Dispatch from Bangkok

Sat 3/23/02 12:28 PM

It was 90 degrees in the shade today.

Fortunately, we spent most of our time in the air conditioned sixth car of  the weekly government excursion train to the River Kwai Bridge.

The highlight of today’s 15-hour, $5 roundtrip rail adventure obviously was the bridge, which we were able first to walk across (whilst whistling the appropriate melody, of course), and then to cross while aboard the train. Beyond the bridge was another section of track, the section known as the Death Railway because of the incredible number of lives its construction claimed.

In the afternoon, we stopped at a town the name of which I didn’t catch. Here we drank milk straight from coconuts bought from street vendors and wandered the dusty backroads among a zillion stray dogs. Here also a strange thing happened:  as we browsed in a Video CD store, laughing at the amazing array of karaoke discs available in this desolate Thai town, we espied a monk in an orange robe coming toward the store. After making a purchase (no vow of silence, I guess, for this guy), he crossed the street and hopped into the backseat of, of all things, a waiting BMW sedan. Perhaps there’s something I don’t know about the monastic lifestyle.

Of course Thailand is full of things you don’t see every day. Such as kickboxing, Thai style, which we viewed at the Rajadamnern Stadium on Wednesday night. Thai boxers use very lightweight gloves. But they don’t seem to punch as much as they kick. They also spend a lot of time in a clinch kneeing each other in the gut. All this they do to music that sounds to my untrained ear like something Bin Laden might play in his cave (as distinguished from some other traditional Thai music we’ve heard which is very nice.). Interestingly, they also have ring girls who hold up the round numbers, but they are extremely conservatively dressed; supposedly the Thais are much more conservative than Bangkok’s reputation would have us believe.

The best fight we saw ended halfway through the first round. Red held Blue in a kind of headlock while he kneed him repeatedly in the stomach, lifting Blue’s feet off the mat — just like one sees in kid’s cartoons! — with each powerful upward thrust. After about four such thrusts, Blue collapsed in a heap and had to be removed from the ring on a stretch-frame litter, specially designed to roll right under the lowest rope. This was done in typical Thai fashion, which is to say with stunning alacrity. They didn’t even wait for Ferdi Pacheco the fight doctor to come down and make sure the guy was all right before carting him off.

Speaking of off, Chris and I are off to Burma dark and early tomorrow morning. We plan to spend about two days in Rangoon before traveling north to Mandalay then into China. I do not know what to expect from Burma email-wise, but I’ll write again as soon as I can.

Best regards,

Jeremy