Bandages, Thermometers and a Spider

MENGLA, China - Under most circumstances, I would invite the two young and attractive Austrians out for a Tsingdao or a couple pieces of fried tofu. But I needed an ATM and then had to get to the hospital.

 

Zack's still sick. His symptoms include fever, headache, body chills, body sweats, difficulty breathing and a pain in his right foot. We took a rest day in Luang Prabang and then another here in Mengla, but he doesn't feel any better. As Mengla has no airport and Zach really didn't want to begin the six hour bus ride to Jinghong, the nearest city with one, that meant when Zach felt even worse during the evening, we paid a visit to Mengla Country Hospital.

 

We never found an ATM, and went to the hospital with 300 RMB between us. That's about $40, or $460 less than required to walk in the door in an American hospital. Of course American hospitals treat and then send the massive bill through a collection agency several weeks later. Here in China you pay for the treatment even before you receive it.

 

Mengla County Hospital is three buildings arranged in an open square. Two are built in a Southeast Asian style, concrete boxes with pointy roofs and a yellow paint job to show they are from Yunnan Province. The other was two story and brick, and this is where the taxi dropped Zach and I off.

 

My Chinese is better than Zach's, and with his illness he was talking less coherently than normal, so I did most of the talking. I explained to the nurse on duty that he'd been sick for a few days, feeling worse and want to know what was wrong.

 

The nurse took a thermometer out of a metal box, filled with disinfectant I hope, and stuck it under his armpit. One-hundred and four degrees: Not too good. His blood pressure and breathing tests came back fine, but they took one look under his foot and sent him to the dressing unit.

 

The story of Zach's foot wound is this: on our second day in Vang Vieng, the same day our tuk-tuk crashed, Zach, myself and the Australian-New Zealand duo of Chris and Veronica decided to celebrate our good fortune in emerging from the accident uninjured by drinking ourselves silly. On the Vang Vieng are a series of riverside bars, where tubers can stop and enjoy a $1 Beer Lao, $1.50 plate of noodles or a $1 joint, and then help themselves to unlimited jumps on a high rope swing. This sounds incredibly dangerous, but only a couple people have died in the last five years on this river. Given the drunk, high debauchery that occurs everyday here, that's a minor miracle.

 

Anyway Zach didn't injure his foot by going head long into the river or passing out from too many Beer Laos. He scraped his foot in the most mundane way, on a rock in the river, walking back to the shore after a jump. It looked a normal cut, a few inches across, red, but after a week it hadn't healed. Zach changed the bandage daily and started applying liberal doses of First Aid cream, but it still looked white and pussy when the Mengla nurse opened it up.

 

The surgery room was disgusting. Zach sat on an operating table covered in a cloth with several blood stains. A large spider crawled around the closest wall. The surgeon, who spoke no English, wore a dirty coat. First came the infection test, a few drops of blood drawn from the finger with an incredibly long needle. Then the surgeon cleaned, cut and dressed the wound, all while Zach winced in the pain of hydrogen peroxide.

 

Before any of this began, I was dispatched to the payment counter and ordered to pay $3.40 for the wound care and blood test. Only then did the treatment commence.

 

The blood test came back normal - no infection - and the surgeon sent us to the brick building. There I talked with the nurses about what we should do now. They wanted to know how Zach felt, when we were returning to Beijing, and how I spoke Chinese so well. I waved this off, as there's scarcely been a less appropriate time for faux-flattery then here at the hospital. They decided to administer a couple intravenous medications, and dispatched me to the pharmacy to pay and collect them. They came to $7.50, and I had to be careful with the small glass bottles as I carried them between the buildings.

 

They put Zach in Room 101, perhaps the best room at the hospital. There were two beds, and the man in the next bed didn't look well. He grasped in stomach and shook his head when I said hello. I think he needed an appendectomy. Later his son came to visit and the nurses hooked him to some kind of pump and he felt better.

 

The room had bad fluorescent lights but cable. For two hours, Zach watched a CCTV-9 documentary about children trying to escape the Battle of Wuhan during the Second Sino-Japanese War (or the War to Prevent Japanese Aggression as the government puts it) and slept. It was after midnight by the time we walked back to our hotel room, through dark streets and a beer garden.

 

Zach looked better after his visit to the hospital, at discharge his fever was only 99 degrees and his headache had gone down. The Chinese staff had been prompt and friendly in servicing us, obviously favoring us over other patients. They ran a number of tests and administered themselves in a professional manner, except when they bothered me about my Chinese skills. The total costs were just over $10 - essentially nothing. But Mengla is no place for a serious illness. I wouldn't want to go under the knife on that bloody table, or have one my internal organs explode while hooked to that strange pipe.

 

Our visit to the Chinese health care system was informative, but next time I'd rather not have the health of a friend be at stake.

Another First Impression

MENGLA, China - What's black and white and fat all over?

 

Me, trying to model Chinese clothes.

 

"It's very fashionable," I said to the fuyuan minding the stall. "But it's just a little small."

 

Then I spent five minutes trying to worm my way out of the black clubbing shirt with small white designs on the right shoulder. I could imagine myself wearing this to a nice club in Beijing or Hong Kong, after I lost 40 pounds.

 

As I struggled with the top buttons, more fuyuans gathered. Soon I had nearly observers, making sure I didn't fall down and crack my head open. I started asking questions. To the woman hlding a baby I wondered how the old child was. Problem is I said "How many years does this child have?"

 

The assembled crowd laughed, and the mother replied. "None. He's only been here for eight months." That surprised me because this baobao - a wonderful word that can mean baby or package - had a full head of hair looked twice as old.

 

I moved onto the person trying to find a shirt large enough for me. Was she from Mengla?

 

No, she arrived not long ago, two months on September 4. She came from Hubei Province, nearly a thousand miles away. She lived with friends from home, and came here for the job. Things in Mengla so far are going fine, but I could tell by the tone of her answer that she hadn't been here long enough to decide whether her journey across the country had been smart or irrational.

 

And they had questions for me. Where did I learn Chinese? Did I dye my hair?

 

Then it came to drink. A little deeper in Mengla's market catacombs I asked a woman what she was barbecquing and less than a minute later was sitting on a small yellow stool drinking a Yunnan liquor that tasted just like paint thinner. I tried to stop my host - a local farmer seeing a couple friends after a day's work - after one glass. I said "no" 37 times, but when I turned my head a bit he snuck a bit more in there.

 

With an appertif in me, it came time for food. A bought a banana for five cents, and then kept wandered through the stalls. After I finished I asked someone where the nearest train I could put my peel in was located. "Wherever you want," she replied, and smiled when I dropped the peel immediately.

 

At a restaurant next to my hotel I attempted to order dinner, only to be stopped by three middle-aged men. "Come, sit with us," they said, and I enjoyed a dinner of fish soup, a spinach-like vegetable in vinegar, stir-fried egg and tomato and buckets of rice. The three were all here for business, one from Hubei, one from Guangdong and another from Sichuan. I asked if any had been to Laos, two hours south of town.

 

"It's not a good place," the man from Sichuan said, looking down at his rice. He'd been there, found it poor, and came back quickly. Now he reguarly comes to this Sichuanese restaurant and holds no regular job. I wondered why he came to Yunnan in the first place.

 

"Because I heard an American would be here!" And the whole table burst out laughing, myself included.

 

Approaching the Chinese border from the Lao town of Muang Nam Tha this morning I felt dread bubbling up in my stomach, that I didn't want to leave behind the colorful worlds of South and Southeast Asia for the monochrome Sino existence. But walking around today proved to be a refreshing reminder that a country with 1.4 billion people can't be a total drag, especially if you're blessed with a little Chinese to communicate with them.

Irrational Exuberance

LUANG PRABANG, Laos - Zack woke up this morning at 11 a.m. with an announcement.

"I'm too sick to take the bus tonight," he said, and then went right back to sleep.

With an unexpected day in the former capital of Laos, I rented a bicycle and went in search of unseen corners. I found evidence that contradicted my previous blog about Chinese influence in Laos. I started with a destination, but after passing scores of homes with red tin roofs, roadside stands selling baguette sandwiches and school children walking back toward country villages, I saw a sign for the northern bus station. Since that's where I am planning to catch the bus to Kunming, I decided to go for a pedal.

Luang Prabang, like most of Northern Laos, is hilly. The landscape here contours in a way I've yet to see elsewhere, with long, tree-covered hills rising a couple hundred feet in all directions. Sometimes they come to a point, or rise steeply to form a small cliff. It is beautiful year-round, but I think especially lovely now in the height of the rainy season.

My Lonely Planet Southeast Asia on a Shoestring claims that the bus station is four kilometers outside of town. I pedalled steadily for almost an hour before reaching the dirt parking lot, and that was at steady pace. I felt I handled the hills with aplomb, not having to get out and walk my cheap Chinese bike to the top once. But yet, I apparently set a land speed record for slowest pedal through the Laotian countryside.

At the bus station I found a helpful and English-speaking ticket agent. He told me what the travel agents in town had told me about tickets to China was frankly bullshit.

"There's only one bus a week," he said. "And sometimes there's not enough people and it doesn't come."

So much for those improved transportation links between Laos and the Red Giant. Getting to Kunming still requires three bus rides and a taxi ride across the border. In other words, it's a third world border crossing.

I grabbed a bowl of pho, Vietnamese noodle soup, and started back toward town. The wet season is beautiful, but there's the problem of rain. I made it about halfway back, over the largest hill and past a hilltop golden stumpa before the sky cracked open and started ruining my copy of P.J. O'Rourke's "All the Problems in the World." I sought refuge in the nearest roadside building.

It was a non-descript building, a bit larger than most with a parking lot out front and a sign that said, "Bowling Club." In Asia, where English is not always standard, I don't take English signs at face value. Bowling Club could be a nightclub, a cafe, a guesthouse or a place where people played snooker. Here signs don't have to tell the truth. But I knew this place, because it's rather famous around town. It's a bowling alley, the only place that serves alcohol after 11 p.m. Zack went here on a bender a couple nights back after several shots of Lao Lao Whiskey. I retreated home with a nasty case of the hiccups. I missed clandestine drinking at a bowling alley thanks to the hiccups. You can't make this shit up.

I arrived at four o'clock and there were no customers. There were plenty of staff, all getting ready for the night ahead. This involved unloading truckloads of Beer Lao and stacking them behind the bar. Massive quanities of the beer, hundreds and hundreds of bottles.

With nothing to do, I decided to play a game. It's 10,000 kip a game, including shoes and thin legging socks. The shoes were standard red, white and blue American floppers and the balls were also made back at home. But these place was built by Chinese. "Bao Ling Qiu Guang Lin Huan Ying Nin," was written in letters above the eight lanes. Why it was written in pinyin and not characters I'm not sure. Maybe to appeal to foreigners, the Chinese-speaking but not character reading kind. I'm not sure, but it means "Welcome to the Bowling Alley," or "Bowling Welcomes You," in more direct Chinglish.

Chinese-made means cheap in most places, and I suspect the Chinese won the bid to make this place because they cut a couple corners. The electronic scoring machines used only a couple colors, like early Atari game consoles. All the lanes were made with the same cheap wood, and it had all been polished. This means that the bowling lanes were as slippery as the place where the bowling releases the ball. The first set I nearly landed ass on the ground.

It's strange how quickly you finish a game bowling by yourself. I wonder if the author of "Bowling Alone," a seminal work of sociology, ever tried it. It's not bad really, and the best part is no one has to know you bowled a 72, unless you blog it.

 

After the game I went over to a table where a older man and two young staff were sitting. From the alley I heard echoes of Chinese, "hao," "wei," "lao" and other syllables. I wanted to practice the language and ask why only the bowling alley is allowed to serve alcohol long into the Mekong night.

 

"Ni hao."

 

No response.
 

"Zenmeyang?"

 

No response.

 

"Hello?"

 

"Hello."

 

"Chinese?"

 

No response.

 

"China?"

 

No.

 

My thought about the spread of Chinese in Laos was wrong. I pushed off from the bowling alley without discovering its secrets. Chinese money went into building the place, but whoever coordinated the deal obviously is not working Tuesday afternoons. I made it back into town in time to meet Chris and Veronica, the Australian-New Zealand couple from the tuk-tuk accident a few days back for curry. Delicious curry.

So to summarize my afternoon bicycle ride, getting between China and its neighbors is still rather difficult, and just because something is Made in China, doesn't mean it speaks Chinese.

The Little Red Tide

LUANG PRABANG, Laos - Chinese are coming to Laos for several reasons. Some are here on business. Some are on vacation. Others know people already living here. Yo-Yo is all three.

 

Yo-Yo is a 22-year-old female from Dali, a city in China's Yunnan Province. She just finished her university degree from Yunnan University, one of the best schools in Southern China. Now she works for a daily newspaper in Kunming, the provincal capital. Her English is quite good, probably helped by her college's high number of foreign language students. She's attractive, intelligent, in short, everything you'd expect from a member of China's young, globalized generation.

 

But I ran into Yo-Yo doing a pretty menial job, mixing fruit shakes at Sakura Restaurant in Vang Vieng, Laos' riverside backpacker hangout. She's here for a couple weeks on a working vacation, assisting her parents, aunt and sister, who own the restaurant.

 

I'm not sure why it's called Sakura (Japanese for "cherry tree") but it's been running for three years now and is a find among dozens of cookie-cutter restaurants. There are both tables and Thai style pillows to lounge on. At the nightly happy hour there's a free Lao Whiskey shot for anyone who has been tubing that day (everyone) and another free drink to anyone who brings their iPod. This brings in a fresh mix of music, and ensuring that people are stuck listening to the three Jack Johnson records an American hippy left behind a couple years back. I ate here twice, and there were a good number of costumers each time.

 

The streets of Vang Vieng haven't changed since my last visit, but the stores on them have. There's a better selection of goods, more crackers and fruit juices, more screwdrivers and playing cards. And the people selling are increasingly Chinese from Hunan or Yunnan Province, attracted by a sleepy local commerce that hasn't woken up from three decades of state-planned markets.

 

These people arrive not speaking Lao, and a good number don't speak English, either. Like centuries of Chinese migrants before them, they travel abroad to bring the products of their native land at a reasonable price.

 

China needs Laos. Thanks to the French, who successfully added this part of Thailand to French Indochina in the late nineteenth century, China and Thailand have no land border. Therefore all trade must go through either Burma or Laos. The Chinese are funding highway construction in Burma, but the route is longer, more mountainous, and passes through unstable territory in the hands of Karen rebels. Going through Laos is a more attractive option, and the Chinese are pouring millions of dollars to upgrade the roads.

 

I can see the improvements. The road from Vientiane to Vang Vieng now takes an hour less than it did a year ago. The sharp mountainous turns south of Luang Prabang have a few less potholes.

 

The Chinese are also building a separate infrastructure to support this new trade. A trade magazine I picked up here in Luang Prabang had many advertisements in Chinese. In Vientiane a new hotel promises Chinese television, Chinese restaurants, Chinese speaking staff and a karaoke room stocked with Chinese tunes. In Luang Prabang there's the "China-Lao Restaurant," "A Taste of China," and the "Luang Prabang China Restaurant." These aren't for Western or local tourists, a couple don't even have English or Lao menus.

 

I appreciate what the Chines have done here. There's now a direct sleeper bus that runs from Vientiane to Kunming, in China, that will shave two days off the journey. We're planning to hop on here in Luang Prabang and use it to cross the border, riding the Chinese Tide back to the Motherland.

A Bend in the Road

KASI, Laos - Can visiting a place for the second time be a homecoming?

 

Maybe it can when things develop at Laos' rate. Three years after I stopped in this town for lunch on the way to Vang Vieng, our Korean made coach stopped for a bite to eat on the way to Luang Prabang. We were promised a free lunch, but when the bus driver pushed us onto the street he did with the command, "you pay!" They promised us free lunch last time, too.

 

Kasi is one-third of the way from Vang Vieng, where my tuk-tuk tipped over, and Luang Prabang, the old capital. It's the lunch stop because it's the town of any size on the route. That's saying something because Kasi is just one street with a couple dozen thatch huts and a couple canteens centered around a tiny parking lot. The other villages are what I like to call "Bend in the Roads," ie, they fit into a bend in the road.

 

Zach left the bus slowly. On days with bus trips, Zach does most things slowly. Zach's a good sleeper, just ask Brown, my grammar teacher from last semester. Many, many times she, another classmate or I would have to call Zach on his cell phone and summon him to the 8:00 a.m. class. Some days she'd have to call for the 1 p.m. class.

 

Exacerbating this is Zach's recent discovery of Valium. One day on Ko Tao, Zach, Katy our friend from Beijing Alex and Katy's man friend Phil went for a snorkeling trip around Ko Tao. Snorkeling usually just results in salt water in my eye, so took a walk around the island. Alex and Zach wore no sunscreen, and came back at sunset with lobster red burns. They hobbled to the pharmacy, asking for a painkiller. The pharmacist, who spoke limited English, gave they Valium. Zack popped three and slept for 14 hours, and now whenever he's facing a long trip he chomps a couple down and is out for the whole journey.

 

And so Zach was pretty useless in Kasi. He didn't bring in money off the bus. He couldn't find baguettes. He was hungry. He needed help, so I went to one canteen, ordered two bowls of noodle soup and paid. I don't think I've thought about Kasi in three years since I've been here, but coming I remembered so many little details about the place. The restaurants use disposable Chinese chopsticks but use them again and again. On the left side of the street buses pull up and park (the parking lot is on the other side of the road) and throw exhaust into the soup of people sitting too close to the street. The baguettes are darker here than in other parts of Laos.

 

Kasi seemed quite pleasant; it was nice to be back. But again I could not and did not really want to linger. Kasi was just a stop-over onto bigger, more colorful places, where we would have "experiences" and visit "attractions" and learn about "culture."

 

After lunch, I saw a street-side vendor, a very old man. He sold metal objects, mostly small knives and farming tools. To attraction costumers he ran a cow bell he'd tied to the stand with a piece of red string. I tried to buy his bell. He wanted 15,000 kip, about $1.50. I didn't want to go over $1, I also had no Lao currency above this amount. (In Laos, you carry large amounts in U.S. dollars, which frequently can't be changed at small roadside places.) The metal-worker wouldn't budge, so again I can only take away memories from the tiny town of Kasi.

Rafter No. 99

VANG VIENG, Laos - Life is an adventure; a sneaky adventure that can lull someone living it into a false sense of security, make them forget that danger can inhabit the smallest, unnoticeable places. Take, for example, the passenger-side back wheel of an aging túk-túk.

Vang Vieng is one of those places that is famous among certain set: backpackers, mostly people under the age of 30 who have spent time in Southeast Asia. Not everyone makes over here to Laos on their holiday, but everyone encounters at least one person who did and they hear at length about this riverside town and its tubing.

Laos is trying to develop responsible tourism, so the tubing is controlled by a community development board. The Lonely Planet describes this as a "cartel," which I think is a bit harsh when describing a bunch of middle-aged women who suffered through the Second Indochinese War. They charge $4 a trip, and that includes a ride up to the starting point, a tube, and a life jacket for the safety-conscious.

Our túk-túk -- basically a motorcycle which two benches and a cage built on the back -- held seven people: Katy, Zach, myself, a Kiwi-Australian couple on an around the world trip, and two British women. Two other people in the British party stood on the bar at the back of the túk-túk.

The Kiwi in the couple was Veronica, the Australian Chris. They sold the house (in New Zealand), flew to Europe and went east. In Armistar, where I watched the incredible lowering of the flags ceremony on the Indian-Pakistani border, they walked through the border during the actual event. They went to the Tribal Areas in Northwest Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden is probably hiding. These are some of the most dangerous places on the planet.

And then we spun. I heard a crunch sounding and then túk-túk started to veer and wobble. We went to the left for a fraction of a second, then the driver made a hard turn to the right. It seemed as if we would tip over first on the driver's side, then on the passenger side. Adrenaline made time slow down, enough for me to grab tightly onto the handrail at the top of the túk-túk. I clamped down and braced for impact.

We went off the road, off the sidewalk and right towards a small Laotian restaurant. I imagined the plastic chairs and cheap wooden tables flying, careening through the corrugated tin walls and down into the river. But then we stopped. We hadn't tipped over.

The túk-túk's wheel, for no discernible reason, had fallen off. The rest of the vehicle looked fine, but the part without a wheel was buried in a couple inches of sand.

One person was hurt. One of the British men hanging off the back jumped off while the túk-túk was still on the road and now was limping toward the sidewalk. The side of his hand had a few cuts and it looked quite painful when he walked. We flagged down a túk-túk going back toward town, and he got on with his three friends.

Nervously, the rest of his went in another túk-túk up to the top of the river. Four dollars is a pretty good deal, but adventure travel comes with a bit of risk, too-often in this world of discount budget airlines and Skyping from Myanmar do we backpackers forget this.

But in this case, everything worked out. On the river, we ran into the British party, minus the man who'd fallen off the túk-túk. He was fine, they said, sipping Beer Laos back at the guesthouse. Resting, not riding.

Hello & Welcome

VIENTAINE, Laos - In small countries, they are proud of their greetings.

 

Big countries have large accomplishments: Great Walls, Pyramids and economic revolutions. Laos' national symbol is a gold, vaguely phallic Buddhist symbol with peeling paint. There's one good paved road in the country (although to be fair it does run nearly the entire length of this rectangular republic). It's the poorest country in East Asia.
 

Laotians don't have much. They have the excellent Beer Lao and they have "sabadee." It means hello.

 

This morning I got off a night bus from Bangkok to pass through Thai customs, Laos Visa and then Laos Customs. We switched from a plush double-decker air-conditioned bus to something with fold down middle seats that block the aisle. But our handler - the man designed to make sure we actually get to Vietnaine - said "Sabadee."

 

This isn't just a Laos thing. In Nepal, everyone said "namantse," also hello. Tourists are expected to learn this word, to respond to it when people offering it as a greeting on the street. The locals will learn English, make products just for tourists and open up the country's historical treasures, if only they learn this one word. And they do.

 

Bigger countries have bigger worries. "Namantse" is also hello in Hindi, but I didn't hear it once in a month in India. China, and far too many other third-world countries, have adopted "hello" as an all-purpose way of attracting a foreigner's attention. I come from America. We have if anything too much "hello" there. Hence the proliferation of "hey," "how are you," "s'up," and "yo."

 

So in Laos, I say "sabadee," frequently and without prompt, in the hope that perhaps a Laotian or two will think a little better of their country.

Journey of My Discontents

BANGKOK – Traveling in Thailand can be so simple that I can move down my list of complaints, away from infectious diseases and racist insurgencies, all the way down to overly efficient transportation systems.

After a half-century of catering to thousands of farang fortnightly, the Thais have made the journey from the island paradise of Koh Tao to the megapolis of Bangkok so painless that all I can do at the end of it is sit here and nit-pick. To wit:

* The ferry sales on the island are controlled by a price cartel, but a particularly effective one. I found a 100 baht discount, but only after going to more than two dozen shops. Set the prices or let them vary the price. This was just boring.

* On board the movie below deck was Mr. & Mrs. Smith. But the boat docked and they didn't let us see the final action sequence in the home supply store. Criminal.

* Made to wait at a concrete pavilion, some passengers discovered the long row of squat toilets came with a pet:a white macaw. He could make several noises, none of which seemed natural for a bird. My favorite sounded like this: THR-R-R-R-R-I-I-I-LL! This was diverting, but this macaw couldn't speak a word of English or Thai, at least none of the eight words that I know.

* For a journey back to the capital city, we had a remarkably complicated timetable. We arrived in the city of Chumphon with three free hours. The twenty passengers from the Ko Tao ferry remaining (some transfered to buses bound for Malaysia or beaches and islands on Thailand's east coast) were led into a holding facility. I'm being too harsh on the bus company. There were three rooms: one with tables, chairs and a menu of standard farang Thai-fare, another dimly lit with tatami mats and triangle pillows for a seista, and an alcove with computers. The hours passed quickly, at the very end I was in the bathroom. I found myself at the very end of the line for the bus, and consequently, facing backwards in a non-seat.

I lost the game of Russian Roulette that is a long-distance bus ride assignment.This gaffe I should/could/am want to blame on Mr. Zachary Raske, who didn't save the seat across the aisle for when I returned from the bathroom. My seat, to put it mildly, stank. It didn't recline, had no light, and featured a view of eight feet from the riders in the first row several inches from my face. I spent the first few hours of the trip in the stairwell of the bus reading, getting through a page or two before someone upstairs would need to elbow by and use the restroom.

* We got off the bus again, this time at a familiar place. Part cantina, part concentration-camp, I'm going to go out on a limb and call the standard rest stop of the Golden Ticket Travel Agency the worst restaurant in Thailand. The standard garnish here is flies - which come free. Everything else is at least three dollars. On the way to Ko Tao I ate pasty noodles with an unrecognizable vegetable or two, this time I try a bland take on Vietnamese pho, noodle soup. The best part about this restaurant is the theme: captivity. Patrons are required not to leave. Staff members and bus drivers participate by yelling at any foreigner who tries to take a walk or heaven forbid, make a run for the 7-Eleven down the street. As a souvenir, I buy a five dollar bag of Sour Cream and Onion Chips and hope for no return visits.

* The journey reached a sudden end just before four in the morning. "Last stop! Last stop!" I heard. Despite facing backward and eating a half-pound of fatty chips, I fell asleep on Thailand's four-lane highway. We arrived two hours early, and we ejected onto the chilly streets of Bangkok in flip-flops and pair of board shorts with a slight rank of mildew from the evening prior. The bus left patrons in the middle of an anonymous street, where the only English spoken appeared to be from taxi sharks, offering to take tired souls to the backpacker nexus of Koh San road for $10.

I walked here, on the strip, in under ten minutes. I'm too familiar with this stretch of the capital to be fooled by these tricks. But the only reason I'm able to avoid them is that I love this country so much that I keep returning and having wonderful experiences, even if the bathroom parrot has yet to master Esperanto.

Soaked

KO NANGYUAN, Thailand - Our boat had two new occupants for our brief trip back around the head wall and our beachfront hotel on Ko Tao. Both were German, and one held an expensive camera pointed at the coral-lightened waters.

 

Zach, sitting behind me in the middle of the boat, suggested that he might want to store the camera in the captain's dry bag. Stiff winds and an approaching thunderstorm meant we'd been hastily removed from the islet of Ko Nangyuan before the rain came.

 

The German rebuffed Zach's advice.

 

"It will stay dry," he said. "You will see."

 

We set off in a Thai Longtail Boat, which is about 20 feet long, and made of thick wooden planks. One plank extends over the front end, this is the "tail." The boats are low and designed to work with the current of the ocean, not go against it.

 

Our fate lay in the hands of our captain. He was a product of Ko Tao's diving scene: long, curly hair and gap in his smile where two front teeth used to be. He drove well: taking the smaller waves head on and then pausing the motor so we could avoid the occasional large swells. We weren't in "The Perfect Storm," but the coming cold front kicked up swells several feet high, enough to make me nervous sitting just 18 inches off the surface of the water.

 

Fifteen minutes later I was on Ko Tao's beach with a cold bottle of water. Our new friends the Germans were nowhere to be found. Several waves crested the front of the boat during the trip, and his fancy camera was soaked.

The Plage

KO TAO, Thailand - Mr. J is fond of slogans. They are plastered around his storefront. Some are practical. "Mr. J has the best condoms in the world! Buy 10, Get One Free." "Buy one book from Mr. J, get a free chocolate." Some are whimsical. "Mr. J flight from Ko Tao to Alaska. First flight free!"

Mr. J looks Thai, about 60, with half-grey, half-black cropped hair and a button-down shirt kept open on the chest. When customers enter, he usually shouts at them.

"Hello! Welcome! Buy one book, get one free chocolate! On vacation, spend money no problem. Make Mr. J happy, spend money!"

Mr. J's store and bungalows are the logical place to begin a tour around the tropical island of Ko Tao, a place where white-sand beaches and perfect coral formation have transformed a tiny fishing village into a tourist destination, but not yet enough development to drive the eccentrics out.

Zach, Katy and the rest of our growing cadre of friends went on a snorkel tour today. Snorkeling for me means leaks, salty eyes and desperate attempts to save my glasses from falling into a sea urchin, so I stayed on shore.

I walked out of my cabin on Sairee, the island's biggest and most developed piece of sand. I passed the restaurants where for the past three days I've woofed down chicken basil and fried tofu triangles and peanut sauce. Further on are the bars, where at night I sit propped up by a triangle-shaped pillow with a large bottle of Chang Beer in my right hand, listening to either reggae, jazz-inflected hip-hop, or urban techno and debating whether dreams contain "real" emotions. After a pair of palm trees that craned for nearly 100 feet toward the beach, I was in virgin territory.

I came to the police station, its three desks deserted and the front door unlocked. It's located curiously away from the island's main population centers and nightlife, as if the Thai police would rather not know how the tourist baht is pumped into their country's economy. Next door a general store was open, and a grabbed a strawberry Italian Ice, and I arrived at Mr. J's just in time to throw the wrapped in his wastepaper basket.

I didn't want to be weighed down on my journey, and Mr. J's cheeky calls for money weren't persuasive - "On vacation, spend money no problem! - so I left.

My original aim was to reach to ferry port of Mae Ham and enquire about chartering a longtail boat for an hour, but I followed a concrete road toward the island's interior. Here, as elsewhere on the island, the businesses are a mixture of Thai and European, the foreign ownership always proudly noted in the sign out front. "Livres francais," a creperie boasted; another restaurant claimed to serve Fish n' Chips and "Danish Specialities." Two days ago I had my second terrible oyako donburi - a simple Japanese dish of chicken, egg, onion and rice - of the trip, so I kept walking. Most countries don't export their finest chefs to small Thai islands.

After about a mile I toured onto a small dirt track that promised to reach a beach in 1.5 kilometers. It started flat but soon I was panting and gasping up a steep headwall that separated the main basin of the island from the shore. This road appeared at one time to have been paved but now that had been replaced by coarse sand with deep ruts. After I reached the top and started to descend I ran into a middle-aged American wearing a "Vermont Isn't Flat" T-shirt. He was on a bike ride, and appeared to have reached to the point in the ascent of the hill where one wonders why they are spending their well earned vacation from a high-pay, high-stress job in Maryland (something in finance) to push a set of wheels up a third-world road. Presumably his wife is having a better time back at the hotel pool, cocktail with umbrella in hand.

At the shore there was no beach, only the Banana Bar. I was the only customer, and to be served I had to stop the caretaker from rolling his joint. He gave me a soda water and retreated behind the bar to his sweet smoke. Banana Bar (this being a Thai island, there are also bungalows) sits in a place that so beautiful that it almost doesn't matter that you can't swim here. The cove is flanked by high rocks, and the surf is constantly smacking into them and throwing white mist in the air. This is the landscape of Maine's coast, but here the water is turquoise and the weather tropical year-round.

 

Banana Bar serves no food, so I moved further up the coast to Cookie Bungalow. I ordered a squid phat thai and a strawberry shake and started talking to a pair of Frenchwomen. They came to Ko Tao last year on vacation and were back for a second visit. They will travel together through Laos and then back to Bangkok. From there the younger one will return to university in Lyons and the other will travel to Shanghai. She knows a French designer there, who has offered a place to stay and to help her find work.

She wanted to know about China. Is it nice, is it exciting? Yes, but in its own, laid-back way, so is this place.

On The Beach I Observe

KOH SAMUI, Thailand - On the beach I observe.

Sometimes I watch my copy of "The Vanishing Road," a tale of a Nigerian boy and his encounters with spirits. But more often I see the people on the beach around me.

There are hawkers. Some sell plastic beads and and long hemp necklaces. Ice cream comes from men carrying a heavy Styrofoam cooler and a sign with pictures of the different frozen treats. The prices have been taped over, replaced with a heavy fee for carrying it from the store to the blistering hot beach. Some flavors are not available, on these the price tag is changed to read "NO." To avoid the sun, they wrap a dark blue towel around their head and place a baseball cap on top. They wear long sleeves and cloth pants, exposing only the front of the face.

To my left are the Germans. They are three: wife, husband and son. The son is not always there, he floats in and out with a pair of white iPod headphones, wide American sunglasses and a visor. I hope their vacation is almost over, because the husband's back cannot stand many more days in the sun. Every square flabby inch is crimson, covered in freckles. Throughout the day, the wife and her dyed red hair peel large strips of skin off, exposing a more pink epidermal layer.

To my right are the British. It is a young couple. The closest is the woman, with a black bikini bottom and nothing covering her tanned breasts. She wears sunglasses and rotates 180 degrees every half-hour. Her boyfriend sleeps mostly, sometimes talks about the economic book he apparently is reading (I never see it). Once they take a walk northward down the beach, but they return 15 minutes later looking cross. The boyfriend sleeps again, the girlfriend removes her top.

There are the two we call "The Playboys." One is American, the other might be Italian. They move frequently, from the bar behind our chairs to the massage tent and often go en promenade. Both have tattoos, the American only one: a red-and-blue yin-yang. Both the yin and yang have jagged, lightning bolt contours. The Italian has more than I can see as he walks from the beach to the massage tent. Several are in Chinese of questionable calligraphy.

The Playboys are popular with the local woman. We hear them talk to the three massage ladies. Two nights ago the Italian slept with a fourth, not present massage girl. Last night he slept with the girl with the platinum-blond hair. In the middle of their lovemaking session the girl from the previous night made an unwelcome appearance, and tried to smash a plate over the blond girl's head. The Italian intervened, and it seemed that things at the beach are now O.K.

Soon the woman will have to do without these men.

"I go to Japan for a week. Then I come back," the Italian said.

As time goes on, the beach seems darker, more mysterious than on my first glimpses of the white sand. The corn salesman also sells marijuana out of his barbecue. A long-haired backpacker makes a pass at a woman's purse while she swims in the ocean. An Israeli man is stumbling around after too many cocktails.

Around 5:00 p.m. the resort employees come around to convert my beach chair and the one to my left into a flat table. They place a small centerpiece with a candle and several napkins where arm lies and two pillows at my feet. My day of watching the beach is over.

One Two Connect Four

KOH SAMUI, Thailand - With the darkness on the white sands of Koh Samui's Chaewang Beach arrive an unusual breed of snake-oil salesmen. They are young children, some still in their neat school uniforms. Beachgoers at Chaewang's sea-side dinner and drink establishments are inevitably approached several times in the course of the meal. The question is always the same.

"You want to play Connect Four? You win I give you 100 baht, you lose you give me 100 baht. Come on buddy, let's go!"

And then a young girl or boy throws a red plastic checker down the middle row as a challenge.

I played twice. The first time it took my opponent, 12-years-old with pigtails, about ten moves to beat me. Someone at my table convinced me to go again - on her time. The only condition was that I went slow and concentrated. I treated the match as I would a game of chess looking at each possible move and the effect it would have in three, four turns. It took me several minutes to drop each checker. I wanted to win.

Three moves in, it was over. I'd been so distracted with hypothetical future turns that I failed to see that I'd left the bottom row open to four tiles.

"I win! I win!" The girl screamed as she cleared the board.

It's an ingenious scheme. Connect Four is a relatively simple game, and there must be a few strategies that mean these they win 95% of the time. The deck is stacked further because the child always goes first, taking the center, and most important square. Most of the competition is not sober. On the off chance they lose, what tourist accepts money from a child in a third-world country?

Not me. Tomorrow I'll probably play again.

The Ladykillers

KOH SAMUI, Thailand - New Hut is accurately named: it consists of a couple dozen thatched-roof bungalows 50 meters from one of the world's nicest beaches. That it still costs $5 a night to rent these when the Thai baht is rapidly appreciating and budget long distance travels means it's easier than ever for Israeli, Swedish and German backpackers to get these is a minor miracle.

Yesterday I arrived with Zach, my traveling companion, and Katy, a 22-year-old Brit who recently decided to drop out of the University of Nottingham and travel for several months. We met on the ferry, where downstairs the Spike Lee movie "Inside Man" screened in a cabin air-conditioned to meat locker levels and upstairs a couple hundred people craned toward the boat's bow to catch the first glance of the Koh Samui. After a couple hours of conversation (interrupted by visits to check on the movie's bank heist), we decided to look for accommodation together.

New Hut's bungalows look the same from the outside, but this belies a plethora of sleeping options. I saw a twin bungalow, a double bungalow, a bungalow that slept four in different, a bungalow with an attached bathroom and a bungalow with an additional fan. We settled on two: a twin for Zach and I and a double for Katy. This decision had consequences.

This morning I woke up around 10:00 a.m. to an overcast sky and an empty beach. August is the end of Thailand's monsoon season, and so far paradise has been cloudy.

Zach went to the bathroom. He came back with a brown leather object in his hand. "This was sitting outside," he said.

It was my wallet, empty of cash. Thankfully there hadn't been much to take: about $10 in Thai currency, and less than a dollar each in Indian, Chinese, Bhutani and Nepalese currency.

We inventoried the bunglow. I couldn't find my shorts (the location of my wallet) or my iPod. I hung the shorts on a clothing hanger near the bungalow's entrance prior to sleep. Whoever stole the cash must have grabbed the shorts, removed the money and left. But I wondered how they could have stolen my iPod which I fell asleep listening to underneath my mosquito net.

I went to the owner of the guesthouse and told him about my loss. He was Thai with an accent that emphasized nasal sounds in his vowels and therefore a little like Daffy Duck.

"I sorry," he said, and looked around the front of our bungalow. "Maybe three o'clock, four o'clock, after bars close Ladyboys come through. They want smoke, they need money, they take your stuff."

So here's his explanation: In the pitch-black, middle of the night, a bunch of transvestite prostitutes stumble home a couple kilometers from a bar, checking beach front cabins along the way. They find our door slightly ajar, reach into the left side and take a pair of shorts hanging on a nail. They also sneak into the cabin, under the mosquito net and remove my iPod and the long, tangled headphones, all without a flashlight or waking Zach and I. Pretty reasonable.

My instinct tells me that it was an inside job, that someone employed at the bungalow made an early morning run through easily-accessible bungalows, but then again, if I listened to my instinct, I would have realized that cabin of my dreams doesn't come without a price.

The Story Train

BANGKOK - Two in the morning flights aren't good for my observational abilities, so it took another passenger on the express downtown bus to point out that the Thais were dressing strange this morning. The majority wore bright yellow shirts. Bureaucrats wore bright yellow Oxfords, college students bright yellow T-shirts with fashionable designs and the poor merchants wore bright yellow that looked second-hand.

The shirts invoke the sun and the Thailand's long-lasting minority, and its head, on the throne 61 years this month.

Welcome to Bangkok, Version 2007. The ubiquitous pictures of King Rama VI -- taking pictures, playing tennis -- are much more sinister than they were three years ago. Because although it's against the law to say so, I'm not sure I agree with the king's judgment. A military coup that he supported against the popular President Thaksin has been in charge for over a year now, and there's no real timetable for a return for democracy. So now I have to refer to the Land of Smiles as a popular tourism destination ruled by an autocratic kabal.

I treasure my memories of this city, where I started a lengthy backpacking trip around Asia. It was my first vacation that truly felt like an adventure. When we arrived and checked into a guesthouse with peeling lime green walls and a smell of mothballs I felt that I stepped out of teenage years and into the Leonardo DiCaprio movie "The Beach."

So when I read on the Associated Press newswire one afternoon in Kansas that the Thais ten year experiment with democracy had ended in failure, a cloud descended on those thoughts. I didn't want to believe my tourist dollars were going toward a crumbling government, and going back seemed out of the question.

But the almighty bucks beat my morals. When the travel agent in Kolkata told me it'd been $500 to Sri Lanka, $400 to Singapore or Kuala Lumpar but only $100 to Bangkok, I bought my ticket.

And really, how much does the political system matter on a beach vacation? What I really care about is how the backpacker strip, Kao San Road differs from my first visit. The place where I spent my premiere night in the country is now a pile of ruble; in six months a luxury hotel will replace where I spent a restless evening and my friend Jeremy got a couple dozen nasty bedbug bites.

Kao San Road is still a couple blocks of concrete that serves as the locus of Southeast Asian Travel. Here travelers arrive shell-shocked from London, Stockholm or Perth, drink a couple Beer Changs, down a pad thai on the street, buy a "Same Same But Different T-Shirt" and then buy a bus/boat combo ticket to the Full Moon Party on the southern island of Koh Phan Yang. At the end of their trips they return, tan, thinner and with stories to tell. Tonight I listened to a few.

James, half-Thai, is from Rochester, New York. He's interning for Morgan Stanley here in Bangkok. On weekends he comes to Kao San to meet foreigners, dance to a Filipino cover band at the Shamrock Bar and drink 80 baht Rum and Cokes. He has a Thai passport, but he's traveling on an American one, which necessities trips to the Burmese or Cambodian border every couple weeks. It's not far.

"If I drive 100, it's two and a half hours. There's no laws," he said. "It's Thailand."

Nick is here with James. They went to grade school together in a small upstate New York time, and now they share James' grandmother's apartment. James spent the summer working on a private island south of Phuket. The island had one resort, few customers, so he spent most of his time with the Thai staff, fishing and smoking copious amounts of marijuana.

An Australian with an ugly mullet promised a life-changing experience if we went to Sala, a town on the Chinese-Vietnamese border. He's been around the world "like six times" and this is favorite place.

Victoria, born in Vancouver but now living in Taiwan, told me how much she hates the way people in Beijing talk. Beijing Chinese tends to add an "r" sound to words. Fuyuan becomes fuyur, men ("gate") becomes mer. She thinks Beijing's clubs might be more happening than Taipei's, but she's too afraid of the Beijinger accent to make the trip over.

The political situation may be different than three years ago, but the military dictatorship is too dependent on tourists to stamp out the city's lively trade in interesting stories.

Fresh Encounters

KOLKATA, India - Fresh and Juicy serves no fruit. It specializes in Indian food for the backpacker: garlic naan, chicken tikka and mango lassis. These are served quickly and cheaply, and for this reason I ate one meal here almost everyday in Kolkata.

 

With a flight out of India looming, Zach and I sat down for one final Juicy meal. We sat in the corner, under a whirring fan that blew out the warm evening air and dust. We ordered. We waited. Zach started talking in Chinese.

 

"Do you like monkeys?"

 

"Yeah. They're O.K."

 

"I saw a monkey yesterday."

 

"No you didn't."

 

"I want to eat a monkey."

 

"Then eat a monkey."

 

At this point, the Asian man at the next table turned over and very gently tried to enter the conversation. "Ex-ex-excuse me?" he said. "Are you talking in Chinese?"

 

My cheeks reddened, because yes, we were attempting to speak Chinese. If I'd known there would be an audience, I would have attempted correct tones. But the man at the next table didn't seem to mind.

 

Roger, 19, came to our table. He was Taiwanese and here to volunteer with Mother Thersea's charity for three weeks. This was his first time travelling internationally without his parents, and he seemed excited. Tonight he left his three travelling companions to strike out on his own. He started at Fresh and Juicy, we took him with us to a bar.

 

There Roger had what might have been his first Bacardi Breezer, told his about he is bored in tiny Taiwan and wants to move away after he finishes studying to be a tour guide or hotel manager, and then announced how happy he was to meet us.

 

"I want to find things on my own," he said. "And I'm glad that I met you."

A New Mission

KOLKATA, India - When someone taps you on the street in Kolkata, they usually want spare change or some milk for their eminanacted children, not offer a movie role.

Kolkata (Calcutta if you're feeling colonial) deserves reevaluation. Mother Theresa made it famous for her work with the city's poor. Thersea did her most important work right after the partition of India and Pakistan, when hundreds of thousands of Hindus created makeshift slums after fleeing what is now Bangladesh.

There are still poor people in Kolkata, they tug on shirts, shuffle between taxis with an outstretched hands and give heart-breaking speeches about how long it's been since their last meal. But there are also wealthy ones, the people I saw at the bar Somewhere Else dancing to a really good cover of The Cranberries "Zombie."
 

It's a cosmopolitan place, and when the house band took a break I chatted with members of the Nigerian national volleyball team, in town for a Commonwealth tournament. They had arrived earlier in the afternoon, and went straight from the airport to the stadium and lost to Singapore. Christopher, a lanky 33-year-old who played center and enjoyed spiking, predicted victory in the next day's match against the host team.

 

Harry Potter's everywhere. Since his final book is printed outside the city, it's available and cheaper than in other countries. A hardcover copy can be found for 550 rupees, about $13. He's also selling-out crowds in Kolkata's air-conditioned shopping centers, where the middle class beat the monsoon humidity. I saw "The Order of the Phoenix" in a rooftop facility with high-security. I was frisked twice before being allowed to enter, forced to spit out my gum (I tounged it) and forced to give up the rest of the pack.

 

And there's Jack, who mans an ice cream stand in the backpacker ghetto of Chowringee in the evenings, which makes recruiting for his day job of aspiring filmmaker easier. Jack served me an orange Popsicle and a business card my first evening here. He looks around 25, well-built and friendly, someone who probably does well selling food but isn't satisfied spending his youth on a Kolkatan street corner.

He wanted to know if I'd been in town later this week, and would be available for an early morning shoot.

"Just four hours," he said. "I'll pick you up from here and return three or four hours later."

I would portray a British solider, one of six who would be committing some sort of atrocity to a young, presumably defenseless Indian. For my work I'd receive 1,000 rupees ($25) and something for my video resume. I declined the offer, not out of pride for the British Raj, but because I'm camera-shy. Even in a non-speaking, strictly massacring role.