Garlic, Chicken Blood and Galangal

I was leery of the idea of riding down to work. It would be a long ride and the bike was too small, my knees were very bent; I knew that riding all the way down to the university wouldn't be comfortable. The ride was also too complex. I had to go over several medians and cross too many one-way streets. I wasn’t Dennis the Menace to be taking such a series of shortcuts every day to work. I was afraid the first time I’d try it, I’d probably get lost and end up out on some desolate (but loud and hot) highway, miles from Anywhere, unsure of what to do next. So even as I enjoyed more facile mobility with my small, clunky bike, I kept taking the tuktuk to work, thinking ‘some day I’ll try out the bike, some day when the weather looks nice and I’m in no hurry.’ Being an impatient sort of person, this day came about a week later.

I wake up on Friday, something of a half-day for me, planning to try the bike ride out to the university. Before leaving, I study the harried blue line which darts around the map on my computer screen like it had been drawn by a child with bad hand-eye coordination on an Etch-a-Sketch. ‘Left at the highway, right at the cemetery, third right after that,’ I mutter the directions to myself knowing they don’t matter, that the roads marked on Google Maps could be dirt driveways or paved lanes. Since the last time the satellites passed over, new roads could’ve been blazed into the jungle and old ones could been swallowed up by vines and more lucrative rubber trees. The directions I'm trying to memorize are relative. I just have to go out and see what's there.

I leave around 7, before the traffic has gotten too bad, when the sun is still down on the eastern horizon and the west is still blue with the retreating darkness. Traffic is light and the town is still quiet. A few motorbikes putt along the main roads.

To the left of the building, there’s a small bog full of enough garbage to seem inimical to the health of those who live nearby. The ground is soggy with food and plastic waste. Water pools with an oily sheen like a cataract over an eye. The plastic barrels that serve as garbage cans are knocked over; no one bothers to aright them and handfuls of garbage drip down their sides. I hold my breath, even in the morning, this place smells terrible: the bottom of a diner dumpster sitting in the hot sun, all the bags ripped and dripping their otherwise innocuous contents. Coffee grounds, egg shells, orange juice, half-eaten toast, untouched home fries, bacon fat leaching from the bags into a slurry of scraped plates and chief’s specials to curdle in the sun. Even the road alongside the place is tacky with the juices and distillations of last night’s meal. Birds sing over the putrid swamp, belying the horror.

Thais wake up early, but just before 7, most people still haven’t left home yet. I pass houses where children bathe naked in small tubs, standing up to do that excited dance that wet and naked children do all over the world and then sitting back down into the warm water before the breeze can raise goosebumps on their skin. People are finishing the heavy breakfasts that precede physical labor. The people in these houses will be going to the coconut plantations nearby or building sites scattered around the city. The air smells like fish and fried garlic.

The next street is under construction. I think it’s still a new street, one that, fortunately, many people haven’t discovered yet. The concrete is being built up and each time I ride over it, there’s another layer of tar or sand spread out over the solid established layer. On either side, there are coconut palms, big shaggy things that look like they’ve managed to retain some of the rain’s moisture even on the hottest days. Above them, the sky is like something taken from the oven to cool in the morning air. There is a vault of blue, orange and white overhead; one of the only places in town to see so much sky at once, the rest patched over with buildings or plantation trees.

Under this unfinished road, a stream flows, I look down its length and it is the perfect southeast Asia scene, hanging palms, rising sun, drying fishing nets and languid boats studying their reflections on the still water.

On Amphur Street, the motorbikes I heard earlier catch up to me and speed along the road, slowing down to weave around the dogs who have come out, waving their tails like flags of surrender in the street as they trot quickly to trash cans and little dumps where they can be seen later gorging on a pile of guts with vacant looks of triumph and greed, almost choking on bloody, lunging bites.

I cross the highway. A trench has been dug into the median to discourage motorbikes from u-turning or crossing traffic, but its ultimately ineffective, just an obstacle to get around. I pick up my bike and step over the trench dug hastily with a backhoe, exposing all the rocks in the otherwise benign looking soil. In rainy weather, it becomes a stream filled with large red and blue crabs.

A cemetery across the street is a morning field studded with gravestones the shape of crescent moons laid down on their side or people with their arms out, holding their arms out in an empty embrace. Vertical Mandarin characters on the graves. Either the cemetery is Chinese or Chinese is some kind of liturgical language here. Latin on the tombstones of the English-speaking world, Arabic on the narrow headstones of Bosnia in green looping strokes and here, dense Mandarin characters—death always relegated to another culture, another language, the one held in common being too profane to commend or eulogize. You don’t talk to death in the same language you use to talk to your children.

A road leads off from the cemetery, wide at first, it turns right and narrows, a car width and a half. The road is gray concrete and looks to have been laid out in slabs, like sidewalk. A fragile road one which is being undercut but rains and erosion and, in a few years, will collapse into a pit and will have to be replaced, but for now, it is new, snaking through the jungle in curves like a footpath going around trees. Bullfrogs, vipers, centipedes and huge black imperial scorpions are imprinted on this jungle tableau like leaves ironed between wax paper in a classroom, their death coming too quickly and unexpectedly; they didn’t even have time to be surprised by it and every bit of life was rung out against those gray concrete slabs, the remaining animal more like a drawing than anything once alive and moving.

Along the road, the rubber trees stand in phalanx, each holding a bucket, prepared for some magical, large-scale clean-up. The rows of trees growing dimmer as their foliage covers the sky, the leafed alleys between them looking like great places to lie down and sleep the way all heavily shaded places do. The road is the only place that lets in any light, a ribbon shining on the concrete snaking through the plantations which can probably been seen for miles, like a celestial path under the waxy umbra of the trees.

The road wasn’t built for the heavy traffic rumbling over it. Once an area of rubber plantations with a road of dirt and mud probably only passable during the dry season, the government used the area for sylvan research and now, in the middle of the plantations, there are a few obscure government buildings which bring in enough traffic, enough professional traffic to justify paved roads. In Surat Thani, there is a dearth of paved roads and construction on every corner to widen existing roads or create new ones. This construction creates more traffic and motorists given to seeking out new roads. To bypass the construction, they take roads like the one through the rubber trees, despite it not being built for such heavy traffic. The other roads through the jungle do not have the same filigree of flattened snakes and centipedes; usually these animals are out at night on roads with little to no nocturnal traffic.

The road forks at a two-laned road with a painted center line. I turn right toward the university. Before the turn, there is a shack which looks owned by a litter of puppies. During the day, I have never seen any humans of mature dogs on its premises, but these puppies climbing over the broken chairs and sitting in the decrepit doorway are ever-present. They are such a common sight, it is hard not to give them a familiar nod as I ride by. The only sign of human habitation is the ever changing arrangement of open windows and doors on the house. Sometimes the door is cracked open or a window flung wide, never the same window and door.

Around the corner from this shack is another which is the haunt of a group of children, some in long shirts, some in pants, most barefoot. Like the puppies they are alone, but their confidence of movement betrays the grandmother just inside the door, listening to their commotion unconsciously for trouble. But the children move much like the puppies, tumbling off tables, moving one-by-one in great lopping movements around the haven of the house; stirring up the dust which would otherwise settle over these places forever.

The next quarter mile of the road is entirely undeveloped, just grass and trees tied together with vines, impenetrable and soaked at the roots by untrammeled mud. Probably a place where no human being has ever walked, at least not so long as it’s existed in this permutation. It’s easy to imagine the branches of the trees farther back festooned with large, cat-eyed snakes.

The neighborhood of Khun Tale, pronounced koon ta le and meaning sea, is just past this thicket and its metal noodle stalls must frequently be upset by snakes, particularly in the morning when the sun warms the metal faster than the green vines and wet grass. There are some anonymous buildings behind the noodle stalls, apartments maybe, but in the morning, traffic is swerving all over the place and the stalls are placed no more then 50 feet apart, the width of a few plastic tables and chairs from which diners slurp their breakfasts flavored with garlic, chicken blood or galangal. These smells are all in the air, bruising the damp morning, stagnating—the weak breeze is like a rivulet which encounters a pile of twigs, mud, detritus and dams. The smells in the air are like the turbid water held behind such a dam.

Khun Tale is a large neighborhood only serviced by two or three roads from downtown. Around the two large universities here, the traffic clots and runs adding another degree of smell and movement. University students, in white and black with little gold chains and Rama IX memorial pins with the Thai numeral for the number nine: ๙. They sit sidesaddle on motorbikes, holding bags, folders, impassive, thinking of their classes or not thinking of their classes. Khun Tale rolls downhill into the campus. The buildings are spaced apart, the grass is trimmed, the air is still.

Before 8 o’clock, the place is still empty. A few cleaning ladies clear the common areas of the toads and millipedes which have come in from the haze of jungle surrounding this groomed patch of academia. Already, the light is dimming with hulking gray clouds, like frigates in this harbor of treeless sky.