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!