Ben Welsher | Writings

Day 59 - The Mekong River Having bid farewell to the rest of the tour group the previous evening Lieke and I were getting the slow boat to Luang Prabang. Sat on the boat at 9:30am awaiting an uncertain departure time we observed a few of our fellow passengers already on the beers. Funny how once an idea takes root it can swiftly become all-consuming. And the idea was to consume all the beers. We put on our shoes with furious haste and dashed up the concrete steps to the road above the pier. Grabbing a polystyrene cool box and bags of ice we filled it with all the beers we could, threw indecipherable banknotes at the shopkeeper until she nodded that the bill was covered and hared it back to the boat before it left. We were hot, sweaty and reeking of alcoholism but we had our essential supplies. A swift bond was formed with three English lads who shared our intention to make this a party boat. Lieke produced a ludicrously oversized bluetooth speaker and the die was cast. From this - To ...

Day 58 - Somewhere in the jungle Dawn is breaking and I am peering into the canopy 40 metres above me. Bec, Lieke, Csilla, Sil and Liset are peering too but nothing is happening. But then a low howl. And a response. 'Howl' may be a poor description because as our guide, Champy, tells us, the gibbons hidden in the treetops are singing. As the whole family joins in though it becomes an other-worldly electronic noise like nothing else I've ever heard. It vibrates through the foliage breaking the new day's stillness. We all sit unmoving but moved by the intensity of the sound. We can't see them but such is the volume they could be metres away. Laying eyes on the gibbons has become increasingly difficult. There is now only one family in this area, down from three. When COVID hit and tourism in the area disappeared desperation drove local villagers to hunt the gibbons to sell to the Chinese. Truly, greviously depressing. Fuck traditional medicine and the ignorant, world-...

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 38 - Sydney After 15 hours of travel I heave myself up steep and familiar streets. The houses sit low and frumpy, riding the waves of the eastern suburbs. There was a mad dash through Guangzhou airport to get the connecting flight. The checked bag, with none of my fleet-footedness did not make it which at least lightens my load up these hills. The streets were flatter in my mind's eye, smooth and reverberating with the sound of my constant footsteps. As I walk I try to remember my life here. And not the prosaic outline of events and people, not the rosy, compressed joy but the feelings. Was I happier? Was I happy? I can't recall. I had expected a wave of nostalgia but there is none. I expected a welcoming ceremony and the keys to the city. But the city doesn't remember me, it's moved on. I own nothing of it and there is no debt to my past residence. Places are memories but they do not have memories. If I search for the familiar and comforting here that is not surpr...

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, ...