Sandy Does Southeast Asia

Last week I went to the immigration office in town to apply for a visa extension. It was a breeze and they even gave me a few extra days to push it to a Monday. Unfortunately, because I expected a lot more bureaucratic rigamarole, I had told the tuk-tuk driver not to wait, which left me fifteen minutes later on the outskirts of town with not a tuk-tuk in sight. The kindly immigration official told me to go about 200 meters down along the highway, although he was more reticent on the subject of what I might find there.

There was nothing to do but hoof it back to civilization, and so I off set along the highway. At the first roadside food stall, after about a ten minute walk, I inquired about tuk-tuks. They pointed in the direction I’d just come from, saying it was very close, which means I’d passed it. But why hadn’t I seen anything? So off I went again in the direction from which I’d just come. The whole thing felt awfully familiar.

If a person who’d never been abroad asked me what is the quintessential travel experience, I would have to say it’s this – trudging alongside a road, through the heat, blinding sun and clouds of exhaust, looking for something you’re not sure you’d recognize even if it walked up and introduced itself, while well-meaning locals point you back and forth along the same stretch.

Eventually, I flagged down a passing tuk-tuk. If the driver thought it odd to find a farang woman walking along the highway by herself in the middle of nowhere, he didn’t let on.

Transportation issues aside, I am now in possession of an extended visa and an official Get Outta Thailand date – February 19. Which leaves me with the quandary: what the hell am I going to do next?

I hate making decisions. Yeah, yeah – I know everyone says that. But I really hate it. If a Decision To Be Made were barreling down the street headed straight for me, I’d push my nearest and dearest straight in its path to save myself.

Basically the decision boils down to whether I’ll try my luck at the Thai embassy in Vientienne at getting another two-month tourist visa (whether I’ll get it is anybody’s guess, given the confusing new visa laws) and come back to Nong Khai until April, or leave for good on the 19th and go…? So I guess that means – do I want to stay here for two more months or do I want to get back on the road?

On the one hand, I’m bored here. I don’t have anyone to talk to except my students, and I don’t like teaching very much (in fact, I may not even like kids as much as I thought I did, at least not seven days a week). I guess ‘understimulated’ would be more accurate than ‘bored.’ There’s just nothing to do here but drink and I stopped drinking about a month ago. Living alone in an empty house with no TV, no Internet, and no telephone sounds sort of romantic in a rustic way, I suppose, but the cold, hard reality is that it means a whole lot of time spent staring at my toes.

On the other hand, this adventure in Extreme Boredom is paying off handsomely in the creative department. In addition to big ass pile of short stories, I just finished a 10-minute play that I could see growing into a series of related shorts.

Also, all this Sandy-time is allowing me the depth of access to myself that you only get when you’re alone all day every day, and I’ve been spending long, uninterrupted periods of time sorting out some things. The sorts of things that it seems you can only approach very slowly, very quietly and very privately because they have nothing to do with anyone else and you can only work them out for yourself. At least for me, it’s too easy to get confused and distracted by other people, and forget that there are no answers outside myself. But I digress.

So anyway, yeah, that’s the decision at hand – should I stay or should I go? I have two weeks before I should say something to the people I work for if I’m going to leave for good. Which means two solid weeks of avoiding thinking about it while staring at my toes and wondering if it’s time to eat again yet. Oh, the glamour of it all!

Tags: Nong Khai, Thailand

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Nong Khai, Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.