Sandy Does Southeast Asia

OK so maybe 15 hours of hanging out time is an exaggeration but would you really expect any less of your humble correspondent? For instance, you and I both know there is no such thing as a 170 thousand hour long bus trip but that will not stop me from trying to convince you that that’s exactly what I have endured, I swear.

Even though it’s hard to keep track of time, I have been paying closer attention because I was curious. It seems I’m spending 3-4 hours working, about 3 hours reading, an hour on the Internet. I usually spend a couple of hours wandering around the town every day around lunchtime. I especially like the big covered market because twice now I’ve seen baby elephants being lead on leashes. (Baby elephants rule.) Plus, I spend 9 hours sleeping. So whatever’s left over is social time.

It may seem indulgent to spend however many hours that is just sitting around chatting and whatnot. Honestly, there is a fair amount of silliness, like sitting at a table with a big group of expats from all over the globe talking about The Bad Lieutenant (which was the only movie we’d all seen and that’s just weird, don’t you think?), when the Belgian laughs, “Yes and he is in the car and he says, ‘Now you will make me a blow job,’ or something like this!” Exactly. But an indication of why this is a special place is that everyone who lives here practices either yoga, meditation, massage or reiki, and most do a combination. That says a lot to me about where their heads and hearts are at. It shouldn’t be too surprising how quickly they sensed that I’d arrived here very, very hurt or that their natural response was to give me lots of love and unconditional acceptance. It’s starting to make me forget that there is a world where scarcity and competition and success at any cost are the rules that people live by.

Also, I think that being here is helping me to get work done. None of my friends are on vacation. They all either live here or have at least settled with no definite plan on leaving. That means they have jobs to get on with. It reminds me that I have a job too and that job is to write. Apparently, my job is also to stare at the river and marvel at how much it looks exactly like chocolate milk. I can handle it though. I am nothing if not a brilliant multi-tasker.

Aside from the demanding river-staring duties, I am happy to report that life is getting a little bit easier every day.

The Basics

As I’ve said, the Mut Mee guest house is at the end of a narrow gravel lane. On the way there is a bookstore with Internet, an art studio and a yoga studio. Mut Mee itself is a collection of seven buildings and bungalows scattered around the leafy grounds, with a courtyard of its center. The courtyard has three open thatched-roof seating areas lined up overlooking the river and the Lao mountains across on the far side. A cool breeze plays over the tables all day. You can sit at the last one if you need to be left alone, at one of the intermediary tables if you are working but open to socializing, or at the long social table right at the front that I think of as Julian’s Table because that is where he usually holds court. Julian is the owner. He is very British or perhaps I only think that because he wears button-up shirts and speaks with an Oxford accent.

How It Works

There is a little book for each room. Every time you take something from the self-service drinks fridge, you enter it in. When you want food from the kitchen, you write down what you want, then lay it open on the prep table for the cooks. Each morning when you open your book, the previous day has been tallied, the date is entered and there is a greeting, “Good morning Sandy!”

What I Do Here

In the morning, I get dressed and ready, and go immediately out to the courtyard. I drink coffee, I write in my journal, I talk to people. Passing the time is a highly evolved practice here. Hours pass with people drifting in and then away. There is a larger, slower cycle to the days than what I am used to. I may work two hours out of the day and spend the other fifteen talking or sitting with other people. There is a good deal of people just sitting together. It has been a very long time since I have had that bonding experience of being with people only to be with them. To sit quietly or listen or talk, with no expectations, no goals, and no time limits. To be together only because humans are social creatures who enjoy each other’s company.

Last night – after a long day of sitting around in the Mut Mee garden – I was, yes, still sitting in the garden, drinking a gin & tonic and passing the time with a table of new friends, most of whom either work at Mut Mee or have otherwise built lives for themselves in Nong Khai. Two from America, two from England, one from Ireland, one from Puerto Rico and one from Belgium. I looked around and thought that this is a completely spontaneous moment. No one planned this in advance. No one is here because this the hip new spot. No one is here because they are networking. No one is here because another person here has an agent who works closely with a casting director who may be…

And it also struck me that no one sitting around this table thinks it’s even a tiny bit odd that I’ve given up my entire life in LA and flung myself halfway around the globe into a totally unknown future because life as I knew it stopped working. They understand. I am at the beginning of a journey that every person sitting around this table has taken. They know the fear and the beauty of it, and so all they do is remind me that I will find my way; that I will eventually understand why it was necessary that everything happened just exactly as it did and as it is doing. And slowly, slowly I am starting to believe them.

This is what a Travel Day is like…

Wake up early. You have to wake up early if you hope to get to the place you’re going at an hour when it’s still possible to get a room for the night. So I wake up around 6:30am, finish packing, leave my key, and go downstairs for breakfast.

Waiting for the city bus to the bus terminal. Not as quick as the day before but maybe that’s because it’s Saturday; regardless, I get to the station by 8:30am to buy a ticket for the 9:30am bus to Udon Thani, where I hope to catch a connecting bus that day to Nong Khai, instead of having to spend the night. Wait around, wait around, people stare at me, wait around, get on a bus.

The six hour trip to Udon Thani turned into seven and a half hours but felt like seventeen thousand and a half hours. I didn’t want to drink much water because who knows when the bathroom breaks will come? Which means that on top of being stuck on a bus, I’m dehydrated. And on top of being dehydrated, I’m already exhausted because I got really depressed the night before thinking about my failed relationship and couldn’t sleep. So now I’m exhausted and dehydrated and still depressed. The countryside is monotonous and empty. I am bored of looking at it. I am pushing myself for some unknown reason to reach Nong Khai. Why am I doing this? Be one place, be another place – it’s all the same. There is no one to talk to anywhere. I am alone in one place, I am alone in the next place. There’s nowhere to get to where the things that landed me here magically would not have happened. These are the sorts of thoughts that keep causing me to burst into tears on a bus full of strangers in the middle of Southeast Asia.

When I get off the bus in Udon Thani, I am pointed to the bus to Nong Khai. I am told it leaves in 10 minutes. Perhaps I can get there just as it’s getting dark. 10 minutes turns into 45 minutes and finally we get on the bus. It’s still okay – I can probably be there by 5:30. The bus pulls out of the station, to my immense relief. Finally! We drive for about two minutes, just out of the station, then stop and the driver gets off. For an hour. Passengers trickle on. Night falls. I feel that jittery aggravation you would get if you had to wait in a very, very long line at the bank and just when you get to the front, the cashier’s window closes and you then have to go to the end of another very, very long line.

When can we go already?? Eventually I remember that I am in Asia. We will go when we go and no amount of aggravation will make any difference. So I settle down to enjoy the on-board TV blaring a Thai variety show (did I mention I developed a splitting, nauseating headache about five hours before?).

By the time I arrive at the Nong Khai bus station, I have completely given up. I don’t even put up a fuss at being overcharged by the tuk-tuk driver. I tell him to take me to the first guesthouse listed in my guidebook. It’s likely sounding because it seems big & I hope that means they’ll have a room available because I desperately need to not go tramping around all night looking for a place to sleep.

As I walk up to the guesthouse – stumbling under the weight of my backpack, hungry, thirsty, feverish and nearly blind from the pounding in my head – I hear something very beautiful. I hear an American behind the reception desk. I never thought I would, in all my life, be so happy to hear an American accent. The American is named Simeon and he takes my backpack and rents me a room and then sits with me while I eat because I told him that I haven’t spoken to anyone in two and a half weeks and it’s starting to drive me insane. I eat a big dinner and drink a lot of water and speak English for ages, all while sitting in a cool dreamy garden courtyard overlooking the Mekong, with John Lennon and Neil Young playing in the background.

This is the Mut Mee Guest House and you will hear more about it soon. But for now, let me just say that I was mistaken about what I was thinking while on the bus – one place is not like another place. Some places are far preferable to others. Some places are worth going through trials to get to because they are less lonely and more beautiful and they can make you forget, even for an hour or so at a time, that everything in your life has gone wrong.

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.

The best thing about travelling solo and with no return date or itinerary is that I can change my mind at the last minute. It doesn’t really matter to me where I go and it certainly doesn’t affect anyone else. So I decided that instead of the Chiang Rai –> Chiang Khong –> Laos route, I’ll head halfway back south, then turn left (East, whatever) and go into Laos that way (see previous entry for why). That’s the plan for now, anyway.

I went out to the train station this afternoon and bought a ticket for tomorrow morning to Phitsanulok, a centrally located city that is a little over half the size of Chiang Mai. Geographically, that will put me in a good position to make the next move (i.e. decide which border to cross to renew my visa, in case I change my mind about going to Vientiane).

And I get to ride a train! I’m excited about that. It’s a seven-hour trip and knowing me, I will remain excited for about one of those hours, then spend the next six wondering if we’re almost there yet.

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Writing Update

I woke up this morning at 4:30 and knew that the story was completely wrong. Not surprising, since Realizing That Things Are Completely Wrong has recently gone beyond a personal hobby and way over into the territory of vocation. The more important thing is that I realized not only specifically what was wrong with it, but exactly how to fix it. Over breakfast a five-page synopsis blurted out with almost no effort.

The good news is that I think it’s going to be about 200 million times better than the original idea. The bad news is that I need to start almost from scratch. Oh well. It’s not like I have anything better to do at the moment.

When I went in for my Hepatitis A booster before I left, the doctor at the travel clinic suggested I fill a prescription for Malarone and take it with me so I’d have an anti-malarial on hand for Laos. Me – clever, miserly girl that I am – figured I would wait until I was in Thailand since I’d heard time and again that you can buy anti-malarials very easily and for much less expense once in-country.

I went to the pharmacy yesterday to stock up before leaving Chiang Mai. Pharmacies here (and most other places I’ve been) are more like clinics in the US, and eliminate the need to go to a doctor and get a prescription and then go to the pharmacy to get it filled. It’s like one-stop shopping. You go straight to the pharmacy and talk to the doctor there and he gives you the medicine. I asked for Malarone. He said they didn’t have it; that they only had Doxycycline. Anything-cycline is a no-go for me so I resorted to the tried-and-true method of simply ignoring what he’d said and asking again for what I wanted.

“You cannot get that here,” he said.

“I can’t get it here,” I asked, waving my hands around the counter and in his general direction, “or here?” now waving my hands around in the air.

He looked at me with a quizzical half-smile that confirmed my suspicion that two weeks without a normal conversation is doing very little to improve my already imprecise style of verbal exchange. “In Thailand?” I clarified.

He nodded, “It is not imported to be sold in Thailand. Only Doxycycline.”

“And that’s a broad-spectrum antibiotic, right?” Right.

Soooo we have a spot of trouble here. My body is highly intolerant of broad-spectrum antibiotics. The last time I took them (for 10 days), it resulted in a crippling three-month bout of digestive malfunction. Even before that, I’ve found that I get weak and generally very, very unwell from just a few days on antibiotics. And the kicker is that not only would I have to start them three days before entering Laos, I’d have to continue taking them for four weeks after leaving.

I’m not sure what to do. I emailed the travel clinic in Pasadena just to make sure I have all the information.

Obviously, I can’t justify running the risk of being exposed to a fatal disease…and I also can’t justify putting myself in harm’s way with the antibiotics either. And I can’t decide which is less bad (aaaand I am sick and tired of being presented with two almost equally horrible options and getting to decide between them – free will, huzzah!).

One thing I’m thinking is I might turn around and head back to the southern border of Laos and then cross over into Vientiane since the capital is the only guaranteed malaria-free place in Laos. But that would mean missing the Mekong boat trip & Luang Prabang which were at the top of my very, very short list of must sees on this trip.

I have to decide soonish because my Thai visa is ticking down and I’ll need to do a border crossing in the next week & a half or so.

If anyone has suggestions, I’m all ears.

I can still keep track of what number each day is because it’s the next number from the day before in my journal. Which means I can’t miss a day of writing or else I lose whatever fragile grasp I’m maintaining on a life organized in familiar ways. The name of each day, on the other hand? I’ve long since given up trying to keep track of that.

Although I have a new tool in my arsenal on that front. See, there have been a couple of days now (I’m sure it wasn’t two days in a row but beyond that, I’m unable to keep track of things like ‘how often’) when I’ve noticed that absolutely everyone is wearing these yellow polo shirts with the royal insignia on them. For once I’m not exaggerating when I say “everyone.” Literally every single person is wearing a matching shirt, like a country-wide soccer team gone amok.

Yesterday in a cafe I overheard a farang lady ask a Thai lady what was with the yellow shirts? Apparently it’s a way to show respect to the King since this is the 60th anniversary of his ascendance to the throne and he was born on a Monday and the color that corresponds to Monday is yellow…so everyone wears yellow shirts on Mondays. Makes perfect sense, right? So now whenever I see all the yellow shirts, I will know what day of the week it is. Yay!

And yes, I consider eavesdropping to be a perfectly good research method.

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Hell A

In other news: this morning I watched a half-hour long show on the making of the music video for Paris Hilton’s first single. That’s cool. I like Paris Hilton. But the crew. Hearing the director’s assistant talk about…god, I forget what he was talking about because I was too busy shuddering. It was so familiar and yet I was able to see it from the outside for the first time in years. And what I saw was that that tone that Industry people talk in about the people they’re working with or project they’re on or the one they’re prepping for or the one they have in development or the one they’re auditioning for – and you know that tone – was horrifying. In a city where ‘fake it ’til you make it’ is considered a valid way of interacting with even your nearest and dearest, something has to have gone horribly, horribly awry. All I can say is that I’d rather spend the rest of my life puking my guts out while being simultaneously annoyed by Eurotrash Disco Dude than spend one day ‘on set’ with those people.

Rant over. Now I’m going out to look for one of those yellow shirts because while I may not like fakey-positive Hollywood types, I love the King!!

Yesterday afternoon I got sick again. Luckily this time I started to feel bad (nauseated, feverish, etc.) while still awake so I was able to get everything out of my stomach before it could wreak too much intestinal havoc. Within a couple of hours, I felt right as rain again.

The soundtrack to my illness this time was the endless chanting of a monk (oh my word, is he ever going to shut up??) being amplified at the Sunday evening market outside, accompanied by some sweet techno beats coming from next door. And I got to enjoy this super hip spiritual dance mix totally free of charge. Lucky me!

Oh yeah, and I take back what I said yesterday about there not being so many foreigners here. There have actually been a huge influx in the past few days and I don’t think that’s just my imagination. For instance, when I got here a week ago, my guest house was almost totally empty and I got my pick of rooms. Today the ‘no vacancy’ sign was out for the second day in a row. But I will stand by the couples comment. Are people even allowed to travel to Thailand without their boyfriend/girlfriend? I’m surprised I wasn’t stopped at the border, ‘Hopelessly Single’ stamped in my passport, and hustled right back onto the next plane heading for Belgium or something.

I haven’t been posting as much lately because life has taken on a rhythm. Not in the negative ‘wake up, go to the office’ way but in a reassuring, comfortable way. Here’s my day:

6am – Come bolt awake and apparently in the middle of a long thought process. I lay quietly for a couple of hours letting my mind do its work.

8am – Get up and put myself together.

8:30am – Go downstairs for breakfast. Every morning I have a big bowl of muesli with yogurt and fruit and two cups of coffee. Over the coffees, I write for a couple of hours. I am still deeply in the process of developing a very roughly sketched novella into a fully realized framework for a novel. The plot needs work, the characters need work, the themes need work…even though I feel like I’m moving very fast with it, it’s still slow – if that makes sense.

11am – Walk to Internet cafe & check email for an hour or so.

12pm – Go back to my room and do the previous day’s laundry. I prefer to do my own handwashing because otherwise my clothes won’t last a month with the harsh treatment they get when you send your laundry out. In between doing the washing, I spend time thinking, writing or reading. I’m currently reading The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq. It’s so fantastic that I’ve found myself wanting to do nothing else but I’m trying to drag it out as long as possible.

1pm – Lunch! I usually have a sandwich and a glass of juice (best orange juice ever).

1:30pm – After lunch, I take a walk and run any errands that need doing, like going to the ATM or visiting a bookshop. I try to wrap this up by 3 or 4pm so I don’t get stuck in the afternoon rain shower.

4pm – A quick stop by the Internet cafe if I have a blog entry in mind to write, then back to the hotel for more think/write/read action.

6pm – Dinner, during which I usually try a new Thai dish. I didn’t like Thai food at home and I’m still not a convert, but I am slowly putting together a small repertoire of dishes that I enjoy well enough.

7pm – Shower & watch the news on CNN or BBC. Not that I care tremendously for world events but this is the only social time I get during the day.

8pm – Read for as long as I can stay awake.

12:30am – Get woken up by unbelievably repetitive crap techno music coming from the next room over (this has only been happening since the Eurotrash Disco Dude moved in & I desperately hope he’ll be leaving soon).

You’ll notice that not once during this routine (and my days are pretty much following this exact pattern) do I speak to another person except to pay for a meal. This could become a problem. I hope I find another foreigner to talk to soon because it’s now been over a week and a half since I’ve been able to speak at a normal pace without using some degree of charades. There are not so many foriengers around and the ones who are tend to be closed off couple types. Keep your fingers crossed that I find someone to talk to before I go mad. The end. Bye!