Thailand Defeated

Ah. No blaring calls to prayer with the speaker volume set on eleven. No clatter of cats to feed at 5 AM. No post-future architects' chrome and glass wet dreams under construction. No Mercedes motor traffic rumbling. No thirty-minute pizza delivery kamikazi motor scooters.

This is the life this livin in a village of dog shit dusty road, shanty towns of thatched roofs, women coming back from the stanky river balancing bundles of laundry on their heads. The land of jungle law and monkey thieves.

Ah!

Or, as Gauguin once said, "To me, barbarism is a rejuvenation."

Or, as Ray Davies once said, "I wanna sail away to a distant shore, and live like an ape man."

It's a shopworn cliche in Siem Reap to gripe about tuk-tuk drivers who harass you coming and going, asking you if you want a ride in their motor bike rickshaws. I have more pressing pet peeves to obsess on, so I don't mind at all telling these fellers "No thank you," even though I might have to repeat this polite rejection of their services a hundred and eight times a day.

Odd though that today, I rented a bike yet, still, as I pedal past these tuk tuk peddlers, I get solicited, "You want tuk-tuk?" Say, huh?

For the past four months, I've spent no less than eight hours a week in the Abu Dhabi Health Club shedding some 15 kg.--btw, four of those hours per week have been devoted to extreme RPM spin classes, so I guarantee that I do not give off the vibe that I am some bedragled barang huffing and puffing along, ready to keel over in the soupy steamy streets--I bet my left bollock on it. So, I wonder, why do they persist in asking me if I want a fucking ride in their freaking tuk-tuks when I am meerily cycling my way around the old market? Obviously, they are on auto-pilot and they do not mind the rejection.

I attended the charity quiz night at the Funky Munkey a couple of nights back. (Yes, my team, courtesy of my bullshit engorged brain, won the NGO gimme t-shirts). The bartender-co-owner Trixie is a very sweet gal. She's good people as we say down south. I met here exactly one year ago for all of ten seconds through Mme. Liz (now of HK) and I'll be damned if Ms. Trixie didn't remember me.

Speaking of t-shirts, I have to pick up one that I saw on a Funky Munkey bar fly that sums up the whole hawkers and tout experience of SR. It read: No Tuk-tuk, No Temples, No Sunset, No Boom Boom. Yes. Read m lips. No goddamned tuk-tuk! Yes. No temples. I'm Angkor Watted out. Yes. Sunsets are dicey during monsoons anyway. And as for boom boom. Um. . .can I get back to you on that? (Is a massage with a happy ending a marital cheat?)

Anyway. Tonight it's dinner and Apsara hand dances at the Apsara Theatre across the street from the posh Angkor Village Resort. We'll problembly head back to Toi-Let on the Cambodia Thai border early next week then live out the rest of our vacation in the Land of 998 smiles. I've deducted two on account of the surly waitress and cook at the Thai Cozy Guest House.