True Stories and Other Rarities: Backpacking in Asia

By Mark Gowan

When the lamp hit the wall we knew we needed a change. And change things we did. Very shortly afterwards we sold almost everything we owned, bought backpacks and boots and two one-way tickets to Bangkok Thailand. We didn't know when we were coming back or even where we would go but Bangkok was a start and we needed a new start. Living a quiet life in Denmark, we did what many people talked about doing. Our adventure was exciting and taught us that in order to know what you've got you sometimes have to give it up. One thing we were not willing to give up was our marriage and so off we went. Written during the trip True Stories and Other Rarities: Backpacking Through Asia takes the reader on our adventure like it really was, which was not always beautiful, not always fun, but always surprising and full characters. Traversing the streets of Bangkok on foot, meeting new friends in Vietnam, hiking Nepal, sleeping in caves, and trying to survive the streets of India. This is not your average adventure book, but our trip was not the average trip. We set off on one of our adventures with pie-in-sky ideas of how it was going to be. We were wrong. Note: a percentage of all proceeds from the sell of this book will go directly to Animal charities and sanctuaries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trollcastle Works
• Release date: Dec 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393244752

Mark Gowan

Mark began his career as a touring musician, meeting his wife in Up With People.  He went on to play music professionally for numerous bands for twelve years and then renovated houses in St. Louis Missouri before getting his Master of Philosophy and teaching community college in Littleton Colorado for nine years.  Yet again, a change was needed and so Mark and Helle packed up and moved to New Hampshire to start a farm.  Mark and Helle have been married for thirty-one years and currently live in the Dallas area where Mark writes, builds furniture, and records music to help raise money for animal sanctuaries.

Book preview

Chapter 1: And What Are We Doing?!

Travel, you wicked fiend.  Take me to your womb and breast feed my hungry lips your magic and mystery.  -a quote from my journal

The new world was in front of us as we sat on a soviet airplane in the Copenhagen airport.  The plane was called a TV 154 Aeroflot.  It was old but I had no fear.  I was on my way to the future good, bad, and ugly.  Helle and I had decided we would take it as it came as if we had a choice.

The people boarding the plane looked different and listening to them I didn’t recognize the languages.  I didn’t know where they came from.  They had a different way about them.  I felt like a stranger in a strange land already.  Everything was so exciting.  The engines were revving up and I had the faint idea that they were jumpstarting this old heap of human beings packed like sardines in a rusty tin.  I could imagine another plane sitting beside ours with cables leading from one battery to another.  I saw my bag on the trolly and realized that I might not ever see it again.  So I took a good look.

After my longing gaze at my new backpack I looked around and noticed the plane had a blue/grey haze about it and its age was obvious.  Paint was worn off the metal on the inside and the outside and whole thing smelled like a cheap clinic.  I was sitting next to an exit door which was usually a good thing in my book.  But once flying the whoosh of air became apparent and my attitude changed.  The exit door didn’t seem airtight.  But how did that work?  These things needed to be airtight.  Right?!  This can’t be good I thought to myself.

Helle had this look in her eyes.  It was a mix of excitement, fear, and disbelief.  I realized when she looked back at me that I must have had the same look, that look that comes from thinking about horrible but possible scenarios and so I tried to comfort her.

Well, it can’t be worse than that flight from New York City to Dallas that time?!, I said hoping that she would take up at least some of my optimism.  She didn’t.  Her reply was simple.  This is.

The Moscow Airport

Muslims sat on carpets laid out on the floor in dark corners conversing in their mother tongues in hushed tones.  Black people in colorful turbans lounged carefree in the poorly lighted airport cafeteria.  A kind of dingy yellow light hung over the whole place.  The Moscow airport was truly a melting pot in that it melted your mind and your patience into a sort of mental goo.  A short tour through the bowels of the neurotic place ended in a sort-of restaurant/cafe empty of patrons and generally of life in any form except for five or six waitresses that stood around talking and watching the greasy television set propped up on a rickety bookshelf.  The service was bad.  No, it was beyond bad.  As far as they were concerned, we were encroaching on their personal lives.  They became noticeably grouchy when we walked in, glaring at us as we carefully sat down at one of the many empty tables.  They became even more annoyed when they realized that they, or at least one of them, had to step away from their friends and the television set.

We were stuck at the airport for a while for some bureaucratic reason or another concerning our passports and had been given vouchers for a few meals.  Nice enough.  We lay these on the table and they stuck to it.  The waitress walked over and took one of the tickets somehow managing to lift it off the table without it tearing and stared at it, and then us.  Then she then simply walked away.  I was impressed both with her attitude and her ability to lift the note so effortlessly off the table.  I kept waiting for a menu.  A few minutes later a bowl of hazy, diluted red liquid got plopped on the table in front of us with two half-pieces of hard bread.  There was very little of it and this was probably a good thing.  The waitress walked back to her awaiting friends and they continued their conversation, glaring over at us occasionally.

Afterwards, and to our surprise plates of rice with some chicken on top arrived with another scowl from a new waitress.  There was very little of it and this may have been a good thing, we couldn’t decide yet.  With plenty of scowl to go around two bottles of mineral water were thrown down on the table along with a little more waitress scowl.  The bottle was label free except for a date that showed it to be several years old.  We were thankful for both the food and the scowls.  We were on an adventure!

Being on an adventure we decided to acquaint ourselves with the few guests that had wandered in while we had been sitting in the place.  We spoke to a couple of African fellows that had been stranded for three days!  Their scheduled plane had long since flown the coup.  One had lost his wallet.  This was not a place you wanted to lose things like your wallet. 

Three days, huh?!  I said in disbelief.

He shook his head slowly.

How long do you think you’ll be here?

Don’t know.  Was the only melancholy answer.

We slurped the last of our hazy diluted red liquid.  It had no taste and so went down easy.  Still no signs of death or stomach problems, we turned our attention to what turned out to be an exiled guy from Cuba on his way to prison.

The rice wasn’t bad.

Snake

Wandering through the dark hallways of Russian limbo we passed dozens of encampments under stairwells full of people who had seemed to simply accept their fate as denizens of this hell.  They had set up camp complete with beds and small tables with colorful blankets hung from the stairwells as makeshift walls.  We hadn’t quite gotten to that point yet and so still held a little hope for our souls.  We ended up in a large open space scattered with chairs and tables.  We sat, still waiting for death by food poisoning.  Death never came and so we relaxed a bit looking around at the dark, dingy, cement halls of the Moscow airport.

Another traveler wandered up to us claiming to be Norwegian and who had so much work in Thailand... that he simply didn’t know what to do.  He was speaking English.  We stood and smiled as we kept waiting for a point to the story, but like our expected death or food poisoning, it never came.  This probably had something to do with the fact that he was plastered, three sheets to the wind.

It was easy to dismiss the claim that he was drunk, sometimes people drink a little too much. But no, this guy was truly plastered even for a Norwegian.  I had played music in Denmark for years and had the true pleasure of playing for drunk Norwegians in Skagen.  They were drunk!  And they were some of the most amiable people that I had met.  This man was beyond that level of intoxication but was still amiable.  Norwegians ceased to amaze me because of their ability to be good, kind drunks.  He rambled on incoherently for a while, something about his work in Thailand and how much money he was going to make, while Helle and I tried to follow along and interject agreeable responses.  But we realized that it didn’t matter when he suddenly quit talking in order to take a good long swig of vodka out of a bottle that we then noticed he was carrying around in his coat.  Forcing the large bottle back in his coat pocket he stumbled away into the darkness of the airport continually mumbling and forgetting about us.

It was about then that we noticed the sound of empty bottles hitting cement and turned to watch a group of Russians well on their way to blindness by alcohol.  Huddled around a table littered with several bottles of liquor, both empty and half-full, they too were drinking...a lot.  They kept drinking and I kept waiting for them to fall over in their chairs or simply lay down on the floor.  But this never happened.  Bottles kept appearing out of a few of their bags and they kept emptying them of their contents and casting them on the table where a few of them would promptly roll off onto the floor.  We chuckled at them as they swayed and slurred their words until we realized they could very well be on our flight.  There was only one flight to Bangkok that night. 

Now this wouldn’t have necessarily been a problem, but the flight was about fourteen hours and these folks were sozzled and were continuing down that sauce hole, and they were loud.  It turned out that they were on our flight.  Once on the plane the fun really began.  Among other things during our time in the air, they razzed one stewardess to tears and continued to drink, becoming a bit irritated when asked to stop by the Thai women (we were on Thai airlines) outfitted in gauzy dresses trying their hardest to keep plastered, friendly smiles on their faces as they bore the bores if not with ease, then with grace.  Silence and sobriety were dearly missed by all except the Russians on the plane.  They continued to drink throughout most of the flight.  I think they must have slept in shifts if at all.  They yelled and hollered, constantly demanding more booze, and kept most of the plane up for the whole of the flight.  The plane finally landed, and it is my firm belief that everyone on that flight was relieved, except for the Russians.  I’m not sure they even noticed we were on the ground.

The Bangkok airport was a bustling place and we were herded cattle-like to a wall of security cubicles filled with security-looking people with the usual airport security looks on their faces.  But what caught our attention was not them.  Four military types were standing at attention on each side of the long line.  The men were dressed in full military attire, chins up strong and a serious gaze that seemed to mirror nothing except perhaps murder and violence.  That was all well and good, but that did not keep our attention long either.  What did was their fully automatic weapons that they held tightly to their chests, black and foreboding.

Everyone in the line, most from our flight, would have I imagined welcomed a quick death after fourteen hours of drunk Russian debauchery.  But just as that thought sped through our weary heads, we noticed that the Russians were making their way to the front of the line dragging their bags of vodka with them and bumping through the crowd.  Mumbling and smiling they were intent on cutting to the front, but this was brought to a quick and final end by the sound of automatic weapons being cocked and the sound of very angry Thai militia yelling at them.  I looked up to notice the weapons now pointing towards the floor in the general direction of the Russians just behind us.  Sobriety and silence came quick as the Russian irks made their way hurriedly to the back of the line.  I wondered if these Russians understood Thai.  That must have been it!  Multi-linguistic bastards.  Just as quickly as they had sprung to action the military men jumped back into their places and resumed staring out into space with their serious gazes and weapons still cocked.  I just wished they had been on the plane.

Bangkok Thailand

Bangkok was just as I pictured it.  The airport had been a picture of modernity which threw us for a loop but the city itself was what we expected: decrepit, evil, beautiful, foul, cold-hearted, lively and filled with amazing smells both good and bad, and it was hot.  It was very hot.  Being from Texas I have experienced heat.  But this was hot on a new and hellish level.  Helle, being from Denmark, was melting.  We had no idea where we were or how to get to where we thought we might want to go.  We had some vague idea of an area that might exist somewhere in the maze that was Bangkok, but other than that we were at the mercy of anyone who would pick two weary travelers up and dump us out again.  We stood sweating profusely and trying to find our bearings.

There were taxis of all ilk parked everywhere with no apparent order.  Free market capitalist attitudes reigned, and only the strong survived here.  After a few bouts of near fisticuffs between taxi drivers and tuk-tuk chauffeurs trying to vie for our attention, we picked one and were thrown into a dilapidated car, hoping that our two backpacks were thrown in as well.  It ended up that they were.  While being jostled in the backseat of our cab we noticed that driving in Bangkok took skill but more importantly it took a horn and the talent to use it.  Our driver seemed happy with his newly found responsibility of two western tourists and his freedom to begin honking his horn and took it seriously.  We weaved in and out of motor and foot traffic.  There was every type of vehicle known to man on the road.  There were beat up cars, mopeds, small motorcycles, three-wheeled carts with two-cycle motors (tuk-tuks), bicycles, rickshaws in varying degrees of degradation as well as pedestrians as far as the eye could see.  The heat was immense as was the wall of smells.  Curry, meat, piss, cement, beer, diesel, gasoline, coal, trash, sweat, and just the smell of heat was thick. 

At times during the taxi ride Helle and I were sure we were going to die in a flaming heap of metal and rubber or suffocation, but somehow we defied death either by the luck or skills of our driver, or from the small fan that blew hot air on us during the duration of the ride.  We looked for a place, a destination to give to the driver, but it didn’t seem to matter to him what we did.  Us in the back, the luggage in the trunk, he was now in control of our fate and his pocketbook.  We repeatedly yelled, KC Guesthouse! KC Guesthouse!, the name of an arbitrary guesthouse we had found in our travel book while trying to survive the cab ride.  It didn’t seem to matter to him at the time.

Miraculously we ended up at the KC Guesthouse in the area of Bangkok.  Stumbling out of the taxi as our backpacks were thrown on the ground, we gave the driver a tip.  A quick smile and he was gone among the throngs of people, motorcycles, bicycles, cars, and general mayhem, and was soon packed for yet another adventure.  We watched as he and his car disappeared among the pandemonium and chaos.  The guesthouse was right across the street and so we made our way carefully to it and were told it was booked up.  We ended up not far from it at another guesthouse called P.C (now the Mad Monkey Hostel).  Rooms were 150 baht (about $7) which was more expensive than usual according to our travel book.  The room was a 3x3 meter cement square with a large bed and a table with an opening towards the street for a window.  We threw our luggage down and fell onto the bed.  It was then that we took notice of the lack of window in the opening.  There was no glass.  Then we noticed how loud and how much street noise there was.  Sitting in disbelief that we were actually in Bangkok Thailand we then realized just how tired we actually were.  We were dizzy from tiredness and heat.  We slept a few hours in the sweat-soaked sheets of our new room with the sound of the insane traffic out on the street.  We were on our way.  We were on our adventure.  The future was a mystery, the past was far behind us, and the present was a simple cycle.

Sleep. Sweat. Wake. Repeat.

Chapter 2: Oh, This is What We’re Doing.

Wa-Lang Kroy-Pop-Can-Na

Soon one thing became apparent.  On an adventure sleep started as a necessity and then became a luxury.  The night in the windowless guesthouse was filled with noise and heat and we sweated our way through it sleeping in between horn honking, street noise, and construction.  We peeled ourselves out of bed soaked in sweat and stared at each other.  We had made it, and we had a lot to learn.  But first was how to find breakfast.  Packing our things and locking our room we walked down to the street below our window and watched as Bangkok whizzed by us wondering where to start.  We had no idea.  First, we walked one way and then the other looking for something, anything to eat.

We decided to take a rickshaw taxi into a nearby part of town and found ourselves being driven through some very local, very colorful neighborhoods.  The term ‘colorful’ was a great adjective and was a very apt one in this particular case.  Everything was colorful.  The buildings, dilapidated as many were, were painted colorfully with colorful awnings and colorful clothing and goods.  The term also applied figuratively.  Here the term referred to narrow streets overrun with street stalls and small stores that stood their ground against the constant onslaught of two-cycled motor-taxis, bicycles, mopeds, and cars.  The streets were dirty, in fact everything seemed to be covered in a thick layer of diesel, dust and dirt.  There were people making food in large, black iron woks on the sidewalks, supported by wooden tables or set into wheeled carts.  They had all sorts of raw meat and veggies laying out on the sidewalk along side, and on and in their carts.  It all smelled so...wonderfully awful.  Rot and heat mixed with the ubiquitous two-cycle oil and gasoline alongside the ever-present urine and coal.  We opted for a safer option to start out and found a small stall selling fruit.  We picked up some bananas and headed to the lady at the stall.  We soon learned that we had to barter for them.  Bartering, we realized, was not an option it was expected.  Even for three bananas.  That morning we stood and bartered the price of three bananas.  It took a while, but we did finally get them.  I’m just not sure who gave up first in the end.

We began exploring and eating our bananas taking in the smells of food and cooking that seemed to attack us on all sides. After the bananas we stopped and bought a small, spicy noodle dish from a street vendor set up on the sidewalk.  It was cheap and it tasted amazing.  One bite and new tastes instantly filled our mouths.  Sweet mixed with sour, and spicy mixed with bitter.  The food seemed to be a dichotomy to Bangkok which was horribly dirty, a sewage pit of people and motors and food, and trash.  There was both horror and degradation, and history and beauty everywhere.   It was incredibly confusing and organized at the same time, and maybe that was why we didn’t care.  Maybe that was why the food tasted so amazing?  Thai food was wonderful.

Before long, the smells of the city became a part of our daily life.  The smells and the noise, the hustle and bustle, the sights that defied any explanation on our part became normal.  The insane number of people who clogged the streets walking, on mopeds, in tuk-tuks, rickshaws, and trucks, and on bicycles.  It never ended and we thought our heads would swivel off our bodies.  We were the epitome of western tourists.  Some time spent wandering around the city and watching the incessant movement led us to more of the realities that were to become normal in our travels in Asia.  Bangkok was a city of endless activity!  It never seemed to be still, perpetually wiggling around.  The smells were always a part of our reality as well.  They changed with the streets and the buildings around us.  They changed with the sounds, which were primarily made up of honking horns and motors.  There was so much to smell in Bangkok.  Wafting into our noses constantly, we would go from gagging to stopping in our tracks in order to find the source of a wonderful culinary scent.  The smells would almost always lead us through impossible throngs of people stuffed in every imaginable crevice of the city.  The heat even had a smell.

Odors ranged from rich and spicy to urine and stench, from sweet to sulfuric and were always accompanied by the ubiquitous haze of diesel, coal, and propane.  And that was just the food.  But even this concoction of poison and filth did not take away from the taste of Thai cooking.  We ate and didn’t worry about it, at least not yet.

There were horribly scroungy dogs and cats on every corner that fought two or three at a time out in the middle of the street as people drove or rode by them, paying them no attention.  I actually saw one cat simply lie down and die right beside the cart of an older lady whipping up a batch of Thai food.  Right in front of us!  It was horrible but it was part of the city.  No one missed a beat simply walking or riding past its body and the food cart.  Along with the amazing and horrible sights and smells was the ubiquitous stickiness of the city.  Our shoes stuck to the sidewalk with every step to some unknown goo.   There was construction work at every waking hour and at night and we wondered how the stickiness of the day’s heat remained so long.  The cacophony of jack hammers was always peppered with the sounds of young Thai boys screaming up and down the streets on their immaculately polished, two-cycle mopeds and motorcycles.  It was almost like being inside an angry beehive twenty-four hours a day.

Alleys, unlit, led to guesthouses and open kitchens and stores that sold everything imaginable and other things that would be hard to imagine.  We bought water from a pleasant lady with a pleasant smile.  Her little niche of a store had a single aisle to walk through that was defined simply by the amount of stuff she had packed in the small space, much like that of a hoarder’s house.  She stood at the end of it, behind a makeshift counter making any choice as to which way to go no choice at all.  There was one way in, and one direction to walk in which was towards the smiling shop owner.  We weren’t even sure if the place had walls, but just stuff.

If I were to guess today, I would guess that she was still in that little store with her pleasant smile at the end of the single aisle.  She would probably be around ninety-one years old at this point (I’m writing this several year later) but my money would be on her standing there this minute on the same spot worn down by her feet with her smile just as bright as ever.  I would bet that there would be some young tourists gawk-eyed and wandering into the place looking for something and they don’t know what, just something.  And she would have it.

Her store was the entrance to the Twilight Zone.  

Snake

We were able to move across the street to the K.C guesthouse the next day.  It was a bit cleaner and the room was off the street a bit which helped with the noise.  It also had a nicer feel.  Rather than a cement box it was decorated in bamboo and colorful sarongs hanging from the walls.  It was fifty baht cheaper and much more to our liking.  The second night, spent at the KC guesthouse, was still spent sleeping on and off to car noises and the perpetual honking horns as there was really no way to get away from them.  We weren’t rested but we were on an adventure.  We didn’t realize it at the time, but we would never really be rested on our adventure and as a result along with the perpetual sounds and smells came perpetual tiredness.  

The next day after a fitful sleep we started with another sticky walk and found a market in the back of some buildings along the Chao Phraya river to buy breakfast.  There was a little waterway that fed the river and it was literally black.  It wasn’t black-like or just black, nor was it analogous to blackness.  It was black.  It was surprising to see a waterway through a city center that was this color.  Sometimes water would be muddy, churned by boat traffic and wind and sometimes waterways had trash in them.  But the waterways in Bangkok were black in the sense that anything that was dipped into the liquid simply disappeared as if dipped into a blackhole.  The. Water. Was. Black. 

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