Pom Tong Kan Pop Khun

Thailand,Pattaya,
30-01-2010.

I'm quitely sipping my instant coffee from the 7/Eleven which can be found at any given street corner in this Asian nation - proudly supporting Thailand, or so they claim - while watching two arabs in long white Djelebbas and sporting the inevitable Muslim beards, trying hard to bring the price down for a double shorttime with two Hot Mommas when my mobile goes Beeb, Beeb, Beeb informing me of in incoming text message...

"Pom Tong Kan Pop Khun" it says, for a moment I'm mystified - I might give out my room number to any given lady I meet on this boulevard but my mobile number...now that is a completely different matter. Than I hear her voice "me like see you now", that voice that has followed me during most of my adult life, during my trails and jubilations, during my long and solitay bicycle trips across Europe, Mexico and The States wildcamping in dark forests and empty Spanish Casitas...almost like a telepathic universe of some kind...

"Aaay, me make joke you", YES,there she is standing right in front of me, a small daypack strapped to her back, her body having gone a bit plump over the years, her round face a dead give away to her mother's Karen inheritance , unlike the Thais whose face is more heart shaped, ignoring the perplexing looks of contempt from the arabs on a cheap shorttime queste, we Wai each other politely before given over to the European hugging...

My poor old Nong, wh*re-tough to her very core with the physical constition of a wild bull elefant in Must, the caramel color of her skin still healthy looking, beaming big bright smiles at me showing me her white and undamaged teeth, a toughness radiating out of her paralelled only by her female coyness, having excused herself from her Norwegian Sugar Daddy back at the Sangri-La Hotel in Bangkok, having come all the way from the Thai capital just to see crazy me...

Taking her daypack from her I offer to take her back to my room so she can freshen up, both of us totally ignoring the two arabs whose looks by now have turned way beyond disapproval - what is their problem anyway?

She tells me about her time in Bangkok tending to the needs of her Norwegian Sugar Daddy, we talk about the plight of the Karen people who are once more fleeing across the Thai border en masse persecuted by that insane Burmese Junta that has no right of excistence but nonetheless has been driving the hilltribe people away from their traditional homegrounds for nearly fifty years now, left there own people to rot after the Irrawaddy Delta was flooded some short years ago, the stupid generals didn't even let the americaqns in to help though their ships where anchored off shore filled to overflow with supplies...for a moment a detect a few tears in her left eye where mine have already gone down my cheeks like rivulets in a flood of blood...

She dries them with her handkerchief telling me "you still think too much, my big Tilak"...when she finally leaves me after a day of reminiscing, I realise we have never actually left my room ordering food and Singha beers up, talking all day in a strange mix of Thai and Englsih with the odd word of Kareni thrown in...and that the never ending knocking on my door as been respectfully absent...