Sandy Does Southeast Asia

I think I missed that sign on the way into town but I’ve found out quickly enough. Honestly, I was just spoiled by Bankok & Chiang Mai. Now that I’m in a city where there are few (if any? I haven’t seen any) Westerns, it’s a whole different situation.

This morning’s quest was to figure out how to get out of here. Sounds relatively straightforward doesn’t it? Well it wasn’t. Because I couldn’t find either a tour agency or anyone who spoke enough English to ask about how to get over to Nong Khai (on the Lao border). I know I can’t take the train there so that means it’s gotta be bus. Unfortunately, Lonely Planet is proving to be a frustrating mixture of obscure and downright incorrect information so I could hardly use it to get me to the bus station.

And when I say I tried to find someone who spoke English, I mean I really tried. I tried at the train station, I tried the front desk of every hotel I could find, I tried Western-style restaurants, I tried an airline ticketing office I eventually stumbled across. Nothing. Not a word of English spoken anywhere. I hope I don’t sound like a cultural imperalist because I hardly think that everyone should speak MY language so that MY life will be more convenient for ME. But. English has for better or worse become the international language of the tourism industry and I am lucky enough to speak it (at least I think I still can speak it but that’s yet to be proven), so I’ve gotten used to the fact that people who work regularly with tourists speak at least a little bit of English.

Finally I found a girl in a restaurant who didn’t speak any English (even though the menu was in English and it’s supposed to cater to the non-existent Westerners of Phitsanulok) but she had a photocopied map put out by TAT (Thailand’s tourist authority, which is where I should’ve gone in the first place) that sort of clarified LP’s contradictory and vague explanation. Even better it had everything listed in English and Thai. Soooo I found the bus stop and got on city bus #1 and was able to point to the long-distance bus station, which they were able to read. Everyone was very curious that I was on the bus and were extra solicitous about making sure that I got where I needed to go. “The silly white girl must get to the bus station!!” is what I think they were saying in Thai.

I’d already decided at this point to stop being hot and frustrated because obviously it was impossible that I would get stuck in Phitsanulok and never be able to find a way out. Which is what I was thinking when my search for a tour agency devolved into my search to find an English speaker devolved to my search for anyone who might be able to help me Get The Hell Out Of Here.

So I got to the bus station where I found out that I can’t get a bus to Nong Khai. I can get a bus to Udon Thani and then a bus to Nong Khai. Here is a brief transcript:

Me: Nong Khai?
Bus station worker (shaking head vigorously): Udon Thani
Me: Um. Not Nong Khai?
Bus station worker (shaking head again and pointing to ticket window with Udon Thani listed): Udon Thani (making hand gesture that seemed to mean “then”) Nong Khai.
Me: OK!

I will say I am appreciating the patience being shown me for my incredible lack of Thai language skills. I’m trying in small ways to make up for it, like when a Japanese man stopped me in a cafe yesterday (when I was still looking for Internet) to ask me about a word on his English-language resume, so I sat down with him and spent twenty minutes helping him correct and rewrite the whole thing. If all I have at my disposal is the ability to speak English, I may as well use it for good as well as evil. The follow-up to this little story is that when I was wandering around this morning, hot and frustrated as hell at the tender hour of 8:30am, I heard someone call out to me. Oh great! I thought. This would be the point when I start getting pestered by aggressive tuk-tuk drivers or something. But when I looked over it was my Japanese friend. We waved and smiled enthusiastically. Yeah, I know people in Phitsanulok.

Back to our main story…the bus to Udon Thani is a 6-hour trip but at least I only have to pay $5.50 for the ticket since I’m taking a public bus rather than a private one chartered by a tour agency. The first bus leaves at 9:30 tomorrow morning. And hopefully I will be on it.

That’s where I’m staying in Phitsanulok. It’s supposed to be Guest House but I quite like it the way it is. I also like the large flaming man at the front desk who doesn’t speak much English but bounces around and waves his hands in the air a lot. What I don’t like so much at the moment is being completely exhausted after a seven-hour train ride, hungry, and gruuumpy. But like most things in life, this is nothing a good dinner and a hot shower can’t fix.

So the quest for the moment is food. And water. It’s really difficult to find things here in the so far charmless city of Phitsanulok. It’s all screeching birds, screeching children, and screeching motorbikes. Disgusting. Plus I’m still coming off a bout last night of what I think of as Incomunicado Anxiety. That’s when you’re two trillion miles away from home and it suddenly hits you that something may have happened that you don’t know about and have no way of finding out about. Not such a problem anymore but before email it was a real pain. Most of the time it’s the standard gossipy stuff but can take weirder forms, like when I was studying in Italy I developed this anxiety that William S Burroughs had died and I didn’t know about it. Because how would I know? Would anyone think to send me a letter about it? Would I see it in USA Today, if I read that? No. Anyway, it’s easier now with email and Internet and so forth but it hit last night.

Long story short, I’m not exactly in love with this trip right now. But on the upside, being alone in such an annoying, inaccessible-feeling place combined with having a pleasant room with a desk in it means that maybe I’ll actually get some work done. Assuming of course that I don’t starve to death first.