Soap

I'm not much of a soap fan. The closest I get to being devoted to any kind of long-running saga is listening to The Archers (a radio soap opera that's been running in Britain for just over 50 years and, no, I haven't been listening that long though sometimes when Neil and Susan Carter are wittering on it does feel like it). Even then I only really enjoy it when there's a good scandal... (yes yes I know there's one at the moment, and no, I don't want to know. It's on CD at home: don't spoil it for me!). Sorry, too many parentheses. However in my current hotel I have been deprived of my one creature comfort, BBC World which, after two weeks, has been so imprinted onto my brain that I can probably repeat the trailers verbatim. As a result I have been channel-surfing and one treat I have discovered is Thai soaps.

I speak about four words of Thai so far: kop khum kha (thank you when a female says it), sawa-di kha (hello, female), mai (no) and chai (yes). I don't think I will get much further since it is fiendishly difficult: the same word can mean several different things depending on the tones used. But, as I've discovered, you don't need language to watch rubbish television. When I arrived back in Bangkok yesterday, I switched on the TV, searched fruitlessly for the familiar spinning red ribbon (not quite sure how that represents the world; looks more like a carrot garnish from a dodgy Chinese restaurant to me) and realised that I only had CNN, HBO and all the Thai channels. Flicking through a few of the latter, I kept stumbling on the same one. It was showing something called USACA (that's my transliteration rather than theirs) and was, I soon determined, the Thai equivalent of Dallas.

There's the rich family (RF for short: their house looks like the inside of a Thai five-star hotel, all sweeping staircases, gold fittings and ballroom-sized lobbies) and their poor counterparts (PF for short: they live beside a temple, naturally, in a small wooden house). Each family consists of a mother and grown-up son and daughter. I've no idea where the PF's father figure is but when I tuned in last night, the head of the RF had just died/been killed or murdered. This was easy to work out since the whole RF, accompanied by some truly dire dramatic music, were pulling back the sheet in the morgue. Cue floods of tears from RF daughter, a steely look and curled lip from RF son (ominously dressed in black) and no emotion whatsoever from RF mother, bar a sidelong glance at both her children. RF mother is obviously a baddie: she wears heaps of make-up a la Sue-Ellen and lots of black and diamonds. She also looks very Western so perhaps she is the female Thai equivalent of Robert Carlyle/Dougray Scott/Jonny Lee Miller, playing archetypal British villains in US films. PF mother only wears very natural make-up, clear nail varnish and little green, peasanty tops. Similarly RF daughter screams and howls when she cries (very very un-Thai, they don't like PDAs of any sort) whereas PF daughter demurely lets tears roll down her cheeks but never makes a sound (she also wears peasant tops, white ones). Post the morgue, the RF family went into the corridor where the whole PF family were waiting: RF daughter attacked PF son (soft hair, warm colours, no black shirts or curled lips) and managed to bash his head against the wall. So he's obviously to blame in some way. Lots of camera focus on each family crying (or not in case of Bad RF mother). Cue more Capulet/Montague-esque music, without the subtlety and the credits.

On my return to the hotel this evening it was on again. Ooh it was all go. It began with the funeral of RF father at which RF son gave PF son a steely Paddington stare for a good few seconds. Confusingly both sons were sporting plasters on the right side of their foreheads (obviously RF son had a bad night between episodes). Then the police arrived, interrupting the service and RF son made it very clear that PF softy was to blame. After a bit of filler and more crying (of both types), the police arrived to arrest PF son, just as RF son drove up to the humble PF abode in his very big silver SUV. PF mother tried to stand between her offspring and the handcuffs but to no avail and off he went, for some reason, in the back of a pick-up truck (perhaps they have different vehicles for different classes of criminals?). RF son then chose a very bad moment to try and revive a romance with PF daughter (he's evidently not been watching the same programme since it is clear that a make-up-free character cannot allow him into her life).

Whilst PF son is being grilled by the police, RF family take the father's ashes to the temple. Son and daughter cry, light joss sticks, hang marigold garlands (given as offerings to Buddha) on his picture; but RF mother still shows not a scrap of emotion (she could give Hazel in the Archers a lesson or two; or even JR). When her unsuspecting offspring are out of the way, she has a little chat with the picture of her ex-spouse, probably telling him how lucky he is to be out of the show, then leaves. However the camera shots of her feet and the shadows behind her, combined with the closest I have ever heard to comedy horror film music, suggest she is not alone. Suddenly a new character appears to break up the sextet and his raised eyebrows and hers suggest they don't like each other much. Unfortunately, RF daughter overhears their conversation (which even I can tell suggests that RF mother had something to do with the death) and confronts her Mama. But she's not wearing black clothes and red glossy lipstick for nothing and sweeps off up the staircase, leaving her daughter in tears.

I wasn't sure I could take much more but of course character seven (he has no distinguishing features so is obviously going to die soon) arrives at the house, records his conversation with RF mother on his mobile phone as she throws brown envelopes at him. So he's the blackmailing assassin, she had hubby killed and poor orange-shirted PF son has been set up and is left in chains (literally), holding the ring-less hands of his quietly tearful mother. Of course at the end of the prison visit PF softy is being returned to his cell as RF hardy is talking to his lawyer outside the jail...somehow he managed to get his lips through the wire fence and curl them.

The show then cruelly ended and I was left with another, on a different channel which began with a heavily made-up woman standing on the steps of a very opulent house, surrouded by what sounded like several symphony orchestras, whilst a man, wearing a plaster!, begged her for understanding... Who needs language?! I'm positively bilingual!

Sin City

I have arrived in Pattaya, the last link in my trail to find connections to my Dad. It is easily the least likeable, in fact the most detestable city I have ever been. Luckily I am leaving in four hours' time. If you wanted to find somewhere that sums up all that is bad about Thailand (and there is plenty that is good) this would be the ideal place to start. The coast, at least three interconnected bays stretching out in all directions, is so polluted you are advised not to swim in the sea. The nightlife is such that you can see the orange glow from over half an hour's drive away, the only lights on a very dark country horizon. And there are so many visitors, so many accommodations to be made for the tourist, that the construction continues day and night. But even the sound of the building work is drowned out by the noise of the clubs and discos: every centimetre of available space is built on, offering every kind of drink, every kind of cuisine, every kind of amusement you can think of (and many, I am sure, that most would not be able to imagine).

I stayed in a hotel recommended by the tourist office at Bangkok airport. Let's just say I won't be using them again. In the lift going up to my floor ( a huge empty space, with echoing corridors reminiscent of The Shining) I chatted to an American guest. 'This is the worst hotel I've ever stayed in', I said, hoping to share some fellow feeling. 'Oh it's all about who you know in this place,' he replied, 'I have a 55 sq metre condo, all new and only 800 baht.' 'I'm only staying one night though'. At this he looked at me, I'm not sure if it was with surprise or sympathy, and then I got out of the lift. This morning I saw another American, obviously leaving his condo, with a TV and a rug, and several bags piled on the hotel luggage trolley: he was moving to another apartment he told the porter. Whereas I can't wait to get out of here there are plenty, of all nationalities, mostly men but women too, who choose it. I imagine this is because it is cheap, sexually liberated and hot, but I'd rather live in the Antarctic than in this assault to the senses.

For once I find myself agreeing with Michel Houllebecq. His novel Platform , which I finished just as we landed in Bangkok, is about the exploitation of sex tourism in Thailand and how it is far from the worst threat facing the planet. He has been compared to Camus and indeed his main male characters do tend to resemble Meursault in L'etranger: nonchalant, arrogant, morally questionable. He is difficult to read, since his characters seem lifeless, a mere front for his manifesto but at times I turned down the corner of a page, wanting to remember some pithy bit of wisdom. As ever, he wastes no time in his description of Pattaya where his book ends: this, he says, is a 'cesspit'.

Learning

During my first few days in Thailand I seemed to have lost certain abilities that I usually take for granted. For example, I woke on the second morning, grabbed the first white tube I saw and put its contents on my toothbrush. It was only the smooth, somewhat unctuous texture in my mouth that made me read the wording which said, in English, shaving cream. On the same day I went to use the Skytrain for the first time and, again, instead of reading the very clear instructions in English I ignored them and tried to negotiate getting a ticket without help. For some reason I had given up reading.

I was reminded of this initial experience today, when I joined a snorkelling/kayaking trip in the Ang Thouang National Park off the coast of Samui. Expecting the weather to be unforgivably hot I dressed in a t-shirt and loose long trousers, feeling smug that I would thus not get burnt (which is more likely and more painful now that I'm taking doxycycline as an anti-malarial). Alas, we weren't on a gentle, slow vessel but on a speed boat with the emphasis on speed: our driver spent most of the journey racing his friends so that by the time we arrived all of us, bar the luckiest two people furthest inside, were soaked through. So much for my preparations: the t-shirt stayed on over my swimsuit, but the trousers, well I wasn't planning to squelch around in those all day. I was so nervous about kayaking (the last time I went anywhere near a boat, a small canoe somewhere in France, I tipped it over within seconds) that I concentrated on technique. Blissfully happy that I hadn't capsized it in what was, after all, a Gulf rather than a boating lake, I didn't pay attention to the fact that my t-shirt and swimsuit only covered me up so far and that even factor 30 is not necessarily up to the job here. I attributed the discomfort on the return speedboat journey to the hard edges of the boat's seats. Oh if only.

In the joyous salt- and seat-free environment of my hotel room, I noticed that the pain I felt sitting in the boat hadn't faded. In fact, far from fading it was getting worse. The evidence was on show in the full-length mirror: for the first time since I was about six or seven years old, I had burnt everything that wasn't covered up by swimsuit and t-shirt. I have the tell-tale, and so far from fashionable, marks of a day's sunburning on my backside. Remember those Coppertone ads? Well add thirty years and change the colour to beetroot. For some reason I seem to have given up knowledge and have to keep re-learning. Some of the lessons are more painful than others...

The Price of Travel

Before I started this trip, I'd always wanted to go round the world, to 'travel'. I'd missed my cue before and after university and I kept fantasising 'well perhaps I'll go next year, or the year after'... but I never did. Now I'm wondering if I actually want to, if in all consciousness it would still be possible for me. I think not at the moment. There are several reasons for my change of heart but the two clearest are the environment and the notion of 'travelling'.

I can't claim to be an expert, having never snorkelled over coral before, but here in Chaweng, the busiest beach on Koh Samui, what was perhaps once a living organism, full of fish and plant life is, now, as empty as the desert. I spotted the odd crab, one shoal of fish and some stray nemos bobbing up from the deep and dashing away as soon as they saw me but there was little for them to feast on. What's more the water, instead of the clear blue of, let's say, the Aegean, was as murky as an open-air swimming pool that has been full of children coated in suncream... And even though it strikes me as physically impossible to squeeze any more development onto this side of the island (though the west is still relatively untouched), the sound of hammers and drills can be heard from the sea and in between the taxis, songthaews and jeeps runs truck after truck full of girders, cement and rubble. Can islands sink?

It makes me question my own notions of what travel is. Koh Samui used to be a backpackers' paradise, apparently, and their interest in it sparked more mainstream tourism such that it is now more like the Costa del Sol than anywhere else I've been. As Alex Garland's The Beach pointed out, at least in the book form, the cost of finding the wilderness is its loss, since everyone else discovers it. The Rough Guide's approach is to suggest the next island up, since every backpacker wants to find the next Beach. Thus they all disappear. I live in one of the most developed countries in the world so I have no right to criticise the country that seeks to make something of the natural resources so loved by its visitors. But I feel uncomfortable about contributing to their destruction.

And what of those who 'travel'? I understand travel to fall into two main categories. Tourism is not, in my opinion, the same as 'travelling'. The first has very clear objectives for many: learning about, seeing and enjoying a new culture whilst hopefully having a break,usually for a shortish and fixed period of time. The second is more of a voyage, to more countries, for longer, to learn both about others and one's self. I am sure there are thousands, millions of people who go travelling and learn a great deal but I seem to have met several, only in passing I admit so they could be lovely people in other circumstances, who act as if the only consideration whilst travelling is how to squeeze the last penny out of the locals.

In a very very cheap Thai cafe where as far as I could tell the most expensive item was all of 200 TB, that's 2.60 or $5 or so, I watched a relatively well-dressed young English woman waving a Malaysian note in the faces of the staff, explaining very loudly that this was worth 100TB and could she therefore eat something? I don't know if she had simply failed to change any money, couldn't get any cash out of the thousands of ATMs or had run out, but as far as she was concerned she was entitled to food. The staff shook their heads. The young woman then obviously managed to find some money because she ordered the cheapest things on the menu, 10TB (13pence or 27 cents) worth of rice and a juice. At this point I could accept that she must have been stuck (even though I noticed her boyfriend/husband/friend, with whom she was at odds, crossing the road to a rather nice resort on the other side of the road) and it was good to see that she had got something to eat. I wondered if I should check that she was okay. But what happened next appalled me and quelled any desire to help. Once her rice arrived she stood up and asked for more: 'this isn't enough rice; give me some extra' she shouted, shoving her bowl in the chef's face. She wouldn't sit down until they complied. The staff wearily dished out another portion. And this in a country where the average daily wage is supposed to be 150TB. Or is that weekly?. She's not the only one: in an internet cafe (rate for 1 minute: 1TB) I watched an Australian woman argue that she hadn't been using it for 40 minutes, only 35 and in a songthaew, the cheapest form of transport on the island, for which it is advised to check the fare before getting in the back, a young man (who'd jumped on without checking) dismissed the driver's request for another 10TB and walked away with his cocomut. This isn't travelling; it's bullying. Or begging.

I want to see the world without taking from it. But I wonder, as Hurricane Rita approaches Texas and a typhoon hits Japan, as young Westerners travelling on a shoestring behave as if the locals are there to be exploited, if that is still possible.

The Impermanence of Suffering

I went to see the Big Buddha today, a 15m-high golden statue that sits at the top of the island. It's not as impressive as Bangkok's Reclining Buddha but it's still beautiful. I had gone because one of Dad's friends had said that he placed a tile there for Dad and I wanted to see it. I had imagined a wall of remembrance or of prayer, where all the tiles were placed, engraved in some way, and you could read the messages. The reality was a little different.

At the base of the statue they are building (or rebuilding: I couldn't tell which) a temple and there is a stand full of bricks and tiles which can be bought, written on with Tesco Lotus (I kid you not, they're everywhere) blue markers and put on a table as a contribution. The table contained only today's bricks and tiles; in a heap behind the wall of one of the shrines was a tumbling mass of yesterday's and all those previous. Through the dust I could just make out a date at the end of August. I wasn't going to see Dad's.

So I dedicated three of my own to him. One from me addressed to Mr Bill as he was known here, one from my sister and her family, and one from me and my partner addressed to Dad, since that's who he was to me. As I was writing the messages, one of the monks asked me where I was from and then proceeded to practise his English on me. He had a little book called How To Speak English and he showed it to me in the hope that I could help since I knew the language. Unfortunately, though I could read the English, I wasn't very good at reading the Thai...! He noticed that I had written on three bricks and asked me why: I tried to explain that my Dad died three years ago, that he loved Thailand and the way of life and that Buddhism was the closest he ever got to religion. When he asked how he died I tried to explain his sadness but the monk looked perplexed. An older monk who was sitting beside me and had so far said very little, looked at me, smiled and said very quietly 'all suffering is impermanent'. I realise that this is the most well-known of all Buddhist statements but, for a moment, on a sunny peninsula in Thailand I felt relieved. And the fact that my bricks would soon join the immense, falling pile, not achieving any exulted status whatsoever, no longer mattered. In fact, it made perfect sense.

Modern Life is Automatic 2

It seems odd to be sitting in a tiny cafe on a tiny island off the coast of Thailand, typing a message into a computer and, hopefully by the time you see this, uploading my first few photographs. In this instance I'm testing the water: I've not taken many photos as yet and, now that the battery has fully reached red, I won't be taking any more until the UPS man arrives with the one digital object that is not sold in Asia. I'm finding it frustrating...today, having just removed the battery that had given its all, an elephant strolled past. This is my first digital camera (you couldn't tell could you?!) and I spent ages deliberating over which one to buy or whether to buy one at all. Remotely it's not as simple as a manual SLR and I'll miss the anticipation of the fat blue envelope landing on the doormat full of holiday memories. But technically, to stick with film is a bit like choosing a typewriter over a laptop so I bought a digital designed exactly like a manual. Now I'm just hoping that the sacrifice of a few days' battery power is worth the flexibility of sending them whereever and whenever I like.


At the risk of sounding like my grandparents getting out the slide viewer to show us lots of pictures of the Trossachs (when I was a child I was always amazed that my parents let them use that word in front of us, since I was convinced that it referred to part of the male anatomy) here is my favourite site in Bangkok: the Reclining Buddha. He is very very large and all that shine is gold leaf rather than paint...





Okay that took forever on a 256K machine (considered high speed) so I shall have to edit my choices a little more judiciously.





Here is old-style Bangkok...


and new...




...old-style shopping and transport in one...

and the future arriving...



And I've just edited my first bit of html! Wonders will never cease.

Brent Cross Reincarnated

When I was a child I went shopping a lot. In fact, most Saturdays were spent in one mall or another either in Cambridge, Peterborough or London. So much so that I was surprised to discover, when I met my friend Kate, that there were families that didn't spend so much time in Marks and Sparks. Having just spent a few days staying at the heart of the Bangkok shopping district I can safely say that my experienced knowledge of the inner workings of Brent Cross (a mall in an unsalubrious and rather lost area of North London, next to a big dual carriageway/expressway) was no match for the polished professionalism of the Thais.

Not only do their shops open 10-10 every day, no sorry hours on Sundays for quasi-religious/workers' rights reasons, not only are there ten or fifteen malls side by side (one selling just IT and camera kit...guess what, I have bought the only camera not yet available in Thailand so no spare charger there then!) but all of them are connected by the infamous 2-line Skytrain and its walkways so you never need to descend to the level of the traffic. Imagine, if you can, fat concrete pillars all the way up Oxford Street or Fifth Avenue, supporting a monorail worthy of Metropolis from which walkways deliver you direct to the doors of Selfridges, NikeTown or John Lewis. No more dodging red buses, black cabs or righteous cyclists. No more imagining how much better Oxford Street would be with a fast lane, for those who know what they're doing, and a slow one, for the dawdlers. Simply get your train from one high-rise glittering glass tower of consumption to the next and buy buy buy. The traffic is still there of course and so is the 'other' shopping, the sort that it is difficult to see from so high up, the bustle of the street markets, the selling and buying of the cheap food, clothes and supplies that support the livelihoods of those who earn less than a Skytrain day pass.

It reminds me of something I read a long time ago in Hunting Mr Heartbreak by Jonathan Raban. He writes about several different places in the US including New York and he describes how that city could be seen in terms of the extremes of air people and street people (forgive me if I misquote; I have several - too many!- books with me but this isn't one of them). In the air live the penthouse and apartment dwellers, the wealthier residents who never touch the street if they can help it, moving from air-conditioned cab to elevator to lobby, from home, to mall, to work. On the street are those who live, eat and sleep on it, in cardboard, on the rubbish that the air people leave behind, on the pavements that their polar opposites would rather not touch. Bangkok, it seems to me, makes Raban's metaphor concrete.

However, this being Thailand it is not quite so simple. As I passed yet another shiny ziggurat in the sky I noticed something equally shiny at its base: a shrine. This particular one, known as the Erawan shrine, is mentioned in most guidebooks because it is rather beautiful but there are several more, often just to the left or right of the main entrance (that is the entrance on the ground). When a building is constructed, the builders must allow space for a spirit house or shrine, to appease the spirits who have been forced to move to make way for the new edifice. Apparently the opening of the Grand Hyatt Erawan Hotel was delayed until the shrine was built and a more auspicious day dawned. I was happy, chastened even, to see that there were as many hordes of worshippers, not tourists, around the base praying as there were hurrying along in the sky.

Catching Up

Well I've left Bangkok and have reached Koh Samui and so far I'm not impressed. Lots and lots of development, and I mean lots, crammed round the edges of a mountainous island of about 250 sq km. Underneath and in between some of the building, hotels are drilling for water and streams run dry and filthy with holiday rubbish. I had a long chat with the taxi driver on the way in about how an island with no springs of its own manages its water supply and he told me that it doesn't, that there is never enough, at least not for the locals. Which is as I suspected but doesn't make me feel very comfortable. Not that anybody else looks very bothered: it is as ever the needs of money and commerce that determine what happens to natural resources.

I wasn't planning to write about this but it is on my mind since, in the depths of my jetlag last night at 4am, I watched a BBC World documentary about China. Apparently the government, determined to preserve its economic miracle (and who wouldn't, out of the countries we live in?) has been forcibly throwing farmers off their land, killing them even if they get in the way, in order to use the land for hotels, factories and posh housing developments. The land, which belongs to the farmers, is taken away for little or no compensation. I found this devastating and dangerous, for all sorts of reasons but mostly because I am aware that the drive to develop economically is always more important, to all of us, than the need to grow food. Who was it that said that one day we would all wake up and realise that tarmac is inedible?

Modern Life is Automatic

One thing that has changed since I last used a rucksack almost, ooh, twenty years ago is the fact that I now have so many electronic things to carry about. And they all need chargers...of course the one that I forgot is not for the iPod or the mobile phone but for the VEC, the Very Expensive Camera that I bought a few days before departing. Lovely as it is, it needs a battery, one of those big fat batteries and I managed to forget not only the spare but also the charger. Luckily Paul is coming out in two weeks and can bring it.

However, after our first day's touring together, the VEC and I nearly came to blows in the calm surroundings of Bangkok's Grand Palace when I discovered that I am not the only one who doesn't like the heat...the poor thing couldn't cope and switched itself into some kind of not-quite-off-but-not-on either mode (the camera version of sulking. So I caught the very large reclining gold leaf buddha but not much else. Of course once we returned to the magnificent cool of the hotel bedroom it suddenly sprang to life again. But the magic three bars of battery life had mutated into one (all that digital sweating) so now having lots of memory card room remaining is rather unimportant since it only wants to take pictures in fridges...

PS

Here's my current view...North London in all its glory (well, you can see Canary Wharf, just). I'm hoping that my views, and perhaps my photography will improve over the next two months!

Here goes...

It's four hours till I leave the flat, nine hours till I leave the country. I’m packed, vaccinated and insured, the technology is charged and though I have yet to learn how to use my very new digital camera I’m sure twelve hours in economy is ample time to read the manual. If you only see text in this blog you’ll know it wasn’t…

I've been planning to do this for sooo long that I can't quite believe that I'm getting on a plane and going. Granted six months have become two and the world has become Asia and the Antipodes but I am actually taking flight. That last word is rather unsettling since I hate flying at the best of times but today I have the world's worst travelling companion, a severe cold. At least by the time I arrive I won't be able to hear myself coughing since my ears will have blown.

This journey started out as a memorial, to my Dad, and though it will still serve that purpose I hope in a way that it brings me to the end of that process of memory and helps me start on another, on a life beyond looking back. I'll know soon enough.

I don’t have time to write much more so I’ll return when I’ve landed in Bangkok, found my hotel and negotiated the first of many encounters with internet cafes.