Tower at the Red Fort
Not that I spent all the hours in hedonistic pursuits, though. On my first morning in Lahore, I hired a guide and driver from local Punjab Tourist Development Company to squire me about the town. They offered two different tours. The morning tour took me to the old Lahore Fort, the Lahore Museum, and several buildings commissioned by Shah Jehan, the man who also had the Taj Mahal built in memory of his wife. The afternoon tour, which I took two days later, went to the huge Shalimar gardens and the old town, where my guide led me through hot and humid narrow streets filled with people, horses, motorscooters and noise.
Badshahi Mosque in Lahore
Both were interesting, but I admit that the first tour entertained me much more than the second. The fort and the palaces were both architecturally and historically significant. The first for the beautiful use of red sandstone and white marble, and the latter because several successive rulers, first the Moghuls, then the Sikhs, and finally the British put their stamp on them. The palaces and tombs of Shah Jehan were not as opulent as the Taj Mahal, or so I’m told, not ever having seen it in person. But they were nevertheless remarkable, with scads of white marble, inlaid with ornate filigrees made from precious stones. One chamber inside the fort, called the Hall of Mirrors, has a domed ceiling inset with hundreds of tiny mirrors, which served to amplify the candles used to illuminate the room at night.
I also spent a good deal of time at the pool at my hotel, and in the dining room, of course. And every day I took a walk through the streets of Lahore, setting out to get a copy of the International Herald Tribune. The heat and humidity were still staggering, so these excursions were of necessity short. But I each time I took a different route to the bookstore on the Mall, and I got to see a small slice of life in Lahore, with its beggars and businessmen mingling on the crowded sidewalks.
The hotel was pretty empty, this being the low season, so each morning at breakfast, and later at dinner, I had the attention of almost the entire dining room staff. We developed a friendly relationship, chatting with each other in between my trips to the buffet, and when I left after four days they all made a point of stopping by as I paid the final bill to wish me a pleasant journey.
I was almost sorry to leave. Almost. But I had four days and two stops left on my trip, and frankly, I just wanted to get the damn adventure over with, and get back home to Vilma.
I left Lahore late on an 11:50 p.m. flight to Bangkok. The plane was packed, so I couldn’t lie down and get some sleep, and arrived in Bangkok groggy and worn out. In no mood to go hotel hunting at seven in the morning, I defaulted to the Amani Airport Hotel across the enclosed catwalk from the airport terminal.
By the time I had checked in and showered, it was late in the morning, so I read up on Bangkok in preparation for my tour of town the next day, and then spent the rest of the day eating, swimming and working out in the hotel gym. That night, I treated myself to a few gin and tonics in the hotel bar. My days of sobriety in Pakistan were behind me.
The next day I took the cheap airport shuttle downtown to see the sights. Bangkok didn’t have a tourist center which provided tours, so I was on my own. Having really only one day, I chose a few of the more important sights, the Wat Pho temple complex, the Grand Palace, and the National Museum.
Wat Pho is located in the center of Bangkok, and is the biggest temple complex in Thailand. Its many treasures included the largest reclining Buddha in the world (150 feet long and 50 feet high), and scores of small temples ornately decorated with ceramic and gold. I intended to hire a guide to show me around, but they were all having lunch when I arrived, and so I just wandered from temple to temple, taking pictures and reading about their details in my guide book.
Wat Pho
When I had seen enough, I left the walled compound and strolled over to the Grand Palace next door. It was the former residence of the king, but now houses the national treasures and is used mainly for ceremonial occasions. It was overrun with tourists streaming off of buses, so I decided to limit my stay there to a quick turn around the grounds, and skipped the treasure chamber. Still, the unique architecture of the Thai palaces was interesting enough to merit my visit.
But the heat and humidity were already getting to me again. It wasn’t quite as bad as Lahore, but I was soaked with sweat, and wanted to sit down somewhere in an air-conditioned building and cool off. The National Museum seemed just the ticket, but when I made my way over there, it was closed.
Momentarily stumped, I figured I might find cooler air down by the Chao Phraya River, which bisects Bangkok, and was only a couple of blocks away. So I struck off to the west, pushing my way through crowded streets in the sweltering heat. Soon my way was blocked by a shantytown of low wooden warehouses, from which emanated a powerful smell. The fish market, I correctly guessed, and stepped inside to check it out.
The warehouses are built on stilts over the river, and as I walked along between stalls of drying, salted, and fresh (or less fresh) fish, the wooden floor boards sagged and creaked. Many openings gave glimpses of the muddy water below.
But the stench was overpowering, and I eventually had to escape back outside. At length I found a way to reach the river at one of the many ferry crossings, but the muddy, polluted water gave off no cooling breeze, and so I turned back into the narrow streets of the old town.
It was about 2:30 when I decided I’d had enough, and started to look for a taxi to get me out of there. I wanted to do a little shopping for gifts, and my guidebook told me that there were several stores that sold traditional Thai handicrafts near the more expensive tourist hotels in another district of the city.
It didn’t take long to flag down a taxi, and I told the driver to take me to the Grand Hyatt Erewan, the finest hotel in town. There, I hoped to get a cool drink at the bar before launching my shopping expedition. But the Grand Hyatt was serving high tea in the lobby bar, so I left there on foot and wandered up to the shopping district.
I did manage to find a few things to take home with me. But my shopping mood, which even in the best of times is a timid and sickly thing, expired in the heat. I needed a drink. I needed two drinks.
I knew the Amani Airport Hotel had a sister hotel downtown, and that they ran an hourly shuttle bus between the two. I checked my map and found the downtown Amani to be just a couple of blocks away. So I made my way over there, signed up for the five o’clock shuttle, and then settled into the air conditioned lobby bar to read the paper and consume a couple of cool beverages. I hadn’t seen much of Bangkok, but I only had a day, and I wasn’t going to beat myself up about it.
On the shuttle bus ride back to the airport, I sat in front of a chatty woman from southern California. She proceeded to tell me that she was in Bangkok to try to get in touch with a rich Indian doctor, with whom she had engaged in some sort of relationship back in the States—the nature of which I never really got a fix on—and that he wasn’t returning her calls. It turned out that he was married, with children, and she had flown all the way from LA to reach some sort of “closure” with him. “Wouldn’t it have been a lot cheaper just to walk away? I asked. “Oh no” she protested, “I just couldn’t do that.”
She went on to explain, in language laced with new age babble, why she just couldn’t do that. But in the end I had difficulty uncovering just what her reasons were, other than the fact that her trust fund allowed her to jet off to Bangkok to track down her rich Indian doctor. I smiled and nodded, and got off the bus as soon as we arrived at the hotel.
The next morning I boarded my Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong, and as is my curse, sat across the aisle from a small Indian girl who screamed at the top of her lungs (and her lungs were large), and kicked whenever someone tried to fasten her seatbelt. We weren’t allowed to take off until the little devil was strapped in, and in the end it took the entire cabin crew holding this tiny girl down before they could get the belt around her waist. One of the cabin attendants even got bit for her efforts, but eventually they succeeded, with no help at all from the girl’s mother. Of course the screaming continued until we had become airborne, but by the time we were over Viet Nam, she ran out of steam and fell asleep. I would have loved to see her in a straight jacket.
The rest of the flight was uneventful, but the landing in Hong Kong was something the likes of which I had never before experienced. The airplane approaches from the west over the ocean and begins its descent. When you reach the outlying islands of the Hong Kong archipelago, you’re already down to about 5000 feet, and details on the ground are clearly discernible. The descent continues fairly steeply, and soon you see the first high-rise apartments to the side of the plane. Looking down, you can see the laundry flapping on the rooftops. You keep going down and down, and the apartment buildings on the hillsides to the side of the airplane begin to appear next to you. Still you descend. Just as you’re certain the pilot has made a serious mistake, the plane banks suddenly to the right, and the descent accelerates rapidly. Now you’re flying right in among the towering buildings, and you can see directly into the nearby apartments. At last the plane flares for landing and you touch down on the runway and brake sharply. The runway juts out into Victoria harbor, and any brake failure at that point would land you in the drink.
It’s a pretty hair raising landing, but soon will be a thing of the past. A huge new airport is being constructed to the west of the harbor, and by 1998 it will be in operation. I suppose I should consider myself lucky to have been one of the last few million to experience the thrill of landing at Kai Tak Airport.
I was curious to see if the Chinese takeover had made entry to Hong Kong any more difficult, but I was through customs and standing at the Hong Kong Hotel Association booth by baggage claim in almost no time at all. I told the lady in the booth that I wanted a harbor view room on the Kowloon side, and that I’d be willing to pay up to HK$2000 (about US$260) a night. Since rooms at the better hotels in Hong Kong started at about US$400 and went up into the stratosphere from there, I figured I was asking for a lot. But she offered me a room at the Harbor Plaza Hotel for US$180, and I figured it was worth checking out.
For that little, I wasn’t expecting much. But when the taxi pulled up to the gleaming glass building right on the waterfront, and I was ushered into the fountained lobby by the bellboy, I was pleasantly surprised. My room on the 15th floor was opulent, with teak walls and marble fixtures in the bathroom. The phones had data ports, which allowed me to painlessly check my e-mail. And when I called housekeeping for a power adapter for my computer, they brought a pot of tea, cookies, and a bucket of ice along with the adapter. This was not too bad, I decided as I lounged around on the down comforter. Not too bad at all.
I scoured the room service menu and was astonished at the prices I found there. US$12 for ice cream, US$10 for a gin and tonic, and US$32 for a club sandwich. Clearly I was going to be living off the VISA card for the duration of this stay.
But the hotel had plenty of free amenities; a pool, gym, free shoe shines, etc., and I was going to take advantage of them all.
For dinner that night I tried the huge buffet in the lobby restaurant. It cost US$60, but for that amount you got your fill of shrimp, oysters, caviar, sushi, various salads and soups, plentiful entrees, both western and oriental, and a desert table that was at least twenty feet long. To say that I got my money’s worth is an understatement. But the budget for this bodacious buffet would probably kept the entire population of a Sudanese refugee camp fed for a year. It was the most excessive display of food I’ve ever seen; truly a weight watcher’s nightmare.
Hong Kong Harbor from Victoria Peak
The next morning I arranged for a tour of the city through the concierge. I and ten or twelve other western tourists were bused around the islands, stopping to see Victoria Peak, Aberdeen Harbor with its floating restaurants and five-minute sampan ride, Repulse Bay, a jewelry factory, and the Stanley Market. Except for the view from Victoria Peak, it was an unmemorable experience, and the jewelry factory and Stanley markets were tourist rip-offs of the first order. But I gathered from my guide book that Hong Kong’s days as a bargain hunter’s paradise are long gone.
In any case, I was relieved to leave the tour in Stanley, and made my way back to the hotel via public bus and ferry across the harbor. I tried for the buffet again that night, but they were booked solid until 8:30, so I retired to the room and ordered room service. Then I packed for the long flight home the next afternoon.
I would be leaving Hong Kong at 1:40 in the afternoon, and because I’d be crossing the International Date Line, I would land in Vancouver at 10:20 in the morning the same day. This served to fool my brain into the notion that the flight would be shorter than it actually was. But they had time to show four movies on the way, which gives you an idea of how long my butt was planted in that seat.
I landed in Vancouver and headed for baggage claim. When all the bags had come out onto the carrousel, mine was nowhere to be seen. The clerk from Cathay Pacific said that my bag probably had ended up in the wrong container, and because the airplane in which I had just landed was continuing on to New York, I figured my bag would probably go with it. I was scheduled to leave for San Francisco on a different plane in one hour.
But the gods were smiling, and they finally located my bag and I made my way to US customs, where my tax dollars were put to work examining every nook, cranny and seam of my bags. No doubt I fit several profiles, what with my long hair and passport stamps from Pakistan and Thailand. But I had a plane to catch, and time was getting short.
In the end they found nothing objectionable among my baggage and I raced over to the United counter to check in. They hadn’t given away my seat, thanks to Vilma confirming my flight while I was still in China, and soon I was back up in the air again, on the final leg of this journey.
Philip was waiting for me at the gate in San Francisco, and he drove me home to Campbell. He even had stocked the refrigerator for me, bless him.
After he left, I got in the shower to wash off the grime. Then I threw my dirty clothes into the washing machine, only to discover that it had given up the ghost sometime during my absence. It was Sunday, and I didn’t think I’d have much luck getting it fixed. But I found someone in the yellow pages who was willing to come to the house and replace what turned out to be a broken water pump. Ah, the good old US of A. Try calling an appliance repairman on a Sunday in Kyrgyzstan and see how far you get!
So with everything cleaner than it had been in five weeks, I retired to bed. Only my body was telling me it was time to get up. And that it was already tomorrow. It was going to take a few days to sort this out.
Nevertheless, the next morning I took off early for the drive back to Ashland. It was both good and strange to be in such familiar surroundings again. I tried listening to the radio on the way up, but was unnerved by the news and chatter coming out of the speakers, so I turned it back off and drove the rest of the way in silence. Autumn was coming to the mountains as I crossed over them into Oregon, but the melancholy I felt with the passing of the summer would soon be replaced with the joy and relief of being home with Vilma again. I’d been gone too long.