Barry writes (with wonderful news) and mentions that he’d been meaning to send email, but since he gets progress updates from this site he feels like he’s already in correspondence. This goes some way towards explaining my thinning inbox these days.

Thank goodness, then, for my sister Claire, who provides the best newsclipping service imaginable. Rumblings of war with Iraq and the Bali bombing reach me through the guesthouse grapevine, but Claire knows the stuff I’m really interested in, namely C-list British ‘personalities’. Ulrika’s allegations about John Leslie! Edwina Currie and John Major. Tony’s little swimmers. And Angus Deayton fired. Crikey!

She also lets me know that Richard Harris died last week. He was from Limerick, my hometown, and even went to my school, where his picture still hangs in the Science corridoor. In Angela’s Ashes Frank McCourt disparages Crescent as a school for rich rugby-playing boys in blazers, though by my time it had gone co-ed, comprehensive, and democratic. Still, the connection was enough to start a brief friendship when I met him in London some years ago.

He used to drink at my friend Edward’s bar on the Strand in London several nights a week. (It has since been taken over by a theme pub, to the dismay of one friend who remarked ‘But it had a theme already! The theme was Drunk Old Men!’) The Savoy Tavern was next door to the Savoy Hotel, where Harris lived for many years. He and Edward became good pals, so I sidled up to him at the bar one night and muttered the one rugby cheer I could remember: ‘All the way back, Crescent’. He was delighted. Limerick rugby had no greater fan than Richard Harris.
    ‘My love! You’re from Limerick? And you went to Crescent? May I buy you a pint, my love? Now tell me, who won the Senior Cup this year? ‘

He was charming and still beautiful. I was thrilled when Edward told me he’d asked for me earlier this year, and we made vague plans to have drinks or dinner with him in June, when I was back in London. I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t make it, though I didn’t know how sick he was. I hope wherever he is he’s watching Munster beat the All Blacks in Thomond Park.

I have sung the joys of Southeast Asia for several months now. Here is a short list of things I will not miss when I leave:

• Spitting. Great hawked gobs of betel juice and phlegm, which occasionally land on my shoes.

• All Southeast Asian pop music, but especially Thai.
• Being forced to drink huge quantities of rice whiskey by rowdy men at ten in the morning.
• Karaoke. In the most basic mud hut villages, some bloody genius has gone and bought a battery-operated ‘CDoke’ machine for all-night caterwauling.
• Roosters who think 1am counts as dawn.
• Women being regarded as unclean or lesser beings in Buddhist temple circles. I thought only old Catholics went in for that.
• Wearing godawful backpacker clothes all the time.
• Humongous mosquitoes.
• Rats in my bedroom.
• Burmese bus journeys. My personal record was 26 hours on an old (left-hand-drive) Japanese jalopy, which broke down six times.
• Lao bus journeys. No reserved seating, and a million sacks of flour to transport, means you have to sit on a boiling bus for two hours before departure.
• While I’m at it, Thai bus journeys. The buses don’t break down, but the drivers all take speed.
• One modem shared across fifteen creaky PCs.
• Chubby 22-year-old American girl backpackers shouting ‘Is this water boiled? And I don’t eat meat.’
• Aggressive touts. ‘You want tuk-tuk? Where you go?’
• Bathing in rivers and falling in the mud.
• Sending rural children into hysterics of terror at my bizarre appearance.
• Hideous modern Chinese architecture—those wedding-cake guesthouses all over Burma.
• Whole villages sitting in silence to watch me eat. (This only bothers me when I’m premenstrual, I’ve walked for twelve hours, and I haven’t had a shower.)
• Small monks marvelling that a person could get to be as old as thirty. ‘Tree-zero? Wow! Wow! Ha ha ha!’
• Condensed milk.
• Leeches. Those things suck your blood!
• Seeing small children with hungry, swollen bellies.

My friend Phone is teaching himself English. A cousin who now lives in China brought him an electronic Mandarin-English dictionary (he doesn’t read or speak Mandarin) and a book-cassette set called Crazy English! 100 Oral Sentence Structures. Here’s a sample:

A: New York City is a tough place to live.
B: Yeah, it’s so crowded and the pollution is so bad.
A: You know, I’ve had enough of this city. I’m going to quit my job and move to the country.
B: What will you do for a job?
A: I don’t know. I’ll do anything as long as it means getting out of here.
B: Well, I don’t think changing your environment will make things better. You should learn to be content where you are.

Phone is a fifteen-year-old novice monk from rural Laos. I am a recovering yuppie with a bad transatlantic accent. Nevertheless, we find we have lots to talk about.

The sole guesthouse tout at the Muang Ngoy boat landing was ten years old. Muang Ngoy has electricity just three hours a day and no road access at all, but it has 17 guesthouses now, thanks to a Lonely Planet write-up describing life off the grid. So Eng has learned basic English and knows how to charm falangs. With pride, she showed the ‘WC’ first, a concrete-floored bamboo hut where you shower with a plastic scoop unless the electricity is on. Most people in these parts just bathe in the river.

The dollar rooms were basic and exactly like every other room in town. Woven walls, no windows, grubby mosquito net, and a hammock strung on a little balcony looking over the Nam Ou river and the karst mountains opposite. When I agreed to take it, Eng beamed.
   ‘Where you from? How long you stay in Laos? What is your name?’ She told me her name, then stuck out a small hand in a businesslike handshake. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said firmly. The rat who would share my quarters that night was not introduced.

Faced with Eng, I didn’t know whether to laugh or write a pompous entry on the evils of tourism. Nor, I suppose, do the dazed grannies who stare out all day long at the falangs who have transformed the town in two years. Now the ambitious young men promise cooler trekking routes than the competition. ‘See the ethnic villages! Also fishing and cook the fish you catch.’ And Germans in short-shorts take pictures of the public safety posters that explain how to avoid unexploded ordinance

The previous day, I’d hiked up to see a spectacular limestone cave where an entire village had hidden for years during the American War. From 100 feet up, you could see fish swimming in a bomb crater below. My Muang Ngoy boatman rowed one-handed, steadying the oar with his stump; presumably the other hand was left in some field hereabouts. We passed another boat made out of the fuel tank of a bomber plane sliced in two. That’s Lao recycling: the temple bells that call the monks to prayer are often made of bomb casings, too. Wars don’t finish when the Orderly Departure planes depart.

In Nong Khiaew, an hour downriver, clean-up still goes on. I watched a small UXO team (with stylish t-shirts) drink coffee before jumping in their truck to head to work. A soldier followed on a Honda. He had a UXO Division badge on his sleeve, too, and a six-month-old baby tied to his back in a sarong. This cossetted son won’t grow up to be a sapper, though. When I come back in ten years he’ll be running my guesthouse.

The boys recoiled at the insect in my hand.
    ‘No, it doesn’t bite. In English, we call this ‘stick insect’. It looks like a stick, like this, you see?’

Phone is the leader, a fifteen-year-old novice monk with the bald head and eyebrows of a baby. He is the only one who speaks English.

‘They do not think he bite. In Lao, he is called ‘ghost carrier’. They think he carry the ghost on his back.’ he says. ‘But I do not believe this story and I am not scared.’

The others peer at the bug from a safe distance.

‘It make no sense,’ Phone explains confidently. ‘The ghost is very, very big. This animal is very, very small. So how can it carry the ghost?’

This evening I’m off to Laos for a month, and from there to Vietnam and Cambodia.

The office I worked at in Manhattan was in a gastronomic wasteland near Penn Station. The lunch choices on our block didn’t go much beyond Subway, Fresco Tortilla, and the place we called Dirty Deli. Ram&oacuten, then, was a great addition to the staff: our Chief Scientist cared about food. We waited for his emails proposing an expedition to some little Peruvian place that sold good ceviche, to the roti shop, or to a soul food restaurant ten blocks away. If we were meeting Ram&oacuten at the elevator at 12.30, chances were we’d eat well that day. I was happy to hear from him when he stumbled across this site last week:

Your mention of banana pancakes made me smile. How did they become the official comfort food of the budget traveler? You can always tell a backpacker mecca by the concentration of places that serve those things. Yangshuo is a good example, a small Chinese town with at least five cafes prominently featuring banana pancakes (with chocolate sauce!). But try ordering some otherwise common steamed buns at one of those places and you’re out of luck. I blame it on Lonely Planet, indispensable for logistics but awful for food recommendations.

Noting my frequent posts about food, he added a favorite quote:

“People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking?
Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about
love, the way others do? They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow
gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

The easiest answer is to say that, like most humans, I am hungry. But
there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for
food and security and love are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we
cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that
when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger
for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it.”

M. F. K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me (1943)

Burma gets 5,000 visitors a year. Contrast that with the 5,000 a day who visit Cambodia’s Angkor Wat and you begin to see why the touts in Mandalay are desperate. To escape, I walked off the edge of the Lonely Planet map and down to the docks, which is usually the best place to see a city about its business.

Close to the edge of the river was a sign for ‘City Park’. It was early on Saturday morning, when the rollerbladers would be zooming past the joggers in Central Park, but Mandalay’s park was nearly empty when I paid the 10 kyat entrance fee (slightly less than one cent). The grass was overgrown but you could still see the stately British park design. Odder, though, were the dilapidated fairground rides everywhere. A rollercoaster, more rickety than the Coney Island Cyclone. A waterslide. A peeling hurdy-gurdy. A flying saucer ride, jury-rigged to run off a power mower engine. I could tell which were still in use by whether a path had been flattened through the grass.

At the back of the park stood a huge ferris wheel like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. It was fenced off but the gate was open and I sat on the bench underneath to take photos. The paint was faded, and it seemed to have been propelled by huge truck tires. I wondered who built it, and how long since it had been used, when a man in his sixties approached. Another tout, I assumed, thinking that even here they found me like mosquitos. But he asked if he wanted to ride the ferris wheel. 125 kyats—10 cents. It took eight minutes to go around, he said. Very good views.

He started the engine and I climbed into cab number 13, scared witless, and trying to sit perfectly still. The ferris wheel turned at a gentle pace. I regretted that I had no one with whom to swap Cold War secrets as it climbed. It might have distracted me from the fact that I might well need a machete to clear a path through the overgrown branches that were no longer used to being disturbed by this ride.

At the top I could see the Ayerawaddy River wrapping around the the city, and the faces of all the people I hadn’t said goodbye to before hurtling to certain death. I was cheered by the fact that this seemed an excellent way to go, and that my unborn nieces and nephews would have one half-decent bar story to remember me by. But the doughty wheel kept turning, and by the bottom I was brave. Again! Again!

My host was proud to have shown me the ride and we chatted for a while. He had worked for the park for many years.
   ‘When you go back to Ireland, remember the City Park. Tell people about the City Park. I wish we could keep it better, but this government…’ He gestured helplessly at the overgrown grass and decaying rides. Then he brightened.
   ‘When you come back, next time, I hope that we will have democracy. Not this year, I think, but perhaps the next year. Or five years, we will have democratic government then, I hope.’
He was an old man already. He had been hoping for a long time.

When I left I noticed that he had carefully recorded our transaction in a tattered notebook. There weren’t many other entries.

Thailand is obsessed with food, and nowhere more so than Bangkok. Days after I should have processed my visa for Laos and moved on, I linger here waddling from one food stand to the next. I’ve got good at casing plates of food as I sidle by, and pointing at anything that looks promising: ‘Same-same. One.’

Even in Bangkok where tourists scurry like cockroaches, street vendors still seem tickled when foreigners sit down with them rather than enduring another banana pancake at the guesthouse. Last night, I spotted a family dipping goodies into a hotpot on a tabletop charcoal brazier.
   ‘Sukiyaki. Beef.’ said the stallholder.
Sukiyaki. Just like the Korean barbeque places on 32nd St.
   ‘Same-same. One. And one Tiger beer.’

First they brought a brazier, then an earthenware pot of broth. A plate of vermicelli, cabbage leaves, holy basil and chilis followed. Then—oh sweet Jesus—a plate of raw tripe, cartilage, and tendon. The tripe was yellow like old net curtains, and the cartilage had the look of long slices of quince jelly. But I knew it wasn’t.

At the next table, the family whose dinner I ordered became enthusiastic. They crowded around to show me how to pick up the tripe and cartilage on a slotted spoon and cook it in the bubbling soup, adding the garnishes at the end. They smiled and nodded as they waited for me to pronounce on my first delicious bite. As I choked down the gluey mouthful, I caught sight of a handsome Swedish couple pointing at my dish from a few tables over.
   ‘What’s that?’
   ‘Sukiyaki. Beef.’
   ‘Ah. We try. Same-same. Two.’
I smiled at my new Thai friends and said nothing to the Swedes. Hell, I can’t afford real dinner theater.

My friend Graham lives in Australia now, but when I knew him he lived in London, his birthplace. He was very good fun, in part because he subscribed to certain notions of Englishness more completely than anyone else I’ve known. During the 1992 general election, in which the Conservative party was crushed outside the rich south, he stood as a Tory candidate in fierce, working-class Barnsley. He conducted his campaign wearing a double-breasted pin-striped suit with a red rose in his buttonhole. The rose was designed to make the locals think he was in fact the Labour candidate, which seemed improbable given his plummy southern accent.
   “And do you know, all those people ever asked me was ‘When are you going to ‘ang that Myra ‘indley?’ (She was one of the notorious Moors Murderers, and has been in jail in Yorkshire for over thirty years.)

Graham was a Catholic, of the angst-ridden variety only English converts produce. He was fervent in his admiration for the class system, and sometimes fretted that his own first name betrayed him as not exactly top-drawer. He wore his grandfather’s handmade shoes, which he polished every day, and leather trousers, which he thought very daring indeed. He had been a public school English master, and had worked for Debrett’s but by the time I met him he was an announcer for the BBC World Service.
   “Can you imagine?” he would say with glee, “I read the news on the BBC World Service“—this with reverence—“whilst wearing leathah trousahs!” His enjoyment of the frisson was delightful.

When I went to stay at his little flat in Pimlico, he would make scones and summer pudding, and have me take tea with his grandmother, to whom he was devoted. She didn’t like the Irish much, and at 96 she was entitled to her opinions.
   “My grandfather had a spot of bother in the post office in Dublin in 1916, you know,” Graham explained with a winking reference to an independence uprising. She was kind to me in spite of this, and told him I was a perfectly nice girl for an Irish.

Graham’s fervour for England was of the kind that only ever exists among slight outsiders. He had been a scholarship boy at St. Paul’s, an excellent English public school. That was where he had picked up his cut-glass accent, as well as his anxiety about the name that betrayed him. He had learned the accent so well (imagine 1930’s Noel Coward recordings) that he had received a memo from the higher-ups at BBC’s Bush House insisting that he modify slightly. He treasured this, and showed it to me in self-parody.

‘Dear Graham,

Please do remember that that word ‘power’ has two syllables.

Yours
______’

   ‘Well, how else would you say it?’ I asked.
   ‘Pah! Pah!’ he exclaimed, ‘As in, British Empah!’

I thought fondly of Graham as I learned more about the transliteration of placenames in colonial Burma. Take ‘Bamar’, for example. These days, you’d have to conjure David Niven, Leslie Howard, or my friend Graham, to decide to write it in English as ‘Burma’.