I can pinpoint the moment I achieved peak cool.
It was here, at this gas station in northern Thailand, On a three-day motorcycle ride around the Golden Triangle,
The gas attendant had to siphon the gas from the big jar to get it flowing and fill my tank. He spat gasoline.
I had surrendered to the healing properties of the asphalt road. With my Aussie buddy Mark, We were bonded. Modern-day Easy Riders.
I rode with no helmet, my hippy hair loose and riffing like a wild guitar solo in the wind.
We blasted past rice paddies, hugging corners to the left. We ripped through slash-and-burn smoke clouds, past road-side gas stations, dodging old men slowly pedalling
bicycle food stalls.
Mini-buses packed with Japanese tourists bombed past us on the right. Moon faces gaping in awe of us spirits. They scrambled to grab their cameras and nodded and gave us the thumbs up.
The exhilarating cure-all of speed and freedom. We rode with no destination. We rode just to ride, just to watch the scenery flow around us.
The emerald shock-green of the tiered paddies soothed and electrified. Like me, Mark was lamenting a lost love.
At night and drunk again on Sang Thip he sang some godawful song about his girl Gemma. I might have been pretending to be a cowboy but Mark really was one. He had worked shearing sheep and Gemma was the rich farmer’s daughter. The family was against the love affair and had offered her $10,000 to break it off. He wailed like a drunken Oliver Reed, from the pancreas and the spleen. He had it bad, poor bastard.
We rode Honda 125 MTX dirt bikes through the Golden Triangle from Chang Rai up to the Myanmar border. The yellow dirt roads newly cut through the mountains.
We drank bottle after bottle of high caffeine medicine and rode eight hours a day.
One afternoon we rounded a straightaway through the middle of nowhere to see a garrison of cops blockading the end of the road. We had no choice but to head straight for them and they waved us to a stop.
One grabbed the handlebars of my motorbike and signaled for me to turn off the engine, staring straight into my eyes.
Mark and I remained calm but I didn’t know him that well and I just prayed to God that this guy was not secretly carrying any drugs. He was probably thinking the same about me.
These Thai cops were serious men.
We dismounted our bikes and they told us to remove our shoes. They took our passports.
They rifled through our packs, squeezed our toothpaste. One Thai soldier was staring me down, right in my face.
“You have heroin?”
No sir, staring straight into his eyes and surrendering the truthfulness of my innocent soul.
I hoped these guys weren’t corrupt.
I had no idea if they were going to plant something on us.
“Cocaine? Hashish?”
No sir. Nothing.
Several of them frisked me. One grabbed my balls and pinched my dick with two fingers.
Then they all hung back and conferred a little. Finally, they returned our passports and said we could go.
Then we were all buddies. The hardness evaporated and they were smiling and friendly and laughing.
I’ve never been so relieved in all my life.
The next day, despite the lurking shadow festering in the quagmire of my bone marrow, my outer flesh was free.
After eating coconut-sweetened rice, Mark and I hit the road. It was early enough for the air to be deliciously cool.
We were in the hills somewhere between Dai Mae Salong and Thaton and soon we were kissing the high blue sky.
There was only the sound of the happy open throttle.
After a while on the winding asphalt road following a river we decided to explore off road. We were riding dirt bikes after all.
“Follow me, Hardball,” Mark said over the growling bike and then sped up a thin, dusty track into the hill.
Apparently with my long hair I looked like an Aussie TV character called Hardball.
Respectful man-love.
I twisted the rubber-handle throttle and kicked at the gears and was soon surrounded by fat jungle leaves.
Mark was ahead somewhere. The forest slipped by, a tangle of thin sapling trunks and bamboo.
The sunlight splattered in amoebic patterns. Thin shards of shivelight spat through the shifting canopy as I sped past the blur.
God’s disco ball.
The trail went down a steep hill and I slowed over the jutting rocks and then twisted the throttle again up the next incline. And on we went up and down, following the track.
Mark stopped at forks and we conferred in grunts before one of us made a random selection and sped onwards.
It was clear our mission had shifted from heading in a general direction to embracing a wilful desire to get perpetually lost.
I tackled one steep hill and miscalculated and ran out of momentum and the wheels got bogged down in a muddy crevice. I idled in neutral as I wrestled with the beast. I dismounted and put the bike in first, slowly easing the clutch until the bike bucked and shat mud and wormed free.
Mark called down from way up the hill in the jungle.
“You alright?”
“Got stuck! Gotta go down.”
Without the breeze of movement, sweat began to gush out of my pores. I turned the engine off and half strangled, half lifted the front wheel, turning the bike into the thick weeds at the side of the track to turn it sharply and point down the hill. I got on and coasted gently down.
Mark backtracked to join me at the bottom of the hill and we lit cigarettes in the silence.
“Hope we’ve got enough gas before the next village,” I said.
“I’m more worried about the water.”
True, we hadn’t thought this out. We took swigs from small canteens. The water was hot and immediately gushed out of my pits and forehead.
“Not sure I can take this hill.”
“Just get a good run at it. Full throttle, Hardball.”
Mark backed up his bike down the trail, pushing backwards with his legs. He kick-started it and then twisted the throttle in a rapid one, two, three crescendo of whining RPMs. His back wheel spat dirt and he took the trail on the dry left side.
I went back further and up the last rise a bit to get a better run at it. I twisted my wrist quickly and got into second then third and swooped up on the left side with a rollercoaster rush and then kicked it back to second, injecting more anger into the climb.
Fear of embarrassment was greater than fear of the speed of the bucking bike. Next thing I know I’m up the hill and Mark sees me coming and off he goes and the ride is back on.
We go like that some more until we come to a clearing where baffled farmers can’t believe their eyes. I didn’t need to speak Thai. Their expressions said, “What the fuck are you doing here?”
We stopped and gestured and spoke, “Which way to main road?”
One of the lithe men spoke English, “you lost.”
It wasn’t a question.
We killed the ignition to the bikes. The group gathered around and soon they were offering us water and noodles in tin bowls and we were glad to eat. The men looked at the bikes and nodded approval. Later the sinewy youth told us to “follow electric wires” to get to Fang.
We travelled on and arrived at a dusty wide opening that was a village with wooden houses with bamboo-thatched rooves.
An old man waved at us to go slow and be calm by patting the hot air.
We gestured at the road ahead and asked “Fang?”
He nodded and grinned and pointed yes, yes and he was glad to see us go.
Noisy hippies. Shangri La ain’t around here.
The road got wider and the jungle shrank away until we were riding past open fields and there were the electric wires running alongside. Except every time we came to a new village it seemed that we had to turn in a different direction.
We passed through many villages, heading west, east, north, south. At one village we stopped and bought caffeine drinks and there was thankfully a gas station.
The pumps were large clear bottles above metal drums with plastic tubes that fed our tanks.
On we went to Mai Suai where there was nothing and then we were on wide, quarry-like roads cut into the mountains.
At the top of one of the mountains there were two Thai policemen. One fat frog of a cop and another thin youth.
The fat Jabba gestured for us to stop. The mountain top was rocky and there were hardly any plants or trees left after the construction.
The fat cop was curious and jovial. After he patted us down he asked,
“Do you have condoms? I buy.”
I said sure and dug through my pack to pull out the clear plastic zip-lock bag filled with aging, stale condoms, Imodium packets and hydration salts.
I offered up the bag.
“No problem, I give to you. I have lubricated, with spermicide or ultra-thin Japanese Moods.”
“Me no like Thai condom,” says the cop, his fat fingers rifling through the bag. “Too small. Me big bamboo like you. Same-same.”
Then he points to his fellow cop. “Not like him.”
And we all had a raucous laugh except for the thin youth, although he shyly took one condom from the bag.
Then away we rode. The hot afternoon retreated as our bikes growled menacing Ohms on the gravel dirt roads cut into the edge of the mountains.
The meditation seemed eternal until the sun was a swollen golden blob and then it was dark and we descended the treacherous winding roads, inches away from steep drops to oblivion.
It was a tense end to a 10-hour day of riding and I was glad when we rolled into the flat town.
We rode in like conquistadores.
That night, over whisky, Mark chuckled:
“Passing around his condoms like a packet of chips!”
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