Cambodia Diaries - 14 October 2010

Bangkok Revisited

One night in late February 1990, my mate Stuart Martin, myself and several mates were being treated to yet another woeful QPR performance in the FA Cup at Loftus Road. Stuart mumbled something about avoiding such displays next season by heading off to Australia and having caught my ear, I piped up that not only was I also harbouring such thoughts, but that I had been putting a few quid away for such a trip.

A week later we met for a beer and embarked on months and months of planning which in actual fact was a case of trying to decide where the hell we were going to go. I was up for a bit more adventure, Stuart keen to just get to Perth, Australia for a reason he did not know why. The next few months were not fraught, but we did make a huge amount of changes, alterations and about turns before finally settling on a plan that bore an uncanny resemblance to the one we had first mooted to the travel agent a couple of weeks after deciding to go for it. It’s odd really but when I look back now, what we booked was hardly that adventurous but at the time, it certainly felt like we were going into the great unknown.

And before we knew it, there we were at Heathrow airport on Monday 15th October 1990 saying goodbye to our families, both wide eyed, bushy tailed, utterly clueless and totally naïve as to what lay ahead!

Twenty years later!

It’s incredulous to think that Friday, 15th October 2010, is the 20th anniversary of our departure and with a certain sense of nostalgia, around a year ago Stuart and I decided that we would return to Bangkok, the city where we first landed back in 1990. In the days before the internet, we had spent an inordinate amount of time planning for this part of the trip to such an extent, that when we pushed off a few days after our arrival in the Thai capital, we hadn’t a bloody clue about what or where we going next.

Without a hint of irony, a year of planning via email, texts and skype, sadly saw Stuart having to pull out of the anniversary return to Bangkok and so I went instead whilst Stuart headed for another place we visited, Bali.

Avoid dumps like the plague

Our extensive research of the time revealed that ‘travelers’ upon landing in Bangkok headed straight for Kao San Road which is where we duly pointed our taxi in the direction of. The more I had learned about the backpacker/$1 a night Kao San Road, the more I knew it was not for me. But Stuart seemed game and so I went along with it. Meanwhile, over in Edgware, the more Stuart learned about backpacker/$1 a night Kao San Road the more he knew it was not for him but as I seemed keen, he went along with it as well.

The name of the guest house we headed to has long since escaped me, but what neither of us have forgotten was the description in the guidebook of the rooms having “…a long-term short horizontal mirror…” Neither of us knew what such a thing was and so we decided that we would find out.

After landing on a hot, humid and rainy Thai morning after an inordinate amount of delay clearing formalities, we got into the taxi and upon arriving at Kao San Road, I took one look at the place and thought, “Dear God no, it’s a dump!”

Kao San Road...same as it ever was!

By now raining and lots of lanky haired hippies in sight, Stuart was too knackered to get out the taxi and so in I went in to inspect. When I came out, sat back in the taxi and said to the driver “Take us somewhere nice please!” the collective sighs of relief by all three of us was palpable. Firstly for the driver, who would earn a fat commission for taking us to the hotel of his choosing (and very nice it was too); Stuart because he wasn’t going to stay on Kao San Road and me because Stuart’s reaction was such that I knew we would not stay in backpacking hovels.

Later that night over a cold one, Stuart suddenly enquired: “So what’s a long-term short horizontal mirror like then?”

“No idea, I didn’t get that far inside the room to have a look!” I replied.

It wasn’t the fact that the two emaciated bodies I saw were clearly spaced out or the fact that the place was flooded that made me turn back, rather it was the smell which hung like a dank fog one only gets in sweaty chancing rooms and best described as eau de rancid.

Kao San Road has changed now. The guest houses seem to have been replaced by bars/shops/cafés and the air of making money is not one tinged with doing dirty laundry. The hippy banana pancake crowd may well have moved on and ‘The Road’ maybe living on the past with corporations like 7/11 and Starbucks setting up there but to me, it remains a bit of a tip!

Starbucks, Jack Daniels just for starters

To go back or not to go back?

I have always had an affinity to those brave lads who either signed up or were conscripted to go to war and who then either lost their lives in far flung reaches of the planet or returned severely wounded.

Spending a lot of time in the presence of amputee war vets from both the first and second world wars as a child left an indelible mark on me and so after arriving in Bangkok in 2010, I did something Stuart and I had done by going out to the grave sites at Kanchanaburi where many an allied soldier and Thai national were buried as a result of working on the death railway.

The names of the lads buried are lost as you look at their young ages. The graveyard Stuart and I visited had countless teenagers and boys in their early 20’s buried so far from home. This trip to one of the other burial sites seemed to carry more men in the late 20’s and 30’s but what was so sad to see, were the unmarked graves of poor souls whose last weeks must have been nothing short of tortuous in the incessant heat and humidity which they were forced to work in to build the railway from Bangkok to Rangoon.

Kanchanaburi

As before, we moved on to the JEATH museum which shows some of the horrors of the death railway. Now this being Thailand, the JEATH Stuart and I visited in 1990 was not the one visited in 2010! This was a shame because I wanted to try and find the visitors’ book we signed on our first trip.

After I handed the pen to Stuart, he handed it to what turned out to be an elderly Aussie lady who in turn passed it to her husband who finally handed it to an English guy we had met. As Stuart and I sat waiting for our countryman to join us, he came over and told us to go back and read what the elderly Aussie man had written. So we ambled over and read his thoughts only to turn to see this huge man reduced to tears with his wife consoling him.

He was a survivor of the death railway and some 45 years after being liberated, he had returned. It was possibly one of the most moving things I had ever seen or felt and so the three of us went over to the wife and said that having only been here in these conditions for a few days and only just visiting the site for a few hours we felt it incredibly brave of this man to return and how much we respected him for it. The wife had tears in her eyes and when she said that her husband had come back to get closure before he died it left a lump in my throat.

I have clearly never forgotten that moment or the big Aussie and it has been a feature of my subsequent trips to go to these places not to gawp; not to say I have been there, but to pay a respect to blokes like the Aussie.

It was thus a saddening and deeply annoying return to the notorious bridge over the river Kwai, made famous by the David Lean film of the 1960’s to find that 20 years on, the only thing missing was a parade of Minnie, Mickey and the rest of the Disney characters, so horrendously over-commercialized has the site become in the intervening years.

The River Kwai bridge as you will struggle to find it these days!

In a way, I am glad Stuart wasn’t there as the time he, the other English man and I spent at the bridge was all but ruined by a succession of hawkers and peddlers matched only by hordes of tourists conducting themselves in a manner so disrespectful and oblivious to the site’s history that frankly, I just wanted to go. I can only but think that if the big Aussie were to visit today, then his tears would be mixed with horror at his comrades’ burial grounds being turned into a circus!

Other than that, I had a great time back in Bangkok!

It was a shame Stuart could not make it up from Perth where he now lives. A few months after leaving Bangkok we settled in the capital of West Australia and popped over the road for a ‘barbie’ one night when out of nowhere, Stuart turned to me and said “That’s her, she’s the one!”

Six years later after he boldly strode across the gathered masses to introduce himself to Philippa, myself and the lads who were at that awful QPR game in early 1990 were required to make haste and present ourselves in Perth for his stag doo and wedding two days later!! For a number of reasons, Stuart could not get to Bangkok and so I sent Mr. and Mrs. Martin a text in Bali where they were grabbing a few days before he has to fly back to the UK for a few months.

Alas, his reply seemed to indicate that the tropical isle that we had enjoyed a tremendous couple of weeks on had also sold its soul as well. Of course, as I write much of Bali’s innocence was lost by events on this day (13th October 2002) when the area we used to party in was bombed, killing many. At the time the first gulf war was on as it is now, life is arguably more precarious today as a result of events in the past 20 years, terrorism, war, the economy so troubled in the early 1990’s remain as they were back then, ‘troubled’. Sadly I am often left to wonder for those who paid the ultimate sacrifice whether they would feel it was worth it in the end and whether being able to buy tatty goods outside of a memorial ground really is any sort of progress much less suitable respect for fallen heroes.

The Unknown Soldier

Cheers

JHx