Buckets of vodka and breasts like weapons

Shopping in Ko Phi Phi

I was young until I went to Ko Phi Phi. With cups of čai on Turkish wharves, I was young, and a youth, I danced in Lithuanian discotheques. But with buckets of vodka and subsequent twerking on Phi Phi's shores, I felt too old. I wanted to go to bed, if only those darn kids would turn their music down. You kids need condoms, I need ear plugs.

Once it was late enough not to feel like a complete loser, I went back to my room, where a book waited for me, thinking again “I should have started traveling 10 years earlier.” And “As long as I didn't get spiderwebs tattooed on my elbows.”

But Thai blue water is Thai blue water and karst cliffs are undeniable, so I stayed another grandfatherly day to hike around the island. The first few minutes sounded like “Dude, bro...” and “OMG, I was like, so shitfaced last night!” but before long I heard only leaves and patient wind, birds and insects. Jungles have a way of filling the world, barricading you from everything outside, capable of blocking even the most insidious house music.

In the green alleys I felt removed from that party-soaked island, which itself felt distant from SE Asia. I wanted to escape the former, and return to the latter. I'd catch a boat tomorrow, but for now, was I still even in Thailand? As far as I could tell, this island was about as Asian as Cancun is Mexican.

The verdancy relaxed in something like a clearing, where a woman was waiting for me. She had excellent posture, and the dark red cloth of her top was pushed into a shelf by mythic breasts with nipples like missiles. Realization that it was a statue came with a side order of relief, followed by a pause. Recalled from my whining dissatisfaction with the beach party scene, with its excess, superficiality, and inaccessibility, I stood and looked at her, as raindrops started to fall on my warm shoulders, her cold ones, and the gifts and offerings spread around her.

Incense drifted among the orchids, a candle burned safely under glass, and a pair of luscious apples stood close at her hand, beside a glass of clear water and a can of ubiquitous coke. Not exactly Shwedagon Pagoda, she was still a moment of calm, a gesture towards the supernatural/spiritual, and I decided with a smile that I was still in Asia after all, as the monsoon began in earnest.

Ko Phi Phi remains in my mind as a great destination...for youngsters. But even in that place of mechanical bulls and automatic bullshit, beautiful moments popped up: like the open-sided hut of hammocks where I waited out the rain, and the abandoned beach at morning tide that showed no ill will towards the past and future festivities. If I came away fond of Ko Phi Phi, I can't wait to see what happens in Cambodia in eighteen days.

Cambodia was the winner of my last poll and my lady and I will be there in less than three weeks. We don’t have as much time as I’d like (shocking), but if y’all have any Cambodian recommendations, I’d love to hear them.

5 minutes walk to reach Bangkok

The minds behind The Hangover II were clever. I don't necessarily mean that in terms of content, since one could debate whether unknowing/drunken sex with a transgender* prostitute is a manifestation of the transitory Zeitgeist of our age, or just a cheap giggle.

*I apologize if this is not the currently approved phrasing, and to my mother's friends, who perhaps didn't expect to read sentences like that when they clicked on here this innocuous title.

But they were definitely clever when they chose Bangkok as their second setting. After all, what trumps Las Vegas for ostentatious depravity, besides Bangkok?

Did you know Bangkok was the World's Most Visited City on Earth last year? (Don't worry, that's the only actual information I will foist on you.)

Art in a Yangon alley

Coming from Yangon, Bangkok seemed like a cold bucket of modernity to the face. Yangon was moldering building façades, communal tea cups waiting in shallow dishes of water, and people with nowhere in particular to walk, while Bangkok was sky trains, giant neon signs, and an entire mall dedicated to computers.

The name Khao San Road has echoed through the stories of travelers for decades, and I was curious to see this famous festival of traveler degeneracy and extravagance. I checked into a hotel, ate soup, and walked down.

Khao San Road, Bangkok. I only took this one picture.

Not sure what to expect, I was still surprised to find...nothing. Nothing new at least. Aggressive hawkers selling T-shirts, overpriced restaurants serving Western food, and shady guys on the edges offering more illicit entertainment. None of this was new. There was just more of it than usual, and younger tourists than I'm used to seeing.

A woman wheeled a cart past me loaded with fried arthropods and annelids, that is, scorpions and worms. Yes, both of those are pretty gnarly to eat, but in that setting? Crunching down on a roasted locust seemed....kitschy.

But there is far more to Bangkok than Khao San Road. And it's not far away.

A few minutes' walk and I was in another crowd, this time with few white faces, the same shirts for half the price, and foods admittedly less unusual but far more interesting by virtue of actually being what people in Thailand eat.

After a bowl of soup I ambled past vendors headed home, fans resting for tomorrow's heat, and men playing checkers on well worn chess boards.

By the time I got home, Bangkok and I were getting along just fine.

My favorite menu

What the hell is a slider?

Not in baseball, I know that answer, but in food. I thought it was a sandwich. My interweb search says it sometimes is, but when I walked into Phil's Sliders the other day, I was surprised to find they only offered itty bitty burgers. I've already had two hamburgers in the last couple weeks, which is my usual number for a year, but oh well, like they say, “When in Rome...” Or in this case: when in Berkeley...do as the haughty foodie university kids do.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my two wee jalapeno patties, bizarre building-block fries, and happy hour beer, but I stuttered just a second at paying $12 for it. $12? That's at least a dozen bowls of mystery soup on the street in Bangkok...

(queue the wobbly screen of the flashback)

The sun was trying to teach me about Thai culture with a hammer as I left my hotel a few hours after arriving in Bangkok, and my hair went straight from water-wet to sweat-wet without passing go. I wasn't sure which way to walk, so was happy to see one of the mobile street carts that prowl the city set up down the block.

My favorite menu is no menu at all. Dearest of all to me is when you say to the cook, with gestures more than words, “I'll take one” and then sit to find out the answer to “one of what?” That's how it worked at the soup cart. The older lady smiled, and the green visor she was wearing fanned a hint of a breeze my way as she nodded her head, and her hand gestured towards a plastic stool somewhat in the shade.

From the far side of the street came hotel staff, who smiled shyly at me, while the gate on the near side divulged uniformed cops who ignored me from behind their mustaches. Mustaches? In Thailand? I suspect if you are Thai and can grow a mustache you are automatically qualified to be a ranking police officer.

Sergeant Stache.

My soup arrived, slippery noodles, savory broth, and glistening pieces of...mystery. I lifted the first. Oh, liver. Okay. Liver's fine. It tasted a little gamey, a little gelatinous, but not too bad.

I lifted the second piece. Wait, I think this is liver. What was the last one?

The third. Oh. Then what were the first two?

On further examination, it's entirely possible that none of them were liver. Too soft. Too...giggly. My guest guess is that at least one of them was congealed pig blood.

My favorite menu is no menu at all; the preconception of what a slider was lead to a modest disappointment, and I'm not sure I would have ordered the pig blood.

Tiger Temple...oh THAT's it.

I counted 211 steps down from the top of the kitschy Tiger Temple. With a spackling of bird crap about every other flight of stairs, 8 steps per flight, that's roughly 13 crap zones. Charming temple. Really.

But the golden pagodas peaking over the edge of the dramatic cliff far overhead promised something altogether more interesting waited up there.

The sign at the bottom said there were 1,237 stairs. Now you're talking.

It was not nearly as long as Adam'sPeak in Sri Lanka, but was surprisingly steep. I arrived at the top completely soaked in sweat, and much happier than I'd been at the first kitschy “temple.”

THIS was a view. The landscape of southern Thailand is incredible, with green jungle washing up and onto epic karst eruptions of pure geologic artistry. Mother Earth is a sculptor.

Add a clean fresh breeze blowing the sweat off your back, just enough raindrops to make it interesting, and a few gold Buddha statues abiding it all with perfect equanimity, and you've earned the price of the sŏrngtăaou.

I found two young English parents with a precocious little girl who appreciated my offer to take their picture. The parents appreciated it at least, the little one just wanted to run up and down the stairs to the altar that looked out over the green landscape.

“Mummy, I want to show you sumfing!”

Back at the bottom I found Wat Tam Seua, “Tiger Cave”, which gives the tiger name to the area due to a rock formation that looks like a tiger's claw, or, depending on which site you read, they used to keep a tiger in the cave at the back. Given the tiny size of the cave, I hope it was the rock formation.

There's no tiger in there now, but there is an unearthly emerald-green Buddha.

I was digging into a plate of sticky pad thai at a stall outside when the sŏrngtăaou driver back to Krabi appeared. “How much you pay?” I told him. He sort of walked away. Does that mean “no”?

Whatever. It was a swell day, so I strolled out to the road with a song on my lips and started stepping through the 8 km to Krabi. The clouds were threatening rain as usual, but humans are remarkably waterproof, my trusty Timbuktu bag is as well, and after growing up with cold California rain conceived in Alaska, the warmth of a monsoon shower feels more like a reward than a tribulation.

Motorbikes sped past with theatrical puttering, and the breeze was fresh. I felt good, and the songs just kept getting better. Feeling the flow.

A guy just climbing on the motorcycle in his front yard asked where I was going.

“Krabi” I told him. He nodded, pointed at the clouds and gestured at the back of his bike.

I'm developing a love of motorcycles, and I was already smiling when we approached the first red light. I was expecting to stop among the little flock of puttering moto's in front, but oh no, not us.

He gunned the engine and we were up on the sidewalk, over some debris, thump back onto the road and across four lanes of traffic, then cut the far corner of the intersection and along we went down the road, free as the birds that crap all over the kitschy temple.

At the next red we didn't even slow, just a casual head turn to look as we flew through it.

Now THIS was worth the price of admission! Cute kitsch temple, great hike, amazing view, now this ride? The day just kept getting better!

Thank you, random dude! I'm sorry I couldn't thank you more than “Kop kun kap! Thai people...very good!” but you seemed to understand.

Tiger Temple...is that it?

I felt like a jerk even as I asked the question.

“How do I get to 'Tiger Temple' and is it worth it?”

I didn't mean to sound like that guy. The one who is really saying “I've, like, traveled so much that, like, temples and stuff just don't impress me any more. I'm THAT worldly. It has to be really amazing to be worth my time.”

I meant “Is it something 'real' or an amusement-parky tourist trap for people like me whose day-tours are cancelled by bad weather and find themselves with a day to burn in Krabi, Thailand?”

That's barely better. But Thailand...has had a lot of tourism.

The grungy guesthouse owner (grungy guesthouse that is, the owner looked like he showers sometimes) replied that it was definitely worth it, so I took the shared pick-up taxi/truck (called a sŏrngtăaou in Thailand) to a large gold dome with a skeletal structure crouching above it in unfinished concrete that looked more like a municipal water tower than a temple. Or maybe the secondary entrance to a baseball park built in the early 1980s.

At the bottom were two large tiger statues that would fit in just fine outside a carnival ride, bubble gum stuck to the bottoms of their “menacing” claws, and rings on their backs from where people set down their slushies.

Oh dear. It's worse than I feared.

The tigers were guarding a room with a nun so bored she was basically sleeping, and at least a dozen donation boxes. Subtle.

Then the Russians arrived. That helped a bit. The last couple years have shown the Russians to be the Next Big Wave. The previous wave was bed bugs.

Russian tourists haven't yet learned that you don't have to take a picture with your head in the tiger's mouth. At a temple. (I admit the likely existence of hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures of Westerners doing the exact same thing. But come one....they're Russian. They're so much fun to give a hard time.)

I tried to flirt with one, just because how great would THAT be? But she could only giggle and say “I...English no.”

I climbed to the top past innumerable scatterings of bird shit and stagnant puddles gathering on the poorly-graded concrete steps.

Halfway there were some little bells. That was kinda pretty. (Sigh.)

I kept expecting to hear “The starting lineup for the visiting Cleveland Indians...” but there was only wind and the faint metal taps of the bells now below me. 

At the top was an altar in a dreary room of puddles, bat squeaks, and pigeon shit (which were actually interesting ambiance after so many brightly lit temples covered in gaudy gold). Stacks of rebar lay around, rusting away without ever being installed. There's something so tragic about that, no?

I wrote my little message in the dust. There was plenty of space beside the two Spaniards who quieren each other very much.

Time to go home I guess.

Then I noticed the peeking golden glints of a temple on top of the hill high overhead, and I could just see steep flights of stairs ascending the sheer cliffside. Ohhhhh. Now you're talking!

I headed that way...