Indochina 2006: Hum Lai! Hum Lai!

Yesterday, I dropped our $300 camera into a toilet bowl of my own urine. It no longer works.

In the aftermath of the incident, I felt like tearing my shirt off, clawing my eyes out, or doing SOMETHING to tangibly express how furiously befuddled I was that I had ruined our camera by dropping it into a urinal. I cursed God and I cursed myself- then I cursed God again. If I wasn’t already bald, I would have torn part of my hairline out. In the end, I settled for being a complete grump to Amber, and fell asleep thinking about how I’m going to get the money to pay rent when I get back to Canada.

The sheer combination of factors that had to take place in order to allow me to drown our camera in piss is almost proof of the existence of God. I had a backpack over my shoulder. One armed. It had the camera and some toilet paper near the top. I did my business, washed my hands, and decided to blow my nose. I reached around for the toilet paper. It wasn’t there. I rummaged further… and as I did so, my body twisted and angled around so that the mouth of the pack dangled above the open bowl.

As the camera dislodged and plunged in ultra-painfully-slow-motion towards the toilet, all I could do, in the immortal words of Turk in Snatch, was “freeze, and pull a stupid face”.

This would never happen in Canada. First, I would have had toilet paper readily available by the side of the cubicle. But in Thailand, you are your own TP supply. Second, normally, the camera is in my pocket. It was only in the backpack because we had been riding the most ghetto penny-farthing bikes around ancient Khmer and Thai temple ruins all day, and I didn’t want the camera to fall out. Thirdly, in Canada, I would not have needed to blow my nose, because in Canada, the particles in the air and water don’t give me the nose-ticklies.

Instead, I must now buy a new $300 camera, and I will never take another piss without becoming unreasonably angry.

So, I will now describe some cool stuff I saw.

1) Bangkok sucks. The Thais call Bangkok “Krung Thep”, which means “City of Angels”. However, unless “Angels” is actually spelt “P-O-L-L-U-T-I-O-N”, the moniker is highly unaccurate. The heat and humidity is oppressive. Tyrannic, even. Reign-of-motherfucking-terror-concentration-camp-tyrannic. It suffocates you like an iron maiden; it bathes your face, your body, crawls up into your clothing and down your lungs where it bitch-slaps your alveoli. The pollution is Agent Orange-lethal. Mexico-City-lethal. Huge caterpillar lines of belching automobiles snake down every street- going NOWHERE fast-
you don’t understand traffic jams untill you have witnessed what I have. On the other hand, it costs me less than a buck to take transit, so why do I care that when the ice caps finally melt due to global warming, they should name some of the floods and typhoons that resullt after the Thais?

2) Ong Bak Reloaded. FUCK. I thought Italian was an irritating language. Thai. I don’t even now how to respond to it. TIM HUCK WANG CHA LONG GO PIM PO LAM WHAT THE FUCK EVER in the most nasal, yet high-pitched fairy-drone you can conceive of. You know that bitch in Ong Bak that screeches “HUM LAI! HUM LAI!” Yeah. Multiply her by 60 million.

HUM LAI! HUM LAI!

3) The Grand Palace and Ayuthaya. Okay, the Grand Palace compound in Bangkok is a straight-up wonder of the world. When I was in Europe, I thought their churches could not POSSIBLY be surpassed. But no. This race of screeching jungle moneys wrote the book on how to decorate houses of worship. The temples are topped by these soaring spires that mimic the coronets worn by their kings and royalty and decorated with patterns of porcelain, gold, and coloured stone that from afar, they look like shattered rainbows poured into the mold of a spire. Flowers, flames, horned ridges, dragon heads, garudas garlanded each spire, and I saw about 20. In one of the temples, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, a two-ft Buddha made
of jasper sat robed in cloth of diamonds and gold surrounded by a dais so encrusted with gold that in the dark lighting of the temple, the sunlight bouncing off the gold looked like fires in a cave.

Oh. They also change the Buddha’s clothing. He was wearing his summer outfit. They have two other gold-and-diamond wardrobes for him, one for the rainy season, and the last for the winter season. Jesus only gets to hang nearly-naked from two planks of wood in the shape of a plus sign. Who’s getting gyped here?

Ayuthaya is the former capital of the Thais, before the City of Carbon Monoxide became it. This is because two centuries ago, the Burmese came down like a plague and flattened it. Now, around the ruins, a typically filthy Thai city has grown up around it. But the temples remain as a testament that at one point, the Thai people were useful. The gold and ivory has been looted, and many of the Buddha statues no longer have heads. Foliage grows out of the cracks of these imposing brick-red ruins of minarets and temples. Birds nest in the cracks of the walls, and pilgrims still come by to lay offerings to the half-broken remnants of the Buddha statues. We got around Ayuthaya by bike, and I can honestly say that if I had not filled the camera with piss at the end of the day, it would have been one of the most surreal and satisfying days of my life.

Now I am in Chiang Mai, the city of Bookstores. It is not even 12 am and I have seen 5 English language bookstores. Tonight I will go to a bazaar and see if the Thais can bargain any better than the Turks or if my Asian genes will triumph once again in finding sweet bargains.