Japanese Virgins

I'm on a trekking tour. It is my first trip to Thailand and I am using the trekking tour as a way to reconnoiter the Thai experience. Cheap and easy and safe. Hey, maybe I won't really like Thailand. Maybe I won't be back. No matter: there are 189 other countries. I don't really know where we are; but that is one of the simply fabulous pleasures of these small group trekking tours wherever you take them. You don't have to know anything. You don't have to know anything about anything. You don't have to be competent, or map knowledgeable, or puzzle over train schedules, or look alert, or even pretend to be interested if you don't want to. You are the child and the group leader is the mommy or the daddy. Your job? Pay the bill and surrender to the pleasures of the child.

And it gets better. You don't have to be social either. You don't have to be friendly or accessible if you don't want to be friendly or accessible. Since you have no family or emotional or debt or employer connections with any of these human beings the standard social extortions have no currency. You do not have to accept a smile if you don't want to and you do not have to offer a smile if you do not want to. Spread your wings and you could fly. Free at last. Great God all mighty: free at last.

Tours are not connected to anything. You are like an astronaut whose tether has broken; content to just tumble towards a meaningless future. No more pretending. What a gift. What an opportunity. You can choose how to spend your social chips. If you are open hearted and charitable and generous it means something; unpolluted by outside influence. You think of the Buddha under the Bodhi tree and wonder about the psychic equation of centered Self and hope giving smile.

Hey, is that what all this Buddha stuff is really all about? Just a question of balance? Your centered Self on one end and your natural desires on the other end? And the balance point in the middle is your point of singularity: your personal nirvana? Just a question of balance? Well, no one has conquered the challenges of balance more than the surfer. Are surfers Buddhas? Was Buddha the first gnarly Indian dude to ride the wave, and hang ten, and shoot the curl, and make it all the way in without wiping out? Is that what a life well lived is really all ab0ut: making it all the way in without wiping out? If I peer at every old temple in India and China and Thailand and Cambodia and Burma and Vietnam will I eventually find a picture of the Buddha surfing?

Anyway, this whole trekking tour tourist thing is almost a Buddhist thing. No yearning or striving, no measuring or competing, no record keeping or defending, no connection to others that needs to be monitored or approved, no anger or self pity. The others in the small group of hipsters are avoiding me. Even better. I can devote more time to not wasting time. Husbanding my resources and conscious of Self as a departure point for charity and generosity to others. Not caring and caring in balance. The Buddha way. Buddha. The ultimate hipster. They'd probably avoid him too. I feel free.

We are waiting for a train that will take us to Kachanaburi. I don't know where Kachanaburi is or why we would want to go there; and I have no idea where we are now or why we came here. My geographic knowledge of myself is zero. Hell, I can't even say these wacky polysyllabic linguistically loony Thai place names correctly. And I don't care.

God, what freedom. To not care. The universal seed at the heart of all vacation or retirement talk. To not care. To reach a personal nirvana in your life where you don't have to care anymore and it does not matter. All artificial family, and social, and work, and moral, and debt, and security, and emotional constructs are finally irrelevant. You are free. Now if you could just lick your balls while surfing everything would be perfect. Anyway, the girl guide named Cheri from Melbourne only knows marginally more than I do because this is her first trip also. Hey, that's her problem.

We are in the middle of nowhere and it is blistering hot. Suffocating hot. Dry season for weeks and weeks hot. Lying on a hot road under tons of blankets hot. We wait 3 hours for a mystery train that may or may not come. Welcome to Thailand. Very few specifics have been sucked into this black hole. It is a land, and a people, and a culture, and an experience of maybes. Maybe yes meant yes, and maybe yes meant no; and maybe no meant no, and maybe no meant yes; and maybe . . ! Buddha, the ultimate hipster and cosmic trekker smiles because he knows that it makes no difference whether the train comes or whether the train does not come. Wanting things is the first temptation that leads to the downward spiral. Surf's up.

But we don't smile. We just pant. We wait under the shade of an outdoor restaurant. Lying on the benches. Panting like dogs who have just humped a chair leg. I take a walk with a fellow trekker up the road for about a mile to mine the tourist experience for anything special that we might see in exotic Siam. It is too early for all of the Western scales to have fallen from our bodies. Banana crepes, and henna hands, and tie dyed pants are not enough: we are on vacation, this cost money. We don't want to miss anything.

But all we see is the dispirited dry season landscape of cracked earth, and red dust, and curled leaves, and shriveled fruits. There is not an insect or a bird in flight, and not a sound to be heard from the jungle. Everything with a heart beat has just given up. Including the people. Trash is strewn about every single house. No exceptions. Not one Thai has said:

"I am going to be different than my neighbors. I am going to set a higher standard."

Apparently, if you are a Thai homeowner the idea is to make sure trash, and garbage, and paper, and old appliances, and pieces of construction supplies are evenly distributed over the whole property from front to back, and from side to side. Hey, maybe it is a Thai way of declaring territory. You know, like a dog hitting everything in his territory with a spot of piss. Maybe not. Ooh, Asia is so mysterious.

House plants in pots have tipped over in front of every house and no one has fixed them. Good ideas now relegated to the past and evidence of the transitory experience of love. Nobody loves these plants, or their plant lives, or the miracle of life that they offer, or the beauty of blossom and leaf anymore. The enthusiasm of purchase and proud display now just looks like a child's short attention span. Standing next to the elderly lady trekker in the disorienting heat I am capable of no deep thoughts, but later I wonder if other important parts of these Thais' lives are treated like the plants; such as their relationships with husband, and wife, and children, and family, and family of man. If you stumble, or fall, or get sick, or end up alone, or lose your bearings in this smiling Kingdom does no one help you up? Does no one remember your past and the good idea you once represented, or is each day completely separate from the days preceding and coming after? Hey, maybe plants in pots lying on their sides is a Buddhist thing. Maybe not. Nobody cares. Apparently. About anything.

At one house we were able to see in the windows. Hey, I wonder how these mysterious people of the east live in exotic Siam? People not shy to call us inferior foreign devils. The inside was like the outside. Debris evenly spread over every floor surface as if the house were a dump for personal lives with no bearings. Ships without rudders. People without dreams. People who love to say: "You don't understand the Thai way." You are correct. I don't.

Finally, the train comes and stops. Or I should say the train wheezes in and dies. The train station with all of the usual train station accessories like ticket window, and seats, and platform, and stairs, and roof is only fifty more yards but the train doesn't make it. An impossible dream. Steel is an inorganic man made material about as far away from the worlds of human emotion as it is possible to get, but the overwhelming impression is that this train just took out a Siamese hari kari knife and committed suicide. Or just died of natural train causes. Hard to know. Looked like willfulness to me as the last gasp of a dying organism clutching at dignity. Looked like suicide. Before crossing the road I stand for a moment and look at the train and reflect on the fact that I just witnessed a train suicide. You don't see that often; and because I am on one of these trekking tours I've got the time for reflection.

Cheri, the politically correct, feminist Nazi tour guide says something in incomprehensible Australian and we roll off the benches and stagger across the road. Next is a scramble up the steep slope of hot dusty blinding white sharp pea gravel and across the tracks where we help each other on board. No station, and no boarding platform, and no ladder or steps, and no one asks us for tickets. None of it seems real but no one asks any questions. Our train has arrived. Happy chemicals are temporarily dumped into tourist blood streams. Be careful what you wish for.

The train is unbelievably hot. Baking in an oven hot. Say your prayers because 'you are not going to be alive at the next station' hot. No comforts. No fans. No air conditioning and no people. That's right: no people. It's a death train and apparently we didn't get the memo. Die foreign devil die. I'm wearing shorts and a T shirt and that is it. I can feel the heat in the bare steel travel right through my feet and up my bones to my knees. It's not the searing flesh burning heat of white quartzite sands, but a deeper denser heavier heat. A heat that will have it's way.

Don't even ask me to describe the bathroom. There are roaches lying on their backs holding up little signs that say:

"Just Kill Me."

When I open the door there is a something that looks like a scorpion on the seat and it does not move. When I shut the door it also does not move (I opened the door again just to make sure I wasn't imagining this). They should just call this the Crap In Your Pants train because nobody is going to use the toilet. If you've got a girlfriend and she uses the toilet on this train and she doesn't complain: marry her. She's one tough bitch. Or Israeli.

All the windows are broken or missing. Ok, maybe the windows are not technically broken. There are no windows. Hey, sign me up for a fourteen hour trip during the monsoon season. I'll pull a giant condom over my whole body to stay dry. Gee Asia is exciting. Nothing but bare steel everywhere. Seat cushions? We don't need no stinking seat cushions. And this monument to Thailand and the Industrial Age crossing on the graph of progress like two tuk tuks T boning themselves at an intersection is slow.

No, wait a minute; that is not right. It is not even that fast. Going slow is an impossible dream for this train. It ambles. Men walking to the hangman's noose move faster. Old ladies with diarrhea headed to the toilet move faster. Trains going to the scrap yard move faster. Moving past a tree limb I have enough time to watch an egg become a larva, and a larva become a pupa, and a pupa become a butterfly and fly off.

But I start to get into it. Little things lose meaning (like crapping in your pants). Time slows down. I can feel the warm steel on my bare feet and I like it. I even like the dirt. I am regressing. Simplifying. Stripping down to essentials. I can feel sweat dripping off my balls and it is a good thing. No one speaks to me and I speak to none of them. It is the 'fxxx you and the horse you rode in on' hot season.

The fields are bare and brown. You can't tell the tapioca fields from the other fields. And you don't care. No energy to ask a local or look it up in a book. It all looks the same and after a moment's reflection you realize it doesn't matter. Buddha time again. A woman comes by selling food. She has left her youth behind her but her wide bare brown feet, and her big hips, and her small breasts and nipples pushing against a Beatles T shirt leaves a sexual wake behind her. Ok, I'm hot: but I'm not dead.

Anyway, it looks like food. Ah hell, it must be food. What are the odds? It must be edible. Even if it goes through me like a shell from a battleship I have to eat something. I buy a beer and some mystery meat on a stick. I get a smile and some cleavage. Sweet Jesus on a cracker I'll bet she looks great naked. More curves than a seal colony. Probably thrashes her head like a rag doll in a soi dog's mouth and moans those incomprehensible polysyllabic Thai words.

Drinking and tearing at the meat and hanging out the window is delicious, like a dog riding in a car. I wonder if dogs with their heads hanging out car windows ever think about naked Thai women. I feel slightly dizzy, and I feel slightly heat stroked, and I feel free.

There are two Japanese girls on the tour. College girls. Virgins. Not a single man's fingerprint on either of their bodies. Young. So so young! Still anxiouis to please. Still interested in other peoples' approval. Still doing what their parents tell them to do. Children in womens' bodies. Lures of Satan. They have the long torso and short leg figures of the Japanese female. Bodies that look as if they were assembled from spare parts. Peasant stock done up with mismatched clothes, and goofy hairstyles, and too much makeup to obscure the fact that they are not special. Pink bows on pigs; but cute pigs, and racially interesting to the tourist. Neither one of them is a beauty queen; but they are young, and clean, and hairless, and innocent, and fertile. Forget Buddha.

They are sticking their heads out the windows and taking pictures of each other. Smiling. Laughing. Happy. Unreflective. Inexperienced. Did I say innocent? Did I say fertile? I walk up beside one; put my arm around her waist, stick my head out the window, and smile for her friend with the camera. I can feel the girl's abdominal muscles cramp and flex beneath my hand. But she doesn't move. I can feel her yearning flowing into me. Everyone is laughing. I love being a tourist.

© Dana. All rights reserved by the author.