Pióro

Longtail

To get to Rai Ley beach from Ao Nang, you need to take a longtail boat. These boats are the tuk-tuks of the sea. The stern of a longtail is smeared with motor-oil and mounted on top is an engine. From this engine protrudes a long shaft with a two-blade propeller on the end. The whole mechanical apparatus looks like a gas-powered weed-whacker. When the thing runs, it sounds as if someone is mowing the sea.

After we took a ride on one, I asked the driver where the boat’s motor came from.

“Toyota.”

The engine was ripped out of some old car and thrown on the back of the boat. He even starts it with a key.

Some Sea-going Boat

To get back to the mainland from the island of Ko Tao we took a trip on a boat. We crossed a good piece of the Gulf of Thailand and reached the port city of Surat Thani by six in the AM. Now, I’m fairly green when it comes to sea travel. I’ve never sailed and my experience on sea going vessels is pretty limited. On this trip, however, I traded one kind of green for the other. Out on the briny ocean toss, I felt my dinner being tossed around my insides. Within minutes of leaving the island at the port of Mae Haad, I was curled up in the foetal position in the sleeping room of the boat. This room housed about twenty-five of us for the trip. It had a low ceiling so you had to move around bent at the waist. But no one had any trouble with me. There was already too much movement going on–the boat going back and forth, up and down and sides to side, my stomach-slosh syncopated against this rhythm. If I looked out the window, I’d see nothing but water, then the horizon would swing by and then nothing but sky. And then down again. I couldn’t watch. I had to concentrate and keep my Phad Thai out of the Gulf of Thailand… which I did.

Bangkok River Boats

The Chao Phraya River, which cuts through Bangkok, has a network of boats which even the locals find confusing.

“I take the same as you. I miss my stop. I don’t know why the other not come. It should be here.”

There is a spot on each boat designated by a sign that reads “Space for Monks.”

Tuk-tuks

Named after the sound they make, these three-wheeled buggies of death are ubiquitous around Bangkok. The government tried to outlaw these safety-hazards a few years ago with little success. In one of these motorised rickshaws, the driver straddles the stick-shift, the exposed car-battery sits near the left passenger’s feet and the lack of any emissions-control is taken care of by your lungs.

The scam with tuk-tuk drivers works like this: driver asks you where you are going. You name a place. He says ‘200 baht’ (approx. $8 CDN). You say 10. He says, ‘Be serious. Okay, okay 1200 for all four.’ You call him nuts and start to walk away. Eventually you agree on something like 30 baht but, and there’s a big ‘but,’ he’s going to show you something. That something is a handful of jewelry and tailor shops. It can be a ton of shops if you don’t stipulate how many before the ride. The driver gets his gas paid for by the jewelers or tailors if you browse for fifteen minutes or more. “Okay, okay. Here, you take your time. Take your time.”

We played along at first, but it gets kinda taxing as you feign interest in stuff you have no intention of buying. I think next time we’ll take the bus.

The memory of a tuk-tuk driver is surprisingly bad. At the end of the ride, you all gather up the money you owe him. One person hands the driver the baht. The driver stares at the sum, looks at you and then back at the money. He’s confused, bewildered. Then, with great concentration as if recalling a distant memory from childhood, the tuk-tuk driver quotes a number that is higher than that resting in his hand. He seems to remember things differently. You say ‘Whatever’ and walk away.

Scooters

Thais can transport anything on a scooter. Two people and a sixteen foot ladder on a dirt road has been the coolest feat to beat so far. In Bangkok, hoards of scooters run like water through any break in the traffic. Lane splitting is an art-form.
The bus station in Krabi is pretty inconveniently located. No one really goes to Krabi to see Krabi. They go there to get to beaches at Ao Nang or Rai Ley. You can get to these places from the Krabi bus station, but you are at the mercy of the tourist agencies at the station, who know you are trapped on the outskirts of town.
We found ourselves at the Krabi bus station, but we weren’t too keen on the inflated bus or boat prices to the surrounding areas. Agnes and I took a walk up the road, where we ran into a scooter guy from Fisherman Association of Krabi [sic]. We indicated that we needed a ride to Ao Nang for four people. He nodded and took off to find his buddies. He came back with three more scooter-guys. We explained again what we needed. One scooter guys said that they would take all of us, including the big packs, on the one hour ride to Ao Nang for the bargan price of 100 baht. This price was the same as the extortionate bus station shuttle, which has four wheels and is air-conditioned. We laughed. We quoted a much lower price. They laughed. We walked.

In the end, we did employ the help of the scooter guys from the Fisherman Association of Krabi. For 15 baht each, they would drive us three kilometers to the cheap buses that ran to Ao Nang. Let me tell you, there’s nothing like riding in formation with a bunch of Krabi fishermen–sort of a skinny Thai version of the Hell’s Angels, in flip-flops.

When we paid up, the fishermen suffered some tuk-tuk driver amnesia (see above). We caught the bus to Ao Nang.

Songthaew

The ‘bus’ to Ao Nang was actually a songthaew, a low-riding pick-up with two benches running the length of the back. There’s no tail-gate, but there is a running-board off the back. The board is about 15 cm from the ground and has many uses. For example, it functions as a rickety step that makes hopping into the back of the truck easier for older Thai women. Or, when the songthaew is jammed to the roof-rack with beach-goers, Warren and Matthew can find room standing on it. Lemme tell ya, there’s nothing like standing on the back of a songthaew as a truck decked out with speakers pulls up behind blaring the Star Wars theme, the asphalt below your feet moving by at 60 to 90 km\h.

Suped-up Scooter

Some enterprising Thais jimmy up a side-car/bench and attach it to the side of their scooters. These contraptions are even less stable than tuk-tuks. The four of you cram onto one. One of you says, “Krabi, one way.” The driver hears “Highway.” and you hear the best price for a trip to Krabi ever. At the highway, the driver is confused. You’re confused. You take a songthaew the rest of the way.

In Bangkok, the ground-level atomosphere is a car-fart air-gravy.

As we came into town on the airport shuttle, I noticed we were on the wrong side of the road. I forgot about this arrangement the next day as I walked into traffic. “Well, if this was one of the other eighteen countries I’ve been to, it would have been safe to cross.” The ride into town from the airport is pretty spectacular. Since coming to Asia, I’ve had a little quest: find a city that looks like the real-life incarnation of the Blade Runner set (minus the flying cars). Seoul had the lights, but not the grit. Bangkok, however, had grit in spades. The highway from the airport to the centre of the city is like a souped up Gardner Expressway. There are electric billboards that flash corporate logos through the night. The land past the signs is a massive sprawl, but not the GTA type where the land is all accounted for—malls blending into warehouses and then back into malls. The Bangkok sprawl is much more chaotic. Big flashy hotels and convention centres are surrounded by dark patches of space. In these gaps random florescent lights do very little under a night sky that takes its red glow from somewhere else.

Matt’s reading the guide book. He comes across an entry about meditation classes. He remember a time when he was kinda interested in Buddhism. He kinda knows what dharma, kharma and vajra mean.

“Hey. A meditation class sounds really cool, eh?” says Matt.

“That’s a friggen’ dumb idea,” says Warren.

Matt is slightly taken aback.

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it— Okay, try this: don’t say anything and just sit there for the next four minutes.”

One steamboat, two steamboats—

“Okay, this is buggin’ me already.”

“Done.”

Thailand is nice. Or so I hear.

I’ve only just left my air-conditioned hotel room.

We arrived in Bangkok last night, me with a raging fever and pain every time I tried to swallow. You never really realize how often you swallow until each swallow feels like burning.

We found the aircon room last night, and this morning, blessed be, we realized that there was a clinic on the first floor! Now I’m all drugged up and ready to go!

Actually, I’m just about ready to go back to bed…

We have one more day of Martha recuperation in Bangkok, and then Monday we get on a bus/boat for some island somewhere. It’s strange, since I’ve been sick, Matt has been doing all the planning and navigating… luckily he has Agnes to help him. Really, he’s been doing a great job, and taking very good care of me. I guess I’ll have to do the same when he gets what I’ve got.

Let me get all Euro-centric for a sec. Koreans got a weird sense of hygiene. The feet thing I can understand. We were staying at a love motel in Seoul. Ah, love motel, let me explain. You see, in Korea it is not uncommon to live in small digs with parts of your extended family. So privacy can be a bit of an issue, especially for amorous mommies and daddies. The solution: the love motel, a place where you can come with your loved one [sic] for a night. Our motel has racks of Korean porn on each floor. Unfortunately, there are some strict laws governing porn in Korea and you are not allowed to show more than boobies in a skin flick. I’ve seen racier stuff on Bleu Nuit. Anyway, I digress… So, the feet thing. You take off your shoes before you get into the love motel and get into a pair of slippers generously supplied by the proprietors. The carpet stays clean longer. Fine. I get that. Also, the shoes thing ties into another very interesting Korean habit, displayed mainly, but not exclusively by men. Horking. Now I’m not talking about a little ejection of excess saliva. I’m talking rip-roaring loogies. Walking around Seoul, you will invariably hear some dude pulling up some lung butter or hocking down some snotties to let loose on the road. It’s never quiet. There’s always the gurgling/ripping sound that comes with such activity. And this behaviour isn’t confined to the outside. In a subway car, buddy launched a greener right onto the floor. Yum. So, I’ve been lettin’em fly too. When in Rome…

Another weird hygiene thing revolves around the hands and mouth. Almost all food products are wrapped because your hands are germy. Fine. You aren’t supposed to walk and chow on the food you just purchased from a street vendor. It’s unclean. Eat it by the stall. Weird. But, it’s OK to double-dip into the sauce bowl at the street stall after you’ve taken a bite of your pork dumpling (man do). What? Gross.

Stereotypes aside, karaoke is big here in Korea. But karaoke is the Japanese name. In this neck of the woods the art form is called norae bang. You can find norae bang in the weirdest places: on big make-shift stages set up in a market to platforms erected within labyrinthine subway stations. We saw one of the latter just the other day. The stage was framed by speakers, like a concert stage, and behind were a few TV screens showing real singers performing. In front of the stage were honest to goodness spectators reclining on cheap plastic patio chairs. We stood at the back of the crowd were we could not only see the stage, but also the commuter-suits passing by. The Koreans have a proclivity for sap-head pop songs, but every second person has a pretty decent singing voice. We only stayed for two songs.

A bunch of us Canuck English teachers and some of our Korean teacher counterparts went out the other night. After a big bowl of noodles, we found the nearest norae bang establishment with a price in our range. Now, if you are imagining that we went to some big smokey bar and had to perform Captain & Tennille’s Love Will Keep Us Together in front of a bunch of strangers, you’d be mistaken. We got our own private room for the nine of us, complete with TV monitors, mics, light-show, tons of tunes to choose from and all the soju (Korean rice wine) we could sneak in. I found out that, in spite of all the norae bang infrastructure, I am still a very bad singer. Oddly enough my best performance was not to the Stone’s Start Me Up or Earth Wind and Fire’s September. I brought the house down with that Celine Dion’s song from the Titanic movie (My Heart will Go On). Okay, okay, before all the indie kids throw up their arms in dismay, let me explain…

At the end of camp, each class has to do a performance for the rest of the camp and all the parents. Think grade school recital. I tried to get my kids into Jungle Boogie by Kool and the Gang, Sedated by The Ramones and even Take Me On by A-ha. But they wouldn’t have any of it. They hated it all. But not Titanic (see aforementioned Korean proclivity). So, fine. I gave in. In the final performance, my eleven kids sang like little cherubim, each one holding a piece of their own art-work that, when lined up side-by-side, formed an long paper Titanic with the ship’s name running down the side. (In the dress-rehearsal only the kids carrying the two T’s and the first I were held up, so the audience was treated to TIT. Magic.) At the end of the song, I came out in my paper iceberg costume and smashed through my singing angels. It was great. So, needless to say, I had some familiarity with the song by the time I got to norae bang.

Martha, however, rocked the norae bang. Even with a gravely throat brought on by a cold, she wailed. Such a trooper.

Arthur is an English teacher from our sister camp, Camp Korea. Our camp was called Pantech and Curitel, named after the huge telecom company that sponsored the camp. Both camps were based at Howan University, just outside of Gunsan. It turns out that Pantech and Curitel don’t know much about kids. They sent some dude in a suit on the first day of camp to do a presentation for the kiddies, who are all between the ages of nine and fifteen. The suit brought the same powerpoint presentation that he uses for attracting potential investors and ran through the whole thing—1st-quarter projections, graphs, pie-charts and all. He bored the kiddies to fidgets. Still, the kiddies were better behaved than Warren and I. We reverted to the habits we acquired while at nurun: when the boring suit starts talking start making poo-poo jokes that could make us laugh milk through our noses.

Anyway, there’s Arthur. Unlike most teachers, he seemed to have a lot of free-time on his hands. I think he found this time by not planning for his classes, ever. Still, he managed to pull things off. Just before our camp finished, the teachers at Camp-Korea had to e-mail some student evaluations off. These get posted on the Camp Korea web site so the parents (and relatives and rest of the planet) can see how the little ones are progressing. What follows are Arthur’s first drafts of some student evaluations. They are hilarious. The students names are their English ones.

Jeremy

Jeremy writes like a psycho killer. Most children, even the dumb ones, learn at least a few English phrases that they can repeat day after day in their diaries—“I like camp. It was fun. Dinner was yummy.” Yet, every night Jeremy writes the same thing: ‘Pantech and Curitel’ over and over in a script that could only be accomplished if the writer held his pencil between his teeth. And the company’s name is never spelt right to boot. I recommend therapy. The other day, the kids in the class were given treats to share: bags of crisps, candies and such. One box contained lady fingers, or as they are called in Korean, pepero. Jeremy was damned if he was going to share these with anybody so he grabbed a handful, opened his mouth as wide as it could go and jammed his fist full of pepero in. He then used his other hand to ram the chocolate sticks farther down his throat, the whole time managing to laugh maniacally like an evil kung fu master who sees that the hero has fallen into an obvious trap. It was fucking hilarious. This is why Jeremy is my favourite. I also saw him eating paste.

Edward

Edward is the kind of student I dread writing about. There is nothing especially good or bad about him. He is a poster child for mediocrity and will grow up to live an unfulfilling life that even he will fail to take any interest in. Unless he does anything spectacular, he’ll get a B-. Usually, I give his type a B without a second thought, but your son is kind of whiny. He bugs me.

Lucinda

Your daughter is dumb and ugly. Usually I take no notice of these students, but it has come to my attention that your daughter has a crush on me. Most of the time, students with teacher-crushes are fun. I lead them on with little smiles and winks, while avoiding anything that could get changed into a rumour and prison-leading allegations. It’s good for little girls. Sure they’ll cry themselves to sleep for the two weeks following camp for love-sickness, but when they’re older they’ll trade teacher-crush stories with their new university friends. It’ll be fun and they’ll remember me and that time with fondness. But like I said, your daughter is dumb and ugly. This depresses me. They can be one or the other, but not both. I’m doing my best to ignore her.

…see Warren and Agnes site. These guys are the homies who scored us this gig in Korea. Follow the link to WSRGraphics in the side nav.

Okay, how’s this for nuts? Me, 12 Korean children (10-13 years old) and raging disco hits. That’s right I’m teaching these kiddies how to git down. I have a class each day that involves something a little “creative,” i.e. not exactly teaching English in the strict sense. So I’m trying to teach these little dudes all the stupid dance moves I know. Some of them got the funk. They have trouble with the Running Man, but rock the Disco Spin.

Repeat after me, “Outta sight!”