Author: Rosencrantz O'Dowd

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Random Thoughts Thailand 2019

New Arrival

Ma and Grace Auckland Airport

The flight to Sydney was uneventful. Watched ( most of ) The Departed. In the middle of a row of four in the middle of the aircraft. Painful but quick. Got changed at Sydney airport so I looked a bit less Worzel Gummidge. The flight was a trial from Sydney to Bangkok. Something like 8 – 9 hours, and didn’t sleep much. BUT the seats and the service is better on Emirates. Plus I fluked a window seat on that second flight and the seat next to me was vacant.’

Fleeced

I was so shagged when I got to Bangkok that I got fleeced by a taxi driver that collared me at the airport. Cost 500 baht ( $25 ) for a trip that another driver today offered to do for 200 baht.

The SilverGold Garden Hotel – someone in Marketing hedged their bets

Was just too tired to think at first when I arrived, and wanted to get to my hotel asap*.

The little posse of food stalls outside Silvergold Bangkok. Brewing up a feed at 4 a.m.

As it was I was so wound up I couldn’t sleep. Luckily about 50 metres from the hotel there were a whole bunch of street vendors. One of them was open and brewing stuff up at 4.30 am! Got a great meal ( big bowl of soup-like stuff, including some that looked suspiciously like refined carbs, not exactly rice but something related ) for 40 baht ( less than $2 ).

* Next time I’ll seriously consider sleeping at the airport. It has air-conditioning, and there were dozens of young-uns crashed out around the airport when I went through. Plus they have wifi and shops.

Yes it’s HOT

It’s hot as hell. At 4.30 am it was just bearable. Any other time of the day I have to scuttle back under the cover of air-conditioning after quick 30-minute forays outside. It’s so extreme that I don’t think there are (m)any hotels without air-conditioning.

Busy? Bangkok , in the area I was, wasn’t actually crazy busy. In hindsight. Today I decided I better start moving toward Rayong. But between grappling with the hotel wifi, and keeping the sustenance and water up, I couldn’t figure out how to negotiate catching the bus. It goes through Bangkok to Rayong, but trying to locate something on a phone across Bangkok is hard work.

English

Not very many Thais speak English either. Even the young ones serving at the 7-11s ( American-styled ‘dairies’, full of rubbish food ) hardly had any English. Two people I found in the whole complex of hotel and street vendors spoke English well enough for a conversation, the hotel receptionist, and the taxi concierge.

The taxi concierge because I decided getting to Rayong and getting settled was a better plan that saving a few baht on a bus I couldn’t find. So I opted for a taxi trip to Chonburi, about halfway from Bangkok to Rayong, with the guy who offered me the cheaper airport fare. But turns out he was the ‘concierge’ , and I got driven by an attractive woman maybe in her 30s. Had a good chat with her, her English was ok, and I tried to regurgiate some very basic Thai she taught me.

Chonburi

Anyway, when I got to Chonburi, I hated it. It’s like a bigger, hotter, dustier Te Hana, but with a six-lane highway splitting it. So I forked out even more, and got the driver to take me to Pattaya, only about 30 – 50 kms away from Rayong. It’s supposed to be by the seaside. Instead it’s a flesh-pot, full of aging pot-bellied Poms with young Thai women. From having spent a whole 6 or 7 hours here, they don’t seem to do very much except drink beer, play pool, watch soccer, and eat. Much like what they would likely do in dear old England, except more cheaply. There are dozens and dozens of eateries, and most of them cater for the ex-pat ( white-skinned ) crowd, rather than offer any Thai cuisine.I guess it needs more investigation. The coconut milk / cream they have here is un-believably good. There are also dozens of bordellos – the women hang out outside, often in ‘company’ uniforms.

 

I feel like a smoke.

I’m a bit over-tired, and – get this – got lost in Pattaya about 500m from the hotel :-/ . My phone ran out of charge. All the streets look the same. None of them are signposted. It’s hot. There are motorbikes everywhere. There are no footpaths. If you’re not on your toes you’ll more than likely get them run over. There are something like 4 different 7-11s within a 200m radius, so it starts to feel a lot like Groundhog Day. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film) )

I’m knackered, but surviving.

Time for a shower and bed.

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Podcasts Random Thoughts

Soaking It Up – Podcasts

I was lucky enough Thursday evening to meet a small cohort of extraordinary people via the friend who originally put me onto the The China Study.

I spent the evening soaking it all up, like a pup loose in a seal colony, and finding some surprising points of similarity. One of those was an interest in podcasts.

Which reminded me that I’d been meaning to write something pointing to some favourite podcasts, and a couple that were mentioned, and new to me.

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Random Thoughts

Hell – smelly, not hot

Hell will be smelly , not hot as the Bible and Billy Graham tell us.

Billy Graham warns of fire and brimstone in ‘final’ book. Be wary instead of the smelly hell
Billy Graham warns of fire and brimstone in ‘final’ book . Be wary instead of the smelly hell

I surmised this today,  as I laboured to rid my whare and surrounds of bad odours.

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Addiction recovery Inspirations Random Thoughts

The words, music, and iconography of David Bowie

Some old friends will roll their eyes when I write I harboured a long-term fascination with the words, music, and iconography of David Bowie.

The Thin White Duke
The Thin White Duke – “a very nasty character indeed”

It will also be no surprise to many that over the years he peppered more than a few of his songs with references to drug usage and habituation.

I myself used to have what I now understand is an adolescent, voyeuristic,  fascination with the same. Adolescent in the sense that, in my early 50s, I’m beginning to grow up. Partly voyeuristic because as a youngster, drugs ( including alcohol over-use ) had a verboten kind of attraction. Thus I partook more than is medically recommended, let’s say. Like many, I’ve come to understand through experience that that caper ultimately ends not in glamour, but in death, jail, or sad sordid squalor. I finished up on the squalor route, fyi.

In that light, here are a few of Bowie’s more and less obvious references;

In Space Oddity, 1969, Major Tom floats off into space, his last communication with Ground Control “tell my wife I love her very much she knows”. The next time he speaks it is to himself – “… planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do..”.

In 1980’s revisit to the Major, Ashes to Ashes, we have Bowie commenting “… we know Major Tom’s a junky, strung out in Heaven’s high, hitting an all time low..”

Opening that same album Scary Monsters,the brillant It’s No Game ( Part I ), starts with a Japanese woman laying down a challenge. Bowie replies in three lines ending with a magnificent scream I don’t remember since Five Years ( Ziggy Stardust  album) “silhouettes and shadows / watch the revolution / no more / free-steps to Heaven”. Wink, nudge.

Earlier we hear the blatantly obvious “You’ve got your transmission and your live wire / You got your cue line and a handful of [qua]’ludes” ( a 70s drug from before my time ).

All this, and many more,  is nothing new from the stable Bowie liked to pretend that he was part of. That stable includes The Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed, and the Ig-ster, the man who by all rights should be dead, Iggy Pop.

Whether or not Bowie was a pretender is one of those questions that followed him throughout. ( cf Keith Richards re Bowie “it’s all a pose” ). It didn’t help that Bowie was renowned for telling the Press whatever suited him at the time.

I don’t wish to make light of very sad early demise. I do infer from that though, that  the man thrashed his body very hard at least though most of the period when he was at his peak, 1969 – 1980.

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Inspirations

Carl Wyant – in memory

The late Carl Wyant was a friend.

Before he passed in 2001, he spent some months trekking up a steep hill in the stink of a northland summer to complete a manuscript, which he called Rumours From The Pit.

Carl Wyant
Carl Wyant

By that stage, 51-year-old Carl was in bad shape, due to a misspent adulthood, but nonetheless, he completed the manuscript.

Seventeen years later, another friend Buddhimanta Khan Das is working to have that manuscript published.

I am including occasional pieces of that manuscript’s contents on this site to honour and remember Carl by, and to showcase the quality of his writing.

That remembrance, for me,  has tinges of profound regret, at not having done more at the time to help him.

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Random Thoughts

Losing Patience With A Friend

He weaves around the corner,  grinning and ragged in the rain, like a familiar smelly dog you don’t want to touch.

He is pleased to see me. I am not pleased to see him.

His left hand wields a can of something that will make the average person barf after three or four. He wears dirty cut-off blue jeans and a wet white shirt.

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Current Events

America – still ‘the Greatest Country on Earth’ ?

Now that a man many have called a clown is running his Oval Office Show,  how much less might we hear the old line,  “America – the Greatest Country on Earth”?.

Aside, that is, from wealthy ‘liberals’ who claim to be leaving in Trump’s wake,  and American Democrats unable to stomach the loss.  There are no doubt many others mulling over –  at least in private – whether the Orange-haired One is a signpost on a downhill road.

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Random Thoughts

The Kindness of Strangers

adult waifMaybe I looked like an adult waif, a figure who commands pity sooner than  anything else.