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- VOL. 12.9
Tatonka’s Globetrotter Cuisine
Thanks to Spanish colonists, Latin American towns were built on the grid system. This facilitates postal deliveries, makes it easier for friends, bearded revolutionaries and secret police alike to drop by on a whim to see how you are. But, more importantly, the grid system also greatly encourages simpler navigation for dimwitted gringo cretinos like me. After several months in Argentina's Mendoza and Santiago de Chile, I got around swimmingly. I don't, in Phuket Town. After five years.
Maybe all this sounds like I'm trying to blame conditions or people for my lack of orientation skills. No way. The last time I was lost in darkest Phuket was the other night, and it wasn't in a warren of back alleys or in a steaming jungle. I got lost in a hotel.
I was privileged to have been invited by a major hotel to review several of its restaurants over a few days. Bags were packed, good-byes were said and silly promises made. Then I drove north for 45 minutes, unpacked, phoned home to undo the silly promises and settled into divesting the mini-bar of its mini contents.
At 7pm prompt, I arrived at the first of my appointed restaurants; at 7.15 the F&B manager turned up to guide me through the menu and to lend me his pen, once it was established that I'd forgotten mine. At 10pm on the dot I left and passed reception, smiling lopsidedly at the silk-clad girls booking guests in.
At 10.30 I finally realized the dream of my day. Slipping into the swimming pool I lay, belly up, my back illuminated by the swimming pool lights, contemplating the twinkling stars up in the black, glorious Andaman skies. Then I turned over in a barrel roll and dived deep into the warm velvet water, all the time hoping that some nubile and impossibly rich single woman occupying a poolside room would notice my aqua-agility and throw down a handwritten yet waterproof note. The note would have a terse and direct invitation on it. Something like: "You. In the pool. Join me in Room 3694. Now."
It didn't happen.
What did happen was a nightmare. I collected my stuff, squelched back to the empty cavernous corridor, looked right, looked left and all of a sudden realized that I didn't have a clue as to where my room was. I gazed at my numberless electronic room key for a sign. Nothing.
So I started walking. Yes, I know that Scott F. Sturgeon, in his famous "Handbook on Hotel Survival" clearly states: "When lost in hotel corridors, DO NOT PANIC AND START WALKING." But it didn't wash at the time. I panicked and walked. And then some. After 15 minutes I didn't have a clue as to where the pool was, let alone my room.
Gathering my wits, I remembered Scott F. Sturgeon's second piece of advice: " Keep calm. Approach a security guard for advice." I spotted a lone security guard and explained my plight in faltering Thai.
He asked me where I was from and we both agreed that Liverpool was a cool place and that the football team was riding the crest of a wave and that they stood a good chance of toppling Manchester United's five-year domination of the football league, and then I said no, I wouldn't be going to Bangkok to see them play as the whole darn thing was too expensive and that hey, yes! I'd been up to the north of Thailand and had seen his town and no, I wasn't contemplating moving up there just yet. Then he showed me where the swimming pool was. Then we said goodnight.
Standing alone, confused and wanting my mother badly, I decided that if I was ever going to find my room I'd better head for reception first.
Easier said than done. This particular hotel is absolutely H-U-G-E. Every time I followed a sign to reception it seemed to lead down some sort of back corridor that led me to the very place that, not five minutes before, I'd contemplated garroting Scott F. Sturgeon - if I ever met the smug bastard. By this time it was well after midnight and my mouth felt as dry as a camel's front left hoof.
Outside, the night was spectacular. Fireflies buzzed by, a perfume rose from the red-tipped dorkham bushes. Over by the swimming pool, empty deck chairs silently beckoned me for the night. Oh, no. In Southeast Asia one does not spend the night in a deck chair. One's face would be lost and rule numero uno in Asia is that one's face cannot and must not be lost.
Some hope. Sitting with my legs dangling in the pool, I realized that the situation was thus: I'd lose face if I eventually found reception - at the end of the day, all I was wearing were 67-baht Tesco swimming trunks and a stupid lost look; I'd lose face if I asked the security guard the way again; and I'd lose face by kipping in the deck chair by the swimming pool.
I started out yet again. After an eternity I spotted a sign on a stairwell that said something like, "Oi! You!! Reception is Definitely and Screamingly Obviously THIS WAY, You Certified Dingbat!!!"
I padded up to the desk, leaving small but obvious perspiration-laden footprints on the marble floor and said: "I'm Mr. Wilkinson and I'm lost."
"Yes, we know. This is for you," said a leary silk-clad cynic. She handed me a previously prepared note with my room number and a rudimentary map scribbled on it.
Well. It didn't take much to realize that they'd known about my plight all the time, and had in all likelihood watched me on closed circuit TV, probably convulsed in sidesplitting gales of laughter at my midnight meanderings. Maybe they'd laid bets on my finding my room. It was all a bit remote from the non-existent waterproof note at the pool. But it worked. I found my way back.
In 1982, on the roof of the southwestern hemisphere, I fell into an Andean snowdrift. Gloveless in a sub-zero Antarctic wind, 7,000 feet up, I struggled out of an eight-foot ditch using my bare hands as shovels. It was the single most painful experience I've ever had in my entire life. Yet the sense of relief I felt almost 20 years ago, stumbling back into my mountain hut to run cold water over my frozen and rigid hands, pales in comparison to the utter elation I felt once Room 2769's door pneumatically sighed shut behind me the other night.
With my back against the door, I slid to the floor, making a mental note to leave a trail of breadcrumbs, torn rags and as many pages of Scott F. Sturgeon's book as I possibly could along the hotel's corridors if I ever left the room again. Then I crawled into bed, flicking the on button to The National Geographic Channel.
On the TV was a programme about brave 19th-century explorers on Southeast Asian islands.
I turned over, sighed and pressed the off button.