The side trip took longer than we thought it would. We had figured the conversion of miles into kilometers wrong. It took us two days instead of one to reach Nakonsithamsat (Thailand) and along the way we noticed that there were an exceptional number of buses whizzing passed us. But we hadn’t been in Thailand long enough to adjust to the new country, totally. There had been elephants working timber along the highway that amazed us. I know our excitement surprised people when we talked to them about it.
Our side trip would not have been worth it had Nakonsithamasat not been the site of the biggest fair in Southern Thailand. It would mean that all of the hotels were full except for a few that had jacked their prices up so high that we couldn’t begin to afford them. We found floor space in the home of an USSIS office employee for two nights and one night in a schoolroom.
Such a fair…the biggest we’d seen in Asia, with three Ferris wheels, lots of booths and lots of gimmicky things to buy…wasn’t that different from small fairs in the States, but had parts to it that you wouldn’t have seen, and especially in the Muslim world. The contrast between Malaysia and Thailand, I think, couldn’t have been better illustrated than at this fair and particularly by this one section that was open to the general public. It took me back to the Midway at The State Fair of Texas of my youth and the girlie show that so fascinated me (see The Good Ol’ Boys, published on this blog). It was only a short distance between Malaysia, where the female body would never have been exposed in public, and the naked women on a small stage at the fair in Thailand, and unlike in Texas, nothing was left to the imagination.
Though the cheap hotels where we stayed in both countries thrived on prostitution, there was this difference between the two countries. (Prostitution was so pervasive that the sound of splashing water throughout the night became an indelible memory of our trip.) At a certain point, at the fair in this one section, commercial voyeurism, where everyone could see it, moved to commercial exploitation, where men for a few bhat could come up on stage and grope the women. The show inside the tent must’ve been even more participatory and revealing. Or perhaps it was all a come-on. I don’t know. I can’t say. I had Peg with me. And now my memory of that, of what was going on there, was more connected with the Midway in Texas and 42nd Street in New York (before it was cleaned up) than south of there (Malaysia, Singapore, or Indonesia). There didn’t seem to be common ground. Borders seemed to differentiate countries in that way, or a country’s religion did.
Randy Ford
