Another voice

Travellers' tales

Auberon Waugh

Iflew into freezing London on Tuesday .1 from a visit to Burma and God's own Kingdom of Thailand — the temperature in both Rangoon and Bangkok was well into the nineties — to hear rumours that the Spectator had been bought by an Australian syndicate and John Pilger was to be the exciting new editor. Obviously, one would need to adjust one's style of presentation a little. I wracked my mind and searched my travel notes for any evidence of poverty, or exploitation, or unjustifiable privilege I had collected on my travels. I could find none. It is true that the people in God's own Socialist Republic of Burma are poorer than they are in Thailand, but they all seemed happy and well fed.

Of course there are various truths to be told. Nothing much has happened in Bur- ma since the Japanese were driven out 40 years ago. No new buildings have gone up, but several tons of gold leaf have been added to the temples and pagodas, and several of the fans in Rangoon's Strand Hotel have broken.

Burma is undoubtedly a sort of paradise, even though I must confess I was also happy to find myself back again among the more familiar comforts of God's Own Kingdom, with its humorous, attractive and intelligent people, its extraordinary ability to cater for every appetite and gratify every sense while providing new and unimagined delights at every turn. But, as I say, there are various truths to be told. I will be describing my journey in two publications — the Daily Mail and Taller. I doubt whether the two accounts will have much in common, although both will describe the same journey and neither, I hope, will depart much from the truth. In one I shall describe the principal sights — Central Burma's ruined city of Pagan, Rangoon's Shwedagon Pagoda and Bangkok's Grand Palace must surely, all three, qualify among the seven surviving wonders of the free world. In the other I shall write more personally about the joys and hazards of travel in this enchanted region of the world — about the piety of the people, the prettiness of the children, the cockroach in my basin at the Strand Hotel and the Shan tribesman being violently sick in the bar of my hotel in Taunggyi, just three miles from Burma's impenetrable, rebel-held interior.

In neither, I fancy, will I discuss the philosophical conundrum presented by these alternative versions of heaven, living side by side under the Lord Buddha's impenetrable smile: socialist Burma, where practically no aspect of the modern age has been allowed to penetrate and

where infant mortality still claims one in 20; Thailand, where freedom and the natural hospitality of the people have corrupted many of the young people with all the horrors of American pop culture and several more beside (although I still maintain that the Thai two-girl body mas- sage is one of the great sensual experiences — if not the greatest sensual experience which the modern world has to offer). Thailand has one of the highest murder rates in the world outside New York. Burma has the world's highest rate for deaths from snake-bite.

There are many truths to be told about both these enchanting countries. Only a fool of a travel writer — or a charlatan of a journalist — would claim to have told the whole truth. The best he can do is to offer whichever of his own impressions will most interest his readers, throw in a little second-hand information and let them draw their own conclusions. Inevitably, one chooses one's material according to one's judgment of the readership. Practi- cally nobody except myself, I imagine, would be interested in the idea of a sort of Benthamite conversion table between spir- itual and sensual delights (one glimpse of the sublime in Mandalay equals two Singa- pore slings in Raffles Bar), so I keep these reflections to myself. It is only when one studies other people's judgment of what their readership wants that one begins to doubt one's own sanity.

By coincidence, a travel article on Thai- land appeared in Saturday's Times written by someone called Tony Partington. I know nothing about this Partington, whether he is young or old, hails from Barnsley or Sydney, Australia. He does not appear to belong to the Soviet-inspired lobby of South-East Asian 'experts' about which I wrote some time ago, although he may have been influenced by them in advancing Pat Pong — two small streets of girlie-bars and massage parlours, much less offensive than their equivalents in Soho or Amsterdam — as the central feature of Bangkok. Presumably, Partington was in Bangkok at the same time as I was, although our paths did not cross. These are the impressions which he thinks will most interest readers of the Times, written in the deathless modern prose for which that newspaper is becoming famous:

Stepping off the Hong Kong plane in Bang- kok, the Third World greets you with a smack of hot wet air and a tug on the sleeve. Everyone in Thailand has something to sell — a wooden elephant, a paper snake or a relative. The only guys not on the make are the orange-robed monks, and they don't

have to be. Joe Public earns merit marks by providing them with meals.

No time to marvel at Mr Partington's grammar, which would appear to have the whole Third World stepping off a Hong Kong plane to deliver smacks and tugs to any journalist waiting on the tarmac. He must whisk us away on a lightning tour of Bangkok's so-called attractions:

The Golden Buddha, constructed as his name suggests from five and a half tons of the glistering stuff, seemed a little too pleased with himself for my taste.

So much for this miraculous, 800-year- old monument to Buddhist piety, discov- ered in 1953 when some 18th-century stucco encasing the statue fell away. At any period in the history of civilisation five and a half tons of pure gold represented a staggering investment in the Benthamite conversion table, but Partington, who de- scribes himself as a 'boiled-in-the-bag atheist' found this 10-foot-high effigy 'too pleased with himself for my taste'.

In the Grand Palace is the biggest Buddha of all: the Emerald Buddha, confusingly made from jade . . . four times a year the faithful come to give him a change of clothes.

I imagine that Partington had no time to visit the Grand Palace. If he had, he might have noticed that the Emerald Buddha, made of jasper, its clothes changed three times a year by the King of Thailand, is one of the smallest Buddhas imaginable, being ony two feet high, as compared to Bang- kok's Reclining Buddha, which is 50 feet high by 150 feet long:

On the soles of the Reclining Buddha's feet are 108 rings supposed to represent the sins of the world. After visiting Patpong Road, Bangkok's red light district, I demand a recount. From the moment Whitey sets foot in the area, he is followed by a garrulous gaggle of pimps. Bangkok by day is only marginally more inviting.

Whitey Partington obviously did not like Thailand at all: 'Double the time they tell you it takes to reach the airport. Better still, avoid the place like the plague.'

He concludes his treatise with a discus- sion of the 'spirit houses' to be seen all over Thailand: 'The penalty for coming off the road and knocking down that little lot doesn't bear thinking about. You'd prob- ably be in Thailand for the rest of your natural.'

Whitey, presumably, belongs to the Ian Botham or new Brit school of modern traveller. Botham it was who, having been sent to Pakistan to demonstrate modern Britain's amazing ineptitude at cricket, described it as 'the sort of country you would send your mother-in-law to'. These are the people whom the editor of the Times hopes to attract to his miserably boring newspaper. If Whitey Partington can persuade them all to stay in Barnsley (with their mothers-in-law) for the rest of their naturals he will have performed a signal service to the human race.