Goin' Up to Country

An
American in Asia:

His Quest for Cosmic Truth

(or at least a Decent Espresso)

I rented a beat-up pickup truck and the rental company delivered a gleaming silver SUV. After carefully making sure I'd be paying the same rate of 1,000 baht a day (US$25), I rejoiced in the knowledge that I'd be stuffing CDs into a state-of-the-art system and basking in the cool blast of quadraphonic air conditioning.

I hadn't driven since I was in the States a year and a half ago and I'd never driven from the right side of a vehicle. I tried my best to put away the concepts of left and right, start fresh and do what everyone else seemed to be doing.

That last part was the most difficult since Thai drivers tend to make up the rules of the road based on whatever they can get away with depending on who's looking. Never ever assume that something a taxi driver does is legal.

I was tense as I passed north on the expressway. I'd always heard that the cops ran a roadblock racket just north of Bangkok International Airport and they had a particular fondness for foreign currency. Thais know the going rate for getting off a trumped-up charge but the cops assume that any foreigner is fresh off the plane and loaded with extra cash. And since they have guns and a big jail, they can assume anything they like.

My fears were unfounded and not only was there no smokey bear, the traffic was almost mellow. Once out of town the pavement turned to a silky blacktop that shot straight through green hills and up onto the vast plateau that makes up the northeastern chunk of Thailand.

I stopped after a couple of blissful hours of left-side-of-the-road driving at a Tesco-Lotus, which is the store where everybody buys everything cheap and in bulk. I picked up some sunglasses, a stove, a regulator and a 50-pound canister of propane.

I hit the road again and drove a couple more hours. Getting hungry I stopped by a roadside food stand and ate some rice with pork that looked a little too rare. The road dwindled into a tributary filled with potholes bigger than my SUV's monster tires.

The main roads of Thailand are beautiful but back roads are only good for tractors.Warped blacktop turned to ancient and crumbling concrete. I pulled into a small town and filled the back of the SUV with vegetables and a couple huge chunks of swine and drove onto a dirt road.

An hour up this road I found my destination, a three-room shack built of teak wood planks that seemed never to quite meet the adjacent planks. I say three rooms but one of them technically wasn't a room because it didn't have walls. Thais call this outdoor living space a Sala, which sounds a lot nicer than a room with no walls and, on a hot day with a light breeze, nice is definitely the word.

The whole structure was suspended on stilts about the height of my two-metre head, to keep the cobras and boa constrictors out, not to mention floods.

It doesn't look like much, but if you put away some preconceptions about basic necessities, it's not a bad way to live.

I was greeted with smiles and wais, Thai greetings in which people place their palms together in front of their face and briefly pray for your well-being. For the next 48 hours I shuttled folks to and from the town, delivering TVs to the shop and bringing one guy to see the dentist. At night they tried to get me drunk and I played a little guitar.

The second day I was sick as a dog. Sicker actually, because as I threw up out the window, a dog immediately ran up and started eating it, regardless that more was on the way.

The family was concerned and perhaps felt a bit guilty that it might have been their rainwater that made me ill. I reassured them that it must have been the noodles that I'd eaten on the last trip to town as I'd actually shot a noodle out my nose while I was throwing up. I could tell by their laughter that they felt much better about it.

Dogs howled around midnight. Around thirty or fifty of them went off together on a mad symphony and even with my obtuse human hearing, I could tell they were letting each other know where they were and how they were feeling. The howling trailed off, picked up a few times and finally stopped, replaced by the quieter din of whizzing bugs, barking geckos and burping amphibians.

Occasionally someone would wander through the dark yard in slapping plastic sandals. The dog would bark but the others were too sleepy to pick up howling again.

The next day, drained, purged and clean from a bucket bath in the yard, I spent an hour hooking up the stove to the propane tank. I told everyone to leave the house when I tested it, trying to make it look like I was joking about the danger.

It worked fine and I taught Mom that the propane fire was much hotter than her barbecue and that it wasn't good for roasting meat or bamboo shoots because it didn't give the food any flavour. The cousins in the neighbourhood were all jealous and made me promise to bring three more stoves next time. At 2,000 baht a piece, it's an economical way to buy some concrete happiness.

Bringin' in the rice.

At noon I got back in the car and hit the road. I was dead shagged from spewing all nutrients out of my various orifices the previous day and I was only able to drink water. I pulled into a 7-eleven and grabbed bags of the blandest food I could find.

The countryside passed in a bleary haze and I cursed my ill health for dampening my enjoyment of the rare country ride.

But as the tires ate more kilometres I began to get my energy back. I stopped at a stand and bought some noi-na, a Thai fruit that tastes like a cross between banana and pineapple with bright black beady seeds that are easy to spit out and a skin like a stegosaurus. Dictionaries translate noi-na as "custard apple" or "sugar apple" but I doubt that means anything to anyone. Anyway, they're pretty delicious, and really messy.

Just after I bought the noi-na, a cop waved me over (they don't have patrol cars - they just stand in the road and intercept people). I rolled down the window and refused to show any understanding of Thai while he tried to tell me that I was driving too slow in the fast lane. He waved me on after a minute. There's nothing like a cop encounter to wake you up. Bracing, really.

As I approached Bangkok I drove straight into a storm. But as I drew closer it kept moving out of my way so all I got was backed-up traffic and the occasional violent downpour.

I got lost on the expressway for a while but once I hit the centre of town I recognised landmarks that weren't far from home.

As I took the second-to-last turn to my street, the fuzz waved me over again.

In Thai, he said I'd broken the law. I asked him what I did, in English. He got surly as only a traffic cop can and barked that it was on order of prime minister Thaksin that he'd pulled me over. Valiantly I refrained from laughing in his face at his idiotic lie, and wisely too as he was perfectly able to drag me to jail, I'm sure.

I said I was just following the other 16 cars in front who had done exactly the same thing. Then I took out my notepad and a pen and asked him his name. He told me his first name and looked much surlier. I asked him for his last name and he said, "License!"

I gave him my license and he marched off for ten seconds, marched back and gave it back to me, glaring dangerously.

I finally said, "How much?"

He said, "It's up to you."

I gave him 100 baht and he waved me on. Really, it was so pathetic and funny and interesting that I couldn't be annoyed. I retired the car in a hospital garage, went back to my room and slept a long and heavy sleep.

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.