These are extracts from a travel journal I wrote following a trip to Thailand, an unpublished piece included to give an idea of more creative writing styles and the breadth of topics I will cover.

…

In search of some luxury, we boarded a tuk-tuk to the Oriental, apparently one of Asia’s best hotels, and had a drink on the riverside terrace watching geckos on the walls and lightning play across the city landscape.
On leaving the Oriental we were accosted by a taxi driver and a tuk-tuk driver, jostling for our custom. Partly as he was cheaper but mainly as it was more fun, we picked the tuk-tuk and off we set for a 10-minute drive home. For a vacuum cleaner with a seat on top it made impressive progress. For once the streets were relatively clear and as we raced along, me clutching the rail, the driver showed how versatile he was by driving permanently in the middle of the road, occasionally veering across to the wrong side, presumably to avoid the ruts. He also had an interesting habit of turning off the engine at red lights – this saved on petrol but made moving away from the lights a bit dilatory, which tends to be rather alarming when you’re in a three-lane expressway with traffic roaring past on both sides.

****

I don’t want to be rude, but Bangkok smells. When you step out of the airport, you’re hit by a bouquet of exhaust fumes, with a lingering undercurrent of sewage – and perhaps a hint of a corpse or two – and this remains with you, clinging to the insides of your nostrils, no matter how much perfume you splash on, or how many cups of coffee you spill over yourself, to try and disguise it.
Sometimes, if the wind is in the right direction, they throw in a whiff of burning rubber just to confuse you, and during the wild ride home in the tuk-tuk someone lets all of the gases out of a long-derelict brewery, and someone else farts in a lift, just to liven things up. Sometimes there is an aroma of decaying rubbish so you don’t get complacent.
No-one else except me appears to notice it. I am assured that many expats and Thai nationals believe the place to smell of attar of roses, and will happily stay there for hours, or even years, on end without the desire that I had to get the hell out and some some fresh air…..

****

Off on my Great Adventure. I’d decided I wanted to go to Krabi, a fairly unspoilt resort from where I could hop on a boat to an idyllic island called Railay Beach. But all the Krabi coaches were fully booked. Indeed, all coaches to anywhere were fully booked. I began to despair as my long-held dream of getting the hell out of the stink-hole that is Bangkok, and go to somewhere more aromatic, began to fade.

After a fruitless request for coaches to places I’d heard of (ie, Phuket and Koh Samui – I hadn’t exactly read the guide book assiduously), I tried the tack of being totally flexible. ‘I’ll go anywhere.’. ‘All full,’ replied the clerk. ‘What, no seat to ANYWHERE??!’ I cried in despair.
The clerk looked at me doubtfully and said she had one seat left – on a bus going to Suratanawee. ‘I’ll take it!’ I said firmly and paid my £7. I had no idea where Suratanawee was, and I still have no idea, but torn between going there and staying one more night in this stinking sodding city, there was no contest. Suratanawee had one great attraction for me, and that was that it was a long way from Bangkok and that with a bit of luck it did not smell.
The coach was to leave at 8.20 so I had a couple of hours to kill. I wandered round the bus station, lined with tiny, dirty bars competing with each other for which could be the most unappealing.
It was a gloomy scene, and as I sat in my chosen bistro, a beer and a dish of syphilitic-looking rice and chicken in front of me, I thought ‘here I am, alone, in the world’s sex and drugs capital, in a vile bar, far from home, about to spend 10 hours on a bus going to somewhere I’ve never heard of’.

Everyone in my bus was Thai – none of them were dressed for a weekend by the seaside and I wondered gloomily what kind of dross-hole Suratanawee was. When the coach disgorged us there at 6.30am I realized it was a dreary one-horse town in the middle of nowhere. Luckily an opportunist taxi driver popped up and asked me and the Spanish couple if we wanted to go to Krabi. Did we half! We piled into his topless truck for a hair-raising 10-minute ride to join a connecting coach for a further 3-hour drive to Krabi.

I fell asleep again and when I woke the scenery had changed to lush green mountainous outcrops and charming little houses set among grassy glades. The air conditioning had started the trip at refrigeration standards but was no longer up to the task required of it and when the bus tipped us out, about noon, we were melting. A 5-minute journey to the jetty in a bone-shaker van and time to clamber aboard a rowing boat with an outboard engine which I suspected had been written off as an unseaworthy vessel in about 1950 and left there to rot. It toppled about alarmingly as we clambered on, but it was a pleasant journey through grey-green sea which sprayed up refreshingly into our faces and took us close to palm-fringed beaches and past green-fringed rocky outcrops. Things were starting to get a bit idyllic.

Railay was charming. Easily manageable – you can walk across the island in a few minutes – it features three ‘resorts;’ each with its own bar and restaurant, set next to each other along a curved sandy beach about half a mile long, rimmed by craggy cliffs topped with high lush vegetation.
Along with several private holiday homes, that was about it. There are some small shops, a coffee bar or two selling second-hand books, sarongs and bottles of water.

In a path through the trees I came upon a troupe of monkeys, being fed tidbits by the locals. One gave me some bread to feed them and I was charmed when they boldly hopped up and took the food from my hand with their little paws.
Suddenly a rogue monkey appeared from nowhere and grabbed my bag of pineapple. I was bigger than him and probably would have won if it had come to a fist fight, but he had the advantage of surprise, determination, cunning and an overwhelming desire for pineapple. I held on, laughing, as he tugged harder – the bag tore and he grabbed the fruit and was up a tree with it before you could say ‘give me back my pineapple, you long-tailed bastard’.
The path brings you out on Pra Nang beach, which features the cave of a goddess of prosperity and fertility, surrounded by wooden carved phallic symbols of great length and girth.
The rock here looks as though it has been formed out of great slow dropping icicles of rock. And the trunks of great trees have grown side by side among the rock, twisting and dripping so that they look like the rock itself.
Arrived back at Sunrise Beach where the bars, set among palm trees, made out of wood, are just yards from the sea. There is a coffee bar and open-air internet café. Railay becomes more idyllic the more you see of it – the ideal place for a chill-out holiday – everything you need is here but there is essentially nothing to do – wonderfully enforced idleness in lovely weather.
Stopped for a beer at a beach bar and got chatting to an American couple, who rolled up a joint and passed it round. I’d been under the impression that you got banged up at the Bangkok Hilton for 20 years for this kind of thing, but apparently not – no-one turned a whisker.
Some hours later, the Americans walked me home still clutching a margarita and I promptly went out again when they’d left and sat on the deserted beach in the dark watching the water gently rolling in and thinking pensive thoughts about life and lurve.

No comments yet.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Enter your comment here...

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Email (required) (Address never made public)

Name (required)

Website

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Notify me of follow-up comments via email.