One for the Road: Sold down the river…

I’ve never looked it up, but I’ve always assumed that the word green, in the naive or gullible sense, gets its meaning from the way fruits change colour as they ripen. The greener the strawberry, the less mature it is.

Well, in Thailand, apparently, a milky complexion in a traveller indicates immaturity in rather the same way that a greenish hue does in a fruit – a fact which, no doubt, explains why we were less than 24 hours in Bangkok before falling victim to our first scam.

It was Saturday morning and the two pasty paddies had just wolfed down their first bite of sub-equatorial breakfast – which, by the way, cost us about 250 Thai Bahts (roughly £6).

(I know; Culmore Diner wouldn’t have a look-in.)

As we stepped onto the street, my callow faith in mankind yet uncompromised, Niamh, who has been appointed the expedition’s chief navigator, stood on the street and consulted her trusted companion, Google Maps, in an effort to find a gym.

(While still in colder climes, we had decided it would be unwise to approach the next few months with the same dissolute, hedonistic mentality with which one usually tackles a summer holiday. Thus, concessions to health and fitness had been agreed before departure).

Anyway, as she dutifully acquitted the responsibilities of her role, I, the expedition’s most eminent looker-abouter, did the same.

“Right,” she announced, her finger rising like the arrow of a compass, “I think that if we just go…”

But at almost exactly the same moment, I clocked a rather rotund man approaching, his broad smile revealing a mouthful of tobacco-stained teeth.

“Hello, my friend,” he beamed, as I grinned back with automatic, reciprocal enthusiasm.

“Well, how’s a goin’?” I replied, still not having quite gotten into the groove of speaking to people from outside Omagh.

He asked where we were from, how long we had been in Bangkok and, crucially, how long were we staying?

I obligingly answered all his questions, in earnest.

“Ahh, good, good. And what you do now?” he asked.

“Trying to find a gym,” I said, miming a couple of arm curls.

“Oh, no. Gym later, but go to floating markets now,” he said.

At this, Niamh lifted her head from the maps. She has been chatting about the floating markets – which, as it says on the tin, is a market that bobs along a small network of canals – from the day we decided we were heading away.

“Think we will do them tomorrow,” she said, flashing me a suspicious, instructive look.

“No, no, no,” he waved his hands, but still smiling amiably. “Floating markets only Saturday and finish one o’clock,” he said.

A conversation then commenced in hushed Hiberno-English, as we tried to decide what to do.

This, however, did not deter your man from extemporising on the beauty of the markets and informing us that he was a teacher at a school located only a few hundred feet from where we were standing,

By the time we’d decided what we were going to do, he had a tuk tuk (three-wheeled taxi) flagged down and a price agreed with the driver.

“40 bhats each, he take you there,” he said, to which we politely explained that we were going to stick to our original plan.

As we walked away, Niamh said there was something fishy about him, to which I contended that he was simply a gregarious teacher who likes helping tourists get the most out of his beloved city.

“And why would a teacher be standing beside the school he works at, on a Saturday?” she asked incisively. “Do you ever stand about John Street at the weekend?” she asked, quickly realising she had overextended her argument.

This reignited an ongoing conversation about trust versus suspicion and credulity versus paranoia, during which once again took up the defence of taking nobody at their word and I again advocated for the door-opening, horizon-expanding virtues of a more face-value approach to travelling.

Mid debate, an older man walked by and said, “Oh, you new to Thailand; can tell because your skin still very white.”

He was well-dressed, had a friendly face and asked the same questions as the last guy, but also enquired about what Ireland was like, what we worked as and whether we would have jobs when we got back home.

“You know, 20 per-cent of Thai college graduates don’t have job when they finish university,” he said despondently. “Very very sad.”

We joined in his commiserations of the Thai job market, listened as he described the many wonders of his homeland, and told him a bit about spuds.

Then, next thing we knew, we were in the back of a tuk tuk and on our way to the floating markets, where we would pay about three times more than what it should have cost if we organised it ourselves.

“See, this is where trust gets ye,” I said, shaking my head, as we floated dreamily down the broad, beautiful Chao Phraya River.