When you travel, you hear things
****While having dinner in Chiang Rai the solo rider gains insight on Thai romance and considers a modern urban myth
Lloyd Sullivan
Bangkok Post dd. 16 januari 2006
Chiang Rai, the city, lacks the aesthetic appeal of Chiang Rai the province. There are a couple of attractive resorts along the river, but the capital itself is a pretty typical urban centre, which is to say (how do I put this), less than beautiful. I don’t know what it is, but Thais appear to save all their creative architectural energy for their temples (wat), which are ornate and often spectacular to behold.
City buildings, in contrast, are generally squat two and three story concrete shoe boxes. They are normally white, sometimes a pastel colour, and 80 percent of them in any given town need a coat of paint. They’re badly weathered, is what it is. Grimy. If you’ve ever seen mascara running down the cheeks of a woman in tears you have a good mental picture of a typical Thai commercial or residential building.
Government buildings often look better, they even show a bit of design flare on occasion, but they make up a small percentage of total construction. Outside of the gentrified areas of Bangkok, Old Town in Chiang Mai, Mae Hong Son and parts of Patong Beach in Phuket, I couldn’t remember a town of any size with the least bit of charm whatsoever and Chiang Rai was no exception. Even so, I liked the place. It was nice and quiet in Chiang Rai.
I was having dinner in my favourite restaurant, raanahaan Muang Thong on Paholyothin Road, a half block or so from the Wiang Inn. It’s open on two sides with plenty of room between tables, and most of what’s on the menu is on display in glass cases as one comes in off the street. It all looked so appetising I wished I could turn some internal valve and open up a reserve stomach. But I just have the one.
I was eating early since I’d missed lunch, and the dinner crowd was not yet in attendance. There was a large extended family enjoying multiple courses at a table next to me, the father of several children feeding himself quite adroitly despite his having lost an arm. There were a few couples scattered about, and over in a far corner a lone Caucasian was eating sparingly, drinking Heineken beer out of large green bottles.
It doesn’t take long to eat when one dines alone, ten minutes or so if it’s just a single course, and while I was waiting for the bill, gazing from table to table after the fashion of people killing time, the lone occidental and I caught one another’s eye. We exchanged slight nods of our heads the way people do, an acknowledgment of mutual presence more than an actual greeting. Even so I was curious about the man.
I’m a lot more outgoing when I travel than when I’m at home, friendlier you might say. I like to talk to people when I’m on the road and perhaps that’s why I like to be on the road, I don’t know. At home in Bangkok I doubt I would have glanced at this fellow, much less acknowledged him. I probably wouldn’t even have noticed him, but when I’m on a trip I’m different.
When I’d paid my bill, I picked up my pint bottle of Regency brandy, put it in the plastic carry bag and ambled over to where this guy was sitting.
“Mind if I sit down for a minute?”
He didn’t mind. He was big man, about 60, with shaggy brows and a long basset hound face. A character face. It was one of the reasons I wanted to talk to him. A guy with a face like his often has a story to go with it. What was this guy’s story? That’s what I wanted to know.
His name was Michael. He was an Irishman, but his accent was English, having lived most of his life in London. He’d been in Thailand for about five years, first Bangkok, then Chiang Mai and now Chiang Rai, moving continuously away from crowds and dirty air chasing a life of peace and quiet. He was certain he’d found that life in Chiang Rai.
“Didn’t care for London?” I asked him.
“Can’t live there. Too dangerous. Didn’t used to be that way, you know. Not at all. Is now, though. Not really English anymore, you see. Immigration.”
“Maybe one day Thailand will be so full of farang it won’t be Thailand anymore for the very same reason,” I said.
“Be a shame,” he said, giving me a long-faced smile. He understood the irony.
Michael was a self-confessed romantic. He was divorced from his first wife, an Englishwoman, and had lost a long-time Thai companion to cancer just a year ago. Recently, though, he’d met another Thai woman for whom he had high hopes. They were just friends at this stage, he said, but things were moving in the right direction, romantically speaking. He was confident they’d be lovers before too much longer, true intimates, because he had money, he said. Without money, according to Michael, one’s chances of real romance in Thailand were limited.
“They all (meaning Thai women) want to know how much money you have. They have ways of finding out.”
“So how did your friend find out?” I asked.
“I told her.” And then he laughed. “She said with my face money was the only hope I had.”
Michael was drinking beer, as I said, and I was drinking brandy and soda because beer sometimes upsets my stomach. I would rather have been drinking what he was drinking and I was envious. I told him so and why.
“It may not be the beer,” he said, “it may be what Thais put in it.”
“What’s that?”
“Formaldehyde.” He must have correctly interpreted the expression on my face as I thought of high school biology class and the wretched smell of dead frogs floating in big jars of the stuff.
“It’s quite true,” he said. “They don’t have proper refrigeration in a lot of places so they use formaldehyde in beer as a preservative. Ask anybody. About 1% by volume, I think it is.”
This sounded to me like one of those stories known as urban myths. But like all such stories there was that hint of verisimilitude, in this particular case the absolute need for freshness and the lack of proper refrigeration in some places. Still, formaldehyde? It wouldn’t look very good on the label, would it?
I thought about it for some days thereafter, the balance of my trip, in fact, and when I got back to Bangkok I called Boon Rawd Brewery, the brewers of Singha and Leo beers, and after successive inquires finally got to the brewmaster himself, a Mr Isara. I put the question to him.
He told me that he’d been hearing that rumour himself for more than ten years, didn’t know where it came from, but that it is completely false. Formaldehyde (or formalin, as it’s called here) is not, nor has it ever been an ingredient in Boon Rawd beers, which are made conventionally with barely, hops and water, and internationally so certified.
Mr Isara was most emphatic about it, and who, after all, would know better?
Copyright 2005 Lloyd Sullivan.
To contact the writer, email to lsulli2@yahoo.com.