We walked into the pizza shop, took off our huge backpacks, and managed to get ourselves seated at a table. We went over the menu, decided on what we were having, placed our orders and, then, I started scanning the dining room to see what the people of Chiang Rai that ate pizza were like. As I was looking around, I noticed the man pictured to the left. Well, not actually that man. I stole the photo of the interwebs and then doctored it a bit in paint to make it slightly resemble the man that I saw, but I think it is close enough to accurate to paint the correct picture. He was sitting at a table behind Marcus. He had a copy of the Lonely Planet 'India' guidebook unopened on the table in front of him, underneath a plate of half-eaten onion rings. When I say half-eaten what I mean is that each of the individul onion rings was only half-eaten. In other words, he had eaten half of each onion ring on the plate. It gets even odder. Oh, and there were three cups of coffee, not that that is odder but they were also on the table. The man himself was wearing a baseball cap and very, very dark sunglasses. I am not sure if I need to, but I will remind you that we are sitting in a fairly dimly lit pizzeria. I begin to look away and look at some of the less strange clients in the restaurant as he starts tearing the warning label off of a pack of cigarettes. By the time I had scanned the rest of the dining room and got back to looking at the man in the hat and glasses, he had removed the warning label from the cigarette pack and was holding it in between his lips so that the picture of rotted teeth and a cancer-eaten lip was covering his own mouth. While he was doing this he was also scanning the dining room and locking eyes over the top of his glasses with anybody he caught looking at him.
I quickly looked away, but at this point thought it would be a good time to involve Marcus in the freak show that was occurring just a few meters away. "Don't look now", I said to Marcus, "but in a bit look over your left shoulder at your six o'clock." Marcus eventually glanced over and then almost choked on his own laughter. The man continued to sit there in this fashion for about the next 10 minutes. Marcus and I, all the while, quietly discussing the ins and outs about why westerners get such bad raps in foreign countries. Suddenly, the man stood up and, without collecting any of his possessions or asking for his check, walked out the door. Watching from my seat, I saw him stand outside the front window, pull out a cigarette, light it up, and then walk across the street to a temporary traffic police shelter and sit down. At about that time our pizza arrived. We ate, I burned the roof of my mouth severely, we payed our bill and, by the time we left, the man still hadn't come back. Everything he left was still on the table but he was no where to be seen. Perhaps the mother-ship called at an inopportune time.
After we left the pizzeria, Marcus realized that he had forgotten to pack a towel. This was very bad. According to one of my favorite authors in the world:
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Chapter 3 of Douglas Adams work,
'The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'.
Not that Marcus or I are interstellar hitch-hikers but the same, in a much tamer way, can be said about the uses of a towel even if it is toned down the things that one may come across backpacking through SE Asia. Marcus decided that procuring a towel was the single most important thing that he needed to do. I waited outside of a shop he went in to search for the towel. I smoked a cigarette in clear view of the bus that we were supposed to be taking to the border. I glanced at my watch, it was 2:30pm. I looked up just as the bus started backing out of the bus station. Marcus still hadn't returned. I quietly chuckled to myself. The bus pulled out and slowly headed down the street, turned the corner, and disappeared. Marcus returned about two minutes later carrying a towel. I smiled as he walked up and told him that our bus had just left. He asked me what time it was. I told him it was 2:33. He waved his towel furiously, "This is Thailand," he yells, "NOTHING EVER LEAVES ON TIME, LET ALONE FUCKING EARLY!"
It turns out that a towel is also useful for flagging down buses in Thailand. I know this because, at that very moment a bus pulled up beside us and, although it didn't actually stop, a woman on the bus started signaling for us to get on. Marcus said, "Laos?". The woman continued signaling for us to get on. The bus still hadn't stopped moving. It was a split second decision. We jumped on. I, confused by how quickly everything was happening, tried to sit down on one of the open bench seats without removing my pack. In my haste I completely mis-judged how much space the seat had to offer and the combined size of me and my backpack. I found myself mercilessly wedged between the back of the seat and the seat in front of me, the weight of the pack having pulled me into the compromising position before I could re-shift my weight to get out of it. I squirmed, and squirmed, and squirmed and, eventually, managed to get the backpack off and into the back of the bus where Marcus was standing and laughing at me. Not only was Marcus laughing at me but so was every other person on the small bus. Every person, that is, except the young Thai monk sitting directly behind me. He was definitively unamused.
