Revelation

I became transfixed by a woman making strange white steamed things on a hotplate outside a café in Hanoi and stumbled in to eat dinner. My only doubt was the large bowl of chopped gristle sitting on the counter-top amongst other ingredients. Pro-culinary risk as I am, I remain somewhat averse to gristle. There was no menu in English but pinned to the wall was a review of another café which makes what I now know are called banh cuon, rice flour pancakes. Using my best sign language, I ordered a plateful, hopefully sans gristle.

Calling these pancakes is a bit of a misnomer, I think, as there are no eggs or butter involves and hence nothing cakey to write home about. Banh cuon are more like flat noodles made from fresh rice-flour batter, enriched, I discovered, with ground alabaster. They are filled with minced pork cooked with cinnamon and star anise and onion, topped with holy basil, Vietnamese mint (surprise!) deep-fried, and served with a sharp sour dipping sauce and chilli. Delightful. Clouds filled with ambrosia.

These strike me as a superior version of one of the staples of yum cha, the big steamed rice noodle rolls filled with prawns or minced veggies. Along with prawn gowgees and mango pancakes, these are the default foundation of the yum cha Pike, beloved for their reliably stodgy slipperiness. A fine point of reference, but one convincingly trumped by banh cuon.

Potential hissy fit

One of my most trusted cadres has strongly advised me to eat a cobra in Hanoi. Apparently the consumption of the cobra is feted with much ritual splendour. The bile is extracted and drunk with a shot of whiskey, if I recall correctly. I can manage almost anything on my own, but I do not think I can manage to participate in the ceremonial eating of a snake all by myself. So adamantly and carefully worded have the injunctions to eat a snake in Hanoi been that I wonder whether admission into some secret society might be at stake. In other words, I need a witness as well as an accomplice. I’m out of Hanoi for a few days and then will pass through for just a few more on my way south. Somehow, I need to mix with my peers on the tourist circuit and find a reasonable dinner partner. As to whether it will be possible to find such a one (or two or three) from a random sample of the general public, my expectations are quite low. Managing to board a plane to the same destination does not, in my opinion, automatically represent common ground sufficient to justify sharing a meal. The challenge is to find someone who passes the reasonable person test AND is amenable to the idea of eating reptiles. Alternatively, if anybody knows of a reasonable person who will be in Hanoi on Monday or Tuesday and might want to eat some snake with me, let me know. Brief character reference required.

How far out of the loop am I really?

Has Britney died? Or has the ghost of her innocence finally passed to the other side?

Thrillseeking

Being a pedestrian in Hanoi is an extreme sport. There’s a whole lot of traffic and not a whole lot of stopping. This sign, which I photographed in a little town in Scotland, would be laughed off the street in Hanoi.
Pedestrians beware, more like it. I’m proud of being an expert jaywalker. As a non-driver, I consider jaywalking to be a kind of political statement. Crossing when the lights are red, darting out into four lanes of traffic, throwing a spanner into the works at peak hour, that’s what sticking it to the man is all about. And besides, it’s an adrenaline rush. Living on the edge, it’s where you feel most alive. Right on. Yeah right. Etc.

The stakes are raised in Hanoi. There’s no cause for pedestrians to disseminate anarchy in traffic as the roads are entirely and fabulously chaotic. There are motorbikes. There are bicycles. There are people balancing baskets of fruit and chickens and snake beans. There are four wheel drives. It’s a maelstrom out there but happily it’s a fury-free maelstrom. Where’s the road rage? I’ve been honked and tooted a couple of times but neither fists nor curses have been hurled in my direction.

Nevertheless, there are many new challenges for the jaywalker schooled on the streets of Sydney. The William St Dash, one of the moves I perfected during my apprenticeship, has no place in hardcore Hanoi, nor does the Late Night Bolt Oblivious. The Macleay St Eyeball – the establishment of stern eye contact with a lily-livered driver who will not, experience tells me, dare to run down prey glaring them in the face – does have some application but only on streets where there are relatively few vehicles. What is generally needed is a slow, meditative and detached approach. Make like a feather in the breeze and float across the road. Make like a lost sheep and bleat your way through.

Pedestrian life is challenging but there are some support structures in place. There are nominal pedestrian crossings all over the place and they are marked by a fantastic variety of signs. These seem to have a negligible impact on the movement of traffic but they do serve to raise the spirits of the pedestrian community significantly.

a) Man of the city
Bowler-hatted and upbeat.

b) Disjointed chappie on the way homeRough night, what-ho.

c) Feral childrenEvacuees from Enid Blyton-land on the lam, armed with lashings of cocoa and a tuckbox full of ginger biscuits. Jolly old Nursie.

d) Loopity loop
Here, the mind and body split is clearly illustrated. My own feeling is that the mind of the Hanoi pedestrian must reside resolutely in her body in order to keep both intact.

e) When in doubt…
…Run.

f) Dapper hatter
Cruise it.

Solutions to higher education crisis

One of the things that Ezra Pound admired about Confucian societies was their respect for scholars and their long-term maintenance of civic order and stability via a set of clearly delineated ethical relationships. And the elder worship. He would have loved Van Mieu, the Temple of Literature in Hanoi. Mandarins-in-training started fronting up to study the Confucian canon, government administration, and poetry in 1076 and kept doing so until the late eighteenth century.

The name of every person who passed the Royal Exams, the Confucian doctorate, between 1442 and 1779 was inscribed on a stele which in its turn was mounted on the back of a blue stone tortoise.
Having your dissertation lodged in the Australian Digital Thesis Repository is one thing. Being held aloft by a tortoise would be something else.
The 82 steles are on display in a courtyard around the Well of Heavenly Clarity.
The clarity of the Well is obviously figurative rather than actual. To walk to the next courtyard, the Sanctuary of the Sage, you need to pass through the Gate of the Great Synthesis. I am certain I dreamed of a Well of Heavenly Clarity during the course of my thesis and had I known that one existed I probably would have jumped on a plane to Hanoi so that I could take a dip. As for the Gate of the Great Synthesis… it would have also been comforting to know that this existed somewhere in concrete form.

Anyway, Pound thought that an orderly state should be sternly governed and led by wise, obdurate, educated men. There isn’t a whole lot of overlap between my vision of the perfect state and Pound’s but I think we would both endorse the following statement, inscribed on the first stele of doctorates at Van Mieu:
Virtuous and talented men are state sustaining elements: the strength and prosperity of a state depends on its stable vitality and it becomes weaker as such vitality fails. That is why all the saint emperors and clear-sighted kings didn’t fail in seeing to the training of men of talent and the employment of literati to develop this vitality.
Why am I, a would-be member of the literati, brimful of vitality, virtuous to a fault, resigned to a life of unemployment and vagrancy? Because there’s not enough Confucianism in higher education policy. First step, funding to resurrect the tertiary sector: jobs for post-docs and ECRs of the rank of literati and dilettanti. Second step, a Well of Heavenly Clarity in every Australian university by 2010!

Hanoi Fly Girls Rock the Vote

By the lake in Hanoi the Fury. If propaganda must be posted, let it be brightly coloured, I say.

Bonanza!

I’ve killed a fair amount of time addressing my reading needs in the secondhand bookshops of South East Asia. Whilst the heinous state of the modern publishing industry and the crisis in contemporary fiction are certainly both in evidence on the shelves of South East Asia, I have always been able to find something or other that I actually want to read. Onerous exchange terms no longer make me wince. I am still baffled and nerdily entertained by shelving protocols. Samuel Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women was shelved in the self-help section of a bookshop in Pai, in between The Surrendered Single and Healing Back Pain Naturally, just a few down from Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus and a book assessing Nabokov’s contribution to lepidoptery. Genius! Memories like this bring me real pleasure. They also make me wonder whether spending too much time on my own is warping my idea of fun beyond any hope of repair.

Anyway, browsing away in Luang Prabang I came across this book.

Everything about this, I love. I love its refusal to entertain any of the nuances which might accumulate to the title. I love the expression on Ralph E. Baney’s face. I love that the photographs are authentic. I love the old-school yellow scuba gear. I really love the many stand-in phalluses. It’s a goldmine.

Leaving Las Laos

This is the Hmong street market which bustles up a storm every night in Luang Prabang.

This is what a chi-chi bar looks like in LP, a stone's throw from the mercado above. This one is operated by Frenchies civilised and business savvy enough to know the merits of discounting cocktail hour.

Et voilà.

Café au lait #2

And this is the more orthodox presentation of the Lao café au lait. Note the charmingly tilted angle of the coffee. That's right, squirrels, we're still in quaintsville.

The limits of culinary authenticity

One of the less palatable contributions to Lao food taste is made by padak, a thick and foully odiferous fish sauce which is drawn out of a vat of fermented rotten fish and rice husks. It is not a visually attractive condiment; it is unkind to the olfactory organ; it trounces every other flavour in its wake. Back in the day, every household had a claypot full of decaying fish sitting by the backdoor, all ready to round out the casserole. Padak strikes me as a ten year old prankster’s dream. Imagine: fill a bucket with dead fish and salt and scraps, pour in some muddy water, let it rot for a while, and then make people taste it on the grounds that it’s a delicacy.

Foreigners are said to have assimilated to Lao culinary culture when they can dip a raw bean into a pot of padak and eat it with gusto. My brief sojourn in Laos has not equipped me with the wherewithal to appreciate padak in any form. The official story is that the fishy, salty taste of the padak is distributed through a dish and mellowed. I do not believe this to be true. When Lao food is prepared for Western palates, the cooks go easy on the padak or, better, substitute for it the shrimp paste that goes into Thai food. If, however, you quit the tourist boulevards and go forth with great intrepidity to the local markets in pursuit of an Authentic Culinary Experience, no such allowances will be made. As I have discovered. Lao green papaya salad is pretty similar to somtum, the Thai green papaya salad. What distinguishes the one from the other, at least on the street, is the padak and the addition of this one ingredient is fatal. Similarly, I had to abandon an eggplant casserole which should have been delicious after just a few bites on account of the padak pestilence.

I like Lao food enormously. Although they all juggle the same basic set of sweet, sour, bitter and salty flavours, Lao cuisine is much feistier than Thai and Cambodian food. Great swathes of lime and tamarind battle it out with slugs of ginger and garlic and chilli. The broths are full of lemongrass; the sour vegies are really, really sour; there are eggplants and tomatoes everywhere. Herbs don’t get used as a garnish, they get thrown into everything by the handful. All these things are good. So yes, I like Lao food enormously but it seems that it is an adapted Lao food that I must love. And thus, on the vast and complex arena that is the dinner table, the great questions of cultural relativism are raised. To embrace Lao food, must I discard my own culinary values? Do I commit an act of gastronomic imperialism when I laud, indeed call for Lao cuisine sans padak? Am I striking a blow for the globalisation of the palate when I refuse to accept the most distinctive ingredients on the menu?

I’ve been pretty harsh on travellers who refuse to cope with local ingredients. Nothing gives me an easier occasion for a good old scoff than hearing some nitwit in a leisure suit order a curry with no chilli. Some feeble sense of culinary superiority is strengthened when, just as I bite into an eye-opening clove of raw garlic, someone else has an audible attack of the squeams over the onion or the garlic or the rice or the fish or the spice or some such rubbish. They, gormless philistines, crave trans fats; I crave strange greens. I feel like a maverick and I like it. Padak has made me question my suitability for this category.

Gender specifics

The use of zebra crossings in Luang Prabang is apparently organised along gender lines.

It’s nice to see ladies light of foot and big of hair finally recognised as an important part of the pedestrian community.

Whilst I’m on municipal semiotics, I might as well post two more signs that pleased me.

I don’t need a warning sign to tell me to keep my distance from all things electrical and exposed in Laos. Nonetheless, I love the, shall we say, alarmist poetics of this figure’s descent.

Unless my information is out of date, the cool kids are still getting very excited about stencils. In Vientiane, even the council is hip to the stencil game.

On human suffering. Mine, mainly.

I have been a little unwell over the last few days and so have abjured the active life. Truth be told, I have lain on a bed in an air-conditioned room and watched the awesome spectacle that is Non-Stop Action Wrestling and reruns of Battlestar Galactica on cable. For a while there, I thought I might have caught some fabulous tropical illness. What a coup for the memoirs that would have been. For better or worse, I’m bird-flu free and unless a sore throat is a symptom, I don’t have malaria either. I have recovered. True to the Scotch blood that courses through my system, I have endured my suffering in uncomplaining masochistic silence. True to my inner drama queen and hypochondriac, I have already exaggerated the extent of those sufferings.

When we are ill, our sensitivity to our own frailty is immediately heightened. It is an act of human defensiveness that our sensitivity to the frailties of others is thus heightened. Although I found myself swooning like a Victorian debutante, I did not entirely lose my appetite and left my guesthouse when the sun was low to eat, to take a constitutional stroll through the quaint streets of Luang Prabang and to shake my head at the frailties of others, protected by the moral immunity of the self-proclaimed invalid. Listening to the baloney gushing forth from the mouths of some of my fellow travellers, I’m astonished that some of them were able to find their way out of the womb. Forceps and caesareans explain a lot. Anyway, sitting in my fragile state, I seethed particularly at the expression or embodiment of the following philosophies.

Dire Poverty is the Harbinger of Great Happiness!

This noxious creed is being peddled all over South East Asia. It goes something like this: ‘The people here all seem so happy and yet they have so little. Look over there, that sweet little woman is wearing nothing but rags and there she is, smiling away. Oh, and look, all those darling laughing children playing in that dirty water. They’re having the time of their lives! Maybe (nods in a meaningful fashion) we in the so-called developed world could learn a thing or two from these people.’ I’ll concede that the contribution of affluence to happiness is one that warrants consideration. And yes, the relationship between material circumstances and spiritual uplift has preoccupied many worthies. But the whole ‘let’s just forget about our plasma screens and designer clothes and get back to simpler things like cholera and high infant mortality rates because it is obviously working so well for the Laotians’ school of thought really irks me.

If I Speak Louder, People Will Obey Me.

This one is pretty self explanatory, isn’t it? This widespread practice has meant, for better or worse, that I have had access to the dinner orders of the loud, obnoxious, and intolerant. I’ve also been forced to bear witness to the bargaining habits of the rich and assertive and observed a corollary: if I wave the cash that I’m prepared to withhold around in the air, I will not get ripped off. It’s not often that I refer to the Old Testament but I believe the good old book of Proverbs holds many maxims readily applicable in such situations. As I monitor such behaviours, I am reminded that meekness is, after all, a delightful character trait.

If I Ain’t Been Eatin’ It All My Life, I Ain’t Gonna Start Now.

Surprise surprise, most Lao food has chilli on the side or inside. Why do people travel to S.E. Asia and find themselves outraged by the ubiquity of chilli? Why do people take it so personally that not all the dishes on the menu are familiar? Fine! Order pizza. I have never suffered acute pizza cravings but I can sympathise with those who want to satisfy an overwhelming desire for a favourite food. But eating what looks like really bad pizza every single night when there is a glorious local cuisine to investigate? People do this. I know I’m not in the majority on this one, but anyone who craves Maccas is absolutely beyond my understanding. Still, it helps to separate the sheep from the goats.

I’m a Vampire. Exposure to Garlic Will Kill Me.

I’ve never had much time for people who consider onion or garlic to be somehow socially compromising. If your social circles/date can’t cope with onion or garlic, get rid of them. I firmly believe in the healing powers of garlic. The only reason I’m fit to write this is because I have consumed hefty doses of raw garlic washed down with sweetened lime juice. Gee, I’ll have healthy, happy kids… Anyway, Lao food contains lots of raw and just-cooked onion and garlic. It’s spectacularly good and yet people order these dishes and then just pick out the onion and garlic. Or worse, people will order – at high volume – a stirfry without garlic or a la ap salad with no onion or something equally moronic – and then proceed to regale everybody within a thirty metre radius about the great injuries and personal losses they have suffered as a result of eating garlic, ‘honey, I bloat…’, to express their doubt that the stirfry will arrive garlic-free, ‘you know what these people are like’, to get suspicious that maybe the waiter wasn’t impressed by the order, ‘ but after all, who’s paying the damned bill, huh?’... And so it goes on.

For my part, I can say that my garlic rations have really hit the spot. I’m cured and will be prepared to walk an extra mile or seven to dinner in Hanoi if it gets me away from the hordes described above.

Cafe au lait, Lao style

Yes, that is a tin of condensed milk sitting there beside the cup of black coffee. Usually a Lao coffee with milk arrives with an inch of condensed milk already waiting in the bottom of the cup. At this riverside café, however, the proprietors are trusting enough to allow people like me to administer their own condensed milk from the tin. Note that you can choose whether to add powdered milk to your coffee or condensed milk.

Behold: the Mangosteen

I have fielded a few questions regarding the mangosteen, namely, qu'est-ce que c'est? I feel it to be a kind of community service to enlighten readers of this blog as to the true nature of the mangosteen for it is truly an extraordinary fruit. Unfortunately I think its relative obscurity is a function of its price in markets outside the growing region.

Exhibit A.
Mangosteens en masse.
Purplish fruit, a bit smaller than a tangerine (the green numbers on the right), but larger than a grape.

Exhibit B.
Scale photograph.
Nothing makes sense without a standard reference point. I chose the queen of hearts because Queen Victoria died with her appetite for mangosteens unsated.

Exhibit C.
The Heart of the Mangosteen.

The flesh of the mangosteen is quite hard and to pierce it, a forceful prod with the thumb and a strong set of fingernails are required. If you’re lucky, your thumbnail will be stained scarlet.

Once the skin is off, the flesh of the mangosteen is revealed in its nondescript glory, resembling nothing so much as an undersized bulb of garlic. If things are as they should be, the flesh is opaque and as firm as a ripe peach. But what, I suspect you wonder, does it taste like? My friends, I can do no better than this: a mangosteen tastes like a mangosteen.

Other points of interest
Mangosteens and mangos have nothing in common but the letters m-a-n-g-o and a place in a tropical fruit basket. The botanical name of the mangosteen is Garcinia mangostana whereas the mango is uncommonly known as Magifera indica. Obviously.

The grandmother of a friend who I consider a Great Authority on Many Things warned him against guzzling too many mangosteens in his youth on account of the heat in the stomach that they could induce. I have eaten many mangosteens in the one sitting and haven’t found the heat in my stomach to be any more noteworthy than that hanging heavily in the air around me.

National Glory Sold Out

This man is called Mick. He is living in his own version of the fields of Elysium. I somewhat spontaneously accepted an invitation to play pool with a random chez Mick at the Kangaroo Sunset Bar in Vang Vieng.

I’d been on a bus for a number of hours trying to tune out of the clamour created by the proximity of a trio of nineteen year old lasses to a solo young male adventurer (not pictured) wearing a very impressive collection of plaited bands on his ankles and wrists.

Although this ragged young man was no doubt seeking to project the twenty first century sense of the term adventurer, overflowing with derring-do and swashbuckling devil-may-care-dom, I am deeply immersed in my nineteenth century reading program and so use the word adventurer in the derogatory manner that one of Trollope’s drawing room ladies might; that is, to denote a slightly opportunistic and unscrupulous player of scenes and people. The bus trip from Vientiane to Vang Vieng was not a long one, but listening to three scraggamuffins from the north of English squeal to gain their knight’s attention, giggle to retain it, and then simper on his every inane word took its toll on my patience. I may have huffed a little. I may have allowed my glasses to slip a little down my nose to as to facilitate a schoolmarmish glare over the top of the frames. In a moment of compassion, I wondered whether the kindest thing to do might not be to avail the young ladies of my worldly wisdom as to the evils of the patriarchal romance conspiracy. Cold detachment won out and I kept my own counsel.

I digress but only to demonstrate why I de-bussed in a mood of no small befrazzlement. Once my bed for the night was assured, I betook myself for a stroll in search of a meal with a view. Vang Vieng is famously viewy, being a small town perched on two rivers and surrounded by limestone cliffs and caves.
My book of travel guidance, as well as a couple of random articles I had read, told me that Vang Vieng is also famous for scores of bars and restaurants constantly screening reruns of Friends. I had dismissed this information as unreliable travel apocrypha. As I made my way through downtown Vang Vieng, I was dismayed to discover that there were in fact scores of bars and restaurants constantly screening reruns of Friends. Of all idiotic TV shows of the last decade to have on perpetual show, why Friends, the most idiotic of them all, the one responsible for the fame of Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer? Why not vary the pain and screen a selection of late-nineties mediocrities? A bit of Dawson’s Creek, a bit of Party of Five (hisssss), a bit of Gilmore Girls? There is much in this world which I do not understand.

It was not without difficulty that I found a lunch venue with a view and without Friends. I made several circuits of the town before I settled down and I couldn’t help but clock the league paraphernalia outside Mick’s bar. Finding a Rabbitohs supporter in the middle of Laos provoked a little twinge of wistful homesickness, I suppose, and my eyes rested on the exterior of the bar for just a few moments longer than they should. As is reasonably well known, I do not follow any code of football so this vaguely emotional response to the green and red of the South Sydney Bunnies can be taken as a sign of vulnerability.

My defences were clearly down and before I knew it, I found myself playing pool with a shell-shocked ex-army dude from Brisbane via Kabul, drinking beer, listening to the Divinyls and Australian Crawl with footy reruns screening in the background, shooting the breeze with Mick, and feeling considerably bemused. Under other circumstances, it is possible that I might have had troubles finding common ground with Mick – a man who left Mt Druitt a few years ago to marry a Lao woman and set up a bar for tourists, a man whose bar, biceps, and chest were covered in the various insignia of the Australian state – and Charles – a man devoted to all things military, passionate about the security business, and unconvincingly owning to a great regard for the teaching profession. Anyway, Mick and Charles behaved very graciously towards this refugee from the Friends crowd with no pool-playing skills and we all managed to get along quite nicely. For such, thankibus muchibus. There did, however, come a time when I thought it prudent to leave and I was only able to do so upon pledging that I would return expeditiously. I am sorry to say that I made this pledge with no intention of keeping it and thus sacrificed both personal and national honour. Had I returned, I might have been inducted an honorary Hero of the Sunset Bar, a Deadset Aussie (Expat) Legend.

just two links

It is pouring with rain outside. I don't have an umbrella and wound up knee-deep in mud trying to cross a road under reconstruction. I had to fish my trusty Birkenstocks out of the mud before they were sucked to oblivion. Fortunately, the internet cafes of Vientiane are mud-free dryzones. Two links.

a) Self explanatory. Deeply narcissistic.

b) Someone asked me to define postmodernism. If I could have, I would have sent them here.

No incommodality

Should my mortal form be less than ineluctable, should my immaterial side have to face up to the murky business of metempsychosis, I think I could cope with safe passage into the body of a Mekong catfish. This, hounds and harlots, is how I passed much of Bloomsday.

Of course, today, it’s back to the grind. And enough with the Joyce references.

Vegetables I have loved

Some people get up before sunrise to take photographs of temples in exactly the right light. I’m as snap happy as any Lonely Planeteer and so, for example, I was theoretically ready enough to get up extremely early in order to catch the Schwe Dagon pagoda in Yangon at sunrise. I set my faithful alarm clock for five am but unfortunately didn’t make it there till mid-morning. It probably would have been in my long term interest to have wandered around the Schwe Dagon complex a little earlier in the day. I’m convinced that permanent retinal damage was caused by the light reflected from the huge golden central pagoda and its bejewelled umbrella, not to mention the surrounding bevy of gilded stupas. This pattern – good intentions to rise early thwarted by a certain languor and succeeded by a mild and easily palliated regret – has been repeated enough times to make it a habit. It would seem that I am able to rise early only to make transport connections and then, perversely, usually find myself rising at least half an hour too early. So it is, however, that many golden photo opportunities have been lost. When slide night eventually ticks along, the section devoted to sweeping vistas of the sun in transit will almost solely be devoted to the setting of the sun. For this, I apologise in advance.

On the upside, those looking forward to photographs of vegetables in the raw will not be disappointed. Whilst my dedication to early morning shots of Significant Monuments (better left to the professionals, I say) can legitimately be questioned, I do lay claim to a surfeit of diligence when it comes to photographing fresh produce. So much so, indeed, that I predict I will have sufficient material to allocate an entire evening to an exciting display of Fruit and Vegetables Around the World. Here’s a preview of what’s in store. If only I had a fixed return date, you could book front row seats.

Eggplants of Phnom Penh

A feast for the eyes! Would that I had been schooled in the Dutch still life painting of the seventeenth century, then could I render with radiant dignity these deserving aubergine orbs.

A Veritable Cornucopia of Healing Greens, Phnom Penh

A banquet for the soul! Forget echinacaea! Is there any ache or pain, any whinge or whine, any cough or sniffle that could not be eased by immediate recourse to such a dazzling collection? Limes! Oyster mushrooms! Coriander! Shallots! Ginger! Assorted leafy greens! Paging Dr. Love?

Cheap Mangosteens, Chiang Rai

A balm for the racing humours! An unguent for the over-salted temper! If nothing else, this photograph memorialises the fact that you can buy a kilo of my new favourite fruit, the mangosteen, for less than a dollar in Chiang Rai. Queen Victoria offered a great reward to any Britisher who could cultivate a mangosteen on the bleak isles. As far as I know, she died a disappointed woman.

Pineapple Slices of Chiang Rai

Strangers in strange lands, be ye soothèd. Solid proof that thrills which are sweet and cheap do not need to be nasty.

Barbequed Bananes de la Vientiane

Superior snacks! Forget about fried bananas and baked bananas and banana splits and banana pancakes. When short sweet bananas roll over a slow grill, their sugars caramelise and ash adheres for vim. I do declare: the barbequed banana is the new sundried banana!

Laotians and Potions, Vientiane

It is as you suspect. I took this photograph of medicinal herbs and whatnots solely for the sake of a weak pun.

A regression only if we are speaking alphabetically

Significant news, chaps. Steel yourselves. Faced with this beastly tropical heat, I have been finding myself disinclined to drink martinis. In fact, to lay it bare, gin without tonic and loads of ice is a bit much for me to handle in this dashed climate. I’ve ordered a couple of martinis along the way but they have all turned tepid far too quickly. As we all know, apart from a hefty dose of alcohol, there is very little to recommend a warm martini of any variety. With or without an olive, shaken or stirred, wet or dry, clean or dirty, no matter how you mix them, martinis should not be served at room temperature, nor should they be consumed at blood temperature.

I have instead developed quite a taste for the margarita, a drink far more suited to the climate. Until not so long ago, being a little suspicious of tequila, I had characterised margaritas as a drink most suitable for squeal-ridden hen’s nights and had openly scoffed at the concept of the pre-made margarita slushy as – forgive me – a plebeian drink. In my ignorance, I equated margaritas with shonky Tex-Mex paraphernalia and its symptoms: stodgy nachos, sombreros, cacti, paunchy blokes, gluey burritos, bad Mexican accents, the shedding of inhibitions better kept intact, frosted blondes, regrettable dance floor scenes induced by even more regrettable tequila slammers and so on. You all know what I’m talking about.

In spite of all this, at some point during 2006, I became interested in both tequila and margaritas; I found myself suddenly able to appreciate the glorious synergy of tequila, lemon, and salt. Wise and wizened as I am now, living the starspangled dream of my new Twenties, I find the margarita to be an excellent cocktail for the tropics. Gin Fizz, Gin Schmizz; Mai Tai, Schmai Tai. Tequila is tremendously enlivening; lemon girds the immune system and protects against scurvy; salt replenishes electrolytes shed all too easily in the heat.

I arrived in Vientiane after a mighty long bus trip and was overcome with the desire for a margarita, so much so that I darkened the doors of an establishment called, wait for it, Tex-Mex Alexia, in order to satisfy my craving. The proprietors were no doubt laughing on the inside when they named their bar after a CNS disorder that causes the loss of ability to read. Hmmm, I wondered, is that a cactus I see struggling to maintain its dignity on the bar, or is it some straggly indigenous succulent previously unknown to me? The exposed clay detail on the bar, no doubt designed to take me back to my adobe hacienda, was pasted on, not entirely successfully. Kenny and Dolly were singing to each other overhead. These, my friends, are the perils of being a single woman fixated on a single drink. You find yourself alone in very dodgy bars in cities like Vientiane where there is no-one to call for company. It wasn’t till after I’d ordered my drink that I realised that I was in what seemed to be a girly bar. By that, I mean that I was the only girl paying for her own drink, and indeed the only girl not getting paid. Sigh.

What I’m discovering, however, is that the margarita is a very forgiving drink. By that I mean when I drink them, I can forgive a scene as sketchy as Kellett Lane at four on a Sunday morning, I can forgive décor as appealing as the Broadway carpark, and I can forgive a barman even klutzier than I am. Unlike many cocktails, provided all the basic ingredients make their way into or onto the glass, margaritas are hard to mess up. If your margarita is a bit warm, the lemon and salt cool things down. If it comes with ice, the tequila can soak up the melt. If it’s too strong, balancing the glass is a nice distraction. If one ingredient is poured with a heavy hand, it’s no problem as both tequila and triple sec (or cointreau or blue curacao or whatever) are palatable enough straight. Even the dodgiest bars just fade into the backdrop as you consider the niceties of the margarita in the abstract and the niceness of the margarita in your hand. Once I find myself in a cooler climate possessed of more powerful refrigeration systems it is likely that I’ll return to the chilly embrace of the martini but for now, amigos guapitos, cansámos juntos, Viva! Viva La Margarita!

tantara

Tantara and tirra lirra. I'm smiling my best golden toothed smile because 'tis Bloomsday in Vientiane. I've swapped the Mekong for the Liffey and soon will be exchanging Beer Lao and sticky rice whiskey for Guinness and Jamesons: rejoycing by means of cross-cultural alcoholic translation.

Alas, I'm having trouble uploading photos so my very exciting shots of tanks and barren plains and vegetables will have to wait a day or two.

Tanks for the memories

Making my way from Luang Prabang to Vientiane, I took a detour to Phonsavan to have a squiz at the Plain of Jars, Laos’ answer to Stonehenge. Hundreds of very large, two thousand year old jars are strewn across a bleak, high plain. They look like stone but they are actually made of some sort of cement mixed from ground animal skins and sugarcane and sand. No one is quite sure what they are doing there or how they got there: the locals are adamant that the plain houses a large collection of ancient whiskey jars and the archaeologists are equally insistent that they are sarcophagi. It’s a very odd place, not in any way spectacular but certainly disconcerting.



The Plain of Jars is situated in Xieng Khuang Province in the east of Laos, an area which was clusterbombed beyond oblivion during the war years. There are craters all over the hillsides and unexploded ordnance still being slowly swept out. A roaring trade in post-military scrap metal supplements the incomes of subsistence farmers, and old artillery shells get recycled as troughs for animals, as flowerpots and as decorations to impress naïve young ladies. This is a fragment of the munitions collection at my guesthouse, apparently all gathered in the area.

Whilst the philistine Americans were pouring bombs out of the sky, splitting the venerable whiskey pots and spilling the remains of the venerables into the fields, the Rooshians were doing their bit for the Laotians and adding to the artillery jetsam. Plenty of the war detritus collected is marked by the Cyrillic alphabet but nothing is as impressive or as large as the Russian tank lodged in a hillside near one of the Plain of Jars sites.

Many years ago, my father was, allegedly, in a position to buy a retired Leopard tank (large, WWII vintage) from a military museum not far from Albury. He was extremely eager to take up this opportunity, as I recollect and based his case on the fun my sisters and I would have playing in and around a backyard tank. I note that the Pike hermanas were not consulted as to the fun prospects of a tank. My mother sensibly vetoed the purchase, perhaps taking the very large dimensions of a Leopard tank into account and that was that, I grew up without a tank in the backyard.

When I got up close to the Russian tank, I could see Dad’s point a bit better. Hours of fun for the inquisitive and imaginative child here!

In fact, I felt compelled to shake off the weirdness of the Plain of Jars by means of a little tank clambering. Et voilà: fun!

adrift in the borderlands

All round, the transition from Thailand to Laos was pretty painless. I took a barge across the Mekong from Chiang Khong, Thailand to Huay Xai, Laos smiled at an official, got my passport stamped, changed some money and was in business, in Laos. I had hemmed and hawed a bit about the best way to tackle Laos. The romantic in me, generally repressed, and for good reason, was twittering that a two day boat trip down the Mekong to Luang Prabang would be a suitably poetic entry into the country. The romantic in me did, however, take a bit of a battering after driving me to undertake twelve days of silent meditation on planks in Mandalay. Sitting on wooden planks on a boat in the sun surrounded by god only knows what companions could actually be a version of hell. Would it not be more sensible to take a one-hour flight from Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang? The romantic won out and I booked a berth on the slow boat to Luang Prabang. Incidentally, I could have lived the lyrics of another vintage song by catching the slow boat to China from Chiang Saen.
Come to think of it, though, I was cruising down the river on a Sunday afternoon.

Having installed myself on the boat, there was little to do but gaze at other boats, stare at the clouds, take in a bit of scenery and read. Charming, picturesque, etc etc.

There were two boxes of goon perched on the bar of the boat and whenever we stopped, kids would jump aboard with pineapple and beer for sale. My co-passengers were, for the most part, reasonably inoffensive human beings although I did notice that a higher concentration than normal of self-help books was weighing down the boat. Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway! The Present is a Present! Ditch Unnecessary Ballast! On board, there was also a large basket full of chickens which would not have passed muster with the R.S.P.C.A. They kept pretty quiet. The night was spent in a village called Pak Beng and of course when I saw this sign, I knew where I was going to eat.
Nothing like a clear delineation of domestic duties. The food was excellent chez Sivilai and I was very happy to discover that Beer Laos deserves its reputation. When we met the wife of the very loquacious owner, she seemed pretty quiet. It wasn’t until we had ordered that the owner merrily confessed that the cooking tonight was going to be done by his sister-in-law. His wife had gone into the hills with her mates, they had taken lots of beer with them and she was now too sloshed to cook. The arrangement almost struck me as egalitarian.

Laung Prabang rolled along easily enough. Adjectives like charming and quaint attach themselves to Luang Prabang pretty readily; so much had I heard of the delights of this town, I was getting ready to be the naysaying voice of reason and hate the place. Tough job, etc. Alas, I must bray with the herd. The town is beautiful, the guesthouses are cheap and clean, the food is excellent, the pace is relaxed… I twitched with delight when I was served this dish by the Mekong.
It’s posing as tofu with ginger but this is not at all the case. What it is is a handful of garlic cloves and loads of ginger stir-fried in rice wine with a little bit of tofu and a few token greens thrown in to add colour and movement. And the margaritas are delivered pint-glasses. In sum:

Things are notoriously laidback in Laos such that it would be a violation of the national ethos to try and convince this photo to rotate. Anyway, in spite of these ready delights, tomorrow I head south to Phonsavan bear witness to the Plain of Jars (sounds exciting, I know) before looping back through more scenery and faded colonial splendour to return to the charms of Luang Prabang.

Carbohydrate update

As is well known, I’m a committed consumer and defender of carbohydrates and have a particular interest in bread. As I readied myself to travel through South East Asia, I readied myself to forego effectively this dietary staple. Substituting rice and noodles for bread is no particularly arduous task and it is one to which I resigned myself without much fuss. After all, I’ll be in France in the not-too-distant future and there able to eat my body weight in baguette and fromage on a very regular basis. The bread in Burma was beyond awful: so sweet that it required salting to be palatable; so soft and aerated that it crumbled to nothing in a second and often mouldy. It was a great relief to discover the excellent breakfast soup, mohinga, and thereby obviate any need for bread. Thai bread was better than Burmese bread and it was possible in the big cities to find some decent loaves. Still, the default sliced bread wasn’t anything to get excited about.

Laos, however, has distinguished itself immediately by virtue of the available carbohydrates. Even though the current state of Laos didn’t exist in the colonial era but the area was the centre of French Indochina. Finally, we can isolate one unambiguously positive bequest of the colonial masters: the baguettes are spectacular! Bread which is chewy and salty and crusty and hearty all at once! I hadn’t realised that I had been so sorely deprived. Even better is that they are available everywhere and that butter seems to mean something beyond sweet margarine. I am very happy about all of this.

I cannot abandon myself completely to bread, however, as sticky rice, as opposed to plain old steamed rice, is a ubiquitous accompaniment. I am very partial to sticky rice. Some call Laos the Land of Lemongrass and Ginger. Me, I name it the Paradise of the Twin Carbohydrates, a title which sounds far more exotic and mysterious in Laotian.

Pop culture and Irish Modernism collide! Again!

I was wondering why there was such a plenitude of second-hand copies of Flann O’Brien’s novels in the second-hand bookshops of Chiang Mai and said as much to a young Irishman with whom I was enjoying a conversation about his national literature. Demonstrating immediately his knack for rapid character appraisal, he looked at me like I was way out of touch with the times. ‘You do know Lost, the TV show, don’t you?,’ he asked, quite politely I think. I confessed that whilst I was aware that there was a TV show called Lost on air from time to time, I had not ever had the pleasure of watching it. Had I known then what I know now! Lost, apparently, takes its narrative structure from The Third Policeman! All that mangling with the timescheme, the notion of a reality beneath (this is how it was described to me), all of that is poached, and acknowledged to be poached from the wondersome Flann O’Brien. That one episode of Seinfeld owed its plot to Krapp’s Last Tape was big news. (Of course, it was still news to me several years after the Seinfeld episode was first broadcast.) That Flann O’Brien should inveigle himself on the scene thus was delightful news. With Bloomsday approaching, I’m now sorely tempted to make grandiose claims for the impact of Joyce on popular culture but will endeavour to restrain myself for just a few days more.

Constant advice

Even far from the grandpaternal sphere of influence, I am bombarded with messages about moderation as far as alcohol consumption is concerned.
I took this photo whilst cycling, very sober, along the Mekong on the way to the Golden Triangle. I’m assuming this is a warning against overconsumption rather than an exhortion to a red-wine fuelled state of existential crisis.

Weird statistical blip

I’ve met plenty of randoms on the road thus far: young things bright and dull, earnest folks, Vietnam Vets, lost souls, retirees, ferals, bearded Oklahomans, hippies, wannabes, geography teachers, masseurs, one person NGOs… Startlingly, however, the demographic group that is most highly represented is high-end finance wonks on the lam. By that I mean investment bankers, private equity whizmoids and project financiers aged from about 28 to 35. I’m almost able to pick them out now, twigging always to a giveaway air of efficiency which has to do with pockets and watches and always being able to find a pen. Generally they’ve taken some time off work – between deals, between jobs, before an MBA, or if they’re French, for an année sabbatique – and abandoned the business class lounge in favour of the slightly infra dig dream of fair to middling travel around Asia. They all seem like nice enough people and most are endearingly apologetic when they tell me what they do, shuffling around the point and then shrugging and admitting, yes, I guess I’m going home to go to business school, mmm, I’m working out the finance for infrastructure projects for whatever government. I’m both amused and bemused by the reticence. Is it just me who gets the aw-shucks treatment? Do my glasses make me look more judgmental than your average bear? I am, but that’s beside the point. It’s not like I’m wearing a badge declaring my pinko affiliations (‘those we don’t convert, we eat,’ perhaps) and anyway, I’m not so much in favour of the violent destruction of global capitalism as its reorganisation. They’re safe, in other words. I’m a gentle person operating in mellow mode. We’re all safe. Some of my dearest friends work in finance, I always tell them (it’s true). Then I give them my best sympathetic look and say, they work you people very hard, don’t they. You deserve a holiday. And then we’re friends.

table for one, sir?

The food situation when travelling alone is an interesting one. Obviously, it’s a situation that I’m managing OK. I’m (ahem, splutter, gulp) hardly starving out here. On the upside, one is neither restrained nor impelled by the requirements of another’s appetite or tastes. For me, this usually licences an early lunch. I would abandon ship if I had to eat with a cowardly-bellied companion. I’m still surprised to meet people on buses and so forth who tell me that they are enjoying travelling in Asia, the people are lovely and all that, but the food’s a bit much, innit? Fools, I leave them to their baked beans on sugary toast and inane chatter.

In Thailand in particular, in restaurants rather than at streetside vendors, in smaller towns rather than cities, I have been the happy recipient of what I have come to term the Five Star Spinster Treatment. If not a truth universally acknowledged, it is a general and widespread assumption that a man travelling alone in Thailand is looking for a young wife. Whilst this may not apply in all cases, there are enough Western men of a certain age squiring Thai ladies of a certainly much younger age to give the assumption some credibility and perhaps to justify a little frostiness of treatment now and then. I’ve met more than one earnest and sensitive young man travelling in search of enlightenment and meaningful non-sexual cultural exchange who has complained that white men are unfairly stereotyped and treated as second-class citizens, all as much of a mindless lecherous cashed-up muchness. That’s terrible, I can’t imagine what that would be like at all. Gender stereotypes, how terribly, terribly awful for you. And what a perfectly dreadful thing to think of a reiki master, I coo and then I get the hell out of wherever there is so that I can dine alone and revel in Five Star Spinster Treatment. This means that you arrive at the restaurant and establish that you want a table for one. Yes, yes, just one person. As it’s low season, few establishments are heavily patronised. The menu will arrive and inevitably so will a gentle soul who will assess whether you are truly worthy of FSST. You’re travelling alone? Yes. Oh dear. Are you married? No. Oh, so you’re a spinster? Ooooh dear. You like Thailand? Yes, yes, yes. A little conference will take place between staff members, knowing and sympathetic looks will be exchanged, et voilà, forget about your book and notebook and postcards and staring vacantly into space for a shower of kindness and attention will soon fall upon you. I’ve learnt to await and answer vast numbers of questions about my family, my brassy haircolour, my bravery, my great height, my itinerary and then to submit to some basic lessons in Thai manners as well as extra fruit, lots of water and a fair amount of giggling. It’s excellent, so excellent that I’m able to ignore that much of it is kindness borne of extreme pity.

On the other hand, one of the downsides of travelling alone is that you can chicken out a little more easily on the so-called brave menu options. I walked past the insect vendors at the Chiang Rai markets three times and couldn’t quite make myself stop and buy up some worms. Had I been travelling with someone else, I know exactly what would have happened. I would said something tough like, ‘I bet you’re not game to eat those purple silk worms. Me, I’d eat a heap of them in a jiffy.’ I’d back myself into a corner and wind up chomping down handfuls of crickets and bamboo worms in order to maintain my Honour. Without an audience, eating insects almost doesn’t seem worth it. That said, I’m still regretting not sampling the spiders deep-fried and coated in sugar that I saw in Cambodia. Nothing deep-friend and coated in sugar can be all bad.

The Transcendental Signified

I haven’t written a whole lot about Thai food and that’s not because I haven’t been eating up a storm but rather because it all just seems just a little bit quotidian, a little bit lunch-on-King-St to extol the virtues of green curry or thick rice noodles or stir-fries with basil and chilli or cashew or whatever. Also, I must admit that my addiction to green curry has hit some sort of critical point and I’ve been ordering it, usually with tofu, yellow tofu at that, with some frequency, ie. everyday. I’m convinced that fresh coconut milk makes everything taste better. What particularly appeals to me about the green curries here is, however, the abundance of eggplant (long, crunchy and tiny all at once) and the absence of unwanted random vegetables like carrot and cauliflower. I am a great lover of both carrot and cauliflower, but I do not particularly enjoy finding them in an undercooked state in a curry. Nonetheless, coming from the city of the five dollar Thai lunch, it doesn’t seem like big news to announce that green curry is currently at the top of the Menzies-Pike culinary pops. Especially when accompanied by a Singha (although rah-yah-blah travellers all over the place tell me that Beer Laos is the best beer in Asia). I’ve also been eating a helluva lot of papaya salad, or somtum, which is offered everywhere, with multiple variants, and makes me feel extremely wholesome. Pad thai is not exactly a great gastro-discovery but the good folk at the roadside noodle carts will cook it up for less than a dollar and, wonder of wonders, use the really wide rice noodles (sen yai?) rather than the thin sticky ones if you ask, or rather, point nicely. Extra wide rice noodles – squishy, starchy and oleaginous – are an ingredient that I confess a passionate and irrational love for so I’m pretty pleased that they can so competently and quickly be turned into pad thai. Come to think of it, I’ve also found myself in ten baht rice noodle heaven at the bus stations. In my opinion, this is what junk food should be all about: stodgy noodles pre-fried in soy and garlic and loads of oil, sprinkled with peanuts and sugar and dished up to go in twenty seconds. A splosh of chilli sauce the colour and consistency of tomato sauce wouldn’t go astray either. Condiments always elevate junk food, I think, by virtue of the opportunity they provide to personalise the standard.

Anyhoo, from Chiang Rai, I made my way to Chiang Saen, a town beside the mighty Mekong, a river I haven’t seen since I left Phnom Penh six weeks ago. Being peckish, I installed myself at a restaurant across the road from my guesthouse on the banks of the Mekong and ordered the Mekong Fish Special Hot Soup. It was a toss-up between that and the Fried Four Red Fellows, which would have been a brave gastro-adventurer choice indeed. Always order the specials, always order things made from local ingredients, aren’t those the rules? I had a complicated and not exactly lucid conversation with a gentleman at the Chiang Rai markets about fish and he told me that the best fish going is Mekong catfish and that there’s too much of it so not to worry about supplies running out anytime soon. I later worked out that he was talking about the Giant Mekong Catfish, the largest freshwater fish in the world, which lives in deeper basins of the Mekong and whose capture is traditionally heralded by a ritual which involves chicken’s blood and rice wine. It is also alleged to taste like pork. I have not eaten a great deal of catfish in my time, let alone much Giant Mekong Catfish but I nonetheless humbly submit that I detect nothing porcine in the flavour of the GMC.

As I waited for my soup, I got quite nervous about what looked to be very much like a scorpion milling around amusing itself on the chair next to me. I also tried not to be aware that the party of Chinese businessmen drinking whiskey at a very impressive rate a couple of (empty) tables away seemed to be talking about and pointing at me in a fashion that I was finding a little disconcerting. All this was forgotten when the food arrived. Mekong Fish Special Hot Soup turned out to be tom yum à la Giant Mekong Catfish and I think it was the best darn tom yum I have ever eaten in my life. I’m quite attached to a kind of ersatz homemade tom yum administered as a cold remedy or, under dire and sadly more frequent circumstances, as a mid-afternoon hangover cure. Mine involves tom yum paste, stock, lots of lime juice, tomatoes, ginger and spring onions as the necessary ingredients with lemongrass and coriander and mushrooms and whatever as optional gap fillers. I highly recommend it to the suffering. Forget echinacaea, tom yum is up there with gazpacho as a panacea. Be that as it may, the tom yum at the Chiang Saen Riverside Restaurant left mine for dead. This is what it looked like before I started eating, a great tureen full of goodness bubbling over a spirit lamp.

The ingredients were just as you’d expect – ginger, galangal, kaffir lime leaves, coriander, little onions, a couple of types of mushroom, lemongrass, tomato, turmeric, chilli, CATFISH, lime juice, I guess – but the soup itself somehow wafted into divine realms of intense, definitive tom yummery. Eating this was a fully conscious ecstatic experience, all too brief, yes, but with no attendant agony apart from some suspect bits of catfish which I jettisoned. I was feeling quite reasonable before I ate the soup so can only speculate as to the extent to which it could heal and revivify the sick. Vastly, I speculate. I just kept right on dishing out little bowls of soup from the central tank until there was no more soup to go. When I reached this sad juncture, I had an inkling of why it had all tasted so good.

Check out the residue! Handfuls of pickled green chillies and whole dried red chillies and lemongrass spears, slabs of ginger and galangal, lime leaves and baby onions! There, my friends, lies the secret of tom yum, the road to good health and humour.

low profile fangin'

Here she is, Pink Shirley, the truest steed that e’er did bear a woman home.

Requests were tendered for a photo of me on the bike but I suffered an uncharacteristic bout of reticence and couldn't quite bring myself to ask anyone to take the necessary photograph. I couldn't swallow the slightly foolish feeling which arose when I considered asking someone to take the snap. And I definitely couldn't swallow the absurdly proud goofy grin which lopped onto my face everytime I got on the bike. Poop poop and all that. By the way, I think I deserve more kudos for actually hopping on the bike...

Anyway, I think it's time for a profile photo on this blog. The question is, do I post an image of myself looking quite dashing and respectable and employable and chat-uppable? Believe it or not, photos like this do exist. Should I post something joking and foolish in order to signal that I'm not taking this whole caper too seriously, that I came of age in the mid-nineties and will never shift out of the rut of self-deprecating irony? Or should I post an image of someone or something else entirely to show just how shifting and transient identity can be. A picture of my cat or a road sign or Greta Garbo or some earplugs or somesuch. These are the questions I am asking myself. Any suggestions welcome.

Paiku à la Piquée

This post is destined to have a small readership. Alas. To add colour and interest, I append this picture. Mexican hot chocolate (too good to be true) amidst the books on offer for casual reading at the Witching Well. For those short of eyesight, there is a book called Deerdancer, which is about shamanic shapeshifting, a book on love magic, and a beginner's guide to Scrying, which is communication with the spirits. I really am living la vida loca here.

Mountains sing to clouds,
Another bloody rain dirge.
Please don’t hum along.

Man, if you dig Pai
Get yourself to In-deeee-aaah.
With a spade, I guess.

Tribal tatts and dreads
Mark the anthropologists.
Tough dress code, this.

I float like a stone;
Monsoon strikes the yoga class.
Will this hut float too?

Mangos thunder down,
Sweet tropical torpedos.
There goes the moment.

Here’s to you, Nancy Reagan

One of the many pleasures of Pai is to make one’s way to a waterfall. There are at least four easily reachable on a motorbike. Got that? On a motorbike. A vehicle which I now claim as my minion. Anyway, the general concept is pretty simple: buzz to a waterfall, sit down, enjoy the view, and ingest a hefty dose of the good old ambient negative ions. Leave feeling refreshed of body and spirit. Easy. The only complication to the Pai waterfall pleasure scheme, apart from getting lost, is posed by the men of short stature who LEAP out of the bushes, both on the road to the waterfalls and at the waterfalls themselves, with marijuana and opium to sell. I tells you, the first time, I almost jumped out of me skin. I’m in the honeymoon period with my little two wheeler, Shirley, and the last thing I want right now is trouble, the kind of trouble that begins with some reasonably innocent sampling of the local specialties and some wayward cruising through the hills and ends with a ker-rash, a splatter of blood (mine), a tangle of metal (Shirl’s), a broken limb or three (mine) and who knows what else. So let it be known that I’ve said no to drugs in Thailand. Repeatedly. Put that in your pipes, and smoke it, kiddlywinks. Actually, it’s not just my fear of totalling my bike and myself which has made me shake my head regretfully at the leaping gentlemen. My good friend Sam very wisely put the fear of God in me when he told me that there are more undercover cops in Thailand than there are in uniform. Wherever I’ve been, I’ve heard tales of dumb farang getting busted for buying or using drugs in Thailand such that I suspect that at least one of the so-called hill-tribesmen who popped out of the bushes was just itching to turn me into the next high profile Australian drug moll. The very thought of the rogue’s gallery that I would join were this the case is enough to make me stick to herbal tea and tonic water for the rest of my life. What a tawdry comeuppance joining this parade would be: La Schappelle, deserving of compassion for being terribly unlucky or terribly stupid; Michelle Lee, living proof that pretty girls do get an easier run; Renae Lawrence, tough, tough enough to take Schappelle under her wing in prison and then…. moi? Surely not! Please agree that I just would not fit in. Heavens, if I were ever to be typecast as the clever, slightly awkward one who, out of everyone here, should have known better, this would be the time, and it would last forever. I cannot imagine that the depths of opiate dependency could produce a greater iniquity.

I realise that I’m hexing myself in writing this. If someone should mistake me for a mule (unthinkable) and shove some forbidden substances into my laptop case and thereby set in train some hideous travesty of both Thai and cosmic justice, please bring this post to the attention of my lawyers. Tell the media hordes that I’ll only talk to Red Kerry. Alone. Oh yes, and in the event of such misadventure, you will each be permitted three milliseconds of sadly resigned retrospective laughter at the bitter irony of this post and not a squitter more.

No beets in beatnik town

These are the first paragraphs of Tom Robbins’ excellent Jitterbug Perfume, a book to whose convoluted plot beetroot makes a significant contribution.

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is a melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin’s favourite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

And so it goes on. The beet is definitely one of my favourite vegetables and reading this book has incited a desperate craving for beetroot. Not just any old beetroot, mind you, but beetroot prepared by mine own hands: grated raw in a salad; roasted with horseradish or aioli or tabouleh or goat’s cheese; as the mystery ingredient in the magical magenta hummus...staining my hands and everything else, resisting peeling and generally causing trouble. Curse you, Tom Robbins, for inducing a serious pang of culinary homesickness and producing a fixation that will be difficult to immediately dislodge as I can’t recollect having seen a beetroot since I left Sydney, either unadulterated at the markets or on a menu.

Signs of the times

I do know that it’s quite cheap and not particularly sophisticated to take photos of signs in foreign countries and then laugh at them. That knowledge does not incite forbearance. After all, I could be devoting vast amounts of space to typographical errors in menus or somesuch and justifying it on the grounds that I grandiloquently theorised typographical error in my PhD.

Be cool. Be a waterfall here. Be a waterfall girded by some fierce and fiendish rocks. These rocks be sloshed and rocked by the waters of ages. Be watch out, smartypants white girl, or you be slip down into the abyss.
The poetics of international sign language. A potentially quite gruesome scenario is depicted here. If the jungle catches fire, watch out, ye conductors of motorised vehicles, because deer will flee the blazing shelter and obstruct your passage. And yet, this sign is quite beautiful, the sort of gentle whimsy that might make its way onto a threadless T-shirt. I’m still ropable that some scoundrel swiped my favourite threadless t-shirt from the washing line of my building. So much so that I have to post the image here.