Somewhere on the North-South Highway in Thailand -- 9 December 1998

At breakfast in the lobby of our hotel, we met a corrections officer from Florida who was missing two fingers on his left hand, writing a book, and thinking about retiring in Thailand. He told us he'd met a guy from Tasmania who'd been approached in Phuket and offered a job, he didn't really know what it entailed when he accepted it. He was given nice clothes and a white jacket and taken to a mill where the workers had been agitating for health care. The Tassie was to be the "doctor" and he would examine the workers and either pronounce them fit or prescribe aspirin. Sinister.

We went to the train station to drop off our gear. The ticket office where Paul had gotten the bus tickets to KL had told him they would watch our packs for the day. Our bus was to leave at 5:30. The office was in the upstairs of the train station, a new space they were just moving into. It was already too small, crowded with employees, travelers and a a lot of packs. Paul piled ours on top and we left.

Downstairs was a coffee place called Coffebucks, which cracked me up. It looked like a Starbucks but had Wild West motifs. The coffee was all right though. We got a paper then walked out to catch a cab to Asia Books, as we were both out of reading material. A taxi driver rushed forward and offered to take us for 200 baht. We burst out laughing, taken totally by surprise by this completely blatant attempt to scam. We got in a metered taxi and the trip cost 67 baht. The first bookstore we went into really wasn't that good, and we walked quite a ways to another branch. This one was much better, although they were playing horrible Christmas music with children singing in high chipmunk voices. It was excruciating, especially since the whole country is Muslim. But we each got two books (one of mine was Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, which I've been wanting to read ever since I discovered it in Edinburgh.) We walked back to the Landmark Hotel, where the first bookstore was, and had lunch downstairs at one of their restaurants. It was quite expensive but good food, no misunderstandings about prawns or anything like that. It was our last meal in Thailand so we figured we could splurge.

We still had some time before our bus left. Paul hadn't found the right wooden Buddha image and decided to skip it. We walked past the very impressive American Ambassador's residence to Lumphini Park. It was quite a nice green space, and we sat by the lake for a while. Two Thai couples asked to have photos taken with us in them, Paul guessed by the placement of all involved that I was the "American Girlfriend" again, and Paul, my brother. I'd really like to know what this photo business is all about.

Paul had been told the day before that our bus would depart at 5:00 so we arrived at 4:30. As 5:00 came and went, Paul enquired in the office and was told that actually, the bus would leave at 5:30. The next time he asked, it was 6:00. Everyone waiting was beginning to be really frustrated. There were no explanations, just "Sit down outside on the benches." Arghhh. At 6:30, we were finally greeted by two employees for the bus company, who separated us into groups based on our destination, and led us downstairs, outside, down the street and right next to a horrible-smelling leaking dumpster, to wait again. I was getting grossed out, thinking about what my pack was lying in on the ground. Finally, we were led away again, down the road and to our bus. Paul stayed with the gear and I raced onto the bus to secure good seats. The bottom level of the bus contained the facilities, the luggage storage, and had a couple of benches to sit on. An employee beckoned me to sit down there. I did, but then saw that everyone else was going upstairs and I climbed the spiral staircase as well, and grabbed two seats together near the front on the right. Good thing too. Later, when he went downstairs to use the WC, Paul learned from seven poor Aussies who were stuck down where I had first sat that the bus was overbooked. They didn't have enough room to all sit and a couple of them were lying down on top of the luggage, with only a couple of inches of headroom above them. One guy had to sit on the stairs. They were very upset, but what could they do? Complain to everyone who came down to use the facilities, that's what. To keep us from rioting, because we still hadn't left, the driver had put in the film, Dumb and Dumber. I was not appeased. We left at 7:00, and when the movie ended, we never saw another. (We had been promised continuous movies and dinner. Our meal amounted to a small cup of water and two small stale pastries in a box. It promised to be a long 19 hours to KL.)

At 10:00 we pulled into a gas station and parked. We didn't seem to be there to fill up, and no one would say what was going on. There were rumors that there were power lines down ahead and that there were highway men or robbers on the road. It was maddening. We read for a while, and then tried to sleep, but I really couldn't get comfortable. I ended up with a huge purple bruise on my thigh from the armrest and a really bad attitude.

Somewhere on the North-South Highway in Thailand -- 10 December 1998

We had stayed with several other busses at the gas station for five hours. At 3:00 a.m, we got back on the highway, only to be mired in standstill traffic a short while later. Everyone woke at sunrise after snatches of sleep. We were still in the traffic jam and hadn't moved very far. At one point, we pulled off to the side of the road. Again, no mention of what our plans were, we were just stopped. A pickup truck pulled up alongside us about half an hour later and a bunch of food boxes and drinks were handed over. At first, I thought the operators were feeling sorry for us because we hadn't had any dinner the night before. Silly, naive me. The food was for our three drivers. We didn't get a stop until noon, and by that time, the toilet had been unusable for several hours (really unusable) and I had gone way past desperate. In the meantime, we'd taken a detour of almost 20 km to bypass 5 km of highway through very bumpy, dusty dirt roads. (Bumpy was very bad in my condition.)

At any rate, we had our first meal since lunch yesterday. Cokes were 40 baht. Bad fried rice with chicken in portions that were definitely on the skimpy side cost 45 baht. I won't get into the WC situation. Suffice it to say that there were a lot of people using the squat toilets and no running water. During the break, we tried in vain to ask the drivers what was going on. Either they didn't speak any English, which I find hard to believe, or they just weren't interested in answering our questions. In either case, we got absolutely nothing.

At 5:00, we arrived in Surat Thani, where it began to rain, and where we just milled around in an open air travel office for a while until we were given the bad news: we weren't going to KL tonight. We were supposed to have been there five hours ago. I went up to the desk to ask why we weren't going, what we were doing instead, etc. I was told only that we'd be going to Hat Yai. I asked where that was and got no response. Then I asked if the company would be putting us up for the night and the woman said, "No!" and walked away. I asked another guy for information and he brushed me aside, saying he had to do something else. I stuck to him like glue so I could ask him exactly where Hat Yai was the minute he was free. His was a ploy though. He artfully evaded me by running away.

I was completely exasperated by this time and very tired. We'd had not one apology or explanation in 24 hours. I went back to the first woman and found out that they were not the same company as, nor were they associated with, the company we'd bought our tickets from. Or so they claimed. And the reason we weren't going to KL tonight was because the border closed at night. A green pickup pulled up outside and we were told to get in. In the back, in the rain, with all our gear. No explanations. For all I knew, this was our ride to Hat Yai, wherever that was. And it was raining. I tried to ask the driver for particulars and naturally came away as ignorant as before. Then he just yelled at me to get in. I resentfully and grumblingly took the last space left on the tailgate and we drove away. Around the corner, where we were dropped off at yet another travel agency. We could have walked. I should have learned my lesson by now, but once I get my teeth in something, I can't let go. I asked the guy behind the desk what the story was and he refused to answer any of my questions. He just told me to wait for the boss. I finally got him to admit that the boss' name was Cheery or Cherry, or something like that.

Okay, here's the part I'm not proud of, where I go completely ballistic. Those of you who think well of me would do well to skip down to the next paragraph now, rather than be completely disillusioned. Cheery finally arrived and was decided chilly. And imposing. She denied being the boss. But what the heck? I plunged in. At first, Cheery tried to blow me off like all the others but I explained that she was the only one left, everyone had told me I must wait to speak to her, would she please answer my questions? Where were we staying tonight? Where was Hat Yai? Could she give me the name of the company we'd gotten the tickets from? The phone number? "No, no." What was her company's name? The phone number? Cheery totally clammed up and claimed not to know the answers. Then I did a stupid thing, I threatened to call the police if I didn't get some answers. Cheery told smugly to go ahead, but that I couldn't use her phone. (Calling the police is a very bad idea for a foreigner, it usually means you will never get to leave.) An Indian guy who was standing next to me started begging me to please let it go and go outside. That was when I knew I must have completely lost it. It was as if I'd just woken up from a bad nightmare, and realized that I had actually done all the horrible things I thought I'd only dreamed. If an Indian guy thought I was over the top, I must have really gone over and right down the other side. I stumbled out of the office and down the street, tears streaming down my cheeks. Now I felt ashamed, stupid and terribly embarrassed. I just couldn't understand why no one wanted to tell me why we were so late, and what had happened. I walked around until I'd cooled off, and stood outside the office with Paul, who still seemed willing to be seen with me. The Indian guy dropped a pack of Chicklets on the ground. Paul said, "You dropped something," and the guy said that it didn't matter. They were in a package and couldn't have gotten dirty. He just didn't want to pick them up because they'd been contaminated by being on the ground. Another guy in our group asked if we wanted to go get something to eat, and I think we said yes but as it turns out, I hadn't even started getting the anger and sadness out of my system. Paul took me around the corner and I cried my eyes out on his shoulder. Paul was very kind and listened to me wail about how no one wanted to give us any information, no one wanted to help us, and how no one cared. I wasn't asking for anything unreasonable, so why was it so hard? He told me that I get intense and extremely focussed on getting the answer I want, and that it scares people or puts them off. I think I see now how I get too confrontational. At the time, it was the last thing I wanted to hear. We walked back and I was pleased to see that the Indian guy was now visibly terrified of me. There is some power in that, even when the other person believes you are insane. Paul bought a paper at the newsstand nearby to see if we could find out what we'd been through, and there it was on the front page: a village rioting against the building of a coal power plant in their area. A total of 5,000 protesters had cut off the only North-South road in Thailand. Three people had died, police had been injured. At least you had to be impressed with the strategy. Now that I think about it, they did the kind of thing I had done, but they had better results. It's totally out of cultural character to speak out so strongly, to go against the grain. The message had certainly gotten through.

At 7:00 we got the word that we were leaving for Hat Yai. A very small van appeared and we all crowded in. It was a tight fit. The AC made it quite cold and water from the system kept dripping on me, and tears kept sliding out of the corners of my eyes. Paul whispered, "Put down your sword." I took his point but it didn't help just at that moment when I was so miserable about having failed my Quest.

At 10:00 we finally stopped for a break. Good thing, I'd been calculating my chances if I asked the driver to stop and let me answer the call of nature. Immediately after we got back on the road, we were pulled over at a police checkpoint. Our driver was made to go into the police station, I don't know why. (What, you expected an explanation at this point?) I considered it a bad sign when the driver came back about 15 minutes later to turn off the engine. He didn't even say anything to the ubiquitous "other guy." Even I didn't dare ask what was going on. The driver did finally come back. I can only assume he paid someone a hefty little bribe or fine and was let go. We arrived in Hat Yai at 12:30 in the morning and were told to stay in the Visa Hotel and to show up at the travel agency the next day at 7:30 a.m. Joy. The Visa charged 450 baht for a room with no hot water, no sheets, and twin beds. We did have towels and toilet paper though. I was exhausted anyway. We slept.

Kuala Lumpur -- 11 December 1998

We rose at 7:00, wisely believing the command to show ourselves at the travel agency at 7:30 to be a bald-faced lie. We had cold but refreshing showers then went out in search of breakfast. All we found was a 7-11 type convenience store. We bought drinks and donuts. On the way back to the hotel, we ran into a Malaysian couple who were on our bus. They had discovered a little hole in the wall place (or maybe it just looked like that to me) that served coffee and Thai breakfast (fried rice). They bough us coffee (even Paul!), which tasted more like Ovaltine than actual coffee, but the conversation was good. Gota and Avi are a lovely couple, pretty Westernized to my eyes. Gota had on a sweatshirt and Avi, a polo shirt. They had been up in Bangkok for the Asian Games and had also been unable to get train tickets back. I felt somehow better that Asians had been as "taken in" by the slick-talking and -looking company as we had been. We read later that Thai culture thrives on the concept of "Big Man, Little Man" which may explain a lot about how we were treated. It may be that service providers become the Big Man once you hand over money to them. You are the Little Man because you need them to provide the service. After they become the Big Man, they don't have to do anything they don't want to. It may also be that anyone outside the already established pecking order, like foreigners, is automatically a Little Man. The Thai economy thrives on the tourist dollar but probably doesn't love or respect the foreigner that comes with it. And it is true that, in the end, we were taken care of, just not well or nicely. We Americans like so much to be liked. And we assume that if we are nice, people will be nice back. I wonder what circumstances allow you to be the Big Man. Surely once you know the rules as a foreigner they have no choice but to let you play.

Our ticket said we were to leave at 8:30, so that's when we showed up at the travel office. At 9:00, we took a tuk-tuk in the rain to a new travel office called Angel Travel Service. We were told without asking that we'd be getting on a bus at 10:00 and then the woman behind the counter filled out our arrival cards (into Malaysia) for us. The bus was really nice, if upholstered in a rather tacky pink rose pattern. I barely noticed. I was too busy being in awe of the plush seats, overhead bins, and the water bottles that someone handed out to all of us. We were also given frozen towelettes to freshen up with. This was more like it.

A British guy named Guy and a Swedish woman named Linda got thrown together because they were traveling alone. They sat behind us and were good to talk to. Linda is very young, blond, tall and good-looking and told stories of Indian guys grabbing her breasts and taking all kinds of other liberties. What bothered her was the assumption that they could, that all blond Western woman are easy and welcome that sort of thing.

Immigration into Malaysia was a breeze. The only thing I could get annoyed about was the excessively long stop at the duty-free shop. We stopped for lunch and met a cop who was on some sort of failed raid or something. He couldn't talk about it and enjoyed the air of mystery that surrounded him. He took great pains to assure us that Malaysia is completely safe and that the Reformasi riots were completely under control. His partner was kind of a lowlife, throwing English curse words around like a US Marine, no offense to that branch of the military. Interestingly, the cop told us that the real reason everyone was so upset with Gore's Reformasi speech was because he gave it then left the dinner early, and didn't even stick around for rebuttals. That and his handshake was way too stiff. Of course, he's kind of a stiff guy but could be that he wasn't briefed on Malaysian etiquette and protocol? We arrived in KL at 9:00, right when the woman at Angel had said we would. (I think the name of the travel agent was no accident. I was much in need of an angel at that point.) The drive into the city is really impressive, an hour before we arrived, we could see two tall towers at either end of the valley through a gap in the hills. One of them, the KL City Center, is the tallest building in the world, I believe. KL is almost always referred to as KL, I think it must be because the name means "muddy estuary", a name too ugly for the city. It's the most beautiful Asian city I've seen, with huge gleaming highrises standing next to old Colonial buildings. Too bad we wouldn't stay. We'd planned to have a couple of days to look around but the bus ride from Hell put an end to that idea. We had to catch our flight to Bali tomorrow.

Linda suggested to Guy that they split the cost of a room. Guy agreed, I don't know if he was surprised or not. Linda had already hinted that she and Guy might spend their time in KL together, she had just decided to stay a while longer. I suppose she felt safer that way, and maybe she even had a crush on Guy. We walked with them as far as our hotel, built on top of the Puduraya Bus Station. The station is a huge complex rivalling Tel Aviv's own, and the hotel looked positively puny on top of it. We had to cross a pedestrian bridge over the highway to get into the chaos of the station. I was surprised to see two people smoking right under a sign meant to deter them. Malaysia isn't quite as orderly as Singapore. It took a bit of hunting to find an elevator that would take us up to the hotel. There were lots of staircases, but it was too hot to lug the gear up endless flights. Paul found the elevator and then came back to get me and the gear.

There was a special on and our room only cost 88 ringgit ($25) instead of the normal 110. There was Christmas music playing in the lobby, County Western stuff I'd never heard before, and a poor little fake Christmas tree stood in the corner. I guess it's for the guests but it sure feels contrived in a Muslim country. Our room was terrific. We had a big bed, hot water, a TV and a phone to check the email. We were hungry and went to the restaurant to see whether it was still open. The staff were so nice and polite and helpful after Thailand. We ordered the local Anchor (great) and a Guiness Malta (very sweet) beers, fries and cheese and chicken sandwiches, which came by the half dozen, and seemed like a weird prospect until we saw that they were tea sandwiches. The Christmas music was still playing and it both warmed and repelled me. I was afraid of feeling bad about missing Christmas although I seemed to be just fine. It's just not what it used to be for me anymore. I guess I'm in the process of figuring out what it will mean for me in the future. We went back to the room, where Paul put photos up on the web site and I watched Steel Magnolias and then fell asleep.