Goodbye Bangkok

An
American in Asia:

His Quest for Cosmic Truth

(or at least a Decent Espresso)

I hardly had a moment to recover from my trip to Cambodia last week before it was time to pack all my belongings and wave my final goodbyes to Bangkok.

After two and a half years of alternately enjoying its lively morass of weirdness, and suffering its pollution of all types including air, water and human, it was time to leave. Having extricated myself from the offices of my former employer, there was no longer anything tying me to the city and I could easily settle any place that had a phone line to connect to my Mac.

So, being in the tropics, I logically opted for the beach. However, I am not quite ready to live the full Robinson Crusoe™ paradise package. I'm not that at peace with myself and I still need access to the perks of civilisation such as fresh roasted coffee beans, decent Japanese food, and a wide selection of clothes for the ridiculously tall and skinny. This pretty much narrowed down my choices to Thailand's largest and most well-known island, Phuket.

So, I packed my bags, loaded up my '93 Toyota diesel pickup and prepared for the long journey down the long Isthmus of Kra, the string of dirt that joins the body of Southeast Asia with the Malay Peninsula, on which Phuket occupies a point halfway down on the western, Andaman Sea coast.

As I packed to leave, I found to my dismay that I'd accumulated more possessions than I'd thought. I arrived in Thailand with two suitcases and now I can't move without two pickup trucks. I was not really phased by the idea of one trip, but making the 12- to 15-hour journey three times in one week was not a lovely thought.

I roped what I could into the bed of the truck. The first trip it would be the books, half my clothes, my stereo, and the rattan furniture. It being monsoon season, I strapped a giant blue plastic tarp over everything and headed out of town at midnight.

Under cover of darkness

The late start was planned for two reasons. First, I've made the drive during the day once before and, aside from a significant traffic ordeal, I spent way too much time worrying when the next psychotic, hopped-up tour bus driver was going to attempt to unite me with the warped and pitted third-world pavement. At night I would only have to worry about the truck drivers, who seem to be a much mellower crowd for some reason, using their turn signals in a complex code to communicate like a hive of ants.

The second reason for my night-flight is that pickups loaded up and wrapped in plastic tarpaulin look just like Christmas presents to the country's corrupt law enforcement officials. When I roll up to the road blocks and they lay their eyes on my lily-white skin and my international drivers' license, the air rings with cash register bells and they're ready to believe in Santa Claus.

However, after midnight, or when it's raining, the police figure the criminals are all home getting drunk, so why don't they do the same? The roadblocks stay up, of course, but they are manned by one sleepy rookie, if at all.

An additional motivation to avoid the fuzz was that my trip was timed at the end of the month, right before payday, when the average cop's Mia Nois (Thai for minor wives) would be needing to pay the rent on the secret love-nests.

Long goodbyes

One of the laws of Bangkok physics is that Jeffrey Studebaker is unable to leave the city in anything less than two hours. Any number of events may bring about the delay and, if I can overcome one obstacle, such as getting lost, another will come into play and I can be sure that I will spend at least 120 minutes driving the 20 or so kilometres from city centre to the open road.

This time, I thought I could defy physics. I knew the route by heart because I'd driven it before and, at midnight, there was little traffic to delay me. Yet, sure enough, as soon as I crossed the bridge over the Chao Phraya river, my escape was delayed.

The carefully secured giant blue tarpaulin blew loose in several places and was flapping behind the truck like Superman's cape. I pulled over to a gas station and surveyed the mess. I'd tied dozens of knots to hold the thing down and I couldn't bear untangling it again, so I stuffed the tarp down as best I could and hit the highway.

Naturally this didn't hold for more than five minutes and I was soon ensconced in a 7-11 parking lot ripping away at the ropes and plastic before a small audience of bemused Thais. I eventually got it tied down well enough to last the journey but it took me two more stops to do it.

As I passed beyond the city boundaries and onto the long stretch of Highway 4 to Phuket, I glanced at the time. Sure enough it was 2:30am. The Special Law of Relativity for Jeffrey Studebaker Leaving Bangkok held up yet again. The up-side of this was that I had remained off the roads during the critical 1am-2am hour, when all the bars close. Drunk driving is pretty much a national sport here.

Run-in with Smokey Bear

Under the cloak of darkness, the rest of the journey was relatively safe, beyond the occasional terrifying brush with death that one expects on any long road trip. I lost count of the police road blocks I passed through. It was more than a dozen, for sure. Yet, as expected, they were manned by one or two lazy rookies, if at all, and I barely had to slow down.

I was only stopped once just north of a Gulf coast fishing port called Chumphon. There an older cop, who was mysteriously wearing sunglasses at night, berated me for driving in the fast lane. Wondering what was illegal about that, I returned that I was attempting to pass the truck in front of me, which was now in the process of being searched by other sunglassioed smokeys. He barked that I was to be fined 200 baht ($US5) for my transgression, payable immediately, to him.

The principle of institutionalised extortion really irks me and does untold damage to a country that I otherwise love, so I was not about to sheepishly foist over a bribe. However, I was also not ready to unpack my truck so he could search it. Finally, I pulled out a single 100 baht note and, attempting to communicate a violent 30-minute tirade with my glare, put it under the notepad he held in the window and hit the gas before he could utter a word.

Along the Burmese Border

At dawn I left the long straight section of the journey and headed into the hills that separate the Gulf of Thailand coast with the Andaman Sea. The road courses in some wonderful curves for two hours, skirting the border of Burma. I really wish I still rode motorcycles. It would be a transcendent experience to fly along that road on my old '71 BMW 750cc German Police model.

Along this stretch, police blockades were replaced by army checkpoints where three or five soldiers would check vehicles for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. I didn't fit their profile so I was cheerfully waved along each time. Near a border crossing I stopped in a small Chinese settlement that is famous for its minced-pork rolls and loaded up for breakfast.

The sun was well up when I hit the Andaman Sea at Ranong but I was losing consciousness. I pulled over at a gas station within view of a waterfall that must have measured more than 100 metres. I ate a cup of instant Tom-Yam-Goong noodles and snoozed for ten minutes. Waking up as good as new and hallucinating only slightly, I filled the tank and drove the last six hours of what turned out to be a 15-hour journey.

Arrival, sort of...

When I pulled in at the new house, I found the tarp had been torn apart by the wind. Since it hadn't rained the whole trip, I needn't have messed with the tarp at all, except to fulfill Bangkok's Special Law of Relativity.

My new place is a bungalow on a hillside in Phuket's Kata Beach with two bedrooms, a large living area, a kitchen, a porch and a carport. There is a decent bit of traffic noise from the road outside, but the beach is one of the island's quieter places and possesses all the necessary attributes of a tropical paradise, with the happy addition of a really great Italian restaurant and a line of small bars with decent pool tables.

I'm within a short drive of even quieter beaches and boat launches to smaller islands, with coral reefs that wait just offshore for me and my snorkel, once the monsoons stop churning up the water.

But, before I could settle in and enjoy my new digs, there remained the small matter of making the long drive two more times. Getting to paradise is never easy, except perhaps for that last Big Trip.

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.