Radio Silence

As I've alluded to in a previous post, I intend to spend most of my time in Thailand in 'retreat'—that is, investing this time in a very focused way toward a few specific goals. As such, I'm taking a blogging break, which is probably best for all of us since my readership is 95% Canadian, and I can't imagine you all want to hear about my tropical adventures from the frozen North. Late April I'll pick it up again, if anyone's still interested!

Bangkok—Round #1

I arrived in Bangkok two days ago after what was unquestionably the single worst experience I've had yet travelling. On no account should you fly GMG Airways (Bandgladeshi) if you value service, your dignity, or possibly your life. I could expound for some paragraphs about the details, but since I didn't enjoy experiencing them I expect I'll find recounting them equally unpleasant. Suffice it to say that I landed in Bangkok at midnight, instead of five o'clock in the evening, and as inspired to produce a limerick:

When travelling I suggest
That one avoids Bangladesh;
The plane's there won't fly,
But yet they'll try—
Effort, for once, won't impress.

And that concludes the dark chapter of my adventure I shall remember as Bangladesh (ok, this is entirely unfair—I never got past the airport, so under no circumstances am I picking on the country as a whole. But GMG Airlines, whew—don't do that). Thailand, meanwhile, has proven to be a marginally brighter experience if an extremely intimidating one.

I thought that Thailand would be a breeze after having spent so much time in India. Bangkok especially is a perfectly modern city with quite  a lot of amenities Halifax will likely never have, not the least of which is a cool-ass skytrain (for those who are not in the know, on any occasion where the word 'sky' is used as a prefix for a machine, 'cool-ass' immediately becomes a viable adjective). Yet, the one thing that every city in India has over Bangkok (from a strictly Western—indeed, English—perspective, you understand) is quite a lot more history being run by the British; in fact, Bangkok hasn't got any of this at all and it shows. Everything is different—everything, it's completely surreal and so far I've found it very difficult to cope. Food has been intimidating in the extreme, and though lots of it looks delicious and all of my previous experiences with Thai cuisine bode well, there is so damn much of it and I haven't the slightest idea what any of it is called or how to discover what's in it. So, thus far I've dined at a Subway, a Pizza Hut and just this morning I found to my utter delight a Tibetan/Nepali/Indian restaurant that is completely authentic and makes the best damn momo's I've had yet (momo's are stuffed Tibetan dumplings). **I'm finishing this entry two days later than I started it, and I have since dabbled in some Thai food and discovered that yes, indeed, it is amazing.

But I think the most challenging part of Bangkok so far has been the sense that I am not welcome. It's not pervasive, and I've bumped into several friendly Thais who contradicted this. However, I'm a young, white, North American male and that, sadly, is not a favourable signature to have here. Allow me to explain.

As I mentioned, I arrived in Bangkok very late—after getting through customs and then taking a taxi into the heart of the city, I didn't actually arrive at my intended destination until about one in the morning. Said destination was Khao San Road, the infamous 'back-packer' strip of Bangkok. And, perhaps, twenty years ago it was indeed a great spot for the budget traveller. I've seen it by day, now, and it looks more or less like a normal street, albeit more densely populated by bars and farangs, or foreigners. At night, however, it's an entirely different universe. A couple of friends had warned me that I wouldn't like Bangkok much, and that for someone with spiritual endeavours I wouldn't find much there. I've made a point of keeping my blog PG-13, so to speak, but I'll let you in on a little secret—when I was a little closer to eighteen I was also significantly more interested in the various sorts of depravity North America has conjured up under the label of 'a good time'. Spending so much time around Tibetans had begun to wear me down, a little; as I've written here before, I've not yet broke the habit of seeing myself through the eyes of those around me, and Tibetan eyes are about as far from depraved as I've yet seen. I, at least, have had to work very hard to keep my conscience clean in their company. So, secretly, I was looking forward to a couple of days bar hopping and letting myself off the hook a bit. Khao San Road however, at one o'clock in the morning, did not satisfy my naughty ambitions. Rather it was, frankly, disgusting. I mean that word precisely—disgusting.

Thailand is world famous for its sex tourism; prostitution here is rampant, cheap, and also customizable, a history that stretches back to the Vietnam war, when American soldiers discovered unfortunate ways to blow off a little steam. In doing research on Bangkok from India I even ran into a couple of websites that allowed you to completely design your 'fantasy weekend' (or longer); you could choose the number of women to accompany you, their ages, and also which sort of explicit acts you wanted them to perform. And worse, these packages weighed in at around $300CAD. In the north, where rural life is more common, as is poverty, women are often shuttled down to Bangkok (or even sold out of Thailand) because their bodies are more profitable on the streets than in the fields.

Khao San was littered with what I expect were various western military boys on leave; bulging muscles and crew cuts covered in designer hats and mismatched clothing, beer and cigarettes, vacant eyes. No one looked healthy, despite their bulk; sunken, dark rimmed eyes and pale, sickly skin sat in drunken postures all around me. The North American women reminded me of the sort who were very popular in their first year of university but had, by the end, failed to mature and thus given themselves over to their various appetites. Bright, orange tans, hair that had been forced blonde, and body shapes that smacked of bulimia or at least binge eating and crash dieting scanned the crowd, looking to garner the attentions of the boys. I don't have contempt for these people so much as pity; they just looked lost, or hurt, or both, and the medication they'd found wasn't helping.

The roads themselves were sticky from spilt beer, and Thais, looking depressed, sat at stalls or booths or wagons hawking beer, bongs, t-shirts and their own bodies. At an estimate I'd say one North American male in five had a Thai woman with dense make-up and revealing clothes at their side or on riding on them piggy-back. Most of them walked holding hands, an intimacy I find, in a way, more revolting than the sexual acts to follow because… because one should, at the very least, not have to buy affection. All of these men refused to make eye-contact; they wore their shame plane on their faces, and searched the place with their eyes—I had the impression that they were seeking confirmation that other men were complicit in their act; and, of course, they were. It was a noisy, raucous, dirty, drunken, abusive affair that I exited in about ten minutes. I hadn't slept in two days and I had about 40kg on my back, but I think I was still privately glad that ever guest-house I found on Khao San was full. Oh, and it is by no means a 'backpacker' spot; the cheapest guesthouse I found there was 600 baht, and most settled in near 1000; I'm currently paying 400 baht, and I've found a place that charges 150 (but only after I'd paid for the week at my current spot…)!

And you can see it on the faces of the locals, the contempt, their sense that you've come to use their entire city like a motel room. It's a very Buddhist country, the place is littered with gorgeous temples (wats), and people exchange little bows with each other everywhere. So they try to be polite, but sometimes you can just see it, naked contempt, and I hate it. I didn't earn it, damn it! I'm not that white guy. And I can communicate it, a little; the guesthouse I am staying is a nice example. It's taken me three days to get the staff to warm up to me, but with a quiet, gentle demeanour, polite questions and iterative thank-you's, and finally my continued sobriety and lack of 'company', I've finally begun to receive warm smiles and friendly 'hello's. My message to white people everywhere, and especially men: Please stay the hell home if all you want to do is be a nuisance. You're ruining it for the rest of us.

So, I've felt intimidated by Bangkok and have ventured into it very little. I have to return here, probably twice, before I leave; my current plan is just to get the hell out of it, for now, and perhaps to explore it further when I pass through again. Instead I'm intending to head north, to check out a retreat that's been recommended to me, and maybe to try my hand at a little trekking. But I'm keen to spend the last of my two months in Thailand in the south, among the vast archipelago of islands, where I've heard that if one searches persistently enough you can find a little solitude and a cheap shack to live in. A quiet spot on a tropical beach with only meditation, web design and a little yoga suits me just fine. And yes, I do intend to take pictures!

The Day It Snowed In India

If there is no such thing as karma—if the happenings of circumstance are really and truly nothing more than swirling eddies in the river Chance—then at the very least I can say that it seems perfectly reasonable to me that we should be so easily deceived. For weeks I have been saying: this is it, I am going to have an entire winter with no snow. With two days left before my escape to tropical refuge, the universe saw fit to notice me, smug smile and all. The ground went white, today.

But, my cynicism is really only for play. The weather here is nothing like that of home; where Nova Scotia is an indecisive prankster, India's mountains are a tenacious wizard. The weather, when there is any—and for weeks or months on end, there might not be—is always a performance. Up here, we are in the clouds; they move so quickly that, in the span of five or ten minutes, the valley can shift from utter opacity (sometimes you actually can't see across the street) to pristine clarity, especially since the wetness of the air briefly cleans away the blanket of pollution. Today, I watched spires of cloud go shooting up the face of a mountain, swirling up a kilometre or two of vertical slope in a matter of seconds. It's completely surreal. But with the clouds comes the rain.

For three days (so far) is has rained more or less without pause. I've just never seen anything like it; in Halifax eight consecutive hours of rain is like an eternity. Here, three days is a joke—soon, it will be three months. But, in the mountains where the air and earth are always cold, only direct sunlight brings warmth. And so, as the days of continuous cloud advance, the temperature drops steadily. For two days we've been watching the snow slip down the mountain slope, coming for us. This morning at 6:30am, at last, it arrived. By Canadian standards, there wasn't much to speak of; two or three inches of hail-born snow that's really only crushed ice. It was bizarre, to my coastal eyes, because all of this was happening during the loudest and more impressive display of thunder and lightning I have ever seen. Up here, the lightning is born a hell of a lot closer to you than it is at home, and the way it sunders the sky is straight out of a Jerry Bruckheimer flick. But today, at least, the snow was the interesting bit.

First, understand that the majority of vehicles here are both front-wheel drive and European; they're designed to be fuel and space efficient. So, if you take them four kilometres into the sky and place them on roads with disturbingly lethal outer edges, you're in a tricky spot. But if you then erase all visible traces of treading from their tires, and fold the roads into waves like a flapping bed sheet, what you then have is a lot of very, very dangerous opportunities to look very, very silly. I watched a car try to ascend an incline of about fifteen degrees this morning; after travelling about ten meters in roughly three minutes, he gave up. Which is good, because moments later a van came swimming down the hill in reverse—a make-shift version of rear-wheel drive that did precious little to reduce the number of snow angels the front (back) made as it flopped about like a dying shark.

But the real thrill of snow, up here, is the ridiculously festive atmosphere it generates. The entire town lost power about an hour into the snow day, which means that all the shop keeps and not an insignificant number of school children took to the streets to make the best of the snow. However, in truth what they made of the snow was simply quite a lot of mess and this is primarily because they spent most of the day throwing it around.

I believe that, as a consequence of having so damn much of it, Canadian's have lost the understanding of how to properly fight with snow. I wouldn't dream of throwing snow at, say, some old lady I saw passing me by. Here, however, every street becomes a gauntlet, and everyone in it a target. Tourists fought locals, locals fought Tourists and each other both. Indians fought Tibetans, Tibetans fought back. Friends fought  strangers, and strangers fought eachother. Hell, they even fought the dogs (which I thought was a bit unfair, actually!). In short, most of the snow that fell today did this at least twice. Lined by Indian and Tibetans, I could hardly get twenty steps without assault. From rooftops, from the street, from windows; it was like Black Hawk Down but with frozen water instead of smelted lead (err… ok, well, to be fair their were no smouldering helicopters either, but I'm confident there would have been if any had flown low enough to get caught in the crossfire). I saw more Indians than Tibetans doing this, however, and I think novelty is at least partially the explanation. It was really interesting to discovering the extent to which successfully being amongst snow requires technique. To my absolute delight I found that Indians who are not from Kashmir or Himichal (which get snow annually) are adorably incompetent at negotiating a frozen landscape. Walking up a hill, I sped past a man walking unsteadily forward in what I believe were meant to be steps. He looked at me, effectively running past him, and frowned in puzzlement at my lack of impediment. I did the obvious thing; I shrugged and said, "I'm Canadian." This was a phrase I had a number of occasions to use today, and I confess I was utterly gratified when he looked at me and knowingly went "ooh…". Fellow Canucks, our reputation precedes us. But the better anecdote is forthcoming.

I know, by now, quite a number of the local shopkeeps and usually enjoy a half dozen congenial pauses on my way to and from anywhere. Today, as I was passing a group of them, one in particular, Suzon, was grinning at me devilishly. He asked:

Suzon: Jon! How you like snow?

Me: I'm Canadian. I loathe it.

Everyone: He's Canadian!

Five simultaneous blasts of icy snow pummelled me from every direction. They roared with laughter, and then they waited to catch my reaction. I stood up, and I feigned indignation. For a second, their bonhomie wavered, but then I broke into a grin and said, "Ahhhh. It's good to be home." The joke went over well.

Before I retired to my room to hide beneath the blankets and await the return of electricity, I made one last stop; at my most favourite of convenience stores, Sanjay-ji's Confectionary. Sanjay himself was absent—his vehicle quite literally couldn't rise to the task of surmounting the local hills (ba-dum). The two fellows who were running the shop today were in good spirits, but underdressed for the weather, especially since their only heat source would have been electric. Neither of them wore a hat, and I asked if they were cold. They shrugged, presumably to say "yah, but… deal with it?". I told them they were better Canadians than I, we laughed, and I left. Little did they know my plan! Next door is Suzon's shop, which sells hand-made knitted clothing. A toque with ear flaps and an inner lining is about 100Rs, or approximately $2.40. I scooped up two, snuck into Sanjay's, and threw the hats at them, whereupon I made for the exit at a dead run. You have to understand: this was the only possible way they would have "accepted" my gift. I left with voices shouting a worried "sir, sir!" in my wake, but I made good my escape and they were forced, I presume, to be warm. If anything interesting comes of this, I'll keep you posted. But I leave for Delhi in two days, and Thailand in a week, so in all likelihood the next time I write will be from Khao San Road in balmy Bangkok. So long, winter, hello Southeast Asia!