3.16 Soaring

After lounging about the swimming pool all morning, Jean and I got itchy feet and decided to go out and explore Bangkok for a few hours until it was time to leave for the airport.

A few blocks from our hotel was a canal, one of the many noisome tributaries that flowed throughout the city carrying human waste and pestilence towards the great Chao Phraya, the River of Kings. Every now and then boats roaring in either direction and churning up the muddy waters would pull up to jerry-built piers, unload their shaken and rattled passengers, and rumble off again.

Well, I’ll tell you, the boats were probably deathtraps, but to the two of us they looked like a hell of a lot of fun. The gods may struggle in vain against boredom, but there is no shortage of things that will amuse two lusty lads hopped up on yaba. 

We boarded an inbound boat, sitting at the very front of the boat, near the pilot, with the delight of two boys climbing into the first car of a roller coaster.

The pilot floored the engine and the boat hurtled forward at breakneck speed, down the canal under a canopy of trees. The boat banked sharply at the Ban Bat temple and continued thundering ahead, passing under a low-lying bridge and just barely averting a collision with an approaching boat. Several minutes later, when we arrived at a pier along the Chao Phraya, the two of us hobbled off, shaken and rattled.

We spent a good hour wandering around Khet Dusit, where the royal palace and parliament is located, then jumped onto the backs of motorcycle taxis that zipped us back to Siam, weaving wildly through the bumper-to-bumper traffic.

The rest of the afternoon was idled away at Gaysorn Plaza and Siam Center, where you would have thought that Christmas and Chanukah had not only come eight months early, but fallen serendipitously on the same day the way we shopped, picking up souvenirs and presents like there was no tomorrow.

That evening we rendezvoused at the airport with Jean’s girlfriend, Nori, who had flown in from Japan. The three of us then caught a connecting flight to Ko Samui, an island of the southeastern coast where we planned to stay for a few days before moving on to the neighboring island of Ko Pha Ngan in time for the full moon party.

Perhaps it was the altitude or the deafening drone of the twin propellers that triggered it, but midflight I began to peak again. Leaning across the narrow aisle, I asked my friend how he was feeling. More than twenty hours had passed since we had taken yaba and I was soaring. He looked back at me and grinned like a Cheshire cat.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The complete version of No. 6 is now available for a variety of devices at Amazon's Kindle store.