Sunday, November 3. A day before my parents and I travelled from Yangon to Bangkok to sell Myanmar’s favourite cosmetic, thanaka, at a business exhibition. Our Agoda Homes booking was a beautiful, spacious booking that, once booked, was inexplicably declined by the owner.
In all its ‘trust me on this one’ wisdom, Agoda repeatedly recommended a self-identifying resort with “Madame” in its name. It should be known that I am not a bona fide traveller of Southeast Asia nor do I own a pair of elephant trousers. I am but a student blindly groping for wholesome lodgings, so there was absolutely no chance I would know where couples (or more) go for that kind of thing in Bangkok.
Boldly, and without any hesitation, I ignored the red flag screaming from the garish photographs and proceeded to book my mother, my father and myself in two rooms for what ultimately became six nights of snail massacres, mosquito bites and stiff bedding.
For our three-day stint of meandering around the exhibition hall, we had lugged all the cargo ourselves—50 kilogrammes of posters, vinyls, cosmetics, lights and string bags—wearing down your poor author’s prematurely painful lower back.
A whole day of standing surely deserves an evening spent relaxing at a luxurious hotel, right? Wrong! Not long after we arrived at Madame’s, we searched for the receptionist, only to see a small podium with A4 paper stuck on it that said, “Check-In.” As we knocked on various huts to find a receptionist, my uber-hygienic mother glanced at the coating of dust on the laminated sheet. The build-up of loathing had begun.
Following a name and sign here no-questions-asked check-in, we went on to explore our rooms, which, decorated with tacky wallpaper and chequered cushion walls, would be similar to sleeping in a KTV room. From the bathroom door, a poster of a woman’s rear winked back at me. It was as I anticipated, a love hotel.
What noises pierced the night? Sadistic Thai threats and whip cracks, you say? Well, dusk was actually dominated by an old grandmother who may well have been shouting at a wall.
The toilet was built on some flimsy drywall and shuddered at every flush. Disorientated, I would step out onto a battalion of snails and hear the crunch of shells and guts underneath my feet.
Other than the swarm of mosquitos, which I prayed had not taken an extensive tour of the premises before sucking my blood, and the night-out in Greenland air-con, it was a decent sleep for US$25 per night. Yes, the pillows stank of bleach, the beds were Thai-prison hard, and a fly floated helplessly in the electric kettle, but it could have been worse.
The following night our all-male housekeeping team forgot to clean my parents’ room. Near midnight, my father knocked on their hut, to find three sleepy men rubbing their eyes. They may well have been in this situation before—a late-night call from a randy guest—except my father’s fetish was for orderliness. He expressed that fetish in what I could only imagine was the most awkward prolonged reprimand of broken English.
Almost satiated on two complimentary spongy love cakes, I went to sleep that night with pangs of guilt for making my parents stay there. I would go see them, explain to them, but alas a cockroach scuttled from their room; I hate cockroaches and was forced to abandon the attempt.
The consensus, after all, was to take this family business trip for “new experiences,” before we learned we would stay at a pleasure-inn.
Yet I left a better man, a man of bolstered fortitude. I was worldlier than before, and I took a mental note that if, over the years, love remained elusive, I could always book myself in at Madame’s (without my parents).
