Thailand Confidential

Sleeping with Conrad

Somerset Maugham was delirious. Crazed by the splendor of Bangkok one day, and by the anopheles mosquito the next. He was so sick with malaria when he arrived at the Oriental Hotel, in 1923, following an arduous trek through the jungles of what was then called Burma and Siam, that when his fever rose to 103 degrees Fahrenheit (39.5 Celsius), the hotel’s German manager-ess was overheard telling the doctor on the verandah outside his room, “I can’t have him die here, you know.”

Maugham didn’t die in Thailand, of course (but in France, some forty-two years later), leaving instead a mark on the country’s travel-cum-literary legacy. This is not unusual. Writers tend to leave their footprints in places foreign to their origin or nationality. Can anyone think of Ernest Hemingway and not think of Paris, Key West, Spain, and Africa? Are not the same associations made between Pearl Buck and China, Herman Melville and the South Seas, Jack London and the Arctic, and James Michener and a dozen very fat books whose titles were taken straight from a map? And so it has been for Bangkok, a port of call for writers for more than a century.

Joseph Conrad was a young ship’s officer staying at the Sailors’ Home in Singapore in 1888 when he was given command of the barque Otago, then tied up in Bangkok, after the captain died at sea. When Conrad reached the Siamese capital, he reported in a letter to the ship owners in Australia that the crew “suffered severely whilst in Bangkok from tropical diseases, including fever, dysentery and cholera.”

At the time, the “Old Oriental Hotel” was a one-story building raised on piles offering “Family Accommodations – American Bar – Billiard Saloon – Newspapers Kept – Boats for Hire – Table d’hote with breakfast at 9:10 a.m., tiffin at one p.m. and dinner at seven p.m.” Such luxury was unexpected and worrying to the future novelist, but he was reassured by Captain H.N. Andersen, the former sailor who owned the hotel and was reconstructing the building which survives today as the facade of the Authors’ Wing, overlooking the garden and the river. The hotel admits Conrad never actually spent a night as a guest, but insists “he was a frequent patron of the hotel’s facilities.”

Thus, Conrad and Maugham, along with two other illustrious former guests, Noel Coward and James Michener, today have the hotel’s most expensive suites named for them, each containing a number of their books and period photographs.

I’ve never understood the appeal of sleeping in a room where someone famous once spent the night, but it seems a popular practice in the overnight accommodation business. So many bed-and-breakfast places dating to the 1700s in the United States boast that “Washington Slept Here,”—it’s become something of a joke, and the financial advantage President Clinton found in offering wealthy contributors the use of the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House is somewhat shamefully well known. Similarly, the Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port Au Prince, Haiti’s most famous hostelry, has suites named for Graham Greene, Sir John Gielgud, Marlon Brando and Mick Jagger. Presumably it’s a commercial scheme employed in other parts of the world as well. I digress.

Maugham’s long journey from London by sea to Rangoon, then up the Irrawaddy River by steamer and overland by train, car and pony through Burma’s Shan states, and on to Siam, traveling to Bangkok by train, was undertaken to produce his only real travel book, The Gentleman in the Parlour. (It was less than a great success when it was published in 1930 and unavailable for many years before being reprinted in 1995.) At the time of his visit, Maugham was famous as a dramatist who once had four plays running simultaneously on the London stage and as the author of several best-selling novels, including his quasi-autobiographical Of Human Bondage and The Moon and Sixpence, the latter based on the life of painter Paul Gauguin.

From his remarks about Thailand, it is clear that however willing Maugham may have been to travel rough in Burma and in the Siamese north, when his train reached Ayutthaya, he’d had enough and intended to remain aboard, saying that “if a man of science can reconstruct a prehistoric animal from its thigh bone why cannot a writer get as many emotions as he wants from a railway station?” His guide had other plans and dragged him from monument to monument, allowing him the contentment of one night on a houseboat, then led him finally to Bangkok, where in an act that proves some things never change, he was handed a card by a street tout that read: “Oh, gentleman, sir, Miss Pretty Girl welcome you Sultan Turkish bath, gentle, polite, massage, put you in dreamland with perfume soap. Latest gramophone music. Oh, such service. You come now! Miss Pretty Girl want you, massage you from tippy-toe to head-top, nice, clean, to enter Gates of Heaven.”

Finally, he stumbled into the lobby of the Oriental, burning with fever that may be blamed for the erratic nature of his observations, leading him to remark on the “dust and heat and noise and whiteness and more dust” and calling Chinatown “dark, shaded, and squalid” one day and on the next being bedazzled by the city’s wats.

“They are unlike anything in the world, so that you are taken aback, and you cannot fit them into the scheme of the things you know. It makes you laugh with delight to think that anything so fantastic could exist on this somber earth. They are gorgeous; they glitter with gold and whitewash, yet are not garish; against that vivid sky, in that dazzling sunlight, they hold their own, defying the brilliancy of nature and supplementing it with the ingenuity and the playful boldness of man. The artists who developed them step by step from the buildings of the ancient Khmer had the courage to pursue their fantasy to the limit; I fancy that art meant little to them, they desired to express a symbol; they knew no reticence, they cared nothing for good taste; and if they achieved art it is as men achieve happiness, not by pursuing it, but by doing with all their heart whatever in the day’s work needs doing.”

Especially impressed by Wat Suthat, he further wrote, “With the evening, when the blue sky turns pink, the roof, the tall steep roof with its projecting eaves, gains all kinds of opalescent hues so that you can no longer believe it was made by human craftsmen, for it seems to be made of passing fancies and memories and fond hopes.”

Other writers who have visited Bangkok may be too numerous to name, although the Oriental has memorialized a wide variety, including, besides the four for whom the suites were named, John LeCarre, Graham Greene, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Barbara Cartland, Kukrit Pramoj—Thailand’s best-known author, as well as a favorite prime minister—Alec Waugh, Romain Gary and Wilber Smith. Why did these authors get some of the most expensive rooms named after them? Some came as keynote speakers for the annual SEA Write awards, presented as an encouragement to young writers from each of the ASEAN countries and co-sponsored by the hotel.

Others were actually working. Graham Greene wrote numerous novels placed in the region—his most famous, The Quiet American, is centered in Vietnam—and actually wrote a letter following one of his visits (framed and hanging in the suite), calling the hotel a place where “almost anything may happen and one may meet almost anybody, from a mere author to an international crook on his way elsewhere.” While Barbara Cartland—whose suite is pink, her favorite color—began writing a novel based in Thailand at the turn of the new century, a romance, Journey to a Star.

As vastly different as the writers were, the hotel was a part of their Thailand experience. Over the years, Maugham enjoyed telling how he almost got kicked out of the Oriental and when he returned to Bangkok many years later, perhaps remembering that early visit, he elected to stay somewhere else.

The Backpackers

Backpackers are the low-riders of tourism: youthful pilgrims in search of themselves under the guise of seeking experience and enlightenment (but for many, in fact, just getting out of the house and school), the holiday-on-the-cheap hordes who’ve been there and done that twice and along the way made Bangkok’s Khao San Road infamous, while throwing enough money at Tony and Maureen Wheeler to allow them to fly Business Class for the rest of their lives (they own the Lonely Planet publishing empire).

In the 1960s, the “straight” world called such people “hip-pies.” But backpackers are a different breed. They’ve partied in Goa and spent a week in an ashram and they wear the same parachute pants from Kathmandu and even take some of the same drugs, but the tie-dyed, long-haired swarm of the 1960s and early 1970s actually stood for something, or tried to, while their clones-gone-astray in the 1990s, as ubiquitous as self-indulgence and sloth, may be rebels without a cause save hanging out (or merely “hanging,” as the current vernacular has it).

The differences between the generations may be understood by comparing books written about them. The first was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a novel deemed unpublishable when the author’s agent sent it around in the 1950s, a manic word-grenade typed in a single burst on a single roll of teletype paper, whose hero was Dean Moriarty (based on the real-life Neal Cassidy), a “sideburned hero of the snowy west” whose energy gave Keouac’s creation a rush like amphetamine. He was one of Kerouac’s “mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center-light pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!” Thus, the Beat Generation was defined; the “Beat” stood for beatitude, by the way.

Arguably, Kerouac was the father of the hippies— On the Road was the book that Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin and many others claimed most influential—and so it was no surprise when the same Neal Cassidy reappeared in 1964 as the driver of the painted bus that carried a group of novelist Ken Kesey’s friends the Merry Pranksters from California to the New York World’s Fair. The bus was called Intrepid and on the front there was a sign that warned three thousand miles of small towns, “We Have Come for Your Daughters!” In the refrigerator was a pitcher of LSD-spiked lemonade. The journey was documented in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 account, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, setting the tone for much of what followed throughout the western world.

In the 1970s, the hippies disappeared, at least in the media, elbowed aside by Saturday Night Fever and the Me Generation and then the Babyboomers, enfatuated first with raising their consciousness (becoming by their own boast “estholes”) and then with making a million bucks buying and selling futures and bonds, and blowing it all on cocaine. No wonder that Quaalude, a horse tranquilizer that tended to make you fall down, was another drug of choice.

In the 1980s came the X Generation and Heavy Metal and Techno and Rap, and the drugs of choice now were manifestations of cocaine in its vilest forms: ice and crack. And to come down, a taste of heroin.

Meanwhile, backpackers spread like crab grass. The old hippie trail to India, Nepal and Tibet was revived, providing new blood for the communes and beach parties along the way; orgies in Goa followed by a month cleaning up in a meditation class in Varanasi.

And then they discovered Thailand, led by the nose by the Wheelers, whose second book was a patchwork guide to Southeast Asia on the cheap. Finally, in 1996, the backpackers’ bible—their answer to On the Road —was published. This was The Beach, a first novel by British writer Alex Garland. As I write this, I’m looking at the back cover copy of the paperback edition: “Bangkok—the first stop on the backpacker trail. On Richard’s first night in a hostel a mysterious traveler slits his own wrists, leaving Richard a map to ‘the Beach.’ The Beach is a legend among young travelers in Thailand: a secret island Paradise where a select community lives in blissful isolation…”

It sounded like the hippies all over again, with the comforts that a quarter century brings. On the first page of his book, Garland called Khao San Road “backpacker land. Almost all the buildings had been converted into guest-houses”—he wrote— “there were long distance telephone booths with air-con, the cafes showed brand-new Hollywood films on video, and you couldn’t walk ten feet without passing a bootleg-tape stall. The main function of the street was a decompression chamber for those about to leave or enter Thailand, a halfway house between East and West.”

Garland and his novel and the inevitable movie released in 2000—starring Leonardo DiCaprio, a yuppie wannabe pretending to be a backpacker; at first I thought the casting was wrong, but then I realized it was bang-on—did for the backpackers what the previous texts did for the beatniks and the hippies. Made them cliches in their own time. Except, this time around there was no substance to subvert.

Where the beats and their long-haired spawn staged a siege on society’s constraints, rebelling against conformity, protesting against Vietnam and for marijuana, against Lyndon Johnson and for dancing, against hypocrisy and for ecstasy (the emotion, not the drug), against police and for sex, expanding on the vocabulary of exploration, actually trying to put their heads (as they said) into a different space, the only questions backpackers seemed to ask concerned cheap train tickets and where they could find the best banana pancakes.

These cultural flotsam and jetsam are found in greatest number in Thailand not just in the three-dollar-a-night guest houses in Bangkok’s Banglampoo district (of which Khao San Road is the main drag), but during the full moon of every month in communion with their peers in ecstasy (the drug, not the emotion) on a beach on an island named Koh Pha-ngan, where, following directions found on the Internet, on the full moon of every month, an estimated eight thousand to ten thousand backpackers worship Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of partying.

(In fact, when someone pointed out that days when the moon is full are religious holidays for those who bow to the lunar calendar, the party was moved ahead one night.)

The old fishing huts on Pha-ngan are gone now, replaced by small cabins and rooms and restaurants that sell fried rice and burgers. Internet cafes, without which no backpacker could survive, sit next to shops selling black-light posters of psychedelic mushrooms and body-piercing parlors with photos on display showing all the intimate places a stud or ring can be affixed. (Bring your own anesthetic.)

Beachside bars crank up the volume and the resonant bass of techno muscles in on the natural rhythms of the heart, as the chemicals ingested go zooming to the brain, abetted by unlimited quantities of alcohol and caffeine-rich drinks called Red Bull and Caribao, the latter named for a popular local rock band. By midnight, the surf has become a toilet for partygoers disinclined to line up for the club lavatories or pay twenty-five cents for the private, beachside stalls. By two o’clock, most are drunk or stoned and those still on their feet are dancing in the sand. The last body is usually dragged away to one of the small clinics by noon.

Back in Bangkok, the veterans compare notes with new arrivals. “What was it like?” “I don’t remember, mate.” “Oh, man, that sounds way cool! What’s the best way to get there— train or bus?”

It wasn’t planned this way. Time magazine opined that when backpackers first hit the road in the 1970s, they were seen as “an antidote to sterile package tours, a return to travel as exploration and adventure,” where anyone could be Marco Polo, travel close to the ground and get to know the “locals” and their divergent cultures. Rather than give their money to international hotel chains, they’d give their money directly to guest house owners, mom-and-pop restaurants, and street vendors. As tourists, they insisted, they were “green.”

There was some truth to that. Contrast the average backpacker who remained in Thailand for the full month allowed on his or her entrance visa with the wealthy tourist who stayed at an international hotel.

This hippie redux dream was dashed quickly. Backpackers traveled like migrating herds on a predictable path, connecting beaches in India (Goa), the Philippines (Boracay), Bali (Kuta) and southern Thailand, and as true environmentalists discovered, the herds inevitably trampled the landscape flat. “They tend to be like sheep, all going to the same places,” Tony Wheeler told Time. “That is a negative.”

Bangkok Heart Attack

When I told my kids back in the United States that I’d decided to have open heart surgery in Bangkok, they thought I needed my head examined. Was I crazy?

I assured them I was not, said they had to trust their dear old dad, even if he was falling apart. I said my Thai cardiothoracic surgeon was London-trained and had participated in over a thousand such operations, while the cardiologist who’d been supervising my coronary health the past year, was schooled in the U.S. and practiced there for twenty years before returning to Thailand, and that Bumrungrad Hospital probably was the best in the region, including those in Singapore.

Coincidentally, I’d interviewed the CEO of Bumrungrad recently for a story about Bangkok’s emergence as an Asian health care center, and was impressed even more than I’d been during my six years of residence—during which time I’d visited the hospital’s dermatology, EENT and internal medicine departments, where I always got excellent care. I also talked with the resident doc at the U.S. Embassy, who told me he could send expat heart patients home and used Bumrungrad instead.

Before getting on with what happened to me in surgery, here is a part of the story I wrote following that interview with the CEO and sent to my kids, making it clearer (I hoped) why they were concerned and perhaps why they didn’t have to be.

Countries are a bit like entertainers: they want to be the center of attraction and make a nice living by being so. They also want to be taken seriously. Certainly this is true in Southeast Asia, where nations compete eagerly to be a regional center for this or that, or in the current business parlance, a “hub.”

Thus, Hong Kong and Singapore battle it out for pre-eminence as financial centers and telecommunications and import-export hubs, while Shanghai threatens to overtake Hong Kong by merging its stock exchange with that of Shenzhen. At the same time, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bangkok are in a three-way contest as transportation links, and Kuala Lumpur has staked a claim as THE software manufacturing center to be reckoned with… as Myanmar and Cambodia haggle over which produces the most and best quality gems, and Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines all say they have the best beaches. We won’t even touch the subject of where the best shopping is, nor where the most beautiful women reside.

As the members of ASEAN, and southern China (arguably a part of Southeast Asia, at least economically and culturally), scramble for control of various markets, some of them make an occasional, amusing stretch. When the Love Bug devastated computers around the world in 2001 and the culprit or culprits were said to be young hackers in Manila, for instance, then President Joseph Estrada, a onetime film actor, said his country should strive to become a center for developing anti-virus software. It sounded like a bad movie plot.

So, too, did a plastic surgeon’s call in Thailand when he said Bangkok could become the world’s center for sex-change operations. In fact, the doctor, himself one of a number of physicians active in waving his magic scalpel to turn one sex into another (mostly men into women), actually was on the right track. He was just taking too narrow a view.

Others in Thailand already had tried to promote the country as a destination for foreign retirees, without any notable success.

But one of the things offered to such retired persons did seem, by itself, reasonably exploitable—and that was the recognition given the country’s new levels of medical proficiency.

Not long ago, if you needed medical assistance in Southeast Asia, conventional wisdom said the best—only!—places to go were Hong Kong and Singapore. I remember a half-dozen years ago asking Andrew Toth, the American consul in Bali, what his biggest problem was. He said it was trying to convince foreign visitors to the island that just because they were staying in a five-star hotel, they could not get five-star medical treatment.

“I told them that if they had anything more serious than a broken leg,” he told me, “they should somehow get to Singapore. Because the hospitals in Bali didn’t even provide medicine or food.”

It was for this reason that many expatriates in Indonesia, and elsewhere in the region, had clauses in their medical insurance policies that covered “med-evac” (airlift) service to Singapore or Hong Kong.

Happily, medical treatment has improved in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia in recent years, but it’s still pretty shaky in much of the region. In most Southeast Asian countries, even the capital cities don’t have much to brag about when it comes to modern medicine.

Of all the countries, Thailand may have improved the most, and there is no better place to start than in the office of Curtis Schroeder, the American CEO of Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok. He believes that Thailand’s medical services now are as good as those offered in Singapore and that with prices one-half to one-third of those in that city-state, Singapore no longer can compete.

The shift began, he said, in 1997, when Bumrungrad opened its new building and six months later the baht was devalued. The Singapore dollar subsequently lost only a little of its value, but this led to its losing most of its Indonesian patients when the rupiah dropped to less than a third of its previous value, making Bangkok the more attractive destination for health care.

Schroeder also credited Bangkok’s location, within quick and easy reach of numerous countries that don’t offer much modern medical treatment—from Nepal and Bangladesh to Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

“These fundamentals are not specific to our hospital,” Schroeder said, “—they apply to everyone in Bangkok.” He also recognized that eight other hospitals (in Chiang Mai and Hat Yai as well as in the capitol) have been certified by the Swiss-based International Standards Organization (ISO), which evaluates and guarantees work systems but not services quality. However, so far, he said, Bumrungrad was (at the time of my interview in 2000) the only one with Hospital Accreditation (HA), the approval given by a non-governmental Bangkok organization that judges actual hospital care by American and Canadian standards.

To win this international acceptance and patient base, Bumrungrad sent marketing teams to meet doctors throughout the region, from Kunming to Jakarta to Bhutan, and opened fulltime offices in Dacca, Ho Chi Minh City and Yangon (staffed by a physician, who makes references), and representative offices in Phnom Penh, Colombo and Kathmandu. The hospital also began hosting medical teams from throughout the region and introduced a web page that attracted over three thousand hits a month.

“Our forms are now in Thai, English, Japanese and Mandarin,” he went on, “and we have a staff of interpreters, including seven who speak Japanese. Many of our physicians are internationally trained. Our nurses receive cultural sensitivity training. For instance, Thai patients take the pills they’re given without question, but Americans and Australians want to know what they’re swallowing, so our nurses have to know. For our Muslim patients, they also know where Mecca is and prayer rugs are available.

“In addition, we’ve tried to create an international feel to the place. Much of the hospital signage is in English and Japanese as well as Thai. We offer vegetarian, western, Japanese and Oriental [Chinese and Thai] dishes on our menu and employ guest chefs from leading local hotels who create healthy gourmet lunches. We have Japanese and Thai restaurants in the hospital, along with a McDonald’s and a Starbucks, and soon will have two Cybernet cafes for our patients.”

The chain restaurants have drawn some criticism, with one Bangkok journalist writing “fill up now on fatty hamburgers downstairs and when your arteries are clogged come upstairs and we’ll replace them.” Schroeder shrugged and said they were a “way to create a world ambiance. Our lobby doesn’t look or smell like a hospital. It’s less intimidating. We believe this creates a better environment for healing.”

This setting further includes fully-serviced apartments for friends and family members. When a man comes from Japan for heart surgery, say, he’s admitted to the new hospital building and his family checks into the old one, converted to comfortable oneand two-bedroom flats.

What has been the result? In 1996, there were forty thousand international patients, including resident expatriates and foreign travelers and in 1999, there were 162,000, the largest number from the Japanese expat community, followed by Americans and British. This business, Shroeder said, represented thirty percent of the hospital revenue and it made Bumrungrad the “largest international health care provider in Southeast Asia.”

That was the situation when I checked myself in, got my body bathed and shaved by three attractive Thai nurses (not an altogether unpleasant experience), and was wheeled into one of the operating rooms. Briefly, one of my arteries was completely blocked (“calcified” was the doctor’s word) and two others were about fifty percent blocked. I had not had a heart attack, only recurring angina pain, so I was making the assault. Call it a preemptive strike.

The plan was to take a long piece of a vein from one of my legs and use it to make the bypasses that would skirt the blockages and return full blood flow to and from my heart. I was assured that it would be at least six weeks before I could lift a bar girl weighing more than thirty kilograms and that the pain in my chest and leg would go away much sooner. I also had to sign a form wherein I assumed full responsibility for whatever they did while I was sedated.

In the days that followed surgery, there were moments. Many of them. The worst may have been when the team of nurses in the Coronary Care Unit extracted the breathing device that had been inserted into my throat and it seemed to have got stuck on the spot where my gag reflex resides, so that I couldn’t stop gagging and felt like what Richard Pryor described in his routine about Forgetting How to Breathe and I went at the sweet little caregivers as if I were Jean-Claude Van Damme. I make light of this, but my friend (now wife) Lamyai arrived in the middle of this affray and burst into tears.

There was also the wonderful experience a few days later having the catheter yanked from my penis.

Worst of all were paranoid fantasies equal to anything Stephen King had devised that accompanied the morphine painkiller that was delivered via one of my IV drips. I swear this is true: both nights that I was being eased and sedated by that scurrilous chemical concoction, I was totally convinced that one of the nurses on the midnight-to-eight shift was a serial killer out to murder foreigners. It was like a peyote trip I took in the early 1970s, when I fell into a suicidal pit; I knew, intellectually, that the depression was drug-induced, but that didn’t mean the desire to kill myself wasn’t real. Now I found myself confronting the nurse every time she approached my IV bottle with a syringe, inhospitably.

“What’s that?” I demanded.

“Med-ih-CEEEEEN,” she lilted in her adorable Thai accent. “What KIND of medicine?”

“Pain-kee-LAH!” she replied.

You get the picture and will appreciate why I was pleased that on the third day I was given Tylenol with codeine instead.

Recovery was quick and by the fourth day I was complaining about the food (think airline economy class or primary school cafeteria) and enduring sponge baths delivered by nurses that made me feel like an old Buick under assault by towel boys in an East L.A. carwash.

On the fifth day, most of the ten IV ports, drains, catheters and assorted monitoring connections were removed and I was in a double room alone with one of my docs telling me I was an ideal patient. (Pants on fire.) Attitude was a large part of the process, he said. There were many men who came into the hospital for what is called “elective coronary artery bypass surgery” expecting to die—between one and two percent do—and they recovered much more slowly. To assist me, I was given what looked like a child’s toy and asked to take breaths deep enough to raise three balls to the top of three chambers, thus re-expand my lungs. I was also given a red, heart-shaped pillow with the hospital’s name on it to hug to my chest when I coughed, which felt like being stabbed the first few days but apparently was necessary to keep fluid from accumulating. I was told to carry the pillow everywhere the first two weeks. Sure.

Lamyai was with me at night and much of every day, helping me pee and turn over and sit up, massaging my back, changing my sweat-soaked PJs, sharing my morning rice soup, peeling and feeding me fruit that was brought by visitors. One night three friends from the bar where she worked arrived at two thirty a.m on their way home, giving the nurses on duty something to gossip about for days. Lamyai was actually encouraged to stay—it’s the Thai way—and I couldn’t have done it without her.

On the eighth day I went home, where I sat with three looping patches on my pump, a humungous bag of pills, my dry, splotched, nearly hairless skin reminding Lamyai of an ancient Chinese man she once worked for, wounded (and missing) veins, tender former IV entry ports, cramped muscles, aching joints, blisters on my feet from the crappy slippers the hospital gave me for my forced eight-hundred-meter marches up and down the hallway, occasional floating spots before my eyes, entrails still partially compacted, and a seven-day growth of hair that looked far better on George Michael’s chin than on my torso, limbs, and genitalia, as I waited for the next adventure in my life.

I had a friend who e-mailed my kids every day I was in the hospital and when my daughter and I finally talked by phone, she said that when she heard I was bitching about the food, she knew I was going to be okay I was, too. Within a short time after discharge, I was climbing the ninety steps to the Bangkok Skytrain without getting short of breath, the pain had stopped in my left arm, and the whole thing cost me only US$8,000. A friend of mine in the States had virtually identical surgery about the same time and it cost him US$55,000!

Okay. After all’s said and done, the question is: would I do it all over again in Bangkok?

Yes. But only if the nurse who shaved me before surgery is in charge of the post-operative drugs.

The Visa Dash

My friend Chris Moore was bragging about how quickly he passed through immigration on one of his recent visa trips, then immediately through immigration again, to satisfy Thailand’s Byzantine requirements to remain in the Kingdom legally.

Chris is a Canadian novelist living in Bangkok and like most expatriates in foreign countries he must leave the country of his chosen residence regularly to keep his visa current. Chris generally has a visa good for six months at a time, but he must leave the country during that period, even if only for long enough to get the requisite rubber stamp on his passport, proving an exit and re-entry. Chris told me he once did a turn-around in Singapore in eighteen minutes, a stunning accomplishment.

The time came for me to make a similar visa run and I decided to challenge his mark. Singapore’s airport is remarkably efficient, so desiring an even playing field I made that my destination, too. Although I gave it no significance at the time, I was carrying a bag that weighed about twenty-five kilograms, following a week-long holiday on one of Thailand’s southern islands.

Trouble arose even before I left Thailand, when the plane was an hour late in departing. This meant that I wouldn’t have ninety minutes in which to do my immigration boogie, but only half an hour. That left me a very small window of exit and re-entry, should I not be so lucky as Chris, or as quick.

As we approached Singapore, I shared my concern with an airline flight attendant, who referred me to the purser, who told me not to worry. She promised to turn me over to the airline’s ground staff on arrival, which she did, along with a Chinese Singaporean who worked in Bangkok and was making the same turn-around visa sprint.

We were met at the plane by a young man with a cellular telephone. We took off at a run, our guide shouting into his phone, and entered one of those conveyor belts called “people movers.” Continuing to take long strides, we passed all others at a rapid clip. As we exited, my knees buckled as suddenly we were on unmoving carpet again. A second man, identically dressed, also carrying a mobile phone, met us at this point and we were passed to him like batons in a relay race.

“Do you have any luggage?” the man asked. My new friend said no and I said only the fifty kg bag, which by now was beginning to feel like a sack of wet sand with a handle. Why, I asked myself, did I always buy so many books and magazines when I traveled?

There followed two more knee-buckling people movers, which took us to the main body of the terminal, where our first immigration passage loomed. Because we had traveled at such unusual speed, there were no clerks in position to meet us. Our escort hustled two into place for us and, in under a minute, I was given permission to “enter and remain in Singapore for thirty days.” (“Hey, guys,” I said to myself, “would you believe thirty minutes?”) I checked my watch, surprised to discover that only six minutes had elapsed.

Then we were on the run again, down an escalator and through the nothing-to-declare customs path. Even if I’d had anything to declare, I couldn’t have found the breath to say what; by now, my one hundred kg bag was hanging by its strap from my shoulder and I was sweating like a pig and snorting, too.

“What nationality are you?” our guide asked.

“American,” I gulped, sucking air. Trying to inject some humor into what was a painful experience, I added, “I learned… how to run… through airports… from O.J. Simpson.”

“Who’s that?” he said.

“You know, the football player,” I panted. “He made television commercials for a rental car company, jumping over airport turnstiles while trying to make a flight. That was before they say he killed his wife.”

“Never heard of him,” the man said. I was beginning to like him more and more.

After that, it was up a long flight of stairs. By now, my shirt was sticking to my back, my socks were slipping into my shoes, and sweat was cascading into my eyes from some mysterious aquifer in my hair. My ears were still popping, too. Slow down, you blokes, I said to myself. You’ve got an “older” man in tow, twice your age and carrying a 150 kilogram bag, versus the combined weight of your cellular phone and your passport. Your legs are longer, too.

We finally reached the airline check-in counter, where a clerk mosied to our service, requesting fifteen Singapore dollars each, the airport exit fee. I said I only had Thai baht. The airline representative said I’d have to change the currency—he pointed to a booth fifty meters away—but fortunately my fellow traveler had enough Singapore dollars to cover me, and as our seats were being assigned and boarding passes were printed he accepted repayment in baht, thereby saving several precious minutes in our race back to the day’s last Singapore-to-Bangkok flight.

Our guide remained behind us now and my friend and I were on our own as we galloped back through immigration, picking up an exit stamp. My two hundred kilogram bag was still on my left shoulder and I was mopping sweat with a large kerchief in my right hand.

Finally, we arrived at Gate 63, an immense room where hundreds of travelers with “carry-on” bags the size of small cars were standing in line to board. I looked at my watch. It seemed incredible, but from the time we exited the plane from Thailand and passed through the boarding gate heading for home again, only fourteen minutes had elapsed! Chris Moore, eat your heart out!

Upon my return, however, my friend Chris refused to concede defeat. His record stands, he claims, as it was unassisted.

Going Troppo

What follows probably won’t make much sense, or seem funny, to farangs who haven’t lived in Thailand for a while, but for those who have, the behavioral traits here listed will ring embarrassingly true. “Going troppo” (short for tropical) is the same thing as “going native” or, more rarely, “going bamboo,” and in Thailand, as elsewhere, it means more than wearing a sarong and drinking the local beer.

From a variety of sources, some of them lost in the anonymity that accompanies much of that which is transmitted by e-mail through cyberspace—along with a few of my own observations— here’s how you can tell when you, as a foreigner, have stayed in Thailand longer than most:

The Farangs

Many Thais blame the Caucasian interloper for much of what’s wrong with Thailand. Unfairly, the American financier George Soros was charged with pushing Thailand’s and then much of the rest of Asia’s economy to its knees in 1997 when he began speculating on the value of the Thai baht. He previously had “broken” the Bank of England with his crafty foreign exchange transactions, so there was reason to suspect he’d had a similar effect on the collapsing value of the Thai currency, but to overlook other factors endemic in Thailand—such as corruption and greed—was to make Mr. Soros a convenient scapegoat.

Other critics say Thailand wouldn’t have the sex industry that gives the country such an unsavory international reputation if it weren’t for American military men here during the war in Vietnam—ignoring the fact that prostitution existed in Thailand for centuries before the first farang sailed up the Chao Phrya River, and that today the industry is controlled almost exclusively by Thais, with Thais contributing the largest customer base, virtually all of the sex workers, ownership and management of venues, as well as the cops who are responsible, for reasons of their own, for the lax enforcement of laws against the trade.

Some pundits get personal, and none more harshly than Mont Redmond, himself a farang, describing in his book, Wondering into Thai Culture (1998), the first Europeans as “big-bodied adventurers from thimble-sized countries, odd in color and custom, and unaccountably fierce or friendly at unimaginable distances from their native land… meddlesome creature(s), inclined to excess in everything but good manners and humility.” His rant continued, but that’s enough to give you a feel for how he felt about his fellow round-eyes. Not that his view was entirely indefensible.

Of course, there are many who praise the farang, if not in words then in deed, most often in the form of flattery inherent in the speed with which much of farang culture and conveniences have been welcomed, copied, adapted and merchandized. Many have written of the West’s influence on the East and I don’t think I have anything new to say, except that I find it somewhat amusing when some of the Thais who are most outspoken in criticizing farangs are the ones who: drive a Mercedes-Benz or a BMW; educate their kids in England, the United States or Australia; fill up their closets with Italian shirts; worship golf to the point of naming some of their children after the game; bet on European football teams; and wouldn’t be caught dead drinking anything but expensive French wines and Johnny Walker Black. And you ought to see the Thai Buddhists during the Christmas season; I thought Americans knew how to shop!

There’s nothing new about this. The first Thai head of state to travel outside the region, Rama V (Chulalongkorn) visited Europe in 1897 and returned wearing a top hat and tails. He brought back Waterford crystal from Ireland, Severes porcelain and Baccarat goblets from France, Italian Murano glass, Royal Crown Derby plates from England, and introduced Western architecture to Thailand.

Which is not to be construed as negative comment on my part, so long as the preference for Western things and ways is genuine and unaccompanied by slurs against their origins. Like many farangs living in the Thailand, I’ve crossed over, too. I have a Thai family and a house upcountry, most of my diet is Thai (even including insects), I drink Chang beer and have a respectable library of books about Thailand, assembled in a so-far futile attempt to understand the country and culture that I choose to call mine for however long the Department of Immigration renews my annual visa.

I’m also trying to understand my peers and have pushed them into what I hope will become, for the reader, helpful groups:

There are other, smaller groups. Farangs who come to Thailand to study Buddhism (some have become monks) or massage or aromatherapy. Journalists assigned by their bosses to cover the region, who make the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand a frequent stop following work to sup, sip and diss the country in which they work, and tell each other how they’d run Thailand if they had the chance.

It’s possible to belong to more than one group. Many of us do. I’m part journalist, part barhound (with a Thai family and house in the Northeast) and I contribute part of almost every week to Father Joe Maier’s efforts in the slums.

Do we share anything in common, other than our big bodies, pale pigment and lack of manners and humility? Surely. I think most male farangs, visitor or resident, have at some time thought of themselves as a sort of “target,” someone perceived as having money, or at least enough to share, causing some Thais to go after them like a heat-seeking missile. In his paranoia, probably rooted in reality, he also may think Thai men don’t like him because of this wealth and advantage, but also because he takes so many Thai women away so easily. Many farang males, in turn, condemn Thai men when they hear how frequently they have deserted their wives and children, or have taken second wives.

Another shared trait is a changed, or changing, regard for the countries of our birth. Living abroad alters anyone’s point of view, if only to sharpen one’s previously held beliefs, and many go home with a repertoire of wonderful stories to tell, but are glad to be back where everything more or less works all the time, and life is more comfortably familiar. Others feel more estranged from the lands of their origins and complain about where they came from as much as about where they are. These are the ones who stay.

Inevitably, the latter disdain western media and the way it reports the world’s news, because the coverage is so Euro-centric. Why, we wonder, do so many western countries give Asia and Asians so little regard? Living in Thailand offers an alternative take on many things and in time some of us embrace the Asian ways, rejecting at least some of the western ones.

In any case, most farangs tend to flock together. We wheel our psychological wagons in a circle, and hang out with other farangs most of the time, constantly comparing notes, praising and criticizing our hosts by turn, going home and coming back again, always shaking our heads in amazement; some are so bold as to write books. And however many conclusions we reach, in the end we likely haven’t a clue.