Everything Is Possible Nothing Is Sure

This is another picture of me and the kids on the back of that long suffering elephant. Actually while it seemed a bit cruel the way they were chained up at the elephant camp, at the same time they seemed very well cared for, well fed, well exercised and much loved by their trainers. There's a way to rotate the picture to an upright position but in an internet cafe I can't for the life of me work it out. This is our last full day in Thailand before heading back to Sydney. It's been great getting out of the routine of my life and the chronic depression I had sunk into. And fascinating. The world has moved on since last I was out in it. While I grew up travelling, my father was an airline pilot and I had free airtickets until I was 24, the last decade, since I broke up with the kids mother and there was two years of crippling court dramas made far far worse by the shocking level of corruption in the system, life settled into a pretty same same routine; not flash with cash, lost everything like most separated blokes, the house, the car; not the kids which a lot of them also lose.

The Thai economy is growing at 13 per cent a year I'm told and every single bloke on the planet seems to have ended up here. We're in Chiang Mai, which last time I was here in the 70s was a quaint little town in the seemingly remote north of Thailand, and now is an absolute buzzle giving Bangkok a run for its money. We are near the Thae Pai gate; a tourist area; smoke belches forth from a thousand cluttering took tooks and taxis and buses and cars; at night the clubs all pound out music and laughter and hundreds of drunken blokes make fools of themselves. I love you long time. 2,000 Baht; they say. Come in mister. Soon enough it would be: you come I go. That's the way of it. Some very ordinary looking blokes who couldn't get a root in their home town, much less a looker, are hanging out with georgeous Thai women on their arms. They're paying through the nose and they're as happy as Larry.

They're so keen to please, they say in astonishment, broad grins on their faces. They're simply not used to women who are eager to please. Even if it is at a price. Australian women, like Russian women, they say, are high cost high maintenance and no matter what happens you will pay. Here they are high cost only by local standards, and the Thai attitude to sex; happy ending guaranteed, has made it a mecca for every horny bastard in the universe. From the golden arsed boys wearing numbers under their chests under flourescent lights; to the thousands upon thousands of girly bars dotting the country, from the brothels to the take home bars; pay the bar 400 baht; pay the girl, boy or lady boy 2000 baht; and the pleasure's all yours. Mass tourism has changed the world; it amazes me that you can just go to an ATM in the streets of what was once the third world and take out money, just as you can at home; the internet is faster, the phone service is better; the economy is booming in a way the Australian economy, hide bound with regulation, never will; and they flock from all over the world in their hundreds of thousands. Double story planes used by the cheap airlines transport them in a cut cost universe equalled only by the net as the entire world turns into one enormous theme park.

THE BIGGEST STORY:

By Freddie Mooche
(AXcess News) Washington - The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee met Tuesday to figure out how to constitutionally block President George W. Bush's Iraq plan with the goal of curtailing additional troop deployment to the worn-torn Middle Eastern nation and limit the U.S. military's conduct in the war itself, which could include troop withdrawals.
While Committee Democrats have made it known that they disagree with the President's troop surge, Republican member Sen. Arlen Specter (Penn.) has joined fellow Judicial Committee members in backing the Senate members move to cut Bush's authority. "This is a joint and shared responsibility," said Specter.

Sabye Sabye

We've finally left Pai after being stranded or abandoned there for the past couple of weeks. I completely enjoyed it, after getting off the bus the first day and thinking, we're not staying here. The first impression is appalling; like a Nimbin on speed with tourists everywhere. But five minutes off the main drag and it's absolutely beautiful. And there are so many characters there if you want to get involved. Some of the hippies are just appalling. There was one character from france with a bald shaved head with a little matt at the back and various tatoos all over who was complaining that he had come all the way to Thailand in search of an "eco-village", apparently a village which is truly at one with nature, but couldn't find it. But he didn't believe in searching too hard for it, because that would be against kharma; so the fact that he couldn't find it because he hadn't stumbled about it was enough to make him decide that he was leaving Thailand.

I saw him in a cafe this morning reading some book called The True Earth. He clearly needs his crystals re-energised. There were others; like old fashioned rastas, with thier matted hair hanging down the back of their necks, filthy, you've got to be filthy. But the wierd thing was they weren't stoned; just high on life man. Sheeeesshhhh. Wouldn't have happened in my day.

But apart from all that it was just fun; sitting with the Thais at 6am drinking coffee for 10 baht; about 30 cents Australian; I'm about the only tourist up at that hour; just working out who's who in the zoo. There's a few very enterprising swedes and dutch blokes with georgeous girlfriends and cute as button children who will tell you cheerfully that they were postmen or whatever in their home country; thought there life was over and then came here. And then of course there was Eddy. It didn't end well. He tried to bite me for another couple of hundred baht last night because he had missed his money transfer from Western Union by ten minutes and I just thought no mate; I'm not funding your drinking habit. There's a reason I don't drink like that, or drink at all, and that's because drinking like that will kill you. And besides, I've got two kids in tow and I work for my money and give it an f'n rest. So it didn't end well; but I must admit I had some very entertaining conversations with him as he did his own Under The Volcano routine. Under the Volcano is regarded as the best description of a drunk in English literature; it was always my favourite book, Malcolm Lowry, who of course died a miserable death as an alcoholic; and while Eddy had never heard of Under the Volcano when I mentioned it to him; his streams of poetry and hysterical stories about spending half his life in jail and the other half as a chronic junkie were enormously amusing. Maybe it wasn't healthy for me to be listening to all that; but it was fun, sitting up late at night listening to blokes from all over the world talking about all sorts of crap. At home I've just been going home alone.

So quick so eager to please, the boys say of the Thai girls; and they laugh and they laugh; and they all say they haven't laughed like this for years. We've begun the long journey back to Sydney; booking into a pretty ordinary guesthouse in Chiang Mai tonight and moving around the corner tomorrow. The kids have gone back to the hotel to watch TV; they're getting homesick now but will no doubt boast about the experience for quite some time to come. It's all been much more expensive than I planned; it'll be a quiet few months while the credit cards get back into shape. But I've enjoyed myself, and I haven't said that for what seems like a very long time.

Same Same But Different

This is a picture of me and the kids on the back of an elephant on the Pai River in northern Thailand. We've been here a fortnight now and are leaving tomorrow. I just don't want to go. Sometimes I get home to my bungalow late at night, well not that late, and think; I'd forgotten how beautiful it was, the sound of the river, the moonlight reflecting off the water, the lights of the huts down the valley, even the lighted lanterns that float off into the sky at night. I've loved it here. Yesterday I was thinking we've done everything, it's time to leave, and today I'm thinking, why, why, when everything is here.

I have to be back at work on Sunday. I was so depressed when I left. Ceasing transmission wasn't the half of it. I don't know what it was, some depressive jag after Ian died. He was the sentinal, somehow, in the internal cosmology, the one to report back to, the chronicler of all our lives; and his passing seemed to reflect on everything. Sydney was boring late at night; no real late night cafes, playing pool with the tragic trannies at 3am had limited appeal; and there was just nothing, there in the darkness and the silence before the dawn. I could never sleep. Here, with the sound of the river, I sleep for hours. Or sit and talk to people from all over the world, literally all over. Back there, I had lost faith in the story; the writer, the observer, the camera eye, the role that God and fate had cast were all meaningless in the depths of growing older and more silent; day by day. Here there are blokes from all over; all ages; and for some reason; maybe I've got that sort of face; they tell me their whole life story in the first five minutes of meeting them. I was a postman, I worked in an icecream factory; I was divorced, there was nothing there, I had money in the bank and I set off two years ago and just never came back.

Never came back. Same same but different. It's a common phrase the Thais use in the midst of negotiations to justify why, after half an hour of assuring the customer that this one was the same as that one and the price would be the same, that in fact it cost extra, because it's same same but different. Like all the other sayings. The land of smiles is also the land of money, with the economy expanding at 13 per cent a year. Suddenly they're all running around in brand new Toyotas, money changes hands rapidly, schemes and dreams. Everything is possible, nothing is sure. One of the last nights at work; I got there, churned out 400 words on our noble fireman for a self promotional activity by the paper; then updated a weather story that hadn't run to take in hail storms in Armidale while reinforcing the prediction for the first white christmas in more than 20 years; then had to find an academic anti-euthenasia after the publication of a how to kill yourself book; then realised there had been a shutdown on the eastern suburbs rail network after passengers reported strange smells; a false alarm, then the radio room rang down and said there had been an explosion at the entertainment centre, turned out to be fireworks in a car park, then bashir was exonerated by the Indonesian courts and I had to ring Bali bomb victims; lifting the scabs off the wounds for the thousandth time, all this just before midnight; then doing the radio spot on the ABC, the national broadcaster; and there could be no mistake. And I haven't had an upgrading in 12 years and thought: what the fuck am I doing?

Ceasing Transmission

Sitting in an internet cafe in the mountains of northern Thailand fiddling with uploading pictures. Still working it out. Mastercard wrote and asked if I wanted my credit extended and I thought: that's a holiday. Walking along a beach in Phuket I realised that my whole self image had devolved into thinking that all the good times in my life were over, sad, sick and lonely, well chronically depressed actually, sick of work and sick of my life and longing for an escape, any escape.

It didn't work out that way. We've been in Pai a hundred and something k's north of Chiang Mai for quite a while now. For a time I never wanted to leave but it's time to go now. We've been everywhere and seen everything, watched the sunrises and sunsets in the mystical valleys; watched the hordes of tourists come and go. There's been a Thai documentary on Pai recently and there are massive numbers of what seem to me to be newly wealthy Thai tourists here; outnumbering the westerners. In the old days it was just westerners; and the relics are everywhere, in the cafes with chocolate cakes, the Mellow Yellow bar; the latter day hippies in the streets. The fashion looked daggy in its day and looks even more so now. And the wierd thing is they're all straight, sipping their ginger tea and talking about how Pai is one of the only places on earth where all the lai lines meet. There's no dope here, a military coup will do that I guess, and they're all just out drinking at night or recharging their crystals or whatever they get up to.

The hippies are known as being clanish and unfriendly; while the most entertaining company in the whole town has been Eddy the town drunk, who thinks I'm a great bloke because for some reason or other I keep lending him money. Most of the time it comes back. I sit swilling over-sweet orange juice and complaining that my liver means I can't drink, which is basically true, and sit with him smoking rough Pablo Burmese cigarettes and listening to the stories that pour from him in deluded torrents. He fell off his bike the other night, drunk as a skunk, blood all over him, and I was nearby and helped wash the blood off him and made sure he got home alright. He thinks the Thais were all very helpful to him after the accident, but in fact they were standing back askance. He broke his dentures in half and had to super-glue them back together. The last time that happened, he said, was when someone stuck a gun in my mouth. Yeh, I thought, and I bet you deserved it.

But it's been great to be somewhere else, outside of things, outside of routine and outside of the spiralling patterns of my life. Back to work a week from today. Sigh.

IRAQ WATCH:

ABC:

By CALVIN WOODWARD and LARRY MARGASAK
WASHINGTON Jan 27, 2007 (AP)— Convinced this is their moment, tens of thousands marched Saturday in an anti-war demonstration linking military families, ordinary people and an icon of the Vietnam protest movement in a spirited call to get out of Iraq.
Celebrities, a half-dozen lawmakers and protesters from distant states rallied in the capital under a sunny sky, seizing an opportunity to press their cause with a Congress restive on the war and a country that has turned against the conflict.
Marching with them was Jane Fonda, in what she said was her first anti-war demonstration in 34 years.
"Silence is no longer an option," Fonda said to cheers from the stage on the National Mall. The actress once derided as "Hanoi Jane" by conservatives for her stance on Vietnam said she had held back from activism so as not to be a distraction for the Iraq anti-war movement, but needed to speak out now.
The rally on the Mall unfolded peacefully, although about 300 protesters tried to rush the Capitol, running up the grassy lawn to the front of the building. Police on motorcycles tried to stop them, scuffling with some and barricading entrances.