Bangkok

As a traveler who writes, you’re intimately acquainted with the way drudgery can become adventure, or at least a story, when looked at in the rearview mirror. Even in your most anxious, stir-crazy moments, you know that one day, back on the far side of Earth, the event you’re experiencing now will somehow seem more spectacular, or at least valuable and defining.

But as a writer who travels, there are other things you see in the rearview mirror, things now well beyond reach because time, and perhaps distance, has carried you too far. You see lost youth, a fading innocence. You see decisions that at the time seemed noble (and probably were) but which now merely leave you silent, staring into the mirror. You see the future for what it became—the past—and suddenly you wish, at least in some moments, to speak and act differently. You wish that the thing in the mirror was ahead of you, but it is not.

In the rearview mirror even idealism looks dangerous, a Titanic launched and sent full steam ahead. You understand well the ship’s design and the confidence with which it departed, but now you also know the iceberg through which history, or at least you, will interpret its voyage. In the rearview mirror you see that life is hard, harder than you ever expected.

But the journey, you remember, is not yet over. You’re not crushed and broken 12,600 feet under the Atlantic, nor are you forever stranded in some emergency lane while the world speeds by at 70mph. And this is why, having pulled off the road and given that rearview mirror a good long look, you will eventually turn your eyes back to the road, and then, slowly but surely, you will pull your vehicle back into the forward-moving stream.

Finally, having removed your hat to better feel the breeze of movement and hope, you will look for a place to hang it. You will choose, at least for a little while, the rearview mirror.

Eric Wiener, is his simultaneously humorous and thought-provoking book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, writes:

It is a fact of human nature that we derive pleasure from watching others engage in pleasurable acts.  This explains the popularity of two enterprises: pornography and cafés.  Americans excel at the former, but Europeans do a better job at the latter.  The food and the coffee are almost beside the point.

Like many of you—and like the Korean grad student in this photograph, taken in Bangkok—I spend time in cafés.  For me it’s because I need the stimulus of caffeine as well as the stimulus of people and sound (there’s nothing so unstimulating as being isolated in a library and seeing, in a blank Word document on a computer screen, your silent reflection bouncing back at you).  In the café, you can eavesdrop on conversations, ask attractive women to watch your computer while you venture to the bathroom, and, if you wish to be obnoxious, try to snort the aroma of coffee (or other things, I suppose, depending on where you’re at and what you want in your body).

The café, then, is about more than coffee.  It is about people, connection, and inspiration.  It is about not feeling alone even when you’re working alone.  And on the road it is sometimes even about refuge.   In Kathmandu, for instance, the soft chairs and rich smells were a refuge from weeks of grueling travel through northern Yunnan and Tibet (July 2004).  In Istanbul the café was a refuge from hours of walking in numbing winter wind (Dec 2004).  In Bangkok cafés have frequently been a refuge from midday heat (2000, 2004, 2005, and 2007).  Once in Bogotá, while photographing with an expensive camera, a café served as refuge from the threat of being robbed on the street.  And in Jerusalem a café even offered the opportunity to sit beside a large plate glass window (two days after a suicide bombing two blocks away) and suspiciously watch passersby on the sidewalk, imagining glass and screws ripping through your flesh and scattering it against the back counter (Jan 2002).  If this last example doesn’t seem to fit the refuge category so well, ask me in person one day and I’ll explain.

Some modern travelers bemoan the current lack of blank spaces on the map, since everything is now pretty much mapped and charted and has left us with nothing “unknown” to explore (or so they say).  But at least we have cafés.  

It will be rare that I post a completely bland snapshot to this photoblog, as I am now.  Had I known that I might one day display this picture so publicly, I’d have taken a moment to compose the thing.  But I took it in a rush, thinking that later in the day I would simply download it to my computer (for enlarged viewing), type up the text (which I'd then store in a Word document in case I might one day find a use for it in a story), and then I’d either delete the photo or file it into some dark recess.  I'm sorry the picture's ugly.

But in recently coming across the photo again I decided to post it here--largely because it says something commendable about the people in charge of the Bangkok Mass Transit System.  I love how they very clearly explain what the problem was, acknowledge the domino effect the mishap on train #24 had on others down the line, and then apologize for the inconvenience some may have experienced.  That’s classy.  And to add to the class, they posted the sign in both Thai and English (for all of us foreigners who can’t read a lick of Thai).

The BTSC folks, of course, did something not only classy but also civil and healthy.  It's good to say "sorry" when something you do, even if unintentional, affects other folks.  I suspect that had the narrator in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men been moseying through this Bangkok skytrain station and laid eyes on the posted apology, he would’ve nodded his approval.  Here’s what he says in the book:

My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth.  He said there was nothing to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were.  And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it.  Dont haul stuff around with you.  I guess all that sounds pretty simple today.  Even to me.  All the more reason to think about it.

In Bangkok I have normally stayed in the vicinity of Khao San Road, where backpackers by the thousands congregate in hotels and restaurants.  Because of all its glitz and commercialism, and because of its foreign hordes, some speak disparagingly about the place.  But I have yet to tire of a neighborhood where one can walk up and down a street and see people from literally scores of countries all in one spot.  There aren’t many places quite like Khao San.

One of Khao San’s beauties is that, if one wants to get away from the throngs (and one probably will), a five-minute walk will accomplish this.  Some seek refuge in Wat Chana Songhkram, the Buddhist temple complex at one end of the road.  Here, while barefoot and sitting on the floor as the ear takes in the monks’ evening chant, the stress of urban crowds and smog dissipates.

But perhaps my favorite respite is Santichaiprakan Park.  Located beside the Chao Phraya River, here you can slurp yogurt at dawn as Thais, more industrious than you at this hour, do aerobics (the yogurt comes from a nearby 7-Eleven).  And then in the afternoon when school lets out, students come to the park to do homework or just hangout.  A modest handful of foreigners are scattered about too, their noses in books, their cameras pointed at river barges, or their bodies stretched out in the grass and their eyes closed.  It’s a wonderful location to people watch.

The photo above was taken one afternoon in the park and shows a child who took great joy in simply running back and forth in front of the water fountains.  While he certainly wasn’t thinking of this line from Kathleen Norris’ book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, it’s not a bad one for us adults to ponder:

There is a vast difference between blindly running away from old ‘nothings,’ and running with mature awareness toward something new.