Letter from Thailand

My homebound flight cut into Dublin at an angle which gave me a great view of the city below. It looked as grey, damp and low-key as ever but I couldn’t help but get excited. So much so that when the plane rolled to a stop and the seatbelt signs pinged off I jumped to my feet, retrieved my bag from the overhead and stood in the queue to disembark knowing full well that the doors wouldn’t open for at least 10 minutes.

Hot, humid, muggy Bangkok has a smell that slams visitors in the face when they arrive and sticks to them for the duration of their stay. Although best described as a mixture of car fumes, poorly maintained sewers and cheap cooking oils, you eventually become immune. The clean, cool, crisp air that sweeps across Ireland and into the aircraft cabins on Dublin airport’s runways however, made me instantly realise how deprived I had been. It was like gulping a first breath after being held under water.

I declined to have anyone meet me at arrivals; mainly due to the fact that it would have meant an airport run at rush hour, but also because my Mother, the prime candidate for such an imposition, had herself been bitten by the travel bug and was mid-way through a solo trip around Australia. And so it was that I hoped off the airport bus on O’Connell Street, wheeled my suitcase past the spire, over the bridge and down the keys to Tara Street Dart station while a misty drizzle settling on my Summery clothes.

A flick through a newspaper some thoughtful commuter had left on my Dart seat quickly acquainted me with the state of terror the country has found itself in the grip of since the onset of the recession. I had kept reasonably up-to-date with the major happenings in Ireland while away, but I somehow didn’t take on board the full extent of the damage being done to the Irish economy. The paper screamed headlines about massive budget deficits, bank shares collapsing and tens of thousands of immigrants turning on their heels and heading straight back to the airport. I mean, I leave you people alone to look after the country for five minutes and come back to find it in this state.

Anyway, by the time I knocked on my old front door the weather had conspired with the economic gloom to knock all the wide-eyed nostalgia I had briefly felt for my soggy homeland out of my system. My Ma I decided, who has signaled her intention to stay abroad indefinitely, had the right idea.

Reunions with various friends and family members were every bit as enjoyable as I expected them to be and one in particular, with a lad I had been good mates with since primary school, proved extremely interesting. Robbie had been contacted by a friend of his who worked in Australia’s booming mining industry. Apparently, mineral companies were struggling to get skilled and non-skilled labourers and were offering implausibly generous packages for those willing to work shifts in middle-of-nowhere Outback mine sites. Robbie’s mate was cleaning up and reckoned he could sort us out with a job that would allow us to do likewise.

With Ireland’s full-blown 1980s-style butter voucher, KVI crispy pancake, soda stream recession making my chances of securing full-time employment within a reasonable time-frame unlikely, a legger back to the airport sounded like just the job.

I had older siblings and other family relatives who joined the hoards heading for Ireland’s points of departure when our economy was last in shreds. It had gone arse-up again, and now I would get to experience it for myself. The last time I went away I was a shiny new product turned out by the Celtic Tiger’s education system which plucked youngsters from council estates and put them through third level for free. Going abroad in order to take a job as a reporter with a publishing house in Bangkok had a very different feel to it than the trip I was eying this time round.

And so it was that we began to lay our plans to take that well-worn route from recession-hit Ireland to Australia’s sunny shores with March penciled in as our departure date.

My farewell to Thailand was somewhat rushed in that I arrived in Bangkok from Cambodia a day-and-a-half before I had to fly home. I was shattered from my trip and dry retching at the thought of the long haul ahead, but was easily talked into a farewell piss-up by my fellow Irish ex-pat Chris; a gargantuan David James lookalike who grew up in my housing estate in Dublin and had been living in Thailand since his early 20s.

A little crew of farang guys I’d met through Chris and my Muay Thai corner man and good friend Ek got together and headed off into the steamy Bangkok evening. We bummed around from bar to bar, sipping happy hour beers and buzzing off the ever-cheerful bargirls who hit us up for free drinks.

The thoughts of leaving the next day horrified me. I wanted to see my family and friends, but my year in Thailand was the best I’d had and life back in Ireland was unlikely to match the carnival my stay in Asia had become. Around the time alcohol chased off my concerns about making a 20-hour journey with a hangover I decided that going home was in fact a ridiculous idea. It would make far more sense if all my family and friends simply relocated here. If only the thought had occurred to me sooner.

We ended up in the one remaining Bangkok nightclub that opens beyond 2am. ‘Spice’ avoids being shut by the police because it is owned and staffed by the police. Thailand’s boys in brown frequently stand accused of failing to properly enforce the law. They may be incompetent on that score, but they know how to run a club. Taking out the competition was a masterstroke and the place was packed with the full complement of dodgy individuals you would expect in the last remaining after-hours spot in a city that lives off its reputation for having a wild nightlife.

The majority of the clientele being hosted by Bangkok’s crooked cops seemed to be female and implausibly attractive. My thoughts were apparently written across my face because Chris quickly read them. “These are all dancers from the go-go bars,” he said with a blank expression. “This is where they come when they’ve clocked off.” I sighed, swilled the beer around in the bottom of my bottle and knocked it back. “Don’t worry,” Chris continued. “You’ll grow to love rain and unattractive women after a couple of years back home.” I cried a little inside and headed for the bathroom.

Overly conscientious toilet attendants are no rarity in Irish nightclubs but the Thais, I discovered, take it to disturbing and potentially hazardous new levels. No sooner had I arranged myself in front of the urinal than two hands landed on my shoulders. I yelped and spun around as far as the job at hand would permit me to and discovered a sprightly young man in a shimmering waistcoat and dickey bow.

“Jai yen yen!” he chirped before erupting into laughter along with a number of his similarly dressed and hitherto unnoticed colleagues. Apparently it isn’t at all uncommon for toilet attendants to attempt to win tips by giving impromptu kneck and shoulder massages to whoever wanders up to the urinal.

“Don’t you ‘jai yen yen’ me!” I wailed, jolted by the thought of the heroic beating such a move would precipitate if attempted in Paparazzis in Dun Laoghaire. “I’ll tell you what,” I continued, starting to see the funny side. “How about I pay you not to touch me while I’m going for a slash? Will that work?” They had probably seen the same reaction from bemused farangs a million times, but the way they had to hold each other up to stop themselves from falling over laughing suggested that it just never got old.

As I pushed my way through the throng of girls who delighted in pinching, poking and giggling at every unescorted male who came within reach of their overly-manicured fingers, it occurred to me that most of them would kill for the unwanted plane ticket I had back in my room. Many would happily walk down the isle with any sweating, middle-aged derelict westerner for a visa. It said a lot about the human condition that all I wanted to do was stay while all they wanted to do was to leave.

The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur but I have a vague memory of walking down the Bangkok soi which was home for much of my stay. I recall slurring teary farewells to inanimate objects ("goodbye lamppost! Good bye tuk tuk stand! I'll miss you!" etc.). The sun was creeping up between still-blacked out skyscrapers and within an hour the whole city would explode into life for the day. Sadly, it was one I wouldn’t get to see – because I had a poxy plane to catch.

Looking around at Bangkok in the days before I flew home I was struck by how different it appeared in comparison to how it seemed when I arrived for the first time. Living in the Land of Smiles for the best part of a year had made me see it in an entirely different light.

During my first visit I never really managed to make the separation in my head between the beaches on Thailand’s south islands and the capital. As such, I tended to wander around the city and even into bars and nightclubs wearing the beach-bum uniform of board-shorts, flip-flops and a counterfeit t-shirt bought off some stall or other. I was totally oblivious to the fact that the Thais all dressed in an entirely different manner. By the time I was due to leave I was giggling along with my Thai co-workers at the beach-ready foreigners whose dress sense doubled as sign reading, ‘I’m an oblivious tourist!’.

Another big difference came about when I learned to speak a few snippets of Thai. The Thais are an extremely proud people and while most working in the hospitality industry fully expect people to address them in English, the average Thai on the street is rarely over the moon when a foreigner assumes they are proficient when asking for directions or whatever, and in so doing highlights for anyone else who might be within earshot that they actually aren’t. Thais, being an extremely conflict-averse group who see confrontation as something which brings about loss of face to all parties involved, will generally remain all smiles in such situations and not let on that they might be irritated or offended. So, most foreigners can blunder on blissfully unaware that they have just ruined someone’s good mood.

Visitors who didn’t take the time to pick up a phrase book and learn 20 or so words before flying out will occasionally encounter a Thai willing to use the fact that the farang in front of them is advertising their newly-arrived status to their advantage – and more often than not they will be in the form of a taxi or tuk tuk driver. Tales abound of wide-eyed tourists being taken for mugs in all manner of inventive ways. Rip-offs range from the old negotiate-an-inflated-price-before-the-start-of-the-journey-instead-of-turning on-the-taxi-metre trick to bringing the farang to a commission-paying out-of-the-way jewelry shop and refusing to take them anywhere else until they’ve both something. Which will usually be fake.

However, even if visitors get away with it, and they generally will, I’m of the opinion that there is something fundamentally wrong with going to someone else’s country for anything more than a couple of days and expecting your hosts to be able to cater to your needs by speaking a language that is foreign to them. You don’t have to master the language – but you can at least make an effort.

Naturally, the first thing I did was learn how to chat with the taxi drivers who ferried me from apartment to Muay Thai gym and sky train station to night market. Starting with asking them to turn on the metre and instructing them to go left, right, straight or to a stop, I slowly built up a repertoire that allowed me to converse in a way that created an illusion of language proficiency that simply didn’t exist. I learned how to politely guide the conversation and keep to the narrow topics I could actually speak about. It was like a deviation-free pre-prepared speech that I rattled off with a few predicted interjections from the driver. I had originally decided to embark on the endeavour as a way of avoiding the hassle of taxi scams but I was immediately struck by how happy a little effort with the language seemed to make to people. Not only did scam attempts freefall, but Bangkok’s taxi drivers actually went from potentially my worst enemies to being my best friends.

A lot of people who go to Thailand see the smiles they are met with by the locals as a being transparent means of hiding mercenary intentions. It is true that the Thais keep their smiles on hair-trigger. The mercenary aspect could be somewhat accurate for those who never get beyond the tourist areas where the Thais they meet make their living by parting foreigners from their money. If you dig that bit deeper however, and especially if you arm yourself with some of their language, the country and the people open up and those ever-present smiles become far more genuine.