by Billy Kay
It is hot and cloyingly humid as my friend Bill Campbell and I penetrate deeper into a Bangkok ghetto, clutching an address scribbled down hastily following a chance encounter on an Edinburgh street. The surroundings are unprepossessing, the adults look at us with indifference or hostility, and the children point and stare and follow us shouting ‘Farang, farang’ - [foreigners, foreigners]. With our backpacks, beards and long hair, we looked like aliens to the Thai weans, and as we trudged on and the streets seemed to become poorer and poorer, we felt very much strangers in a strange land.
In the previous few days, we had been back in the caller air of a Scottish winter, celebrating Hogmanay and Ne’erday and having enough energy left to throw a farewell party for friends in our Edinburgh flat. The day before departure, Bill had run into an acquaintance on the street. When he told her that we were about to set off on a year’s travels, beginning with a student flight to Bangkok, she said that she had been at Cambridge University with a student from Thailand, and proceeded to copy his address and scribble a wee note for him. This is why we found ourselves in the back streets of Bangkok. They reminded me of the medina in Fez in Morocco where every medieval alleyway seemed to have its own occupation, be it leather tanners, wool dyers or tinsmiths. The streets around Rong Muang were slightly wider, and the occupations undertaken there more modern, but the principle was the same, with every family sharing limited space with workshops repairing motor bikes and scooters. The street was lined with concertina doors that were raised up to reveal workspaces so tiny that the pavement itself was where the repairs were carried out - the families themselves squeezed into rooms above the works. So there we were, jet lagged and wabbit, our lugs resounding to the din and clash of hammer on metal, looking for the address of someone we had never met. We were quite sure, though that even if the contact was there, the most he could do was give advice about a place to stay…. the street in which we found ourselves was very obviously a place where people strived to survive and get by - there was neither the space nor the means to provide hospitality.