Brian Felsen

Image via Wikipedia

One of Mr. J’s servants picked us up at the guest house and took us to Doi Suthep, a wat from the 1300′s on top of a mountain. You walk up 300 steps to get to the complex. Very nice views, lovely cloister, but it’s another wat. An Asian tour bus came and its people were more fascinated by us than by the wat. We actually went into a gem store there, which was frustrating because Dilek, me and Elif are at least one and probably two too many people to buy something. Elif had sold some silver in Turkey and wanted to spend that much, period, on a gem. Dilek wanted to pay for everything. I wanted her to spend a little more if she saw something she liked. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t pretty ugly, but she didn’t buy anything.

We then went to Doi Inthanon National Park. There we saw Phra Mahathat Naphamethanidon, a pair of chedi built by the Royal Thai Air Force to commemorate the king’s 60th birthday in 1989. The area is lovely – gardens with flowers of every color, magnificent views of mountain peaks, but the chedi are just plain spooky. It’s a his and hers tomb-to-be, each facing the other, each requiring a walk up many, many stairs to get to. His is austere, with a single Buddha in the middle. Hers is insanely ornate – carvings of her in action all over the inside walls, plus perfectly awful carvings of great architectural highlights from all over the globe, paid for by various governments.

The rest of the park was lovely. We saw three waterfalls, starting at the one on the top of the mountain. Elif and I hiked down from the 3rd one to the 2nd one, which was the largest, and the hike back up was a killer in the heat. The driver then drove us from the 3rd one to the 2nd – we didn’t know it was accessible by car – we felt a little silly.

The driver got us to the church on time and we caught a bus south to Sukhothai. It was advertised as a 2nd-class bus. Imagine sitting on a crowded school bus for 6 hours, but much less comfortable. Not only did our backs and tailbones hurt, but our asses were killing us. We arrived in Sukhothai at 12:30AM. Immediately we were hit up by the motorcycle taxi mafia. There we were, us four surrounded by a dozen of motorcycle taxi people wearing pink jackets trying with brochures of guest houses they wanted to take us to. We said, no, we want to go to one we already had in mind. We argued for awhile; a guy from the Balkans (!) with a handlebar moustache came up and told us that we would love the place his “friend” was recommending, and we went to the customer service window of the bus station to ask for help. They had a sign “Report problems and scams, get help” but the guy inside was quite nasty and wanted us to go with his good friends at the motorcycle taxi mafia. We asked him which way was our hotel and he said it’s over 5km down the road. We said that’s impossible and showed him our Lonely Planet map. Turns out, they’d built a new bus station way out of town and that’s where we were. So we said we wanted a tuk-tuk or taxi, as Dilek and Cos wouldn’t get on a motorcycle taxi. The guy said there was no transportation at 1AM except motorcycles. We asked Cos and Dilek. Dilek was not getting on a motorcycle. So we hitched up our packs and started to walk.

We’re walking down the main road for maybe 20 minutes without seeing one car of any sort. Nothing. Then some lights come from way in the distance, getting bigger, getting bigger, and then I see the scariest face in the world bearing down on us – it looked like the guy at the beginning of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre – twisted, mouth hanging open, eyes bugging out – and driving a sawngthaew tuk-tuk which was mounted backwards: it was like a motorcycle pushing a cart. He was a mute, with spastic twitches, but he had a great smile. We told him where we were going; he made 50 with his fingers, we said 40, and he was happy. I didn’t think you could negotiate after 1AM in the middle of nowhere, but we did. The hotel was another 5 miles – much further than what the guy at the bus station had told us! He dropped us off at our hotel and then took out a card printed in block letters: “I will take you all over Sukhothai for only 500 baht. At least 3 hours. Over 14km of ruins.” I told him no thanks. He then made lots of grunting noises and twitches and held up four fingers. I told him thanks, but no, we wanted to walk around ourselves. Then he made the numbers 3 and 5 and a circle for 0, and I figured, let’s hire him. He was so happy. He asked me what time and I said 8AM, and he showed me 8 fingers twice and then made me shake his hand to seal the deal. We had ourselves a driver.

Th 4/4

He was the first driver to show up on time. Sukhothai was the first capital of Thailand and was big from the mid-1200′s to the late 1300′s; it has the peak of Thai art and architecture. There were 21 different sites and 4 ponds. There was a large lotus pond with a bridge in front of Wat Mahathat, whose stupa spires feature the lotus-bud motif. Inside its walls were 200 chedi! The 15-meter brick-and-stucco Buddha at Wat Si Chum was our favorite, but all the different sites – about a dozen – were lovely. Although it was as hot as Ayuthaya and the ruins at Ayuthaya were in better condition, Sukhothai was more enjoyable, mainly because of our driver – not having to walk around in that heat from place to place was a good idea, and it was really too large to walk around in any weather. What I liked about our driver – I forgot his name but it was something like Pai – is that he would try to explain what we were seeing. He’d point to the Thai on the inscriptions for what he found interesting, and then we’d find the corresponding English. We fed him breakfast but what really made his eyes light up was whenever we asked him to get whatever he wanted to drink – he ordered a frozen fruit shake and other cool stuff. He also seemed to know exactly where we wanted to go even before we told him, and he didn’t leave anything out.

At the end he wrote on a card “Si Satchanalai-Chaliang Historical Park 60km” and then took us to a friend of his. His friend looked like a real badass – muscle shirt, loads of tattoos, and we would be riding in the back of his pickup – but Dilek and Elif had had enough. I whined a little – it was supposed to be spectacular, and we’d planned to see it and it was so close – but it’s supposed to be similar to Sukhothai and they’d really had enough. It was too hot and they didn’t believe I’d ever really take them down south to swim, and I decided to choose not to ruin my marriage by seeing some ruins. So our driver takes us to the bus station, where we get harassed by some sleazy bus company operatives. Elif says she wants a VIP bus to Bangkok and this guy says we have a wonderful 2nd-class bus. Elif says she wants to see it first and he says, if you buy the tickets, when the bus comes if you don’t like it, I’ll refund your money. We laugh at him and a bus arrives to Phitsanulok, a larger town of about 100,000 less than an hour to the east. We take a bus there, as transportation options from there to Bangkok are supposed to be much better. The bus was 3rd-class, no air-con, and oh did we sweat. At Phitsanulok we found a bus to Bangkok – no VIP, but nice enough. We slept on the bus and woke up when the bus stopped at the Bangkok airport. The airport is north of the city and we were coming from the north – we had no idea that the bus would stop there and thought it would only stop at the central bus terminal, so we started yelling and jumped up and grabbed our stuff and hopped out.

We went into the airport and asked if there was a flight to Krabi and they said the daily Krabi flights are sold out for weeks, but there’s a flight to Phuket in a half-hour, the last one of the day, at the domestic terminal 1km down the road. We ran out and caught a cab, told him domestic terminal, and the driver says OK and then drives right past the exit ramp. We start yelling and say domestic, domestic, and point behind us, and then the driver has to drive to the next exit and turn back, and we get there, run on line, are standing behind these Sikhs that are taking forever, get our tickets, run to the gate, and the plane is late anyway.

We land in Phuket and the Phuket airport is about 35 minutes outside of town, so we take a minivan into town to a recommended hotel, which turns out to be a shithole. We walk all around downtown Phuket, go into six other hotels, and they’re dirt-cheap, or expensive, and they all have shithole in common. Dilek is getting loopy. She wants to walk to the bus station – it’s 1AM again – and try to find a bus to Krabi. I tell her that there will be no 1AM buses to Krabi. It takes some convincing; I’m glad we packed light, one backpack per person. Finally we give up and stay in an expensive one ($20) that turns out to be dirty anyway. I feel satisfied that I got them south to swim ahead of when I promised I would. I don’t know how many more days of stupas and bots and wats Cos could have taken.

Image by tallphil via Flickr

We hired a tuk-tuk to take us to the ruins around the city. The ones downtown are all walkable, but it was too hot, and we wanted him to take us outside the city to go to the ruins of Wiang Kum Kam. It was hard getting him – he waited for us while we ate breakfast, laying on his back in the back of the tuk-tuk even though we hadn’t hired him yet, and when we finished he said hire me, hire me. We told him where we wanted to go, and he balked: “It’s far! It’s far!” It’s hard to negotiate with people who want your money but only want it easy – they really would rather sleep than work. We agreed on a price and he took us to Wiang Kum Kam, the earliest historical settlements in the area, from the Mon in the 11th century. It was flooded and abandoned in the early 18th century and the ruins look much older than they are – ruined. Then we went to Wat U Mong, which is a forest wat from the 14th century outside of town. It was a nice complex with a lake where we saw ducks and fish. From there we went to the Hill-Tribe museum, which was lovely – small, but it was well-curated and nice to see the crafts and tools, as well as photographs of the many different kinds of hill-tribe people around Chiang Mai. Then we went back downtown and saw several of Chiang Mai’s temple wats, which is about all the city has to offer. Many were nice – especially those of Burmese style – but nothing really moved me like in Bangkok. Also, they needed a Jesus to come along and kick the moneychangers out of the temple – the tuk-tuk touts were harassing you inside (“Where you going? Where you going?”). Elif’s starting to answer them “To hell. You go there?” “Away from you.”) but nothing seems to work. Also in the northwest, many Buddhist temples have women walking around with sticks holding lots of tiny birds in bamboo cages that they’ve just caught – they ask for money and they’ll free the dozen birds trapped in one of those cages – it’s good luck! The whole thing is quite despicable, and many temples in Bangkok have signs saying “We do not have bitches walking around with trapped birds”. Wat Phan Tao was really impressive, with moulded wooden teak panels supported by 28 huge teak pillars, but they had a sign “No women.” Wouldn’t want to distract those spiritually higher than we are with 51% of the human species now, would we? The driver dropped us at Wat Bupparam; I gave him 700 baht, and he demanded 8, and I said, “You said 800, I said 650, we agreed on 700, and that’s all – you’re – getting.” And we walked inside Bupparam, which looked very different – lots of peacock symbols (means something solar, common in Burmese temple architecture).

We had a lovely late lunch afterwards, during which I was so focused on how to get out of Chiang Mai (it wasn’t our style) that it was only when we paid that I noticed that the waiter/cook/owner was a transvestite, all decked out with makeup and blonde hair, the only thing missing being that she really needed a shave. We tried to get a driver for tomorrow to take us around the national parks nearby, and had a hell of a time doing it – many didn’t want to go (“too far, too far”) and those that did wanted to charge extra to see something else like the waterfalls at the top. Everybody was trying to sell us on an excursion to see the hill-tribesmen. The problem was that I could tell right off that there was no way of having an authentic experience in Northwest Thailand. All the hill-tribesmen I saw were on the street selling stuff, decked out in traditional garb like prostitutes searching for white people. The only difference between them and the Thai merchants was that their dress was more colorful and their faces looked like Native Americans. Did I want to ride elephants in the forest with opium-addicted guides and have hill-”tribesmen” pose for photographs in front of their bamboo giftshops? Well…no. I saw an ad in a local magazine advertising the services of “Mr. J.”, called him, and hired him for tomorrow. We went to the famed and fabled Night Bazaar, which sucked. All the writing was in English and the sellers were like mosquitoes. Chiang Mai has a huge tourist industry, except that during the hot season, there are no tourists, but plenty of people in the tourist industry. Get me out of here.

Image by orangebrompton via Flickr

We’re at the Laotian border just ten miles from Vientiane, its biggest city, and we don’t go. I do the math; I want to see Sala Kaew Ku (Wat Khaek, meaning “Indian Temple”) here, and it’s an hour and $30 a person to get visas for Laos, and then there’s transportation to Vientiane, and we’d have to come back the same night or else have to carry our bags with us, and it’s a real pain to get from here to the northwest, with mountains in between and no trains or planes direct, and the flight to Bangkok is at 11AM, so let’s bag Vientiane and get on that flight. Vientiane is in Laos, and if I’m going to triage stuff out of the concept of “seeing Thailand”, Laos has to be saved for “Seeing Laos.”

Far weirder than that was Wat Khaek. It’s one of the most bizarre places I’ve ever seen – a 1978 shrine made by Luang Pu (“Venerable Grandfather”), a Brahmanic shaman who made his own mix of Buddhist and Hindu iconography and mythology. It’s essentially a huge, weird sculpture garden of cement statues of Hindu gods and Buddhas mixed with things that look like Munch paintings, Polynesian masks, 1930′s WPA art, people clubbing each other. I exposed maybe a roll of film on the place, which made me feel quite guilty, not about the money but about looking back on the trip and seeing where my aesthetic priorities are – kitsch over high art – but this is the Rolls Royce of kitsch, not even in the same ballpark as the 5 Temples shrine in Los Angeles, not even in the same ballpark as Gaudi Park in Barcelona. They had chickens and statues of chickens.

From there we went to see Phra That Nong Kai (the Holy Reliquary in the Middle of the River). It’s a Lao chedi which slipped into the Mekong river in 1847 – it’s now near the middle and continues to slide – and its top is only visible during the dry season, which we were in. You can just see the top of it; the rest is under water.

THAI Airlines had a bus which went the 1 hour south to Udon Thani, where we took a plane to Bangkok and then a connecting flight to Chiang Mai. (We made a V, flying southwest and then northwest; there was no other way of getting there directly.) The flights were wonderful, except for some turbulence on the second leg undoubtedly due to the heat.

Chiang Mai came very highly recommended by my friends the Ojalvos, but it reminded us of San Francisco – not in its topography, but being a picturesque but not lively enough. We arrived at 3, settled in, took Cos to a Yunan mosque (where Chinese people with skullcaps asked us if we were Moslem) and Cos prayed inside for ten minutes while we sat, and then we went to an overrated dinner dance at the Old Chiangmai Cultural Center. We met a biology teacher from Kansas who was teaching in Singapore; he didn’t know much and confused Jared Diamond with Richard Dawkins. The food was bland of course and the rushed dinner was accompanied by Thai dancing performed by the first ugly Thai women I’d seen; they were too young and rather inelegant. After dinner we were ushered outside to an amphitheater where we saw hill-tribe dances which were much better. After that ended, the hill-tribe people tried to sell us stuff.

(Beautiful hill-tribe stuff at The Lost Heavens Tribal and Primitive Art, www.thaiway.com/thelostheavens)

We went downtown to Udon Thani‘s only taxi lane, and ran into a very Thai problem. In the Kusturica film “Black Cat White Cat,” Dadi says “There’s a saying they have at the Bulgarian border: if there’s a problem you can’t solve with a little money, solve it with a lot of money!” Well, there was no amount of money that would get most of Udon’s drivers to take us where we wanted to go. They were just plain lazy. “It’s far! It’s far!” Finally we resorted to listen to the tuk-tuk touts “Where you going? Where you going?” and explained our situation. One said he has a friend with a car; he’ll take us to him. I said no, your friend should come here. After several cel-phone consultations, his friend does come. There’s no way we’re going for a ride with a tuk-tuk driver to the middle of nowhere, to have someone quote us an outrageous rate, which we’d refuse and then have to pay the tuk-tuk to take us back to town.

The friend has a brand-new SUV pickup, and is a well-dressed and well-educated Japanese man. Turns out his brother wasn’t available to do it and begged him to take us; he said no but then when he found out where we wanted to go, he wanted to go too, so he figured, why not do a road-trip and get paid for it? He quoted us a very low rate and told us his story: his wife’s a restaurateur in Japan, he owns an Internet café in Udon, where he has family. We went east to Ban Chiang. It rained once for 30 seconds but hard, but Elif and Dilek were very happy in the back of the pickup. The village around Ban Chiang was gorgeous, and the villagers and children all smiled at us. Not many farang in the northeast, and I loved it. Wat Pho Si Nai had the burial ground with over 50 skeletons and pottery from over 4000 years ago, and a nifty museum full of well-described artifacts, especially vases with bunt-orchre swirl designs. It’s under fierce debate how old it all is, depending on what techniques were used. Excavation was done by Penn.

Then we went northeast on paved and dirt roads to Wat Phu Tok, which was one of the highlights of my life. It was the domain of a famous meditation master Ajahn Juan, who died in a plane crash in the early 80′s. In the middle of this plain in the middle of nowhere in the northeast corner of Thailand, there’s a huge sandstone outcropping with caves and unbelievable views. At the bottom there’s a temple-without-a-center with reliefs of Buddha’s life surrounding it, and a pond, and that in itself is beautiful enough. But then you start to climb the stairs.

The stairs are made of wood and go into the rock. The wood is rotting in places and broken in others. The rail is of wood and if you hold onto it, it will come off from its base and swing wildly. If you lean on it you will die. Your job is to climb. There are seven levels. You climb the stairs to one level, and then you walk on wooden planks (that are falling apart) hundreds of feet over oblivion to get to a cave temple, which has a wooden floor, and then you can take the plank to the other side and get amazing views, and then go up another level, where it’s a little cooler and a little scarier.

I had many thoughts. I was exhausted and scared and alone and alive. I experienced enlightenment on Level 6. I did not have my camera. Elif was with the others with the camera. Caffeine affirms your thought-path with a yes! People in Thai cities wear ski masks from pollution. I have occasional feelings of discomfort and irritation that I’m having them and irritation with myself for being irritated and irritation with myself for thinking about being irritated about being irritated, and then I am able to let the thought pass. Keep moving. There are no computers up here. I really need more nature and sounds in my life. Especially birds. Bowing. If you bow to a Thai person when you thank them for giving you directions, they will have to bow back. I have a lot of fear. I have no trust in people to maintain the place, and no trust in governments to care or protect, and how did a bunch of people make these incredible deathdefying stairs and planks anyway? Sometimes taking the path more taken is a good idea. That way has a plank to an incredible view. That way looks interesting and less-traveled, goes around a corner…oops, the planks are really rotten here, falling away, I don’t want to be falling away right now. I hope you’re taking pictures, I always tell you, expose the film my love my bitch. There were herds of buffalo on the drive here, water buffalo for rice I’m told, what do they do to plow? I wish I could shut up my internal talking. Maybe Elif’s right that I should be more concerned with filling my head than emptying it anyway. Use all the resources – buy yourself a Palm Pilot and an Olympus micro recorder. I better do a Stack Dump now. What mnemonic can I use to remember some of what I’m feeling later? How did they ever make this place? Billy Wilder: “We’re all complete idiots, but collectively we’re a genius.” I should collaborate more, like he did.

I meet up with Dilek somewhere. She’s trying to communicate with me. I don’t want to communicate with anyone now. The others appear, including the driver. The 7th level is a disappointment. After the stairs, no wooden planks, just a long walk through a forest on the top of the cliff. I was barefoot, we left all our shoes hundreds of feet below. I shouldn’t go. There may be snakes. They’d walked a long while and found nothing. I’m going. I’ve played enough video games in my time to know that the final level is not necessarily amazing but always different. And sometimes it really is amazing.

I walk through the forest. I pay attention to all noises. I hear noises far away and it’s because I moved the vine out of my face, which had long-distance effects, another part of it moving some brush elsewhere. Pay attention to weird wood, cracked wood, whatever looks interesting. And especially pay attention to snakes. Respect death. Sara died from eating a little cream. Respect the death. Respect death. The path forks. One path goes straight up through brush and over rocks and the other goes ahead. I take the ahead rather than the up one, figuring it’ll meat up with the harder one eventually, but after awhile it starts to slope down. How stubborn are you to stay on the same path even though it’s not proving fruitful? I give myself a par time. Then I’ll head back. Eventually it does meet up, or it doesn’t, but I arrive. There is no niche here because there is no cave because I am on the top. I am on the edge of a cliff with a tremendous, unbelievable view. I have nothing more to say. It must have been easy for unlucky old Ajahn Juan to meditate here. Aaaah. Not just look at this look at this will you look at you, fucking look at this, but aaaahhh. After some time, I fart. I pee over the side. I calculate the odds after the fact of some peasant 20km from Laos seeing me with high-powered military binoculars and reporting me to the Thai authorities. Rejoin the rest, you’re being selfish. Rejoin the rest, you’re being selfish.

The walk down was even scarier. I hear that Dilek was sobbing on the way up. Elif tells me to walk backwards. I walk backwards in some places and forwards in others. We get down to the bottom. I take my shoes, Elif takes hers, Dilek takes hers, Cos takes his, but our driver Anra doesn’t take his because some worker here in the middle of nowhere, with lots of monks in orange wrapping and bare feet and no tourists within 50 miles of here, stole his nice shoes. The shoes cost more than we were paying him for the whole day. Anra enjoyed himself and can afford shoes but it’s still a bummer. It reminds me of Dennis Miller’s quote about religious people – “all it takes is a few million rotten apples to spoil the whole barrel” – and now poor Anra has to drive home barefoot. We head down the road toward Nong Khai. We get about ten miles and I give him a Thai jello candy. He thanks me and feels better. He lifts the top of the carton, sucks out the jello, and throws the whole plastic container out the window. I’m sorry his socks weren’t also stolen.

(Our driver to Ban Chiang: Anurak Promsiri, 01-6945653, sakamoto119@hotmail.com)

Image via Wikipedia

F 3/29

At 6:15 we gave Tang what turned out to be a wake-up call. He said he thought we’d said “between 6 and 7.” He said he had to shower and he’d be right over. He came a half-hour later. I realized that although I’d asked if the car would hold up, I forgot to ask if it had seatbelts. It did not. We told him to drive to Prasat Phnom Rung 2 1/2 hours east by the Cambodian border. When we got there, he said, go slow, you take your time, I sleep.

Phanom Rung is Khmer for “Big Hill” (Phnom means “mount”), and it’s on an extinct volcanic cone. The Angkor temple (Prasat; a “Prasada” is a South-Indian pyramid temple) was built between the 10th and 13th centuries, but the bulk of it was during the reign of King Suriyavarman II in the mid-12th century. He was a great Khmer ruler whose reign seems to have left the best architecture (he also built Angkor Wat in Cambodia). This one was incredible. You walk up this massive staircase, past a long promenade, past pillars with lotus-bud tops, then over a naga (multiheaded serpent associated with water, fertility and creation) bridge, to get to the huge cone-shaped prasat (temple) made out of laterite and sandstone. The temple had amazing sculpture, including the Phra Narai lintel (the block over the entrance across the door pillars) which shows the reclining Vishnu, surrounded by heads of Kala, the god of time and death; he’s asleep on the milky sea of eternity, represented by a naga (he’s reclining on his right side on the back of the naga). Growing from Vishnu’s navel is a lotus that branches into several blossoms, on one of which sits the creator god Brahma Above the lintel is a Shiva Nataraja (Dancing Shiva) relief. There was also a lintel showing a divinity seated over a kala (a demon commanded to devour itself, commonly sculpted over a temple entrance as guardian).

After Phanom Rung, we went 5km south to Prasat Muang Tam. This one was from the late 10th century. It was in many ways equally stunning, especially as it was surrounded by four L-shaped ponds. Each pond was surrounded by nagas whose tails meet to form low gates leading down to the water. There were kalas everywhere. The temple was dedicated to Shiva, but Vishnu was also worshipped there. When we got out a few men were watching playing on some musical instruments and walking and laughing. We loved it.

We were done by noon and we said, OK, let’s go to Khao Phra Vihan (Preah Vihear in Cambodian), three hours east. His jaw dropped and he said, no good idea, you stay here and rest, we’ll never make it, it closes at 4:30. He said, let’s see it tomorrow. Now I’d heard about Thais being lazy but we were hiring him for the day and we’d said it would be hard, and there was no way we were going to stop at noon. He said, you’re crazy! and laughed hysterically, and said, OK, you’re the boss, and drove.

He was driving and he started to sweat. It was very hot in the car, but he was not looking well at all. Sweat was running down his face in waterfalls. I offered him water. He was very happy. I offered to stop for cigarettes and coffee and whatever he needed. He was very happy but looking worse and worse. We stopped by the side of the road where there was a thatched covered hut and a woman cooking. We offered him lunch but he refused, saying he wanted a vita-drink. The vita-drink is basically sugar water, a B complex, and caffeine. Cos could not eat any of what the woman was making. Cos could not eat any Thai food at all, which was becoming a bit of a pain. So Elif asked the woman if Elif could cook Cos some food. The woman looked surprised but said OK, and Elif cut up some vegetables and made Cos some fried rice and egg. We looked around for our driver but he had disappeared. When he came back, he looked better than I’d ever seen him. Must be the vita-drink, I thought.

We got to Phra Vihan at around 3:30 and we were stopped by border guards. Phra Vihan is closed. Apparently the Thais and the Cambodians are in a border tiff. The Thais have a sign posted saying that due to factionalism among the Cambodian security forces and due to Cambodian villagers polluting Thai streams, they have to close the site to protect the safety of all Thai guests. There’s always been a dispute about the site – the World Court awarded it to Cambodia in 1963, but the Thais are still unhappy. It closed during the 1993-7 Phnom Penh offensive against the Khmer Rouge, but when Pol Pot died in 1998, it reopened, and now it’s closed due to this stupid pissing match. Another rule to remember when visiting a border ruin or area: call ahead. (Not like I have a phone number). Although the Thai military wouldn’t let us in, they were glad to take our money to let us see it from the Pha Maw I Daeng cliff a half-km away. We went up and could barely make out Phra Vihan, but the view of the valley below was lovely, and the sounds of the cannonfire (BOOM! – puff of smoke) were heartpounding.

From there we made Taeng drive 2 1/2 hours north to Khong Jiam, on the Laotian border and right near the Pha Taem rock paintings, which we wanted to see the next morning. Taeng calls someone on his cel phone and says that he’s sorry to disappoint us but his best friend is coming from Singapore the day after tomorrow and staying with him in Bangkok for nine days, so tomorrow he’ll drop us in Khon Kaen, where his brother may have a car and can drive us the rest of the way. I’m thinking that we should end up in Udon Thani tomorrow night because it’s bigger and we can rent a car or find someone else in case his brother doesn’t come through.

But for now, Taeng is a trooper. He drives us to Khong Jiam and takes us to a guesthouse of a friend of his. He’s getting a kickback but it’s getting late, and the place is nice. We’ll pay for his room, even though he said he’d sleep in the car, and the owners give us half-price on his room. We go out for a walk on the Mekong River. Nice views of Laos. Taeng takes us to a restaurant on the river and we offer him dinner. He says no thanks and says he’s going for a smoke. We say he can smoke with us, but he says no and goes down by the river. He’s clearly an opium-head. I don’t care as long as he drives alright and takes us where we want to go. He doesn’t eat anything though. He has very bad teeth. Dinner was in an outdoor restaurant. The owner was Japanese and told us about the horrors of MSG and how it clots blood and decreases sexual appetite. The Thais add it to everything, for the taste. We stayed until the winds came and it started raining tamarinds. A tamarind fell that was the size of my arm. You could kill someone with that tamarind. We covered our heads and ran to the hotel.

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Sa 3/30

We saw Pha Taem first thing in the morning when it was only 95 degrees outside. It’s a tall stone clif with prehistoric paintings over 3000 years old – paintings of turtles and elephants and hands and geometric designs that looked like labyrinths. The hands were the most interesting, as some were dipped in paint and applied to the surface, whereas others were outlines, as if someone spit paint at the hands on the wall. Right on the road there we saw Sao Chaliang, which were lots of mushroom-shaped rock formations that we could climb on.

We headed west and then northwest. On the way we saw some wats. Wat Tham Hew Sin Chai, near Ubon Ratchathani, would have been a nice cave temple with water cascading over it to make a waterfall over the entrance. I say “would have been” because it was the dry season, and because of a very nasty scene. There was a starving, bloody black dog inside, near the Buddha image. It was very, very hot outside. Some other wats had cats walking around and on the Buddha shrines, no problem, but here, a woman sweeping up started beating the dog with her broom. The dog was too tired and weak to go, and she kept beating it, and I went up to her and puffed out my chest and bellowed “HEY!” I was saying “very bad, very bad” in Thai. Elif pointed to the Buddha, and then acted out in pantomime that the Buddha would slit her throat if he saw her beating that dog. To which the woman smiled and held up the crucifix dangling from her neck, as if to say, I’m a Christian, what do I care about Buddha, Jesus would approve of me beating this helpless animal! We stayed in her face until she left the dog. So we didn’t get to see Thai dancing in Bangkok, but we got to see a live play of Buddha’s teaching that life is suffering, acted out in canine. There was more humanity in the prostitutes of Patpong than at this mountain temple.

We drove north to Khon Kaen, and Taeng told us his brother wasn’t going to be available to be our driver tomorrow after all. He took us to some nice wats along the way, including a very peaceful and lovely Laotian one near Yasothon. By the time we got to Khon Kaen it was late and started to rain. Looking at the map, Udon Thani north of there was where we were headed, and it was far larger (and more likely to find a new driver). I did the math and figured we’d take a bus immediately and then at Udon take a taxi to a hotel, but we may not have been able to catch one that late, and I said to Taeng if you drive us north to Udon we’ll pay you some extra. Taeng looked exhausted and his windshield wipers were barely working; he laughed and rolled his eyes and said you crazy, and then kept on driving. We got to Udon and checked into the Royal Mekong Hotel; it was pricey ($20 a night) but we all wanted some luxury. I checked in, came out and sat down next to him in the taxi, and said, “There’s no more single rooms available, so rather than going to another hotel, I thought you might like THIS instead,” and I fanned out six 500-baht bills in front of him, two more than we’d agreed on, and his face looked up like a Christmas tree and he bowed and made the praying gesture with his hands, and we took his picture and went inside. They gave us a complimentary cocktail, a fruity concoction with as much alcohol as there is vermouth in James Bond’s martini, and the waitress hovered over us hoping for another order. It was Cos’s birthday so we bought him an expensive black russian cocktail with about as much alcohol as there is vermouth in James Bond’s martini. There was a lounge singer with huge fake breasts singing out of tune to a pianist who could not play the piano.

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In the morning we took a bus to Ayuthaya, which was the Siamese royal capital from 1350 until 1767, when the Burmese sacked it. Its name is Sanskrit for “unassailable” or “undefeatable” – and for a long 400 years, it was. The Siamese had control over many of the countries surrounding it, and its population was over a million in the late 1600′s; it was supposed to have been one of the world’s great cities. Now it looked like an abandoned Efesus, and it was abandoned for good reason: it was 105 degrees outside. Unlike Bangkok, there was no shade, no refuge, no hope. We were at the mercy of the sun and the tuk-tuk drivers. Cos bought a cowboy hat and I bought a straw hat. They had elephant rides and nobody took them. I bought water for 50 cents, four times the normal price. The wats were in really good condition, better than Sukhothai, but the sun was melting my brain, and for the first (and only) time the weather was really getting in the way. We went for lunch in a Chinese-Thai restaurant and had a palm-hearts salad that was hotter than the heat. I went to the bathroom and a Chinese boy, looked like the son of the owner, was at the sink. Water was barely dripping out of the sink onto his hands. He looked deeply philosophical. He said: “Very little water today…but better than no water at all.” We went to the canal and took a boat trip. There was a sign before we got on: “You will see many wats and many smiling faces.” The river passed many wats. And we saw many, many smiling faces. Children bathing with their parents, splashing around in the filthy water below their teak houses, smiling and waving and seeing if we were looking and diving into the water for us.

We decided to take the train 1:15 north to Lopburi. Lopburi was a part of the Angkor empire, and then it was wrested from the Khmers in the 13th century by the Sukhothais in the north, and there are plenty of wat temples there, but we went for the monkeys. We were told that Lopburi was a city besieged by macaques, which frolic all over the wat temples, and it sounded like fun. The train there was a 3rd-class train. They had fans blowing every ten feet from the ceiling. The fans weren’t helping. I had sweat coming down my front, down my back, down my middle. I was feeling crazy. I couldn’t sit still. At some point the train reached a stop and I saw a lot of hands reaching out the windows and coming back in with some kind of snow-cone. I stood up and ran to the window and yelled “one!” Elif said make it two. There are points in your life where everything you hear about Hepatitus-A or dysentery or not drinking the water don’t seem to matter. Give me the ice thing, now. It was a cocunut-milk snowcone. It made me feel better for a minute.

We got off the train and there was a second when I wondered whether it was worth coming and where the monkeys were. Then we crossed the tracks and we were greeted. Hundreds upon hundreds of monkeys, everywhere. Coming to you, begging for food. Fucking in the streets. Tumbling with each other down hills. Scampering up telephone poles and swinging from telephone wire. Walking on barbed wire. Playing with bars on apartment windows. Food-fighting. Running across the street, causing traffic to stop and start and swerve. Jumping in the backs of pickup trucks for free rides. Elif took a picture of one who then made his face look fearsome. We took the 3rd-class train back. We made faces at the children of two families and they made them at us. We gave them some coconut candy and they gave us banana chips. I did not feel very smart today but I thought: People are very nice. Monkeys are fun. Life is OK.

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We went to Wat Phra Kaew (Temple of the Emerald Buddha) and the Grand Palace, from 1782, the first ear of Bangkok rule by Rama I. A line of tuk-tuk drivers waited outside. “It’s closed,” they all said. “Reopens at 1PM. Come with me, I’ll take you shopping, have a friend with an amazing sale on gems…” We walked past them into the palace. The place was like Disneyland. Very baroque temple architecture: Adventureland, Fantasyland, it was sculpted with tailfins and was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Although I’d passed a travel test by not listening to anything a tuk-tuk driver tells me, I failed one by getting the CD audio guide (the rule is, never get one for anything that’s not an indoor art museum). It was useless, and trying to find my way back to return it took forever. The temperature soared to 105 and we had to wear long pants. It was the first place in Bangkok where we saw tourists – either nobody goes during the hot season or Bangkok’s so large it absorbs them all nicely – lots of Japanese tourists and not much else. The sun was three inches from my head. I drank a gallon of water. We then went to the Vimanek Teak Mansion, the world’s largest golden teak building, a 3-story 81-room mansion from 1910, a nice complex where the prince and his sister lived for awhile with some fine displays of old photos of turn-of-the-century Siamese ceremonies. Dilek and Cos left the house without telling us to buy ice cream. We searched the entire top floor, where the temperature was more like 205 than 105, and finally we left and found them under a tree happily eating ice cream, and I screamed at Dilek. I really let her have it. Cos always wanders off, partly because he’s an idiot and partly to get away from Dilek, but Dilek should know better. We saw some boring Thai dancing in an outdoor pavillion there. We ate in an outdoor restaurant on the grounds which was for the workers and groundskeeps. The food was amazing and far too spicy. I have no idea how people in hot climates eat spicy food.

We went to the Dusit Zoo, which on the map looked like it was next door, it probably was, but we couldn’t find it and it was too hot. We asked some people where it was, and they couldn’t understand. They couldn’t read the Thai in my Lonely Planet. I pointed to a billboard advertising the zoo and then shugged my shoulders and asked “where?” and they still didn’t understand. The Thai people are very nice but completely thick when it comes to body language, sign language, barely mispronouncing words, etc. (Their language has five different tones, rising and falling, and if you don’t say the word with the correct tone, forget it.) We found the zoo and it didn’t have much in the way of animals, though we were very impressed by the multicolored monkeys (Pythagrix Nemaeus: the Donc Langur (Douc Langur?). We sat down in a park there and a family gave us all mangoes and helped us cut them. We told them we were from Turkey. Such nice people.

We went to Lumphini stadium to see Muay Thai boxing. We arrived early and the windows were closed, but official-looking sellers came up to us in yellow “VIP” jackets and asked us if we wanted to sit or stand. I recognized this as a scam immediately – there were cheap standing areas, and there were sitting areas, and there was ringside, and I knew they’d say that the only area left to sit in would be ringside, and it was a weeknight and there was no way it was sold out, so I said I’ll buy tickets later. They got confused and followed us for awhile, but we waited. We gave up on being vegetarian just for this vacation and bought spicy meatballs on a stick from a crazy guy who sang to us. They were yummy and he asked where we were from and we said Turkey and he said Galatasaray. Soccer makes the world go round. Eventually the window opened and we bought non-ringside seats.

The preliminary bouts were the hardest to take, for they start out at the lowest weight categories, which meant we were watching a couple of 15-year-olds beat the crap out of each other. After the first round, the betting starts, and middle-aged men stand up and scream out their bets. The first bout had one kid beating another kid, and he was clearly the favorite. Then, suddenly, he gave what looked like a nice kick to the other guy’s head, except instead of the other guy falling down, he himself fell down, flat on his back, from exhaustion, and was carried off on a stretcher. The second fight was also two boys, one of which was like Randall “Tex” Cobb. He never connected and always got hit, and kicked, and hit, but he would not fall. It was disgusting. Finally, he did go down, and was carried off on a stretcher. In fact, most of the fights ended in a knockout, and most of the knockouts ended in one guy completely immobile, carried off on a stretcher. It was great fun. I ate roasted watermelon seeds and spit them on the floor. Life is good. It’s time to head north.

At breakfast we saw Rana and Engin and they said nothing to us and we said nothing to them. We went to the huge temple, Wat Pho

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, with its mammoth reclining Buddha, 15meters high, with gold leaf and mother-of-pearl inlay for the eyes and feet. It’s the oldest and largest wat in Bangkok and has the largest collection of Buddha images in Thailand. They had dozens of Ramakien murals featuring their version of the Indian epic Ramayana, and we liked the Chinese Rock giants with weapons in their hands guarding the Sheltered Gate. It was again over 100 degrees outside. Bangkok was having a heat wave. It wasn’t supposed to be this hot until mid-April. Cos and I got 1/2-hour massages at Wat Pho, where they have a little school. We paid 50 cents extra to get clean sheets. They had a fan. The woman who massaged me looked like a middle-aged owl, with cokebottle glasses and a moustache. She didn’t massage me so much as manipulate my body into grotesque contortions. She cracked my knuckles on my fingers and toes. I will have to buy a book on Thai massage. Being bent pleases me more than being rubbed.

We took a ferry to Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn, named after Aruna, the Indian god of dawn. Its prang (Khmer-style tower) has a plaster covering embedded with a mosaic of broken multicolered Chinese porcelain (from then the Cheinese ships calling at Bangkok used tons of old porcelain as ballast). Wat Arun is a small place, it is a lovely place, but it is an evil place. It’s right on the river on the opposite side with an incredible view of Bangkok, but we paid three times to get in there. When you get there, they request a donation and show you a book where everyone paid 100 baht. So we left 100 baht (usual admission is 40). Then they have these two cutout figures of goofy monks where you can put your heads through and take a picture. We snapped a picture of Dilek and Cos with their heads in it, and a man appeared out of nowhere and demanded 80 baht from Dilek. It says at the bottom of the life-sized figures, in tiny one-inch-high blue letters on a blue background, 40B. Finally you get to the wat, which you can climb around, and it says “Admission 40 baht.” I said that we already paid, but the front desk payment was just an optional donation. (Every temple has one, but they put the admission at the admission and the optional donation inside). A nasty trick, and by now I was pissed, but we’d crossed the river and it was 100 degrees outside and we ponied up our third payment. I started to climb and was stopped by a man demanding 20 baht to rent a sarong to cover my legs with “out of respect.” Only one or two places in Thailand, such as the Grand Palace, demand that you cover your legs, and I knew that Wat Arun wasn’t demanding it out of respect. So I opened my backpack and put on my slacks over my shorts right there. I climbed and sweated. It was beautiful. I hated it.

From there we piled in a 3-wheeled tuk-tuk (a basically motorcycle with a covered cart behind it) to get to a Portugese church. Elif yelled at me because piling 4 people in a tuk-tuk instead of a 2-rowed songthlaew meant that we were literally sitting on top of each other, but we made it there OK. We ended up in a poor area of teak houses over little streams and tiny, tiny alleys that looked like some kind of Venetian ghetto (mixed with something out of The Deer Hunter). Even though the houses were decrepit and they were living over smelly, garbagey, muddy streams loaded with mosquitoes, they had amazing little gardens and birds in cages which looked well tended-to. We went to the church and then to a temple nearby where a monk was sleeping under a huge bell. It was too hot. I again suggested we go back to the hotel to swim. They were thrilled.

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• Namwan journey 1 (Wat Arun) (noonamawan.wordpress.com)

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We met Rana and Erhan for breakfast downstairs at the Maxx Hotel and they said, let’s go to the Weekend Market! Since that was where we were going, I couldn’t say no. The experience with them was dreadful. Erhan knew only three things in English: the numbers; the phrase “What is your final price?”; and “too expensive”, and he used them interchangeably. He never bought anything, and it took him about 30 minutes to leave each seller, which inevitably resulted in the seller meeting the ridiculously low number Erhan gave him and Erhan still not buying the thing. We bought lots of orchid bulbs and a marionette. I had an ovaltine shake. They had everything from rare animals to putatively rare antiques. Lots of Osama Bin Laden shirts for young punks to purchase, the way America revels in Charles Manson. After two hours we were done and left them. We walked to the Skytrain, passing an impressive array of lepers, clubfooted men, gangrene sufferers, and burn victims. And dogs with bloody balls. Lots of them. I don’t know what it is about Thailand, but all the dogs of both sexes seemed to have bleeding genitalia. We took the Skytrain to the Jim Thompson House, a lovely teak home and gardens that an American expat made after he founded his silk empire in the 1950′s and before he disappeared mysteriously in 1967. We went to a noodle shop and made the mistake of ordering our food “not too spicy, just medium.” In Thai, that translates to “hotter than drinking straight habanero sauce”. Dilek and I were on fire. We each ordered ice-drinks pictured on the menu. One was bright green and the other was bright pink. The green one tasted like bubble gum. The pink one tasted like very concentrated bubble gum.

Then we went to Lumphini Park. People were paddling in paddle boats. Others were lifting weights. Others were watching Elif to see if she was watching them lift weights. Sikhs were jogging in their pants and turbans. It was 105 degrees outside. We slept under a tree. I said, let’s go back to the hotel to swim, and then we can go to Patpong. They thought it was a great idea, especially the first part.

Back at the hotel we bumped into Rana and Erhan, who wanted to come to Patpong with us. Fine with me; I’d feel safer going with the mountain that is Erhan than just with the molehill that is Cos. The taxi dropped us off at Soi 1, and the second we stepped out of the car, people were coming up to Cos and Erhan (not me) and asking them if they wanted a woman. Down the entire Soi, women were standing in packs, and it was shocking: they were wearing dresses and makeup, and they looked grrrreat. Thai women were much more attractive than I’d expected, and it felt nervewracking for me to be suddenly so attractive to so many beautiful women. I’d expected drugged-and-beaten-looking whores like in NYC, or boyish stickfigure 13-year-olds like they say Bangkok has, but instead I find myself in the wetdream sequence in Fellini’s 8 1/2. Which one do I want? How could I ever choose? We walked to the end and found the sidestreets with more specialized tastes – mostly gay – and at the main avenue which the Soi led into (Thanon Sukhumvit), there was a night bazaar. We saw a Sizzler Steakhouse and Erhan and Rana and Cos went to eat there. Dilek, Elif and I (the cool ones) ate Korean food. We reconvened on the street and I saw a man selling fried bugs from a pushcart. He had maggots, cockroaches, grasshoppers, and frogs. I’d eaten frogs in Florida so I ordered a goodie bag of a mix of the first three. I hadn’t learned the Thai numbers yet and he said what was probably 15 baht. I misheard him as 50 ($1.10). He was very happy. Nobody else wanted to share in my quarry. I started with a maggot, which was a mistake, as it was the chewiest of the three. The grasshoppers were my favorite, as they had the most texture and their legs poked the insides of my cheeks in unexpected places. I later grew to like the maggots.

I wanted to go to a sex show in a larger place, as I’d heard that the massage parlors were creep joints and that the smaller shows were fine until you wanted to leave – then some large bouncers would demand a sort of “exit tax.” King’s Castle had a chain of three places on Soi 1&2 and Pussy Galore was on Soi 2, but I was looking for Supergirls, which was recommended, and I couldn’t find it yet. Elif’s stomach was hurting and she wanted to sit down, so we took the logical choice and went into a gogo bar. They had no cover but their beers were an outrageous 90 baht ($2.05) apiece, which I guess was your entertainment charge. There was a small stage in the middle of the room. Surrounding it on all four sides was a bar with high chairs, at which we sat. Cos and Dilek sat against the back wall. The show consisted of about a dozen girls dancing in colored underwear. Some had implants. This was not the Bangkok I’d heard about…or was it? Every so often, one of them would get nude and dance a little and put her clothes back on. Across from us was a man being rubbed down by three of these girls. Some would disappear into the back room. I realized that this was an indoor version of what we were seeing outside. We decided to drink up and leave. Then a dancer takes an interest in me. She comes over and slithers down. She smiles. I smile. She makes her second and third fingers in a V and flickers her tongue between them in what is obviously some international sign language for cunnilingus. I look at Elif. Elif says, “Go with it.” I smile back to the woman and mimic her gesture. I feel like I am Woody Allen having fun with Diane Keaton in “Sleeper.” The woman then takes my head and pushes it down into her lap. She holds it there. I realize that I have to do something in order to get my head back. I kiss her left thigh with an exaggerated smacking sound. She releases my head. She smiles. I smile. I look at Elif. It is getting time to leave. The bartender, a stern middle-aged woman, walks out from behind the bar and goes behind me. The dancer, still smiling, makes the international cunnilingus gesture again. Before I can postulate what more could she want, she pulls open her panties with her left hand, pulls down my head with her right, and now the bartender-who-is-now-a-madam is forcing my upper back down from behind. I have laid down with some skanks in my time but there is no way I am going to eat out this woman. I play dead for a second and pull my head back, smile, and take my drink back to Dilek and Cos. Elif gets the check. The bill is for 480 baht. We leave 500. The bartender wants more. We say the tip’s on there. We walk quickly out the door. Rana discovers her purse has been opened but everything’s still inside.

We’re out on the street again. I want to find Supergirls. I want to see a show but do not want to fulfill the aims of 20th century theater by tearing down the 4th wall. A tout walks over to us and Elif, feeling better, inexplicably starts to flirt with him. What would you like to see, he asks. We have everything. Elif teases him. Will I learn a lot? Will I be better in bed? Will I be able to shoot ping pong balls across a room for my husband? Yes, yes, and yes! Then Elif says we’ll eat and come back. The tout doesn’t buy it. The tout starts to get upset. Not angry; nobody gets angry; but whiny. Why you lie to me? He asks? I tell him, you should know by now not to trust a woman. The tout pauses and laughs heartily. We finally escape. Nobody else approaches us but in front of all the doors along Soi 2 there they are, hawking their wares, carrying laminated menus of performances that you will see inside. All the shows are the same. I am glad. People come to Patpong for one of two reasons – to put something into a woman or to see something shoot out of a woman – and I am definitely here for the latter.

We find Supergirls, finally. It should have been easy, but it was at the end of Soi 2. In front were men and women dressed in Superman capes, red white and blue with an S emblazoned on the chests. This looks like the place for me. We’re going in. Erhan has heard enough and is taking Rana home. See ya! Forget to write!

Supergirls is less impressive inside. It’s kindof small. The first act is a woman with chopsticks. She tosses rings all over the stage. She squats on the chopsticks until they are satisfactorily inside her. She then manages to pick up the rings, one at a time, with said chopsticks, and deposit each ring around a whiskey bottle. I am impressed. The next girl descends from the ceiling into a large champagne-glass bathtub and wiggles around in the bubble bath. It is quite boring, but by now a Laotian prostitute has come over to our table to talk to us. She flirts with me. I have learned my lesson. She flirts with Elif. She has learned her lesson. She guesses all of our ages. She gets all of ours correct except guesses Cos as being younger than he is. She calls Cos Papa. She senses that we do not want to fuck her. We do not want to see her naked. She is soggy and her belly is hanging out. But we do want to talk. We learn that she is 28 years old and has a 6-year-old boy in Vientiane. She does not like working here very much. It took her three days to give birth. She gave birth by C-section. The scar was a mammoth one, and it ran vertically down below her underwear, which she started to open for us to show how long it was but I believed it ran down there. Dilek fell in love with her and gave her a dollar. I gave her a dollar. She was very nice, but about halfway through I started to lose interest, for at the end of the bar was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life. This woman was about 18, maybe 20. She was one of the dozen or so women on the planet who have a perfect face as well as a perfect body. She undressed. I thought that maybe that was her show, that all she would do would be to dance around, or maybe hang out and take the stage. Her presence in the room was like Selma Hayek in “From Dusk To Dawn” – Selma wriggled with the snake, but, as Woody Allen says, 80% of her success was in just showing up.

The most beautiful woman in the world took the stage. Someone taped balloons on the poles on the stage and gave balloons out to some audience members. Elif said, “God, she’s beautiful.” The woman lied on her back and spread her legs. She inserted a tube into herself. She put a dart into the end of the tube. The dart looked like a small new year’s party favor with a long point stuck into the end. She took aim with fierce determination and squeezed her legs and the dart shot out and popped a balloon. She had no trouble with the first six balloons or so but as the balloons thinned out she started missing. There was no question of whether she would be allowed to give up, or that she would give up. She concentrated and kept shooting. The darts were starting to fall short. Finally she finished the balloons on the stage. Now she started on the ones in the audience. I covered my head. Elif held her balloon way out in front of her. The woman finished her act. I gave her a dollar as well. We gave a few cents to a friend of the Laotian so she wouldn’t feel left out either. The Laotian took one last look at Elif and felt her face, lovingly stroking her cheekbones. She asked what the Thai cop had asked the day before: “How you get so beautiful?” We told her she was beautiful too and went home.

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We ditched the tour we bought tickets with. One couple, our age, wanted to come with us since we spoke English. We said OK. The woman Rana was fine but her husband Erhan was not. We went to Chinatown, which was ten times the excitement of NYC’s. All kinds of food, cooked, uncooked being sold right on the street, a crowded lane where you jostle and elbow your way through hordes of no tourists. Elif and I treated it as the world’s largest open-air dim sum restaurant. Hey, Dilek, Cos, you wanna try this slimy green ricecakey thing? Munch, munch. Rana and Erhan looked sullen and ate nothing. We walked through the Indian District and saw a Sikh temple, a large hall with a mosque-like interior, devoted to the worship of the last of the religion’s 10 great teachers – not a teacher at all but a holy book, the 16th-century Guru Granth Sahib. A man inside was very, very nice to us. Come to free breakfast tomorrow. He took our picture in front of the altar, so long as our back was not to it. We sort of stood sideways. Erhan stayed downstairs, saying he’d seen lots of them in India and didn’t need to come up with us. He said he couldn’t eat anything in India and lost 10 kilograms there. I couldn’t imagine how he would look any different sans 10 kilograms. We went to Wat Traimit, with a huge 3-meter, 5 1/2-ton, solid-gold Buddha in front of a curtain. The Sukhothai-style Buddha was “discovered” 40 years ago underneath a plastic exterior, which had saved it from the marauding of the Burmese in the 1700′s. It was a nice complex but the wat had no character at all. You can take a jar with numbered chopsticks, which you shake until your lucky number comes out; then you go over to some cubicles, put in a 10 baht coin, and take your fortune from the shelf with your chosen number. I knew nothing about this, so I walked over to the shelf, thought for a minute, and took out my fortune under shelf number 8. It read, all is lost, and what is lost cannot be regained, no lucks. I thought about my dead cat Sara. Walking out, we asked some policemen how to get to the Royal Theater. They told us and then one asked Elif, “How you get so beautiful?” How indeed. She said, you must have beautiful eyes. I knew right away that was too complex a thought to go across languages, and he took it literally and took off his sunglasses and showed us his eyes. His eyes were indeed beautiful. He said I am very lucky man. Lucky indeed.

We then walked around in the heat looking for the Royal Theater where it said there was Thai dancing on weekends. We finally found it after asking lots of very nice people on the street. There were no Italians in sight. We went into the theater. They were showing a Pokemon movie and no Thai dancing. So we all went to ride the Chao Phraya River Express Taxi up the canal. We saw the world’s longest suspension bridge and some temple wats and lots of teak houses. The canal docks and takes off within a matter of milliseconds. The boy managing it would blow his whistle in my ear and smash the boat on the pier, passengers would leap aboard, some would make it, others wouldn’t, and we’d take off. The boy got into a fight with a gay guy who bitched about him for what seemed like hours. Then the boy smoked a cigarette that smelled funny. His eyes turned red and he seemed happier. We went to dinner at the Seafood Market. Erhan had a printout about the place from the internet. We ate there because he could have Turkish food made for him there. You sit down and Thai women dressed in blue skirts take you with her shopping cart over to the ice trays and aquariums, where you point to what you want to eat. Then you pay with her at the register and sit back down. Then a waiter takes your order of how you want it cooked, you eat, and pay him again for cooking it. So we got to pay twice for an OK meal. Erhan smoked and smoked. I think about how many people Erhan would feed if he were cooked.