Around the World in 50 Years (39 page)

Most guys stagger out in 30 to 50 minutes. But not our Andrew. Since he had never been in a place like this, and had never before paid for sexual servicing, he did not know the worldwide unwritten rule of gentlemanly bordello behavior: You quit after you come. Orgasm and out. You scored; game over.

Andrew naïvely assumed that, since he had been quoted a price for two hours, he was entitled to continue to conjugate and copulate for the full 120 minutes, and so he did, with the result that I was kept waiting far longer than I ever anticipated until the loving couple came downstairs, and the lady had high hopes of packing her bags and moving to join our boy in Jersey City.

The future of these emporiums, which have long thrived in parts of Southeast Asia, is problematic. As the region prospered, affluent local patrons gravitated toward long-term relationships with concubines and mistresses. Meanwhile, sexual tourism has come under fire. And reformers contend that these pleasure palaces encourage sexual servitude and the exploitation of women, and demean them as little more than sex objects. The defenders of the system argue that these establishments offer the girls, who typically come from poor rural areas where they faced hard and hopeless lives of grinding poverty, the rare opportunity to earn good money in a safe environment and climb into the middle class, sometimes even marrying their clients. The proponents further maintain that a woman should be free to do what she wants with her body, including selling it or renting it out for the evening, as long as no compulsion or abuse is involved. I was torn twixt the yin and yang of the debate. I was a devout, equal-opportunity-believing, ERA-supporting, card-carrying liberal mysteriously trapped in the body and mind-set of a horndog.

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On none of my previous trips to Thailand had I visited the infamous Bridge on the River Kwai that WW II Japanese prison commanders had forced Allied POWs to build as part of the Death Railway. To rectify this omission, Dennis, Andrew, and I took off at dawn from Bangkok in a rented car for the long drive west to Kanchanaburi.

I should have stayed with my memory of the movie, because the reality was disappointing.

In my recollection, the gorge was so wide and deep it required a towering timber trestle. But the film, I later learned, had been shot at Kitulgala in Sri Lanka. Kanchanaburi had no yawning gorge, and the unimpressive bridge was no more than 30 feet above the muddy, sluggish water, and was further robbed of any grandeur by a bright, blue-and-yellow, toy-like tourist train that crossed it every 15 minutes. Moreover, the original wooden bridge built by the captured servicemen had been destroyed by Allied bombs. What the tourist brochures were calling the “Bridge on the River Kwai” was a steel span the Japanese had captured in Java and shipped to Kanchanaburi, believing it more likely to survive bombing.

Notwithstanding this substitution, the adjacent area should have been treated as hallowed ground, sanctified by the 60,000 British and Dutch POWs and other slave laborers who died building the railroad that provided the Japanese with a vital supply line for their troops in Burma, who were trying to fight their way to India and bisect the British Empire. Instead, the bridge environs had become a blighted honky-tonk mishmash of shops selling junk jewelry, smuggled rubies, fake rubies, handbags, T-shirts, junk food, and tacky souvenirs. It might be tolerable if the tourist traps were set apart from the bridge and the exhibitions about it, yet they were contiguous and inextricably entwined. There's the combined “Art Gallery and War Museum,” the conflated “Death Railroad Museum and Miss Thailand Directory,” and, high above them all, the “Best View of Bridge and Toilet.” It's a travesty. Watch the movie, but don't waste time visiting the scene of the crime.

The Bridge on the River Kwai in today's Thailand is not the tall wooden trestle built in 1942 with the blood of thousands of Allied POWs, but a steel span the Japanese captured elsewhere and installed at Kanchanaburi in 1944. The Death Railway has been replaced by a diminutive, brightly painted tourist train.

The fallen have fared a bit better. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission created and maintains a peaceful cemetery away from the tourist area, “in honoured remembrance of the fortitude and sacrifice of that valiant company who perished while building the railway from Thailand to Burma during their long captivity.”

The headstones are small, white, and uniform, rising only an inch above the verdant carpet of grass, aligned in precise rows too long for me to see their end, with solitary trees providing some shade and emphasis, all surrounded by a mile-long, neatly manicured hedge and bordered by flowering plants, all immaculately maintained by a dozen groundskeepers. The plaque near the gate read: “I will make you a name and a praise among all people of the earth when I turn back your captivity before your eyes, saith the Lord.”

The inscriptions on the headstones were sentimental, loving, and sorrowfully proud, like those I'd seen 40 years before at Sollum, relics of an era when those qualities informed and guided the Greatest Generation:

For King and Country.

To live in the hearts of those we love is not to die.

He lay down his life that others might live free.

They gave their lives and all that living means, my sons.

Heading to Brunei, we ran into massive monsoon thunderclouds and turbulence in the path of our A319 to the south, Sinabung volcano spewing ashes from Indonesia on our west, and a killer typhoon to our east that became the strongest to hit Korea in 15 years. We arrived in Brunei, shaken but safe, for several days of planned boredom and decompression in Asia's strictest Muslim country during the final week of Ramadan.

The Brunei Times,
which I read in flight, carried an “Invitation for Expression of Interest” from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, for a position for which I was ideally qualified—“Consultancy on the research and handling of low morale activities in Brunei Darussalam.” The scope of work included: “1. Definition of Morale. 2. Database of Low Morale Activities. 3. National Plan for Low Morale Activities Reduction.”

Some might scoff, but this task offered a worthy challenge in a country where the heat and humidity are oppressive 24/7/365, alcohol is prohibited, pornography is forbidden, gambling is outlawed, amorous couples face fines and jail for hugging and kissing in public, and adulterous lovers can get hard prison time. You can't even hope to play footsie with your friends' wives because, at most large dinners, the men eat at one table while the women and children eat at another. No wonder morale was low!

The main forms of entertainment and excitement in boring Brunei were wandering through the scrubby jungle that covers 75 percent of the small country, chilling to the AC at the extravagant indoor malls, visiting the free amusement park on the north coast, or paying tribute at the grandiose Regalia Museum, which immortalizes the outfits, swords, and medals worn by His Majesty Paduka Seri Baginda Sultan Haji Hasanai Bolkiah Mv'izzaddin Waddaulah, Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan Negara Brunei Darussalam since he became the 29th sultan in 1968. At some 600 years and counting, his is one of the world's oldest surviving monarchies, and the only absolute monarchy in Asia, so absolute it tolerates no democracy, no opposition, and almost no political activity.

Although some superficial similarity can be perceived between Brunei and the oil-rich Gulf States in terms of size, wealth, population, religion, form of governance, reliance on guest workers, and high expenditures on opulent buildings, Brunei pales in comparison. It lacks the drive, the business virtuosity, the brilliant entrepreneurship, the world-class architecture, the cosmopolitan attitude, and the throbbing vitality of Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

What you get instead is a tranquil, law-abiding Familyland boasting one of the world's highest GDPs per person, thanks to its vast oil resources. It's a land where your health care is first-rate and free, your cities are spotless, your housing and other needs are subsidized, you pay no income tax, and you receive a guaranteed pension. The cooking, cleaning, and dirty jobs are done by Indian and Filipino guest workers, and your education—which stresses Malay culture, Islam, and monarchy—is free as far as you can go. Monarchical though it was, we saw no dissidents, heard no hotheaded revolutionaries, encountered no Arab Spring–type upheavals.

Yet even the Sultan was bored with the easy life in Brunei and allegedly indulged in a harem of 40 ever-changing gorgeous women from various nations, each paid about $10,000 a week, all of whom, to shield the Sultan from criticism, were imported by his younger brother, the playboy Prince Jefri. Several women who claimed to have been lured into the harem had sued the Sultan for making them sex slaves, but the courts had granted him sovereign immunity.

Prince Jefri owned 80 flashy autos and a luxurious yacht called
Tits,
that was accompanied by two yacht tenders, named
Nipple 1
and
Nipple 2
. If I'd taken the morale job, I would have consulted Jefri on how to liven things up. And add some class.

Dennis and Andrew headed home. It had been refreshing to have male company for once on these trips, and particularly men like Dennis, with his irrepressible Irish good humor, sanguine outlook, and impressive repertoire of droll stories, and fearless Andrew, ready for any adventure, except strange food. On the other hand, it had been a chore to constantly look for bars where Dennis could get Schweppes Tonic Water and Bombay Gin—impossible in bone-dry Brunei—while searching for McDonald's and Pizza Huts to satisfy Andrew, and resisting his repeated requests to return to the club in Patpong, where the young superstud was likely now as welcome as a card counter in Vegas. I flew back to my hub in Thailand for a busy night of resupply and repacking before I sallied forth on the road to Mandalay.

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Tip to the CIA:
If you need to extract information from a captured terrorist, don't waste your time, and risk international opprobrium, with waterboarding. Just take him for a visit to the Burmese countryside during their hideously hot and humid summers and seat him in one of the unimaginably uncomfortable two-wheeled horse carts they use for carrying tourists over their bumpy dirt trails, and he'll soon confess to anything. They are hell on wheels. If he passes out from the ordeal, you can instantly jolt him awake him with just one cup of tar-thick Burmese tea (which I had to dilute 15:1 to bring it to the brink of drinkability). And when he's confessed and has no further value, you can finish him off with a dish of Burmese hot-and-spicy fried finger eels.

I'd delayed visiting Burma for more than 40 years to be politically correct, hoping that my boycott would bankrupt its tyrannical regime, which went by the marvelously sinister name of SLORC (the State Law and Order Restoration Council). With the passing decades, I realized that my position was more reflexive than reflective and, after giving it some serious study, concluded that my tourist dollars would not be propping up the despots, who made their millions by controlling the lucrative trade in rubies, minerals, timber, gas, and oil. I realized instead that tourism was one of the only vocations from which ordinary Burmese could make a few dollars to avoid the extreme poverty that afflicted the nation, which had the lowest per capita income (adjusted for purchasing power parity) of any country in Asia. Others might argue that if curbing tourism deprived the Burmese people of their dollars, they might grow so discontented that they'd rise up and overthrow the dictatorship, but that was unlikely with this docile populace. In the election of 1990, the people had given 80 percent of their votes to the opposition, yet when this was ignored and invalidated by the regime, the country remained tranquil.

Whether from political correctness or the economic recession, few travelers or their dollars were present in September 2010. On my flight that landed at the tourist mecca of Bagan, I was the sole sightseer to disembark. In my Bagan hotel I was one of only four guests, served by a staff of 30 to 40. Yet Bagan is the heart of Burmese tourism, an ancient religious city where a thousand thousand-year-old temples, monasteries, and dome-shaped stupas stud the region—the ones left after Kublai Khan demolished the other 12,000 in 1268. It's a stupa-endous place, deserving far more visitors.

Another reason for the absence of vacationers was that the regime (renamed SPDC in 1997) had scheduled elections for the following month, motivating travelers to stay away for fear that the voting might lead to violence. I didn't think it would. I assumed the process would be peaceful, and that the SPDC would count the ballots as it pleased—it had barred all international monitors—and render it a futile exercise, as it had done before, without active dissent. To curtail foreign activists and provocateurs in the run-up to the election, the despots had ceased granting visas-on-arrival at the international airport. You had to apply at the Myanmar Embassy in your own country, which thwarted spontaneous wayfarers.