On the road again - Thailand part 6

On the road again

I thought I was sleeping, but even despite the pounding rain I could hear the collective gasp and feel the van tense as we braked suddenly, and swerved. A dog. The rain was coming down in sheets and I wondered how the driver could even see, much less brake for all of the curves he was taking at speed. I alternated between trying to sleep and not focus on my potentially imminent demise and staring nervously out the front windshield, but it was clear that there was nothing I could do at this point, and my fate was in the hands of what I hoped was a competent driver. Competent or no, the van a 15-passanger vehicule, the kind my parents didn't want me even riding in when I was younger because of their propensity to tip over, it had no seatbelts, it was 4 AM and pouring rain. At least the 4-AM part was to our advantage; traffic in Thailand is often more of an obstacle course than a path to a destinaiton, and the fact that we were not sharing the road with an armada of scooters and motorcycles contributed to our safety. Still, I can't pretend I wasn't nervous, but as I tell myself frequently, whether I die or not is determined by forces beyond my control, and worrying about it won't change it. During the daytime, traffic is barely controlled chaos. It seems like there are twice as many motorcycles as inhabitants, yet you constantly see entire families piled onto one machine. Stopping at a traffic light in Chiang Mai, you see a flock of literally hundreds of motorcycles, many of them with an additional person perched pillion-style on the back. Sometimes an old lady clings on feebly behind, or you see a woman returning from the markets with double her width in bags and baggage. There are also the sidecar varieties, though for many it's a kind of mobile shop, with things that dangle and rattle as the vehicle moves. The motorcyclists weave in and out of traffic, the shuttle busses stop suddenly in many places, and wherever there is a market it seems to spill out into the street. In the more rural areas you'd see, for example, a younger guy clinging to the back of the load of a pickup truck - at highway speeds (okay, most things only go 40 kph anyways, but still) - or a load almost three times the height of the truck, ballooning out over the sides and taking on almost comical proportions. And at some places there are cows on the road, which certainly contribute to the mayhem. This morning, the van was left swerving from the shoulder over two or three lanes towards the median (of an almost completely empty road) to avoid potholes large enough to serve as a watering hole.

We had all piled out of the house at 3 AM. It was strange to see everyone dressed and wandering around, looking sleepy and excited at the same time. We were off to Bangkok by van to meet the princess; a 10-ish hour drive. Eventually the rain must have let up and/or I must have relaxed, as I was able to more or less sleep for a few hours and awoke to a vision of verdant, mist-shrouded hills flanking some body of water, and I struggled between being awake and asleep. Mostly I was trying to decide if I was cold or if my legs were cramped; I'm not small and not usually dressed for air conditioning.

I feel you can judge a place quite a bit by its coffee; strangely, some of the best coffee producing regions seem to drink the most terrible coffee anywhere. Sumatra is not far away from here, yet most people drink 3-in-1 instant coffee, which I find drinkable under duress but not particularly good. Egypt was a mixture: Nescafe was widely available, and somewhat less so turkish coffee. But in Turkey: no Turkish coffee to be found, just cay (tea). In Europe, where no coffee is produced, they make fantastic drinks, which are exported elsewhere but otherwise horrendously overpriced. American coffee, much disparged, is at least mostly made with actual coffee grounds, and with the gentrification of coffee even that is quite drinkable. Thankfully Singapore has adopted the chinese Kopi, made from actual coffee beans, poured from the height of about a foot and a half (half a meter) and mixed with condensed milk.

All of that was a prelude to saying the coffee we had for breakfast was simply terrible, with an aftertaste of coffee filter and a strong actual flavor of some kind of spice. Or old coffee grounds, who knows. My friend ordered an ice coffee, which was also terrible but in a different fashion, with its own unique and terrible taste. Still, as anyone who knows me knows, I'm functionally retarded until after my first cup of coffee, so you can bet your buttons I drank the stuff. And wonders of wonders, I am now awake.

Despite the traffic and despite the terrible coffee, we made it alive to Bangkok, though the old guy was carsick towards the end, and we were again welcomed at the singer’s home where we had stayed the first night. They, of course, welcomed us with all manner of hospitality, which included an apparently famous and expensive dessert. Now, I’m not in general a big fan of jelly desserts and things made of strange wobbly gelatin, so I wasn’t too keen on the bowl of clear jelly surrounded by some kind of viscous clear liquid. I, ever curious, wanted to know what it was. The grandpa wasn’t really having much of anything to eat on account of his fragile stomache and general weakness, so Jun, the singer’s brother, told him it was good for health: “The last time I had it,” Jun said, “my wife couldn’t sleep for four nights.” I tasted it and didn’t like it, and it was happily lapped up by another family member. The dessert? As near as I could tell from the explanation, it was made from the saliva of seagulls, used in making their nests. Or something like that.