Drunken Dugongs and Ladyboys on Parade

An
American in Asia:

His Quest for Cosmic Truth

(or at least a Decent Espresso)

I went on two trips the past couple weeks, both to southern Thailand. The first was to the city of Trang, a town that wants to be a tourist resort town but it's too far away from anything interesting. So what they've done is to create an artificial attraction: The Trang Underwater Wedding Ceremony, and that was the main story I was there to cover. I ended up spending a good bit of time in the hotel.

As civilisation encroached on their environment, more and more of the native manatees have succumbed to alcoholism.

At the hotel I watched the end of a kung fu movie on Malaysian channel from across the border. After the movie they showed this extended preview of the next attraction. It was slowed down to super slow motion, which was unwise because it allowed me to see exactly how far the good guy's foot was from the bad guy's face when the bad guy pretended to get hit. It was one of the lower budget Hong Kong flicks they were cranking out (judging by the fashions) in the mid eighties.

What made me stop working on my article and watch the whole preview though, was the fact that the theme music for the preview was a song from the album, Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of the War of the Worlds, this really dramatic double concept album put out in the mid seventies by Justin Hayward from the Moody Blues, the guy who was Jesus Christ Superstar, and (get this) the actor, Richard Burton.

The album is really worth having around if you can find it. People don't really lay down in a dark room and listen to a double album start to finish anymore, but if you can stand it, that's the thing to do. Richard Burton narrates a condensed version of the H. G. Welles classic sci-fi story and Hayward, Wayne and company just ham it up on a dramatic orchestral soundtrack of the world getting stomped by a fleet of squidgy martians. Plenty of moog synthesizer, orchestral swells and wild sentimental crooning.

The movie's on now. The voice-over is in Thai. Nothing like watching an old Chinese Kung fu movie dubbed into another language that's equally incomprehensible?

On top of this little rock is a guard house, where a family stays to watch over the swallows nests they harvest to sell to the Chinese for soup.

Sometimes things in a foreign country can be really confusing. In the southern city of Hat Yai I thought I should wander the streets a bit to see why the town is famous for its nightlife. I came across a big place lit with neon and fronted by tall white Roman pillars. It seemed like a bad idea at the time, so I went in.

I was escorted to a table in a large empty section near the stage, as if I needed to stand out even more in amongst the crowd of drunken Malaysian tourists. I got a beer and took in the scene, immediately recognising it as something that could never possibly occur within the realms of fiction, because it was just a little too weird.

Thai performers of ambiguous gender sang to karaoke (which means, by the way, 'empty orchestra') and ponced about on stage in fine Vegas style. That would have been strange enough for one evening, but on two giant screens on either side of the stage, the modern B movie, Starship Troopers, was playing. So while guys in velvet suits crooned incomprehensible Thai lounge tunes amid bevies of kicking babes, humans in a futuristic neo-nazi world were being ripped apart by giant alien bugs. In all, highly entertaining. You really can't put a price on experiences like these.

Or rather I couldn't. The bar staff was quite ready to put any crazy price on it and, in the process of paying my tab, waitresses whom I had never seen were waltzing up to my table for a tip. I'm no sucker but I'm an ex-waiter myself and I know that most customers don't leave any tip, so I exited with a good deal less paper.

I got to do a little jungle trekking in Hat Yai. To get the right idea on the scale of this picture, notice the little people on the left side of the photo.

I moved in the direction of my hotel but was intercepted a block before the entrance by a neon sign that said, "Hollywood Disco". I can disco and I've lived in West Hollywood so I thought they might be talking to me. Once I permeated the labyrinth that passed as an entrance, I got myself accosted by a waiter with a flashlight, demanding sweetly that I fill my hand with a drink. When they got back with a bottle of Heineken, I gave the waiter the little drink coupon that came with admission. He looked extremely dubious about that and went to a waitress to ask her about it. She shined her flashlight on it and they looked at it like it might be a new species and I quietly made my way to the densest part of the crowd.

This was also the front of the crowd, where the music was loudest. I'm a rocker and have stood on hundreds of stages piled with speakers to the ceiling, but this sound system actually made my hair move. Not just a couple of twitching follicles either. I'm not exaggerating when I say the entire wig was flouncing to the beat.

Tractor.

Jeffrey Studebaker has been (in no particular order) a SE Asian correspondent for a Singaporean travel magazine, a teacher, consultant and translator in Japan, a guitarist with the band, Swoon 23 in every city of the US of A, a coffee roaster in Seattle, a bike messenger in Portland, a marine fire system repairman in Seattle, an osteoporosis clinic researcher in Providence, a mental ward counsellor on the night shift in Portland, a brief success in New York, and he has now returned to the US after nearly a decade in Asia to pursue a publishing career.