Too far to walk...

 

"We begin here then, in the very quick of the nightmare, in the crucible where all values are reduced to slag."

Henry Miller - The Air Conditioned Nightmare

This evening I find myself enjoying the slightly salubrious yet subtly seductive comforts of the 'Jolly Frog'. This particular guesthouse, perhaps more than any other, was responsible for putting Kanchanaburi on the map as a backpacker's destination. That was many, many years ago now, and of more recent times it has become something of an emblem of Kanchanaburi, despite an ongoing process of delightfully delapidating degradation that has rendered its décor somewhat dated by modern standards . To say the rooms are basic is to understate the reality. This is not the place to come if one requires high levels of opulence in order to enjoy a break. On the other hand, its throwback decadence to its glory days of the seventies has an almost timeless appeal to a huge variety of travellers. The clientèle this evening are an odd mixture of the geriatric remains of a peripatetic generation and a cosmopolitan group of footloose and fancy free youngsters trying to reinvigorate the bygone days of backpacking yore.
In short, the Jolly Frog has a rather pleasant way of attracting the outlandish and the eccentric. Its garden is perhaps its most notable feature, sitting as it does aside the River Kwai. Unlike the rest of the establishment, it is always looked after with great care and, perhaps, even love. As I tap out these notes on a hot and steamy Wednesday evening I cannot help but overhear the delightfully bizarre conversations of the youngsters sharing a beer or two and swinging to and fro in the hammocks in the centre of the garden. From the accents I am guessing we have several Spaniards, a Frenchman or two, a young American with a predilection for swearing every time he wishes to emphasize a point and several girls, perhaps one American, one French and one English. They, much like myself, are enjoying the late night delights of a bottle or two of 'Archa', a cheap but cheerful Thai beer that sells for the very reasonable 49 baht in the local convenience store, and the soporific atmosphere of a warm night relaxing beside the river.
Actually, I have to admit to being pleased to be back here this evening after a very unpleasant sojourn into Bangkok over the past couple of days. In my years of travelling I have visited many, many cities from Moscow (very dull) to New York (very noisy), Barcelona to Venice (both fascinating), Cairo to Izmir, and many others far too numerous to mention, but I cannot think of any city over decades of travelling that is quite as unremittingly unpleasant as Bangkok. It is a dirty, dingy, dilapidated dystopian disaster of a city that has few, if any, redeeming features.
I spent last night in a hotel 2.5 kms from Don Mueang Airport, chosen for its proximity. In practice, it took nearly an hour and a half to find said hotel (the Pool House Guest Residence). My first resort was to attempt to hire a taxi, but trying to communicate with the drivers of these vehicles proved to be almost impossible. None of them seemed to recognise the name of the hotel, even though I had it written in both English and Thai. None of them seemed to have the foggiest idea of how to read a map, the very concept seeming to throw them into a state of confusion. None of them seemed to want to go on the metre, even though the law requires them to do so, preferring attempts to arrange a hugely inflated price beforehand instead. 

 
After several efforts that merely resulted in increased frustration, I resolved to walk to the hotel. This was probably a mistake as it took vastly longer than expected owing to the lack of anywhere to actually walk. What pavements there were were invariably broken up to the point of unsuitability, the rest of the journey being a case of either walking through a seemingly endless building site or against the stream of a apparently never ending cascade of recklessly driven motor vehicles.
Eventually, I found a 7-11 store that I knew to be in the vicinity of the guest house. I asked the girl behind the counter if she knew the hotel. She did, but she assured me that it was far too far to even consider walking. Instead, she suggested I take a motor bike. Tired, sweaty and a little fed up (a rare emotion for me), I took what I perceived as a rather desperate option and clambered aboard a Honda 90.
The rider rode thirty metres to the West, twenty five metres to the North, followed by one hundred metres to the east and…. we were there. As an expression of the idea of 'too far too walk' it seemed to be lacking something vital that, in the West at least, we tend to call 'distance'. 

 
To be fair, the Thai conception of 'too far to walk' is very different to the British or American. To those of us in the West, the expression would indicate several miles of challenging perambulation, whereas here in Thailand 'too far to walk' means anything above 40 yards or so. An old joke sprang to mind: question“What do you call a person walking in Thailand?”, answer “A tourist!”.
(Actually, I was tempted to use another, very much similar, line earlier, It was along the lines of 'what do you call someone hopelessly lost in Bangkok', the answer being, obviously, 'a taxi driver').
It is hard to conceive of a form of words that will convey just how hopelessly unpleasant Bangkok is. It consists of street upon street, road upon road, of sheer, adulterated ugliness. Even the centre of town, the area around the Royal Palaces, are notable for just how tacky the use of excessive gold leaf can appear. It comes across as a depressing display of unjustified opulence in a land where most of the population are struggling even to put a meal on the table.

Such tasteless decoration accounts for only a small area though, the vast majority of Bangkok being an endless chaos of cars and cables, broken pavements and unrepaired holes, officious policemen and self-righteous military men. From East to West South to North, inside and outside, over a vast distance, there is barely anything that one could recommend to someone about this truly atrocious city.

Luckily (I survived!), I now find myself back in the far pleasanter environs of Kanchanaburi where, if all goes well, I intend to spend the next couple of weeks reading, writing and learning to juggle. The last being the result of meeting Alex, a professional German juggler who was happy to pass on the basics to me in return for a few lessons of twirling nunchucks (I am no master, but sufficiently competent now to start a complete neophyte on the path towards a level of competence).
The hot season has arrived, with rumours of temperatures in excess of 40C on the way in the coming week. This seems a good enough excuse to me to curtail the more physical aspects of flaneurial activity and to concentrate instead on the process of writing, both this blog and a book I have been planning for a year or so now. The prospect of afternoons spent in air conditioned cafés slowly imbibing Americanos and fruit smoothies whilst tapping away on my netbook seems pleasant indeed in this heat...

Development

Taking due care not to breathe too deeply, I am currently enjoy the delights of the 85C Bakery Cafe in Chang An. The cafe is modern and a little soulless, built to cater for the aspirations of many Chinese  twenty somethings and their desire to be as much like Americans as possible. The coffee itself is imitation Starbucks and, if I am honest, really not too bad. There is little here though to distinguish the place from any number of other coffee outlets which one finds almost anywhere around the globe these days. One of the pleasant things about Thailand, apart from Bangkok, was the rather delightful variety of establishments where one could partake of liquid libations. The same cannot be said of modern China, where all such hostelries seem to be much of a muchness; pleasant enough, but essentially dull and lacking in anything other than the wished for corporate identity.

After nearly managing to miss a plane at Bangkok's Don Meung airport, I find myself back in the day to day turmoil that is life in 21st century China. As readers of my blog will know, I prefer the charms of leisurely travel with huge amounts of space built into the schedule to enable time to be taken for whatever diversions that one takes a fancy to en route. On this occasion however, due to social commitments, I was unable to leave Kanchanaburi until one in the afternoon to take a flight at seven. As ever, when one fails to build in enough slack, anything going wrong will put stress on the schedule, and therefore stress on the traveller. In this case it was the entirely predictable mayhem that is Bangkok's traffic. If one can avoid the busiest periods in Bangkok, traffic will generally flow at a reasonable rate, but … if arriving between half three and half seven, then traffic can slow to a rate barely above walking pace.

'Development' as it is known, was going on apace throughout the northern part of Bangkok, thus adding another level to the difficulties. This generally took the form of improved road schemes, the building of yet more dull glass and concrete monstrosities to clutter an already overcrowded skyline, and extensions to the rail transport system in the city. In theory, the economy here is only just growing, but by the look of certain parts of Bangkok, some people are doing very well indeed.

All this seemed a far cry from my adventures of only two days before. A friend took to their head the notion that kayaking on the River Kwai might be fun, despite the ambient temperature being around 38C. After some persuading, I finally acquiesced. I envisioned being hot, sweaty, overworked and under rewarded for my efforts; nothing could have been further from the truth.

We were taken by van to a point several miles upstream where, in the shadow of a Buddhist temple, we were assisted, by a very helpful group of children, to launch onto the gently flowing waters of the Kwai. After a short lecture on how to control the direction of the vessel, the two of us set out from the shore. Much to my surprise, I seemed to take to it like the proverbial duck to water and was pleasantly amazed at just how little effort was needed. After a couple of minutes of orientating ourselves to the situation, we set off downstream letting, for the most part, the current do the majority of the work.

Down at the level of the river, the temperature seemed surprisingly pleasant. We had taken care to bring along around three litres of water for the trip, and one could easily cool off by dipping a hat into the cool, clean waters and placing it, still dripping wet, back on one's head. The scenery was gorgeous, an endless variety of trees and plants lining the shores with tall, impressive, forest-clad mountains as a backdrop. A huge variety of wildlife was also on view, the bird-life in particular being both stunning in its variety and so colourful in the range of plumage. Cormorants and herons were plentiful, along with a variety of waders strutting the muddy banks on their elongated legs, every  now and again plunging their long beaks down into the shallows in search of tasty titbits.

At one stage, we saw a couple of water monitors. Ostensibly harmless, they are still a little intimidating, being all of two metres long and having the appearance of small crocodiles. These slid into the waters about twenty metres from our kayak and we experienced a nervous moment or two, half expecting them to come bumping into our less-than-completely-stable vessel.

Thailand, despite its crazy politics and archaic systems of governance, can be a wonderful place to spend an extended break. If one escapes the mad busy-ness of the cities then one is often rewarded with beautiful vistas, gentle people and the constant presence of amazing wildlife, both fauna and flora. The sheer abundance of this is hard to take in at times, and almost movingly beautiful at others. As far as the kayak trip went though, the River was lovely indeed until we passed under the famous railway bridge (built by prisoners in World War Two). At that stage, as we re-entered 'civilisation' the presence of humans was all too obvious by the amount of detritus that had been dumped in the river, particularly the ubiquitous plastic bottles, and the need to counteract the wake produced by high speed launches ferrying tourists from the bridge to the main town.

It is rumoured that the Thais and the Chinese have agreed to a high speed train connection that will pass through Kanchanaburi at some stage in the not too distant future. This, it is believed, will lead to more 'development'. What this basically means is more hotels, more factories, more people, more rubbish in the river, more species disappearing, more damage to what it is that is beautiful about Kanchanaburi and its environs.

The beauty of the Kwai above Kanchanaburi was but a memory by the time I reached Shenzhen in Southern China. Everywhere I looked beyond the new airport were new buildings, new roads, new everything. China seems to be fast disappearing under concrete. From Hong Kong to Guangzhou, a distance of some sixty miles, it is hard to tell where one city ends and a new one begins. This area is home to some 115,000,000 people. At climate talks, the Chinese often claim concessions, saying that their country is still 'underdeveloped'. If this is underdeveloped, I would hate to see what overdeveloped looks like …

The Chinese, like so many other countries around our planet, measure their success in terms of economic growth. What this growth has created in reality is a country where the air is nearly unbreathable, the water undrinkable and the food bordering on inedible (pesticides, dubious production methods, genetic modification, all unbridled and unchecked) and cancer rates sky-rocketing. If this is the fruit of economic growth, then one has to question the underlying assumption that such growth is necessarily a good thing.

Indeed, it seems that many thinkers in the past have done so. One often hears it said that we need economic growth to raise the standards of living of the less well-off. Oddly though, there is plenty of evidence that in many countries where growth has occurred in recent times, it has actually led to a worsening of economic inequality, not an improvement (the UK, the US and China all being obvious examples). In many economies what is needed is at least the intention of addressing the inequality of wealth distribution, rather than endlessly trying to grow economies to the further enrichment of the super rich, with all the subsequent damage to the society and the environment.

Back in the 85C Bakery Cafe, a couple of hours have passed and the place is now crowded with smokers, much to the detriment of the air within. Often smoking is banned in such places but, as ever in China, such rules are rarely enforced. In many ways, one can understand the fatalism of the Chinese smoker. Perhaps they rationalise that the air is so bad anyway that one might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. I find myself looking back to the joys of the kayaking on the Kwai and the feeling of fresh air in the lungs. Sadly, it may be some weeks before I get to experience the latter once more ...