Number one in Colupchuh

In 2003, in Bangkok, as a friend and I were returning late at night from the bars, we passed a homeless man on his regular corner. This man was naked but for very short pants, his hair matted with filth, and his body and face coated in thick, black soot. He looked like a deranged minstrel. Grinning at us toothlessly, he gave the old thumbs-up, and uttered the perennial slogan: “Thailand number one!”

(“Oh yeah?” I muttered to my friend once at a safe distance, “where else have you been?...”)

This is just one extreme, absurd example of the knee-jerk nationalism stoked so carefully and intensively here. When a man whose country has reduced him to absolute shit still thinks it’s number one, then the wedding of propaganda and gullibility is complete. As in many cases, you must believe it’s number one – otherwise you’d have to face some dire realities. In reality, there are many Thailands, and Thailand No. 1, that of the mega-rich, might as well be a parallel universe to where Sooty lives (lived?), which has to be somewhere in Thailand No. 8 or 9.

I’m writing this on the train to Chiang Mai, a 12-hour ride. It’s okay, I’m in an AC car. Leaving Bangkok feels like leaving an abuser, one of those insidious ones that promise the moon but just bleed you. Leaving this town costs money, it’s a physical effort, and strangely, I’ve found that it took resolve. But thirty minutes out and already the landscape seems gentler, cleaner, not just physically. I took a taxi to the train station. The driver was a Thai Chinese (they’re a large subset of society) who’d driven a minibus for 20 years and recently bought his own taxi. I asked him if he knew who the taxi kings of Bangkok were. Whoever owns those massive fleets of omnipresent red / yellow / pink taxis must be very rich, and very connected. My driver, however, was a freelancer.

“The taxi and tuktuk drivers around hotels and tourist enclaves are no good,” he as much as told me with his broken English.

I agreed enthusiastically, citing the fact that they all spout Thailand-number-one type slogans while peddling the bodies of thousands of Thai women for a song. Around the tourist enclaves, the taxi and tuktuk drivers are generally procurers and conmen – it’s the rule, not the exception.

If I go to the strip shows, my driver told me, I’ll pay 500 baht, while he’ll pay 20. I was beginning to like this guy. He was honest and real; he presented no illusions. (Even the approximate meter price he’d quoted me to the train station when I boarded the cab was accurate.)

“Fine, I get farang (foreigner) price. I understand. I’m not Thai, okay. But how can they say Thailand number one and still do all that?” I said.

“Thailand number one colupchuh,” my driver noted dryly. It took me a moment. Number one in corruption. Now I really liked him. No cabbie I’d ever met here had the honesty, sincerity, and balls to say this. I nodded in appreciation. He went on to tell me that the cops are also crooked here, from small fry to bigwigs, another tidbit absent from tourism copy.

“I have never been to any of those strip shows and don’t intend to,” I told him. “Because I know that money goes to the mafia, the same guys who force poor girls from the northeast into prostitution. I wouldn’t give those people a single Baht.” A philosophy I try to live by at home, too, where I avoid “legitimate” crime-owned businesses (that I know of.)

“All the tuktuks around Khao San and the tourist area are mafia,” he said. “And the whole area around the Grand Palace, Phra Athit, etc., that’s all operated by the mafia.” In short, anywhere tourists go. Bangkok is colupchuh. Big colupchuh.

Written later: the train ride

The 12-hour ride is nearing Chiang Mai. While the tourist greeters at the train station in Bangkok told us there would be little food onboard, and that we must bring our own, we have been fed continuously – three rather tasty meals, and as many coffee and cake rounds. It’s good that I took this daytime ride rather than the nighttime sleeper carriage where you go to sleep and wake up elsewhere. This way I got to see the transition in the landscape, to feel that I made this transition too. Going north, at one point the land started getting hillier, lusher, much greener. Just seeing all that green was worth the trip. Now we are passing through a clear, brilliantly starlit night in the mountain pass. I spent over an hour between carriages (o, the lax safety regulations of developing nations!) chatting to an Australian girl, enjoying the slowly darkening jungle, breathing the diesel fumes, smoke from agro fires, and wet, ever-cooling night air. And I was traveling. Oh, yes.

Assuming this post has not been intercepted by some form of mind police, here are some images from the ride. Click on photos to enlarge.

Between cars

The State Railway of Thailand thinks that "Lost" was remiss in adhering to plot rules.

AC car with fans, which came in handy, because the AC was spotty

Emblem of the State Railway of Thailand.
Every emblem here looks like a combination of Batman and the Freemasons

This girl slept almost through the entire ride. I was impressed.

Like Instagram, but not fake

Postscript:

I spoke in haste regarding the train ride. Turns out it was 3 hours late. We were on it for 15 hours (!) and it reached Chiang Mai near midnight. When I wrote we were “nearing Chiang Mai” I was wrong. We were nearing 3 more hours on a slow train. Then it reached a city I thought was Chiang Mai, but was actually Lampang. There was more and more slow crawling through the night. I spent more time between cars, and at one point saw treetops beneath me in the dark as we crossed an abyss. Once we finally set foot in Chiang Mai, I was happy. The fatigue left me. I checked into Little Home, a guesthouse I once, many years ago, stayed in with a Japanese girlfriend. I woke up an old lady, spent the first night in a musty storage room of some sort, but now have my own beautiful room for exactly half of what I paid in Bangkok. Chiang Mai awaits me, and I it. It’s just friendlier here – I have not been pestered too much by touts, and even the tourists take on the city’s easier, less paranoid (than Bangkok) air. I went out for beef noodles at a place she and I used to frequent, where the guy sits out front in a little rowboat that has all the cookware set up around him. Delicious.