JOHN, CRAIG AND RAY...

Slacks in the Lao P.D.R…

Photo: A nice man we gave John’s camera to near Pha That Luang

With the cool season upon us, fleece is the word and talk has turned to slacks.
My friend John looks good in slacks. In fact he looks good in just about everything, the bitch.
As usual, I don’t have a thing to wear.
We’re preparing for our Ray Mears winter challenge deep in the python-infested suburbs of Vientiane, capital city of Lao P.D.R. (which officially stands for ‘People’s Democratic Republic’ but actually means ‘Please Don’t Rush’, as anyone who has ever been there can confirm).
Choosing the task has proven onerous. John is not easy to please.
Having ruled out “caring for your blistered feet”, “carving your own canoe” and “fashioning a blowpipe from flax”, we finally settle for a combination of “outfitting yourself” and “hitting the trail.”
If the outlandish ensemble Ray is sporting on the flyleaf of his book is any indication, things aren’t looking good.
“Try to avoid camouflage: in many countries you may be mistaken for a soldier and find yourself in trouble,” warns Ray in his contentious Ray Mears’ Essential Bushcraft: A Handbook of Survival Skills From Around the World.
Aside from military night at Midnight Shift, it’s unlikely John or I would ever be mistaken for soldiers. Caught cavorting with one, maybe, but moving right along…
“I prefer Lycra cycling shorts as underwear: they don’t chafe between your legs.”
Okay, Ray, too much information.
And our favorite: “Trousers can be used as a buoyancy aid – knot the ends of the legs and draw them quickly over your head to fill with air. Passed under your armpits, they function as very effective water wings.” While the legs over the head bit, I can state with absolute certainty, would not prove remotely challenging to any of my friends, the water wings thing is just silly.
“I don’t think I care much for Ray,” declares John, who has made it clear he won’t be seen dead in any of the Mears Winter Bushwear Collection. Fussy fashionista!
So John opts for fabulous polka dot bottom-hugging shorts and a designer t-shirt, while I stick with my batik beach smock and crowd-pleasing tribal turban.
We fly to Vientiane courtesy of Lao Aviation, which now ranks as the world’s 103rd safest airline, up four places from 2009 and just ahead of Qantas.
The Lao capital is an acquired taste, and here I must digress from my bush babble to bang on a bit in my alarmingly alliterate way.
“Vientiane’s charm is engendered by its population and its quirkiness,” writes Irish author Dervla Murphy in her fabulous One Foot in Laos.
In Bamboo Palace, journalist and writer Christopher Kremmer described the city as a “low-slung, balmy town cradled in a bend of the Mekong River, where the only tension was an intermittent struggle between the rising dust and the lowering dampness of the air.”
Both were writing in the late 1990s.
To be sure, Vientiane is still a balmy dust bowl of a city -- the plain, somnolent sister of glamorous Luang Prabang to the north, and somewhat lacking in aesthetics and tourist attractions, which is why I love it and why I am I’m drawn back to it again and again. Well, that and a 6 foot 3 American-Hmong guy called Jai.
I love Laos for what it doesn’t have: fast food outlets, busloads of bossy, obese tourists and high-rise hotels.
And it is, as Dervla Murphy writes, quirky.
Among my favorite quirks are its colorful and candid signs that reflect a sense of humor one doesn’t find elsewhere in Asia, or at least I haven’t happened upon it anywhere else.
“From a closer distance, it appears even less impressive, like a monster of concrete,” reads a huge sign at the base of Patuxai – Vientiane’s version of the Arc de Triumph, built in the 1960s from cement that was supposed to be used for an air base during the Vietnam War (in which poor Laos was almost bombed into oblivion).
I adore the “Important Notice” in the restroom of my favorite restaurant Sticky Fingers that warns “Excessive Amounts of Toilet Paper will Cause Blockage,” and the accompanying cartoon illustration of an exploding water closet hurling colorful excrement in every direction.
Unfortunately, Laos is on the move. It is trying to shed its sleepy image, tart itself up and bring in the tourist dollars.
Backpacker cafes advertising overland bus trips and banana pancakes are springing up, its been featured in the New York Times “destination of the year” section and on those vacuous travel shows featuring irritating hosts talking about themselves in front of gilded temples.
Most recently, the London Daily Telegraph described it as “Never Never Land.”
It’s all been a bit over-hyped.
While I despair that tourists are now coming in droves, I take some consolation from the fact the good-natured, generous Lao folk won’t be rushed into mass-tourism action. And that Vientiane is not everyone’s cup of green tea.
“It’s a flyblown hellhole, the service is dreadful, no-one speaks English and the roads are a joke,” an Australian woman in a polyester jump-suit shrieked to her dinner companions at the table next to me a few visits ago. She was sweating profusely and so sunburned I seriously thought she might burst into flames.
Chill out or go home lady, I felt like telling her, and probably would have done -- in no uncertain terms -- had I been on my sixth bottle of delicious Beer Lao instead of my second.
Ms. Furnace Face had probably read about Laos being an “exciting time-forgotten land” in numerous glossy travel mags.
She’d come with visions of traditionally costumed, smiling staff serving her intricately carved fruit platters while dancing a ramwong.
At the very least she’d expected some semblance of infrastructure, a functioning air-conditioner and a comfortable vehicle for her day tour of Vientiane’s “Splendid Colonial Era Homes.” And don’t even get her STARTED on what a fiasco that turned out to be.
Boy has she been let down. Riddled with blisters, unable to make her understood, her holiday in paradise is now in ruins. Absolute ruins.
But things are changing.
I observed with dismay during John and my bush boy adventure that the ramshackle bamboo lean-tos where I’ve watched many a sunset and imbibed many a Beer Lao next to the Mighty Mekong River have been razed to make way for a concrete monstrosity pretending to be a promenade.
“It’s very stark,” John remarks in typically polite understatement. It’s an atrocity, a Chinese-funded horror to compliment the Vietnamese-funded cement high rise hotel and the Thai-sponsored fountain park , all of which have been erected faster than you can say ‘investment opportunity’ or ‘environmental impact study.’
But time to end my rant, flee the cement and get on with the tasks at hand. Having memorized Ray Mears’ “Hitting the Trail” chapter it’s time for Johnny boy and I to learn some life skills. As usual we’ve modified the tasks to suit ourselves.
My task is to make my way via tuk-tuk to Wat Sok Pa Luang, or the forest temple, and endure 30 minutes in of herbal pore-cleansing in its wonderfully rustic stilted wooden steam room, followed by an hour of gentle Lao massage by a handsome Lao man while staring out at the lush tropical gardens.
John’s task is to sit under a beautiful frangipani tree adjacent to the monastery school, observe gorgeous, saffron-clad monks and “immerse himself in the moment.” We both pass with flying colors. If this were Amazing Race, we’d go straight to the next pit stop. Okay, it’s probably not the Ray Way, but we liked it.
I haven’t known John for very long. I met him through a mutual and dear friend Roque, who is a frequent guest at my funky Bangkok apartment in between UN assignments in Afghanistan, Kosovo and almost any dangerous destination you could name. Roque and I go back years. We met through Amor, another of my offshore pals-and-lifelong-best-friends-in-this-world, in Bangkok in the mid-1990s.
Many people stay at Chez Craig while passing through Bangkok, but over the years I’ve grown reluctant to let folk I don’t know inhabit my guest bedroom. It’s a middle-age thing!
I’m glad I made an exception for John. Aside from being a talented designer and photographer (he gave me a framed exquisite photograph he took the last time he was here of monks in Laos – future houseguests PLEASE NOTE), he’s a gentle soul, a funny and fabulous travel companion and now a new friend, which is nice. And he looks good in bush slacks. No. Make that, purple polka dot, butt-hugging bush briefs, which went down a treat during our holiday in the land of shadows and saffron.

JEAN, CRAIG AND RAY WHO?

Photo: Andrew Biggs

“In treeless lands, nomadic peoples often use dried dung from herbivorous livestock as their main source of fuel,” I remark to my friend Jean over soba noodles during our most recent Sunday brunch.
“Is that so,” she mumbles, struggling with her chopsticks.
“The best way to prevent the head of your axe from rusting is to rub it over with the end of a wax candle,” I continue.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” snaps Jean, but I’m on a roll now.
“To trap eels, you will need to line a cloth sack with bait, such as high-smelling intestine, and weigh it down with a lump of rock.”
Now she looks alarmed.
“Craig, what are you on?”
“Nothing, Jean, I swear I’ve been clean for weeks.”
“Should we try to make you go to rehab?” I say “no, no, no” and explain that these fascinating tips are from Ray Mears’ vanguard “Ray Mears Essential Bushcraft: A Handbook of Survival Skills from Around the World.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” says Jean dismissively, signaling the waiting to bring us more soy sauce and complaining that her noodles are wilting.
But Jean, who at 83 is my oldest friend, is still recovering from the physical and emotional trauma of being forced by a visiting relative to go elephant riding on a recent trip up north.
“It wasn’t exactly the highlight of the holiday. I don’t like riding elephants, I can’t see the point of it. I’ll never do it again, NEVER,” she remarks bitterly. “I’m a city person, no doubt about it. I don’t know why, but I just am.”
Me too. Why anyone would schlep around on a fucking elephant when there is any number of sleek, sports car convertibles on the market is beyond me.
Jean and I are not fans of the great outdoors. We are urbanites through and through, with a similar sense of adventure that ultimately brought us to Bangkok – in my case via Hong Kong, London and Sydney, in Jean’s case after stints in Mexico, San Francisco, Santa Something-or-other (I can’t read my notes), Cambodia, Bujumbura, Srebrenica and Kunming (I made two of those up). Trekking is anathema to us. The fact that anyone would choose to hike through malaria-infested jungles to stay in a bark hut with a hilltribe family flabbergasts us.
And when we say city, we mean smack bang in the middle of them, as we also share a fear of the suburbs.
“I loathed suburbia, just detested it,” recalls Jean.
“All people did was play bridge, go shopping and gossip at the hairdressers.”
Jean was born in conservative Ohio in America’s mid-west.
“I couldn’t wait to get out,” she says. And get out she did, upping stakes for Greenwich Village, Manhattan in 1947. I love hearing her stories about New York during that period and the way she tells them. They are far more entertaining and colorful than the drab Big Apple described in Julie Powell’s book Julie and Julia, which Jean describes as “ridiculous nonsense.” She’s not one to mince words.
But marriage meant Jean was trapped in the ‘burbs’ until her children grew up, whereupon she hotfooted it to Sun Valley, Idaho to visit Earnest Hemmingway’s grave and get a quick divorce, which laws back then prohibited in most states.
Flash forward a few decades and at an age when most folk are contemplating retirement homes, bingo halls and senior citizens cruises, Jean headed to Cambodia.
It was 1989 and the remnants of the genocidal Khmer Rouge were still active in large parts of the country. Not easily dissuaded, is our Jean.
“I came with a Cambodian-American who was trying to find his family and I wanted to help him,” she recalls. She returned two years later when the country was mired in civil war, under curfew and at a time when foreign tourists were being kidnapped and beheaded. A less intrepid person would most likely have fled for good, but not Jean. Off she went again on her third trip in 1995, where two years later she was caught up in a military coup – I’m starting to wonder whether she doesn’t bring on these disasters herself.
“I went back in ’95 because the people were so poor, they really needed everything. I stayed at a hotel that a friend was managing, and sent out a few CVs.”
She worked in the education field until the political situation made it unsafe to remain in the country, but she visits regularly and Cambodia has a place in her heart.
“Cambodian people are wonderful. If you are a friend of one person, you are a friend of their entire family. It’s a special place Cambodia, it really is.”
After a stint in China, Jean moved to Thailand, which she uses as a base for her extensive travels. And she still works.
As well as making the arduous journey to the U.S. a few times a year, she’s off to Cairo next week and ventured, alone, to India for the first time earlier this year.
Actually, this is still a source of much guilt on my part as I was the one who suggested the trip, was supposed to go with her, but pulled out at the last minute due to work commitments. Jean was totally cool about it. Others were not.
“Oh my god, you made her go to India by herself. INDIA! What sort of person
are you,” several friends remonstrated.
For two sleepless weeks I had nightmare visions of poor Jean floating face down in the Ganges, succumbing to Botulism or one of those other strange Indian cults, being run over by a cow or bursting into flames after mistaking a funeral pyre for the Varanasi cross-river ferry. And it would be all my fault! How could I live with myself?
I needn’t have worried. Jean took it in her stride. She, like me, is a savvy traveler.
We often trade little travel tips like how to push to the front of the immigration queue without anyone noticing, the best way to get past those imbeciles who stand still on moving walkways -- Jean favors a sharp blow to the back of the head but I swear by pepper spray – and techniques for avoiding small talk with irritating airline passengers in adjacent seats. Jean pretends she is deaf, I speak in tongues and feign epilepsy. We laugh our heads off these handy hints. Except she’s now outdone me.
“I demand a wheelchair from check-in. A porter then wheels you straight to the front of the counter then right through Immigration via the disabled section,” where upon she ditches the chair and strides briskly to her departure gate. Damn, why didn’t I think of that?
Jean loved India “except for the food” so much that she visited a second time and we’re tentatively planning another holiday there next year, although she’ll believe that when she sees it. And she has about half a dozen other sojourns planned before then, including another to the States to placate her family who say “at her age” she shouldn’t be living on the other side of the world.
“They want to put me in one of those ghastly seniors gated communities, you know the ones I mean, where the houses look like shipping containers,” she chuckles. “It’s not for me.”
No it isn’t. In fact I can’t picture it in a million years. Jean would be bored to sobs within a week. Her no nonsense, frank approach to life would probably piss her neighbors off in days.
She’s not one to suffer fools gladly, although she graciously makes an exception for me.
So what have we learned? Oh, shit, not much really. Jean and I got so caught up the latest Bangkok gossip and travel tales that we completely forgot to do a Ray Mears bush task.
“Ray who?” she asks. “Speak up dear, and don’t forget to bring me back some coffee when you go to Laos next week. Beans, not ground coffee, can you remember that? "
As I have forgotten to get it the last four times I’ve been to Vientiane, I forgive her rather terse tone. She’s still recovering from that hideous elephant excursion and probably needs time to heal. I know it would take me months to get over such an abomination.
Jean has been a friend for almost seven years. I’m sure she’ll be around for many more to come.
And I’m back in her good books after the Varanasi debacle, I hope, because this time I did manage to get her coffee. I have a sinking feeling, though, that it might be the wrong brand. BOY will I be in trouble! I jest.

LUFTY, NADIA, CRAIG and RAY

Photo: Duncan McLeod

Four: Indonesian Adventures

Villagers in the hills of South Sulawesi have a spiritual connection with the forests, an intrinsic respect and understanding for the land on which they have lived for centuries. They are rugged outdoor folk who possess remarkable bush skills, among other things.
Visiting big city TV crews, alas, are not blessed with these talents.
This idiotically obvious revelation strikes me amid a tirade of expletives as I slip on a rock, go hurtling through a bamboo fence and begin sliding on my backside -- at breakneck speed and in pouring rain -- down a hill.
My cameraman Lufty has also taken a tumble, but seems to have recovered his forest legs and is upright again, despite having to balance a camera high above his head while skidding past a cow.
Our translator Nadia is next to go ass up. She was further up the incline when the deluge began, but is narrowing the gap in our impromptu race down the hill. Duncan, our fourth team member, has somehow made it to safety, but he’s an outdoorsy sort of bloke.
My life flashes before my eyes, my left eye at least as my right contact lens has blown to buggery.
In seconds I’ve lost a shoe, ripped my jeans and now appear to be airborne. Nadia is encrusted in mud and in danger of crashing into a beehive. If this were ‘Forest Idol’ we’d be the first ones voted off.
As I resign myself to imminent and disfiguring injury, I become entangled in a row of vines and, despite near strangulation, come to an abrupt halt. At the same time, Nadia ploughs into some shrubs and also manages to stop.
From the top of the hill, the firmer-footed village leaders stare down at us, their concerned looks masking incredulity at our ineptitude.
We had anticipated a few difficulties in what was supposed to be a 1-kilometer trek into the community forests of Labbo, but even the most pessimistic amongst us thought we’d make it past the 100-meter mark. How humiliating.
We should have been more prepared. We should have read up on our bush skills or at least considered purchasing some sensible shoes. But with so much information around, where does one begin?
“The great difficulty in writing about bushcraft is the sheer scale of the task, so I have confined myself to the fundamental skills,” Ray Mears writes in his seminal “Ray Mears Essential Bushcraft – A Handbook of Survival Skills From Around the World.”
“I have assumed that the reader is already interested in travelling in wilderness, can navigate and is conversant with first aid techniques.”
What? Now he fucking tells me! I have no recollection of reading this outrageous disclaimer.
Admittedly, I may have skimmed over the introduction to Mr. Mears’ book. And it’s possible I skipped “The Basics” chapter entirely in order to get to the guts of Ray’s literary foray and discover the essence of the man. Who he is as a person. His motivations, the rationale behind his arcane fashion sense and humorous hairstyle.
I realize I only have myself to blame, but I still feel cheated, deflated, winded. I’m also riddled with splinters and starting to chafe. Instead of being at one with the landscape, I am the laughing stock of Sarawak.

Months into my Craig and Ray challenge, I’m suffering setback after setback as it disintegrates into a soul-destroying fiasco.

Julie Powell experienced similar self-loathing.

“I have wasted a year of my life! Dammit. Goddammit! GOD DAMN IT!” she rails at her crock-pot while de-boning a duck and unraveling in chapter 8. It is arguably the most dramatic moment in her otherwise whimsical Julie and Julia. But it was also an important turning point, I feel.
Julie bounced back. She swallowed her pride, poured her fears down the sink along with her lumpy chutney and got on with her task of mastering all 524 of Julia Child’s French cooking recipes within the space of a year -- before hitting the talk-show circuit.
I need to muster similar resilience; drag my sorry ass back up the hill, persevere with my bush challenge and emerge triumphant, and in one piece, if I’m ever to regale Ellen and Oprah with humorous, occasionally poignant anecdotes from my own riotously self-centered personal journey.
But as my bush outfit is in tatters and I’m minus one Jimmy Choo, a second attempt at scaling the hill is out of the question.
Instead of rising to the challenge, I revert to one of my self-tailored, life-guiding maxims: If at first you don’t succeed, reach for the vodka bottle.
Then I remember I can’t even do that. We are in a conservative part of Indonesia where alcohol is banned. This day just keeps getting better.
Time to go home, pop and Valium and start from scratch tomorrow. We will all need a Valium to recover from our near-death experience and endure another night in the Murianna “guest house,” the only inn in the town of Bantaeng. The Murianna is devoid of light, bed linen and plumbing but abundant in insect and marine life, overflowing with sewerage and distressingly mauve.
Despite our forest injuries and my complaints, we are having a fabulous adventure shooting our film, the latest in the Voices of the Forest series. (See the shamelessly self-promoting links at the end of this blog entry) And, no, the irony of being the producer of films about forests, given that nature is my nemesis, does not escape me.
Without a shred of irony and with no misgivings, Duncan, Lufty, Nadia and I bid adieu to Bantaeng and its bed lice and head back to civilization.
Makassar seemed like a provincial town when we arrived five days ago. After our boozeless bush stint it now feels like Manhattan.
We are thrilled by the prospect of warm showers and Bintang beer at the optimistically named Quality Inn.
Excitement turns to despair, a few tears and some self-reflection when are informed that the rooms we had booked have somehow been unbooked.
It’s the height of the holiday season, the month before Ramadan and every hotel in town is full.
I’m still angry at Ray Mears, and in no mood to construct a shelter from the bark of a rambutan tree and set up camp in the car park, as he would no doubt suggest.
I politely but assertively demand this situation be resolved, and that our unbooked rooms be rebooked.
After a spirited discussion between the reception desk staff there is a breakthrough.
Hey, this is Indonesia – a fascinating, albeit confusing country where yes means no, no means maybe, maybe means go away and ‘It’s fine’ means it’s a disaster. But problems are usually solved.
It just takes a bit of stamina and a sense of humour to get through the solving process.
We breath sighs of relief as rooms are found, keys are handed to us and the Bush Bastard Ray Mears part of our shoot segues into the Being John Malkovich bit.
Our keys are for rooms 02, 08 and 04.
“Does that mean they are on the ground floor?” I inquire.
“No,” says the smiling receptionist without elaborating.
“Where are they, exactly?” asks Nadia.
“They are between floors 6 and 7. Take the lift to the sixth floor, walk down the corridor and go through a small door between rooms 619 and 621, which says ‘Jacuzzi Room’. The staff in there will explain the next part.”
So off we go.
Seventeen minutes later we arrive at the cavernous ‘jacuzzi room’ where flirting women in skimpy skirts are draped across a lime green vinyl sofa.
From there we are pointed in the direction of the kitchen, instructed to turn left at the fridge and proceed up a spiral staircase to a bordello red room where more flirting folk welcome us. They point us to a labyrinth of halls, which lead to curtained -off entryways, fake doors and randomly placed shower stalls.
But the rooms in this hidden bit of the hotel, somewhere between floors 6 and 7, are cleaner, larger and flashier than the generic standard ones and the bathrooms have fabulously gaudy ceiling mirrors.
It seems we are to spend the night in the brothel wing.
It’s bizarre, but we instantly feel at home.
I manage to put aside my feelings of betrayal and block Ray Mears from my mind as I drift off to sleep amid whirring ceiling fans, the strains of karaoke-singing sex-workers and the grunts of the short-time, hired pleasure emanating from the room next door.
I’m back in a city, comforted by the familiar sights and sounds of sleaze and sin.
At the end of the day, I’m more brothel boy than bush barnstormer. But that will come as no surprise to anyone, including, I suspect, Ray Mears.
Too bloody bad!

VOICES OF THE FOREST:

http://www.asiaworks.com/videos/our-work-recoftc-thailand.html

http://www.asiaworks.com/videos/our-work-recoftc-nepal.html

http://www.asiaworks.com/videos/our-work-recoftc-cambodia.html

STUART, CRAIG AND RAY…..

Three: Bivalves or Bust

Photo: Warapol Kingwongsa

“On the way home, I had a sudden stab of dread concerning the beet and potato salad,” writes Julie Powell in her uproarious escapade Julie and Julia.
I hear you sister.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve fretted over fondue, the sleepless nights worrying myself sick about soufflé recipes and sausage fillings, the recurring anxiety attacks brought on by the mere mention of asparagus. Yep I’ve been there, done that Jules. Jesus, who hasn’t?
Well, my friend Stu for one.
When it comes to things culinary, he is calm, cool, collected, a master chef in fact.
Stu would blow Julie Powell out of the soup kettle.
I have no doubt he could master the art of French cooking in a few hours; whip up all 524 of Julia Child’s recipes in an afternoon with ample time left to adjust the Persian rug, prune the bonsai and run a feather duster over his exquisite -- if mostly pilfered collection of bronze Angkorian horse heads before the dinner guests arrived.
Stu is the only one of my friends who could carry off a task of this magnitude – and with more aplomb and less histrionics than Ms. Powell.
He is also the only one of my friends to have appeared on national television in a pink ostrich feather-trimmed satin gown belting out Diana Ross and the Supremes’ Baby Love, but we’ll get to that a bit later.
A dinner invitation to the home of Stu and Tum – his gorgeous boyfriend – is something to be savored.
Superb food is assured. There’s not a dessert fork or soup spoon out of place. The crockery is tasteful, the fashionably embroided table cloth immaculate and of quality fabric, the imported scented candles giving off just the right amount of light (unless you’ve dropped acid, but I won’t go into that now).
All in all, it’s a delight.
While this is to be admired, it should be pointed out that these sumptuous soirees tend to be civilized (until the 5th bottle of wine at least) A-list affairs, which I fear may have caused my friend to sink into complacency.
Granted, the ability to whip up a masala-seared salmon in coconut curry butter at the drop of a hat is a gift. I could no sooner do it than fly to the moon or iron a pair of slacks.
Yes, it takes skill to produce grilled scallops wrapped in pancetta and basted with pineapple mojito vinaigrette from leftovers in the fridge, I’ll give him that.
But once you’ve done this 65 times for beautiful, witty, urban people in designer outfits, don’t you risk becoming blasé? Where’s the challenge? Does your creativity diminish? And why do I suddenly sound like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City?
What would happen, I wondered, if he was catapulted back to the basics; demoted to the D-list or, god forbid, forced at blowpipe-point to whip up some grub for boring, plain people. Sorry, I mean salt-of-the-earth bush folk.
I decided to put it to the test.
“When it comes to finding bush food we need to be open-minded: many sources of nutrition will be strange to us, some even repugnant,” warns Ray Mears in his life-affirming “Ray Mears Essential Bushcraft: A Handbook of Survival Skills From Around the World.”
“But if it’s a matter of survival, we must not allow our prejudice to deter us from obtaining nourishment.”
Stu is so open-minded it hurts. Nothing about him is the slightest bit repugnant.
He is urbane, charming, intelligent and almost as handsome as me.
But I know that beneath this flawless Martha Stewart façade, some deep-fried prejudices are simmering.
I’ve noticed Stu’s disdain at the mismatching cutlery at my own shambolic dinner parties, if you can call them that; his abhorrence at my choice of servants’ uniforms, the barely disguised incredulity at my taste in placemats.
Stu’s task was to whip up a three-course meal using any or all of Ray Mears’ bush ingredients and a wildcard insect of his choice.
Ray’s list: Fungi, roots, ants, caterpillars, torpedo worms, thistles, seeds, berries, seaweed, bivalves, edible mollusks, tent poles – though I may have confused that last one with the ‘How to Build a Shelter’ chapter as I’d had a few bush tequilas by that point. My task was to help, to learn, or at the very least try not to be as annoying as I usually am.
Swift evening spreads over Bangkok as I venture from my upscale neighborhood to Stu’s less salubrious suburb. A few miles downtown, red shirt political protests are threatening to turn violent and a State of Emergency looms amid this hot season inferno.
Being a Bangkokian, I look on the bright side. The latest threat of civil war means less traffic and I am at Chez Stu-gup-Tum’s in no time.
What a feast awaits.
Stu greets me at the door in his floor-length Kath and Kim apron, brandishing a plate of incinerated “tiny jumping frogs” and “crispy grasshopper” aperitifs (I’m quite serious).
“We were going do them in a honey marinade, which would have added flavor, but … “ he starts to explain, the wry, sardonic smile that I’ve misread many times during our 7 year friendship beginning to take shape.
And as I’ve done scores of times in the past, I interrupt, talk over the top of him, and steal the limelight by snatching two of the vile creatures from the crystal serving dish and downing them in a single gulp, before he has time to add “but we did whip up a chili dipping sauce which makes them at least palatable. I wouldn’t advise eating them raw, they may be poisonous.”
I feel myself turning an unfashionable shade of green and I seem to have a grasshopper leg lodged in my windpipe.
“This is very impressive, have you been out in the rice paddies trapping frogs and catching grasshoppers,” I splutter, trying to disguise my gagging by lip-synching to Lady Ga Ga, who is booming from the latest in home entertainment systems along side the living room feature wall.
“No, this is Bangkok, a man on a bicycle sells them door to door. Are they tasty?”
“Wo-a-oha oooh ahooooo oooh oh, caught in a bad romance,” I retch as Stu steers me to the balcony where Tum is working wonders with fish wrapped in banana leaves held together with adorable little lemongrass stalks on the BBQ.
“And here are … drumroll ….. three types of bivalves,” Stu declares, proffering a plate of shelled atrocities.
“We added salt and pounded the ingredients together in a mortar and pestle. ALWAYS carry a mortar and pestle when you are in the bush, it’s an absolute necessity. Or you could improvise one from a lump of rock and a boomerang. Now over here we have the fungi – organic shitake mushrooms from the Emporium Department Store’s natural forest section,” he continues in that irritating overly cadenced Melbourne accent. “What do you think Craig?”
“Stop callin’, stop callin’ , I don’t want to think anymore, I left my head and my bivalves on the dance floor…” Oh my god, I’m gonna throw up.
“Are you not well?” inquires Stu. “Should I play some soothing Renee Geyer tunes?”
“Noooooooooooo. Just Dance” I spit.
But I jest. The food, while not magnificent, was indeed edible. The company, as always, brilliant.
I met Stu when I joined arguably the loudest most dysfunctional book club in the world in 2003. Actually it’s more a club of drinkers who enjoy reading. But none of us enjoyed his selection, Tuesdays with Morrie, that year. And that’s putting it mildly.
Fortunately he has since redeemed himself.
Stu began his career as an educator, teaching drama, theatre studies and English at a high school. I didn’t know him back then, but I’m sure he was an inspiring and popular teacher. I picture him as Melbourne’s Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison’s character in Glee). As a shallow, brash Sydneysider I’ve always been more of a Sue Sylvester.
But he’d made his mark in show business, too, in Australia, with appearances on the hugely popular Hey, Hey It’s Saturday’s Red Faces segment, where his impersonations of Diana Ross, as mentioned in the early part of this tome, Cher, Elton John and Barry Manilow, to name a few, had the audience clamoring for more, and saw him invited back again and again.
He was also in some obscure 70s band that once appeared on the Don Lane Show – yes he even plays a goddam instrument, the piano -- but now I’m giving away his age.
Stu first came to Thailand on holiday in 1987.
“I’d never been overseas before,” he recalls. “I finished teaching in cold, rainy Melbourne on a Friday afternoon, jumped on a plane, and 9 hours later I was in Bangkok. I’ll never forget that heady mix of carbon monoxide, rotten fruit and sewerage. It hit me as soon as I walked out of the airport and into the chaos. I loved it.”
Like many of us, he came back and he stayed, initially teaching before moving to magazine work and back into television as host of Talk of the Town.
These days he is organizer of the Thailand Open Tennis Tournament and other promotional events, which sees him hobnobbing with the likes of Maria Sharapova, the Pet Shop Boys, one of the Williams sisters -- I can never remember which one is which -- Kelly Clarkson, Molly Meldrum, Andrew Biggs and me.
Best of all, he gets freebies. He was able to procure complimentary tickets to the Kylie Minogue concert a while back and for that alone, I will worship him until my dying breath.
Well that and a few other things.
In Bangkok, friendships can be frenetic and transient. Many folk come and go. You like people too intensely and too quickly. Then they’re gone, onto their next posting, their next country, or to escape their looming Bangkok-burnout breakdown.
My friendship with Stu hasn’t been like that at all. It built up slowly, it simmered, it was worth it. Now it’s like a fine wine, or a passable bush claret at least.
It’s comfortable, wonderful and reassuring. I know I can be myself – neuroses, narcissism, blathering idiot, and my 73 other personas on any given night -- and I won’t be judged, or taken particularly seriously.
He and Tum have been together for 8 years. They are like two well-dressed organic peas in a tasteful hydroponic pod. Fun, hospitable, welcoming, and forgiving -- in this case over my total failure to contribute anything remotely meaningful to the bush task I had set them.
So, what have we learned? That bivalves give us terrible wind; that deep-fried grasshoppers are best enjoyed with a chilled white wine and Lady Ga Ga, and that a slap-up Ray Mears’ bush tucker feast is comforting, especially in these troubled times of uncertainty and political turbulence.
Yeah right!

Coming Soon..

Craig and Ray hasn't gone away, but Craig has been busy working and galavanting around Asia.
Now he's back. Do stay tuned for:

Craig, Ray and Jamlong....
Craig, Ray and Karuna......
Craig, Ray and Stu............
and
Craig, Ray and Jeanne...

Coming Soon!

Andrew, Craig and Ray....

Two: Shrubs in the Fall

Photo: Paula Hill

“Most of the stupidest things I’ve ever done, I have done in the Fall,” recounts Julie Powell in her fascinating ‘romp’ Julie and Julia, which those of you who made it to chapter two may recall.
My mate Andrew Biggs and I have lived life the same way, or so he tried to convince me before the inaugural CRAIG & RAY task degenerated into a boozy spectacle last week.
“Craig, do you realize that most of the stupidest things we’ve done together we’ve done in the Fall? It’s uncanny,” he remarked, swigging from his bush goblet and carving a slice of Camembert from his bush platter while reclining on my balcony divan, resplendent in his smart new bush slacks.
“You’re so full of shit,” I reply as we collapse into Shiraz-spitting bush guffaws.
My friendship with Andrew is a delicious mix of wit, sardonic asides, wine and song.
When I’m with him I laugh my ass off. He often does too.
Andrew is one the sharpest, funniest, most entertaining individuals I’ve ever met, control issues aside.
We’ve been through a lot together over the years: Clashing party outfits, malfunctioning teleprompters, heartbreakingly incompetent domestic staff.
But can our friendship make room for Ray? Will it withstand Monsieur Mears’ challenging bush tasks and our occasionally rancorous competitive streak? We’ll find out after the break….
Welcome back to Alcoholic Afternoons, where it would appear that Andrew is more adept at “improvising a drinking straw from a hollow non-poisonous shrub” than me.
How can this be? Cheating, that’s how.
“You’ve deliberately chosen the easiest shrub on the balcony. Anyone could make a straw out of a fucking elephant-ear fern,” I screech, struggling with the disintegrating stalk of a potted miniature orange tree that was supposed to form the base of my own pathetic effort.
“Yours looks like a shoehorn,” he retorts.
“It’s absurdist,” I scream.
“Actually, I think you are both disqualified,” interjects Paula, my gorgeous neighbour and recently appointed bush-task photographer. “They are held together with rubber bands. Ray would never allow rubber bands. This is farcical.”
Paula has a point.
We haven’t strictly adhered to the Ray Mears Essential Bushcraft: A Handbook of Survival Skills From Around the World instructions. In fact we’ve been rather loose in our interpretation. This was due to time constraints, apathy and unnecessary complications on Ray’s part.
“On a journey downhill water may become trapped in naturally occurring bowls such as hollow logs or sumps formed in impermeable rock,” writes Ray. “If you cannot access it by mopping, improvise a drinking straw from an available grass stalk or another non-poisonous hollow shrub.”
As neither Andrew nor I have ever used a mop, and given we have no idea what a ‘sump’ is, we’ve had to jump straight to part two where we encounter yet more obstacles from didactic, ungay Ray.
“If possible, sterilize the water before drinking it. Avoid water trapped in the trunks of poisonous trees or tea-coloured water that has become badly stained by tannins leaching out of bark.”
“This is tedious, let’s use wine instead,” suggests Andrew and before you know it we’re leaching gallons of tannins from bottles of Merlot -- which my dear maid Sanom has carted all the way from Villa Supermarket despite her bad back – and drunkenly crooning old Air Supply hits at the top of our lungs.
As bush boys we make fabulous media professionals. But the list of candidates was limited. Despite prompting, most of my friends simply couldn’t make the connection between ‘straw’, ‘mouth’ and ‘drinking,’ associating the implement with ‘nose’, ‘snorting’ and ‘party drugs.’
Andrew and I met at The Nation Media Group in 1992. I was producing an abominably awful television show called Good Morning Thailand, he was editing the entertaining Nation Junior Magazine. NJ magazine was targeted at Thai teenagers wanting to improve their English skills.
Andrew had taught himself to speak, read and write Thai and the magazine became a huge success, largely because he imbued it with the Thai concept of “Sanuk”, or fun, along with his personality.
Management decided to do a TV version. NJTV was our first collaboration, Andrew’s debut in front of the camera and a spectacular flop.
It featured a cast of ridiculous characters, badly acted by friends who would work for free, among them bawdy slapper Crystal Ball – the greatest fortuneteller of them all -- her g-stringed assistant Lek and the Idiom Idiot, played by a temperamental, substance-abusing queen who worked on the features desk and who, at one point, demanded his own trailer.
The show’s production values screamed early Gilligan’s Island. Its set design and lighting resulted in a dismaying Muppets on Acid sort of look. NJTV aired in the middle of the night on a government-run station and was watched by an estimated 37 viewers across 76 provinces.
So it was on the buses, not the box, where Andrew took off. The Microbuses, to be exact.
In Bangkok’s pre-skytrain days, people spent hours commuting to work. It was a hair-raising ordeal. The Microbus was an air-conditioned, private alternative to the city’s hellishly hot public rust buckets. They even had TV screens, which featured “Andrew Biggs’ ‘learn English’ vignettes on high-rotation.
“It was a captive audience,” he recalls.
The rest, as they say, is history. Andrew has gone on to write books, host numerous television and radio shows, open his own English Language Academy and won numerous awards. These days he has millions of fans and is in huge demand on the public speaking circuit. Not bad for a boy from Sunnybank, Brisbane – I can’t believe I just wrote that!
Despite being the most famous farang (foreigner) in Thailand, Andrew Biggs is no tantrum-throwing diva (except when the House of Cheesecake runs out of cheesecake, but that’s another story along with the unfortunate incident at the Emporium Department Store’s sock sale fiasco which I’m not allowed to talk about).
But enough about him. What have we learned from our little Ray foray?
Ahem, that bushcraft isn’t our forte; that unlike Julie Powell, Andrew and I don’t confine our stupidity to “The Fall” -- we’re hot, dry and monsoon season fools.
And on a mawkishly personal note, it has affirmed that laughter is such a large part of my life and that good friends to laugh loudly with, like Andrew, are as rare as naturally occurring impermeable sump frocks. I mean rocks. Whatever. Moreover, it has left me secure in the knowledge that ‘shrub’ is a fabulous fucking word. Don’t you think?

Let the Terror Begin....

Trapped in a boring job and living in a tiny apartment in New York, Julie Powell regularly finds herself weeping on the way home from work. Then one night, through mascara-smudged eyes, Julie notices that the first few items she's grabbed from the Korean grocery store are the very ingredients for Potage Parmentier, as described in Julia Child's legendary cookbook, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” and the project is born. Julie begins to cook -- everyone of the 524 recipes in the book, in the space of just one year… -- Cover blurb ' Julie and Julia' by Julie Powell.

With love and thanks to my great mate Deb....

One: Potage Shmage

“The road to hell is paved with leeks and potatoes,” writes Julie Powell in her irritating best seller Julie and Julia.
Not for me it isn’t.
Give me leeks and potatoes any day -- and throw in a Beef Bourguignon and a Choux de Bruxelles while you’re at it.
My road to hell isn’t even a road. It’s a leech-infested, rain-sodden, slippery, slimy track that leads into a forest, through a stream and up a fucking hill.
Mastering the art of French cooking may have been Julie Powell’s perdition, but it isn’t mine. My personal purgatory is bushwalking. Yes, bushwalking. I loathe it, as I loathe most things involving pristine, natural environments. Put simply, I lack any sort of aptitude for it.
I’m a big city boy.
Sirens comfort me. I find countryside repellant.
Exhaust fumes and gridlock reassure me. Mountains, hills, birdsong and hiking trails scare the shit out of me.
Unlike Julie Powell I’m not trapped in a boring job, nor do I live in a tiny apartment.
The only times I find myself weeping are when the party drugs start to wear off or when someone shouts “Last Drinks Folks.”
And my mascara never EVER smudges.
But Julie Powell is nothing if not original.
Why couldn’t she have hit the bottle to deal with her depression, you may well ask? Developed a substance abuse problem or maxed out her credit cards and sunk into crippling personal debt like normal people?
You’ve got to hand it to her. One self-indulgent bout of the blues, one year, 524 recipes, a best-selling book and a movie deal later and Voila! Amy Adams is playing her on the big screen and before you can say Bonjour, she’s raking in more cash than you can poke a braised onion at.
But how cynical of me to suggest that fame and fortune were Julie Powell’s motivations.
No, no, no. It was about setting goals, confronting fears, taking on challenges, removing herself from her comfort zone.
My therapist tells me I need to do the same. (He also tells me I have to overcome my “intimacy issues” and stop treating sex as a recreational weekend team activity, but that’s a separate sidesplitting blog in the making).
So, brimming with New Year’s enthusiasm I’ve decided to give it a go: To set myself personal challenges, put myself out there, overcome my fear of the great outdoors and equip myself with some essential skills.
Rest assured, I won’t be reaching for Julia Child’s recipe book.
My salvation has come in the form of a ragged manual I happened upon at a guesthouse in the terrifying tea-plantation terrain of Sri Lanka during a recent holiday.
It’s called “Ray Mears Essential Bushcraft – A Handbook of Survival Skills From Around the World.”
Ray is marvelous, the Julia Child of the bush world in fact.
His knowledge is encyclopedic, his compendium entertaining and comprehensive. I couldn’t put it down.
Among his myriad user-friendly, survival bible guidance:
--How to safely stow an unmasked double-bit axe in the crotch of a tree buttress (It’s not as straightforward as it sounds);
--How to improvise a drinking straw from a grass stalk or another non-poisonous hollow shrub;
--The correct way to strike a match: Preparation is the key to all fire-lighting, notes Ray;
--How to utilize the inner bark from a lime tree, one of the most important sources of “natural cordage”;
--The proper way to dislodge limpets swiftly and firmly with a rock for use as an essential source of nourishment;
--How to fashion a rabbit snare with a pear-shaped noose, and how to design your own eel-trapping bag.
And that’s not all.
“Knowledge is invisible and weighs nothing,” observes Ray, who is no fool.
“Be mindful that in times of crisis you can find shelter in the forest, rub sticks for fire and know which plants around you can be eaten and you will have a home, a hearth and a meal,” he continues, albeit with a disclaimer that “Bushcraft is not necessarily easily learned.”
Godammit Ray, with your help I’m gonna learn it. My days as the laughing stock of the soap-challenged bush fraternity are numbered. By this time next year, I will have mastered all 300 of your practical, useful, vital ‘how to survive in the bush’ tips. Well, some of them at least.
Obviously I won’t be able to do this alone, so I’ve decided to enlist the help of friends, family, work colleagues. My nearest and dearest. The people I love most in this world. They don’t yet know who they are or when they will be called upon, which adds a nice little element of surprise, don’t you think?
My fabulous maid Sanom will also play a crucial role – somebody has to do the legwork and shop for the ingredients -- non-poisonous shrubs and double-bit axes don’t grow on trees you know.
As well as sharing my newly acquired bushcraft knowledge, you may gain an insight into the folk I call upon to assist me. This will be limited and edited as I see fit. At the end of the day this blog is, afterall, mostly about me.
Me and Mr. Mears.
So break out the fire sticks, bring on the limpets and eat your heart out Julie and Julia.
Welcome to CRAIG and RAY. Stay tuned.