Postcards from Thailand

There are a few restaurants around town that proclaim they serve Vietnamese food. The ones I’ve been to have either had Vietnamese dishes on the menu, but they’re not actually available, or have had regular central Thai menus. It was therefore with an air of skepticism that I went to another self-proclaimed Vietnamese restaurant last night. It was a simple place, shielded from the street by a screen of bamboo poles with cast concrete tables and benches, the tables topped with inlaid ceramic tiles.

There were quite a few customers there already eating, which is always a promising sign.

The menu when it came was all in Thai, and I’d forgotten my glasses, so I asked my companion to handle the ordering, adding a few suggestions from happy memories of past trips to Vietnam.

The first dish arrived quickly. It was simple, thin slices of pork rib topped with crispy fried garlic and a spicy dipping sauce.

Next to come was minced shrimp wrapped around a sugar cane stick accompanied by a large bouquet of herbs and leaves, some bitter, some aromatic, some peppery. I recognised coriander, mint and holy basil, but the rest were a bit of a mystery to me. There were also lettuce leaves and a large plate containing pieces of star fruit (carambola), sour green mango and cucumber, slivers of garlic and small, fiery green chillies as well as small coils of thin, cold wheat noodles. The idea is that you peel the shrimp mince from the stick and place it either on one of the lettuce leaves or on a larger herb leaf along with a selection of the other items. You then add a little hot/spicy/sour peanut sauce, roll the whole thing up, and pop it in your mouth.

Then arrived a thin, crispy pancake filled with stir-fried minced meat and vegetables accompanied by a small salad of cucumber and chillies in sweetened vinegar and another spicy dipping sauce.

And finally we got fresh spring rolls: thin sheets of moistened rice paper lined with lettuce leaves and topped with minced shrimps, lots of holy basil and tiny pieces of other vegetables and noodles, then tightly wrapped and sliced into bit-sized pieces. And, of course, there was yet another dipping sauce.

The food was pretty good. OK, they’d mixed minced pork with the shrimp wrapping the sugar cane to keep the cost down, and they’d used holy basil in the spring rolls rather than the more traditional mint and coriander (mint is quite difficult to find here I find). A Vietnamese traditionalist might have frowned, but for five pounds for two (including a large bottle of beer), it was excellent value for money and a very pleasant change.

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I celebrate each fourth of July (or “Thanksgiving” as it’s known in the UK) by taking a worming pill. It’s a common precautionary measure here in Thailand. Each year schoolchildren are lined up and fed one of these foul-tasting preparations by their teacher. What makes it worse is that you’re supposed to chew the pill, rather than swallow it whole.

Much of the risk comes from eating undercooked meat. Particularly in the north east (Isaan), salads are prepared with raw minced meat or fish, or only very lightly cooked meat. Here in the central plains when they make Isaan food they cook the meat more fully, but there’s still a risk. I suspect the Isaan tradition stems from two things: (1) the available meat is very tough and stringy, so mincing makes it more palatable. (In the case of the fish, freshwater fish are very bony, so mincing means you don’t have to pick out the hundreds of tiny bones.); (2) fuel has traditionally been in very short supply, and even now is expensive, so minimal cooking keeps down the cost.

The shortage of wood for fuel has also historically accounted for the rise of stir-fried and other quickly cooked dishes; slow-braised dishes are almost absent from the cuisine.

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I drove G to the central police station where he had to make a statement. The place seemed fairly chaotic. Nobody was manning the front desk, but seemingly at random various police officers would arrive and take away one of the waiting to somewhere more private to conduct constabulary business. Eventually G was taken away for his interview. About an hour later he reemerged to tell me that the police didn’t believe his story about his pick-up having been hit by another vehicle, and that they wanted him to pay a 400 Baht fine for the damage to the concrete barrier at the central reservation.

G didn’t want to accept this fine – it would affect the insurance claim. G was told to wait whilst the police officers had a private discussion.

At this point I went home. I hadn’t showered or shaved by this point, wasn’t wearing any deodorant, and was wearing yesterday’s shirt. To put it bluntly, I smelt pretty bad.

I put a dish of home-made baked beans in the oven to warm and quickly showered. Then suddenly remembered something I’d seen at the scene of the crash: there was a headlight near the start of the skid marks. I drove back to the scene, took my life in my hands again as I crossed the Asia Highway, and started searching. I couldn’t find the headlight, but I found several pieces of silver plastic, some of which appeared to be from a bumper. (G’s pick-up is white.) I gathered these up and went back to the police station. As I arrived there G ‘phoned me to say that he needed 2,500 Baht; the police had agreed to investigate the crash, subject to a fee. I drove to the nearest ATM and withdrew the money.

At this point G was at the police vehicle compound on the outskirts of Ayutthaya. He said that he’d be back at the police station in 15 minutes. I had a choice of waiting in police reception with its hard, plastic chairs, pesky flies and stifling air, or outside with its even harder, concrete benches, equally pesky flies, and baking sun leavened only by a slight breeze. I chose the latter. More than an hour later G turned up. It took a further hour for him to pay the fee and complete the paperwork.

But that wasn’t the end of it. We had to drive to the police vehicle compound to complete even more paperwork. “Compound”, perhaps, is rather too grand a word for a patch of dirt with a couple of huts at the end of a gravel track. Here there was a handful of smashed-up cars and a larger number of smashed-up motorcycles.

G’s pick-up at the Police Compound

Eventually G was free to go. By now it was mid-afternoon, and my baked beans had been in the oven rather too long. Still, having only had two mouthfuls of muesli all day, I thought they tasted fine.

Things are still far from over. G will have to come back to Ayutthaya to make a further statement, and will then have to appear in court. The toughest thing for him, though, will be how to tell his mother.

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I’m sitting in the waiting area of a local hospital. All of life is here. There’s the toddler with her hair in a pair of bunches, with shoes which squeak with her every step. There’s a pair of schoolboys with their brown shorts, brown, calf-length socks and brown canvas shoes. There’s the middle-aged woman standing at a payphone talking urgently, with hushed tones to some anonymous recipient. There’s the baby with spiky hair in his mother’s arms. There’s an elderly woman lying on her side comatose, covered in a blanket being pushed from somewhere to somewhere else. And out of sight in the Emergency Room is a good friend of mine.

It wasn’t meant to be like this.

This weekend G, a friend from Bangkok, came to visit me. It was a joyful weekend. He’d just become an uncle for the first time on the Saturday morning and was excited about that. We talked for hours about this and that, about everything and nothing. On the Monday morning we both woke at the ungodly hour of 5:45 so that he could drive to work and I could lock the gate behind him after he left. Ten minutes later I was watching the BBC news on TV and starting on my bowl of muesli when there was a ‘phone call. It was G. My first thought was that he’d accidentally left something behind. But no. He said he’d been in a serious car accident, and would I come?

I drove as fast as I could to get there, but wasn’t prepared for what I saw: there were some long skid marks, a trail of debris, a stream of brake fluid, and his white pick-up truck on its side, facing the wrong way in the fast lane of the Asia Highway. There were also three other vehicles, Emergency Medical Services. Two had arrived following a ‘phone call from someone who’d seen the accident, though the first on site had been passing by chance.

Thailand doesn’t have a national ambulance service. Rather, groups of (mostly) volunteers respond to accidents. They do it to gain merit according to Buddhist philosophy. They also get money from the hospitals to which they deliver their accident victims. So fierce is the competition for accident victims in some parts of the country that if members of two different groups arrive at the same time there can be fisticuffs, or worse, for the right to help the victim.

In accordance with Thai law one mustn’t move any vehicle involved in an accident until the scene has been inspected, either by the police, or (more usually) by the insurance company’s agent. G was standing next to his pick-up waiting for both. At least he wasn’t visibly injured.

I risked life and limb to dash across four lanes of the Asia Highway to reach the central reservation. There G told me what had happened: he’d been driving along in the third lane at a moderate speed when he was rammed from behind by another vehicle. He then skidded and hit the concrete barrier of the central reservation, upon which his vehicle flipped on its side and slid a further 20 metres or so down the carriageway. Then his pick-up was hit by another fast-moving vehicle. He couldn’t open the passenger side door, but was able to wind down the window, so he’d hauled himself up through it and out of the pick-up, leaving his shoes behind in the process; he was standing at the roadside in just his socks. The vehicle which hit him didn’t stop. Why? Perhaps the driver was drunk. Perhaps he didn’t have insurance. Perhaps he didn’t have a driving licence. Quite possibly, all three.

After a long wait for the police and the insurance agent G decided to abandon the wait, leaving the scene in the hands of the Emergency Medical Service team, and I drove him to the nearest hospital.

And now I sit, waiting, pondering the frailty of life.

***

Fortunately, G wasn’t too badly injured – lots of bruising and muscle pains, but the X-ray revealed nothing broken. He was able to walk out of the hospital clutching a bag with a rainbow assortment of different pills.

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