Malaise

Day 113 - Georgetown

Blues, oranges and pinks smeared the sky and a purple haze hung over the fields. The sun was rising slowly over over Southern Thailand and creating a scene of such delicate beauty that Turner could have painted it. It was just before 6AM and, sat in the vestibule of the the train, I could watch through the open door my time in Thailand running out. The train was hurtling (well, kind of) towards the Malaysian border and country number five. I'd contrived to miss my ferry off Ko Tao three days prior due to mixing up the arrival and departure times. One of the more burdensome aspects of solo travel is not having anyone to check your working out. It was a fuck-up and I may come to regret it more than I did at the time but it's also travel and pleasant chance often arrives after unforeseen events. The train gets me to Hat Yai and from there it is a bus over the border. As someone from Great Britain you can only really appreciate the wonder that is the Schengen Area by doing border-hopping travel like this. We've always had a watery border and have managed to cobble together a country with other parts of the island so it's not the same as slipping so easily from France into Germany, or Greece into Bulgaria that no-one, not even you, notices. I say border-hopping but generally it is like hopping with your legs tied together. The Thai-Malay border wasn't particularly bad so the Thai-Vietnam crossing would not be dethroned today from its #1 spot for chaos. From the border we pass through a city called Butterworth (surely named after some well-meaning but financially incontinent character from a Dickens novel) and over the bridge to Georgetown (surely named after some ill-meaning and financially incontinent character from the British monarchy). The check-in process at the guesthouse involved me videoing myself posting banknotes through a letterbox and sending it off for someone to verify. The 500km journey from Thailand had thoroughly sapped me and the only thing left was to tumble into bed.
I wake somewhat refreshed and dress for the day. Electing to slip on a pair of ever-so-slightly-too-tight navy shorts gives me a fat-American-on-holiday look that I wasn't going for. On the other hand my khaki shorts that I came with are now so baggy that they also give off a fat-American-on-holiday look so, really, I can't win "Jesus Judy, would you look at all these booooooodists". I put on my red cap and leave the hotel. My energy levels would benefit from breakfast for once. Breakfast is truly the one to avoid when travelling. It is more often weird than wonderful when abroad. I like all foreign food (except Mexican - just five identical dishes with different names and Greek, which bit exactly is supposed to be tasty?) but they rarely stick the landing with breakfast. Too often it's a version of their main meal rather than a sub-cuisine in its own right. Western Europe did truly bring civilisation if only in the form of the first meal of the day. You can see it in the curve of a croissant, the harmony of an eggs benedict, the pops of a coco. True that breakfast's status as 'the most important meal of the day' was entirely fabricated by Kellogg's but people still insist on it being some immutable truth. Hence I usually skip it. But today I needed the energy so I went for....a bowl of noodles. Both thick and thin in a dark brown sauce with egg and pork they weren't half bad for an evening meal. Georgetown is a flâneur's friend with its narrow colonial streets, elegantly crumbled plasterwork and high-quality street art. All very instagrammable these days of course but not ruined by that, not yet.

Come the evening, in a rare deviation from my form of the last 100 or so nights, I didn't seek out some tatty local's bar. Instead it was spent getting pissed on a rooftop. On a rooftop in a wine bar that was part of a 5 star restaurant. This would have been a budget-busting splurge but for the fact that the wine was reasonably priced to start with and that there was a 2 for 1 happy hour that went on for hours. The first glass of white wine on that roof was crystalline perfection. I could describe gooseberries or apples or stone fruit (is that a fruit or fruit with stones generally?) I could describe that taste that isn't bitter or sour but somewhere in between (there's probably a word for it). I could describe...actually it seems I can't describe the flavour well at all. So let's just say that the cold glass of wine on a hot day cut sharply through the low, rumbling annoyance that had become omnipresent these past couple of days. It tapped a pleasure centre so precisely that I could only emit an 'ahhh' like I'd be served a steaming jug of Bisto. There's only so much beer you can drink, though I'd largely rendered that statement a theoretical rather than established truth, and the wine was a wondrous change. While I sipped I mused on how much less inclined I'd been in recent weeks to wander into a bar or restaurant on a whim. I hadn't, believe it or not, just stumbled upon this rooftop bar. That would have been one on the eye for Newton. I don't think he would have liked them apples. It was unclear why I'd wandered less. I was fairly sure I hadn't become one of those tourists travellers that hammer an itinerary into stone to take in all the most queueable restaurants and photo-worthy spots in a destination. But, again, there was a touch of goldilocksing to it I had to concede. A desire for the ideal bar where they sold cold lager for a pittance. Where I could find a seat in the corner, music not too loud. Not empty, not too full. And the NPCs creating atmosphere should not be other tourists so I could convince myself that something about thru experience was uniquely mine.

The traveller is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveller's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption and mythomania bordering on the pathological.
-- Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Or not so well-hidden perhaps in my case. It could be travel fatigue, the novelty of the new diminished. That's understandable after three months but also a terrible, near-criminal waste of a vanishingly rare opportunity. I still had half of the trip left and three months did stretch reasonably far into the distance but having a defined limit did make every moment a little more precious and pressurised. It was a microcosm of life (though the later, currently, lacks a precise end date) and whole forests have been pulped telling us how to deal with that problem. As a species we are driven by a fierce desire to avoid scarcity and the stresses it causes. But when we obtain abundance we have few natural mechanisms for not making that a source of stress too. Like fat Labradors gorged on ennui. Six wines later (when the bill came the waiter insisted I had 12, obviously unaware of alcohol's cumulative effects) I stumbled home in the cool night air like a happy, fat Labrador.
If there were two things that popped into my head when I thought of Ollee, the Australian I met in Laos, it was beer and bumjets. She was a great advocate of both. Not together. I think. The bumjet is a ubiquitous feature of the Southeast Asian bathrooms if you're not already familiar. Most cisterns will have a hose attached to the side and a small lever at the end of it to start the water flow. Unless, however, it's a hole in the floor and a bucket of water situation and in which case go with god my son (or daughter). Some people, mainly Southeast Asians, swear by bumjets and wouldn't even look at a square of paper. The idea is that you accurately fire a jet of water into you bum without any tedious and unhygienic wiping. Well this morning I would see if I could join the ranks of Team Sparkly Anus. Well. My first attempt wasn't accurate but gave me an idea of the pressure these things deliver. Can't say I wasn't warned. The second shot saw me leap up like a cat if you stuck your finger up it unannounced. I say cat but it could be any animal with an anus, finger size adjusted accordingly. Obviously a human finger would cause more commotion in an echidna than a narwhal. Now Ollee would say I was doing it wrong but I was no better off than before. Only now the toilet paper I still had to use soaked up the the water and disintegrated into sodden chunks on my trembling arse cheeks.

Got a bum that's dirty but wish it was wet? Now it can be both with our patent bumjet!

That should be the tagline.
On my way to breakfast (coffee) I was accosted by a kindly-looking monk who asked for a small cash donation which, despite my previously stated aversion to his sort, I gave. I got a bracelet in return. The transaction gave me no issue, a piece of tat to smile at in 20 years maybe. But as coffee blackened my white teeth and whitened my black hangover I found out that monks, much like modern coffee shops, can't accept cash. Ordinarily being gulled like this would offend my self-image as a seasoned traveller but Buddhism is all a bit of grift anyway so I just looked at my bracelet and smiled. Very Buddhist.
Ollee had been to Georgetown and recommended I go to a bar. Of sorts. It felt like more of an off-license that chucked some plastic chairs out onto the street. Marvellously unpretentious in that way I like. Aren't the best things undesigned or designed so well as to seem that way?

I got talking to Dennis, a lanky silver-haired fellow in his early fifties at a guess. He was good company and we embarked on something of a pub crawl ending up with some uncommonly good live music. His English was a little too good, and schtick a little too smooth and I'd picked up a few too many of the bar bills to convince myself that this wasn't a monk with a bracelet but no robes. I've had for worse evenings with people that weren't scamming me. As I called it a night I decided to think the best of him. Out for my morning coffee the next day who should I bump into but Dennis and he had a story to tell. Why, not 30 minutes ago he had lost a sizeable sum of money. Or was it stolen? He needed it for some urgent and worthy purpose but "oh!" what could be done (stage directions - back of hand to forehead). This was a a little too much for my cynicism and I declined his requests for a donation. What I still cannot work out though is if our crossing of paths was pure chance or if he had been stalking these streets for the last couple of hours. Was this his standard routine or pure opportunism? Or was he...gasp! (stage directions - cover mouth with cupped hand) Telling the truth! I should meditate on the possibilities. There was a free ferry back to the mainland. The only drawback was that midway through the voyage the TV screens onboard began showing a news report about a ferry somewhere else in Malaysia. That was on fire. It was a bit like having Air Crash Investigation as the only inflight entertainment when you're 3000 feet up . On Malaysian Airlines... We safety reached the other side though, there was probably a chicken aboard. From there I took an unusually relaxing bus trip down to Ipoh. It's a quiet sort of place that I instantly take to and it was possessed of a Sinhalese bar which is the very stuff dreams are made of. Saloon-style swinging doors, faded paint on the walls and plastic patio furniture. The owner brough me a frothy beer in his rapidly shaking hands and the locals looked on with a careworn curiosity. A dead dog slumbered in the corner. The lack of pretentiousness was indelibly underlined when the curry I ordered arrived with bread. White, sliced bread. I loved the place. But, I had to admit, I am a tourist and it is vain to think that others don't come here like this is some uncontacted tribe. I make tourist choices and got to tourist places and I can't be the only one beguiled by a historic, scruffy bar. Yes, I like Ipoh. It feels rundown and windswept and empty but there's pockets of life. I like its mundanity and yesterday charm. Its broken pavement and fin-de-siecle lampposts. I was sorry not to spend more time there.