Memories of Thailand from 1986
I asked my friend Heather to regale me with a few of her thoughts about Thailand. She visited there back in 1986 and went around the country for about 6 months. Following are the transcripts of a couple of discussions we had about some of her excursions. ---
Heather - “My first trip through Patpong[1] was with these two Swedish truck drivers. They didn’t speak very much English, but the Thai women thought they were amazing. The men were 6’, blonde and built, and had these ice-blue eyes. They would be mobbed everywhere they went.
So, they came to me, and asked if I would travel with them. One of them introduced himself as ‘Bo’ and that introduction with his name was about the only English he knew.
They were so sweet, so the three of us squished into a tuk-tuk, though they were both hanging out the sides, and we went to Patpong. The area was just bars and brothels then, and it was very busy. To get two blocks it took you like five minutes.
Thai girls were coming to the tuk-tuk and trying to pull them out, and the men were hanging on to me and yelling at the Thai women that I was their ‘girlfriend’. The men were wrapped around me, and I could barely breathe. But they were really cute and sweet and were embarrassed by all the attention. Bo would turn flaming red and I thought his ears would start on fire.
That’s what I remember from my trip to Patpong - two great big Swedish truck drivers, and me.”
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While eating dinner at a Thai restaurant, The White Elephant, here in Calgary, I asked Heather to tell me about watching the filming of Good Morning, Vietnam!
“I was in Penang getting my visa renewed, and there were a whole bunch of Americans outside the office waiting. They had apparently pissed off the guys at Penang and had been told to wait.
The process for getting your visa renewed was that you’d go into this room, hand them your passport. So, there were like five officials sitting at the table. You hand your passport to the first guy, and he has this great big book, it’s probably about 6” deep – he opens up this big book and he looks up your passport number and looks at you, and then he puts a big stamp in it that covers a whole page, closes your passport and the big book and slides it down to the next guy. And so, you have to do this with all five guys.
I finish up and go outside, and the American guys asked how I got approved so quickly. My response was that I was polite to them, and I also stuck a $20 in it, and they just went ‘stamp, stamp, stamp’, and ‘Welcome to Thailand’. The Americans had been waiting for three days! So, I got their passports and went in and got them approved.
They gave me a ride to Bangkok, and they just happened to be staying in the same area. They asked, ‘do you want to come and watch us, we’re in this movie?’ They didn’t even know what it was called. I’m like well, ‘Who’s in it?’ and they’re like ‘Robin Williams’, and I’m like ‘oh cool’.
Film poster for Good Morning, Vietnam!
So, there was a canal, and there was a bridge over the canal, and there were all these restaurants in a square. They told me that ‘when the filming starts you can sit in one of these restaurants and watch, but when you go in, you got to be there, you can’t come and go – you’re there for the afternoon.’ So, I watched them do this scene where the kid comes in and he has a backpack with a little peace sign on it, that actually has a bomb in it. So, I watched that whole thing being filmed, but I never did see Robin Williams. That was really cool!
Then when I watched the movie, I’m like ‘Oh I know that guy, and oh I know that guy’ but it was such a great movie. Seriously, I didn’t realize that was the movie until they were talking about Robin Williams’ new movie, and it was called Good Morning, Vietnam! I thought, oh that was probably the movie I saw. Those guys (extras) got paid $100 a day.”
Debb – Wow, back then? What year was that?
Heather – It would have been ‘86.
Debb – So, what was your favourite place in Thailand?
Heather – Oh, that’s like picking your favourite child. My favourite beach place would have been Koh Phi Phi.[2]
Debb – Why?
Heather – It was quite remote, and it wasn’t as touristy. I guess it is now. But it was just two volcanoes with a stretch of beach in it. It was like five bucks for a hut on the beach a night, they had sunset beach and sunrise beach so you could go from one beach to the other. It was like a 2-minute walk across the sand between those two volcanoes. It was just really, really laid back, calm…a little bit more Thailand, then the touristy areas.
Debb - So where did you visit in Thailand?
Heather – Oh everywhere, from north of Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, the Golden Triangle and all the way down to where Thailand and Cambodia meet in the Gulf (of Thailand). Then over to Kanchanaburi where the Bridge over the River Kwai is, all the way down to Krabi and down in the south before you get into Malaysia. I was everywhere.
I used to have this book, it was called ‘the Shoestring budget to Southeast Asia’ or something like that, it was this yellow backpacker’s bible, and I’d drop it on its binding, and wherever it opened that’s where I would go. I went to some really obscure places let me tell you. I thought, oh god how am I going to get there!
And then I went back to Thailand a couple of years later and met up with a friend from Australia and we went to Nepal and Bhutan – that was really interesting. That was a trip. When you got there, you had to pay, like a visa, but it had to be in American money.
Debb – Yes, a lot of places are like that, even Egypt, you have to pay for your visa in American dollars.
Heather – Where do you get American money in Bhutan? And they wouldn’t even take their own currency. Because I was English speaking, they’re like ‘you’re American you should have..’ and I told them I’m Canadian – we have our own currency. They don’t even think we have our own currency! So that was quite amazing.
I think the most beautiful island I was on was actually off the coast of Malaysia, it’s where they filmed the movie The South Pacific in the ‘40s. There was a guest house on that island called ‘The Magic Mushroom Guest House’ and there were people there staying on this island, that didn’t even know what month it was, they were just totally baked. Ha ha!
Debb – (laughing) So back to Thailand, you spent a long time there right, how many months?
Heather - I was there probably a total of about six or seven months over the course of three visits.
Debb – So what drew you to Thailand?
Heather – It wasn’t Canada. 🍁 It wasn’t snowing.❄️ (more laughter from the both of us) It was cheap, the food was amazing, the people were amazing! I kinda used Bangkok as my jumping off point and so I’d go there…and then you only got a six-week visa, so you had to leave the country to renew your visa, so I’d go to different places.
Debb – So during those visits did you spend a lot of time in the south, or in the north of Thailand?
Heather – Both, but the food was totally different in the south than it was in the north. The south is mostly seafood, and the north was more wild boar, pork and chicken. The south was all prawns and fish. On the islands and even on the beaches, the restaurants would have a big cement slab out front filled with ice, with the catch of the day, 🎣so you would just pick which fish you wanted and tell them how to bake it, and it would just show up on your plate, wrapped in foil. It was amazing. Like a whole red snapper cooked in peanut sauce with all the accoutrements and everything was only five bucks. That was a lot of money back then, ‘cause I think that it was also about five bucks for accommodation a night.
I’m hesitant to go back because it was such an amazing time.
Debb - Yes, that’s always a challenge when you go back to places. Well, you see how they change, right. (A short break while the food arrives, and we start eating.)
Koh Phi Phi to the west of Krabi, and Koh Pha Ngan in the Gulf of Thailand, north of Koh Samui.
Heather – There is a small island north of Koh Samui called Koh Pha Ngan – it used to be a coconut plantation, but then the Grandma died and the kids took it over and turned it into a party island and just destroyed it. Before, it didn’t even have a road on the island, you had to take a boat all the way around.
Debb – Yes, that’s sad. Yeah, that’s the thing about going back to places, you see the good and the bad. I’ve been going to Egypt for twenty years, so I’ve seen how much it has changed over the past twenty years.
Heather – Like that’s how I went back to Hong Kong, to the apartment I used to live in, it’s now a 120 storey Hyatt. It used to be a 12-storey walk-up. The harbour where all the junks and boat-people used to live, is totally gone and now full of luxury yachts. And in Singapore, whole city blocks have just been imploded – bulldozed flat – and just waiting for something to be built there.
Well Heather, thanks for sharing your thoughts with us about Thailand and Southeast Asia. I’m sure you have plenty more tales to share so I will be hitting you up for those again soon.
