How Long the Lonely Road

Hop along, my little friends, up the Withywindle! Tom's going on ahead candles for to kindle. Down west sinks the Sun: soon you will be groping. When the night-shadows fall, then the door will open, Out of the window-panes light will twinkle yellow. Fear no alder black! Heed no hoary willow! Fear neither root nor bough! Tom goes on before you. Hey now! merry dol! We'll be waiting for you! —Tolkien I was the last to enter the dim hall, to flash my paper ticket to the trannies and silicon-bolstered counteresses out front and proceed down that narrow aisle lined with red-lit bars, rows of girls arranged in front in short black dresses and plastic grins, and this eventually delivered us out into a wide chamber under a tin roof. The off-white ring stood in the center, surrounded by rows of couches, and then encircled by more bars of crimson lighting and seedy natures. There was the siren call of “Welcome!” and the bar girls gathered around the old foreigners so beckoned; and there ...

O the girls are so pretty, The girls are so pretty, So spicy like curry, They come to the city, And I am not picky, And the girls are so pretty, In Kanchanaburi. —Traditional Thai Song The Thais say, “Where are you going?” instead of “Hello” or “What’s up?” when they greet someone in the street, and the most usual answer, the “Not much” reply, goes, “To eat rice [food].” Thailand is an unquestionably touristy place—as much so, at first glance, as Disneyland or any theme park. Once you look beneath the surface, however, by a little patient observation or humble questioning, there remains in the jean-wearing, mall-shopping, apparently Western culture of Bangkok much to assert that This is Asia. [Something about Thai tattoos will appear here at a later date; but for now know this—there is a certain tattoo, a gridwork written in Pali on the shoulder, that imparts the invulnerability; and Thais under eighteen years old are not allowed to wear it, because they often have it applied and go p...

Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, Cause summer’s here and the time is right for marching in the street. —The Rolling Stones I had heard that the Thais transport tourists about like cattle, but did not know what this was about until I arranged through my hotel to take a bus to Krabi, a jumping off point for many of the islands. A group of us were shuffled on and off to different buses with no notion of why, and at several points asked to wear a sticker. “Yellow stickers, get off here!” cried the Thai drover. “Where the hell are we?” demanded this one, dropped off at one tourist office and then another, always trying to get somewhere warm and cheap and complacent. I vowed from this point on to only take the local buses. I was looking for the cheapest place to stay on a beach somewhere and finding that the fabled $3 bungalows of Thailand no longer existed, or were at least very difficult to track down. There was a secret island community in Thailand, devoted to disc...