Mai Muay Thai...



Yesterday I woke up after a few hours sleep, unable to stay in bed from the sheer excitement, even though I was still absolutely exhausted. I had a strange Thai breakfast of fruit, and barley in coconut milk, then had a little wander around the weird little guesthouse in which I'm staying. On the top floor the corridor has been created by smashing through the brick partitions of several buildings, joining the rooms along a dim, wood-lined passage that's almost pitch black, even in the day. There's a balcony at the end which is a veritable jungle of what I guess we call house plants, though here of course they're all growing outside. After my slow start I went back to Chatuchak Market yesterday, having decided to buy a couple more of the light cotton shirts I'd picked up the day before. But could I find the stall again? The place is a sprawling warren, and no matter how many times I wandered in circles and ended up at the same point, having trawled through hundreds of alleyways and stalls, I couldn't find the nice young lady who gave me a nice discount a big Thai smile. I settled for a couple of almost identical shirts for 100 baht more, and bought a white trilby to keep the sun off my head. I'm looking rather Hemingway at the moment, if you give or take a foot or so, a beard and about seventy-five pounds. After escaping from the market I set off through Chatuchak Park to find No.7 Stadium, where a Muay Thai tournament takes place on Sunday afternoons. As I looked up the path ahead I saw a squirrel moving across the path very slowly - too slowly for a squirrel I realised as it became clear that it was in fact an adolescent Monitor Lizard, heading towards the cool green water of the lake. He decided to head back when he saw me move slowly towards him, quivering with excitement as I fumbled to get my camera out beffore he disappeared into the bushes.

I kept on through the park, finding the Northern Bus Station, then utterly failing to find the stadium, and traipsing along the main highway coming into town, receiving strange looks from the street vendors who sell food and bumper stickers to the bus and taxi drivers. I'd given up on the Thai kickboxing and decided to go home when I heard an enormous roar from one of the covered foodstalls. Looking in to the crowd of animated men, I saw that they were watching a Muay Thai contest on the TV, shouting bets across the crowded space, jumping out of their chairs when the fighters delivered crashing blows with their knees and fists, and with powerful kicks. I decided to stay for a drink, and to soak up the atmosphere, but there were no drinks for sale. I stayed anyway, being invited by means of pointing and mime to join the book. I declined, pulling my pockets out to show how I knew I'd end up if I was naive enough to put my money down with these guys. The lady who was cooking brought me a pepsi in a glass with a straw and some ice - I thought I'd risk whatever microbes might have been frozen into crystalline form for a short period for the sake of courtesy. When I left at the end of the second fight, I had a hard time paying for the drink, even though it turned out that she'd sent someone over to the bus station to buy a pepsi for the strange farang who walked along the motorway to watch Muay Thai on the TV, and who didn't even want to bet.



First Impressions...

Yesterday we flew into a golden sunrise high above the furrows of cloud over the east coast of the Indochinese Peninsula. Looking at the chequered landscape below it was impossible to guess our location. A forceful sense of familiarity struck me as I looked at the quilted fields below: we could have been flying over any European country in high summer. At that height, everything is made uniform. The illusion was quickly dispelled as we approached the ground, and I caught sight of the vast green floodlands and the muddy, indistinct boundary between land and sea. Coming closer I saw the palm trees, the bright reds and golds of the temples, and the reflection of the rising sun in the water of the paddy fields, and I laughed out loud.

It's very difficult to find meaningful expression of the wonder and delight that I'm experiencing around each new corner of this wild, sprawling city. The cool order and simplicity of the train on which I rode into the city, negotiating the ticket machine with ease (despite my nervous anticipation and lack of sleep); navigating the journey to Mo Chit without the slightest threat of becoming lost - these were my first surprises. Then the emerald green of the park itself: the strange cloudy-green waters of the lake; the liquid roots of the trees, which look like they're melting out of the sky.

Chatuchak Market is a wonder. There are 15,000 stalls, and I was soon hopelessly lost as I wandered around searching for clothes to wear in the increasingly oppressive heat. Everywhere people were eating foods of a huge variety: black jelly in ice water, bowls of whelks, pink barbecued prawns, noodle soup - unnameable and unidentifiable - so it wasn't long before I was ravenous. I stood and watched at one stall, trying to work out how I should go about ordering in the absence of even the most rudimentary jet-lagged Thai. Pointing at the various trays of piping-hot food seemed acceptable, so I sat down with a bowl of rice and three mysterious dishes that turned out to be chicken curry, a deep-fried black fish of some description, and a crunchy, crispy, delicious dish that I couldn't manage to identify. Eveything tasted incredible: hot, sweet, sour, citric, rich, salty, pungent. And still hot. Hot, hot, hot. I wandered around for a while longer, stifling the urge to buy beautiful brass Buddhas and hideous, amazing Predators made from hundreds of nuts and bolts and bits of scrap metal. I stopped to listen to an Issan man play the èrhú, with its strange nasal yet rich tones so suggestive of a culture that I do not understand in the slightest.

On the way back to the station I saw a woman begging by the iron railings of the park, her disfigured face melting into a long lava-like flow of flesh like the roots of the trees in the park behind her. A blind man singing Thai songs on a portable karaoke machine shuffled his way through the crowds, past the stalls selling knives and knuckledusters and tasers; alligator skulls, skins, teeth and claws; ingeniously carved antiques made last week in a tiny Bangkok workshop. A blind girl stood still at the foot of the station steps holding out her begging bowl, and I thought about the welfare state and the woman with the almost-certainly curable disease that was slowly transforming her face into a waterfall.



I found my way to the guesthouse I'd booked online, travelling on the Skytrain, looking across the vast panorama of the city, and down onto the rooftops with their colourful spirit houses and concrete dragons. Later in the evening, after a perfect dish of Pad Thai noodles, I wandered around the red-light district which stretches along the road where the quirky little guesthouse is located. Ladyboys with long slender legs stand at every street corner, plucking the sleeves of the unaccompanied white men. A slight shrug and a smile was sufficient for all but the tallest, strongest, and scariest, whose determined grip took more effort to dislodge. Their astounding sexual aggression gives an impression of strength and confidence but it looks like hard work all the same. One ladyboy told me as much. She said 'Not everyone knows what I am', which causes problems with some cutomers one can imagne. It struck me as a particularly emotionally-draining line of work, which is why I suppose Bouquet was interested to know if I would like to be her 'boyfriend' while I stay in Bangkok. When I thanked her and declined, she said she would have to finish her beer and go to work. Even having a European boyfriend to take care of the bills seems like hard work. Her last - a German guy - broke her heart she said. As we finshed our beers one of the children who run around at night thrust her McDonald's begging cup at us, exposing us to the full force of her incredible cuteness. I shook my head with a couple of 'Mai's to make sure, but Bouquet took a few bhat from her purse and put them in the cup with a big sad smile. As the happy oblivious child skipped away, Bouquet sighed and said, 'I would like to have,' which I thought was quite heart-breaking too.

Having walked past a few of the mobile stalls selling a variety of fried insects and insect larvae earlier (you photo you tip - 10 Baht), I thought I'd have a go at the least-frightening of the offerings served by a tiny Issan lady: small grasshoppers fried to a dark and crispy finish. She was quite surprised when it became clear that the Thai phrase I was mangling was 'How much?', and when she'd asked if they were actually for me to try, she generously gave me a few of the long, yellow beetle larvae to try as well. They actually turned out to be marginally tastier than the grasshoppers, but neither are something I'll be in a hurry to try again. I expected the insects to be more like a crustacean - a dried shrimp perhaps. Later on, sitting at a small mobile late-night bar, I asked one of the bar girls, Boo, what was hanging from the rack on the bug-vendor's trolley. She was surprisedwhen I told her that I'd already tried the grasshoppers earlier, and was quite amused by my decision to indulge in Issan peasant fare. She was less surprised that I didn't really like it. The ghost-like creatures hanging up turned out to be dried, flattened squid. They're barbecued over coals for a few minutes, then run through what looks like a small, toothed wringer to tenderise them. They're quite tasty, and certainly more palatable than the grasshoppers and beetle larvae. Sea-bugs win hands down over land-bugs as far as I'm concerned.





Why choose Indochina?

 

This old map has a lot to do with it. Torn and faded, stained and defaced, this 'New Map of Asia' was folded into one of my Grandad's old books. He traced the voyage of its protagonist with a red biro, to better illustrate the traveller's route through the subcontinent of India and the oceans of South East Asia. He'd glimpsed some of these sights himself when he'd served with the merchant navy in World War II, back when his eyes weren't so tired. He must have been a confident young man, stepping ashore to explore the markets of India alone, ignoring naval regulations for the sake of some blessed solitude. 'The only mate I ever needed with me was in here', he'd say, cheerfully patting his ankle, indicating a razor-sharp dagger that fitted neatly between his socks and his skin. A real East Ender.

The East. As a child it always conjured fearful and fascinating images straight out of late-nineteenth century literature. Wakefield's 'New Map of Asia', published in 1817, with its legends of Arabia, Persia, Tartaria, Hindoostan, Siam, Cochin China, and the Russian and Chinese Empires, still manages to do so. That suspiciously Orientalist fascination has stayed with me from childhood and now, at last, I'm travelling to South East Asia for the first time.