Relaxing

This blog is titled Dick and Joe's Asian Adventure, but Dick and Joe do the Hokey-Pokey is more like it. Or, at its raciest, the East St. Louis Toodle-oo. We were both worn out when we got here, and we have been majestically lazy. We did bestir ourselves and make our way down to the seaside for five days. Really Gulfside---Hua Hin is the resort town on the Gulf of Thailand where Rufus Pugh led Strachey and Timmy to hide out in The 38 Million Dollar Smile (MLR Press, 270 pp., $14.99). Our friend Poe---who sees all and knows all in the Thai manner---got us a luxury duplex condo on the water for fifty bucks a night. It's owned by a client of Poe's friend Dragon's Swiss financier boyfriend. It had a blue pool meandering through a garden of frangipani and palm trees with coconut husks attached to their trunks out of which grew many-colored orchids. This place would not appear in Lonely Planet, our usual Asian habitation guide, but we adapted up nicely.

We mostly read and walked on the beach---taking care not to step on any gigantic Swedes---and had dinner with Poe and his British boyfriend Simon and with friends of theirs. Among their friends was Richard Murray, the one-time owner of the Thai-Bookazine bookstore chain (he still owns the store in Hua Hin), who wants to help me find an East Asian distributor for SMILE (he liked the book). We heard tales of farang melodrama, including the stabbing death of a British bar owner named Nick, possibly done in by his Thai katoey (ladyboy) partner, Madame On. Poe said Madame On, aged about 22, spent a lot of Cliff's money on Botox treatments. Poe thinks I should write about this and call it The Botox Murder.

Back in nicely steamy Bangkok, we have been planning our Laos and Burma trips. We leave Thursday by train for Den Chai, Thailand, then go by bus to Phrae and on to Nan. That's a northern mountain town in a province whose liberation movement was tamed only in the 1980s and it's still off the beaten track. We'll look around Nan for three days and then head to a Mekong village that has a border crossing and take a Lao boat down to Luang Prabang. Getting up and moving about is bound to be good for us.

We've also planned to go to Burma on February 24. I'm sorry to say that is the day before a Thai court hands down its verdict on the Thaksin Shinawatra assets case. The deposed prime minister, vaguely fascist and a crook of staggering proportions, wants his seized Thai assets back, and if he doesn't get them his "red shirt" supporters are threatening to wreak unspecified havoc. We won't like missing that. Thaksin himself would be arrested were he to re-enter Thailand. He lives in Hong Kong and the UK and is now an "economic advisor" to the trouble-loving communist government of Cambodia. Thaksin shows up there from time to time and waves some bloody tranches and derivatives in Thailand's direction. Last week there were coup rumors in Bangkok when 40 tanks rolled through the city on the way, a general said, to a "maintenance facility." The general told The Bangkok Post that nobody should worry, because in Thailand "coups are no longer fashionable."

My other favorite Post reading has been on the always wonderful Letters to the Editor page. Mr. Ernest Wetherspoon, a resident here, wrote complaining that the 7-Eleven clerks always greet farang customers in Thai instead of English. Why, asked Wetherspoon, can't these young folks say hello in the language spoken, he claimed, by 30 percent of the world's population? Most of the responders dismissed Wetherspoon as a crackpot, but a surprising number thought he was spot on. To my horror, I bought some nuts at a 7-Eleven recently---these small storefront operations exist on nearly every block in Bangkok---and the clerk handed me my change and said "Tank-oo" instead of "Kapkun-kap." O Ernest, what have you wrought, you silly twit!

Large baby

Amomg the Thais we encountered on a day-long excursion to Lopburi, an old Thai capital, the center of attention was Maxim, an eight-month-old boy, who was very large and very white. He was the son of Kevin, the American nephew of Perry Smith, the friend of Simon and Poe who arranged this outing. Perry is a retired official of World Vision, the Christian NGO (Perry is Buddhist), and lives in Thailand, India and London. Kevin, who lives in Malaysia and has done real estate, is married to Dafy, a young Bulgarian. When I met Maxim, I thought Kevin said Maxine, and I said, "Wow, she is enormous." Kevin and Dafy laughed and said, no, it is a boy named Maxim. Thais value light skin---Isaan people from the north are looked down on and Cambodians might as well be Bushmen of the Kalahari---so there was much ooo-ing and ah-ing over large, pale Maxim on the steets of Lopburi. In the market all the women wanted to hold him. This made Dafy nervous, as did the frogs in a bucket in the meat market. She was afraid Maxim might catch something from them and told Kevin, "I hate them! I hate them!"

Dafy was also nervous about the monkeys hissing and cavorting on the power lines overhead, and not without reason. The town is teeming with a kind of macaque, and sometimes these creatures swoop down and grab food or even cell phones from passers-by. The townspeople have come to revere the monkeys despite their unmannerliness. They are believed to be offspring of the Hindu god Kali. They are also a big tourist attraction and have brought prosperity to Lopburi. So once a year the monkeys are guests at a feast put on just for them. Their favorite foods are cucumbers and boiled eggs. We did spot evidence of ambivalence toward the monkeys. The guard at one Khmer ruin that draws tourists was carrying a slingshot.

Inside the modest palace compound of King Narai was the room where he met foreign envoys. Siam's first substantial contacts with Europe were in the seventeenth century, and we stood in the simple stone room where the king met emmisaries from the French court. (The Thai term for foreigner, farang, originally meant French person.) Court protocol required the French envoy to hold his letter up to the king on his high platform, but the Frenchman bent over, deliberately making the king reach down. The king at that moment maybe got an inkling of what life with the Europeans was going to be like. There's an engraving showing this historic event.

Also in our entourage was Dick Sandler, an American who originally studied Thailand and the Thai language at Yale and has lived here for forty years. He runs two resorts in the South. Standing in a palace annex built by King Mongkut, the beloved ninteenth century founder of modern Thailand, Dick made a crack about Mongkut and his doing the polka in The King and I. I was surprised and mentioned how so many Thais I knew resented their great king having been turned into an adorable buffoon in this tuneful farang entertainment. Dick said the Thais don't like The King and I because they prefer their own myths about Mongkut. He said they are great myth-makers about their history. I guess this is something the Thais have in common with Americans.

Another American in our party (Poe had hired a large van and driver for the day) was Bob Feingold. Bob lives in a small town in Malaysia. He went there from Connecticut in the late sixties as a Peace Corps volunteer, then lived and worked in Kuala Lumpur and is now back in his original Peace Corps town. Joe and I have run into or heard about similar stories in this part of the world. Fond as many of us are of Ethiopia, I've never heard of any Peace Corps people going back there to live. Of course, part of the attraction here is that Thailand was a lot more hospitable to gay men than was East Jesus, USA in 1966.

Today is Sunday, and tomorrow we go by bus to seaside Hua Hin for five days. It's another vacation from our vacation.

The Enigma of Arrival

I love that title of Naipul's, although I could never quite bring myself to pick up the book. Especially not since I misplaced my asbestos gloves. (That's a Frank Kelly line---thanks, Frank.) In fact, the only enigma has been the password for this blog. I had it wrong and so was rendered unchacteristically mute for my first ten days in Bangkok. As some of you know, Joe's arrival was delayed by a week so that he could help the Wheatons clear out their Concord house. He arrived early Sunday with an appetite for tam yam goong and with the blog password. Both have been useful.

A word about jet lag: according to The Times, somebody has invented a drug that may cure it. Good. Jet travel is supposed to be fast, but with layovers at JFK and in Seoul, my journey took 40 hours. Joe's trip via L.A. took 37 hours. You arrive feeling as if you have clawed your way across the planet inch by inch. Bad.

As always, it's worth it. Thailand is as hot and stinky and aromatic and odd and sweet and simpatico as ever. I mostly spent the week before Joe's arrival going around the city and tasting the food to make sure it would be safe for him to eat. I found it to be so. My favorite new menu item, at a place near our hotel called Too Kub Kao by Oscar, is "deep-fried chicken hips." Joe, alas, missed a wonderful event. Our friend Poe bought two tables at his condo association's annual Thai-Chinese dinner party/festival, and I was invited to sit with the fourteen members of Poe's family for the ten-course Chinese dinner and the karaoke and Bingo. No one except Poe spoke a word of English, but everyone smiled---of course---and the Thai language lessons I took last year enabled me to understand the Bingo calls. To those of you who were unimpressed when I went around at home saying "neung seung song see heh," I can tell you that "one two three four five" finally came in handy. I'll resume my language lessons at some point. Yesterday while Joe was getting a haircut (at a place called---this is true---Gay-Cut) I tried to chat up the shampoo lady in Thai, and she stared at me as if I were addressing her in Estonian.

Our plan is to head down on Monday to Hua Hin, the Gulf of Thailand resort town where Poe and his boyfriend Simon have a house, and think deep or no thoughts there for several days. Then we'll return to Bangkok and embark on a more adventurous two- or three-week trip through Laos. There's a new train to the Lao border, and then you get around by boat and bus. The journey up along the Mekong on the Lao side of the Thai-Lao border is said to be gorgeous and not too overly trodden by farangs like us. So, we'll see what's over there.

Then in March we'll go to Burma.

We have followed the Haiti horrors on CNN. It is all barely imaginable.