It doesn't make a hard woman humble

The title of this post will make sense later. It doesn't make any sense now.

Alan, Marilia and I then went on some kind of walkabout. The notes say so. I can't remember whether there was any point to the wandering. There didn't have to be, just being in the street was an experience.

The notes also say that I went to the Burmese Embassy. I had less success there than I had had when I made enquiries in London before I set off. At least there I had the feeling that I was being understood. At the Burmese Embassy in Bangkok I was met with blank incomprehension.

That was it, then. No chance to visit Burma, at least not by organising it myself.

It seems that after that we must have made our way back to Banglamphu where we sat around chatting. I seem to remember having my first bowl of kuaytiau - noodle soup - and falling in love with it. What a fantastic way to eat and take on a substantial amount of fluid at the same time! My notes say "some washing" and this was an example of how Bangkok was back in the modern world. Just around the corner from the Clean & Calm was a place that took in washing.

So what? Well, this was no dhobi wallah place. This was a a place with a proper 20th century front loading washing machine. It was fantastic. I think they charged by the kilo.

The highlight of the daylight hours was the Golden Buddha and the highlight of the evening was visiting the Patpong Road. Trust me, I really didn't want to go. It was Alan who was most keen. I had read a book called "Borderlines" by Charles Nicholl in the year before setting off and that had related an episode regarding the Patpong Road. It is the red light district, full of girlie bars and strip clubs.

Alan, Marilia and I arrived by Tuk-Tuk - a truly amazing form of city transport, the Thai version of the auto-rickshaw and much better. As soon as we were off the Tuk-Tuk the hassle started. Within a second a tout was accosting us telling us to come in to a particular bar with the promise that there was "No cover charge! No cover charge!". We had come to see these bars so we let this guy take us in to the place he was promoting.

We sat at the bar and ordered three small beers. They weren't particularly expensive, only 20 Baht (about 40p at that time). As we sat at the bar a couple of naked girls were sort of dancing in a very bored way on a sort of stage which was elevated behind the bar. I had never seen less enthusiastic exotic dancers. I seem to recall going to couple of strip clubs in Paris on a trip there a few years before with a girl called Liz (not the same one as mentioned previously). Somehow or other that experience was completely different. The clubs were genuinely tiny bars where a series of girls stripped off with the only prop being a typical Parisian bar chair. We were in Paris and it looked like art, it wasn't particularly erotic. The participants did however seem more than half interested in what they were doing and got genuine applause from the surrounding crowd watching the performances in the dark.

This place had none of that ambiance. It was all rather sad and tired. There was loud music and along the dimly lit back wall I remember seeing a couple of older pot bellied men sitting with a naked girl on each side of them. Add to sad and tired the words sordid, sleazy and seedy.

We were all on a tight budget and we all merely sipped our beers. After a few minutes the bored dancing girls disappeared and they were replaced by a girl whose trick was to produce ping pong balls from her yoni - I use the Hindu term because there doesn't seem to be a word in the English language that ever works very well, the English words are usually either medically correct or extremely and offensively crude or sexist. Anyway the girl produced ping pong balls from her yoni and dropped them into a pint mug. Bravo! Incidentally I use the term "ping pong balls" because I am sure table tennis enthusiasts would not want their balls associated with the genitalia of Bangkok's exotic dancers. I think Finbarr Saunders or Julian Clary would be proud of that last sentence.

This went on for a few minutes. Look, let's get something straight. Apart from the strip club bars in Paris with Liz I had never been in any establishment populated by naked girls. I had, however, seen the film Emanuelle both in the UK and in Paris. I am sure the UK version was cut more savagely than the French version. I won't relate the story but it involves Sylvia Kristel's character flying to Bangkok where she has various erotic experiences. At one stage there is scene in a sleazy strip joint not unlike the one we were in and in the French (uncut) version one of the performers inserts a lighted cigarette into her yoni and there is a close up of the woman using the muscles of that organ to almost literally inhale and blow out the tobacco smoke (I cannot decide whether an image I have in my mind of her blowing smoke rings is a memory or my depraved imagination). The movie poster shown here comes from a website called Wrong side of the art. I want to credit the owner and don't want to rip anyone off so follow this link to see it in the location that I found it.

In all honesty it had been nearly 15 years since my Uncle Lourens a.k.a. Lout Henkes had taken me to see the movie in Paris and I had forgotten all about it being set in Bangkok. My visit to Bangkok and Thailand had nothing whatsoever to do with having seen that film. OK?

Having said that the next girl on after the ping pong ball artist exhibited similar extraordinary yonic control. This one gyrated around for a minute or so and then inserted a blowpipe you know where and fired paper darts out of the blowpipe with sufficient power to burst balloons!

By this time Alan, Marilia and I had had enough. We got up to leave and asked for the bill for our 3 beers. This was when things started to get a bit more edgy. We had ordered 3 beers at 20 Baht each but the bill was for 1,860 Baht. At the prevailing exchange rate that was nearly £37.00. We said we were not paying that much for 3 beers. We had been told there was "No cover charge" whatever that meant and we had been assured the beers were only 20 Baht each.

At this we were led to the part of the bar nearest the entrance where there was a sign which explained how the place worked. There was no "cover charge" and the beers were 20 Baht each but you were expected to pay 150 Baht for each performance you watched and, including the girls mooching around when we had been led in (straight past the sign at the entrance) by the tout, we had seen 4 "shows" and thus owed the bar 600 Baht each for the entertainment and 20 Baht each for the beer.

We protested that we had not been shown the sign on the way in and insisted we were not going to pay. While this was going on at least one English woman in her mid to late forties came over and said she and her husband were effectively being held prisoners because they couldn't or wouldn't pay their bill.

Things then got ugly. A small wiry and extremely brassy woman with an excruciatingly loud and awful voice was summoned and she began to harangue us. She was shouting "You must pay, you pay now!" over and over again. We were not going to pay and this girl aimed a kick at Marilia.

Big mistake! Marilia was no shrinking violet. She was hard as nails and was wearing trekking trainer boots. Marilia just kicked the woman straight back at which point I slammed 100 Baht on the bar and we exited as fast as we could.

Once outside we were safe. It was a lucky escape but we all agreed that we had seen quite enough and we piled onto a Tuk Tuk back to the Clean & Calm. That was sufficient excitement for one day. Looking back it was pretty good value as an experience costing about 70p each.

The reference in the title to this post is to a song from the musical "Chess" which I have never seen. There was a single in the charts performed by Murray Head and there was a line: "One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble".

Bangkok

The filofax notes say that I was up early. I'm not sure why, perhaps because I went to be early. My body clock might have been slightly out of sync with the clocks in Thailand. My calendar was different too. It was 1991 AD in Europe but 2534 BE in Thailand. The Buddhist Era began 543 years before the Christian Era. Being in the 26th Century just added to to the feeling of having traveled forwards in time.

The Clean & Calm Guest House was, as advertised on its card, 30m from the Chao Phraya Express pier at Wat Samphraya. This was a major selling point for me. It was so convenient. The first task for me was to get to the General Post Office. This was (and could still be) on the Charoen Krung Road quite a distance from Banglamphu but easily accessible on the Chao Phraya Express. I needed to get there because I was desperate for news from home, a letter from Liz perhaps and I think I had arranged for my Lonely Planet travel survival kit to be posted from home so I could pick it up in Bangkok rather than cart it around through Turkey and the Indian sub-continent or South Asia.

I am not sure whether the ticket along side this text is a ticket from that day but it certainly is a ticket from the Chao Phraya Express. It is difficult to explain the Chao Phraya Express but you stand on the pier which is a sort of floating platform and after a few minutes you notice a boat heading towards the pier very fast. The Chao Phraya is a big river, it seemed to me to be significantly wider than the Thames, and it has a huge amount of traffic on it. The Express comes up to the pier, its engine roaring and one of the crew signals to the pilot with a whistle so that it goes into reverse and the back end swings round to the pier and a rope is briefly thrown onto the pier to "secure" it while passengers quickly jump off and then jump on. Within seconds the whistle is blowing and the boat is roaring off. You make your way to a seat and then a conductress walks up and down with a roll of tickets and a chrome tube shaped coin holder with a hinged lid which the conductress opens and closes rhythmically to encourage new passengers to own up and pay their fares.

I think I did pick up some mail and my book but the notes seem to say that Alan and Marilia had some problem or other.

The notes then say "pm to Golden Buddha + walkabout". The Golden Buddha is at Wat Traimit. It is at the junction of the Charoen Krung Road and Yaowarat Road and it makes sense that we would have visited it after the GPO on the Charoen Krung Road.



This ranks way up there in a category of things that might be called (like the BBC Radio 4 programme) "Things we forgot to remember".

The account in the leaflet on the left is also summarised in the Lonely Planet Guide. It says that the original golden Buddha image may have been covered in stucco to protect it from marauding hordes either during the late Sukothai period (13th and 14th Century) or later in the Ayuthaya period (14th and 15th Century) when the city was under siege by the Burmese. The leaflet says that the temple that housed it was deserted and it was not until 1931 that the image was moved to its present site and then not until 1955 when it was discovered that it was made of pure gold. The Lonely Planet guide book says that it fell from a crane while it was being moved.

How can it be forgotten that something has an image of Buddha more than 3 meters high and made of 5,000 kg of pure gold inside it? If it can be forgotten in relation to such a large piece of gold then it must be possible that there are smaller and possibly larger pieces out there. Thailand is (as will become apparent) very densely populated with images of Buddha.

Future Shock

So far on my trip things had been pretty much as expected. I thought I knew about Turkey, I had been there before, at least. As I had traveled east things had become less sophisticated, simpler and more real. India was a shock to the system. There is nothing that can prepare one for the experience of India. To a certain extent coming there after a decent length of time in Eastern Turkey did soften the landing. It was so steeped in ancient history with references to the more recent history of the UK that it was a little like gradually going back in time. Nepal was a similar if more serene experience. It was certainly somehow the simplest of existences too.

The culture shock on arrival in Bangkok was a future shock. It was like being catapulted from the distant past right into the future without pausing at the present day. At the same time the modernity of it all was juxtaposed with ancient religious edifices and fringed with frenetic independent private enterprise.

Let's just pause to credit the previous four months with having been positively fantastic. This leg of the journey was going to be even better. I knew it. I could tell the minute I set foot in the country.

The Clean & Calm Guest House had the advantage of being within a very short distance of the Khao San Road, the main Freak Centre and backpacker hub. It was however far enough away from there too. The Khao San Road was definitely a full on experience with every available inch devoted to the provision of some service or other to the traveler. Bus tickets to anywhere, visas to anywhere, excursions everywhere. Every place was not only an agency but also a restaurant and a hotel. The pavements were end to end with stalls selling everything from fake Levis to bootleg cassettes. Yes, cassettes. This was in the early days of CDs and that technology had not quite taken off in Thailand.

No note is made of any immediate visit to the Khao San Road but I am assuming that we must have looked in on the scene. All my notes say is "Riverside Rest". I recall vaguely eating a meal in a restaurant on the river's bank. I think that the journey from Kathmandu must have been a few hours in duration and there would have been a time difference too so that by the time we had arrived, dumped our packs and eaten it was quite late, local time. We went back to the Guest House and crashed.

Kathmandu to Bangkok

One of the things that I must have done prior to visiting Boudhanath the day before was pick up my passport from the Travel Agent in Thamel. It just occurred to me that I have the name of the travel agent. I think he was Navraj Sharma Poydeyal and was based out of the Lhasa Restaurant, 15/84 Thamel, Kathmandu. At least I think that was him. You'll note the visa signed by Prateep Yusuksataporn, an attaché at the Royal Thai Embassy in Kathmandu, was issued on 9 January 1991 and used the following day.



The passport stamps have to be right. I did depart Nepal on 10 January 1991 and the same day arrived in Thailand the same day and was given a three month visa. I do not understand why the ticket below bears the date 12 January 1991. All I can assume is that I must have changed the date or the flight or it must have been changed for me.



I had to check in at 7.00am. It was foggy. It was, as stated earlier, foggy every morning until after 10.00am. My flight was due to leave at 9.00am. The departure was delayed by the totally unforeseen circumstance of fog. Who could have predicted it?

Whilst whiling away the waiting time before the flight was called I got talking to a couple called Allan from Melbourne, Australia and Marilia from Sao Paulo, Brasil. We had something in common. Both of them had been living and working in North London. Marilia was employed behind the bar at the Town & Country Club in Kentish Town. It is highly possible that Marilia had served me with beer in a plastic glass on one or more of the many occasions I had been there to see a band. They had set off after me but they too had been in India. Allan said they had nearly not been allowed in because Marilia had got so pissed on the complimentary Air France vin rouge. On arrival she had kissed the tarmac like the Pope! They were very good company. The notes I made say that I also met a Japanese woman. I haven't made a note of her name, she must have made an impression at the time but now ... nothing.



I don't know who had a card for the Clean & Calm Guest House but it was a good recommendation. The notes are sparse. I actually wrote "Flight" and then "Arrive" then "200B taxi C & C G H" and on the next line "Riverside Restaurant". I am sure we arrived after dark and therefore arrived without a full appreciation of where we had arrived. I do remember that as we exited the airport we walked through a Duty Free shopping areas selling what seemed to be fantastic stuff at amazingly low prices. On close examination the prices were in US dollars so they were not that great. The goods were very western too.

On arrival at the Guesthouse we got rooms. I haven't found a note of how much the room was. I think it was about £1.00 per night which when I arrived was 50B. One thing is for sure my room didn't have a view of the Chao Phraya river. It had no windows at all because it was on the ground floor and the door was straight into the sort of dining/sitting area. It smelled very clean. It smelled strongly of chemical insecticides.