The Reflection

The Reflection
Originally uploaded by Crystal Skull.

My camera's final act of narcissism before it gave up the ghost.

Trouble in Thailand

JETs are expected to be upstanding citizens and outstanding ambassadors of their respective countries. They live in Japanese society at great expense to the taxpayer, so it is understood that they approach their task of internationalization with professional acumen.

Then they go on holiday.

They crash motorbikes, they have to be coaxed out of trees by concerned barstaff, they get lost in the bushes at outdoor parties, they convince people to take hallucinogenic substances and then abduct them, they crash bicycles, they intimidate taxi drivers and then smuggle all manner of contraband substances back into Japan. It takes great skill to be so evil while looking so good.

I refer to my recent trip to Thailand with six friends, all Okayama JETs, who, for their own protection, I will assign pseudonyms. The brains behind the whole scheme is Mary Jane, a Texan, who suddenly decided one day on a bus that it would be a good idea to do Thailand, and do it good. The Numbers Guy is from Boston, and it was up to him to arrange the most diverse accommodation possible, from a cupboard crammed with bunkbeds to a 5 star luxury hotel with a pillow menu. Ya-Chan the OzPole organized the transportation: trains, planes and catamarans. He was also the official tech manager with roaming cellphone, DSLR camera and portable hard drive for the gigabytes of mad photographic evidence we managed to amass between us. Metal the Englishman tested the hottest food Thailand could offer (only one dish was ever hot enough) and was fascinated by the colour green. Clockwork from Melbourne scored us great places to stay and did her best to keep the boys under control, and Wednesday (forgive me) from
f%!#$ing Scotland kept us on our toes by getting tanked on vodka and disappearing every couple of days (and threatening taxi drivers when such services were required of her).
Then there's me. I guess my role is writing about it on this obscure blog (although I did play central roles in the tree incident and the abduction).
Supporting roles: Rosycheeks (who knows what would have happened if I had taken the narcotics she so persuasively offered me?), Braces (takes the 'guide' back out of 'tourguide') and The Hustler (aka Speed Demon), from Chiang Mai; The Oaf (who amazed us with his skills at staying alive &/or out of jail for so long) and the Disturbance (another JET, who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, as usual, and was persuaded to imbibe a magic milkshake and then abducted and tortured with various hilarious mindgames).

Mary Jane, Wednesday, Clockwork, Metal and I arrived in Bangkok the day after Ya-Chan and the Numbers Guy, who had just been bounced from the Grand Palace for being so scruffy, then survived a ride with a rehab dodging taxi driver. We stayed at a very small backpackers, and Metal, Wednesday and I all managed (in separate incidents I must add) to lock ourselves in the tiny smelly bathroom. We went out for dinner and received several offers to visit sophisticated establishments with names like 'Super Pussy' to see ping-pong shows. Not being very interested in ping-pong, Metal and I turned these offers down.

Consensus had allowed us three doses of Bangkok on the trip, and thankfully none of them were longer than 48 hrs. We escaped to Chiang Mai on a little Air Asia jet, and Mary Jane attempted to win us a pillow in the in-flight trivia contest, but was trounced by a five-year old who then proceeded to sing 'Yes, Jesus Loves Me' over the aircraft's intercom. Whatever happened on the night that we arrived must have been good, because nobody remembers it. The restaurant we wanted on Christmas eve was booked out, so we went to one of the best restaurants in all Asia instead (by accident). They had live Thai music, a view over the river, and a picture of Hillary Clinton's armoured car on the menu (she ate there once). Someone even brought along one of the cute waitresses from the guesthouse, which made the meal even more of a feast for the senses. We did several different things between us during our time in Chiang Mai, only occasionally regrouping for things like meals and drinking binges. These included dealing with drug addled guesthouse employees, a downhill extreme bike trek (complete with injurious wipeoput on video!) elephant rides, bamboo rafting, a cooking class, a dinner and dance at the cultural center, foot massages, a trip to Laos over the Mekong river (getting served shots of cobra whiskey by exquisite Laotian girls and practicing Japanese with a blonde Korean recovering from her last facelift... having my hair pulled out by a furious monkey, losing vast quantities of money and meeting the hilltribe women with the long golden necks, doing a gemstone deal, losing even more money in a brilliantly conceived Burmese currency swindle etc etc...it was quite a day); meeting a girl called Jonothan (!) Ya-Chan and I getting kicked out of bed on two consecutive nights because of The Numbers Guy and Metal bringing Thai girls back, watching Muai Thai boxing, going to a club called Porn Bubble (not as bad as it sounds), stumbling across Thailand's hottest hip-hop act, Thaitanium, getting offered ecstasy by the receptionist of the guesthouse and meeting Buddhist monks who listened to punk rock in their temple... and that's just the stuff I can remember.

Dazed on confused, we caught a plane back to Bangkok, where the Numbers guy had organized us rooms at the Pan Pacific, a five star hotel that trains their personnel not to look too shocked when a tribe of bleary-eyed international backpackers stumble through the doors as if they could really afford to stay there. (We could, because even though none of us look like it, were all Japanese...at least for the time being). We drank real French wine, smoked real Cuban cigars and wore real fake Versace sunglasses indoors, while being serenaded by a beautiful singer and her skilled accomplice on a grand piano. After flipping through as many sattelite channels as we could in one go, we went out to an awesome concept-club called Bed, which was something of a cross between a huge bedroom and something out of the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy's Improbability Drive. Somehow, after Bed closed for the night, we ended up outside a club that was so dodgy that not even Wednesday wanted to go inside. Ya-Chan and the Numbers Guy ditched their gold-digging dates, we avoided the Khmer-Rouge bouncer (thankfully I resisted the urge to say "We go already. Why you so horrible?" to him), and we got the hell out, all crammed into a tuk-tuk that I didn't fall out of, even though it seemed unavoidable at the time.
We were all rewarded with the most comfortable night's sleep we'd had all year, perhaps ever.
(and we didn't even use the pillow menu!)

The breakfast at the Pan Pacific was so exhorbitantly expensive that not even rich Japanese people like us could afford it. The staff breathed a well suppressed sigh of relief as we left, destined for the Bangkok train station via the cleanest, most astonishingly hi-tech underground railway I've ever seen. It even tops Tokyo, and just outdoes Paris, and even though I've heard Moscow has chandeliers, I'd bet it doesn't have synchronized glass doors between the platform and the train. In keeping with the yin/yang theme of our trip, our next train was an overnighter with a green and brown interior, and I still haven't been able to figure out which colour was the paint job and which was the.. uh... nevermind.
Luckily I fell asleep before that big drunk American bundle of obnoxiousness started throwing up. My heart goes out to Mary-Jane and Metal for having to deal with that one. Foolishly, I ordered breakfast on the train, but luckily the worrisome stomach cramps had subsided by the time we managed to scramble onto the ferry, moments before it left for Ko Pagnan.
We were accompanied on the ferry journey by a bunch of louts that had probably been dredged out of the gutter of some British football stadium and shipped to Thailand as a cruel joke on the international backpacker set. Having survived that, we made our way from Thong Sala to our bottom of the range beach bungalows 20 minutes walk away. It was an interesting amble, especially for the Numbers Guy, who did his best to ignore the ladyboy that kept riding past us very slowly, making eyes at him. After an actual swim in actually warm water that you could actually see your hand in front of your face in (Aaaah! at last!). We had supper with a Thai family who had turned their balcony into a restaurant called... Restaurant. Fed, we daringly taxiied to Had Rin, the legendary party beach, to risk our lives and our sanity with the rest of the Eurotrash that had been imported from all over the world to make the event as devastating as possible. The prize for the most popular product of the evening went to the beach bucket fillet with a can of coke, a bottle of red-bull and a bottle of vodka. I made it through the evening on three little bottles of red bull, which more closely resembles cough syrup in Thailand than the caffeinated marketing bomblets we're used to in other parts of the world. Thankfully, we were all part of the 99.5% of the partygoers that actually managed to survive (seriously). Us boys all thought we were going to see our life expectancy jump back up again (being Japanese and all) after we left that most dangerous of New Year's parties, but we still had to survive a taxi race. A nerve shattering experience indeed at 6am after a night of risky partying.

After a brief period when sleeping and waking and night and day blurred into one amorphous haze, we decided to bust out of the ultra budget jungalos (nice word, Ya-Chan) and get ourselves somewhere a bit more decent. Haad Yao was next. It was beautiful. The bungalows were really close to the pristine beach. Palm trees swished languidly in the warm breeze. The staff acted as if they were coming cold turkey off an all-week crack binge. We hired motorbikes and drove them dangerously (Ya-Chan sent himself to hospital with a broken arm and a hole in his head).
Most of us set out to Thong Sala to sample the legendary milkshakes at the superbly positioned Amsterdam bar. It was here, in the midst of the wonderful shake-up, that I decided to climb a tree, sending the bar manager into a panic and prompting some of the more sober clientele to nonchalantly raise a few eyebrows. I had escaped up the tree to avoid the man that has since become known as the Disturbance. He of the worryingly psychopathic slam-poetry who travels alone, "glooping" (his own word) onto other groups of people for hours or days at a time. He was too stoned to make his own decisions, so in my wonderfully frothy headspace I managed to convince him to have one of the special shakes and come with us to Haad Yao. He did, but as the taxi sped along and his neurons started to fire in decreasingly predictable patterns, he started to worry. We were all having a lot of fun by this time, with Bach playing in our heads and fascination with the colour green leading to sophisticated and groundbreaking philosophical theories. We were realising some of the truth behind the foundations of the universe, and we had a panicking headcase with us along for the ride. By the time we got to Haad Yao, he was convinced that we were psychopathic Nigerians who were just pretending to be English teachers in Japan. His body, his motorbike and his belongings were in three different places on the island, and his mind was in a different place altogether. When we made it to the bungalow, he locked himself in the bathroom. This was where our mischievious abduction backfired, as we had to regain his trust from the other side of the door, explaining to him that it was actually a way out of this apparently terrible situation he had got himself into. All he had to do was go to the big brown rectangle, look about halfway up on the right and slide the little bolt to the left, and he'd be free. It took a while. His head eventually cleared a little and he was sent on his way, finally persuaded that he actually had the wits and the resources to take a taxi back to Thong Sala and find his motorbike.

With the Disturbance behind us, we spent a few days lounging around on the beach wondering how the hell the staff at Haad Yao bungalows could live in such a beautiful place and be so morose at the same time. We swam alot, and even though Metal doubts my mental coherence at the time me, I still maintain that I was attacked by a fish. We borrowed a hammer from a friendly local restaurant to fix Ya-Chan's motorbike, and thankfully no-one noticed any damage when we returned them and I safely got my passport back. I think they were distracted by wondering how The Numbers Guy managed to get so much mud on his handlebars as he maintained a straight face while telling them that the bike had never got horizontal while in his custody. That night, some of us got Wednesday to threaten a taxi driver, and he took us inland to what was supposed to be the New Moon trance party near a waterfall. It looked like a trance party, and there was falling water, but the music was nearly all bubblegum house and the "waterfall" was more like a little weir. Wednesday got lost, and when we eventually found her, she threatened another taxi driver (with violence this time) and he took us home.

The next morning, (expletives deleted).

In my first and only attempt to organize anything on this trip, I arranged for us all to pay return price tickets to Ko Tao, when we were only going one way. We were entertained by The Oaf, who probably got dropped in the sea during the evil football lout prank and somehow floated to Ko Pagnan. We watched him try to board the ferry without a ticket, pick a fight with whoever was close enough, and then eventually get detained by disgruntled officials in a makeshift cage on the pier. We had been in Ko Tao for scarcely half an hour when we heard a familiar "Oi! Aaaargh!" It was the Oaf, trying to form a sentence. He had miraculously made it to the island without anyone noticing. Weighed down by omiyage (compulsory souvenirs for Japanese colleagues) laden backpacks, sleep deprivation and monster hangovers, our motley crew descended on Sensi Paradise. We all looked at Mary Jane in disbelief. She had told us that this place would be sixteen hundred Baht for all of us, yet it was a beach lodge of utmost class, with hardwood decks, impeccably dressed staff gliding around tending to guests' every whim, and discreet signs saying "Guests with plastic bottles will be asked to leave". We hid our plastic bottles before we were approached by a hostess who, if she were any less beautiful, might have looked slightly worried. She tilted her head in the manner that someone who facilitates tropical bliss for the world's elite would ask: "What the f%*!# are you guys doing here?" Mary Jane explained that she had booked seven beds a few days ago and attempted to confirm the price. The gracious hostess laughed politely. "No, that would have been sixteen THOUSAND Baht."

Hopefully, Mary Jane learned the lesson to never again refer to anything over a thousand as "#teen hundred". We hadn't dragged these backpacks, these hangovers, this dirt under our fingernails to the gates of Sensi Paradise (yes, that's actually what it was called) to be turned away by a sixteen THOUSAND Baht price tag. We reminded ourselves that we were rich Japanese people and skilled negotiators, so Mary Jane and I went to look at the room (which was more like a HOUSE) while the others debated the possibility of finding something else at this late stage of the game. Mary Jane and I were thoroughly impressed. Our house was nestled between boulders and palm trees a stone's throw from the crystalline water, and we rushed back to convince everyone that we should stay, (and Jedi mind-trick the management into knocking 4000Baht off the price tag). It was at this magnificent spot that we managed to recover somewhat from the previous two weeks of excess and insanity, use a flushing toilet, snorkel amongst psychedelic fish and coral and treat ourselves to beautifully prepared food. Alas, we could stay but a day and a night. Our next stop was Chumpohn, a refreshingly untouristed city, where Clockwork, Wednesday and I opted to be tortured by an untalented cabaret artist at an a la carte restaurant while the others ate rediculously cheap and delicious food at a sidewalk cafe. We boarded the overnighter to Bangkok, which this time, thankfully, we had managed to get first class tickets for. It wasn't exactly luxury, but at least it wasn't a health hazard like the last one. We arrived in the city and headed to the Grand Palace, as Ya-Chan and The Numbers guy wanted to try to get into again without being bounced. The latter and Metal donned sarongs to cover their legs, but the security guards thought they were ladyboys, so The Numbers guy was bounced again. Finally, they arranged to borrow long pants and we were all let in to see lots of Japanese people and gold plated stuff and an emerald Buddha. Metal finally got his come-uppance in the hot-food department when we went to lunch near Kao San Road. He asked for the hottest thing on the menu, and after the waitress had assessed that he was serious, told him that she'd give it to him, but he wasn't allowed to leave the restaurant until he had finished all of it, which he did. Respect, Metal. I had a taste and it was something in the league of what Dick Cheney might dream up to use on the unfortunates at Guantanamo Bay. Our final night in Bangkok was at the Ambassador, a seventies throwback which Metal and the Numbers guy nearly set fire to while demonstrating how to "go rockstar" on a hotel room. Thankfully the staff didn't discover the burn marks and broken glass until after we had left on the early flight to Kansai the next morning. We all managed to get back into the country, even though some of us couldn't help giggling when we were asked if we were carrying marijuana. Mary Jane managed to convince customs that the sword she was carrying was actually "a toy" and none of the other unmentionables were discovered and/or confiscated. Our only problem was (real) Japanese people trying to usher us out of the 'residents only' queue.

So we're all back in snowy Japan, and we're behaving ourselves again (supposedly).