153 photos

Back now. Two days into my new job. My body clock is fixed while my imitation Franck Muller wristwatch is already on the blink. The luggage remains unpacked. (I left with seven kilos and came back with 48, but I left five kilos of excess body weight somewhere in Phi Phi.) My enthusiasm is waning and this will be the last of the entries. Thanks for reading and thanks a lot for your messages of support.

The trip ended, post-trekking up north with a drunk called Noi, with dinner for two atop the Banyan Tree Hotel on the 62nd floor’s Vertigo restaurant. I had a nine course dégustation menu. Mrs K had soup and salad.

We went to tailors, we hired scooters, we ate in restaurants that served wine. We counted the days until we had to come back. Then we came back.

I’ll let the photos do the talking. Over and out.

01/18/2006 | Asia 2005 | 2 Comments

How to kill time in Bangkok

It’s been five days of pleasure-hunting with Gus, back again from Laos. We’ve been to Middle-Eastern and Japanese restaurants, Irish pubs and Korean bars, street barbecues, bookshops, cinemas and the odd place with a name like “Spanky’s” or “One Night in Bangkok” to watch the human traffic.

  1. Stroke sharks at Siam Ocean World.
  2. Contemplate going to church to sing carols, then change your mind when, upon consulting the church’s website, you see nothing but photos of a small army of white-haired Women’s Institutors doing good deeds.
  3. Perform an extensive, detailed, comparable study of Bangkok’s shopping malls. Sit in an electronics shop in a vibrating chair whilst watching a $60000 television. Admire Ferraris and Bentleys on the concourse (you don’t get that at Bluewater) and eat cream pastries cooked by an imported French chef with a famous face.
  4. Read something by Paul Theroux (witty) or Michael Palin (verbose.)
  5. Drink mint tea and smoke a sheesha in Little Arabia.

I met up with Jerry Hopkins for a beer or three. Jerry wrote the Jim Morrison biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive, and is now a long-term Bangkok resident. He owns a house upcountry with his wife but spends most of his time in the city, which has phone lines. After a couple of beers in his appartment we went to a bar. It was empty apart from us but there was traffic through the bar. Transpires it was a blow-job bar. “They don’t sell a lot of beer here,” Jerry said.

So, happy Christmas. Mrs K arrives the day after tomorrow so free-time to update this will be at a premium. Will check in once or twice, though. Ho ho ho and all that.

12/19/2005 | Asia 2005 | No Comments

From your Father

Dear Matt,

Have just re-read your latest blog and have come to the conclusion that your memory is failing you or have chosen to indulge in spot of boasting.

With respect to the number of condoms you took over – my memory tell me that I counted them all out and counted them all back in again and that the totals tallied exactly not so much as one had been used!!! Perhaps you would like to publish a retraction?

Your ever loving

Dad

12/14/2005 | Asia 2005 | No Comments

Medical notes part II

I am still in Bangkok, bathing in splendid torpor and reading a lot. Yesterday I played a game that entailed staying in bed all day and seeing which of a series of unlikely body positions would induce sleep the quickest. Prior to that I read all 650 stunning pages of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections in one sitting, which got me sunburn and a headache.

Previously, I set myself the task of exploring the city entirely on foot, watched two dogs launch a guerrilla ambush on a third and then stumbled across a cinema and sat down to an afternoon of The Great Raid (great) and Harry Potter (hairy.)

My walking tour was curtailed by an aneurysm in my groin. Well, not an aneurysm per se but it might as well have been. My glands were swollen and aching. I managed to convince myself that I was probably dying and got a fitful night’s sleep, waking every seven minutes to inspect myself.

(Aside 1: The last time I had underpant discomfort in Asia I hobbled back to the UK with my tail and “the worst case of herpes” my doctor had ever seen between my legs. She was ultimately proved wrong through a series of elaborate and largely painful and humiliating tests. I was never in doubt, of course. That year had been particularly barren for me. My mum had given me 144 condoms for a ten-month stint in Malaysia. I came home with 143 and knowledge of the “posh wank.”)

So the next morning I was pleased to see that the swelling had gone down and I could swing without discomfort. BUT! the pain had crept up twixt my buttocks and was really quite sore. So I jumped in a taxi, ready to hear that I had an insect living in my veins. Or only a few days left to procreate.

(Aside 2: My medical history is largely the story of my backside. When I was only a few months old, I was laid on an operating table and force-fed a barium enema to highlight a fistula. Fast forward 23 years and there is a big black man shaving my bottom while I sob quietly into a pillow, prior to the removal of a pilonidal cyst.)

Bumrungrad Hospital is awesome. The first two floors have Starbucks, McDonalds and Pizza Express, it’s listed on the Bangkok Stock Exchange and is testament to how hospitals the world over should be. Within five minutes I was having my vitals measured and okayed, then a receptionist asked me what the problem was. I told him – “enlarged glands in the groin, painful buttocks” – which was more than his English could grasp. I said it again, louder. Then again. Then I said, highly embarrassed, “I think a GP will be fine.”
“OK , no problem sir … is a lady doctor ok?”

And after 15 minutes of questioning, medical history, sexual history, early modern history and the weather in Belgium, I am once again in a hospital with my pants around my ankles and a very petite, gentle Thai lady has her nose level with my arsehole, prods a bit, mutters sympathetically and diagnoses cellulitis and lymphadenitis, which will almost certainly clear up after a course of antibiotics. “Don’t worry! No more surgery.”

So if you need me, I’ll be lying on my front, inducing sleep.

12/12/2005 | Asia 2005 | 1 Comment

Down in the mouth

I’m aware that this won’t be very exciting for anybody but me (and possibly my Mum, who will work herself into a frenzy about 3rd World medical facilities) but I’ve just been to the dentist and it was WONDERFUL!

There’s something quite unnerving about letting strangers stick sharp things into your mouth and scrape around, but this time I’m glad I did. I’d been bothered for a couple of days with red gums and was becoming increasingly manic about the implications of them. As I get older I become more anxious, more of a hypochondriac. Any headache has me reaching for the guidebook’s health section to read that I have either the first signs of typhus, typhoid, Hep A, B or C, malaria, dengue, tetanus, diptheria, bilharzia, arachnophobia, yellow fever, polio or Crohn’s disease. Normally it’s nothing worse than a hangover, but it doesn’t stop me worrying.

So off I popped. Down the road from my hotel is a boutique dentist’s surgery with a very attractive receptionist. So I popped in for a check-up and came out one and a half hours later with six new fillings and a numb face.

I had always prided myself on the state of my teeth. Previous trips to the dentist over the past few years have never lasted longer than 15 minutes. I’d get a little badge that says “I was brave” and compliments on a perfect set of incisors. So perhaps I had been lulled into a false sense of security, even overconfidence, about my oral health.

It took three minutes and six sharp stabs to identify cavities I never knew I had. I suppose if you poked me in the eye with a sharp stick it would be sensitive as well, but there were definitely painful spots that contrasted with the non-painful spots either side of them.

It was unlike any dental appointment I’ve ever had (the last one was over two years ago) but I remember fillings being metallic, slimy tasting and liable to stick out like a nun at an orgy. These this time involved a little bit of paste and an ultra-violet gun. I got pricked twice by a syringe with a bent nib (a novelty in itself) and didn’t feel a thing.

To combat the red gums I had a “scaling and fluoride polishing – Full Mouth” and my molars are shining like cats’ eyes. You can’t even see the fillings. The price was the best thing – 4500 baht, 92 euros or 63 quid – and teeth 14, 15, 16, 24, 25 and 47 are good as new.

So don’t forget to floss, children, and for dental work of any gravity, head off to the airport …

12/07/2005 | Asia 2005 | 1 Comment

Wuss

I’ve wussed out. I write to you from Bangkok, where I fled two days ago after losing myself in Hanoi. I’m not alone. I’ve been exchanging emails with fellow losers and have counted two comments about arriving in (and leaving) Hanoi. April said “I really had enough of Vietnam as well, they are fucking crazy and I cannot believe I managed to get out of the place alive.” Meanwhile, Olivier wrote to me and said “Ouais ben, je viens juste d’arriver a Hanoi .. and I only want one thing .. get the hell out … as I was telling you before, I’m just totally bored of vietnam …”

Nothing wrong with Hanoi per se, it just comes at the wrong end of 2000 km overland. It’s a bit like Ho Chi Minh City, a lot colder, just as charmless. It’s got the pitfalls of a big city with very few of the benefits. There was some lovely beer. A lot of the folk were terrific. A lot of them were less terrific. I was sick of saying “no … because NO …” and paying up to 20 times face value for stuff. The food in Vietnam was some of the best I’ve ever had anywhere. A lot of places had taken both chicken and egg off the menu (I don’t know which one came off first.) Vietnamese pork is unlike any I’ve eaten anywhere else. Ditto the tea, although more than a pot can be a strong laxative. Ditto the coffee – world-beating. I bought a percolator. Unsure of what to match with the pearls I bought, I picked up a tea-set. Apparently I should have been looking for a twinset, but I don’t know what a twinset looks like.

Also had to invest in a new bag to lug around my new toys. Rather like the Buddha, perhaps the shell-embossed chopsticks and matching case will be less exciting in the cold light of day. Vietnam also had some great pith helmets, but I persuaded myself I could do without them (and am now regretting it.)

So nothing funny has happened, nothing to make you chuckle. I got detained at a bank in Hanoi for suspected fraudulent use of travellers’ cheques. The teller was convinced the signature on my passport was different to the one I was supplying. So they took photocopies of my passport, visa, plane ticket, driving license and made me sit down in a back room and write out my signature 20 times, twice for each cheque. Having taken note of where I was staying and satisfied themselves that I am me, they let me go with a cheery “please come back soon!”

I took a taxi to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum to look at the old man’s body. The cabbie stiffed me with a rigged meter and when I got there it was shut, so I walked around the outside and then got stiffed again on the way back five minutes later. Good job I cashed the cheques, I suppose.

12/06/2005 | Asia 2005 | No Comments