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April 2010

april
Written by Editor
Friday, 08 October 2010 16:35

april
Written by Editor
Friday, 08 October 2010 16:33

april

Written by Editor

Friday, 08 October 2010 16:30

BANGKOK TRADER

Volume 4, Issue No. 3
FEBRUARY 2010

Managing Director: Alan S. Verstein
Tel. 081 761 9302
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Creative Director: Reid Nixon
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Executive Assistant to the Managing Director: Wiparat Jaila
Tel. 02 655 0941
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Published by Siam Gazette Co., Ltd.
Publisher: Kaewta Verstein
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Siam Gazette Main Office
Ground Floor, Vanissa Bldg, 29 Soi Chidlom
Bangkok 10330, Thailand
Tel. 02 655 0940
Fax 02 655 0941

Cover photo of Thai amulets provided by Dave Stamboulis.
To contact Dave, email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

april

Written by Editor

Friday, 08 October 2010 16:28

A Bangkoker Down

and Out in Africa
by Dave Stamboulis

Editor’s Note: if you’re a long-time Bangkok Trader reader, you’ve read Dave’s interesting travel experiences in Bangkok and throughout Thailand, and you’ve also seen his fine photography that frequently grace our pages and covers (this month’s cover photo is currently up for an international award!). Dave sent this story to me a year ago from Madagascar, and he returns to Africa once again this month, so I thought it’d be nice timing if I shared his previous African tale. Read on, there’s a Thai connection to it all. It really is pretty phenomenal… I was thinking last night that I have been traveling for 25 years now and have never really ever had more than a scratch. Yeah, I had that attempted robbery in Georgia, and of course have had a few hundred bouts of diarrhea, probably 20-30 back spasms, and not more than the usual bouts of flu… so I guess you could say that I travel under a pretty amazing star, and I guess I was due. I had just finished a brilliant day hiking in the Isalo National Park, this beautiful desert landscape full of natural swimming holes and the usual array of Madagascar’s indigenous plants, insects, and playful lemurs. My guide and I had just finished a circuit of various trails and were coming back into the nearby village. Coming down the road just outside of the park, I slipped on an uneven patch of road, and as I went down, I heard this crack in my ankle. Ten minutes later, my ankle was the size of a tennis ball, and I couldn’t walk. In retrospect, you could say I was lucky. I was with my mandatory guide, and we had just gotten off trail… and there happened to be a group of foreign botanists who had just finished their afternoon research and who had a vehicle about ten

Last Updated on Friday, 08 October 2010 16:40

april

Written by Editor

Friday, 08 October 2010 16:25

minutes away. One of them happened to have a very well-stocked med kit and a son who was a doctor, so she was quick to put an ACE bandage on me and stuff me with ibuprofen. I was also about 15 minutes away from my hotel, where I was able to get the ankle elevated and on ice for the afternoon. At any rate, it appears that I’ve torn the exterior ligaments in my left ankle, and recovery doesn’t look like it is coming anytime soon.

I spent the next few days in pain and unable to walk, miserable as all hell, and thinking that I was getting very old, very fast. The village I was in was pretty small and with few amenities, not to mention that the cook in the hotel I was in had to be the worst cook in the entire country. My world consisted of trying to lean on a stick to get into the shower, eating painkillers, and getting bedsores from laying in yet another of Madagascar’s most uncomfortable plank beds with a bit of foam acting as a mattress for 20 hours a day.

Yet, out of all this, I started to fall in love with this country. It is a phenomenally poor place. It is interesting how we gage “poor.” I mean, I have seen poverty, tremendous poverty, all over the world. India certainly has its millions. Ethiopia, at least on paper, is supposed to be in the Top-5 in every category, and I have been there. Yet I guess there is something to me about 70% or more of a population not wearing shoes that strikes me as particularly poor. The average Malagasy earns around 1000 baht, or $30 in a month. In my book, that is poor, especially when one sees the average costs of transport, petrol, or even eating a meal out on the street.

There are so many villages here with so many people just sitting in the dust by the side of the road, living seemingly with nothing in the most wretched of hovels… but it is most interesting when one spends time in one of these small villages and starts to see how people manage.

First of all, almost everyone has land, so they can grow rice or cassava to eat. And of course, no Malagasy ever seems to be in a hurry to do anything or have anything happen. The transportation, “taxi brousse,” is god-awful. You are told to show up at 8am for a trip that is supposed to take 4 hours (on a good road), and the overloaded minivan is finally stuffed to the gills at 2pm after 6 hours of waiting in the most vile dust- and poverty-filled “parking lots,” and then another hour is spent getting petrol, visiting various relatives of the drivers, and putting another 20 kilos of various debris onto the roof. Nobody in the taxi brousse smells as if they have bathed in the past week, but then I am sitting sweating alongside of them, so I suppose it all evens out.

At any rate, I happened to have my injury in a hotel run by a woman who speaks English, a fortunate change after two weeks of me attempting butchered French. She has a friend, Ali, a nearby hotel owner, who it turned out had studied in Singapore several years ago and has been to Thailand many times. Ali, it turns out, owns (through her father) a sapphire mine in nearby Ilakaka, where I was told to never set foot in (packed with shady characters all armed to the teeth) unless I wanted to be robbed and shot within seconds. Well, it turns out that Ilakaka is actually run these days by two groups of foreigners, Sri Lankan Muslims and Thais! Ali told me there was even a Thai restaurant! Ali and my hotelier, Delina, spent a lot of time coming to my room every day, making sure I had food, water, even getting the local medicine man to give me an herbal massage, and basically being my lifeline in trying to remain remotely human.

After a few days, Ali told me that I needed to get out of bed, and she decided to cheer me up and take me to Ilakaka to visit the mines. Ilakaka is a pretty interesting place out on the grasslands in the absolute middle of nowhere. Like a Wild- West shanty town, where people spend their days digging hours in the hopes of finding a stone or two. Evidently, several years ago, Ilakaka had nightclubs and casinos, but these days, it’s pretty toned down. A gram of sapphire is taken from the miners for about $1000, then sold to the Sri Lankans and Thais for about $5000, and they, in turn, polish the stones and sell them back home for six times this price. The local miners get paid 3000 ariary, or $1.50 a day (food included!) for their labor, while armed guards stand over them to try to stop them from swallowing or hiding any stones they might uncover.

That evening, we visited the Thai restaurant on the edge of town. If you can imagine a Thai restaurant in the middle of the Badlands in South Dakota or in the middle of the Mongolian Steppe, this would be about how this place was. No name, no menu. Just a wooden collection of shacks on the side of the road. What everyone found hysterical was that the Malagasy waitress could speak some Thai, and she refused to speak Malagasy with my friends while I had this surreal conversation with her about what was available in Thai. I will never forget this pitch-black woman telling me, “Som tam mee ka,” with a deadpan expression and little accent.

The food turned out to be quite good. The owner is a Thai from Chantaburi (where else? all the Thais in Ilakaka are from Chantaburi). He told me he had been living in Ilakaka for five years, hadn’t been back to Thailand, and had a Malagasy wife and a baby. Perhaps the most amusing part of it all was when the bill arrived – it was higher than in the finest French restaurant in Antananarivo (the capital)! Talk about being taken to the cleaners. I had a real laugh when I realized that, of all my travels in Madagascar, the only person who had ripped me off was a Thai.

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