Dim Sum

A silvery white billowy brilliance of clouds

Skittering atop Bangkok’s oozy brownish red haze.

Into heavens arms dreams are borne

Fluid air and catapulting thoughts.

The first thing you will want to do upon arriving in Bangkok is flee.  Flee from the pasty white tourists, whose skin is flushed red from the heat and humidity while they demand to have things as they are at home.   Flee from the tenacity, from the cacophony, the pushing, the yelling,  the selling of bodies and souls, and air that is so foul with exhaust and so humid that  to move through it requires an extra effort, as though the specific gravity is somehow denser.  Once you’ve acclimated, if you’ve managed not to escape to the beaches in the south or the cool of the mountains in the north, it is great sport to watch tourists newly arrived and see just how red they can become before they cross into  that final precipice of exhaustion from the heat and jet lag.  Families nattering and picking at each other for no apparent reason.

Traveling alone envelops you in a press of humanity, the essence, the distillation of experience and expectation thrown up in your face as you find yourself in a reality that is painted by your past with people and places that you have never imagined.  Airports are the divine pulse of humanity, the breath of life, the beginnings and endings of journeys taken and forgone.  I notice a woman alone with her man, her silver hair closely cropped, a perfect jaw line untouched by age.  Eyes that look out at me with the disconnection of an opium-tinged gaze, arms wrapping her torso as her hands tightly clasp her articulated shoulder blades, embracing despair. Babies  borne away from their orphanages, in the arms of new parents who do not have the comforting smell of their caregivers. And to where will they be taken, who are these people removing them in an instant from their culture and all that it entails, flying effortlessly across time zones and turning day into night and night into day?  It is the big bang of the nuclear family, a global restructuring on the  molecular level.

 I tire of the heat, of the traffic, of the vendors always trying to sell me their wares and watching families dump sacks of eels back into the Chao Phraya River, an act I can only comprehend in some sort of Buddhist frame of reference.  I shall miss the water taxis and long boats adorned with flowers, the waves beneath my feet, jumping from the docks rising and falling in the rough afternoon waters.  And I shall miss the push of the crowds as we all squeeze onto the boats - our watery conveyance, the women careful not to debase the religious purity of saffron robed monks with a single unintentioned touch.  We all stand there, side by side, moving with the waves, listening for the whistle that signals the arrival and departure as we journey up the river flowing down.

A southbound plane carries me into the vortex of the beaches, the beautiful white sands, and the sun of a blinding intensity and into a small, tropical airport at one of the many islands.  A driver meets me to take me for an hour-long drive to the Jungle Beach Resort.   Everything is called a resort here. I sit up front, a string of jasmine flowers hanging from the rear view mirror.  Looking through a cracked windshield, I watch the jungle slide down the highway.  Almost at dusk, we begin to drive down the arc of a protected cove, a wonderful sandy beach to the west and just as I am thinking I have arrived, that here I will watch the sun set each evening, suddenly up and away we begin to bounce along a very deeply rutted road.

All reverie is interrupted as we jar to a stop, rocks flying and tires locked, to pick up a group of people that we spot as we round the bend.  Good news I am sure since it must be a sign of other habitation.  It is a family, a mother and father, children and grandparents on holiday together from the United Kingdom.  And where did that term come from -  United Kingdom?  United by strife I suppose, the struggle of religion the most deadly of all to humankind.  They begin to tell me all about the object of our destination, The Jungle Beach Resort.

The cicadas are maddening,” I was told.  Cicadas?  Surely they are exaggerating, I think to myself.  As the car coasts to a stop, I hear some sort of shrill buzzing akin to the sound of high voltage electrical wires.  As I open the door a rhythmic and multi chorused screeching pierced my cerebellum.  Maddening.  By lamplight, I find my thatch-roofed hut and wander off to dinner. 

Had I somehow managed to stumble into some vision of an unsanitary Disneyland?  It was something I had seen in the past-perfect tense of childhood now translated into the reality of the tropics.  My waiter  Kosol has a strange resemblance to Peter Lorre and even stranger still, it seems that he has learned to speak English by watching his movies. 

Morning was an Alfred Hitchcock soundtrack.  Loud, loud and louder still.  The proprietor insisted that all of Thailand was covered with these mad cicadas.  I could hear him listening in on the phone line as I made arrangements to leave.  Departure was immediate, to another island.   A boat trip of a couple of hours and no more cicadas.    Islands without cars but Internet cafes around every corner.  Barefoot in the morning, before the revelers of the past night were awake, I would walk through the sandy pathways.  Stores and shops and restaurants and bars.  Sunrise and sunset spent walking on the beach, Days spent motoring around the island on narrow open hulled fishing boats, bows bedecked with flowers, riding on that bow as it crashes through the waves, with nothing underneath me but the blue clear water, as if I had wings to fly.

With the desire to see more, to discover the older part, the ancient cities and people, I journey back to Bangkok to head into the north.  Leaving on the third class train, I ride for what seems like hours through the city, past shanties a hair’s breadth away from the reach of the train.  One nail less and I am certain they will be pulled into the collapsed space the train creates as we whoosh by.  As we leave the city and the country begins, women with round, flat baskets atop their heads board the train.  They bring mangoes and coconuts and sweet rice wrapped in banana leaves to sell in the markets.  We sit in the heat, all of us, sweating.  Across from me a woman is chewing on betel nut, her lips and gums are stained a dark red and the nails of her right hand are red from cleaning the betel fragments from her teeth.

I journey further, by bus, the bus of the people, without air-conditioning we jolt and bump along the hot, hot roads.  My feet are warmed by the heat radiated up from the pavement, as I try to fit my frame into seats designed for a people far more diminutive than my own.  Where to put legs and arms and how to stay cool, it is all an unsolvable riddle as I fly through villages and into the ancient heart of this country.   Bundles and baskets and clucking chickens, people and packages, we are all speeding ahead, the hot wind in our face a welcome respite.  We pass a gutted and burned out bus, another of those cautionary tales that we all must ignore.   I expect ancient cities and building and temples and people.  I expect old and beauty and quiet and reflection and the feeling of connection with the past to the present but I find the present stamped presumptively onto the past.  Wats (temples) with manicured gardens and lawns, still living places of worship but trapped within a modern vision of precision. 

And I am trapped by the security guard Bassett, rotten teeth and a leering smile as he stands between me and my exit, no one else for miles.  We stand in the last rays of sunset as he tells me that he is here to protect me, touching my shoulder. This is a very forward gesture for a Thai man, indicative of his belief and hope that I may be a wayward woman.  And I inch slowly, step by step, to remove him from the path of my escape.  From that day on, I must exercise more care.  As I bicycle from my lodgings into the ruins, which are spread for miles, he seems to find me with no effort at all.  But, he is the exception. 

I love the Thai sense of humour.  Once, in a moment of quiet reflection I was startled by an enormous splash.  I look into the pool for the fish that has displaced so much water.  The ripples are there as I scan the water and then happen to glance at a gardener, one of those responsible for the neat as a pin ancient city and he smiles.  I look at him and then to the water, a question in my eyes that he sees from across the pool of water and at the same moment in time, we laugh.  Another day, I find a group of gardeners sitting under the mango tree.  One of them offers me a slice of their mango that is resting on his machete.  Just as I reach for it, off it falls and into the dirt.  Without hesitation, he reaches down, picks it up and brushes it off and hands it to me.  With no common language, we are reduced to pantomime and I touch my stomach and shake my head to let him know that this could make me ill.  We all laugh as he cuts another slice and I sit there with them eating green mango.

Thailand for me is the land of jasmine scented tea, a confluence of humanity and inhumanity, for how else can it be in a land where the display of innocent affections between a man and a woman, a kiss or the holding of hands is frowned upon while seems to be accepted that parents may sell their children into a sexual slavery?  To live with greater suffering in this lifetime may mean greater rewards in the next and to live without risk is to not live at all.

In Thailand I learned to sit still long enough to hear the mango fall from the tree.  Long enough to watch life wander on past, to be and to suddenly find myself surrounded by a sea of saffron robed  young monks and their teachers. They are asking me “Do you if you speak Thai?” as all tourists seem to ask them if they happen to speak the language of their own particular homeland.  Do you speak Thai? 

To be at Doi Sutep, atop the clouds and mountains of Chaing Mai and to watch and hear the saffron robed monks begin their evening prayers and chanting.  To stop and listen, to put down the camera, to hear their ethereal voices become one as it resonates with every part of my being, to ride it like a wave, like a leaf in the wind and lose this body that is ours for such a short time. 

The fevers of travel will pass or not, we will survive or not, but there is so much more than survival.  Life is a river to be lived, to be submerged in and subsumed in, it a circle of beginnings and endings and we all shall suffer or delight in the connection of it all.  Travel well and smile often for that truly is our universal language.