- Poor starv'ling bard, how small thy gains!
How unproportion'd to thy pains! -

dinsdag 6 november 2012

letters to thailand - part 13

letters to thailand - part 13

To the boys and girls of the LEO CLUB
C/o the honourable chairperson BeeBee,
The Construction View Hotel Ao Nang,
81000 Krabi, Thailand

White man walking

Last week I was visiting a friend who had just received an e-mail from his wife.
She was hunting for cheap silver jewelry; it was her first time in Thailand yet she completely forgot to talk about the reason that had brought her there in the first place. In stead she was mostly going on about the toilets in the trains…I shall spare you the details, it’s much more fun to run your imagination.

The story brought me back to a very special bus trip in India.
From a place called Hampi I was on my way to Goa. Suffering the old Delhi Belly I had scored a nice ball of opium from one of the Sadhu’s who’d let me stay in their cave. The bus was full of course but, after he told me to put my bag on the roof, the driver let me crawl my way in through a window in the back.
We’d been bumping along for a couple of hours when I realized I had not taken enough opium. Other than sigarets, some cash and a passport I had nothing else on me…contraband stayed in the bag and that bag was now sitting on the roof, hugged by scores of other bags, sacks with rice, baskets with chicken, two scooters, a bicycle and the harvest of some 10 acres of coffeebeans; before Goa I would never get to my ball of medicin. Just in time I made the driver understand that we were dealing with an extreme case … we had to stop … NOW!
Outside the bus I panicked…not one bush or tree. With a million eyes in my back I walked, only to return some thirty minutes later. Inside the bus there was complete silence.

Most Indians are born with Delhi-belly, they are prepared… and fast, in and out the bus in thirty seconds. Goa was at least another twelve hours away…I wanted to die. An old man must have seen my bewildered eyes. Reading the total despair he smiled, handed me an old loincloth and gestured I should rap it around my waist. To be completely prepared I unbuckled my belt…trousers fell spontaneously to the floor. I had gotten to be so skinny, when I stucked out my tongue I looked like a goddamn zipper.
As I made my way to the front of the bus I realized I was on the verge of writing history. The driver wasn’t convinced: "If you walk distance I leave your behind" , he shouted as I left the bus. Outside I took exactly one step. Close to the left front tier I squatted and lifted my makeshift skirt. In no-time I was cleaning my ass with water from a soda-bottle. I got up, washed my left hand with the remaining water and got back on board. The whole operation had taken not more than forty seconds. For a moment, ever so briefly, there was that same eerie silence until suddenly everybody clapped their hands wildly. There were screams and whistles. The driver slapped my shoulders hard, smiled broadly and said: "Now you’re an Indian."

My cabin in Goa, like the bus that had brought me there, lacked a toilet.
"Outside", my landlady yelled from her porch, "that white cabin overthere, between the coconut trees."
Inside there was a concrete block measuring about half a cubic metre. At one side there was something that looked like a little slide. It ended downneath the wall in which there was a rough hole. I didn’t have much time to think about that…climbing the rock I squatted, carefully manouvering my behind over the slide.
Sheer horror! Without any warning something wet and hairy was stuck up my ass…it felt like a dishwashing brush. I jumped up and outside where I found myself eye to eye with a band of pigs…one of them had shit around his bristly nose.

For the rest of my stay I would dump into the Indian Ocean. The fish were having field days.

letters to thailand - part 1
letters to thailand - part 2
letters to thailand - part 3
letters to thailand - part 4
letters to thailand - part 5
letters to thailand - part 6
letters to thailand - part 7
letters to thailand - part 8
letters to thailand - part 9
letters to thailand - part 10
letters to thailand - part 11
letters to thailand - part 12