1993 Thailand, Sumatra, Bali

1993 Thailand, Sumatra, Bali

Fearing the worst, our white-knuckled fingers are imbedded in the taxi’s upholstery and our feet stomping an imaginary brake pedal during a breath-holding ride from the airport into Bangkok, as our mentally anorexic driver spends equal time on both sides of the road in pursuit of anything ahead.

Exacerbating the situation, he demonstrates his proficiency in the science of ‘stupidology’ by abandoning both hands from the steering wheel to preen into a hand held mirror! Out of millions of sperm released by his father it’s difficult to fathom that this narcissistic fool was the fastest.

After a couple of days in Bangkok, a 12 hour bus ride 700 km north takes us to Chiang Mai’s moated old town, where we secure lodging at Lai Thai Guesthouse. Visiting Bo Sang ‘umbrella village’ and Doi Suthep Temple we use a three-wheeled ‘beepbeepmobile’ called a tuk-tuk, named after the sputtering sound it makes. The motorized contraption feels like a pimped out tricycle with a roof, and its open sides allow passengers not to miss ingesting any of the befouling diesel fumes!

While trekking through the backcountry to a Meo hill tribe we encounter a woman lowering a wicker basket of unhatched chickens into a natural boiling hot spring. Having worked up an appetite, and knowing that for protein hard-boiled eggs are hard to beat, we fork over a few baht to sample her crackable commodity.

Boating along the Mekong to the Golden Triangle where the nebulous borders of Thailand, Burma, and Laos all collide; we stumble into a black market in Burma selling fictional aphrodisiacs that sadly include tiger skins, bear gall bladders, snake skins, and other oddities from endangered species.

Back in Chiang Mai the Loy Krathong Festival is now underway. It is meant to pay respect to the water spirits of the river, and frankly after seeing the brutally polluted water, it’s no wonder they grovel for forgiveness! The ridiculousness of the festival is that elaborate offerings of flowers, candles, and joss sticks floated in the city’s murky moat and river only help aggravate the pollution problem.

Buddhists release candle-lit ‘sky lanterns’ as a symbol of letting go of misfortunes and receiving merit; and the exquisite sight of hundreds of lanterns resembles a legion of huge florescent jellyfish effortlessly swimming off into the night sky like kites with their lines cut!

An interesting trek takes us to one of the Thailand’s most impoverished minorities called the Akha. Originally from China, the slash-and-burn farmers wear traditional metal headdresses decorated with beads, and have their teeth stained a reddish-black from chewing plugs of their beloved betel nut. Peeking inside one of hill tribe’s huts we see minimalism taken to a new level, as the only contents on the dirt floor are a bamboo sleeping mat and a vintage rifle worthy of the ‘Antiques Roadshow’.

Another hill tribe capturing our attention is the Padaung, who fled persecution in Burma and now reside in a northern Thai province. Getting there sounds awkward but a domestic flight takes us to the border town of Mae Hong Son where we find a guesthouse near Jong Kham Lake.

Being unable to locate any transport available for hire is frustrating, but fortunately guesthouse owner Piya agrees to drive us upcountry to the Padaung village in his 4-wheel drive jeep. Convulsing over a cruel road resembling a defunct riverbed, we spend half our time mid-air and the other half getting our butts spanked by the seats, so reaching the road’s end we are quite alright with walking the last stretch to the village!

Women of the Padaung tribe, known as ‘Longnecks’ or ‘Giraffe Women’, are rivetingly adorned with yards of stacked brass coils circling their necks as a symbol of wealth and beauty. Girls start wearing the coils about the age of five, adding a new one each year, and as they get older the increasing weight squashes down their collar bone and rib cage to create what appears to be an incredibly elongated neck.

Weighing up to ten pounds, a set of the brass coils can seemingly stretch a women’s neck to over a foot, producing the surreal appearance! Any adultery committed in the tribe is said to be punished by removal of the rings, as it’s believed to make the woman ugly and shame her. So as one might imagine the adultery rate in the village is infinitesimal, even though there’s some pretty serious ‘necking’ going on!

These women deform their bodies even further by putting similar rings around their legs. However, the one accessory that none of them have is a smile, and the tribe vibe has all the chipperness of an undertaker’s convention. Even though we find the village fascinating we leave feeling somewhat despondent; much it seems like the longnecks themselves.

We also visit a tribe called the Kayaw or ‘Long-Ears’. In a kinky perception of beauty these women suspend weights from their ear lobes to stretch them out to lengths worthy of the Ubangi. This custom seems about as useful as a roll of soaked toilet paper, as the ability to trip over an earlobe would not make my top ten beauty tips; but hey, that’s just me! Satisfactorily saturated with stretched body parts we don’t fancy stretching our stay, and head back to Bangkok for a flight to Indonesia’s largest island of Sumatra.

Trying to swap a traveler’s check for rupiah in the graceless capital of Medan, our expectations of the city are rapidly curdled by a tangle of traffic up each other’s tailpipes, choking fumes, and a prevalent feeling of unfriendliness. During our hectic hunt to acquire some cash we happen to spot the name of a cafe we think we read about, supposedly serving good lobster. In this spirit-sapping city lobster definitely strikes us as odd, but hope-drunk we may at least be able to salvage a good meal, we decide to check it out.

Zero English is spoken in the near empty café, and since we see nothing resembling lobster on the menu I try to mime our request to the waitress. I present my best imitation of a pinching lobster, which just for the record, I think easily rates no less than 9.5 out of 10.

However, my crustacean enactment is obviously misconstrued. Undeniably horrified, the waitress looks as if I just pulled the pin on a live grenade. As a gaping hole replaces her mouth and her jaw succumbs to gravity, I’m sure Munch would be pleased; the woman is now stuck in a pose that’s a dead ringer for the iconic image in his painting called “The Scream”.

Her eyeballs are bug out of her head like a bullfrog’s, and she keeps them glued to me as she backs away. Shunning us like we have the Ebola virus, she bumps into another table, sending the cutlery sprawling and almost toppling it over. She bolts through a doorway in the back of the restaurant, and playing peekaboo to see if we are leaving her eyes are pools of paranoia. Holy crap; you’d think I asked her if I could take a dump in her pocket!  We’re unclear of her interpretation of my gesture, but undeniably it had one hell of an impact, and even though we didn’t score a meal, we laughed and laughed, and then we laughed some more.

A friendly face in Medan seems about as rare as a Sahara salmon, but mercifully the ‘café terrorists’ have just secured a flight to Padang, and will be able to extract ourselves from this spittoon of a city tomorrow. We’re absolutely ecstatic about this as we’d rather grab a Samurai sword and disembowel ourselves than squander another day in detestable Medan.

With Padang turning out to be another city deserving of a standing boo, we decide to bus to the matriarchal Sumatran society of Bukittinggi, where only the women are permitted to own a business or land. I guess you won’t be astonished to learn whose brainwave this was, but I’ve capitulated to visiting this primitive culture in the off chance I may accumulate some desperately needed husband points!

A ‘Big Ben’ clock tower is the town’s landmark for a colossal bazaar with perhaps the strangest assemblage of snake oil merchants in all of Indonesia. We’re both attracted and repelled by the bloody horror show in the meat section. ‘Tapeworm Central’ is a carne-copia of animal carnage looking like the work of a demented Jack the Ripper; with a severed head here, chopped off hooves there, and a collection of disembodied tongues, tails, and entrails completing the gruesome crime scene!

We hike along Ngarai Sianok Canyon, respectful of sheer rock walls plunging 120 meters down. The canyon is also known as ‘Buffalo Hole’, as every now and then one of the hefty quadrupeds roams too close to the edge, and with what must be one very messy splat, is spared the indignities of old age!

This is the glum rainy season here on visitor-shy Sumatra, and Christine and I are the only guests in Hotel Fort De Kock, but to our chagrin our room infiltrated by warmongering mosquitoes so large they should be required to file a flight plan!

Assuming the role of military strategists we try preemptively barricading the bathroom window slots with the bed blankets in an attempt to keep from consumed in our sleep. However, as a result of cohabitating with the Mozzie Mafia we awake each morning to blood-speckled sheets and measled in itchy red welts courtesy of a mean-spirited insect that makes you like flies more!

Moseying about town we spot a Jurassic Park escapee, known as ‘Dorcus Titanus’ or Giant Stag Beetle, madly thrashing its wings while lying helpless on its back like a capsized tortoise. A quick flick of my foot uprights the avocado-sized insect and reveals antler-like mandibles that give it the look of the aftermath of a cockroach copulating with an elk! Happily, the bulky brute achieves liftoff and buzzes off into the sky.

The character running our hotel is named Amin, and oddly enough likes to be called ‘Idi’!  The affable fellow entertains us by explaining some of the interesting customs of his Minangkabau people. Apparently not liking to say exactly what’s on their mind, they instead have a code of actions to convey their messages.

For example; when a son’s father is really angry at him, rather than try and defend himself, the son simply pulls on a pair of his father’s pants. When the father sees this he backs off and nobody loses face. Likewise, if a guest is over for dinner and there’s no more food left, rather than say so, the wife goes into the kitchen and stirs a pot loud enough for all to hear. When a son wants to get married, rather than discuss it with his parents, he hangs his clothes in the kitchen to relay the message! Idi is good fun, and during our discussions his favorite expression is ‘different field – different grasshopper’; summing it up pretty damn well!

Passengers far outnumber the seats on the bus back to Padang, and the driver’s helper, who appears to have the intellectual depth of a pond plant, jams in dozens more bodies in the isle by using splintered wooden boxes as seats. In addition to the splinters, we also cuss the bus for a migraine-inducing music necessitating we fashion earplugs from wads of saliva-moistened toilet paper, taken from a lavatory with a stench worse than a sack of threatened skunks!

From Sumatra we fly to the familiar island of Bali, heading straight for the quietness of Suji Bungalows.  The little oasis serves a great escape from Kuta’s hawker-infested main streets, where within a five minute span we are hounded to buy perfume, pot, transport, puppet ducks, pineapples, yo-yos, watches, and an elephant! Balinese sellers simply do not know ‘NO’, and could likely talk a Tequila worm back to life!

Bumping into a Swiss couple we met in Sumatra, we catch up on our travels and head north together to the village of Ubud. At Artini 2 Bungalows we’re amazed to see the grounds keeper meticulous cutting the grass with a pair of scissors! When I ask him tongue-in-cheek if he does haircuts with a lawnmower, he looks at me with the puzzlement of a frog suddenly relocated to the desert.

Our happy hour go-to is ‘Arak’, a kick-ass local moonshine distilled from palm flowers. As the potion keeps evaporating from our glasses we’re joined by amusing little sticky-toed wall geckos doing their “chuck chuck chuck” calls while streaking about feasting on mosquitos, the real jerks of the insect world.

Occasionally a giant ‘Tokay’ gecko joins in, barking out a loud and repetitive “Ech-Oh” sound. This never fails to bring a chuckle because its call diminishes in volume until the lyrical lizard’s lungs finally leak out the last of their air on or about the seventh repetition, leaving only an abbreviated ‘ech’!

Renting a van with our friends we further explore the island, with stops in Candidasa, Kintamani, Bedugal, Lake Batur, Singaraja, and the wee village of Bug Bug. With time winding down in Ubud, the four of us treat ourselves to the island’s most famous dish of ‘Bebek-Tutu’, which we ordered yesterday. While it may sound like a fancy ballet skirt, the mouth-watering meal is actually a Balinese smoked duck that’s been smothered in spices, wrapped in banana leaves, and tendered by slowly cooking over a wood fire for 12 hours.

Waiting for this dinner to arrive we keep the restaurant’s bar staff as busy as a centipede with athlete’s foot, and getting slightly buzzed, somehow arrive at the absurd conclusion that tonight’s tasty quacker shall henceforth be named Desmond, in honor of the dude in Africa!

Finally Desmond’s cooked corpse puts in its long awaited appearance, escorted by the rest of a lavish feast which blankets the table. Then, just as we’re all about to grub down our dinner vanishes. Ubud succumbs to one of the village’s not infrequent power failures and plunges us into darkness.

However this is no biggie, as the lovely staff quickly scurries off to round up some candles. Once we have light to see, the famished foursome attack and devour delectable Desmond like piranha coming off of a fast!  Our romantic candle-lit dinner under an indigo sky cluttered with brilliant stars is the perfect conclusion to our gratifying days in beautiful Bali; our all-time favorite Indonesian island.

Mark H. Colegrave  1993