Nick

The sudden death of our dear friend and cousin Nick Ohly hit us hard out here, at this antipodal remove from Sara and Derek, Michel, Jack, Tanya, and infant Miles, upon whom he doted so when we last saw him in Guilford. Everything we've experienced out here since Jake e-mailed us with the news has been colored or even dictated by his passing, and it's been hard to return to the blog with cheery updates, even though there has been much cheer on this trip, and probably too much to report. This past weekend was a Thai festival called Loi Krotang, a time to expunge one's ill fortune and sins and seek the water's forgiveness for all we've done to deplete and pollute it. It is observed at night by means of little banana leaf votive boats and the flying of paper hot air balloons, and the effect Saturday night took our breath away as hundreds of glowing paper balloons with their paraffin flames rose toward the full moon. They looked like stars come down to visit with the moon, but even more, as I wrote Sara, like souls ascending, and so we bought a paper baloon and wrote Nick's name upon it and released it by the River Ping. It didn't seem to want to leave at first, but then the breeze caught it, and up it went to join the rising constellations of light until it was hard to distinguish it from the rest. It felt for the first time as though we were able to mark Nick's passing, even though the weekend before we had dedicated a little Buddha effigy in one of the Khmer temples around Angkor Wat and secreted it in an interstice and marked its location on a map so that in future years perhaps Derek and Jack or maybe even Miles might retrieve it.

We spent four days in Siem Reap, staying at a French-owned hotel called, for some reason, the Victoria Angkor, although perhaps the reason was that it looked Victorian, or British Raj, with open verandahs and ceiling fans in the lobby, only toned up considerably. Our fellow guests were mostly French and would not cue up for the buffet breakfast. We have observed, however, that the day of the ugly American is about done. Most Americans we've seen have been extremely well behaved. The louts, the true bulls in the china shop, the people who climb onto statuary or jokingly imitate worshippers at temples, are the Eastern Europeans, probably because, like the newly prosperous Americans of the 1950s, they're suddenly able to get out of their home countries after years and years cooped up within their own borders. 

Cambodia's miserable history was in evidence in the poverty along the roadsides; the signs warning passersby about land mines, of which a local hero has personally found and defused some 50,000; the books about the Khmer Rouge massacres; and the blind amputee land mine victims we encountered here and there. Flying into Siem Reap we passed over hundreds of square miles of the malarial swamp that adjoins the Toié Sap, the largest lake in Indochina, and spotted a couple of fishing villages comprised of house boats and houses on stilts. The Khmer Rouge wiped out an entire such village, we later learned. The tuktuk driver we hired, Mr. Chanthol, apologized for his stilted English and explained that when he was a boy he had to quit school because the Khmer Rouge were going around shooting teachers and even schoolchildren. So he picked up what English he could from tourists.

I had not seen Angkor in half a century, Debbie was last there forty years ago, and since then the sculptures have been ravaged by guerrillas, vandals and looters who, it is estimated, have driven off with some 7,000 tons of statuary, much of it to the thieves' market in Bangkok, where art dealers are reputed to show collectors photographs of Angkor so they can order particular pieces from the site. In many places you can see where they've chipped, pried, and sawn off pieces of sculpture, usually the heads, so that everywhere there are these decapitated figures where I think I recall seeing statuary intact. All of this makes the surviving richness of the complex all the more extraordinary, because the overall effect of these miles and miles of temples, moats, walls, libraries, monasteries is still simply awe inspiring. 

Some of the shops and restaurants we ventured into in the town were run by French expatriates, and I found myself thinking, "But they can't be expatriates. They're already foreigners."

Catching Up II

When we first arrived in Chiang Mai we stayed at a picturesque little hotel not far from where we were eventually to find our apartment. It was run by a thin Englishman with bottle bottom glasses and his Thai companion. We were not typical of their clientel and felt a little anachronistic as we made our way to our room, past fountains consisting of rotating marble balls, little boys urinating, grown men wrestling, and so on. But the room itself was tastefully appointed, and as I walked out the hotel's soi, the Thai word for cross-street or alleyway, I walked amidst a swarm of butterflies. • By then we had already encountered Debbie's students in Bangkok as they came dribbling in from Seattle and moved into rooms in the YWCA, among them a Moslem woman of Thai extraction who had just visited her grandparents back in Viet Nam, from whence she and her family had fled when she was a baby. Debbie's class seemed to us very promising and congenial, and eager to see as much of Thailand as possible. • But back to the hotel of rotating balls. Debbie and I and her students had lunch with the dean of the nursing school at the local university: a very canny and self confident woman whom I found myself grilling about education in Thailand, as though my father's ghost had found the ventriloquist's string on the back of my shirt and had me in his thrall. Debbie's colleague Michael had instructed us that Thai's always pick their teeth after a meal, albeit behind a napkin, which has the odd effect of making everyone appear as though they were playing the comb. Nevertheless I winced when Debbie began to pick at her teeth beside the dean, until I looked over and saw that the dean too was working something from between a couple of molars. • As Debbie began her classes, I went out hunting for an apartment. I was shown a room in a dismal establishment called Hillside Four, with its abandoned lobby and empty stores, like a 1950s Asian hotel that had fallen on hard times. So we decided on Apartment 801 in Srithana Condo 2 beside the shopping mall, which looks like the apartment of a minor drug dealer in an episode of Miami Vice. It's quite spacious, and situated on the corner of the building so there's nice cross ventilation in the event of a breeze. • The weather has been hot and humid, but it has cooled down considerably since we got here. I sweat more when I enter an airconditioned establishment, but sweat plenty walking the hot streets. We were like mad dogs and Englishmen as we made our first expeditions through the town, walking great distances in the midday heat. But now we take the three-wheeled tuktuks or the roofed and benched minitrucks called seelaws on most trips. The seelaws cost about fifty cents to take you anywhere, and pick up multiple passengers along the way. Nevertheless I prefer the somewhat pricier tuk-tuks, which bump and swerve through traffic like rodeo bulls and give me a headlong sense of adventure, even if it's just a run to an ATM. We also time our lives differently: getting up early to take advantage of the cooler temperatures, retiring to the apartment in the middle of the day, then proceeding to a nearby hotel pool or out to a restaurant in the afternoon or evening.

Catching

Hello folks. A month has passed since I wrote my last entry and I doubt I'll be able to catch up. But herewith a few random notes that may account for some of what's transpired.
I like to think of myself as adventurous, for haven’t I spent so much of my life in the antipodes? But I have never been a backpacking, roughing-it sort of traveler. I have always traveled in comfort, sidestepping public transportation and market food and native hostels and all the rest of it. There’s this Viceregal part of me from my New Delhi boyhood that is affronted by any manifestation of obliviousness or disrespect, and he’s at odds with the democrat who wants everyone to love me. (Love me? They hardly know me.)
I am elaborately courteous, almost magnanimous, like a politician on a poverty tour, even when I’m not entirely sure what I’m saying. Did I just tell the tuk-tuk driver “hello,” or “Thank you” or “Just looking”? And did I append the feminine or the male sobriquet to the end of it? I’m afraid I try to puff up my significance by playing on my enormity in this nation of small, slight folk. (My shoes alone, left by the steps to a temple, look like the Frankenstein monster’s next to the little scuffed chappals of the faithful, but unless there's a flood, I don't fear anyone taking them while I'm wandering around the wats.)
In any case, Debbie and I moved into a large apartment next door to Kadsuankaew, one of Chiang Mai's principal shopping malls. It's pronounced Gad-swan-ghee-ow, or at least we think so until we try to tell a siilaw or tuktuk driver to take us there. The cognitive dissonance of even the most correct Thai pronunciation of anything issuing from a large, parboiled Caucasian face is too much for some drivers who, even after getting out and conferring with his passengers, to whom we are asked to repeat the address, have to simply drive away. Mysteriously, while Casey was here, she was always immediately understood, a testament to the slightly oriental cast of her eyes, perhaps, or her sheer benignity.
Our first few days in the apartment were unnerving, at least for yours truly. Maybe Janet's death, Dad's death, and Catherine's illness finally caught up with me, but I suffered a bout with the black dog whose dissociative influence was much compounded by the strangeness of this place and by coming to rest after so much forward motion. But I have almost entirely emerged from my sputtering funk and in the meantime have enjoyed many glorious days of sightseeing, marketing, and squiring Casey around.
Chiangmai is a vast improvement on Bangkok, although I fear it could become Bangkok in another twenty years. For now it has a provincial feel, lots of greenery, and hundreds of curious little shops and restaurants. The old town is demarcated by 700 year-old walls flanked by a moat, within whose boundaries development has been kept under pretty good control. But beyond the old town, where we live, high rises loom and multiply. There's an enormous condo market here, with units being scooped up by Aussie and Japanese investors.
The expat community here is a study. In my boyhood, Europeans greeted each other in Asian countries no doubt out of an unconscious nod to racial solidarity. Now they scowl at each other, as if each were spoiling the other's illusion of uniqueness. The Thais are far friendlier. I get this feeling of unseemliness about expats, the vast majority of whom are male and middle-aged to elderly. I suspect them of all kinds of things: of being fugitives from justice or, in any case, alimony payments; of sheer parsimony; of a taste for young boys or only slightly older girls; of being drug dealers or Viet Nam vets come to re-experience their first sexual forays. But then I catch a reflection of myself in a tea shop window and there walks the very spit and image of the aging, hoary, oversized men in their Hawaiian shirts who, at least when Debbie's isn't with me, very likely make the same dismal assumptions about me. Nonetheless I've seen couples consisting of such men and much younger Thai women and girls, most of them rather unprepossessing compared to the run of Thai girls, an enormous proportion of whom are beautiful. They do not seem blissful, and it occurred to me that old men who come to Thailand in hopes of finding a dazzling submissive wife -- especially men who have escaped unhappy marriages back home -- are apt to end up with a companion who is neither dazzling nor submissive but assertive enough to bully him into a relationship and aggressive enough to take him for all he's worth. "You buy for me, I do for you," I overheard one of them tell her middle-aged American companion at the walking market a week ago, which seemed to sum up the arrangement pretty well.
Casey arrived a week ago and hit the ground running. Jet lag did not seem to be in her vocabulary, and no sooner had she landed than we were off and running, racing through the night bazaar buying up all and sundry, dining on Thai street food, inspecting Thai groceries, joining Debbie's class at an AIDS clinic, driving south with her father to visit various furniture markets and silk outlets, riding up to Doi Suthep, the hilltop wat overlooking the city, venturing out to the elephant farm, and on and on. She was like a beacon shining her light on everything she passed and reawakening her father's enthusiasm for this lovely city.

Ayutthaya

Here's Debbie strolling among the ruins of the first complex we visited. 

The sprawling complex of ancient ruins included a still very-much-in-operation temple with a splendid gold Buddha in a forest of purple columns etched in gold. To convey a feel for the place, I photographed it in panorama, hence the irregular shape of the images. 

Ayutthaya

And now for something completely different. Last Friday Nongnut's brother Amnart, a Bangkok traffic policeman, kindly drove us out to Ayyutthaya/Ayudhya: Thailand's answer to Angkor Wat: a ruined city about 80 km from the city. 

Amnart was a short, hearty, muscular man with a grey burr cut, and reminded us a little of Uncle Marion.  Apparently his sister sends a lot of her colleagues and visiting westerners to him to escort them to Ayutthaya, which he apparently regards as a kind of good deed he does on behalf of Nongnut, in whose accomplishments he takes enormous pride. Their father was a policeman in Trang in southern Thailand. Amnart's English was rusty, but he described his father as a kind of Godfather figure who ruled his district armed to the teeth. Amnart, unlike his sister, was no scholar, and joined his father in the constabulary, in which he was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Moslem separatists. In his last engagement, he was hit with a ricochet from a dum-dum bullet and lay in a coma for seven days and given up for dead. He finally awoke to find one of the princesses at his bedside, thanking him on behalf of Thailand. But he had enough of combat and moved to Bangkok to direct traffic.

It's happened

Here's another example of what I'm talking about: the name of a very creditable bakery in an enormous indoor Bangkok mall that is fancier and better staffed by far than anything I've seen in Seattle or San Francisco, Palo Alto or New York. "It's happened to be." What does it mean? Do they know what it means? Didn't anyone along the way point out that it doesn't mean anything? That all it's going to do is distress people? People like me? If there are any people like me?