Closing Time

The morning was a blur. The early morning boat ride in to the mainland was rough. Not the sea, which was choppy, but not to bad, but I was still suffering from an over celebration of ANZAC day the previous evening. Peter was the only Australian at Lost Paradise, but we wouldn’t have wanted him to celebrate alone so we pitched in. What are friends for?

I spent the better part of the day running errands around Trang with Wally and crew. After the customs house and immigration, we moved on to Tesco, and other warehouse stores for Wally’s supplies. I stocked up on snacks for the train ride, and after lunch they dropped me off near the train station downtown.

I spent the remainder of the afternoon wandering around downtown Trang, a pleasant little provincial riverside town. The train left just before sunset, sliding smoothly, far more smoothly than an India train, out of the station, through the suburbs of Trang and into the countryside with its banana trees and coconut palms and tamarind trees and bamboo thickets and jungly undergrowth of vines, some of which, if I’m not mistake, were Kudzu.

The sky was a dull grey overcast with some strikingly dramatic cloud formations on the eastern horizon. I was lucky and had the two-person berth to myself for the majority of the journey. I sat by the window and watched the scenery slide by thinking about Wally and the rest probably motoring past Ko Muk or perhaps already back on Kradan unloading the weeks supplies into the cycle cart, or maybe already back at the restaurant lounging under the thatched roofs telling stories over cold Chang.

Barbeque orders would be placed and Ngu would be grilling or tinkering about with the one remaining generator. The dogs would be prowling for scraps, the puppies wrestling in the yard, Tang and Blondie still off at the beach, lying in the shade, bellies full of chicken carcasses and pork scraps begged off the tourists that had lunch on the beach. Life everywhere continues as it was without you.

Children in backyards leaned over the fence watching the train as it passed. My time in Southeast Asia is nearly over. Four days in Bangkok to do a bit of last minute work, maybe buy some bootleg DVDs, and then poof, it disappears from me for now. It’s less the place I will miss than the people, both the locals I’ve met and the travelers.

I’ll miss you Southeast Asia, you’ve changed my whole outlook on the world and shown me things I never dreamed I’d see.

Like the evening light now falling on the hillsides just north of Trang, a quiet, relaxed light that falls like one of Winslow Homer’s washes over the green hills and white thunderheads turning them a golden orange against the distant blackness of a storm over the gulf of Thailand. Thailand in this light becomes a softer, subtler place, less dramatic and harsh than in the glare of the midday sun.

I started to write a bit of reminiscence, try to remember the highlights of my time in this part of the world before I return to the west, but about halfway through I kept thinking of a popular Buddhist saying—be here now. Most of these dispatches are written in past tense, but this time I want to simply be here now. This moment, on this train. This is the last time I’ll post something from Southeast Asia. There is no way I could sum anything up for you, no way I can convey what I’ve seen and done and even what I have written of is only about one tenth of what I’ve actually done. So I’m not going to try.

I know it’s hard to do when you’re at home and working and everything is the same shit happening over and over again, but it really is true, that bit about tomorrow… that bit about yesterday… one is gone forever and the other will never arrive. There is only now. But I’m not very good at this sort of thing; instead I’ll leave you with some thoughts from others:

“To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.” – Edward Abbey

“The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.” — e.e. cummings

“What do we live for if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” – George Eliot