the window and brush against my head. An initial impression of Bangkok is of a city drowning in a sea of concrete and industrial commerce. Reinforced steel and concrete explodes from the ground immediately next to rambling wood-tin shacktowns and I hesitate even to call them that, because it's a derogatory western term and this is where people live and have lived and will live for generations. The passing scene is dishearteningly poor and reeks from lack of sanitation. Fetid waterways trickle through and among these clustered shacks. Where it isn't drifted over in paper, plastic bags and bottles, the water is blue and putrid, stagnant and unmoving, but the residents are crisply clean. Clean wash hangs everywhere and clothes are worn either casually blousy or knife-edged starched and pressed. There is shy friendliness in the eyes that briefly meet mine or occasional disinterest, but nothing of the threat or anger I have felt in the poor sections of American cities. Is it too early for such generalization? Perhaps. But the Thais seem comfortable with what is and less westernized by what might be.

The temples occasionally glimpsed from the train, richly ornamented as any postcard, are buried in new construction, walled-in and their delicate scale overpowered. I wonder if they will so completely lose their context as to become some sort of foolish memento to a past time. We'll return to Bangkok to stay for a day or so at the end of the trip and perhaps the impression will be less pessimistic. Meanwhile, the train lurches on---smooth while running, but ear-splittingly crashing and banging at starts and stops. An elephant, handler easily astride between his ears, ambles down the dusty strip between the concrete piers of a soon-to-be highway and I should be sophisticated enough not to loose my breath, but I'm not. The train is old, very old, probably sixty or seventy years old, with wooden seats not unlike the pews in a church and clean---spotlessly clean like the Thais themselves.

One final, tooth-rattling lurch signals our arrival at the Bangkok train station, a conglomeration of travelers from everywhere in the world mixed into the rich broth of Thai commuters at rush-hour. Perhaps every hour is rush-hour in Bangkok, but it's six in the evening and this human soup seems ready for serving. English is the second language of signage in the station and a travel agency beckons. Will we get hosed in a railroad station agency? Perhaps, but we are dead tired and where else to turn? so we put ourselves at the mercy of an agent and are treated with great courtesy and good humor. We emerge with tickets for air-conditioned sleeping-berth tickets on the 7:45 night train to Surat Thani, bus tickets to the pier (what pier?) and ferry tickets to Koh Samui, our island destination. What do we know of destinations? This island has been recommended by friends, among several others and it's reachable, not only reachable, but reachable now, from here, beginning in less than two hours.

There are those who would never leave home without all reservations made, but for better or for worse, we are not among them. We have two nights booked at a beach cottage on Koh Samui, not all that sure what to expect, but confident in the choices of these smiling strangers who shake our hands and wish us a pleasant trip.

The 7:45 pulls in at 9:15 and leaves at 9:45. This train too is old and unimpressive, but we board and find not berths, but seats---clean seats, but hard seats and our spirits drop. It'll be another hellishly long night if we have to sit up for twelve hours. It is air-conditioned however and soon after we pull out a porter appears, unlocks what look like overhead storage bins and our upper berths appear. He works slowly but steadily through the car, making up berths with clean linen, pillow cases and blankets. By eleven we are in what will easily pass for heaven, lulled gently to sleep by the swaying rhythm of the tracks. I awake at 4:30 and climb down to smoke a cigarette on the outside steps at the end of the car and glancing up at a sky full of stars, my eye is immediately drawn to Orion, my patron constellation. The darkened Thai countryside is flat on this narrow peninsula and I am rested. I go back for more.

So an Asian odyssey and the late-morning bus is what has brought us to this Surat Thani pier to await the next ferry to Koh Samui, four hours from now at 2:30. Well, perhaps not four hours. It has taken a while to write this and they are just now announcing an extra noon boat, as there are a good many of us waiting. Not the big, safe, unperturbable looking car-ferry that stands at the dock, but rather more of a launch, a long narrow boat of sixty or seventy capacity that we have boarded, stepping gingerly below and walking carefully between the sagging planks that separate twin engines at idle. We pull away, somewhat uneasily loaded and leaning a bit portside, through a broad harbor smooth as glass and into the long swells of the Gulf of Thailand.

An hour out, the sea becomes increasingly heavy and portside windows are slid shut, as we are taking a pretty good pounding and the spray from the bow is constant. Misha isn't crazy about boats, but her spirits are good and it's the two young Thai girls opposite us, traveling with their father, who become sick. A Brit woman several seats down, full of good cheer and flashing smiles back at the pier, is getting greener by the moment, but Koh Samui takes shape through the spray-sheeted windows and an hour later we ease into the small port city of Nathon without further incident. The Brit and her companion have two ferries and two islands yet to go and her cheeriness has taken a hell of a beating.

Island taxis, highly decorated pickup trucks with covered bench seats, split up the business for the forty-minute drive across the island. We board and there is much horn-honking along the way, the signal that offers pickups to any likely looking candidate and there are numerous stops as riders jump on and off.

Island Inn has our booking, offering a cluster of cold-water-shower cottages with private bathrooms for 350 baht, a little less than $15 per night. Our friends who've been here would say we paid too much, but the inn is attractively set along a palm-lined beach, the Thai food is excellent, the staff friendly and we sink gratefully into the routine of no routine. The beach is spectacular and in wandering that beach we find even more of a paradise at Lamai Beach Resort and book the next seven days. Same rate, with a much superior cottage nearer to the beach and endowed with the luxury of hot water shower. The Lamai staff is all smiles, indeed all Thailand seems to be built upon the smile and it is not insincere, but a cultural grace that seems to approach the twenty-first century undiminished.

Did I mention the rooster? Ah well, perhaps every paradise must have its rooster and ours lays claim to one as well. Our cottages are raised above ground on concrete piers, an accommodation no doubt to seasonal storms that whip up the Gulf of Thailand. This fine bird makes his morning appearance, as all proper roosters will, at the first blush of sunrise and from directly beneath his random selection of cottages. Sunrise and I don't often blush together anymore---I've had a lifetime of that and value my early morning hours in bed all the more for it. But this fellow is in his working prime, in excellent voice and literally lifts one off the sheets as he struts beneath the cottages and lets fly, endlessly it seems and with the agonizing lack of tempo common to the breed, that leaves one waiting, anticipating, speculating upon precisely when the next call will pierce the rhythm of gently lapping waves and from which direction this violence may intrude. The farmer's alarm-clock may be welcome when their are dawn cows to be milked--- less so on holiday in the south seas.

A quiet word is had with the manager at breakfast, calling gently to his attention the notice on cottage walls that asks residents to be respectful of one another in the enjoyment of quiet. It works for us---we are respectful, we enjoy, we are quiet. He nods, he smiles and I am reassured. Next morning Mr. Rooster is particularly enthusiastic from directly below our cottage and after an uninterrupted half-hour of his best work---surely there must be an island calling championship in which he holds the trophy---I revert to my roots, become typically American and lose my cool. I am not proud of what follows, but a trip-journal is a test of one's fairness in reporting and no place for namby-pamby editing in one's own favor. I appear, thank God briefly, on the porch of our cottage, wrapped in nothing more than the bedsheet, wild-eyed and thinning gray hair askance, screaming at the drop-jawed kitchen and early-morning staff, in the full range of my least articulate yet most direct language of my need of sleep, my insistence that those needs be met and my suggestions for the care and feeding of the rooster. The word fuck may have been used several times---the whole event is somewhat of a blur, but the rooster was taken elsewhere (not necessarily where I had suggested) and peace fell across the resort rather like a wet blanket.

I narrate from a degree of embarrassment, but tranquility must be served (it says so on my cottage wall) and those of us who insist upon it in the interests of others, oftimes get damned little thanks. Future mornings the rooster could be heard, but strangely muffled, as though housed in a distant building and muted with blankets. Staff was kind enough to serve my morning eggs as though I was entirely sane.