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My Thailand Travel Diary part 1 June 12, 2008

Posted by dodo in : Bangkok, Hotels, London, Thailand, Tokyo, Travel Clinic, USA, Vietnam , trackback

Tokyo, the Okura Hotel. Girls in kimonos and obis stand by the elevators on each floor to greet arriving and departing guests, with a great deal of bowing. After unpacking soiled clothes, I anxiously fill out a list stamped with the warning: “Garments badly worn out will be returned unlaundered.” Ergo, my frayed shirts and frazzled underwear will probably be rejected. The room-maids trot, rather than walk, and they bow low both before and after turning down the bed.

The drive to Kunitachi Hall, in Tsuyama, takes two and a half hours on streets even more clogged with Toyotas, Isuzus, Hondas than Manhattan’s. The average age of the players in the Kunitachi Orchestra is only twenty. But they are lightning learners, good-looking, well-dressed, polite, and harder-working than American and European orchestra musicians would be able even to imagine: we rehearse for four hours without intermission or break. More than half of the personnel is female, young women scarcely larger than their cellos and horns and considerably smaller than their basses and tam-tam, for the percussion section is entirely “manned” by girls. With little experience of shifting-meter music, and after only a few rehearsals, the orchestra performs the Sacre almost perfectly and without apparent effort, but so robot-like that the music is stripped of its power.

Travel GuidebookHerr Renicke, the orchestra’s permanent conductor, and his Japanese singer-wife come to the Okura for dinner. He has been invited to the United States to give an Amadeus program, meaning a Salieri overture followed by two of the Mozart pieces fractured in the film. “Should this gimmick be taken seriously?” he asks, and I answer that a concert organization in London has programmed a Salieri sinfonia next to Mozart’s Jupiter, an unkindness that even the movie villain does not deserve.

Most of the other passengers on my Thai Air flight to Bangkok are hippies ultimately headed for Katmandu. After five hours, we turn inland and cruise over Vietnam, Laos, Kampuchea, the Mekong River—in pampered luxury, served by seductive girls in moire sarongs, as if all memory of what happened and is still happening below had been erased. “Welcome to the Kingdom of Thailand,” the sign reads at Don Muang airport. The taxi fare to the city, 300 bahts, $12, must be paid in advance and a contract signed in duplicate with the driver.

Traffic is left-side, English-style, and directions are in English as well as Thai. Why does “Keep Left” require about eighty-five letters and diacritical marks in the native language? Near the airport are a few stilt-style Le Corbusier apartment houses, then miles of slums only partly hidden by advertisements for Mitsubishi, IBM, Dairy Queen, and Dunkin’ Donuts. The largest sign, in the center of the city and in Times Square neon, is intended to protect a homegrown industry: “V.D. INTERNATIONAL CLINIC FREE CHECK-UP.” As Paul Theroux wrote, this “city of temples and brothels smells of sex as Calcutta smells of death.”

Tonight marks the conclusion of Visakha Puja, the festival of the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, passage into Nirvana, all—and it seems the best way—in one day. We pass a festooned enclosure in which the faithful, like Russians at Easter midnight, circle a temple carrying lighted candles and joss sticks.

The porters and lift boys at the Oriental Hotel are dolled up in the white tunics and ballooning black plus-fours of the Royal Guard. Assistant manager Pornthem Hantrakarnpong (not a name to drop) escorts me to the fifteenth floor and the large “Jim Thompson” apartment overlooking the Chao Phraya. One wall is inlaid with glass shelves containing jewel-encrusted gold jars. Another displays a silk-screen picture and a mural of nineteenth-century Siam, framed in red with gold borders. A statue of a courtier, smaller-than-life, carved in Thai teak and richly robed, stands spookily at the far end of the room. The rattan tables are heaped with orchids and fruit: mangoes, papayas, lichees, pomelos, pineapples. A note is attached to the last: “Thais eat pineapple with salt.” A sign in the bar asks the guest to “Fill out the honesty check,” and another above the bidet advises that “Massages are available from a professionally trained staff.”

The bedroom is gory with red-lacquer tables and chairs, wardrobe, desk—where my name is embossed on the writing paper—and a bed with matching silk curtains, pleated headrest, filigreed canopy. Handles are gold, as are the legs and feet of the furniture—claws, rather, for they are dragon- shaped. The bed linen is the softest silk.

The balconies, doors, and windows are locked against scorpions, giant roaches, spiders, lizards, and rats, all revoltingly pictured on a card. I plump like a potentate on the pile of pillows in the living room and study Thai grammar. In principle this could hardly be simpler, each word being employable as noun, verb, adverb, adjective. Word-order tends to follow the pattern: subject, verb, object, modifier, but in practice any word can be placed after any other. Genders, articles, conjunctions, conjugations of verbs, plurals, prefixes and suffixes, and tenses can be ignored. But communicable pronunciation is impossible owing to the lack of equivalent English vowel sounds, and the letters to spell the tones and inflections by which the meanings of identical words are differentiated.

At 6 A.M., the Chao Phraya, muddy, thick with palm fronds and clumps of matted vines drifting downstream, is already teeming with sampans, bamboo rafts, pirogues, houseboats with rounded tin roofs, ferries shaped like Mississippi steamboats, passenger boats—sharp-pronged and so narrow that their roofs provide no shelter—and low-in-the-water barges, both singly and linked together like railroad cars. The landscape beyond the huts on the opposite shore is lush with poincianas now in orange flame.

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My Thailand Travel Diary part 1

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