The  unending two-wheeled parade of old women on bicycles shaded by paddy hats (chickens hanging on one handlebar and fresh produce on the other), young girls on trendy scooters with silk gloves that reach their elbows, and men who, between helmets and hospital masks, all look vaguely the same.

The way each street crossing is a little adventure.
The way it is so alien and exotic, different and new. A minute in the local market and you'd have thought you were in a whole other planet. Spinach-colored milkshakes, rice dyed the color of tangerines, cups of beans in condensed milk, fish and vegetables and fruit and parts of animals you didn't even imagine existed.

The dirty little labyrinthine lanes.

The couples slow dancing to French waltzes under pagodas in the park when the sun goes down.

(-Why I Love Saigon, a little bit)

 

 

"We best make a move. If I stay here another night, I'll just get slashed again and it feels like I've been drunk more often than not these days."
"Story of my life. But yeah. Let's make a move before I propose to one of the girls."

After the Essaouira incidents, this was probably the best evacuation call in my life.

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.