The road to nowhere

Some thoughtful person emailed me last week and suggested that I might want to take a look at a recently established, satirical Irish website called ... oh, I forget. Anyway, I unsuspectingly surfed on in, and what did I find? A fairly unflattering picture of moi, a headline proclaiming “Olaf Tyaransen finally banished from Galway,” and a clutch of badly written, highly insulting, and not very witty paragraphs accusing yours truly of being – and I quote – “a talent-free asshole” who “wants to be Hunter S. Thompson.” Ha! Like I really want to be a seven-months-old corpse, and cannon-fodder for Johnny Depp. Talent-free??? Moi?
As with all such begrudging nonsense, the article wasn’t signed so I can only presume it was written by one of those brown-nosing dweeb journos I tend to encounter when out and about in the City of the Tribes. “HOTPRESS is a load of shit!” they always tell me. “How can I get a job there?”
“You can buy me several drinks,” I always reply.
Anyway, there’s no particular point to all of the above. Except...
We were somewhere around Thong Sala, on the edge of town, when the paranoia began to take hold. It was night-time and, for no apparent reason, Mr. Pong had suddenly stopped his car right in the middle of the road. I peered out through the mosquito-flecked windscreen, but couldn’t see anything impeding our continued forward movement. There were no stray dogs, traffic cops, crashed motorbikes or drug-crazed farangs lying in our path. There was just more road. Lots of it.
“Pong, you’ve stopped the car,” I pointed out.
Pong calmly took a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, removed and ignited two of them, and passed one over to me. Then he said, “Yes. Ha, ha!”
I took a deep drag and languorously exhaled a jet of blue-grey smoke, waiting for him to elaborate. He didn’t. He just smoked his cigarette and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. I was a little drunk, and not entirely sure that I wasn’t missing something.
“Why have you stopped the car?” I eventually asked. “I’m going to miss the ferry.”
Pong gave me a funny look. “Light say wed,” he said. “Wait for gween.”
“What the fuck are you on about?” I said. “Light say what? Wait for who?”
He pointed his cigarette out the windscreen in a north-westerly direction. “Light say wed,” he repeated.
I looked out again. To my astonishment (and, for reasons which I’ll explain in a moment, horror), there was a set of traffic lights at the junction. “Those weren’t there yesterday,” I said. Then in a slightly more panicky voice I added, “Were they?”
“No, dey just put dem up,” Pong said, proudly. “Dem de first ever twaffic lights on Ko Pha-Ngan.” He rummaged around in his door’s side pocket and produced a print-out from one of the island’s fledgling news websites. The headline screamed ‘KO PHA NGAN GETS FIRST TRAFFIC LIGHTS!’ They must have considered it a better story than ‘MORE DEATHS AT FULL MOON PARTY’.
We sat smoking in the car, light-bathed in red. It seemed to have intensified somewhat. Pong started humming the Thai national anthem. I, on the other seat, was getting seriously freaked out. And with good reason. This was the third set of virgin traffic lights to spring up in my vicinity in recent years. Everywhere I go, they eventually appear.
I know that sounds strange, but allow me to explain. A few years ago, in a semi-successful attempt to curb an abusive lifestyle and avoid several angry people, I decamped from Dublin and relocated to the wilds of County Leitrim. Shortly before I left there (in another semi-successful attempt to curb an abusive lifestyle and avoid several angry people), the county got its first ever set of traffic lights. It was media silly season so the installation of Leitrim’s lights became a big event, attracting amused coverage on the TV news, making the front page of several national newspapers, and taking up the entire mornings of the likes of Gerry Ryan and Ray Darcy. Just about everybody I knew jokingly mentioned it to me. But no big deal. It just stuck in my mind.
After my surreal sojourn in Lovely Leitrim (as they rightfully call it), I moved down to Galway, where, while looking for accommodation, I stayed briefly in my family home in the then village of Barna. The place was all fields when I was failing to grow up there. Today it’s fast becoming an overpopulated city suburb.
Anyway, one night in Barna, I stepped out of Donnelly’s Pub and immediately banged my head against a sturdy metal pole. Reeling back, I looked up and saw an orange light mockingly winking at me. I had just painfully discovered that, while I had been sitting conducting important business in the pub, Barna had been getting its first ever set of traffic lights right outside the door. I may be wrong, but my recollection is that it made the front page of the Galway Advertiser.
Now, two years and seven thousand miles away, it had just happened again in Thong Sala. Seriously, what are the odds? I move to three totally separate locations, all of which soon get brand new, first ever traffic lights. So new that all three are considered worthy of media attention. How many times in your life have you read a newspaper article about traffic lights being erected? Exactly! To my mind, that’s not normal planetary behaviour. It’s all just a little too off-kilter to be deemed insignificant. One of the better Bond villains – I think it was Goldfinger – had a fairly straightforward method of deducing if somebody was out to get you. He said, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself, “Jesus, he’s really scraping the barrel for writing material here,” but honestly I’m not. I’m a firm believer in all kinds of vague New Age crapulence, and so I suspected that this was a signal of some kind. Well, they’re traffic lights so they’re obviously signals of some kind. But I meant coded signals of a supernatural, or potentially even extraterrestrial, nature. Like in The X-Files. Or the W speeches.
I considered all the evidence for a while, and then I said to Pong, “I know this is going to sound really crazy, but I think I’m being stalked – by traffic lights!”
“Yes,” he nodded. “I tink so, yes.” But that’s normally what he says when he doesn’t understand me. I decided to keep my paranoid thoughts to myself.
We’d finished our cigarettes, and the light was still red. I couldn’t avoid staring at it. It resembled the kind of button that you should only press in the direst of emergencies. Pong started fiddling with the car radio, and the sudden bursts of erratic static seemed to be attacking my brain. The red light continued to glow, surreally. Now it looked like a not too distant dying sun. Time seemed to be dragging. It felt as if we’d been sitting there forever. I found myself fighting off little waves of panic. For some reason a speeded-up snippet from the theme song to a TV road safety commercial from my childhood started playing in my head. “One, look all around you/ Two, don’t hurry, stop and wait/ Three, look straight across and listen /Before you cross the road ... ”
Eventually I couldn’t stand any more. “Look Pong, the light’s broken. We’ve been here for ages! Let’s get the fuck out of here!”
“No – not bwoken!” he snapped, a little annoyed that I was dissing the new pride and joy of Thong Sala. “We wait for gween!”
Gween had Godot tendencies. Sixty-four agonising seconds later, Pong finally relented. (“OK – it no work. Ha, ha!”). We broke the red, escaped the hypnotising spell of the light, and sped off towards the pier. I had red dots in my eyes, and a red-eye boat to catch.
Pong’s car almost made it onto the 10pm ferry. It was just as well it didn’t, as it wasn’t a car ferry. He beeped farewell and quickly sped away before the old woman he’d knocked off the bicycle could get up to take his registration. I was still obsessing about the traffic lights as I carefully staggered across the crude wooden plank bridging the pier and the boat. If they signified ‘enemy action’ then who was the enemy? Those Irish website wankers? It seemed unlikely. They couldn’t even spell. But who? More to the point, why?
I’d been feeling uneasy even before I’d spotted the lights. I was headed to Burma (aka Myanmar) on my monthly visa run. As the whole world knows, Burma’s a pretty fucked-up country. It’s dirt poor, under harsh military rule, and home to a number of bloody wars – both civil and uncivil. It’s a place where bad things happen on a regular basis. Press freedom being what it isn’t in Burma, we don’t get to hear about most of them.
The rational side of me wanted to laugh the whole thing off. But the rational side of me is hopelessly small compared to the irrational part. I couldn’t help thinking that something significant was happening. What if the traffic lights were actually on my side? Maybe the red light had been warning me to STOP? It wasn’t too late to change my destination. All I was going to Burma for was to get a stamp on my passport, allowing me to return and stay another 30 days in Thailand. It would cost me more money, but I could always get a different bus to Malaysia when I arrived on the mainland. Depending on the weather, I had about six or seven hours to think about it.
The night ferry from Ko Pha-Ngan to Surathani is a complete nightmare. The wooden boat’s about three hundred years old, and is entirely lacking in all the basic necessities required for a comfortable late night sea voyage (i.e. a bar and a television). There’s no upper deck to stretch your legs on. There aren’t even any seats. Instead, about one hundred grimy mattresses, flat as doormats from years of use, are lined up against the inner walls in the bowels of the boat. It’s like a prison dormitory. Worse still, they always switch all the lights off. Sneak thieves often work the nightboat, and the guidebooks are full of warnings about keeping your possessions close. Most people sleep with their arms wrapped around their bags.
My forty or so fellow passengers were a mixed bunch of Thais and farangs. A few people had small dogs with them (for some bizarre reason, poodles are incredibly popular with the Thais). After an hour out at sea, the only sounds were the splashing of the waves, the creaking of the timber, the constant thrum of the engine, loud quadrophonic snoring and the occasional bark. There was some spectacular lightning flashing in the sky, eerily lighting the cabin through the portholes every few minutes, but the sea was lullaby calm.
Still, I found myself unable to sleep. I passed the journey thinking about life, love and traffic lights, but came to no real conclusions.
The ferry pulled into Surathani at 5am. Even at that ungodly hour, there were a lot of people around the pier. Traders were setting up stalls for the morning market, and groups of fishermen were preparing to set out for the day. One guy was shouting, “Burma bus! Burma bus!” Nobody was shouting “Malaysia bus!” so I decided to go – and the hell with the traffic lights!
Some other passengers from the boat were already waiting by the bus. An American couple, three young Frenchmen, a Canadian girl and an English guy. All farangs – and all obviously on their visa runs. Everybody was still a little frazzled from the boat, so small-talk was minimal. After a while, our driver came over and opened the doors. We all piled in. Actually, I stood back and clambered in last. I’ve travelled in these buses before and know that the front seats have the most legroom.
At 6am on the dot, we set off our 250km journey to Ranong, the last Thai town before the Burmese border. From Ranong, you have to get a long-tail boat down the Pakchan River and then cross the broad estuary over to the Burmese immigration office at Kaw Thaung (the southernmost point of mainland Burma). The ‘VIP’ minibus wasn’t particularly clean, but at least the air-con worked. There was a great gaping hole where the stereo used to be. Nobody spoke. Some people slept.
I spent the first half of the journey taking careful notes of the traffic lights we went through, but couldn’t establish a cohesive pattern. We stopped at six reds and, it still being early morning, drove cheekily through three. We sped through nine greens. Orange didn’t light even once. Was that significant? I considered raising the issue with my fellow travellers, but then thought better of it. This was between me and the lights.
After about two hours on the road, we pulled in at a service station for a quick coffee break. I popped into the Seven-Eleven to buy a new notebook. All they had were children’s school exercise books. They were black with pictures of traffic lights on the covers. This was getting too weird! I bought one for 10baht.
We arrived into Ranong just after nine, and drove straight to the Thai immigration office. For once, I didn’t have an overstay fine. I got my passport stamped within minutes and with a minimum of fuss. When I left the office I went over to the Gents. An exiting Thai immigration officer held the door open for me with one hand, and then put his other out. “One hundred baht!” he demanded. I looked at him in surprise, and he burst out laughing.
It was the first time I’d ever seen a Thai immigration officer laugh.

It took about twenty-five minutes for everybody to clear immigration. Then it was back into the bus and a short five minute drive down to the water. The Ranong pier was smelly, filthy and overcrowded with impoverished-looking fishermen, fishwives and fishmongers. There were also lots of assorted children, dogs, thugs and drunks. The driver warned us to watch our bags. An unsmiling, middle-aged Thai boatman in ragged jeans and a straw hat was waiting for us. Bags clutched tightly to chests and breasts, we followed him in single file down to his long-tail.
It took a few minutes, and a fair bit of awkward balancing, to get everyone safely on board. Then another few minutes to get out of the scrum of boats crowding the water. The boatman’s kid ran around the edges of the long-tails with the ease and skill of a tightrope walker – pushing one way and pulling another to manoeuvre it out.
We hadn’t gone half a kilometre before the boat was pulling in at the final Thai border checkpoint – a small white stone office on stilts in the water. The kid ran the length of the boat collecting our nervously vouched passports. Then he darted up into the office, emerging a minute later with our exit-stamps stamped. He handed them back to us and the boat pulled off again.
Once we were out in the open estuary, the scenery was truly breathtaking. Fully awake and loosened up now, people began to chat more freely. To my mild horror, I discovered that I was the eldest passenger on board. The average age was mid-twenties. The American couple had just spent a year teaching English in South Korea. Between language schools and private lessons, they’d made a lot of money (around $2000 US per month) and had had a ball in the country. But they’d no plans to go back. “It’s a crazy place and the people are really friendly, but a year’s enough for anyone,” the girl explained.
The Canadian girl was travelling around working on a book of South East Asian photographs, but was currently employed as a dive instructor on Ko Pha Ngan. She’d also just completed a couple of days working as a movie extra on a beach set outside Surathanni.
The English guy was a builder from Lincolnshire who’d taken a year out to see the world. He’d spent six months in Sydney and would be in South East Asia until Christmas. Having the time of his life, he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to handle the small-town mentality when he got home to the UK. Travelling had been a real mind-expander for him. “Who needs drugs?” he shrugged. “Back home, every weekend would be pills and the pub. But since I’ve been out here I’ve not had more than a couple of beers. Just haven’t needed them, you know?”
“I know exactly what you mean,” I lied, nodding sagely.
The Burmese immigration entry point was also built into the water, and there were several other boats pulled up outside. Nobody had any fenders so the boatmen used poles to stop their long-tails bashing off each other. The kid recollected our passports, which we handed to him with the $5 bills tucked inside. He went up into the office to hand them over.
An unarmed Burmese immigration official came out onto the balcony to do a quick headcount, but didn’t say anything to us. With all that I’d heard about Burma, I’d expected to see some military about, but if there were any soldiers watching us, they were well hidden. Still, army or no, I was glad I’d left my ‘FREE AUNG SAN SUU KYI’ t-shirt back in Thailand.
The kid came back with our passports and receipts for the dollars, and the boat set off again. It took another ten minutes to reach the port at Kawthoung. The boat passed a beautiful golden temple on the way. A monk wearing red robes (Thai monks wear orange) was silently contemplating the water.
“HELLO!” “HEY!” “OVER HERE!” “WELCOME!” A group of obvious touts began calling and waving to us as our long-tail approached the Kawthoung pier. There were more of them than of us, and they jostled competitively amongst themselves as they helped pull us off the boat. A young guy in his mid-twenties attached himself to me. “Hello, my friend,” he said, in near perfect English. “Welcome to Kawthoung. You English? American?”
“I’m Irish,” I replied, reluctantly shaking his hand.
“Ah – Irish! Well, you need anything you ask me. Anything you need, I will get for you. You want cigarettes, alcohol, Ketamine, Viagra, women, anything – I will get for you. How long you stay here?”
“About fifteen minutes,” I replied. All we had to do here was get our passports stamped again. He followed me up to the immigration office at the pier entrance, talking all the way. My fellow travellers were all being similarly wooed. I had been warned that these guys sometimes try to plant drugs on you, slipping them into your bag or pocket, and then sneakily pointing you out to whichever crooked customs official they’re in league with. If they pull a bag of illegal pills out of your pocket, you’re essentially fucked. They probably won’t want to lock you up, but they’ll clean you out of money, cameras, watches, jewellery and whatever else you’ve got that’s worth taking. I kept my hands in my pockets as I walked.
In the immigration office (just a small unpainted room with battered desks and filing cabinets), they examined passports and receipts – photocopying both. The Burmese officials were surprisingly friendly and efficient, and I was in and out of there in less than two minutes. My guide was waiting for me. “What you want?” he said. I told him I’d like to buy some cigarettes. Beaming widely, he told me to follow him. We walked across the street towards a nearby shop.
He led me inside and brought me up to the cigarette cabinet. “What you want?” he asked. “These are all Burmese Golden Triangle cigarettes – 100 baht per carton. What brand you like?”
I told him that I normally smoked Benson & Hedges, and he pulled a carton of what looked like B&H from the shelf. “These called Duya – same as Benson & Hedges. Three hundred baht per carton.”
In golden packets, Duya were modelled exactly like B&H (though when I smoked them later they certainly didn’t taste the same). I paid for the cigarettes and then he asked me if I wanted to buy any alcohol. He walked me over to a different shelf, pointing out the various Burmese rums and whiskeys. They all looked like paint thinners.
Realising that I wasn’t going to go for any of the local product, he held up a bottle of what he claimed was English gin. “This from England – very good quality,” he claimed, pointing at the label. The label was an obviously stuck-on photocopy. It read ‘LONDON GIN’. Further examination of the shelf revealed more bottles bearing labels reading ‘IRISH WHISKEY’, ‘LONDON RUM’ and ‘SCOTLAND WHISKEY’. I passed on them all.
We stepped out of the shop and into the sunlight. I started walking back towards the pier, and he still followed me. “You want anything else?” he said. “Valium? Viagra? Ecstasy? Ketamine? Only 150 baht for four pills!”
The drugs would all undoubtedly be fakes, but that still wouldn’t save you from Thai Customs if they were discovered. I told him thanks, but no thanks.
“You want a woman? I get you nice woman! Or man! Anything you want, I get for you!”
I took a look around. Kawthoung definitely had the air of a frontier town. Everybody was watching over. I considered staying the night. All foreigners staying in Burma have to stay in government guesthouses (the citizens are strictly forbidden from discussing politics with westerners) and, hilariously, the main one here is called the Honey Bear Hotel. I could always spend a night and get a long-tail back to Ranong in the morning. It looked like the kind of town where you could get into a lot of trouble. But maybe you could have a lot of fun here too.
I looked down the road, where a bunch of workers were removing something from the back of a lorry. “What are they doing there?” I asked my new Burmese friend.
“Fixing the road,” he explained. “They’re putting in new traffic lights. They’re the first ones in . . .”
I didn’t hear the rest of what he said. I was already jumping back into the boat.