Bangkok to Bali: Departure, a Pink Suitcase, and the Question of Eric

The person walking into the room was not the owner of the pink suitcase. He was Eric, eighteen years old, American-born of Vietnamese heritage, with the specific quality of confidence that very intelligent people who know they are going somewhere have at eighteen and which is much more endearing than it has any right to be. Eric was heading to medical school. He knew what anaesthesiologist meant and could spell it without looking it up, which he mentioned, and which did suggest he was probably going to be fine. He explained the pink suitcase: it belonged to a woman who had checked out that morning and left it behind, which the hotel had placed in the room while waiting for her to collect it. My theory about sharing a room with a woman turned out to be wrong. Eric was a reasonable consolation.

Our guide was Nin, Thai, with the particular combination of patience and mild exasperation that guides develop after leading successive groups of Western tourists through countries that the Western tourists are experiencing for the first time and the guides have narrated hundreds of times. Nin was very good at her job. She maintained a calm that was not indifference and an enthusiasm that was not performance, which is a difficult combination to sustain across a month of being responsible for other people’s experience of somewhere you know extremely well.

The group dinner was at Cabbages and Condoms, a Bangkok institution opened by Mechai Viravaidya, a former politician and public health campaigner who funded his family planning programmes through a restaurant chain decorated entirely in prophylactics. The condom art is, on examination, genuinely impressive as a commitment to a theme. The food is also good, which it needs to be to hold your attention alongside the decor. We met each other across the table in the way that groups of strangers meet when they know they are about to spend a month together, everyone performing a slightly idealised version of themselves, the actual personalities emerging gradually over the days that followed.

Eric almost missed the train that night. This is not a small thing in the context of the trip. We were leaving Bangkok station on the overnight service to Hat Yai, and as the departure time approached Eric was not in the group. He was not on the platform. He was in the toilet of the train carriage, which is not a toilet in the British railway sense of a contained chemical unit, but a hole in the floor connected directly to the track, which meant that the people standing on the platform watching their loved ones leave on the Bangkok night train were given a parting gift that was not from the train itself.

Eric’s absence from the group at critical moments, and Nin’s enquiry into his whereabouts, became the trip’s recurring motif. Where’s Eric would be asked at ferry departures and border crossings and restaurant tables across four countries over the next month. Eric’s answer was always reasonable and always slightly too late. He was going to make an excellent anaesthesiologist.