Flying to Thailand is like childbirth from the baby’s point of view. Even in the jet age, the journey takes almost a full twenty-four hours, crosses twelve time zones, and leaves the body feeling gassy and unsure of itself. Passengers emerge from the plane’s airtight fuselage like they’ve just awoken from a coma. The bland movies, the plastic trays of chicken in a tangy barbecue sauce, the sleeping positions that never satisfy, the inevitable crying child: it sucks.
If the journey to Thailand is tough, some folks will feed you the illusion that the country itself is also tough. They’ll illustrate wide-eyed stories featuring opium-smoking hill tribes and some old Chinese warlord and ten square city blocks of brothels and malaria-carrying thirty-foot sea snakes. They’ll tell you they just returned from Apocalypse Now. All their taxi rides were white-knuckled rocket shots through the city center where they kissed death on the lips. Then they lost their marbles at sme island beach palm tree hippie Mecca bamboo bungalow. They got a tattoo and hung with Burmese slave traders for the last two-weeks of their stay. They converted to Buddhism.
No. Not so. Thailand is easy, mostly. Its Ministry of Tourism calls it the land of smiles. For most tourists, it is. Decent, hardworking people with good incomes go there to relax. Ten million visitors a year (a huge number) can’t all be wrong.
Or can they?
No, they can’t. I’ll digress for a moment, to make a point.
Zaphod’s Adventure
Many years ago I was a freshly scrubbed high school graduate. Staying true to my upper middle class upbringing, I was scheduled to attend college in the fall. August in Minnesota was winding down day by day, the last carefree breaths of childhood, the end of life with the parents, the end of easy classes and study hall, the end of an era. College would be adventure enough, in distant Wisconsin, where they didn’t call pop ‘pop’ but rather ‘soda’, and where the drinking fountain was bizarrely named a ‘bubbler.’ Almost all my friends, too, were going to college, somewhere. The real crazy ones were heading to Colorado or Louisiana or to famous places in New England. College was everyone’s next era, a comfortable extension of high school, without Mom and Dad to catch you drinking. However, one friend insisted on being different. I’ll call him Zaphod to protect his identity. Zaphod was decidedly not going to college.For him, college was just bourgeois boredom. He was gonna go see the real world. He was going to Thailand.Zaphod told us he had arranged to work in a refugee camp. Our jaws went limp. We felt our knees wobble. He grinned at our shock. He wasn’t surprised by our surprise. Free from school and free to do what he wanted, his wings were itching to spread and fly far into the unknown. His crazy, cavalier bravery made our upcoming education adventure appear stupidly mundane, like camping in the back yard. Never before had we been in the presence of one so awesome as Zaphod. Zaphod, clutching his diploma was voluntarily dropping himself into the jungle. Hadn’t he seen the Deer Hunter? Platoon? Midnight Express? He didn’t care, he said. For two weeks he basked in a heroic glow, separate from the rest of us in our meek herd.
We went to college. We had so much fun we probably considered Zaphod a complete moron for passing up the chance to party. We came back for Thanksgiving and compared notes. We came back for Christmas and found that Zaphod had returned. Four months had passed. Zaphod was alive and well. A few phone calls informed us that he was holding court at his parent’s house, and of course would have a real good story to tell.
Zaphod had worked at the refuge camp and all that, yeah yeah. None of us knew what refugees were. Thailand people? Viet Cong? Names like the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot were trivia too damn unimportant for us. We college kids were only in Poli Sci 101. It wasn’t until a few years later when I was ducking as tracer bullets whizzed over my head that I realized why Cambodians fled to Thailand to languish for years in refugee camps. “So this is what the whole refugee thing was about! Id like to be a refugee myself right now.” But that’s a story for some other time.
Anyway. We listened mildly as Zaphod mused over the good deeds he’d done for the suffering Cambodian refugees. Peace Corps work, we thought: digging wells and serving rice porridge with green beans on the side. But Zaphod’s story took a crazy turn; his animated voice explained how “things had gotten hairy.” Things hadn’t gone as he’d planned. In scary Bangkok Zaphod had run out of money. Gasp! He’d become desperate and had had to resort to his resourcefulness. Wow! While loitering in some outdoor cafe (where freedom fighters congregated over green tea) or maybe it was in a watering hole near the port (where pirates drank and stabbed each other) Zaphod had met an Australian. Not an Australian! He’d agreed o work on the Australian’s boat, which was bound for the United States. And then? But then one of Zaphod’s Thai friends told him a disturbing thing. Oh no. Zaphod’s trusty Thai friend had learned from a reliable source that the Australian man’s boat was carrying – are you ready for this – drugs! Drugs! Oh my god. Midnight express! What did you do?
The story’s details started to get milky. Somehow there occurred another meeting between the Australian and Zaphod, and the Australian insisted that Zaphod work on his crew. Zaphod revealed that he knew what was on the boat and he wanted nothing to do with it. The Australian told him it was too late, and if Zaphod wouldn’t work for him, he’d have to die.
In Zaphod’s basement (his parents were upstairs watching TV) we were sitting around him in a semi-circle of amazement. No doubt some of us wanted to bury our faces in our hands. The story was a thriller. No one dreamed of questioning the story’s probability. We grabbed our knees at every word.
The Australian – a huge, blond man who always wore khaki fabrics grabbed Zaphod. Somehow, Zaphod got free. Frantic chasing ensued through the snaky, chaotic streets of Bangkok and after much pursuit Zaphod knew he was free, at least momentarily. But he still had to flee the country. Then his resourcefulness came to the rescue. He remembered that his mother had given him a credit card in his own name but linked to her account. That same afternoon, Zaphod used the credit card to buy himself a pane ticket home. Escape!
Admittedly, the story’s end was not much of a climax. We were expecting a nightmarish stay in jail or a kung-fu asswhoopin’ or maybe bluffing his way out. We freshmen were, nonetheless, too overcome with the spell of Thailand to be disappointed. Just living a day in such a far out place was heroism.
Four years later, after I’d been to Thailand and places much scarier, I realized what a hoax Zaphod’s whole intrigue had been. Zaphod was like Tom Sawyer, telling a friend how he’d spent the night in the haunted house on the hill. But hell, back then, we craved entertainment. Zaphod gave us relief from comparing kegger during our winter break.
Zaphod never did go to college. He entered the military, became an elite soldier – part of a unit with a Greek letter in its name – and traveled covertly to no-no countries on missions he couldn’t talk about. His ability to awe us thus rose above the need for words or allusion; silence became his fiercest weapon.
What became of me? I’m still trying to impress my friends with cute little tales from Asia.
I’ll try not to pull a Zaphod. I’ll assume that one day, you’re gonna go to Thailand, maybe even some of the other places I’ve been. I don’t want you remember the hunk of bunk I fed you before you knew for yourself. Fortunately, no bunk will be needed to convince you of my worthiness. There’s plenty of sleaze and adventure in the land of smiles, but it’s below the surface. As a resident of Asia for six years, I often lived below the surface, and will try my best to show you what those murky waters lok like. Zaphod probably never saw any real adventure, as he was too busy breaking free from Australians.
Getting On with It
The plane had reached a full stop. With a ‘bing!’ the seatbelt signs gave us permission to stand. The captain began his “welcome to” monologue with a weatherman’s practiced delivery. No one listened. Amazingly, no one really cared that the surface humidity was eighty-three percent. My fellow passengers, who had been sitting since yesterday, couldn’t wait to burst upwards and outwards from their chairs. The eager mass began crawling over itself, sending elbows and armpts into noses and ears, grasping with escalating urgency for their carry-on luggage. “Excuse me.” “Could you hand that to me?” “Sorry.” “Let me just get around here for a sec … thanks.” Once their luggage drill was done, they stood. But they had no place to go.
Not me. I’d done this airplane thing before. Many times. I didn’t stand. I waited. I sat. I crossed my legs and sat some more, as if the last twenty-four hours of sitting had been easy. While everyone else stood stuffed together in the aisles, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of any positive movement at the front of the plane, I worked on my crossword puzzle.
The minutes wore on. The frustrated discomfort in the aisles mounted. People sighed and sagged. I felt eyes on me, admiring me for my calm. I was right. They were wrong. I basked in their admiration, and got a word for nineteen down. “Yes!” I raised a victorious fist in the air.
My moment of triumph could only last so long. Up ahead, the aisles were beginning to clear. My eyes rose to watch the beginning movement. My body waited like a lizard to slide into action. Some of the saps in the aisles were probably thinking I’d made a mistake, that I would be last off the plane. No. In a single, unbroken motion, I unbuckled my seat belt, tore out the crossword puzzle from the in-flight magazine, reached for my small bag at my feet, and stood up just in time to join the flow of passngers waddling up the aisle towards the front of the plane. I heard a gasp from behind me. “Who is that guy? What veteran traveler, dressed in New York black strides with such economy of motion? That mystery man of the world.” I didn’t even look back, as that would have been a waste of movement.
There’s no better way to travel than alone. I move faster, without hesitation, without regret. I don’t have to make compromises with myself. I don’t have to wait for the slower myself to catch up, or the faster myself to stop rushing.
We passengers poured off the plane like an overflowing toilet and ambled towards the immigration lines like a herd of limping moose. Immigration lines can be very long. I wanted to get their first. Though my seat on the plane was nearer to the back than the front, my quick stride brought me almost to the head of the pack, beside the cheetahs and those unashamed tourists who were actually jogging with shopping bags of duty free whiskey and perfume.
I found an empty line and was immediately smiling at the immigration official – an attractive young woman in a blue uniform. Behind me, the rest of the moose herd gradually got into line and caught sight of me at the front and knew I was a master.
“Hello.” I smiled at her like a Tom Hanks movie.
“Hello.” She didn’t look up from my passport, but gave me the Thai grin anyway.
“Is it possible to give me sixty days? I am visiting a friend and his family down in Phuket, and I think I might need more than one month. Normally, on arrival, tourists without a visa already in their passport are given permission to stay in the country for thirty days. Thailand is very flexible with the rules, so it was worth a try.
Now she looked up at me. My face was still grinning in the most wholesome way. “Sorry. If not have visa cannot stay more thurtee days.” Her stamp came down on my passport like a judge’s gavel. Thailand charges twenty dollars for the two-month visas. They’re a convenient source of income. Why should they give away for free what they can sell for money?
The Legitimate Way to Leave the Airport
No matter where you go, be it New Delhi or New York or Djibouti or Des Moines, the rip offs will congregate at the airport. Airports are feeding grounds, with the dumbest, slowest, fattest fish. You’ve just arrived; you don’t know a deal from a steal; you’re still staring at the currency, trying to find numbers you recognize. I’ve traveled copiously during the last twelve years; last year I got hosed in Mexico City for a huge taxi fare. I was not a mster then. It happens. It’s likely to happen again. Stay on your guard, but don’t hate yourself if you suffer a burn or two. Odds are, the rest of your trip will be much easier than ordeal of getting out of the airport.
I felt somewhat more at ease than I normally would when just landing in a foreign country. Several years ago, Thailand’s Ministry of Tourism ordered a clean up of the Bangkok airport, because they genuinely love their tourists. However, rip-offs that cloaked themselves in a legitimate veneer were able to remain. Can you blame them? Imagine you’re a teenager working at a 7-11, earning four dollars an hour. A Japanese tourist gives you a hundred bucks for a pack of gum and walks out the door, smiling. Would you chase after them with the change? At Bangkok International, the sharks still eat as many of us as they can.
I emerged from the baggage claim with my crappy old green backpack on a wheeled cart. Pushing into the arrivals area, one of the wheels was squeaking awful nasty, ruining my cool. Why do I always get the squeaky carts? I pushed forward, pretending there was no sound.
A hotel tout approached me. She looked about forty-years-old, with a desperate face and a blue skirt suit. She said, “Hello. Which hotel you stay? You want some information?”
“Mai ao kap!” I threw back at her, using my most forceful Thai, meaning, I don’t want any, muchas gracias. The idea was to warn her I wasn’t some tourist to be duped. She appeared to not understand a word I’d said. She looked confused, which worked just as well. I slid past her, noisily, towards the taxi counter.
The taxi counter was happy to see me. Of course they were. They looked as official as the blue skirt suit. They had an electric sign that said taxi. I told them I was going to the Meridien President (a hotel), downtown. The pretty girl smiled at me like a spider about to eat and pointed down at the laminated price sheet taped to the counter: six hundred fifty Baht (US $15) for a ride into town. “Hmmmm,” I thought. I was pretty sure the normal price was more like two hundred. She explained that she wold take my money, write out an official receipt, and hand it to the cab driver so that the cab driver couldn’t try to rip me off later. “But I can just go to the taxi stand outside, right? They use meters, right?” I don’t know why I even asked her. The pretty thing just grinned back at me with an even mixture of hatred and guilt, her lips didn’t part to say a word. “Bye.” I smiled at her and pushed my rusty cart towards the door.
Yes indeed, just outside, at the real, official taxi stand, taxis were waiting. They were metered taxis. Make sure they use the meter; pay the cabbie directly; there’s no rip off. Good. I got in. “Meridien President,” I said, trying to pronounce the words the way that Thais could understand them.
“Three hundred Baht.” The driver was an elderly man with gray and black hair. He eyed me via his rearview mirror. At least his attempted rip-off was more modest than the last. I was closing in on the real, official price.
“No thanks. Use the meter, please.”
“No. I use meter, cost more. Maybe four hundred.” This could have been true. If he didn’t use the meter, he could keep the whole fare for himself. Additionally, I have an ingrained respect for the elderly.
“No. Use the meter.”
He protested meekly. I cheerfully offered to take another cab if he wouldn’t use the meter. I sat back on the cracked plastic upholstery, clasped my hands behind my head, and let logic of my threat sink into his head. He turned on the meter and we rolled forward.
The cab could have used a new set of shock absorbers. The air freshener attacked my nose like an airborne toxic incident. Enough magic amulets were dangling from the rearview mirror to protect us from accident, injury, or machine gun fire. The buildings and billboards flew past us, stained gray by Bangkok’s horrendous air pollution. I had time to think.
My mind wandered and wondered how different people might describe their first journey to Bangkok.
- The Prozac Optimist: The Thai people are warm and friendly. They must be the happiest people on earth. What’s their secret? Has part of their brain been removed? Why can’t we nasty-tempered Westerners be more like them? Their white-teeth smiles brighten my day like butter melting on hot pancakes.
- The Safari Trekker: Suddenly I was hurled into a cab. Language flew all around me, incomprehensible. The assault on the senses was assaulting. I an my driver sped off (well above the safety limit) into labyrinthine back alleys that unexpectedly expanded into open-air markets where cobras and strange spices and surface-to-air missiles were for sale. Hong Kong Triad members and transsexual hookers in fishnet cat suits glared at me from the sidewalk. I prayed to the benevolent Buddha to see me safely to my hotel room at the Ramada. I gripped my bullwhip.
- Hunter S. Thompson: My first priority upon disembarking from the plane was to score some high quality Thai grass as soon as possible, maybe also some smack and some amphetamines, to deal with the hangover from the long flight. While waiting in line at immigration I finished the three mini-bottles of Jack Daniels I’d managed to talk the stewardess into giving me. I was entering the land of depraved souls and sticky rice with a head full of acid and three recently dropped tabs of MDA. I didn’t expect to get out of baggage claim without causing some horribly obscene inident.
- Your next-door neighbors: First of all, let me just say that the Thailand people drive like absolute maniacs. I don’t know how, but somehow their traffic seems to flow, even while everyone’s driving in every direction at the same time. The food was absolutely delicious. Some plates were spicy though. The next day Suzy and I were really glad to have a western toilet. The hotel pool in was shaped like a crouching baboon, or maybe it was a mango.
Twenty minuteslater, we arrived at the Meridien President. My total fare was one hundred thirty Baht (approx. US $3), not three hundred and not six hundred-fifty. As you see, even in Thailand, with its arms thrown open to the world, tourists will lose money if they are not alert. My head was dizzy, swimming in this minute-to-minute, heart-stopping adventure.
The Meridien President is a five star hotel. Its main lobby is a marble cathedral with angelic Siamese beauty and youthful hospitality industry smiles everywhere, amidst giant vases of tropical plants and elegant couches around indoor waterfalls and classical Thai music wafting through the air-conditioned and perfumed air. Someday, a James Bond movie will be filmed there. I wasn’t gonna be a guest, however. Too damn expensive. But the cabbie would never have known the way to my shoestring budget gueshouse, so the Meridien was a landmark to get me within walking distance.
I leaned forward toward to the driver. To pay the meter fare plus forty Baht for the highway toll, I gave him two hundred and gestured that he could keep the change. I felt magnanimous. I’d given him a thirty Baht tip. A freshly bathed Thai bellboy in a safari uniform opened the door for me. He appreciated my shoddy shoes and wormy backpack and wondered what the hell I was doing at his hotel.
The cabbie did not look as overwhelmed by my generosity as I was.
I stood. The bellboy tried to hoist my backpack, taking care to not get any dirt on his uniform. I motioned him away and flung the thing carelessly over my shoulder. The bellboy stood back as a cloud of dust settled.
A pleasant-faced Chinese man’s was standing next to me. He and his wife and son were about to enter the cab. “Excuse me,” he said, “did you come from the airport?” “Yes.” “How much did you pay?” “One hundred seventy. He looked disappointed. “Oh. Because I just agreed to give him two hundred (US $5)” “It’s okay” I reassured him, still feeling magnanimous and carefree about money, “I gave him a tip, so it worked out to two-hundred. He looked back at me with relief. He didn’t want to get riped off, not after how much he’d paid to stay at the Meridien (approx US $120 per night, plus VAT and service charge).
The little nuclear Chinese family got in the car. I turned to look at the father. With the squinting eyes of Indiana Jones, I communicated with him in silent glance. “Have a good trip, fellow traveler. It’s a hard road, and we gotta stick together.”