Ben Welsher | Writings

Day 55 - Huay Xai After what has felt like an age in Thailand I am heading for a new country. The ticket lady asks if I want to travel to Chiang Kong on the Thai-Laos border today or tomorrow. Since I am sat on the bus to Chiang Khong the answer would seem to be obvious. Well I assume it's the bus to Chiang Khong though it has another destination on the side and her question unnerves me a bit. You can never be 100% certain of anything when travelling in these sort of countries, just about everything you do requires a leap of faith of greater or lesser distance. A couple of hours later we make a stop in a town. Is it a disembarkation stop? A rest stop? Short stop? Long stop? These things are never made clear. I'd been apprehensive about this part of the journey because the main road forks here with the route to the north being the one I assumed we'd take to Chiang Khong and the route to the east being the one that would take us to Thung Chiang which is what is on the outsid...

Day 51 - Chiang Mai To avoid further mishaps I book a direct flight from Sydney to Northern Thailand. Several days of negative covid tests mean I'm highly unlikely to fail one at the airport but I just want the ease of a single flight. The mishaps that ensue anyway are minor and entirely my own fault. I spend 20 minutes on a bus in Sydney that is going in the wrong direction but only decide something is amiss when the driver pulls over the otherwise empty bus, gets out and locks the doors. Having located the correct bus I make it to the airport. At check-in I'm given a sticker to wear but no explanation as to why. It's got something to do with baggage I think. I don't like wearing stickers so during the flight I take it off. Wine for breakfast makes you reckless. The belt trundles around it's circuit now empty of luggage, the hall now empty of people except me. This is becoming familiar. That sticker, it transpires, was to help staff guide me to the correct baggage...

Day 34 - Bangkok Packing my bag again I bid farewell to the old capital and head again for the new one. It's been restorative. After an ice coffee at the train station I wander over to check on my iminent train. A mere hour late. It doesn't matter and I feel equanimity at the wait. This is the flip side to my complaints about constant planning. Compared to a holiday where every delay and inconvenience feels like a robbery of time and experience I am shackled to no particular schedule. I need not squeeze every moment for all it's worth and can just be. The things I've written so far are riddled with contradictions like that. One day saying that being in the moment is impossible, the next day that the moment is precisely where I find myself. But that is reflective of my feelings, contradictory, inconsistent, sometimes black, often grey, occasionally white. To write down these feelings helps to make sense of them, even when they veer and drunkenly swerve between the extre...

Day 31 - Ayutthaya There's a couple of day trips you can do via train from Ayutthaya. I decide to visit Bang Pa-in and its royal palace where the king gets up to god knows what. Ayutthaya is made into an island by rivers on all sides. The train station lies over the River Pasak to the east. Google Maps directs me to walk over a formidable-looking bridge to get there. I think I must have taken a wrong turning because when I arrive at the bridge there is no obvious pedestrian route only a monstrous six-lane highway. Undeterred I decide that the metre-wide hard shoulder is a sufficiently safe route to walk along provided none of the traffic steaming along at 100km/h does something unsafe like hitting me. Confidence in my decision begins to wane as I reach the halfway point but I've gone too far to go back. Salvation arrives in the form of a guy on a scooter who pulls over, asks where I'm going and tells me to get on the back. Since discretion is the better part of valour I co...

Day 27 - Ayyuthaya I pack slowly and reluctantly. Reluctant because my things are strewn everywhere. While the location on the river is sublime the room itself is almost entirely occupied by a double bed making that my only storage option. The bus station has a departure board that bears no relation to reality so i must trust what I am told by a man who may or may not work for the bus company. I've started dressing in a particular way for these journeys. Boots and shorts. Hideous to behold but eminently practical, Alex would be proud. The blackness of the boots accentuates the whiteness of my legs. Seated on the bus I have the sense that something isn't right. It's a sense I ignore half the time but lo and behold it turns out this isn't the right bus. The driver checked my ticket but it wasn't going anywhere near the destination written on it. The correct bus gets me as far as Suphanburi and I immediately miss its ancient, juddering spaciousness as I realise my onw...

Day 26 - Kanchanaburi Trucks to the left of me, cars to the right, here I am stuck in the middle lane with you. 'You' in this case would be my skewed sense of the possible and impossible. The scooter experience on Ko Samet emboldened me to go further. There's a national park about an hour away from Kanchanaburi with waterfalls and caves and the like which I set my sights on. I'll be damned if I'm doing an organised tour so scooter it is. The distance makes me apprehensive, some of the busy roads I'll go make me very apprehensive but people said I needed to push myself on this trip and try new things. I'm sure this is what they meant. No, they'd say "you don't have a license, don't do it". Like the Indian headbob or the Egyptian smile, they say "it can't be done". But we place such faith in a piece of paper as if it wards off all the bad things that may happen. The momentary competence that that piece of paper endorses has...

Day 25 - Kanchanaburi On a pontoon, eating small fish, regarding a bridge. A family of English near me are also regarding the bridge. "I don't know what's more impressive, this or the Sydney Harbour Bridge" the wife says. There's some validity to that, what's more impressive - The Burj Dubai or the Great Pyramid? The size of a thing isn't the only measure as men having been saying since before that pyramid was built. "It's like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, only that's higher". The husband has noticed that they are both bridges. Sydney does indeed have the higher bridge, 134 vs 27 metres, and longer too, 1150 vs 130 metres. Two nil Sydney. But this bridge here is the Bridge over the River Kwai so we can also score on construction speed, 101 months vs 20 months, and deaths during construction, 16 vs 90,0000. The latter figure is for the whole Burma to Thailand railway so should be pro-rated but still a likely victory for the 'Kwai. So, ...

Day 24 - Kanchanaburi I awake in a box in Bangkok. Even though we are dipping out of high season in Thailand the accomodation in the city is still in high demand and I am leaving it too late to have my pick of the better worse places. With only one night to stay on my way through the capital I reasoned a dorm could be tolerated for the economics. Inevitably it was a top bunk. After only minutes of twisting and squirming caught in an endless spin of arranging possessions and cursing the things I'd forgotten to bring up from my bag down below one night felt one too many. I'm regularly reminded that dorms are the way to meet people but dear god they chafe me. Waiting on a taxi outside the next morning I watch a man pass the knocking shop next door. The girls cagole and pout and he smiles. His t-shirt reads 'I'll think about it'. I bet he will. I'm dropped off at Thonburi train station and its lines to the west. The Thai railway surprises me with its extent, its fu...

Day 17 - Ko Samet There's an unusual sound outside the window as I slowly open my eyes. Similar to the sound of the jungle but it isn't the cicadas. Outside I am greeted by my first rain storm. It buckets down, noisily slapping leaves and gushing from decrepid guttering. Thunder booms through the foliage. Once it has stopped I decide this is the day I hire a scooter and explore the island. At least when I lose control on a bend and die and become a cliché news story I can blame the wet roads. I'm given a racy yellow model and affect total confidence in its use. I'm a little apprehensive though, that cultural caution again. Another tourist has hired a scooter just before me and puts it on its side metres from the hire shop. Do not be that guy. But actually there isn't much to it. There's only 1 road, little traffic and with all the hills, turns and speedbumps you can rarely get above 30 km/h. Probably just as well given my inexperience and the fact that I don...

Day 15 - Ko Samet "I can see the sea!" That electrifying moment on childhood holidays when the packed, uncomfortable car in which you've been stuffed for what feels like days turns a corner and the great expanse of shimmering water is there. Your dad has stopped threatening to divorce your mum over poor directions and now you are on holiday. The endless tedium of I-spy, the featureless expanse of the motorway, the parent-goading piss breaks. All were purgatory for this sublime vision of heaven. There's still some of that childlike wonder in me as the Gulf of Thailand appears through the windscreen of the minivan. There's also still the aching arse and the boredom of the unimaginative landscape. I get a good price on an imminently departing speedboat and am soon cutting through the waves on the way to Ko Samet. I'm staying at what is described by one of the travel guides as 'a ratty old hotel run by an old English guy'. It is exactly that and I rather...

Day 13 - Bangkok I'm back on the Khao San road, back in the same bar. Considering it epitomises the sort of place I've no wish to spend time in I've spent an awful lot of time here. But now, as yesterday, there is method amongst this madness. I have a purpose, it is another nostalgic circularity of life decisions. Another harking back to 10 years previous. Am I living out that trip again in the absence of a better idea? I have a pint of Dutch courage as I watch an enormous sign get lifted from the street onto the back of a truck. A few traffic cones dotted randomly around segregate the operation from the pedestrians walking either side. It must have come down 30 metres from up on the side of the D&D Inn that morning, with similar safety arrangements I suspect. The sign is laid at an awkward angle in the truck and a man hops up onto the top edge of it. He's putting enormous faith in the structural stability of a sign that had probably been up there for many years an...

Day 12 - Bangkok in the wind, this trip can properly start. Whatever that means. But first the other minor thing I failed to do, apart from not lose the laptop, was to return the work phone. It was put into a jiffy bag, addressed and 3 first class stamps affixed ready to put in a postbox. And then it was brought to Thailand where the queen's head (even when she has 3 of them) doesn't carry much weight. This wouldn't have been a problem in the good, old colonial days (n.b. likely untrue). So more diligent planning rendered pointless by a lapse of memory. I'd moved out of 'one of the best boutique hostels in the world' by this point to somewhere half the price. It wouldn't feature on any 'best of' lists but it was adequate. And fortuitously near a post office. Except as I soon found out the Thai Postal service doesn't send mobile phones owing to the risk of batteries exploding. I began to countenance the unpleasant thought that I wouldn't be a...