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.

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.

Return Diner, Return Traveler

WICHITA, Kan. – There's plenty of "Ethnic" food, as it is regrettably known around here, in Wichita, you just need to know where to look. Thanks to my friend Ryan from Hong Kong, a couple nights I ate at Café Asia.

It was my first Asian meal since, well, Asia.

The restaurant's decor and location weren't impressive: a small space hidden at the back of a strip mall in the north side of town. Inside there were tablecloths hiding tables that looked straight out of a cafeteria and a collection of Buddhas and postcards on the plain walls. At one corner there was a section of DVDs, with a sign: "Not for Sale." Children of the owner watched them when they came to the restaurant after school.

I studied the many-sectioned menu. There were "Appetizers," "Chinese Favorites," "Chef's Specialties," "Thai Items," and "Combination Plates." Each one had several dishes, with the ingredients explained in grammatically correct but sometimes confusing English ("pork with pieces of sliced vegetables cooked together").

The menu, did however give away that the restaurant was owned by a Malaysian family. The Chef's Specialties were all Malaysian, the rest was just a drab mixture of Chinese and Thai that most Asian restaurants in small-town America feel they need to offer to ensure a crowd.



I asked the waitress for Nasi Lombok, the Pad Thai of Malaysia, and something I ate quite frequently when I visited the country.

She looked surprised. "Oh, I've heard of that. Yes, yes I have had that once. We don't have that here."

I wound up getting a kind of sweet Malaysian noodle, which were pretty good, but the real point of that request an excuse to converse. I told the waitress of my travels in the country, and in turn she told her story.

She was from northern peninsular Malaysia. That's why they had Thai on the menu, because the country is quite close to the border so people knew how to make some of the dishes. She also knew some Chinese people in her hometown, so she knew something about that cuisine, too. Business in Wichita was fine, if not booming. She longed to make a return visit to her home country. She'd done it once before. Maybe next year.

On the way out the door, I said goodbye to my new Malaysian friend. She'd been very friendly, talking for nearly 20 minutes, pausing in between to help other customers.

"Wait," she said, "Take this."

She pushed a piece of paper into my hand. I opened it when I got outside. I was expecting a menu, for my return to the restaurant. Instead it was a tourist brochure, for my return to Malaysia.