1/26 -- Easy Rider

Motorcycles are not popular in my family. I probably have a natural fear of them linked to my clumsiness and general predilection for stable four-wheeled craft, but a tragic piece of family history rendered motorcycles virtually off-limits, psychologically if not by decree. Several years before I was born, my mother's twin sisters were in a car accident with a man on a motorcycle. One aunt was killed and the other needed several steel plates and surgeries.

So it is quite surprising to reflect that after nearly 23 years of diligently avoiding motorcycles, I traveled over 100 km on one in a single day: in a strange country, whose language is alien to me (or is it the other way around?), seated behind a man Ive known for two weeks, and helmetless for more than half the journey.

On Monday I put on my nicest outfit (which is to say, still quite goofy)--white waterproof pants and a green long-sleeved golf shirt--shaved my neard (neck-beard, for the uninitiated), and set out for Hua Hin with Wat to pitch his kaffir lime shampoo to some of the swank spa-resorts in the area, hoping they would begin selling it in their gift shops. We bade Audrey adieu and walked to the covered garage area. Wat mounted the bike as I stared at the lone helmet he owns, an unconvincing shell of silver plastic made by V-Tech (of cheap-o cordless phone fame?) with a flimsy visor. I pointed at the helmet and asked, "Aren't you going to wear that?" hoping to bring it to his attention without revealing my fervent desire to wear it. "Oh, yes," he replied, and began to bungee-cord it into place in the bike's front basket. With bigger eyes than I'd intended, I said, "If you're not going to wear it, I will," as if I were doing him a favor.

As we drove through the gray morning mist, Wat encouraged me to relax and move with the bike's motions. After we strayed far from the vertical on a turn, he asked how much I weigh. I told him that it fluctuates but is probably 85-95 kg. He laughed in surprise and I explained that I thought perhaps it would be better for me to stay upright rather than leaning into each turn along with him; he agreed.

We stopped briefly for hemispherical rice pancake things from a roadside stand. Once Wat explained to the woman serving them that his farang friend was not, in fact, interested in buying any land in the area, we began our journey in earnest. The road toward Hua Hin is a hilly, curvaceous pavement scar through a jungle so thick that visibility seldom extends 15' beyond the roadside power lines. At one point, we were passed by a pickup truck that swayed as it shifted from one lane to the next, probably because it was weighed down with not one but two fully grown cows, held in by nothing more than the tailgate and a thin aluminum guard rail. Yikes!

As we rode--through Pala-U's entrance arch, past where Audrey spotted a red-faced baboon, up the hill to the Buddhist shrine at the apex, down the hill to the flatlands--Wat filled me in on some of the gossip about the Thai Royal Family. While the Royal Family has no de jure policy authority, the king is generally respected and has some de facto political influence. Further, it is a crime to criticize the Royal Family. Sulak Sivaraksa, who edits a Buddhist political commentary magazine called "Seeds of Peace," has been jailed several times for his criticisms. [It is not clear where this prohibition rests on a continuum of speech control ranging from, say, libel/slander law to something like the early American Alien and Sedition Acts. It seems like it might be more like the latter, though.] At risk of my own imprisonment, here is some of the dirt: one prince is a sex addict and polygamist, another got a model arrested in the UK for pushing drugs for him, and another (?) pays for favors not with cash, but with winning lottery numbers in various combinations that would pay various sums; the queen is some kind of Manipulator Par Excellence.

We stopped at the Thousand Stars Foundation to visit a friend of Wat's, a woman who was so deeply moved by the Tibetan plight that she resigned her teaching position at the University of Bangkok to begin the first Tibetan Buddhist temple in Thailand. (FYI: Thailand is roughly 95% Buddhist, but Wat tells me that the difference between Thai Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism is something like that between Catholics and Protestants.) One of this woman's feats was performing some kind of prayer-walk (a prostrating series of five or so moves for each step forward) for 80 km. The Foundation's land is a sprawling campus of shady fruit trees and vegetable gardens, bordered with the flying Tibetan flags and centered around a large, multicolored tepee that is some kind of a prayer area. Wat's friend was not around, so we left.

The countryside is a patchwork of tropical fruit monocrops and small homesteads, all set against mountains that rise jut suddenly upward from the flatlands in purple, mirthful contours as if penned by an illustrator for a Dr. Seuss book. Our first stop was at the "quite posh" (Wat's words) Dhevan Dara spa resort, an oasis of manicured lawns and palms protected from the squalid environs by forty foot white walls. We smoothed out our highway hair and walked to talk to the gift shop purchasing manager, a Thai woman who was more interested in the farm as a project than in the shampoo as a product. She treated us amicably and accepted a bottle to show to her boss. We got back on the bike.

Upon reaching the remotest outskirts of Hua Hin, Wat stopped for gas and asked for the helmet, explaining that the police presence from now on was too high to break the law and drive the bike without one. Hua Hin came into view as we descended a final hill, the edifices of its grandest hotels barely blocking a clear view of the beach. Hua Hin's has Bangkok's blend of mostly three- and four-story buildings, interspersed with taller structures and lined with vendors' stalls. But something here is different. Maybe it is the relative infrequency of hustler taxi drivers and souvenir peddlers, or maybe it is just that the sea breeze clears the air better. Whatever it is, I find it less oppressive than Bangkok.

Once we hit the city, Wat's driving reached a new tier. As I soaked in the aesthetic--power lines two dozen thick running along storefronts on each side of the road, decorated every half-block by the orange sphere of a paper lantern--Wat bobbed and weaved through creeping traffic, maneuvering the sleek, azure Honda Dream 125 through moving cars like a Bangkok pizza boy on a 20-minute deadline.

We headed for an allegedly world-class spa/therapy/resort, where we were curtly told that our product's packaging was hokey and would only be considered in bulk, packaged in the resort's bottles. Dejected, we grabbed lunch. I had something called sue-key that is basically a seafood surprise soup, and Wat read the newspaper while I eavesdropped (if you can call it that with the language barrier...) on the Thai youth behind me, the three of them loud and gregarious and sporting a slightly outdated "punk" look. Two cats lazed in the shade of the food stand: one napped under the table on the chair next to mine, and the other was sprawled sloppily over the soda display case with its mangy tail and legs dangling part-way off the top. We visited a 24-hour all-organic food store that is somehow linked to the Royal Family to see if they would carry our shampoo. Here Wat came face to face with the marketplace--there are two or three competing brands, all produced at lower cost and more homogenously. Moreover, they aptly market their products as a hair treatment (Aud and I had suggested the language "hair remedy"), since the stuff works more like an intense conditioner than a daily cleansing shampoo. Wat spent a long time scrutinzing the competition as I looked on, not knowing quite what to say.

Outside of town, a spa ca led Aka agreed to carry ten bottles of our stuff on consignment, which excited me more than Wat. The country roads that took us to Aka were also home to several new housing developments intended for ex-pats. Serviced by narrow roads and neighbored by dusty rural squalor, the siting choice seems likely to be motivated by cheap land rather than attractive location. Construction crews in face masks put he finishing touches on concrete border walls and grand archways, while landscapers transplanted palms and unrolled long mats of sod in a desperate attempt to offset the desolate, stony mountains all around. We passed developments named with all the inventiveness of a planned community of McMansions: Sunshine Mountain, Jungle Garden, Summerland. But they lack even the shallow "community" structures such developments provide with clubhouses and parks--row upon row of identical villas, perhaps 1000 sq ft each, fill all the space with no sign of communal areas. Attached garages provide protection from outgoing neighbors. As we rode by these $100K vacation homes colored in popsicle pastels--lemon-lime for the brick walls, mixed berry on the vaguely "Oriental" roof--I failed to see the appeal.

We returned to town to buy two 5kg bags of brown jasmine rice, because the village in Pala-U seldom carries anything besides white rice due to (ill-informed?) consumer demand. Wat's normal vendor was out of rice, so we headed to the Tesco-Lotus store in the large Market Village shopping mall. Three stories tall and perhaps a quarter mile in length, it is like many American malls except that in place of a parking lot it is lined on either side by large corrals that store motorbikes four-wide. Another difference is that while most American malls seek some kind of manicured aesthetic and are designed to include lounge spaces and wide aisles, every nook and cranny of Market Village--in front of entrances, encroaching on storefronts, beneath escalators--are kiosks peddling everything from belt buckles to body soaps to real estate. Oh, and you get one shopping cart for the whole mall...kind weird. We entered the Tesco-Lotus market, a sprawling complex occupying one end of the mall that is almost definitely the Thai equivalent of a Wal-Mart. I made a bit of a scene insisting that we put the rice in our backpack rather than in another plastic bag, but other than that the visit ended without incident and we headed home.

The sun was fierce as it began its descent toward late afternoon, and we stopped for a cold drink. Wat chugged a Sprite and I luxuriated in a cold bottle of soymilk--it was so good that I couldn't help smiling when I finished it, like after a little too much red wine. Wat made a phone call in English, and soon we swung down another highway a few kilometers to see Wat's friend Paul. This entry has dragged on enough already, so I'll be brief: Paul is a white South African ex-pat, who changed majors from philosophy to sociology/anthropology and then worked most of his life as a computer programmer working on user-interface software. He's married a Thai woman and they are going to begin a homestead as farmers, leaving the rhythms of industrial employment behind. He has about two acres of land and intends to build a home out of shipping containers and employ permaculture techniques to his land. That may sound weird or awesome depending on your opinion and background...I'm inclined to think the latter. I hope to write more about Paul later...

-Kyle