Bare Facts: Length - 2.5 weeks; Cost - 350,000¥; Countries - Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam; Transportation Organizer - Intrepid Travel (www.intrepidtravel.com); Value - worth every penny
Growing up in the north woods of Wisconsin in North America, I was always a bit of a renegade who lived without rules and stormed my small-town neighborhood and countryside with the exploratory wonder of an untamed youth. Yet my parents did wonderful things for me amidst the monstrosity of my youth. My mother always took me on her weekly Tuesday night expeditions to the library in search of the latest bestseller, giving me my first introduction to the world through words, and better yet, trashy novels. More importantly, my father took me hunting, camping, and fishing in the unexplored places of my youth, which in later years of contemplation has come to be a grown man’s source of wonder and refuge spawned in the realization that life is raw; and only through metaphor, anecdote, and dreaming can one begin to understand it. In more recent years, the effects of such events in childhood have become apparent in an unquenched curiosity about the world and a wanderlust to feed it. Such longings have walked me over the alpine peeks of New Zealand, carried me into the dust storms of the great Australian Outback, taken me up the lush valleys of Fiji, smuggled me through the Zapatista jungles of Guatemala, bounced me across the story of Cambodia, propelled me by motorcycle along the winding mountain roads of Japan, and now landed me behind a desk pretending to be a teacher. So, like many of you, sitting around the office burning away the countless hours of doing anything but teach, one day last year I had the grand notion of indulging my fantasies of traveling through Cambodia and running up the cut-stone steps of the legendary Angkor Wat. As time passed, it was the fantasies of the orange-robbed monks, tranquil monument walls, putrid third-world odors, shady Phnom Pen bars, and a history almost unspoken to the world that was getting me through my days of monotony. So off I went, from Bangkok to Ho Chi Min City, searching for some adventure, a story, and the possibility of a cold Cambodian beer.
The trip started in Bangkok, the seething cesspool of life that sustains Thailand in all her filth and beauty. For three days I roamed aimlessly amidst the buzz and sputter of the Tuk Tuk’s (three-wheel taxis), around the spectacular temples of the ancient Kymer people, and in-and-out of shady bars and cheap restaurants living on a mere 2,000¥ a day. Amidst the stained brown river waters, the homeless people of the streets, the diamond swindlers, the prostitutes, the homeless children, the fried whole sparrows, and the never-ending mass of traffic-terrorists, my most memorable moment came (very suitably) the evening I went to see Thai boxing.
The event played out like a stereotyped page in Thailand’s history, complete with bets, bribes, beers, beauty, and brutality. There, beneath the naked lights and among the masses, I met and attractive Irish woman who was friendly and pleasant, but wouldn’t stop talking. She immediately triggered feelings of both attraction and repugnance as a result of her inherent physical beauty and the ridiculousness of her position. Without her knowledge, she disgusted me because she reminded me of the overbearing, rumor-spreading, proselytizing high school mother of my best friend. However, at the time it was all right because she kept buying me beer, despite sitting next to her very quiet, out-of-place boyfriend. So the story goes . . . we got drunk as skunks and in the haziness of our condition, I started talking to her straight-laced boyfriend, and she went to the bathroom (by herself) at 2am in a Muy-Thai Madhouse (bad idea). Inside she met a young, overexcited man, package-in-hand, who drunkenly tried to grope her. Understandably, she came back in hysterics and decided to tell the police a full half-hour later about the foggy details of the encounter (worse idea). At that point, her story ends and ine reaches a barbarically instinctive focus because I got out of there like an underage fratboy at a keg-bust and onto the back of a random guy’s motorcycle (with no lights at 3am) and went burning across the streets of Bangkok (smile across my pissed face) back to my plush $5 room.
So that was Bangkok. Just thinking of it puts a smile on my face . . . However, Bangkok for the person seeking fantasy, backpacker’s paradise, and beaches is probably the low-point of Thailand. For someone interested in the reality and truth of S.E. Asia, complete with wretched smells, poverty, pollution, chaos, and the outstanding possibility of experiencing something completely unsought, well, then Bangkok is just the right place. After four days I was certainly ready to get the hell out, though I was truly pleased I went there, and I acknowledge that Bangkok with three crazy friends is a recipe for jail.
The next day I met a married Australian couple, and older British woman, and a young girl from Oz who was headed to India (I did not tell her she was going the wrong way) and off we went towards the border of Cambodia. Two days later at sunrise we found ourselves in the early hours of darkness bouncing along in the back of a pickup truck headed towards the border along the Thai/Cambodian coast watching the predawn colors float above the South China Sea.
Tune in next week for Part 2: Cambodia. -ed.
