Singapore to Bangkok: Fame and Misfortune

Laurie Weed's Portfolio Travel Writing Asia Blog Index

Asia Update 3: Singapore to Bangkok, or, “Fame and Misfortune”

August 2002

It's been quite a while since the last Update, due in part to the Malady Theme that continues to play loudly in the foreground of this journey. On the day we flew from Bali to Singapore I threw my back out, rendering me even more worthless than usual in the carrying of our 6 (started out as 8,) heavy bags.

Singapore is probably the most expensive place to stop in this part of the world, but we hang out for a few days so my back can recover. It's an enormous, surgically clean beehive of high-end shopping malls and planned housing. Still, we revel in the cheaper delights of a first-world city: fast Internet, excellent food, REAL COFFEE, safe transportation and the complete absence of touts. The people are almost freakishly polite and friendly, and everyone speaks perfect BBC English. Little India, which I didn't expect to like at all, turns out to be one of my favorite spots. We wander through the bazaar ogling mountains of silks, jewels, and a myriad of other bright, shiny things, and then gorge ourselves silly on vegetarian thali, curries, biryani, and fresh roti bread for about $2 a meal.

When the whole Orwellian thing starts to make us feel glum, we move on to Malaysia, but not before the hotel air-con goes haywire and I wake up with a raging head cold. The ride to Kuala Lumpur only makes it worse, as the temperature inside the train is set at subzero to keep passengers immobile and incapable of speech.

Other than the strange sight of fleets of Muslim women in burqa, KL is a comfortable and fairly modern city. It's less artificial than Singapore -- quite grubby in parts and reeking everywhere of durian and smog. Since I'm still sick and the smog is not helping, we watch movies and sleep a lot. Our Chinatown hotel room lacks windows; we wake up unsure if we've slept for 8 hours or 15. By Friday night, I've recovered and am itching to get out, so we're off in search of a dance club adventure. In the swanky "Golden Triangle" neighborhood, we stumble upon a hipster spot with a pumping techno beat, and it just so happens that world-famous DJs are scheduled to appear and spin until dawn...sweet.

At 1 a.m. when the glitterati arrive, the whole building is bursting with people. All of them smoke like chimneys, so by 2:30 we can barely see or breathe. We're tempted to call it a night even though the music is excellent, but since Craig won't likely have another chance show off his glowsticking prowess in Malaysia, we splash cold water on our faces and dive back in. He finds a spot in the corner of the packed dance floor behind the speakers to do his thing. I hang back to watch, and to avoid eye injury.

The music is pumping, the crowd is primed, and the next thing I know Craig has been prodded up to the top of the 6-foot speakers and is now twirling solo, onstage, in front of the globetrotting DJs and their rapturous fans, in the hottest nightspot in the country. No way am I going to miss a minute of this; I leave the dance floor and hop up on the bar for a better view. The prodder, a shiny bald fellow who turns out to be the club manager, joins me.

The effusive Bernie is so enthralled by the glowstick show (especially after the shirt comes off mid-act,) he offers Craig a job. He'll have to get in line, though, because the Salem Party Wagon folks are already waiting on the sidelines, dangling corporate sponsorship for their gig next weekend. After a triumphant finale, we manage to slip away to Chinatown for 4 a.m. breakfast and a long nap in The Sensory Deprivation Tank. Alas, fame is fickle and on Monday, we hop the night train north to Penang, anonymous travelers once again.

The quaint, colonial island is worth a day or two of exploration, and then we're keen on getting on to Thailand for some serious beach bumming. After a 24-hour travel marathon of minibus, taxi, and ferry rides, a longtail boat finally deposits us on Bottle Beach, Ko Pha-Ngan: origin of the infamous Squid Boat Adventure (please harass Craig, cmn3@cornell.edu, if you've not yet heard this story.) Bottle Beach is quite remote and offers us only the basic necessities: perfect turquoise water, white sand, and a bungalow that faces the ocean -- with someone else to cook and clean, of course. There is no road or telephone here, and the generator, (which from the sound of it is powered by a dilapidated boat motor,) is only turned on between 6 and 11 p.m.

Apparently, word has spread since Craig's visit in January and Bottle Beach is now on the backpacker circuit. Luckily, a room is available - only one - and it happens to be in the perfect spot just steps from the water. As we're hanging the hammock, we can't help but notice that the bungalow next to ours is bedecked with seashells: seashell mobiles, seashell sculpture, and seashell jewelry...it's a little disturbing. My first impression is that these folks have been on the island way too long -- best not to get involved with them.

It turns out that the Seashell People, as we affectionately refer to them until we're introduced, arrived just a few days before us and we already know them. Craig and Ben were once peers in the faraway tech world of San Francisco. An Englishman by birth and philosopher by training, Ben fled the dot-com crash to travel the world. He alighted in Paris intending to spend a 2-week holiday, met the lovely Delphine, and stayed on for 8 months. Now the two of them are rattling around Asia together...so much for originality! The seashell art is evidently what happens when creative people lack purpose. The four of us laze on the beach, hatch improbable business schemes, practice our Night Circus act, and never quite figure out why the wind blew us together.

Initially, we thought we would stay here 3 days. By day two, getting out of the hammock requires the Jaws of Life, and we linger for 3 weeks. Although Bottle Beach is exquisite and tranquil, I am determined not to succumb to seashell mobiles for diversion. Near the end of Week 2, we're pondering our next destination when the Malady Theme resumes with a vengeance: Craig wakes up feeling slightly unwell, and within a few hours he's delirious with fever. It subsides the next morning, but spikes up again that afternoon. This is a very bad sign indeed. Between bouts, he claims he feels "not bad”, but since there is not even minimal first aid available on Bottle Beach, and the only hospital on the island is little more than a triage station for the chronic stream of motorbike accidents, I drag him off to Ko Samui in search of civilized medical facilities.

The trip to Samui requires a longtail boat, a taxi, a ferry, and yet another taxi. By the time we arrive, Craig is feverish again. While waiting "10 minutes" in Thai Time (that's about 30 minutes Standard Time) for blood test results he can barely sit up, so I round up a nurse and ask her to bring him a cold towel for his burning head. Instead, she insists on taking him to the Emergency Room where he can be "more comfortable”, arranging his 6'1" frame on a 5-foot gurney. The sight of his legs and feet sticking off the end of what now appears to be a child's bed reduces the flock of tiny ER nurses to fits of helpless giggles; another 15 minutes pass before they remember the ice pack.

At last, the doctor returns with test results and fortunately, malaria is ruled out. She tentatively diagnoses Dengue Fever, which is very unpleasant but not fatal. The bad news is that there's no treatment, you just have to ride it out: 5-7 days of roller-coaster fever, chills, sweats, muscle pain and rashes, and then a month or two of fatigue and weakness. Great.

I settle the invalid in a hotel close to the hospital. It's too expensive for us, but I reason that a good bed, air-conditioning, and television will comfort him during the acute phase of the illness. Alas, Ko Samui is a far cry from our quiet little Bottle Beach. The hotel lies between a major construction site and a disco, and the one television channel is temperamental at best. I spend the next four days fetching liquids, noodles, and various medications. When the patient is well enough to complain almost constantly about the noise and the bad TV, it's time to return to our hut on Ko Pha-Ngan.

After a few more days of quiet recovery on Bottle Beach, followed by a dramatic tropical storm that threatens to relocate our bungalow to somewhere near Oz, we're packed up and on the road again. As we're heading north to Chiang Mai, we part ways with Ben and Delphine at the train station. They're going south along the Malaysia route, with a plan to manufacture hats in Indonesia to finance their trip to Burning Man. We wish them happy trails and then, all-aboard for Bangkok.

Both Craig and I have stayed in Bangkok before - separately - and we both hated it, unequivocally. Craig is still weak from the Dengue and he particularly loathes the idea of spending any time in the chaotic capital. However, a 1-night layover is unavoidable due to train schedules, and I am determined to enjoy it in spite of the horrible traffic, the filth, the scams, the frantic crowds, and the cancerous, black soup they call "air.” I manage to get us from the train station to a decent hotel in short time and without incident, and I foolishly believe that this good luck will endure. Once we've checked in and cleaned up, I convince my dubious travel companion to explore our environs: Siam Square, a relatively clean part of the city.

We set out optimistically, and make it all of 30 meters down the street before Craig smacks into the corrugated tin roof of a street stall with his face. With a deep sigh of resignation, I lead him back to the hotel, holding his bleeding head and muttering. After applying first aid and thoroughly verifying that tetanus shots were obtained in the US, we retreat to the air-conditioned sterility of a shopping mall for the rest of the day. Thus ends all hope of improving our negative impressions of Bangkok. We're so anxious to leave, we don't even mind (much) that the only train tickets left are 2nd Class seats for the 13-hour journey to Chiang Rai. Certainly, our luck will change there...