01/02/03: Arrive early in the morning and head to the Khao San Palace. Wally’s for breakfast, check emails, coffee at
random café with L, O and the mercurial F. Drop of a roll of film
for development, dinner at The Connection – not great – with the aforementioned
crew. Dong Dea Moon and Chart with the same, plus ‘Mai’ and ‘A’ – Thai friends
of the Nong Kai contingent.
02/02/03: Wally’s again. Pick up
photos, riverboat to Chinatown with L, F and Welsh B. Back to our domain and then get a taxi to Nana for an Indian. Dong Dea Moon for a
quick beer before bed.
Welsh L & K had a connection in Bangkok: somebody who
lived there in a penthouse apartment, with a swimming pool and everything. Furthermore,
it happened that K’s brother, G, was on his way over for a month’s holiday and
they’d be tied up with all of this for at least the next couple of days. They
left our train at Samsen Station, as opposed to terminating at Hua Lamphong
Station with the rest of us, and it wasn’t long before O and the faceless extra
from Mut Mee had gone their separate ways too. By the time we reached
the Khao San Road it was just me and my partner left, booking a room back at the Khao San Palace.
But our accompanied travels
were far from over – L made sure of that. Before we parted company, she
arranged for us to meet her and O later, in a café at the end of the road.
There we would be introduced to F, a by now semi-mythical Dutchman who L and O
knew through their time spent teaching English in Nong Khai.
The rainy season had reached
cessation and, as we entered February, the climate had levelled out onto a very
hot plateau. I didn’t feel uncomfortable being back in Bangkok, but neither did I feel much at ease. This probably had to do with the pending arrangements that needed to be agreed upon
as a matter of urgency, especially if we decided to revert to our Vietnam plan
and had to obtain visas in advance.
After returning to Wally’s
for breakfast, I found myself in an internet café checking my e-mails. After that,
I moved onto our rendezvous early to drink coffee and gorge myself on CNN and
find out how the UN Weapons Inspections were getting on (Laos had been a
television free zone, for the most part). Nothing substantive had materialised
as yet, but that didn’t seem to be good enough for the United States, who, like
some wild animal being held back by Colin Powell’s leash, were gnashing at the
bit, impervious to the UN’s pleas to allow the inspectors to complete their
task. I had another cup of coffee and cursed it was not of the Laotian kind.
One by one our entourage
arrived: first O, then L, and finally F. Standing at around 6 feet 4 inches,
this lanky Dutchman, with an Andrew McCarthy-esque quality about him, possessed
a voice of surprisingly deep timbre. As with O, I took to him almost instantly.
Our meeting was brief but
attempts were made to decide what to do with the rest of our allotted time in
Southeast Asia. My partner and I had a month left before we were due to fly out
to New Zealand. O had almost the same amount of time at his disposal, after
which he was scheduled to leave for Outer Mongolia. L was in a similar
predicament, but she’d be returning to New York. I cannot recall F’s circumstance but I think he was the least restricted of us all. The early
reports were that Welsh L & K had disappeared off the radar, but we knew
that they too had plenty of time on their hands and had made explicit their
intention to explore someplace else other than Thailand, once brother G had settled in. Given that everybody had either already explored the south of
Thailand, or had no interest in going there, a common dilemma appeared still to
be shared: Cambodia or Nam? Or even Cambodia and Nam? Indeed, unless one flew,
to get to Vietnam one would have to travel through Cambodia anyway, so if any
of us were intent on going to Nam then they might as well go to Cambodia too.
About a week earlier, some Cambodian rag (the Light of Angkor) had attributed a highly
inflammatory quote to the Thai actress Suvanant Kongying, wherein she had
supposedly accused Cambodia of having ‘stolen’ Angkor Wat from Thailand and
that she ‘hated’ all Cambodians. It’s almost certain that
she’d said nothing of the sort, but Cambodians, apparently, are a people who
don’t very often question what they read in their press. Not even the
then Cambodian Prime Minister, Hun Sen, bothered to check his facts – for there
was no physical evidence to back the story up – and publicly denounced Miss
Kongying, chipping in that she was, 'not worth a few blades of grass near the
temple,' with the Cambodian Government the next day banning the broadcast of
Thai television programmes across the whole of the country.
Cambodia has a sort of inferiority complex where its
larger, more economically successful neighbours are concerned (Vietnam to the
east being an equal source of antagonism, although Laos, to the north, less
so), and following Hun Sen’s comments protesters gathered en masse outside the Thai Embassy in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh
to express their distaste. Worse was to follow when on the 29th January 2003 word erroneously spread through the protesters’ ranks that twenty
or so Cambodians had been killed in reprisal back in the Thai capital. These rumours sent
everyone ballistic: the Thai Embassy in Phnom Penh was razed to the ground and
many Thai-owned businesses were either looted or destroyed. Consequently, the
border between the two countries was closed indefinitely, although officially
only to Thai and Cambodian nationals. And this is where F’s experience came to
light, for he had recently tried to enter Cambodia via the border crossing at
Aranya Prathet, only for the Cambodian Border Agency to stamp his visa,
rendering it null and void, turn him around and send him back to Thailand.
We’d
been aware of these goings-on (what would become known as the 2003 Phnom Penh Riots) since our second
day in Nong Kai, but it had taken a while for the actual severity of the situation
to reveal itself. Welsh L & K had raised the possibility of travelling to
the island of
Koh Chang to wait and see how events panned out. Located south of Trat Province
on the southern tip of Thailand’s border with Cambodia, and not far from
Bangkok itself, its location was conducive in the circumstances. It was also an
island L had already been to but thought pleasant enough to visit again. The
question was how long were people prepared to stay in Koh Chang and where would
they go from there? The answer could only really be Cambodia, with maybe a short
stay in Nam tacked on the end, assuming that the political tensions between
Cambodia and Thailand could be resolved quickly enough.
This rough outline of a plan
agreed upon, and with enough room still for manoeuvre, we re-dispersed and
agreed to reconvene at The Connection – an establishment popular with travelling Israelis – at L’s behest. In-between, I submitted a few
rolls of film for development. I did this because I was concerned that some of
the older rolls of film I was carrying were starting to degrade in the
humidity, and also because the many cartridges that I was carrying were taking
up vital room in my bag.
Later, to compensate for the
exclusivity of The Connection, my partner and I persuaded everyone along to
Dong Dea Moon. Next up was Chart, where we’d watched K-19: The Widowmaker and Panic Room during our last stay in
Bangkok, and where we were joined by Mai and ‘A’, young Thai lads who L had seemingly adopted as her guides, having got to know ‘A’ through her
teaching network. (‘A’ was called exactly that, although I assume that this was an abbreviation of sorts.)
Meanwhile, L’s limits were
fast becoming obvious: she demanded civility, liked things to be just-so, and
had no obvious enthusiasm for getting drunk. But at least she liked to get out
and about and was entirely unfazed by her surroundings, no matter how weird. With
this in mind, we agreed to meet with her on the Sunday, where she had
arranged to meet up with yet another of her many contacts.
The plan is to board the Chao Phraya Express, the riverboat
that services the Chao Phraya River. L has brought F along, which I am very
happy about. We’ll also be meeting Welsh B at Pier N13/Tha Phra Athit, the
nearest port of call where we can board a vessel. (I include the proper
adjective in describing Welsh B because she made a big issue out
of her Welshness, whereas I apply the same description to Welsh L simply to differentiate him from
American L.) We have no fixed
destination in mind and so make a spontaneous alightment eight piers downstream
at Pier N5/Ratchawong, which services the area in and around Chinatown. Chinatown
is pretty hectic, and really there’s not a lot to see or do, save for the odd
shop selling cute Asian tat. It is also very hot. Back on the boat,
the river’s a good place to be in weather like this. The Chao Phraya River
itself is the colour of mud and a pretty dirty body of water, but
you wouldn’t know it from the preponderance of water hyacinths that float upon the
surface.
The evening brings with it
irritation. First up, it has become very apparent that Welsh B is some sort of
racist, the focus of her heavy disdain being me and my partner – in other
words, the English. The way she expatiates on the matter comes as quite some
surprise, especially when she moves on to the subject of rugby. So brazen is
her manner that I can only conclude one of four things: that Welsh B thinks that we are both Welsh too (unlikely, despite our surnames); that Welsh B
has wrongly assumed that at some juncture she let us know that present company
was excepted, or that she did actually say this but I just didn’t hear her (a
little less unlikely); that Welsh B doesn’t like either of us and has contrived to cause as much offence as she can (not impossible); or that
Welsh B takes great pleasure in talking up her Welsh heritage and it doesn’t
even occur to her how she might come across (probable). My partner and I aren’t
really bothered either way, but the relish with which she delivers a
blow-by-blow account of how the Welsh Rugby Team narrowly defeated the
‘arrogant English’ on their own turf – an account that is delivered completely
off-subject to a group of people who either don’t care for rugby or know not
what rugby even is – is bizarre at best and egomaniacal at worst. The bad conversation would be easier to
bear were it not for the bad meal that accompanies it. I had been looking
forward to dinner: an Indian meal in the district of Nana, just down from Siam
Square. L warned us that the area was a little salacious, although maybe not as
notoriously so as Patpong (modesty permits me from expanding on this) but that
the Indian cuisine found there was the best to be had in the whole of Bangkok. If
this is true then we have drawn a very short straw. The food itself isn’t
terrible but the chicken I’ve ordered is nothing of the sort; a dry, dark-grey
brawn, I suspect it might be of canine origin. It could be pork, at a push, but
if it is then the bones holding the meat together don’t make much sense, for
they are quite small. And then there’s the service, which is cursory, and L
apologies for the complete failure of it all – she’s visibly embarrassed by the
behaviour of Welsh B in particular. There’s nothing for it but to head back to Dong
Dea Moon.
It was around this time that I began to labour under the
misapprehension that the classical actor and theatre director Simon Callow was no
longer with us (i.e. dead). I have no idea from where I acquired this grim
untruth – maybe I was disinformed, or perhaps I dreamt of it – but you can
imagine my surprise when many months later (it could have been a full
year) I chanced upon a television interview with said actor, looking very much
alive, and, by all accounts, very well.
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