The train edged out of Thonburi, the other side of Bangkok, its nose pointing north-west towards Kanchanaburi early in the am, full of tourists, locals and their dogs. It was too early to complain about the fare discrimination (locals paid less than a quarter of what I did), and I guess it was only fair, for even at 100 THB, this was the cheapest means to get to the bridge.
Four-and-a-half hours of admiring the Thai countryside later, the train pulled up at Kanchanaburi, the place that made David Lean famous. While the film The Bridge on the River Kwai may not have been shot at the actual bridge in Kanchanaburi, it did catapult the sleepy northwestern town into a very popular, money-earning tourist attraction.
Kanchanaburi, I thought as I alighted, was the kind of place you want to stay in for ever.
Kanchanaburi’s neat rows of pubs, massage parlours and lodges that threw in free Internet and bicycles impressed me easily. I mean, here I was in what was definitely a “world- famous” destination with what was a properly organized industry, minus the chaos that I had experienced on my pilot trip through Haridwar. I hate to
draw comparisons (and hence break the “No judging” rule so soon), but it did occur to me suddenly that Haridwar could have been a little more organized, if nothing else.
In Kanchanaburi, one couldn’t go wrong with finding the right sort of place to crash in. But I told myself firmly when I couldn’t make up my mind that if I failed to find suitable living quarters in the next ten minutes, I would bid adios to River Kwai and go back to eating bamboo worms and field rats in Bangkok. Fortunately for me, I fetched up at Hotel Royal Knight, and made it my pad for the night. My sudden joy at finding a bicycle to ride may have been the clincher— not to mention the narrow little room that was reached via a narrow staircase that opened out to a wooden deck by the side of the little river.
I really wanted to ride the bicycle, and how I tried. However, my associations with the two-wheeled contraption had ended in my teens and it didn’t do much good for my ego when my inability to ride it was proved a second later when I fell off it right outside the hotel gate.
The hotel security guard had a strange light in his eyes when he plucked me out of the bicycle heap and suggested hitching a ride. In the end (after assuring him that I could ride, and failing again), I hitched a ride to the bridge, but the incident sort of opened my eyes about keeping in touch with my bicycle riding skills.
There must come a moment in every traveller’s sighting of the bridge when something powerful descends, something that causes them to pause and think. Of course, you can get as quirky as you like with your thoughts. My first thought had nothing to do with the steel columns, the number of years that went into making the bridge or the thousands that lost their lives in trying to build this fatal structure, but about how it would look at midnight, awash with moonlight and without the milling crowds.
My decision to stay on in Kanchanaburi was to see that imagined sight, and thanks to this decision, that evening on the masseuse’s mat, I learnt a new meaning of “Happy Ending”, one that had nothing to do with the sights Kanchanaburi promised.
Oh, the joys of adulthood.
If I were asked to draw up a list of the most visited sights of Kanchanaburi, I would begin with the watering holes, followed by massage parlours, but that is only because I had seen drunks stumbling along the streets and some more cavorting in the pool at Royal Knight with naked, squealing Thai girls pressed close to white, overfed bodies.
I know I am going to sound naive when I say how quickly travelling hardens and reinforces you against a bile attack the sight of sex-in-the-pool brings about. I may have lost some backpacker points for feeling this way, but there was no way I would ever step into a pool with the body juices of drunk tourists for company, and was desperately relieved to escape into one of the massage parlours in the hope of restoring my mood and feet.
When entering a less-reputed massage parlour in Thailand, you can expect a reasonable number of active butterflies in your stomach, especially if it is your first time in a country renowned for dark pleasures. I cannot explain my reaction when the masseuse disrobed and pushed me back on the bed before sniggering in a weird way. At that moment, the sight of the Thai girl scared me.
Stupid of me for thinking that small, dark, smelly massage parlours employed fair, Swedish masseuses waiting to relieve me of the considerable stress I had worked up over the days. Perhaps, I was not just stupid, but blind, or possibly both, for I had failed to notice the cheap flashing boards decorated with pictures of smiling Thai girls. The only thing I could be grateful for, when lying naked on a
narrow bed in an incense- filled room, was the absence of a moral police in the form of a friend or a relative—that I forgot the friend or relative minutes after experts hands began kneading and cracking my body, reaching into private zones like I were a cadaver, is altogether another thing.
“Yuwan evlything?”(You want everything), the fierce woman asked unexpectedly.
I think, at this point, it was reasonable enough to expect that “everything” meant all of me, minus the spots that did not require the services of a masseuse, but it is exceedingly difficult to explain your thoughts to a woman whose fingers were flicking imaginary specks of dirt from your inner thighs.
I was slow, but not completely dumb. “No,” I said at length.
“Yuwan appy endi? Yugimme two hunle bah exla.” (You want Happy Ending? You give me 200 baht extra.)
But when you have little or no idea what that meant, you shake your head and look blank. Okay, so I was not completely blank, for my mind was doing the mental conversion into dirhams and dollars, and happy endings for AED 25 seemed a fair deal—whatever it was.
One had to take certain risks.
When I left, albeit a lot lighter and less uptight than I arrived, I had learnt the following.
1. Massages could mean more than a body rub. 90
Keeping your underwear on is a good idea.
Have a very good reason to refuse the offers for extra.
Never utter the word “Happy”.
You will never regret a Happy Ending.
The Happy Ending helped in my appreciation of a good beef massaman curry and aided in the discovery that chatting up people in smoky bars was not terrifying, and I could go into one without wearing a fake wedding ring or with a fake story of boyfriend “coming along in a few”. An example of that being Sean, an Englishman teaching English in Japan, who, by the time I mustered courage to speak to him, was just licking the last of a fiery green curry from an old white bowl and sweating bucketloads, but who showed more than a passing interest in an Indian woman slightly under the influence, asking him if he would like to see the bridge in the moonlight.
It must have been the spice, because he agreed.
It was well past midnight when I returned to my narrow room, and before long, the day knocked about. It was time to head out on the day trip I had so enthusiastically signed up for the previous day. Thanks to my night out with Sean, being bundled into a mini-van with five strangers (and Sean) for a trip to Erawan Waterfalls and bamboo raft rides did not dampen my spirits. Instead, I had the feeling that I had conquered every single myth surrounding single female travellers—and Thai massages.
I am convinced now that the woman-travelling-alone myth is a lore created by those who have never gone into smoky beer bars alone.
I am also convinced that travelling has a way of drawing back our layers, of exposing our bones, making us more receptive and less judgemental. I have a reason to say this. Knowing very little about Thailand before journeying there unprepared, I can say that if you have been led into believing that Thailand is all about sex tourism and insect-eating, your imagination is the snag, planted by unimaginative, armchair travellers who won’t stop till you’ve stopped travelling altogether.
Figure this: I had been asked, by Mrs SM, no less, if Indians still practised snake charming and rode elephants to work, and honestly, it irked me. I hated anyone with no knowledge of my country to pass such a judgement, but I also realized that as much as I hated others judging my country, I had also been victim of similar prejudices.
And I wouldn’t be judgmental in a place I was going to spend another week, looking for happy endings to things I was going to do.
