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.

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.

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.

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.

Seeing the light

I will forever remember Pai as a place of revelation. I was warned in advance by several parties that there’s something of the vortex about Pai. You plan to stay for one day, you wind up here for a week. You plan to stay for a week, you wind up here for a month. Something in the air, etc etc. If there’s a pinch of Byron Bay in the Chiang Mai mix, there’s a whopping great spoonful of Nimbin (without the junkies on the street) in Pai. This is the main bridge across town…

Little town, pitched on a slow moving river, surrounded by lush rainforest and rice paddies. As far as accommodation goes, there’s a wide range of cheap bamboo bungalows to choose from and then some slightly ritzier digs near the hot springs up the road. I’m staying in the Sun Huts, where all the huts are named after planets; the Unicorn Huts (‘one big Family’), Rainbow Huts and the Lazy Chair bar and restaurant are located nearby, as are the Pai Treehouses and some centre called the Natural Mystic. There’s plenty of puns on the name of the town too: Cinema Pairadiso, Pairadise, Pai in the Sky… but no Pai-ning for the fjords, in spite of the heat. The fact that Pai rhymes with high hasn't escaped the punsters either. All round, it’s pretty herbal and people from all around the world come to Pai seeking some sort of revelation.
The life is a journey not a destination crowd are particularly well represented here; Japanese and Israeli karma counters constitute some sort of demographic hump. You can get a pair of traditional fringed leather moccasins made here although whose traditions are being followed I know not. Lots of people are working hard to give folk music a very bad name, sighing and yeah-yiiieaah-yeahing their way through some ill-advised covers. I did a yoga workshop with a childless woman who called herself Mama. It’s resolutely off-the-beaten track. One company selling treks into the hilltribe villages offers a 50% refund if you see other tourists. Inexplicably the same operation also advertised mental help as part of the package. I sat in a café called ‘The Witching Well’ (hold your fire, they work some serious voodoo magic with cocoa and cinnamon and call the result Mexican hot chocolate) and flicked through some of the books on the bookshelf. Information on Wicca, shamanism (the Amazonian, rather than the Nordic or Siberio-Mongolian varieties being favoured), and my old favourite, reiki, was available in abundance. If I wanted to, I could read The Celestine Prophecy here and follow it up with The Teachings of Don Juan. It’s extremely beautiful here, I’m quite relaxed and my defences are down but I’m not ready for that level of enlightenment. Noooonono, not just yet.

What is it then that has been revealed to me in Pai? Are you now reading the blog of a healer? Am I going to start extolling the virtues of wormwort which hasn't been turned into absinthe? Has my totem amphibian lead me to a tumultuous understanding of my place in the cosmos? None of the above… Amigos, hold on to your hats for a bold truth is approaching…I’ve learnt to ride a motorbike! Yep, I have discarded some of my former inhibitions about being in charge of motorised wheels and got me a motorbike! Sure, it’s a bit of a girly bike, a 125cc automatic number, and it’s hot pink (photo to come) but I have managed to fang my way through the backroads of Pai, visiting waterfalls and temples, without injury to myself or any others.

How on earth did I swing this, you may well ask. Who in their right mind would rent me a motorbike? After so many capable people were unable to teach me to drive, how on earth did I manage to overcome a language barrier and learn to ride a motorbike? I have never ridden a motorbike on my own, I don’t have a driver’s licence, I have the spatial instincts of a drunken mule…

My friends, the truth is, I lied. I lied and bluffed my way into the rental contract and fluked my way out of the gates. I was given a fifteen second refresher lesson in the operation of the vehicle (admittedly not too complicated), took a deep breath and summonsed up all the Menzies-Pike capacities, willing the ancestral technical prowess which had laid dormant, nay morbid, for my entire life, to spring to the surface, and somehow managed miraculously to start the putterpuss and ride off before they realised their mistake. A little automatic bike isn’t too hard to negotiate but, as much as I enjoy the egotism of the autodidact, I think I possibly could have done with a little more initial advice. Learning to conjugate Russian verbs on my own? No problem. Figuring out how to slow down, look out for traffic and pedestrians moving in fourteen different directions, stay on the bike and turn around a corner… not entirely unproblematic. I have in the past been a notoriously reluctant recipient of mechanical advice but I confess that a little more help, especially on the turning of corners and the turning of motorbikes right around when one has been travelling in the wrong direction, would have gone a long way. I was pretty bumpy on the old start-stop business for a while there too but now, even though I’m not going to break any land speed records, I think I’ve got the basics licked. The roads are in pretty good shape here and there is very very little traffic. It’s low season, there aren’t many tourists around, and life is pretty slow moving anyway. I wouldn’t say the small children of Pai are necessarily safe, nor would it be entirely true to say that there haven’t been some close shaves with the local bantam population (unpredictable little blighters, chickens).

Watch out! I’m going to get my motorbike licence once I return to the more settled life. I’ve got the Easyrider soundtrack on high rotation in my head (and the last twenty minutes of the film in the denials box). I’m convinced that people will take me very seriously if I ride a motorbike. I’m all ready to tell the sceptics that my great uncle raced motorbikes at Penrith in his teens, so there, it’s in my blood. I have even had the odd delusional thought that I could get a motorbike licence in the UK and then make my travel around Europe a little easier and more exotic but this sounds like too scatterbrained a scheme, even for me, even in Pai.

Reasons you want to stay on my dinner party list

It may not look like much, but mango sticky rice is a divine dessert.
The laudatory descriptions delivered prior to my departure by la belle Hoffmann-Ekstein put my palate in an anticipatory state. The reality here in Thailandia has been all too splendid. I’ve eaten banana sticky rice in Sydney and think of it fondly because it is the complementary dessert which accompanies home deliveries from Eat Thai, a stalwart of sedentary evenings in the inner-east. Banana sticky rice, as good as it is, isn’t a patch on mango sticky rice and it’s all in the texture. Sticky rice is steamed which makes it, at its best, chewy and sticky. The mango, should, ideally, be a firm and juicy counterpoint to the rice. One could make a case that a good banana should be firm but not too firm but a juicy banana is either overripe or squashed and hence the antithesis of firm. Ergo, mango is the superior accompaniment to sticky rice. A drizzle of fresh coconut cream seals the deal. And now, finally, I know how to make sticky rice. Hurrah!

PS: note P.G. Wodehouse casually placed in the background, what ho.

rain man

This is the best campaign poster I have ever seen. Strategists, take note.
The Chiang Mai elections are being held in the not too distant future and this man is one of the candidates. There have been some serious floods in CM over the last few years and this chap is clearly keen to demonstrate his credentials as a man on the front line of community aid. What strikes me firstly is that he looks ever so slightly ineffectual in this photo and secondly that the bright whiteness of the polo shirt is quite startling compared with the brown water engulfing the rest of him. The babykissing stakes have been raised!

Things about Chiang Mai bookshops

Chiang Mai is a small city – around 200,000 people – and it was voted the fifth best city of its size in the world. I am a little dubious about city rankings but thought the figure worth recording. It seems that Chiang Mai does not fear running second as there is a pizza place in town which happily advertises the second best pizza in town. I haven’t gotten to the bottom of that one yet. Even though I haven’t undertaken comprehensive research on the matter, without hesitation, I award Chiang Mai first place as far as Availability of Second-Hand Books in English in a Non-English Speaking City (small-medium size).

Some things I have noticed:

* There are more second-hand copies of Thus Spake Zarathustra for sale in this town than there would be in O-Week at the Co-op at Sydney Uni if this were set as a first year philosophy text (and had been ordered on time).

* Many so-called off-the-beaten track travellers pass through Chiang Mai. This accounts for the Ethiopian and Kazakh phrase books. Excellent.

* Lots of Dickens for sale in Chiang Mai. In fact, I estimate that total Dickens outweighs Gaskell, Austen, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. OUTRAGEOUS!

* There are more copies of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man than The Da Vinci Code for sale at Gecko Books. There are two ways of looking at this. The way I’d like to think it goes is that the travellers who come to Chiang Mai are a discerning bunch and bring with them Modernist Classics rather than Bilge to read. What I fear is the case is that second hand copies of The DVC just walk out the door whilst Joyce stays on the shelf.

* Philosophy and self help books are shelved together in some establishments.

* Marion Keyes made it into Modern Literature section of Gecko Books whilst Gore Vidal was shelved with General Fiction. On the other hand, Gore Vidal occupies a whole shelf in the Contemporary Literature section of the altogether excellent Backstreet Books.

* Inexplicably, the many, many copies of Anna Karenina and War and Peace on offer are not matched by Dostoyevksy’s Greatest Hits.

* Bertrand Russell occupies one fifth of the philosophy section in one establishment shop.

In spite of these oddities, Chiang Mai is a glorious pleasure-dome of book browsing. The books are super-cheap and a very odd variety of titles are available. If this were Glebe Point Road, the shelves would be picked through in a day, the Beats memorial displays would have been pillaged long ago, and the stores of highly collectible orange-cover Penguins and classic British crime ravaged.

What is particularly interesting to me, not to mention dangerous, is that all books in the same condition are roughly the same price. No distinction is made according to publisher, date of publication, or rarity. This dazzles my bibliographical sensibility. Wordsworth and Penguin classics are the same price and so are New Directions and Olympia Press and Bantam. A Black Sparrow Bukowski is equivalent to a Picador Tom Robbins. Long out of print and really hard to find Ursula LeGuin novels equal David Eddings or Brian Aldiss or someone lame like that. It’s crazy. The very simple lesson, that Books are Heavy, is one that I have almost internalised. When I moved house, this knowledge came closer to being wisdom, even though I didn’t move the boxes. Travelling with books in a bag that I, shock horror, have to carry, is really bringing the message home. Books are Heavy. For this reason, I’m not going to buy up big on stupidly priced second hand books in Chiang Mai and make my fortune by selling them off in London. No really, I am not going to buy a copy of Kenner’s Joyce’s Voices in perfect condition for two dollars and resell it for forty… I could, however, easily persuade myself to spend a week here, buy loads of underpriced books, post them on eBay and thus fund an even more decadent excursion through Indochina. Even though this is probably the best money making scheme i have ever concocted in my life, I'm going to let it pass me by. Instead of making my fortune by exploiting the benevolent pricing policies of the CM bookshops, I'm catching a bus to a town called Pai. By all accounts, my destination will provoke a state of terminal riverside relaxation and I may never leave.

Anyway, I’m still drowning in Gravity’s Rainbow and have The Magic Mountain on the side to reread and thereby elevate my being in time. Most of the bookshops here will buy books back without too hefty a markdown so I have shuffled through a number which have lightened my senses somewhat. Thus far, inter alia:

Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses – to assuage my uneasiness at not having read it years ago, an egregiousness, I understand, for one interested in the American Novel in the Twentieth Century and the Western;

John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick – in the hope that this one will convince me about Updike’s standing in Contemporary Letters;

P.D. James, The Children of Men – as counterpoint to the film, as follow-up to the Dagliesh mysteries. Now that I’ve read it, I want someone who has seen the film to read the book so that we can have a long earnest conversation comparing the two. Anyone?;

Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven – in the hope that this might touch some of the heights of The Dispossessed;

P.G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves – What ho! ‘I began to realise that my ideal wife was something quite different, something a lot more clinging and drooping and prattling, and what not.’ Enough said;

Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Under Ground – Hypothesis: The more Ripley, the better. Results: Confirmed.

I’m going to sally around the north of Thailand for the next week and will return to CM to exchange some ballast on the way to Laos. As I have mentally designated Laos a zone of minimum activity, I will need many books. Notwithstanding a mood change, my current intention is to plough through the last four volumes of Trollope’s Barsetshire Chronicles (and thus notch a reading feat that no-one of my acquaintance under fifty has on their belt, and leaving only twenty-odd doorstops by the nineteenth century’s grumpiest novelist to go, not to mention the collected works of Balzac) and finally to acquaint myself with the works of Richard Ford. Riveting stuff, I know.

First train journey in S.E. Asia a roaring success!

I arrived in Chiang Mai by train, a very auspicious entry. I wasn’t able to catch any trains in Cambodia because the passenger train system was apparently shut down a few years ago. To my great disappointment, train travel in Burma was also no kind of option, firstly because it was onerously expensive and secondly because of the talk of forced labour gangs building and maintaining the lines. Of course, I then saw the road labour gangs and realised that the bus was only the cheaper, rather than the more ethical route.

Anyway, the sleeper train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai reminded me of why I like train travel. You’re rocked in a cradle rather than lurching over pot-holed roads and the beds on this train were actually extremely comfortable. The train is patrolled by people selling good things to eat and drink; there are enough Scenes from Human Life to inject colour and movement into vacant gazing into the carriage and once that’s done with, you can pull a set of blue curtains and retreat into a cocoon of doze. Excellent.

The centre of Chiang Mai looks rather like North Thailand’s answer to Glebe Point Road. Perhaps that should be the other way around: GPR is clearly Sydney’s answer to the North of Thailand. Second hand bookshops and yoga studios everywhere, massages offered on every street corner, vego-vegan-organic-macro food in abundance, a big market, and plenty of opportunities for self-improvement in the form of massage, yoga teaching, cooking, kickboxing courses and so on. Once I’d found a place to stay, I ambled down the road and stumbled into a bookshop-cum vego eatery. Suddenly, I’m eating a salad special, drinking organic coffee, man, reading a back issue of the New York Review of Books (with a long article by Joan Didion) and wondering which yoga class I’ll go to that afternoon. Time and place warped somewhat.

One has to be careful in hippy towns and there are some signs which are keeping me on flake-out alert. As seduced as I am by the rancho-relaxo-dom of GPR, Byron and surrounds, and now Chiang Mai, I fear losing my tough cynical edge. You know, I’m happy to wear fisherman’s pants and long strings of beads and abandon grooming in order to get closer to my animal self; I’ll get as excited about tempeh on a menu and centres devoted to biodiversity as the next earth-lovin’ peacenik but I fear being sucked into the irony free vortex of peace and love. There are no Kahuna massages on offer but there are some dubious signs.

1. A reggae bar called Freedom with a ganga leaf stencilled over the front door. Skinny white dreadlocked boys in service to Jah all around.

2. The reading needs of the followers of Osho (creepy creepy tantric sex cult) are so well addressed in the local bookshops that I suspect that there is an Osho centre (an oshram?) nearby.

3. Past life therapy. There is little that I am more cynical about than past life therapy. I’m sometimes tempted to go along just to enjoy the claim that I was once one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies in waiting or a Tibetan shamaness or a lieutenant who fought in the Boer War in drag or actually Djuna Barnes (who died after I was born, I think, but had lost it, by common consensus, well before 1977) but my ego holds me back. What if the past life therapist, using not clairvoyance but common sense to pick up on my scepticism, decided to teach me a lesson and told me that my past lives were all lived mucking out stables and emptying chamberpots and supervising latrines, that centuries of dung preceded this life? Then where would I be?

4. Meet a shaman! From a tourist brochure: ‘Interested in a Soul Experience? Diana Manilova, a Russian expatriate has lived in Thailand for the past 5 years. Working with individuals and groups, leaders, business people and scientists, her psychic gifts are globally recognised. She is a classically trained musician, published author and talented, Russian certified healer.

Regardless of your spiritual beliefs, meeting Diana can be an unexpected discovery. You may even find yourself taking part in a healing meditation and walking on broken glass.’

I swear I didn’t make that up. All I wanted to do was interrupt via square brackets. I’m far from ready for soul experiences.

5. New Age capitalism. You can buy into holistic investment schemes and make money from macrobiotic capital. Yay.

6. Dolphin paraphernalia. Lots of it. Enough said.

7. T-shirt slogan; ‘Slow down and enjoy the present moment.’

I was told by a man in a bar that I had a long way to go before I had fully abandoned my farang (foreigner) ways. I think this was an oblique was of suggesting I was a little uptight (avec raison, mes amis). I will, however, keep holding on very tightly to my farang ways if they protect me from a potentially fatal over-immersion in the present moment, if they act as a talisman against the siren song of the dolphin.

Co-opted at last!

Bangkok is bright and noisy and slightly disorienting. I found myself a place to stay far from the festy sink of backpacker inquity that is Khao San Road, a cheap room with hot water and functional electricity and a bookshelf and a coffee percolator but it took more than clean hair and a caffeine injection to adjust to Bangkok. I thought it might be possible to eat myself into a state of post-Myanmar re-adjustment. This tactic wasn’t entirely successful for some reason. Too much choice, that ol’ thing. I read a couple of Agatha Christie and P.D. James novels to steady my nerves and reassure myself that the world always makes sense, that the killer is always found, that order is always restored.

Still, Bangkok was confusing me. I needed a context for the bright pink taxis, a bridge from the 50c street noodles to the Nike-iPod collaborations in the malls, from the monks and wats to the neon and concrete and these could not be provided by genteel British crime novelists. What I needed, obviously, was a mainline dose of pop culture. I watched some Z-Grade movies on cable to see if this would help. Alas, American Pie 2 (true) and The Perfect Catch did not bring back my mojo. The BBC World theme music was beginning to feel like a drill in my skull. I needed to do more than merely listen and look. No, my friends, what I needed to come to terms with Bangkok was a fully embodied radical pop-culture experience: the multiplex!! I voluntarily underwent complete sensory distortion therapy and saw 28 Weeks Later at the top of a shopping centre: aircon so intense that you’re provided with blankets in the cinema (OK, I went for the supercheap VIP seats), amazing surround sound from all directions, lights, lights, lights, simulated odours of delight wafting everywhere: and it worked! The best photo sticker machines ever, a lurid disco bowling alley, a hugely serious, seriously huge gaming arcade, comic shops, crazy camp hostesesses at pizza shops, gadgetry ahoy, don and ramen bars in fluorescent boxes, weird Olde Americana themed pretzel bars,previews for a Thai language martial arts screwball comedy (Jackie Chan meets the Farrelly brothers in a ladyboy bar), standing up to pay respects to the king before a film about a rage virus, familial disloyalty and the end of civilisation… It might have been a hallucination as there were no photos allowed but suddenly, Bangkok is happening!, the Asian megalopolis makes sense, and I want to go to Tokyo!

i can feel the devil walking next to me

Yangon Airport looks like an early James Bond set, one that has been gathering dust and getting gradually more dilapidated for decades. Boarding passes get hand-written and the aircon conked out when I was there, changing the terminal climate from glacial to stifling in minutes. I wasn’t convinced that I would make it out of Myanmar until the plane to Bangkok actually left the ground. The sense that something could go wrong was omnipresent throughout my stay in Myanmar. Not only is every piece of infrastructure in a state of disrepair, the many authority figures administer a set of shifting incomprehensible rules and are not particularly open to negotation. Foreigners need to pay a US$10 departure tax. My twenty dollar note had an infinitesimal tear (we’re talking a one millimetre tear here…) on one side and hence was rejected as payment, a problem as I had absolutely no more cash and no means of getting any. It took twenty reasonably tense minutes and a few extra airport officials, including one with a gun, before my note was accepted. Keeer-razy.

Anyway, one hour on the plane and boom! Bangkok! Bright lights! Hyperstimulus! Consumer Culture! Fast moving traffic. I wandered through the ritzy Siam Paragon Mall near my hotel making conversation with myself about the products like some sort of demented DeLillo character. Oooh, look, I didn’t know that Philosophy made a Margarita bodywash, aren’t they clever. M.a.c girls, all around the world, they all look like beautiful space freaks. Mental note, Apple shop. I’m not even going to look at the marked-down Cacharel shirts and Camper shoes. Gee whiz, walk-in Balenciaga! I’m far too grotty to cross that threshold. Hello Haribo! Haribo GOLD! And so it went on. Nothing like a re-immersion in global consumer culture to make you feel right at home…

Notable culinary experiences, with digressions on the side

Close and uncensored observations of my eating experiences have been promised. And so, in no particular order, it begins.

1. Mango, sticky rice and coconut cream on the street in Bangkok.

Sweet, salty, chewy, and succulent all at once. Marks deducted for service in styrofoam.

2. Degustation amok in Siem Reap.

Amok is one of the national dishes of Cambodia, or so I’m told. It’s a mild red curry of whatever meat, fish or veg takes your fancy, served in a banana leaf with a swirl of coconut cream on top. The curry paste is spice rather than garlic-ginger-galangal based, thinned out with stock rather than coconut milk and the whole seems to be brewed with some sort of red pepper, onion and morning glory. It’s pretty tasty. And it’s called amok, which lends itself to a delightful array of puns. And a degustation amok seems to me to make a good thing even better, with five versions of the one dish, all displayed in their own little banana leaf compartments. I really must start taking photographs of such noteworthy dishes. Full marks for presentation, Amok (the name of the restaurant as well as the dish).

3. Banana flower salad, Siem Reap

Prasit’s does a mean banana flower salad, possibly a better banana flower salad than this. Monica, who is highly knowledgable about such things, tells me that is because we have better quality produce in Sydney. Of course we do. That said, a banana flower salad within coo-ee of banana trees is hard to beat.

4. Banana pancakes, Angkor Hilton Guesthouse.

This guesthouse was a little terrifying. I was dropped there at 11.30pm after a truly heinous fifteen hour trip from Bangkok. The bus trip was dusty, hot, and bumpy, there was a five hour schlep through border checks in the middle of it and it was punctuated by a sappy English girl lisping, ‘it’s all experience, innit’ every five minutes. So is being in a padded cell, love. After all of this, I would have slept under a banana leaf. As it happened, I slept at the Angkor Hilton. Our deposition there was a clear example of collusion between a bus company and a guesthouse as no sane person would have recommended this place unless they were on the payroll or a member of the family. Yes, it was large and airy and clean and cheap-ish. (The price offered pre-midnight was subject to some increase with the passage of eight hours. In fact, the overnight net increase in tariff turned out to be 100%. Classy. ) The fact that there was no electricity was a negative, but one with which I could cope. (The midnight story was that the king of Cambodia was visiting in a few days so electricity was being conserved in his honour. The light of day revealed this to be a fiction.) That not one of the surfaces would have passed a basic-spirit level test was worrying to my only occasionally practically minded self. (Watching my torch roll along the window-sill was amusing for a very little while.) The great difficulty I had in convincing my hosts to let me leave was unnerving. (It involved the concoction of a large ballooning fiction involving room reservations elsewhere, a large boyfriend, two large boyfriends, and the inability to make plans independently, and a lot of girly shrugging and giggling.) All that said, the Angkor Hilton made a mean banana pancake – bananas properly caramelised in coconut milk and fluffy eggy pancakes. The coffee tasted like it had been made with last week’s dishwater, but the pancakes, the pancakes were grrreat.

5. Chilli sauce, Thai Airways

The precedent for a constant fine array of condiments was set on the flight from Sydney to Bangkok. The insipid inflight noodle offerings were supplemented by optional sachets of chilli sauce. Since then, chilli, in various forms has rarely been more than two metres away from my table.

6. Gristle-filled spring rolls, Angkor Wat.

Alas, what record of notable culinary experiences would be complete without a serious dud? Monica and I arrived hungry at Angkor Wat at sunset and thought that we would brave one of the Khmer menu only resto-shacks and order on the ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ principle, using the time-honoured ‘point and smile’ technique. A little gesticulation took us a long way. A little risk-taking on the eating front seems vital to me. My father instilled this principle in my sisters and I from an early age and it is one that I am determined to pursue. Following the bloody-minded Pike principle, we wound up with a yummy sour chicken soup and a strange sweet curry with cold noodles, some kind of meat and sausage and pumpkin. On watching others, I realised we were supposed to eat spoonfuls of this alternating with bites of fresh chilli. Unfortunately the chilli-lime plate had been taken away before we could try this. Some cold, yellowy-looking drinks were delivered to the people at the other end of the table. They looked happy, I thought the drinks might be some sort of soothing lemon concoction so we finangled a couple of them too. They turned out to be sugarcane juice – super-sweet, but palatable. The chaps sitting next to us were onto our game and watched us, amused; when fresh spring rolls arrived in front of them, we got in on their act. The fun stopped here. Plenty of fresh greens – mmmm. Some slightly gritty tiny prawns – oooh-kay, texturally challenging but do-able. We both stopped at the same time when we realised that there was a texture which couldn’t be categorised as either leafy vegetable matter or odd little shellfish. That texture turned out to be strips of what I can only describe as cured gristle, long chewy strands of some sort of tough fat which had been stewing in something acidic for an insufficient period of time. It was unforgettably awful and suddenly absolutely inedible. I remain haunted.

Thus far, I am sad to report that I have consumed neither dumplings nor crab. I expect this sorry state of affairs will be remedied soon.