The first hint that D. might be different from all the other taxi drivers in Bangkok comes when we tell him our names:
"Jason."
"Ah, like the guy in the movies who kills kids," he says, putting his hand in front of his face first to suggest an ice-hockey mask, then to cover his Thai smile. "Where are you from?"
"America," says Summer.
"I love America! I lived there. Seven years. North Carolina."
This is really surprising. We have met few Thais who have ever left their own country, let alone been to America.
D. is tall for a Thai and lanky, with the look of a man who has partied hard. He says he used to be much bigger, and I wonder if an American diet in his early twenties added a few inches to his height as well as his waist.
In 1983 his mother, fearing that her fun-loving son was going to end up in a Bangkok jail, persuaded a relative in North Carolina to bring D. over for a visit. This man had an American wife (Betty, nice and pretty, he looked after her house, she looked after his visa, then divorced him and married her longtime American boyfriend while he paid it forward and married a nice Chinese girl who needed a greencard), and tried to fix D. up too.
D.’s most memorable date was with a two-hundred pound shut-in who had a fetish for illegal immigrants: she already had a daughter by a Mexican apple-picker. Her snores kept D. awake all night, sweating and drinking Budweiser. After that he gave up on the marriage route.
For seven years D. washed dishes, cooked, or packed bags in a convenience store. Most nights his best friend Tony, an amputee with a specially adapted pick-up truck, would collect him from work so that they could go "Par-tay!"
And then one day he missed his mother so much that he went home to Bangkok. On the way out, lacking the right papers, he was banned from travelling to America for life; and for D. it is was as if he’d been locked out of paradise.
A few days after meeting D., Summer and I decide to travel overland to Cambodia. Flying is wonderful when you’re in a hurry and the destination is more important than the journey, but for us neither of these things is true.
It’s about 600km by road from Bangkok to the Cambodian border. For $20 we could ride there in a comfortable air-conditioned minibus, in the company of other foreigners. But for $75 D. offers to drive us, and that sounds like a lot more fun. And so we hail a cab to Cambodia.
D. doesn’t disappoint. He shares Thai gossip and stories about his life and driving a taxi in Bangkok.
Often he listens to his foreign passengers’ conversations, not letting on that he can speak English. One night a tourist spent the whole ride laughing about how all Thai women are for sale. D. was furious at the insult, partly because it contained a grain of truth. Not only is the sex industry vast, but many Thai girls like to date white tourists casually, for gifts, clothes, and trips to expensive bars and restaurants. D. says that things are worse in Cambodia, where he rode his motorbike for a vacation six years ago. A woman offered to sell him her daughter - permanently - for 5,000 baht ($125).
The Thai landscape does disappoint, however. Bangkok sprawls along beside us for twenty kilomters, all apartment blocks and malls and gas stations. Beyond the city as we head south-east the land is featureless and the highway is brand new, marked by bright clean bilingual road-signs in international standard shades of blue and green. The only indication that we are in Thailand, apart from the Thai script, is that every few miles we see a new Buddhist temple under construction, all built to the same plan and paid for by local subscription.
At a roadside cafe we stop for lunch. $1.75 buys us two bowls of noodle soup, piled high with shrimp and pork and vegetables and cooked in front of us, plus two bottles of drinking water. Summer asks D. what music he likes. He spits out his tuna sandwich and starts singing Van Halen’s Jump. He also loves Dolly Parton and Aerosmith, and speaks fondly of the Richard Marx concert he saw in the States.
Our guidebooks - two of them - say that the border closes at 5 pm. The first sign that we may fall behind schedule is that D. keeps pulling into gas stations, asking the same question, and driving off without refuelling. Apparently his cab like many in Bangkok runs on liquified natural gas - 10 baht per liter, versus 27 for regular gas. But outside Bangkok LNG is hard to find, and after 300 km, D.’s tank is almost empty. A couple of the places that we are sent to are closed on Sundays. Finally D. gets directions to an open garage in the little town of Chanthaburi and fills up.
Unfortunately D. neglected to get directions out of the little town of Chanthaburi and soon we’re lost. It’s a sleepy place - narrow streets, stores closed, dogs sprawled asleep in the afternoon heat, few people out. We find a delivery man (on a motorbike with a trailer) and he and D. and a woman who passes by spend fifteen minutes discussing how to get back to the main road. I can’t understand Thai, but I suspect it’s all "Ah, this is a bad place to start" and "You can’t get there from here." The delivery man kindly offers to give us a motorcycle escort out of town; we chug along behind him for half a mile, make one right turn, and the highway entrance is directly in front of us. "Good luck," he says in English, as if sceptical about our ability to make it from here.
With 100 kilometers to go and ninety minutes left to get to the border, we hit a police checkpoint just outside Trat. Problem: it’s the 8th of January and D.’s insurance disc is eight days out of date. That’s a $20 fine, but they won’t accept payment at the checkpoint; instead we have to drive to a district office and pay it there. Now.
In the bathroom of the drab municipal building, I kill time studying the supply chain that a column of ants has set up between a hole in one wall and the vomit-encrusted sink at the opposite end of the room.
D. storms out with the look of righteous indignation that traffic offenses inspire the world over. He says "1 hour, 100 kilometers. That means 100 kilometers per hour," and drives off in silence.
In the last 60 kilometers the scenery changes dramatically. To our left the Cardamom mountains rear up, a continuous wall of rock 700 feet high, covered in virgin forest, that has long separated Thailand from Cambodia. To our right the sea: the Gulf of Thailand. On my map the purple line that marks the Cambodian border is wider than this strip of land. The Thais cling to it like the inhabitants of Skull Island cling to the rocks outside their stockade, an image that comes to mind because our ultimate destination tonight is the village of Ko Kong.
Like the stockade, the Cardamom wall today seems designed to keep something in. Every couple of miles there’s a police roadblock, where D.’s cab will be checked on the way back for smuggled Cambodians.
He promised 100 km/h, but I am not sure what speeds D. does reach in this last stage of our journey, because his speedometer doesn’t work. He loses control only once - coming out of a hairpin bend on the narrow coastal road he over-corrects, and the car fishtails and stops on the wrong side of the road. Fortunately there’s no other traffic.
It seems pointless. It’s 5:30, and we’ll surely have to drive back 50 km to the nearest town to spend the night. We pull into the border crossing, and jump out.
Happy New Year. The border is now open until 8 pm.
I pay D. and tip him enough to go some way towards paying his fine. Children tug at our arms, begging for money and candy. On the other side of the border fence we see the motorcycle taxi touts gathering; they’ll surround us soon, fighting for our $2 fare to Ko Kong. And then I will try and fail to persuade the particularly well-dressed Cambodian officials to accept the true cost of our visas, without their 40% personal markup.
But for now we’re here. Thanks D.