Gallery of the Absurd

Spend any time at all in Thailand and you'll discover one of its hidden delights. Signs and sights are often incongruously screwy. More than once you'll find yourself knitting your brow, scratching your head, and thinking, "Huh?"  People write whole blogs about this topic because the material is everywhere, though it is beginning to disappear with the whitewash of westernization.  

In fact, the Thais may be becoming ashamed of their own typos. Seen on jersey barriers along a highway: a series of signs that read "SAFETY FIRT" in enormous, bold black letters. A few yards farther along, the offending typos had been blacked out so that the signs read simply "SAFETY." Finally, a few of them had been triumphantly corrected to "SAFETY FIRST."

A gallery of the absurd for your amusement:

The traditional Thai greeting, similar to the Japanese bow, is a prayerful
gesture called the wai (pronounced "why").  Here, Ronald McDonald offers both wai and wifi.

Where else could one find a hotel inadvertently designed to simulate a luxury liner colliding with a lighthouse?

Seen in an Aussie bar on Walking Street. Arabs keep out, but we respect your beliefs.

Entering Walking Street, you may expect "Passion of Colourful Paradise."
Could this be something like Disney's "Let the magic begin"?

Upon exiting Walking Street, you are wished a passionate evening ... I think.

We understand no smoking in the elevator, but what is that other ban all about?
Only in Thailand might you see a sign forbidding opened durian fruit.
Otherwise known as the world's stinkiest fruit, durian
tastes heavenly but smells like a cross between raw sewage and advanced decay.
Even Andrew Zimmern couldn't get past the smell to taste the ambrosia. 

The first line describing Koh Samet in a hotel handout makes it sound like
an S&M paradise: "A most idyllic Island for bathing and restraining."  What?

This international restaurant offers not only Thai, European, Chinese, and
Japanese food, but also free gruel! Count me in for this deal.
Another restaurant on the same street advertises "Western-style Chinese
food."  Pu-pu platter, anyone?

Pattaya also shows an absolute lack of reserve about matters that Westerners might find tasteless. 

Obviously a great deal of beer is drunk in this establishment. Ironically, the
toilet is located seemingly a mile away, in an adjacent hotel's garden.

These two off-color "laffs for the day" appeared in our luxury hotel's lobby.
But that's okay; there are no English-speaking children staying here.

Observed above the hippo pond at Khao Kheow Zoo. It's touching that they care
more for their animals than for the well-being of your cell phone.

Come to Thailand, and you'll find that the list indeed gose on.

Mrs. Jumbo and I

I love elephants.

I made this point vehemently to our Thai taxi driver, Ben, who was ferrying us about the Khao Kheow Open Zoo, 40 miles outside of Pattaya. Ben was intent on making sure we missed nothing, but I can do without aviaries. We have exotic birds in Florida.  Elephants, not so much.

"Mai nok. Chop chang!" I insisted. This means, basically, "Screw the birds. I like elephants," and Ben understood and obliged us.

I've seen elephants up close before, petted a bristly little baby in Chiang Mai, and watched them wield paintbrushes to create astounding drawings of flowers and trees. I've read Water for Elephants, the basic theme of which is the old saw that an elephant never forgets. I've watched Dumbo so many times with my kids that I can sing a mama elephant's lullaby to her baby. I suspect they might be smarter than us, and they have good hearts.  At least Asian elephants do.

How can one not love such a sweet, albeit large, doe-eyed creature?

So, I approached the elephant enclosure at Khao Kheow with a bagful of bananas and a joyful heart. I'd fed an elephant only sugarcane before, but I figured if they have a sweet tooth they must like bananas, too. I offered a whole banana to one adolescent, who promptly threw it on the ground and scared the hell out of Bill by giving him a kiss instead.

Then its mother strode forward to set me straight. She nibbled some leaves from a branch inside the enclosure and turned to me.

This time, I peeled a banana. She took it delicately with her snout and popped it into her fuzzy mouth. I followed up with the peel, which she liked as well. Meanwhile, her children wandered off.

When I stopped feeding bananas to her for a moment, she seized the branch, threw it over the log fence, and then struggled to get a grip on it, to haul it back inside. I handed it back to her, and she returned it to its place at her feet.

We were bonding.

At this point, it seemed appropriate to show her a sign of respect and gratitude for our interaction. I stepped back, placed my hands together in a prayerful and deep Thai wai, and bowed to her, saying, "Kap kun kah, chang" ("Thank you, Mrs. Elephant.")  Then something astonishing happened. She raised her trunk in her own wai and bowed her head in solemn response. I couldn't believe my eyes. Neither could Bill, who was snapping photos like mad.

                         

Then she politely requested another banana.

We both enjoyed this so much that we continued the same exchange of gestures until the bag of bananas was empty.

Long ago, a mahout probably taught her this trick for an elephant show, and she in turn taught it to me. I consider myself lucky that the trick didn't also involve her seizing the trainer and placing him on her back.

Pattaya: Believe It or Not

If the phrases "amiable depravity" and "another day in paradise" seem apt descriptions of life in Florida, they are equally apt for the similarly warm, open, and peculiar kingdom of Thailand. Keep an open mind, and the paradoxes of Pattaya will come tickle you over and over again.

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Alarmingly ramshackle infrastructure can be found inches away from the heights of hedonistic luxury. Overlooking our hotel's serene blue pool is a building under construction, where workers set up sawhorses and ladders, and work far into the night, perilously close to the raw edge of the upper stories, without protective devices or barriers of any kind. We can see them up close when we pass by in our 6th-floor hallway, but we scurry along quickly so as not to distract them. Some of them wear hard hats or reflective vests, but it's hard to imagine these offering any protection to someone hurtling to the ground. They seem to have excellent balance, though.

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On a nearby street, we encountered a beggar who appeared sadly lacking in adequate medical care. He told us he was in this state of affairs because of a terrible accident, and hauled out his colostomy bag to prove the point.  And yet Bill has found a UCLA-educated dentist in nearby Jomtien Beach who, within 5 days, went from first impressions to fully crafted dentures at one-tenth the price we would have paid in the States. In Dr. Nan's waiting room are coffee, soft drinks, and a bottle of whiskey for patients who need them. Bill had received such an ill-fitting temporary pair in Florida that he wore them only once and tossed them aside. The new choppers are, he reports, 10,000 times better. This is why so many Westerners come to Thailand for their dental work, afterwards treating themselves like kings as a reward.  

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Which leads to the fact that there are no straightforward explanations of the bar scene in Pattaya. Nothing in this sexual theme park is quite what it seems. Paradoxes and complexities abound.

Of course, one becomes quickly used to seeing elderly gentlemen, some on canes or walkers, arm in arm with slick young Thai girls, their girlfriends for the length of a holiday, who will show them the ropes and happily accept their spending money. But the economy here is changing.  Cosmopolitan malls, hotels, restaurants, clinics, and casinos are nibbling at the edges of what used to be one big red-light district and now provide more respectable jobs for girls who had only menial or bar-girl work as options. 

To be sure, though, the bar girls are here, even if not all of them are available. Most massage parlors are only that, for example. The man sitting next to you at a bar might be husband to one of the girls, but this might or might not mean that she is available.

One Isaan country girl lived a 17-hour bus ride away from Pattaya, loves her mama and papa and country music, and has come here to work. In her words, she has worked at a bar here for exactly three days and seems shy, innocent, and giggly. She is 28 years old. This might just be her schtick, or it might be the truth. One cannot know for sure.

Another bar could be more family-friendly, a local Cheers like Ken & Jim's Bar, where proprietress Jim can be found Skype-ing husband Ken, a contractor in Afghanistan; tending to her baby girl; or putting on an awards dinner for a roomful of Swedish golfers in town for a tournament. There's a Thai expression that everyone knows: jai di, "good heart." Jim has one.

Another Ken, from Switzerland, who owns a home around the corner from Ken & Jim's and is there so often that he has become a fixture.

Me and my new friend Kim, at Ken & Jim's.
She and her Swedish golfer husband are snowbirds who escape
 their Scandinavian midnights by wintering in Pattaya.
A classic "good girl" from Nakhon Phanom, in far-north Thailand. Kim nevertheless loves
the Pattaya go-go scene, just because it's fun.

Bar girls will even chat with foreign wives, if they make the effort to speak Thai with them, play their games, or trade girl talk about a new purse, earrings, or where they got their nails done. They will greet you with a smile, teach you Thai, share their flower wreaths, and dance with you, even if their motivations may be ultimately mercenary.

A lively game of dominoes enlivens
the slower midday hours behind a bar

Sometimes, though, you might glimpse the darker side of this life, when a girl drops her smiling mask for a moment.

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But the biggest Pattaya paradox is a massive, all-wooden construction called the Sanctuary of Truth.

Until I got its name straight, I persisted in calling it the Fortress of Solitude, but now, for a number of reasons, I won't forget it. Not far from the north end of overdeveloped Pattaya Beach, it couldn't be further away in spirit.

So near and yet so far

The brainchild of a now-deceased wealthy Thai businessman, the Sanctuary was begun 33 years ago, with the lofty goal of expressing the ephemeral nature of human life and the infinite nature of the spiritual. To capture this concept in wood, the obsessive founder decreed that construction would never end. Now, years after his own ephemeral life ended, his creation continues. The air around the sanctuary is filled with sawdust and a never-ending din of hammers and saws wielded by Burmese craftspeople carving every inch of the place with intricate designs. That they can manage to continue doing this forever is a tribute to industry and employment in Pattaya.

 

The results are astounding.

But, in true Thai fashion ... wait!  There's more!

You'd think it should be enough to keep endlessly re-creating the magnificence of heaven on earth. Not here in Pattaya.  Instead, a vast menu of Disney-esque amusements awaits the bored and jaded traveler. The Sanctuary of Truth presents, for modest additional fees, challenges worthy of The Amazing Race: speedboat tours, horseback rides around the grounds, elephant rides around the grounds, a horse-drawn carriage around the grounds, an ATV go-kart course, horse races, bungee jumping, a suspension bridge, shark feeding, fish feeding, traditional Thai music and dance, and, last but not least, an air-gun range. One wonders what deep spiritual wellsprings all these activities are meant to tap. Where, exactly, does the air-gun range fit in?  It is as if the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris began offering a zipline from one flying buttress to the next.

At the Training Race Course, this bored young thoroughbred showed more interest in
Bill's trousers than in racing his colleagues.

Rules 6 and 9 for the ATV course are the sort of thing that tends to give tourists the jitters. If your go-kart breaks down amid a melee of  other karts, you must exit your vehicle immediately and wait in the middle of the track.  Wait. What?  And "If any additional damage will charged by cost." We were unsurprised to see no one taking advantage of this activity.


Also unattended was the suspension bridge to nowhere. Here, thrill seekers might mount a tightrope wire enmeshed in netting, to cross a scum-coated creek and then return via a second tightrope wire.

I had dressed, I thought, with appropriate modesty for the Sanctuary, in a skort that ended just above the knee, but it turned out not to be so. I was cordially asked to wear a sarong to cover my immodesty.

And then,  because of the ongoing construction, without benefit of such modern conveniences as nails, we had to wear hard hats. We looked quite jaunty but were soon drenched with sweat and a bit nervous because we had to wear them in the first place.

To reach the ground level where the Sanctuary stands, one must descend a hair-raisingly steep flight of splintered planks with only a rope for a railing.  This was when we came to understand the value of instead riding a horse, an elephant, or a carriage.

This Is Thailand

Bill has taught me a new acronym: TIT.  No scurrilous meaning at all. It stands for "This Is Thailand," sometimes also expressed as "it's the Thai way."

To sum up TIT with an incident from our previous visit to Thailand, ten years ago: We were dining in an upscale restaurant in Chiang Mai. I asked the waitress for salt, which apparently confused her, and we never saw her again. For one reason or another, she had lost face and simply disappeared.

We're experiencing this sort of thing less often here in Pattaya, perhaps because it has become so westernized in the last decade. Whereas, before, one could find no wine or Coke Zero here, which might have caused a waitress to vanish in shame, now both are abundant.

In fact, the Pattaya locals are remarkably good natured. None of them has disappeared on us, though TIT incidents are beginning to accumulate.

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A common form of taxi transportation here is the open-air "baht bus"--a sturdy pickup truck outfitted with benches in the back, to inexpensively and conveniently carry as many as eight to ten customers, some of them clinging to the steps. 

Riding the baht bus

One day, after a long walk downtown, we lazily decided to hire a baht bus from the Walking Street area of Pattaya back to our hotel, a journey of only about four blocks. This particular taxi stand had a woman coordinating the drivers, so we told her where our hotel was and set off with our driver, a goofy, gap-toothed kid. At some point, Bill noticed that the driver had left the side streets behind and was now barreling down the highway.

"This guy's going out of town!" he said.

We knocked on the partition behind the driver's seat, gesticulating wildly, and he pulled over.

"Kap [Thai equivalent of "dude"], you're going to Jomtien. We wanted Areca Lodge," Bill explained.

It seems that the boss lady, for her own unfathomable reasons, had told him we wanted to go to Jomtien. He happily turned around and took us home instead, grateful that we had spared him an eight-mile drive. 

When we passed the taxi stand on our way back, he beeped and gestured vigorously at his colleague. They would have words later, I was sure.

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And then there was the laundry. You'll note a laundry theme running through this blog.  Laundry becomes as important as wifi on a trip of this length, so you'll likely read about it again.  Unlike our Prague hotel, Areca Lodge offers laundry service.  This time, though, we would be smart about this. The hotel, we found, charges three to fives times more than a laundry/cafe right across the street.  It's convenient, it's cheap, and it gets the job done.  Why spend more?

When I went to pick up our clothes, I spotted an unmistakably garish pair of my panties in someone else's sealed plastic laundry bag. Another pair of mine lay forlorn on the folding counter. The laundress presented them and a pair of socks to me, asking if they might be mine. Shouldn't she know? I thought. Alarmed, I pawed through all the clean-laundry bags, spotted Bill's trousers and shorts, and indicated, "This is our laundry."  The laundress reviewed the itemized checklist with me, pointed out seven items in the bag and on the list, and sent me on my way, for a ridiculously low charge.  I didn't dare claim my bright, flowered undies. When I got to the adjacent family bar where Bill had been waiting for me, I scrutinized the checklist, looked at those socks closely, and realized that we were indeed missing a pair of my underwear and that the socks were not mine.

I returned and pointed out to the laundress that there could be no other pair of panties like these in the entire kingdom of Thailand, returned the socks, and straightened things out. Both laundry workers were unfailingly pleasant and, I have to hand it to them, did not disappear. Still, this is a textbook example of TIT.  I will return when we need laundry done again. At this point, they have some face saving to do, and they appear to think that I am now their friend.

See how they smile at me when I pass by. Maybe they're laughing at me.

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Yesterday was the big Loy Krathong festival in Thailand, a sweet celebration of the harvest, for which people light candles on little boats made of banana leaves and flowers, make a wish, and set the boats, called krathongs, afloat on rivers, streams, even puddles or swimming pools if that's all they have. There's even a catchy tune for the occasion: "Loy, loy, krathong! Loy, loy, krathong!" ("Float, float, float your boat! Float, float, float your boat!") And our hotel had announced that, for a fee of $13 each, we could enjoy a vast buffet, listen to entertainment, and receive our very own krathongs to float in the pool. How could we resist?





The hotel staff were dressed to 
the nines, and all of them were 
working the event, hard. 








We dressed up ourselves and eagerly appeared at the hour when the event was to begin. What fun this would be!

We were the only ones there.

The buffet was indeed vast, and the staff, attentive. But it was so dark that we couldn't really tell what we had selected to eat. The hotel photographer came round to take our picture--free of charge, he said, because the hotel would use it, if that was okay with us. They were anxious to prove that someone had attended the event.

"Areca Lodge celebrated Loy Krathong with a festive gala, attended by esteemed guests Mr. and Mrs. William Wade, among too many others to name."

After dinner, we went out on the town for a while, then returned at the usual time for launching krathongs. Just like the Fourth of July, this is 9:00.  Down at Pattaya Beach, partygoers were sending aerial luminaries into the sky.  They dotted the night air like fireflies, as seen from our hotel.  Making the best of things, we lit our krathongs, made our wishes, and set our little boats adrift in the pool. 

Once a krathong has burnt down, it shrivels into a sad, charred clump, then joins a black mass of burnt krathongs at the other end of whatever body of water it has found itself in. 

It was an appropriate statement about the whole awkward TIT event.

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Within the next ten years, many TIT quirks may well have disappeared, which will make Thailand a far less entertaining place for tourists.

But you know it's still TIT when a public toilet is stingy with its toilet paper rolls. A female traveler once had to carry a scrunched-up roll in her purse, as well as have particularly sound knees, in case she encountered only a "squat toilet" on ground level. This proved particularly challenging on an overnight train hurtling over uneven tracks. Thankfully, this is changing.

Hotel water temperature used to be dependent on whether the sun was out, to heat the water tank atop the roof.  The Areca Lodge has no such problem, though its water pressure changes dramatically in the course of a single shower.

The infrastructure still hasn't seen professional work in quite a long time. Sidewalks are heavily potholed and often disappear entirely; randomly tangled electrical wires dangle alarmingly low over pedestrians' heads.

One street vendor obliged Bill by polishing his shoes. The only TIT part of this is that Bill's shoes are sneakers made of brown canvas which is now black.

And you really know TIT when you sit down to grab a quick meal at a restaurant, then notice the waitresses taking turns grooming each other at the back of the house, removing from their hair what one hopes are not living things.