Now I’m back in Thailand I’m reading up on stories that make news fun. But in this Land of Smiles there’s always one story to wipe grins off faces. One ‘minor’ headline stirred my memory bank. “Gas tank in city van explodes in flames.”
Basically a gas fuel tank in a passenger van exploded, destroying the van and damaging nearby shops. The driver told the police that the fire broke out while he was waiting for more passengers. A busybody passenger raised the alarm and they all tried to put out the blaze. But it spread quickly. Wisely they ran away before the explosion blew them to hell. No one was hurt, which cheered me, as did the fact that the Thais were still doing quality events and explosions associated with them.
I’ve spent time in Bangkok. Back in the 80’s I was romantic to a fault about the city, using words like ‘mystical’, ‘graceful’ and ‘serene’ to describe it, casually forgetting poverty, corruption, pollution, traffic and danger. As an oriental city, Bangkok is about as serene as a chainsaw hacking through corrugated iron.
Bangkok, of course, is no Kabul but my favourite story is about a rocket slamming into a city department store. Back awhile, an aggressive ex-soldier became involved in a dispute with the owners of the store. They did not see eye to eye about the location of an unregistered motorcycle taxi business. Both parties wanted to monopolize this lucrative venture but whereas the owners might have compromised, the ex-soldier stuck to his guns, so to speak. Not interested in a negotiated peace treaty and being an ex-infantryman he decided on a frontal assault.
So there you are buying a genuine Gucci bag for buttons when, from inside his jeep, the old warrior takes aim with his trusty rocket launcher. Bang! Thais are not easily frightened and I reckon that most would carry on shopping. On the other hand, you and the other tourists, forgetting that Bangkok is to traffic what paddy fields are to rice, split for the exit and dash out into the road. Splat!
Back to the rocket launcher: the police, realising that this guy was Rambo incarnate, called in military assets. Following classic search and destroy tactics they surrounded his apartment and demanded his surrender. During the ensuing gun battle – he counter-attacked with a grenade launcher – they nailed him with overwhelming firepower.
I love this country! I remember another interesting explosion. Either poverty or opportunism caused a hundred or so Thais to descend on a truck carrying dynamite soon after it left a city road and overturned. As it started to smoke the driver knew it was time to look for another job. But the Bangkokians continued to filch the cargo. In the ensuing blast more than one hundred died: too many body parts for complete accuracy.
Bangkok’s traffic is epitomised by the curious driving habits of ordinary citizens. Take Thai motor-bikers: a sociable breed who happily accommodate extended families on two-strokes. Passengers sit where they can, hanging onto the rider or any bit of the bike they can latch on to. Kids bestride handlebars, petrol tanks, or sit on mums’ or grannies’ knees holding baby brothers or sisters. How they gurgle!
Askance, if not horrified, you look: they smile. Here comes a truck! The driver’s driven non-stop from Chiang Mai and he’s gone to sleep. Time to look away before the impending image sears your brain.
Mobile caterers push wheelbarrows piled high with portable restaurants along city roads. Living life on the edge, some position their establishments near bus stops. Good positioning: bus stops are well used in Bangkok. Unwary tourists use them because they think that’s where buses stop. True, but bus stops also serve as winning posts for the daily bus races. Another headline highlighted the problem: “Man escaped death yesterday after he was hit by bus.”
The driver admitted that while racing to be first at the stop he swerved on to the pavement, crashed into a telephone booth, a power pole and then “bumped” into a potential passenger. Competition between bus companies is fierce. Red, blue and green buses hunt down passengers aggressively then race off. I’ve seen tourists dismount, stoop forward and, pope-like, kiss the ground in deliverance. Smiling Thais gently kick-box them out of the way so that they can take the best seats in the restaurant.
You can imagine the carnage when, as everybody sits eating duck and rice with diesel fumes, a brace of competing buses collide, mount the pavement and career through the tables. No? I can.
We had a portable restaurant near our office. Located in a narrow lane it was equipped with gas and kerosene-powered barbecue facilities, as in ‘Whoosh!’ We all partook of cheap and delicious grizzled chicken, pig, prawns, fragrant rice and fresh vegetables. An adjacent business supplied bottled gas for household and industrial use. They had a variety of delivery vehicles from trucks to motorcycles. The position of the restaurant made access a challenge. Diners obliged by picking up their tables to allow bigger trucks through - cheerfully.
Well, if you can’t face poverty, hardship, monsoon floods, tsunamis, military coups and general inconvenience cheerfully, you may as well become a monk. (Easily arranged.)
One morning I arrived by motorcycle taxi - not recommended for those of a nervous disposition – to find deposits of sand, gravel and huge concrete pipes. A wooden hut - deluxe living-quarters for a cheerful bunch of flat-nosed Thais from some impoverished North Eastern province - had been erected. Sewage was the name of their game. Using steel spikes, shovels and wicker baskets they carved through tarmac and anything else to cut through to the crap.
As the trench grew in proportion to the stench, life went on. The gasmen struggled; the portable restaurant sizzled; dedicated customers giggled, and some wore facemasks between courses.
I love stoicism. I can watch it all day. My wimpy-western concerns about health and safety had long gone. Or had they? Suddenly I realised we might all be in terrible danger. If the malodorous fumes were toxic, might they not also be inflammable? What would happen if a spike hit an electric cable? What if a spark made contact with a leaking gas bottle on the back of a motorbike, just as the barbecue in the portable restaurant was being encouraged with kerosene? Would there not be one hell of a bang?
I went back to Bangkok some years later to find that the lane in which I worked had gone. But there’d been no big bang. The pipes were the harbinger of a huge block of luxury flats. A billboard offered ‘exotic views of a mystical, graceful and serenely oriental city’.
That was when I realised that instead of writing fiction I should have been an advertising copywriter.
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