The JaYmes Escape

“Yes, Yes, Dee mahk-mahk”, says the young Thai lady as I massage her thigh with my knee. Dee mahk-mahk means ‘very good’, and on my last full day in Chiang Mai she is giving me a quick course in the art of Thai massage. Manouvering the subject into various bizzare positions to massage them with everything from your soles to your elbows is actually quite hard work.

It’s been two and a half weeks since I crossed into Thailand and having now left Chiang Mai, I’m on my way to the border. After an overnight stop in Chiang Rai in the far north, I will cross the ‘mighty’ Mekong river into the town of Huay Xai in the Lao Peoples’ Democratic Republic; better known as Laos.

The elephant grasped the banana with his trunk, which disappeared with it before coming back empty a few seconds later. Before long, all the bananas and sugar canes had gone and he grudgingly plodded on knowing that we’d soon be sold some more. Sure enough, the handlers have a cunningly placed cooler just down the track.

Suddenly I’m in the water; an hour or so has passed since the elephant experience and I’ve been trying to stand up on a bamboo raft. The water isn’t deep but it is brown enough to make the rocky river bed invisible, and I stand just in time to watch a piece of elephant dung float past. Wet and filthy, I find my way back onto the waiting raft trying to decide if I’m going to remember this as a positive or negative experience.

Don’t forget to check the gallery for some recent pictures. Particularly recommended are the albums from Siem Reap and Phnom Penh.

The jungle buzzed with mosquitoes as another man keeled over; thin and wretched from undernourishment, overwork and disease he has finally succumbed to Cholera, Malaria or Dystentry.

The Japanese war effort in China was being hampered by allied supplies from Burma and India; allied contol of the malacca strait around Singapore presented a logistical problem – to sever the supply route they would need to attack and occupy Burma, and yet there was no way of transporting supplies from Indo-China and Thailand. The solution was to build a railway through the jungle to connect Bangkok with Rangoon in Burma. The labour force was to consist of Asian conscripts and Allied POWs living in the most horrendous conditions along the route. The price was hundreds of thousands of their lives.

Thus this became known as the death railway, and today a collection of monuments and cemeteries surrounds the railway’s most famous landmark: The Bridge over the river Kwai in Kanchanaburi; some 100 miles west of Bangkok.

“You want suit sir?”,
“Tuk-tuk sir, where you go eh?”,
“Massage, Thai Massage?”,
“Hey you, where you from?”,

Bangkok’s Khao San Road; I’ve heard so much negativity about ths place that I was dreading my arrival – but actually it isn’t that bad. After Cambodia it’s quite pleasant to relax and enjoy some ‘well beaten track’ pleasures for a change. To the travel snobs who whine about this place I say “Go somewhere else then”, and stop boring us all with your stories that begin something like, “I met this bloke in Lithuania”.

What’s that you say? No I’ve never started a sentence with that, never ever, not me….

I’m carrying my bags across the mud; to my left is an area strewn with rubbish buzzing with insects. Further on a group of Buddhist monks in bright orange robes are eating at a Khmer ‘restaurant’; a hut with plastic tables and chairs arranged on a wooden floor and hot vats of rice, noodles and various meat dishes. Straight ahead is the water; fresh green plants are being unloaded from a ship that looks like a floating pile of twisted steel. Alongside a boy of about 6 or 7 squats naked, playing in the dirt.

This is the port of Sihanoukville, on the Cambodian coast, where most goods enter or leave the country. It is a pleasant, if slightly edgy, seaside resort town which has glorious white beaches with thatched beach bars where rich Khmers and western tourists play side by side. Peter had hooked me up with his friend Panner, who gave me a full tour of town, out to a pleasant waterfall, and to cheap and delightful Khmer restaurants without even an English menu.

I show my passport to a man in uniform and walk down a dilapidated wooden pier. I have to watch my step to avoid losing a foot between the wooden boards. I reach the boat; a shabby flat-bottomed river vessel that could have plied tourists around the canals of Amsterdam or Venice 40 years ago, and heave my large bag towards the man on the roof where it will be strapped down under a tarpaulin. I am about to travel up the coast on what local ex-pats call the ‘vomit comet’; an express river boat tossed around on the open sea. As I take my seat the men inspecting tickets hand out sick bags; I take a deep breath as this is clearly going to be the final descent of my Cambodian roller-coaster ride.

After four stomach-churning hours of being bounced around on the waves we arrive at Koh Kong, close to the Thai border. I have not used the sick bag, but am informed that the sea was quite calm today; my belly shudders at the thought of what it must be like in the rough. Some negotiation and I’m bundled with my bags and some fellow tourists onto the back of a pick-up truck making the final 10 minute journey to the border.

Predictably, coils of razor wire mark the end of one country and the beginning of another. On the Cambodian side beggars, some with missing limbs, roam waving their hats like zombies, and smiling Khmer children try to sell me large boxes of cigarettes, presumably cheaper on this side, and offer me this many or that many Thai Baht for my Riel or Dollars. A few steps past the wire and a couple of keen eyed Thai soldiers, a certain orderly calm replaces the anarchy. The road widens again becoming clean black tarmac with neatly painted lines and an arrow indicating to the few arriving vehicles that they should move to the left rather than the right. There is even a cashpoint next to the neat row of air-conditioned minbuses waiting to take me to the town of Trat where I will stay the night.

As Cambodia disappears behind me I realise that this particular ride is over; I have arrived in a place which more closely resembles my expectations of ‘civilisation’.