The tourist authorities plug “Amazing Thailand” as a happy land of smiles and beaches; the press likes to paint it as a deadly refuge for sex and drugs. I see Thailand as a fascinating mirror of our motives, desires and defects as travelers. In the tourist capitol of Asia, these reflections are impossible to avoid: they’re in the visitor’s brochures, the shop windows, even the con-men’s hooks.
The journey starts at Khao San Road, Bangkok’s backpacker slum. Everyone doing the Asian overland this year has bottle-necked in Bangkok, filling nearly every room in town.
Desperate for rest, I end up staying in the Sawasdee Guest House “dormitory,” a massage room without a door and with just enough space for a queen-sized mattress. A Thai lady in tight jeans is rubbing a handsome, nearly-naked man from Pittsburgh. She pulls his limbs together like a cradle, then twists and cracks his back.
I lie on the bed beside them. “I love Thailand,” the man sings out in a gay drawl. He gets massages twice a day here, sometimes two. “They made me up as a lady-boy,” he tells us, recounting a night out dancing with some Thai guys. I giggle, feeling like Alice in Wonderland dropped down the chute into a David Lynch movie. A flirtatious security guard comes around, promising to watch over me or at least watch me sleep.
Waking at an afternoon hour, my jet-lagged head spins from the American music and action movies pumping from Khao San’s open-air bars. I weave between shaggy guys in sandals and short-skirted girls hard-bargaining cheap hemp bags. The combination can be pathetic. Two likely impromptu couples waver in the street, their faces red from sun and booze. “Don’t waste it,” slurs one mate, as the grinning girl kisses liquor into her friend’s mouth.
I scan the travel agency windows, which offer to put anybody anywhere on the globe, or on Thai tours to:
** Floating Market
** Crocodile Farm
** Bridge Over River Kwai
** Three Places in One Day
The worst, though, are the hill-tribe trekking agencies. Their signs promise “NEW non-tourist remote area” and “two days visit long necks.” Many of the hill villages have been turned into human zoos, a situation unlikely to improve as agencies look for virgin stomping grounds.
I settle on a trip to Khao Yai, the oldest of Thailand’s 66 national parks. The park is promoted as a vast rainforest of rare plants trampled by bears, tigers, and elephants. Thailand has carefully conserved such natural habitats, recognizing them as a reservoir of tourist dollars, both international and domestic.
At the bus station, a motorcyclist aggressively offers me a free ride to Khao Yai Garden Lodge. I know from experience that if I don’t pay for it, somebody will. That somebody is Klaus. This short, paunchy, squinty-eyed German botanist runs the lodge with his Thai wife and kids.
I have to walk in to see “the boss,” who is working on a new wing to his nature-complex-on-the-highway. En route, we pass a mini-waterfall, big mesh cages of birds, plants and turtles, and hanging pots with umpteen varieties of Thai orchids.
“Ah, a room? I’ve got only one left — it’s vewy crowded wiz the holiday {the King’s birthday},” Klaus says, furrowing an anxious brow. I ask about accommodation on-site. “No, no; no tents in the park now, nothing!” he yells. Klaus launches into an itemized description of the tour: 1.5 million bats in the bat cave, a drive to this waterfall and that viewpoint. “Uh, but I came to walk,” I interrupt. He eyes me suspiciously, as if most park visitors oppose a simple stroll through nature.
I wanted to run from all this, seeing it was not my reflection but someone else’s. I knew didn’t belong on the tour bus, in the pick-up bars. I sought and found my vision of Thailand in Burmese border towns, chewing betel nut with cackling old ladies, and in Buddhist forest wats, meditating on the impermanence of my journey. I learned Thai cooking in Chang Mai and rock climbing on the cliffs of Krabi. Not that I didn’t ever disappoint myself, like bingeing on coconut cream and failing to tithe in the temples. But at least I tried to do good, too, by bringing supplies to Karen refugees and only hiring tribal guides to trek in Thailand’s hills.
My last act of mercy is setting free a nuthatch. At many Thai temples, women peddle birds in tiny straw cages, which buyers release for good karma. I think of the irony of the bird’s liberation as I prepare for the plane ride to San Francisco. The modern bird that has always symbolized my freedom swivels around to show its backside, returning me to captivity.