A Bumper Crop of Empty Promises – a ticket to the stars

Why do people travel? There’s no simple answer. Do we have a primordial drive to crawl out of our skin and fly? Is it an inherent  psychic metamorphosis? To seek is to be human? It occurs to me that in our long history, our species has never been comfortable to stay in one place very long. We’ve ravaged the Earth with our migrations, we’re everywhere. Now, it’s on to the beckoning stars, which seem closer with every generation, our choking litter and petty race based politics pushing us out.

Unto the ages of ages, a world without end. There’s no easy explanation of wanderlust. Everyone does it, wants to do it, dreams about it, lusts after it, feels obligated to , regardless of social economic elite status or lower working class. Does the always active Lymbic lizard brain force this ambition upon us? Are we compelled to spill out of our personal comfort zone to seek the unknown?  Is it a survival instinct trigger?

This isn’t a recent phenomena. Humans spilled out of Africa a million years ago and haven’t stopped pushing the outer limits of our boundaries since. Modern society paints travel with a glamour brush. You’re not cool if you don’t. ‘Avoid the impulse at your peril’. Technology has made it easier to exploit our environment. We can cover distances in hours that took our ancestors thousands of years.

Modern mass tourism is sold by nations as a sign of internal economic and social evolution. “Look at us, we’re here”. The Chinese for example, use tourism as a nationalist front. They have burst out onto the world stage, to fly their flag, to be noticed. Western nations spent centuries building colonies, marking territory, like dogs pissing on a fire hydrant. What did we get in return, genocide and another pandemic? Have we learned anything…no ? Airliners are parked, not scheduled for the scrap heap. Armies aren’t being de-mobbed. We just can’t stay home. Thailand, where I live, is splashed with micro-colonies of a multitude of nationalities.

Desperate economic third world migration is not tourism but as spirit driven and consequential. The internet shows them what they don’t have and they’re drawn like moths to a flame. To travel must be a genetic affirmation of the human condition .  I travel therefore I am. Over time, wanderlust, whatever the catalyst, has resulted in grand economic and social design, failed evolutionary trajectories, and toxic relations. The tribal and diverse clash openly on many levels. My earliest motivations to travel were escapism, discovery and wonder from the profits after a summer job. That world was simple, still fractured and distant, ancient cultures remained separate, unaffected.

At the time I thought I was involved in travel as something rare and unique. The act of travel differentiated you from your peers. The planet has become smaller since. There was a simpler world to escape to, but it’s started to look all the same. My youthful exuberance is ancient history, naturally . Chain hotels with cringe-worthy fecal chloroform count pools and swim up bars replaced grass roof bamboo shacks. Those glossy over-sized magazines and photographic periodicals like Life and National Geographic that fascinated my imagination as a child have been banished into obscurity by today’s woke-cancel colonialist anti-industrial culture. I’m left with a bumper crop of empty promises. Where can I buy a ticket to the stars?

 

Cool Factor Eleven

I can think of a lot of places less attractive to live out a Corona Virus Lock Down than a quiet South East Bangkok village. In fact it’s become even more luxurious now that usually siren-heavy  distraction of traffic and crushing cacophony of bodies in the street is mitigated by the shelter in place directives. With yesterdays light rain and subsequent greening of vacant gardens, my ‘Baan‘ has reverted to paradisaical. Until recently we’d plan regular escapes to more peaceful destinations away, but nowadays it’s nice to stay home. Every day we notice something new.

The panoramic view from my hi-rise tower and wrap around condo-balcony (of which I have two) is amazing. The cityscape has never been more clear. A perpetual cloud of auto and industrial pollution has lifted. Metropolitan Bangkok is near one hundred kilometres diameter, it’s unusual to see all of it. Most western cities , certainly every Canadian city, would disappear among the clusters of spiraling towers filling the horizon in all directions. The snaking city skyline that follows the Chao Phraya River is an impenetrable wall.  Concrete spills over the horizon in every direction.

Bangkok is a mega-city of neighborhoods. Each ‘Baan” is the site of a village that once stood individually in the midst of thousands of others dispersed across a central plain. The origin of Bangkok is ‘the village of plums‘ . If you hunt carefully in the increasingly rare undeveloped green spaces you might still find hardy plum trees which bear a seasonal harvest of bitter green plums. Bitter is a popular taste among Thai.

It’s in villages ( my small area consists of ten) where Thai culture is strong, rich and practiced. Families live close and intermarry for generations. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. The temple is at the center of every community. Every young boy will have been given to temple life as a novice monk by their family at some point growing up, a compulsory service to Buddhism. The practice is as normal as a western family sending a child to ‘summer camp‘ to learn community norms and interactions, including relations among well established hierarchy and peers.

I live in such a village, a rich and luxury experience, far from the imposed isolation of  western urban experience. Becoming part of this extended family took several years of observation and scrutiny on either side. A foreigner is not easily accepted into a ‘Baan“. We were watched, questioned, avoided, tested and rejected on many different levels before we were accepted, first as human beings, and finally ‘regular folk‘.

Superstitions cast doubt on foreigners. Long established stereotypes exist due a history of odd and often abhorrent behaviors of foreigners. “Westerners are drunks“, a commonly held perception . “Westerners are dirty. They have no respect”, is another widely held belief. “Foreigners won’t speak Thai“. They are shocked and delighted when you do. It takes time and effort to be accepted as a single thread in this rich tapestry.

The rewards are enormous, the cool factor is off the charts,  eleven on a scale of one to ten. As I write I overlook a deep green khlong (canal) flowing towards the Gulf of Thailand behind me. On its western banks is a long wooden dock where fresh daily produce is brought to the wet market in slippery fast motor-craft from broad fecund fields to the south. I haven’t yet solved the mystery of why the khlong water changes color from silver to green to black, one day to the next, or why the local people don’t fish  the thick schools of huge carp that at times seem so abundant that one could walk across the water on their heaving backs. Feeding them is popular and the fish display themselves in flying bursts to complete for airborne treats.

I lift my eyes to the cluster of fantastical roof lines. A classical architecture, centuries old, Thai-Buddhist temple rises like a vision from a jumbled sea of residence roof lines. Coregated and concrete brick of every color, new and faded over time…like a tapestry sewn over time. Red tiles are swept up in the inimitable Khmer style surrounding the conical gold umbrella stupa representing ten Chakri kings.

Looking across the khlong situates me here, impossible to mistake being anywhere else. Because of an imposed quiet, we can hear monks chanting during significant phrases of the moon, as they’ve done for centuries. Like I said, I can think of worse places to self-isolate.

 

Paradise Reborn

Travelers to S.E. Asia were rare a few decades ago. There were no direct flights from the western world. Guided tours after long ship voyages were a more common means of bringing well heeled foreigners to see the sights of the exotic East. Writers like Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham thrilled the world of the 1800’s with strange scenes coached out of them by the impossibly remote regions unique beauty. The Oriental Hotel sat riverside as the most luxurious and elegant pit stop in all Asia. No shoes, no shirt, no service.

Into the 1970’s government workers,  spies, returning and exiting soldiers, ( because of the ongoing Vietnam War) and the exceedingly rare ‘business traveler’ were the few intrepid international travelers. Tourism didn’t exist. To travel so far meant that you were literally “out of touch“, an arduous occupation, a calling for some old school purist adventurers. The original ‘guide books’ were notes you’d exchange with travelers about what might lay ahead, who you might meet by chance, going the opposite way. Forget about Air B&B.

Bangkok had only one publicly available long distance line at the time, located in the grand colonial building , the Main Post Office on Charoen Krung Road in the river adjacent Tambon District of Taksin. Which means ‘Love‘ by the way, and it’s still a popular place among Thai to get married. In the P.O, sooner or later or at Christmas you’d meet every foreigner in country standing in line for the old British style phone booth to become available.

G.P.O Post Restante Bangkok Thailand was your mailing address for letters that might have taken months to arrive. You had to be patient with the postal clerks who’d often want to survey the stamps and odd post marks before handing them over. That alone drove some to ‘culture shock‘. Of, course no one spoke English. Around the corner on Silom Road was a Telex Office to send an urgent message, by telegram, paid by the word, beside the  American Express office. Amex travelers cheques were the only game in town. Banks would not exchange foreign currency. That was done black market.

You could drive from Europe to India. Hippie bus lines from London and Paris had been at it, bringing Euro-Freaks to Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Khyber and Punjabi rail heads leading to Goa and the Kathmandu Trail, since the 1960’s. I’d done it myself. But you couldn’t drive to Thailand. The Irrawaddy Flood Plain from Bengal to Cambodia formed a natural barrier to overland travel.  The first guide book on S.E. Asia wouldn’t be published until “The Lonely Planet” in 1985.

There were only a handful of tourist hotels in Bangkok, no rental condo’s, fewer swimming pools. In the post-war time between the Vietnam War and tourism Thailand was quiet. Hotels like ‘The Malaysia‘, once famous for it’s notorious clientele of warriors on leave, spies , NGO spooks, opportunists and mercenaries of all nationality fell into humid disrepair. Somehow management has kept the bar and kitchen alive to this. It was one of the only places where western food was available and still hosts a decent menu. To have been a fly on the wall in it’s heyday. And if those walls could talk?

Geographic isolation held S.E. Asian cultures intact for thousands of years. Like native cultures across history introduced to plague, this pristine Neo-Hindu Buddhist culture collapsed in a heap with the advent of mass tourism. Backpack tourism has been as destructive to ancient culture as war and occupation. Thai have a derogatory expression to describe the airborne plague of temporary tourists, ‘ Farang Khee Nok“. The phrase translates as “Bird shit foreigner’, describing a bird which flies overhead and arbitrarily shits on everything below as it passes. It’s a love-hate relationship that has lifted millions out of poverty. .

I don’t have to re-explain, regurgitate or examine the thousands of articles and journal entries penned to bemoan the fate of once pristine cultures lost. To you, an experienced traveler know history has slipped through your fingers like sand. Those same grains now mixed with concrete,  rose to form a galaxy of luxury hotels or like atolls and islands on a tropical green sea, whichever you prefer.  “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot“, a blonde goddess once sang. Anyone not in mourning for paradise lost has no soul.

It’s gone… or is it? I exist in the here and now, as a long term resident of Thailand. I see a new industry that has supercharged a poor agrarian population into a faux-middle class modernity.  And from the perspective of the ‘Twat Packer Culture“, those twenty somethings, only recently introduced to this region thinking it’s always been a lascivious beer bar and full moon party, imported ecstasy from Holland , the norm. It’s not, and it isn’t. But is it all bad? I’m not going to argue with nearly forty million tourists who visited Thailand in the peak year before Corona.

The Corona virus has killed international tourism for the time being. Culture is returning, more obvious now that the temples aren’t hidden behind mobs of flag following louts, like green shoots on a forest floor after wildfire. Is this Paradise lost, paradise found or paradise reborn? My opinion is mute. Future visitors have a choice to make. What impact will they have?

What will they make of this opportunity? Why did it take a pandemic to show us the error of our ways ? Will garbage strewn beaches be a thing of the past because of a new and enlightened breed of tourist who resists littering as spiritually abhorrent? We can only hope.

 

Sheltering in Place

“Throw caution to the wind”. We agreed on reckless abandon as best strategy. We can’t leave now. Every mode of transport, air, land and sea is interrupted by government decree. Can’t get in, can’t get out. Lock-down official, masks mandatory, locals are nervous around suspect foreigners. Not that xenophobia is new to us. Our experience with reverse racism has been enlightening. There are thirteen recognized smiles cataloged by Thai anthropologists, all have been replaced by fear in the eyes, tight fitting medical masks. We’re stranded in Thailand….sheltering in place.

 

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Do you remember a few weeks ago? We were immortal. I’ve rediscovered my mortality on cable news. Iggy Pop sang “I’ve got a lust for life”, our Generation Ubermensch anthem. We believed him, that was us. I listened, so did you. We were fearless, eternal, God was dead. Now….meh….not so much. I’m no hero, just an average Boomer guy. The Valkyrie aren’t likely to pick me for the feast.

I don’t leave my condo unless I have to. I’m no poker player planning to evolve into a master race. I live in a tall glass tower, far removed from the crowds. Outside is for poor people. My lust is flaccid. Superman hasn’t been seen for a while. I play my cards close to my chest these days.

I’m watching way too much cabal television. My satellite fix is limited to the propaganda offerings of competing global governments. The world is reduced to a wall mounted animated light-box fifty two inches wide. The idea’s being sold are much smaller. The pictures fly around the world. Social media life is encapsulated into snippets and visions of a future lived backwards. What I see is yesterday, and may as well be the fourteenth century.

An uncontrolled plague is ravaging the world. The body count is exponential. Caught between announcers is a beauty contest. There aren’t enough body bags. Italians and Spaniards are frozen in mobile morgues that drift into the night to graveyards without address. Families leave corpses of loved ones on the sidewalk to bloat in the relentless Guayaquil sun. I keep the windows closed even being a half mile in the air. I keep alcohol swabs at hand, ready for the elevator, which I avoid, ‘like the plague’.

The only thing I control are the  internet, air-conditioning remote and grocery delivery times. I pay bills on line. Customer service counters and the 7-11 are closed. I keep delivery persons at a mandated distance, and then some, as if they were diseased or highly radioactive. The plague is stripping me of my humanity., but I still tip reasonably.

This isn’t living, this is confinement. During the Black Plague,  Avignon Pope Clement, wore a conical mask with a beak like a bird of prey. He confined himself behind a circle of fire and burning bushels of lavender from nearby fields. This is what we’ve been reduced to. “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” a philosophical parable, become ironic prophesy, a worldwide frog march into the fourteenth century. A life understood must be lived backwards. One day soon we’ll have to fall in love with the world and live again…. or else.

Mid-Flight Paralysis

What use is self-isolation when you don’t have a minute to spare? Days of sunshine, weeks of Spring, a season of bounty,  passing into the panicked fog of an advancing plague. I should be celebrating my golden years, but I’m not. Instead I’m thanking my lucky stars that the bubble of imposed social distancing is keeping me from engaging with ‘the virus’. Too many people have died.

“I’m too old for this shit”.

At my age it could take my life. Because of my age , the triage ethicists at hospital might decide I’m not worth saving. I’m too old for the computer model to consider as worthwhile. Not long ago I’d achieved pensionable age. The cheque was in the mail. I was free to fly,  to do as I chose, loosed from the restraints of finance and soul sucking labor. Instead Corona has me locked down, in a state of mid-flight paralysis.

“If only China would have acted more responsibly“.

No matter how I try to avoid the media induced panic, the bad news is on heavy rotation, on every channel, Istanbul to Jakarta, New York to Nairobi, with me caught somewhere in between. The body count is worst in all the places I don’t have any ambition to go. The worst hit cities are all the most popular Chinese Tourism destinations after the New Years travel explosion out of Wuhan and Hubei Province. If only China had acted more responsibly.

“Living in a gilded cage”.

Here in Bangkok conditions are the same as everywhere. We’re all suspected ‘super spreaders‘ and grave consequences await any seeking a fresh breeze or a ray of afternoon sun. Mind and body, we’re locked down. My gilded cage is a prison whether I like it or not. Corona is my jailer. Like every prisoner my first impulse is to escape.

“A life worth living”.

We’ll all need to channel our energy where it’s needed most to see this through…into the depths of our souls. Remember that life is worth living. Personally I’m seeking perspective, in the writing of Defoe, Boccaccio and Poe. Great plague writers of the past. It’s good to remind yourself that Corona is only one of many global pandemics across history. In fact it’s not the worst we’ve seen. It certainly isn’t the first to originate in China. Why weren’t governments more prepared?

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light“.

This is a great time to take stock of ourselves. Perhaps our best objective is ensuring a healthy and prosperous exit. Make every moment count, even if your calendar is expiring. Look inside for inspiration and strength. Dylan Thomas wrote. ” Do not go gently into the good night. Rage rage, against the dying of the light”. Think of yourself as a burning volcano.

Lock down in Paradise

Who would have thought a few short weeks ago that we’d be ‘locked down in paradise‘? We’ve gone from dismissing strange rumors about a bat-disease flying out of a Chinese wet market, just weeks ago. Until January 2020 I’d never heard of Wuhan. Apparently Wuhan is a nondescript factory city in the middle of nowhere. No more. The Chinese Virus is ubiquitous and Wuhan synonymous with ‘death trap‘.

Until The Wuhan Virus, mass Chinese tourism had became the norm in Thailand. Opinions split evenly about the phenomena. Thai people see tourism as a necessary evil, an economic miracle lifting millions out of poverty in a few short decades. Twenty percent of the nations GDP depends on the 40 million tourists who visit The Kingdom every year. The ‘Land of Smiles’ has closed its borders to foreigners of every description with few exemptions. New visa’s are next to impossible to obtain.

Wuhan Virus has scared the shit out of everyone. The Virus is highly contagious. The government has taken the previously unthinkable step of locking us in our homes, and  we’ve obeyed. But you know what? It’s not so bad. My wife and I have fully developed personalities and boredom is not “the mind killer” it was famously described as by Frank Hebert’s ‘Dune’.

We’re living in a pleasant solitude, happily stranded. I’m concerned that aircraft are not safe. Health and hospital standards in Canada are no better than Thailand. In fact, because of my age I might not receive treatment in Canada. In Thailand seniors are respected. Health Canada announced recently that they have developed ‘ethical guidelines’ that ‘may‘ not allow treatment to anyone over the age of sixty. So, no hurry to go back to Canada where I may or may not receive treatment if I were to contract the virus.

My wife is a great ‘bakery scientist’, creating recipes as she goes. I’m writing again, listening to Texas Red Dirt music online. My favorite station is Dallas- Ft. Worth powerhouse KHYI 95.3. Red Dirt Texas radio at it’s best. Over the past week we’ve done our shopping over the internet. We had groceries delivered to Canada without a hitch. We have a 7-11 in the basement of our building, for the little things. Going out, into the ‘real world’ has become rare.

I’m not unhappy about trading the steamy heat of Bangkok for the air-conditioned comfort of my luxury condominium. Monsoon rains are building. Songkran festivals cancelled. It’s the beginning of what Thai call, “The Lonely Season“. Humidity increases daily. Temperatures average 37 to 40 degrees. Our only regret is losing access to our two open air swimming pools and fully-fitted fitness rooms in the complex while the virus rages around us.

We’re going to beat this Corona Virus, one way or the other, no matter how long it takes. You may as well decide to do it with style and aplomb. Even it’s only comfortable resignation, don’t fret. Will my current state of content last another few weeks if the lock-down is extended? We’ll see. So far so good. God bless you.