It could be said travelling is not unlike going through a river's bank looking for diamonds. The more people that have been there before you, and / or the more people around you, the less likely it is you will find something worth keeping.

I try to fight being a travelling snob sometimes. Not very often, and not very hard, though.

Thailand.

















The people are nicer.
The girls are cuter.
The beer is cheaper.
Really, now, by any standard, what is there not to like?

I won't bore you with any other passages (I promise), but here is the opening of The Sketchbook:

Bangkok, Thailand

It has been ten days now since I set out from England to the Far East. If I haven't written much since, it is in part literary constipation (the curries, surprisingly, haven't helped) and in part because, for most of these days, it seems to me that I changed hostels more than I changed places. Although this is not true, I have to admit I've spent more waking hours indoors than outdoors.

How did this happen? (Are rhetorical questions in or out of the travel writing scene?)

The heat, for one, this wet jungle heat that permeates every street, infiltrates every shadow, seems to melt our morale, weaken our bodies into a putty-like state of flaccid languor and has us scramble for our air-conditioned haunts. Then, if we didn't get here jet-lagged, we seem to have made ourselves so: the Euro-cup games are on until 4 or 5 every morning and staying up wrecked our internal clocks. We can literally listen to the cogs jam and spark and jump in and out of gear randomly, always out of beat. Thirdly, and if I leave this for last, it is because I think it may have been greatly influenced by the previous two, none of the places we saw really captured our imagination or truly convinced us.

The air is hot, humid, damp, moist. It smells of the sea without the salt. It smells of the rusting iron of cargo holders. The old warehouses still stand, though like one brought back from the dead, returned with twice the life but half the soul. This recycled artery of the world is now one long promenade. Chic, pompous, pointless. Beautiful, some times. Serene.

Tom said: "The way I explained it the other day was, if - right - if Aliens made contact and asked: "So, what's Earth like?" and a corporation had to explain it to them, they would have built Singapore, know what I mean? Thrown in fifty per cent Chinese, twenty per cent Indian, some fake old buildings for the atmosphere, some new ones too to look modern, all the pubs pretending to be Irish because that's what's meant to be good. The aliens would look at it and say: "It's alright, Earth. A bit boring though, innit?"

She feels the streets on fire in her heart and it fuels her dancing. She feels the students' fight blooming like flowers in the Fall, a little naive and a little too late. This could have been in 1968. 
She dances in sunset’s amber light on Polaroid green grass like its Woodstock farm’s old turf. It could still be 1969. 

And she dances like she knows that for kids like them, for kids like us, there is no tomorrow. 

He didn't sleep much, not very often, not any more. Instead, he would lie wide awake at night. 

He didn't have any problems he thought, with some concern. He didn't have any real problems, serious problems like a troubled childhood he couldn't outgrow, or a terminal disease, or a career taking a turn for the worst. He didn't have a job to hate. He didn't need to make ends meet, he wasn't struggling to put food on the table. He didn't have any deadlines or exams or assignments. 

Everybody else had better problems than him, and that kept him up at night. 

He couldn't get any sleep, he would just think about everybody he had ever met and about their problems and if he started running out of people, he'd start to think about characters in films and books he'd read and seen (respectively - wait, no, not) and what their problems were. He'd usually start with that Scotsman who needed a horse and by the time the sun was rising he’d have realised that even Winnie the freakin Poo had bigger problems, more serious, more interesting, than he did. Winnie the Poo had friends with major depressive disorder and lived surrounded by potentially dangerous wild animals. One day he's just a depressed tiger or a friendly pig and the other day they're chasing after you with a killer glint in their eye and all their teeth on show. You never know with wild animals. He'd seen a program once, at four in the morning, about tamed lions. Anything, you never know what, could trigger the hunting machine back on. Anything could trigger the Tigger.

He wished he was Winnie the Poo sometimes, so that he could worry about his best friends hunting him down. He couldn't even go to a shrink. He had a good friend who was a great shrink, she might not even charge him a penny, but what would he say? 

"I wish I was Winnie the Poo sometimes"? 

Sure, that'd make an impression on her. She'd ask how his childhood had been, he'd say it had been just fine. She'd ask about his sexlife and he'd say it was okay. It had had better days of course, but who hadn't? She'd ask about traumas, phobias, obsessions. He didn't have any. Not one interesting fetish. Not anything even the tinyest bit Freudian. He wondered if she could make a case study about him. The symptomeless syndrom, medicine's final great mystery. Could he be sick of not being sick? 

Was there a name for something like that? Maybe she would name a condition after him. She'd probably name it after herself of course, they always do that, Doctors do. They let the patient do all the suffering, but they take all the credit and go ahead and name the disease after themselves. He knew pretty well none of those kidnapped kids was called Stockholm. 

Winnie the Poo, for Christ's sake. He was almost as lame as the teletubbies. He wondered if the teletubbies had any problems of their own, and if they hadn't, if it kept them up at night, the whole night through, night after night after night?

(-Sanity is away at the moment, can I help you or would you rather leave a note?)

"These nights always end up being the worst nights of my life."
"Hey, that's so unfair."
"No, no it's not. I always end up looking after you, you always end up pissed."
"One example."
"The whole of England? Trying to make sure you'd be alive the next morning."
"So not true."
"Bath? I went to the hotel for one minute and when I came back you were in an ambulance."
"I distinctly remember saving a life that night."
"You were in an ambulance!"
"I saved a life!"

(-Anonymous conversations)

(Clicking the image zooms in)

"Hello. My name is xxxxx, and I used to have a problem. I was a drunk driver. I haven't handled a car in 44 weeks and 5 days." - 12 step program