Here follows the story of my trip to a little town a few hours north of Bangkok. Now that it’s done, I realize it’s long but stick with me here. You’re on Facebook to waste some time anyway, right?
Since I have nothing better to do with my time, I’ll write it in the style of my hero and personal friend Dave Barry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and terrible spackler. Sorry, he’s not my personal friend, I can’t back that up. If you haven’t read any of Dave’s writings, you should look him up and read some. You’ll thank me for it, and then what comes below won’t seem so strange. Go ahead and Google him now, I’ll wait. In fact, to make it easier to find the right Dave Barry, Google “Dave Barry Toilet Conspiracy”. Dave spends a lot of time writing about toilets. You’re back? OK, let’s dive in.
I’m calling this trip report “Mike Brown Travels To a Tiny Village in North Eastern Thailand And Thoroughly Enjoys Almost Every Minute Of It.” Don’t cheat and look at the pictures yet, it will spoil the surprises. Oh you already did? Great. Did you tell your kid that Santa is gay-married to the Easter Bunny too?
So the whole trip idea came from my semi-permanently drunk/hungover German friend Martin. I should back up and mention that all Thais have nicknames. Martin’s girlfriend’s nickname is “Goy” which translates to “Pinky Finger”. True story. Following in the fine tradition of German Humor, Martin’s nickname is “Martin”. My given name is Michael, but only my mother called me that, when she was reaching in slow motion to the kitchen drawer to get the wooden spoon in a rare moment when I was acting boy-like. For the other parts of my life, my nickname has been Mike, but Thais have a hard time saying the hard-k in Mike, so they usually call me Miiiiieeeeeee, which I believe roughly translates to “Farang who pays too much for his Fried Rice with Shrimp, medium spicy, no onions”. Farang roughly translates to “Fat foreign man who drinks too much cheap beer and wears cargo shorts.”
Sorry, back to the trip. Goy’s father “Pa”, which translates to “Pa”, was down in Hua Hin for a visit and we were invited to go back up with him. My new life plan is to say “Yes” to anything and just enjoy the adventure. Well, maybe No to Heroin. Or sex with men. Well, maybe a young Brad Pitt. While I was on heroin. OK, any era Brad Pitt then. And heroin.
Damn, I got off track again. I feel kinda like the Thai railroad system â derailing nearly every day. No, I actually liked the train ride from Bangkok to Hua Hin when I first arrived and plan to use it again to see other interesting jungle locations. OK, so we’re off at 7 AM to an unknown location in the province of Issan, a region in northeastern Thailand twice the size of England, whose major export is rain. No actually it’s probably rice, but rain is a close second. Technically it’s not rain, but water running downhill into the rest of Thailand. Recently there have been a series of heavy rainstorms in Thailand and 32 of 77 provinces are experiencing flooding, and Typhoon Wutip is on the way over from the Philippines. But don’t worry, the Government Says Everything Will Be Just Fine, not like two years ago when half of Bangkok was under water at all.
Accompanying us and Pa is Goy’s sister’s son. He’s about 5 and I never did catch his name. Martin and I nicknamed him “Crazy Boy”. If he was in Texas, he’d be on an IV drip of Ritalin.
A popular, yet insane form of paid transportation in Thailand is the Minibus. This is on top of the scooter taxi, the Tuk Tuk, the green bus, the red bus, the meter taxi and the luxury coach bus. Guess what we took? Yeah. The minibus is like a hotel shuttle van, with approximately 27 seats built for tiny Thai people but without the luxury of an actual suspension. On the upside, the whole 8 hour trip cost only 380 Baht or $12 US or $97.50 Canadian. The cost-to-pain ratio was excellent.
I was lucky enough to have the two non-cargo seats in the back row to myself, so I laid down in the fetal position to try to get some sleep. I stuck my legs between the back of the seat ahead and a cardboard box holding a self-priming water pump. I still have the image of the pump on the box burned into my memory. Unfortunately, with the non-flat nature of Thai roads and the wheels bolted to the chassis of the minibus, we were getting actual air, and I was being tossed toward the roof at random intervals, so, no sleep for me. But the bruises were a bonus. We arrived in Bangkok at a side-of-the-road bus stop and jumped into a taxi which took us across Bangkok, which translates to “Longest Distance Between Bus Stops In One City In The World”, to the side-of-the-road bus stop for buses heading north.
After a further harrowing 4 hour ride with two 20 minute stops, we arrived at the bus stop in the unnamed town, which I now know of as Thep Sathit, which consisted of a parking lot, restaurant and convenience store. And by parking lot I mean dirt area with 27 wild dogs and incongruously, go ahead and look it up, I’ll wait, one purebred Golden Retriever. And by restaurant I mean a kettle of hot water, some vegetables, some meat and a few concrete tables under an asbestos roof. And by convenience store I mean 20 square feet of drinks and snacks under an asbestos roof. The specialty of the kettle is noodle soup which was probably the best I’ve ever had. Yummy. Waiting for our arrival at the bus stop complex was Goy’s extended family â mother, sisters, other unidentified-relations, and Goy’s two children, a 7-year-old daughter whose nickname is “Boom” and a 5-year-old son whose nickname is “Minibus”. True story. “Boom” translates to “The sound that Dave Barry’s toilet makes when it explodes” and “Minibus” translates to “Medieval Traveling Torture Chamber”. Only one person spoke English, so she was very sweet to facilitate our conversations, with many hand motions thrown in for effect.
The family was very accommodating to us, showing us their rice farm and their house which is of course, cozy, warm and welcoming, with wooden plank floors polished to a smoothness you can only get with generations of bare feet.
The countryside is a combination of wild jungle and agriculture. In another bit of incongruousness, there were three huge wind turbines in the middle of a crop field, surrounded by corn, hot peppers and some kind of two-foot-long Thai potato-ish item. It’s a very good thing the Western fast-food industry doesn’t know about this, or a small order of fries would cover your entire tray.
In a great coincidence, there were some staff from the Chinese turbine installation company there, so I spoke with an engineer about the system. Each turbine makes 2.5 megawatts at full steam, so to say. To put it in perspective, that’s as much power as my solar power company back home could make on the roof of 5 Costco stores, not including the snack area serving their delicious pizza. Costco fans know what I’m talking about. Then multiply that by 3, giving you 15 Costcos of wind, or as many as I think are in the greater Portland, Oregon area. This is an experimental site and based on what they learn after it starts real production, they plan to install 90 more turbines about 50 km away. As Thailand’s electrical grid is powered by various forms of decomposed organisms, the growth of wind and solar here is a Good Thing.
Looking at Google Maps with an incongruously-strong data signal, we spotted a large reservoir on the “other side of town”, so we headed over on scooters, rented at the charmingly Farang double-the-normal-rate. We passed charming homes, farmland and mud. Lots and lots of red mud, recently moved around by heavy rains. We arrived at the reservoir which was of course, charming and beautiful. The spillway was a 10-foot wide, 30-foot long flat concrete span, linking to more charming and beautiful jungle on the other side. We saw a scooter parked in the grass on the far side and thought “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” and headed across the trickling water without incident. We proceeded across the grassy levee until we hit a dead-end defined by actual impenetrable jungle. We turned around and came back to the spillway. Martin proceeded across while I waited. I then started across. This is where I encountered my several minutes of not enjoying my trip at all. I naively thought the scooter’s tires would have enough traction on the concrete but at 2 mph, I hit a patch of mud / slime and the scooter instantly rotated 90 degrees to the left, about its longitudinal axis. For a split second, I was one with the scooter, frozen in the driving position, hanging in the air in exactly the same way that bricks don’t. Sorry, I stole that one from Douglas Adams. We, the scooter and I, then became very brick-like, landing in a couple of inches of water. I could hear Martin howling with laughter as I struggled to squirm out from under the scooter and get it upright again. Summoning all of my dignity, which was running at an all time low, I made it back to the other side. Upon my arrival I discovered an elderly Thai gentleman spending a relaxing afternoon under a tree. He also was laughing at my misfortune. Being trapped under a scooter in two inches of muddy water on the spillway of a reservoir in the middle of the Thai jungle must have a universal what-a-moron humor quotient. I imagine his retelling of the story will be the highlight of the next few weeks in town. If he has a computer, you’ll probably be able to read about it in a stupid-Farang-story Thai web site somewhere. I wrung out my shirt and we then proceeded cautiously back to our jungle “huts”, with complimentary bugs and lizards but no soap or toilet paper, where I rinsed everything out and changed into less-muddy clothes. I checked my 2-month-old Samsung Galaxy S4 phone (drive-by gloat) and it had a few drops of water on it, but was functioning well so I breathed a sigh of relief. It was to be short-lived however. Later than night, the display did a kind of zizzy lines all over the place thing, then died a quiet 5.0″ Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16M color, 1080Ã1920 pixel, 441 ppi pixel density, Corning Gorilla Glass 3 kind of death. Damn I loved that phone. I was forced to eat a whole tub of chocolate Milo-flavored ice cream to assuage my depression. True story.
The next morning we caught the 9 AM minibus back to Bangkok, which arrived smack on time at 9:40, but hey everyone was cool with it. We hit the road, making great time for about 2 km then pulled in for what turned out to be a 20 minute rest break. We continued until another 20 minute rest break, then arrived at the bus depot in Bangkok. After 20 minutes (seeing a pattern here?) we caught our next minibus home to Hua Hin. Now I’m going to take back everything bad I’ve said about minibuses because this one was magnificent! It was made by Toyota, known for reliability and comfortability. It had enough headroom that I didn’t smash my head going in and out every time with the side effect of teaching the Thai travelers some choice English vocabulary. It had padded seats. It had a suspension with actual suspending components. The downside was the driver. This man was like Michael Schumacher’s faster brother. No, not Ralf you moron. We were doing 140 km/h, which roughly translates to 297 miles per hour, on the highway coming out of Bangkok. To this man, lane lines and shoulder lines are someone’s idea of a sick joke, speed limits exist only for ladyboys, and 3″ of space to the next vehicle is 2.5″ wasted. My imaginary-brake-pedal just about wore out in the first 10 minutes. The next 10 minutes were worse. I didn’t enjoy the next 10 minutes at all. And so on. Of course, we made two obligatory 20 minute rest breaks. Finally arriving home in one piece, I laid down on my couch and wept with the realization I was still alive. Oh and the next day my phone dried out and the display started working again! Woo hoo!
Speaking of Space, when I was a kid I wanted to be either an astronaut or a submariner. In retrospect, maybe it was I just didn’t like the surface of the earth or the people on it very much. I grew up with the space program, watching Neil Armstrong step onto the moon on my mother’s birthday when I was 6 years old. My prized possession was the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Space. 600+ pages of science, bitches! Last year in a fit of nostalgia I bought a copy on eBay, which I then gave away when I left California. NASA, call me. On this trip I’ve been through a tougher physical trauma regimen than you could imagine. Launch me into space, please. We’ll call it “Mission Minibus To Mars.”
