Off the Beaten Track

by Frank Kusy

  ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘I just didn’t turn up in time.’ Bob’s laconic features creased momentarily in a smile. ‘But I think subconsciously I didn’t want to catch it anyway. I’d found a much more interesting option: a special tour bus going to Goa. I really wanted to take this bus, because it was unusual. It was a bus full of German tourists. I wanted to take a three-week tour with them, because I thought it’d be a funny story – of an American on a German bus speaking only English. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get enough material out of them. It wasn’t as funny as I thought it’d be. Any one German on his own will speak a little English. But get them in a group, and they just speak German.’

  ‘So for three weeks, you’re stuck with this busload of Germans, and none of them says a word to you?’

  Bob nodded sorrowfully.

  ‘It was like living in Berlin.’

  *

  The following day, Dave decided he wanted to be a famous travel journalist. ‘It can’t be that hard,’ he grunted. ‘Here, give me that Walkman.’ And with that he slipped my trusty tape recorder over the table to a German backpacker who was sharing our digs at the TT Guest House.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘Have you got any good travel tips for a book that somebody might be writing?’

  ‘Not so quick, please,’ said the flustered German. ‘I speak English not so well.’

  ‘Okay. Do…you…know…somewhere…good…to go…in…Bangkok?’

  ‘No’.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Yes. The King’s Palace. I think you must see the King’s Palace.

  ‘Yeah? Do you have to pay to get in?’

  ‘Hundred baht.’

  ‘Sorry. My tape recorder wasn’t on. What was that again?’

  ‘HUNDRED BAHT. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ Dave muttered into the microphone. ‘King’s Palace….must see it….hundred baht. Now, what is that?’

  ‘It is my lemon juice.’

  ‘Yeah? And how much is that?’

  ‘Ten baht.’

  ‘Alright…ten baht…lemon juice…this is the TT Guest House in Bangkok.’

  ‘They write it on the bill.’

  ‘Oh right…they write it on the bill…they write it on the bill at TT Guest House…good tip…examine the menu and look at the price before you have anything.’

  ‘Why are you talking to your Walkman?’ said the German.

  ‘Oh, this is very important,’ said Dave. ‘I’m writing a travel book here. My name’s Frank Kusy, actually. Maybe you’ve heard of me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, have you got any more good tips about the rest of Bangkok?

  ‘No.’

  ‘No good tips. Okay…Bangkok seems to be a total write-off, apart from the King’s palace. Good tip, that. Good tip. Get the bus straight out of here.’

  ‘You know,’ said the German, looking pensive. ‘It’s very curious. I have been studying the label on this bottle of Mekong whisky, and the fruit on it looks just like our prime minister!’

  ‘Right, got that. Helmut Kohl looks like a pear.’

  ‘Ja! Everywhere in Germany, people know this cartoon of Spitting Image. And when you look at this bottle, it is the same! Here is the mouth, wide open. Here are the eyes. It is Helmut Kohl on the bottle.’

  ‘OHHH! Chapter eighteen…mention Helmut Kohl and the Mekong bottle.’

  The German’s puzzlement deepened.

  ‘I think this is not so important for a guide book?’

  ‘What kind of sandwich is that?’ said Dave, pointing at the German’s plate.

  ‘It is a chicken sandwich. Do you want to look inside?’

  ‘Right…chicken sandwich…at TT Guest House…has onion, tomato and cucumber...and, oh yes, chicken. And how much is that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think 25.’

  ‘Twenty five baht,’ Dave whispered into the mike. ‘Possibly more.’

  ‘I think again,’ said the German, ‘and King’s Palace is too expensive. One hundred baht! You can eat four sandwiches for such much.’

  ‘Note. Four sandwich! Quite so.’

  ‘I prefer the sandwich.’

  ‘Excuse me for asking, but why are you blowing your nose with your left hand? Is that a Thai custom?’

  ‘You are always asking me something when I have something in my mouth,’ spluttered the German. ‘Can you wait until it is empty?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Dave, switching off the Walkman. ‘You’ve had your chance and you’ve blown it. I’m off to interview someone more interesting. Do you know Helmut Kohl’s phone number?’

  As the hapless German rose and left, muttering darkly to himself, Dave turned to me and said, ‘I don’t want to be a famous travel journalist anymore. That was a complete waste of time.’

  ‘Yes,’ I laughed, ‘but at least I know how many sandwiches it costs to get into the King’s Palace!’

  Chapter 14

  Off the Beaten Trek

  The trek did not start well. I was bumpity bump bump bumping my way along a very bumpy ‘road’ with Dave, our new guide Swit, and two saffron-robed monks. One of the monks had a ghetto blaster pumping out Michael Jackson’s Thriller into the jungle and the other one looked like he was about to be sick.

  Suddenly, as the jeep rounded a particularly nasty bend, he was. And all the rest of us were covered in vomit.

  So what was I up doing here? Why had I visited upon myself what was to be one of the most challenging weeks of my life?

  The answer was simple. I was still gritting my teeth when I recalled that so-called ‘trek’ Trailfinders had laid on for me back in January. That last village we’d visited had been busier than a rush hour on a Friday afternoon at Piccadilly Circus.

  I was also fed up of reading about such well-trodden trails in all the guidebooks. I was going ‘off the beaten track’ in mine – my readers were going to get something new and different!

  To this end, I had engaged the services of a diminutive local guide called Swit.

  I liked Swit. Thirty years old, and possessed of a mischievous grin which engaged me to him immediately, he was the most untypical Thai I had ever met. For one thing, he was not a Buddhist.

  ‘You’re a good Buddhist, aren’t you, Swit?’ I asked him jocularly, fully expecting a positive answer, and he gave me that mischievous grin and said, ‘No. I am not pious. I am flexible. My dear papa was pious.’

  As it turned out, Swit had been a Buddhist monk – a prerequisite for all Thai boys on their way to manhood – but only for one and a half months. He had then left the temple to pursue his dream, which was to become the best tour guide in Thailand. And what was the most important thing he had to learn to achieve this dream? He had to learn English. ‘I have to learn English good,’ he explained, ‘because I am on the job. English is second language in Thai schools, but only reading and writing. So most Thais who finish from school cannot speak English.’

  While he was telling me this, a beggar sidled up to us and started making strange parping sounds on a wooden mouth organ. ‘What is the Thai attitude to begging?’ I quizzed Swit. ‘Is this man trying to make merit here?’ My guide shot me that mischievous grin again. ‘Some beg to live. Others are professionals, very rich. They come home to TV and all mod cons. They earn up to 200 baht per day. A few years ago in Bangkok, they caught a bunch of these professionals. The leader had a truck, and every morning he picked up ten or twenty beggars, and then dropped them all round town. Each beggar had his pitch, and if any other beggar tried to muscle in, there was a big fight!’

  Dave liked Swit too. ‘Man, but he’s short, though,’ remarked the chatty Canadian. ‘I mean, I’m not tall and that dude doesn’t even come up to my shoulders – I hope we don’t lose him in the bush!’

  By ‘the bush’, Dave meant the large, still remote, area north of Chiang Mai known as the Golden Triangle which had once been famous for its opium smugglers. Now, with the g
overnment burning all the opium fields and telling the farmers to grow vegetables instead, this area was ripe for tourism – the villagers had no other means of making ends meet.

  But Swit did not want to go to the Golden Triangle. ‘Weekend coming, too many Thai visitors,’ he complained. ‘We go north and west – first Mae Hong Son, then Pai. Look, there is a jeep with two Buddhist monks. Let us travel up with them…’

  *

  Half an hour off the jeep, a few clicks west of Mae Hong Son, we entered a beautiful old prehistoric forest. Everything was larger than life, like Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. Massive banyan trees loomed up all around us, encrusted with fossils, and the air was alive with the cries and shrieks of baboons and wild birds.

  ‘It is best,’ said Swit, ‘to be at the front of the line. Many leeches in forest. First person walk past, leech prick up their ears. Second person, leech on the move. Third or fourth person, leech get inside your shoe!’

  I wished he hadn’t told me that. Beforehand, I had been obsessing about spiders – wildly batting the little swagger stick Swit had given me against overhanging webs. Now I was dancing around, slapping my legs and squinting at my feet anxiously for leeches. ‘Aaargh! It’s got me!’ I gave a strangled cry. ‘It’s squirming inside my boot!’ But Swit was unsympathetic. ‘You must walk faster,’ he said sternly. ‘Back of line is bad.’

  ‘He’s like the Yogi Coudoux, isn’t he?’ puffed Dave as our tiny guide skipped ahead. ‘He’s slowed his heartbeat down to 15 beats a minute and has entered some kind of mystic trance. Look at him go, and look at him veer off in different directions with every shift of his Yogi Coudoux mind!’

  And it was true, because Swit appeared to have no idea of where he was going, but at the same time doggedly certain.

  Three hours later, weary from slogging through the jungle, I gasped ‘Where is the village?’

  ‘Oh, one hour, two hour,’ said Swit, slowing down to a trot. ‘Local guide tell me “When you come to one dog, or maybe two dogs, you are near.”’

  Dave and I stopped to listen. Eventually, in the distance, we could hear three dogs barking.

  ‘Is that it?’ I cautiously enquired.

  ‘Two dogs, three dogs, no difference,’ sniffed Swit. ‘We stop here!’

  ‘Here’ was a wide clearing with a scatter of ramshackle log cabins on stilts ranged around it. If this was a village, it looked like a pretty poor one.

  How poor it was, and how little food it had, became apparent minutes after we arrived. I was sitting outside a hut, at the top of the stairs, looking over a beautiful sunset, when the lady of the house appeared and chucked a bucketful of slops over my shoulder. It landed in a big, deep hole which had been dug just below the hut. What happened next was unbelievable. I heard this thundering of footsteps, and a whole gang of pigs turned up and flung themselves into the pit. They fought over those slops like it was their last meal on earth, and the smaller ones – who couldn’t get near the food – began shovelling up more earth with their tiny little tusks and eating it! The pigs were closely followed by a pack of wild dogs, who also jumped into the hole and began foraging. Roosters, hens, goats and a stray cow also made their way into the hole. The din was now quite incredible, what with a whole menagerie of livestock trying to get in or out of that pit. The few slops were now long gone, and most of the animals were eating earth, literally digging and eating themselves into an early grave. Finally, just when I thought they’d never get out, a large water-buffalo showed up and flung himself into the hole. Everything else immediately vacated it.

  Whoa, I thought, this is grim, what will we be getting to eat?

  The answer to that question came shortly. I looked up and there was the village chieftain advancing on me with a wooden tray held high above his head. All the local children were running around him, excited looks on their grubby little faces and screaming away like it was Christmas and New Year rolled into one.

  ‘This looks good,’ I remarked to Swit and the monk, who had both just turned up. ‘I’m starving!’

  I stopped being starving when the tray was lowered and our meal came into view.

  What we had here were five toasted mice. Well, rather larger than mice, actually – three large, purple, hairy members of the rattus norwegicus family, looking like road kill. Their feral yellow teeth were bared in snarling defiance, and their tiny toasted hands were raised up in a gesture of reluctant surrender.

  The monk looked at Swit, and Swit looked at Dave and me, and both of us looked at the monk, and he looked back at us. Nobody wanted those mice. All three of us were waiting for someone to make a move.

  At last, I did.

  ‘Yum yum,’ I thanked my host. ‘But me Buddhist. No eat meat. Only vegetable.’

  ‘Me too!’ said Dave and Swit in unison.

  The fat monk – who had been eating cheeseburgers all the way up, and who had indeed just given the chieftain the remains of his last Whopper – had no such excuse.

  ‘Oh shit,’ I could hear him thinking. ‘Six months in this village and all I’m going to get to eat is toasted mouse.’

  *

  This Karen tribe village had been a find. We put it on our new trekking trail map, and moved on.

  Though we soon wished we hadn’t.

  ‘Brrr!’ said Dave, rubbing his hands together, ‘It’s cold!’

  We were sitting in another Karen village just outside Mae Hong Son, the embers of the dying brick fire in our hut throwing out hardly enough heat to warm our toes. The sun had retreated from the surrounding forest, and we were looking at a very chilly night ahead indeed.

  ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Have some of my blanket. I don’t need it all.’

  Dave’s puckish features creased in amusement. ‘No, you’re alright. I got a thin, threadbare blanket of my own.’

  Then his eyes alighted on a beaten tin can in the corner of the hut. ‘Oh, what’s that? Could it be kerosene?’

  It was indeed kerosene, and as Dave picked it up I saw a devilish, excited glow in his eye.

  ‘Yes, this is what we need,’ he crowed. ‘This is what the doctor ordered!’

  Half the can sloshed onto the dying embers and the log fire roared back into life again. Though ‘roared’ was an understatement. It gave a titanic PHWOOOSH and Dave was blown back, his eyebrows singed clean off, to the back of the hut.

  At the same moment, out of nowhere, the village headman came running in, his arms flapping all over the place, going ‘Ay yay yay yay! Ay yay yay yay yay!’ Then he ran out again.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Dave, getting back to his feet, ‘that was fun. He sounded like that video game Bag Man falling down a mineshaft. Let’s have a repeat performance!’

  And before I could stop him, he grabbed the kerosene and emptied the rest of the can over the fire. This time the blowback was so powerful it blew the woolly cap off his head and gave him a permanent tan.

  ‘Ay yay yay yay!’ screamed the village headman, running in and out once more. ‘Ay yay yay yay!’

  ‘This is too much fun,’ chortled Dave. ‘If I didn’t want my eyebrows to grow back, I could keep this up forever!’

  *

  By day four of the trek, we were in a sorry state. We had been eating unspeakable stuff for days, and our boots were full of blood from leeches. Also, my hopes of virgin territory in the Karen tribes had been dashed when, in the last village we had visited, we had been cheerily greeted by a Frenchman in a hammock. ‘Oui, homme!’ he replied when I asked him if he’d been there long. ‘It is nice and quiet and it is off the beaten track!’

  ‘Bloomin’ Frenchmen,’ I observed to Dave. ‘They always get everywhere first!’

  Now, as we skirted the Burmese border and moved south towards Pai, we came to a Meo village without a Frenchman in it.

  Even better, it had some rice.

  ‘Oh right on,’ enthused Dave. ‘Some rice! Get a photo of that stuff! We got some rice happenin’! Give that man so
me matches for the fire. No, give him a lighter too! I’m so goddamn grateful for that rice!’

  We watched as Swit mixed in the rice with boiled egg and chillies, and then, with gratitude bordering on reverence, we tucked in.

  ‘That food was the best we’ve had on this trek!’ I pronounced ten minutes later. ‘Well done, Swit!’

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Dave. ‘It was awesome. You can tell the cook that.’

  Just before our jeep arrived to take us back to Chiang Mai, we were treated to a cinema show. As in Koh Samui, the ‘screen’ was a thin white bed-sheet stretched between two bamboo poles in a jungle clearing. I picked my way through the gloom and plonked myself down on my ringside seat which was just a long plank balanced on two wooden stools. The film was Rambo with Stallone speaking (or rather, squeaking) in a hilarious, high-pitched Thai castrato, and near the end of it a vendor turned up offering little paper bags of ‘snacks’. ‘Ooh, mine taste nice,’ I remarked to Dave. ‘Just like Twiglets!’ The two Meo kids seated either side of me were of the same opinion. They wanted my snack real bad. Quite a scuffle ensued as I fended off their prying hands, and then the film ended and the lights went on.

  I looked down to see what those kids were so keen on.

  I had dried cockroaches.

  They only had dried beetles.

  Chapter 15

  How to Die in Khao Yai

  Back in Chiang Mai, Dave did not hesitate. Throwing off his backpack, he flung himself into the hotel swimming pool and exclaimed, ‘Man, I needed that!’

  The water instantly turned a murky shade of grey.

  I smiled as I watched my ebullient young friend from Canuck land splashing about in the water. It was so nice having a travelling companion once more, especially one with such endless energy and madcap humour. Bangkok to Bali, and Bali all the way back to Bangkok again, had been gruelling and lonely – I had met scores of people and made many friends, but none of them endured for longer than the time I had to move on again.