กระบี่, Krabi

Good morning!

Walked down to the Krabi River ...

along the boardwalk riverside, looking at the longtails, when accosted by a guy offering a river trip on his. Reflex was to respond no. We did but toed and froed with looks, like, and yes then perhaps but why not? He named a price, saying don't worry if you don't have it on you. Why? our lives as forfeit? You can pay when we get back, if we do, we thought.

Dam, he said his name. Dam. And just as we were boarding, in pressed khaki uniforms, complete with ribbons, who should turn up but the Authorities. Maritime? or criminal? They questioned Dam first, asking to see his papers, which he produced. The general atmos was convivial. We were gathered there for a bit of a get-together before Dam took us out to the mangroves and left us for the monkeys to eat. (I asked him later what the monkeys ate out in the mangrove forests. He said, Other monkeys.) The lady Authority produced a camera to take our mugshots.

We of course posed for this, a holiday snap, why not? Evidence we were once... Satisfied, Authorities left us to our fate. Dam fired up the 4-cylinder, wide smiles, both ways.

Dropped the propeller. Usual seems to be a just under 3m shaft, perfectly counterbalancing the automotive engine, diesel or petrol, truck or car, at the short end, where the tiller is.

In addition, here a steering-wheel, most often a lever, levering a rudder under the rear platform, forward left, back right. The platform a bit like on a punt, with which d'antan I had had experience. It was my first ever paid job. I came down from the tower where I had been reading The Cantos, kitted up in cricket whites, braces and a boater, and plied the waters of the Avon.

These were Cambridge-style punts. A canny start-up, but engineered so we, the punters, took home a proportion of what we made from the punters, puntees, often in Christchurch pour faire la touristique. The bizo took a commission. Suited me fine. Could stop whenever, roll a ciggy, Pocket Edition, usually, Drum occasionally, although I liked the cardboard drawer Three Castles came in, which my grandfather smoked, able to hold a conversation, a glass of whiskey (sherry later) in one hand, and roll one-handed with the other, learnt riding horseback. Aspirational. I never fully graduated but the dream remains.

I had his tobacco tin then, silver. The same size as a pocket-box of Three Castles, it had affixed to the inside of the lid a spring-loaded ZigZag papers holder. Blue I preferred. ZigZag blue. I recall difficult to source in Sydney in the mid-90s. We had a newstand down harbourside we visited for ZigZag, usually yellow, although we also came to enjoy the liquorice-flavoured papers, softened rather than tainting the harshness.

I lost his silver tobacco-tin on the banks of the Avon, outside the house with the turret where I read all of Pound. Thing about punting on the Avon is, it is not a river, more a creek which swells seasonally, and sometimes daily. Punting 6 fat Americans (capacity for these punts) required knowing where the deep channel swerved out on the bends, a certain degree of hydrological knowledge then; if you mussed it you ran aground. Puntees would stay put. Punter would jump out and push, if he or she could not gain purchase for the prongs at the end of the almost 3m-long pole; and anyway, leverage was not your friend on these runs, rather, it took getting wet, staying in squelchy plimsoles, and the shame of a high-tide mark on your pants.

One Christmas I spent solo, eating baked beans for dinner, listening to The Sugarcubes sing "Birthday," 1988. Since, it has always been affecting, especially the line about sewing a bird in her knickers. During the day I had made over $300 after commission. And on the banks I wrote some of the work gathered here. The original format for these pieces was Poundian lineation, blank spaces in the line indicating rhythmic variation, syncopations. His music I do not think has been bettered.

The house with the turret was demolished before the earthquake. Two doors or so down, along the Avon, there had been another house also marked for demolition. The scene we struck there after the demolition party, apart from the tragedy which it also recalls, recalls this:

Dam gunned the longtail up-river. We were on our way to the Island of Nose and the Land of the Giant:

Here, offering some context, phone snaps:

Against all expectation, Dam was there. In Dam we trust.

We relaxed. Then was spotted an iguana! said Dam. It was not, probably a big Monitor. Dam was sufficiently excited to indicate it was anyway a rare sight and we did a uey to check it out.

We turned off into a narrow channel, wending deep into the forest of mangroves. The reveal: it was Dam's village. He asked if we wanted to stop for lunch. No. The longtail-ride was too exciting to leave.

We returned to our embarking point, paid, thanked Dam for an unsurpassed experience, and continued down the quay.

Leaving the Krabi river, we found a place to lunch full of plastic-wrapped pulp-fiction, even the Straubs were there, unfortunately the ones I had already read, from the Blue Rose Trilogy. In Riyadh I was reading his The Hellfire Club, 1996, brilliantly disturbing and oddly dislocating in period. Contemporary but prosed like a novel belonging to an older generation.

Back onto the main drag:

fishes with brains from the market:

Introducing Pygmy Hippos

One of the highlights of the Dee Andaman, a free breakfast! with gecko

leaving กระบี่ for เกาะลันตา