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Bite Me All Night

Matt Gibbs — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:09:44 +0000

At the mere mention of ‘Fiji’ and ‘Vanuatu,’ visions of coconuts, sparkling blue water, and smiling islanders arise like heat from golden sands. Tourists gliding languidly through the shallows with bronzed skin and not a care in the world. Said skin is smooth. Unbitten. Unbitten in mosquito-infested countries.

I pride myself on the fact that I am a mosquito’s last port of call. They land on stones before they land on me. I’ve been to countless malarious areas and walked away unscathed. So why – oh why – would bed bugs find me so delicious in Fiji? Actually, I’m not so sure that they were in fact bed bugs; they could have just been fleas, or some other disgusting insect. The point is, they bit me in a tropical paradise and I was not amused.

You know when people say, “‘Night-night… don’t let the bed bugs bite!” How can one do that? I mean, I know you can spray the bed with insecticide or spray yourself with repellent, but that seems less polite than the friendly petition, “don’t let.” It’s not as if I can wake up and talk to the bed bugs as if they were a Wallace and Gromit creation. Look down on them with a kindly Snow White face and charmingly admonishing finger saying, “Now, don’t bite, my dears.” They’re fecking BUGS! Don’t let them bite, my arse. Actually, no, I won’t let them bite that. It’s prize winning, it is.

Cut to Kiribati–white sand, blue lagoon – three weeks later: Fijian fleabites all healed and I’m ready to bare some skin in the sun on the weekend and the tropical bugs strike again. Only this time, they were invisible. They’re very cunning. One night in the Lagoon Breeze hotel and I’ve been bitten (and not in a good way). To add insult to serious injury, I was later told that the perpetrators were actually sand flies. Insects arising from the beauteous beaches to torture the innocent Australian visitor.

I’m telling it to you straight: this is the other side to the tropical islands paradise. There are bugs, and they’re waiting for you. Don’t be fooled by the idyllic idea of a sun-drenched Elysium. It has bite marks all over it. First, they tell you not to bare your skin because of the suns deadly rays, now I’m telling you to cover up for fear of a bit of temporary skin blemish. But this is reality, kid: this is the great outdoors.

Matt Gibbs

An aid worker by training, but a show-off by nature, Matt has been a bit of a nomad; working in Papua New Guinea, Sudan, Sweden, Kenya, a handful of Pacific Island States and Ethiopia - in addition to his native Australia - for the past six and a half years. Matt is currently penning children's books with his writing partner and deciding whether his nomadic lifestyle should be thrown in for some nesting...

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Bodles Revisted

Paul Boakye — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:48:03 +0000

We take the old roads from Kingston to Old Harbour, avoiding the new Super Highway, a journey of about ninety minutes by car.

The Old Harbour Fish Market is now a shadow of its former self as is the disused railway station. The spot where the church stood that my aunt Annie and I walked the three miles to every Sunday morning is now a fast food joint while the church itself has moved to a more prestigious location, I’m told, with religion still big business on this tiny Caribbean island.

Cars can no longer turn down the Old Bodles Road that was the direct route to and from our house. Rain has apparently washed away the bridge and the road is now permanently closed. We must drive a further mile down the highway and enter onto the property at Bottom Bodles, then circle around to the main entrance from the opposite direction – a far too long a journey that I would never have undertaken as a child. For even along these dirt back roads the familiar whiff of fresh cow dung had brought on an instant sense of dread that started in the pit of my scrotum and gripped my bladder making me gasp for breath. All I could say to give our driver the cue to pull over was “I think I’m gonna have to pee you guys.”

Fear has always had a tendency to make me want to wet my pants, and as the piss hit the dry dirt road and bubbled up, the sweet sickly pungent smell of cow dung was everywhere. As I button up quickly and the car drives on, the sight of cows returning for their twice daily milking greets our journey just as they did when I was boy. I was always petrified of cows. As I made my way to school each morning, I would desperately try to avoid them by walking the three miles before or after I knew that they had made their familiar journey to the Dairy. Of course this meant that I was often late for assembly because if I was ever met by cows on the way, I would stand deadly still, clutching my satchel for comfort until they had passed at a safe distance.

Now and then, one particularly feisty cow would dare to charge towards me and I would run for my life, screaming at the top of my lungs, and scaring the young calves that darted off in all direction. It didn’t matter that they were small and probably just as scared as I was; the young ones frightened me too. So my days invariably began with negotiations about how best to get to school without meeting any cows along the way. Not easy when you live surrounded by several hundred acres of dairy farm, the existence of which represented the first examples of genetically bred cattle anywhere in the world.

The Jamaican Hope was bred specifically to adapt to the Caribbean by combining the British Jersey cow with the Holstein and the Indian Sahiwal breed. This new Hope produced three times more milk than any other cattle on the island, and so they were constantly marching towards the Dairy and across my path. Today, however, I am in the safety of a car and cows can’t bother me now. Riding across this rough terrain with my camera at hand, I’m surprised at just how photogenic cows can be. Were they always hornless all those years ago when I was walking to Old Harbour Primary in panic?

We reach a guarded gate and a handsome man with flawless black skin steps out of a hut and in front of the car to enquiry about our business here.

“We’re heading up to the house,” says David our driver, stating the obvious without giving any reason.

“Who?” replies the Guard.

“Gonsalves,” says my cousin Aubrey from his open window in the back seat of our car.

“Oh, Mr Gonsalves, sir – go on up.”

We smile then; things are as they should be, and David drives on.

“It’s good to see the name still counts for something round here,” Aubrey and I both chime.

A short drive further and we arrive at the once pristine electronic white gates that open onto a long driveway leading to the main house and research centre. The gates are rusty now, wide open too and possibly broken, but still they represent my first real point of recognition. My heart begins to race. I’m ready to step from the moving vehicle when David announces that we are about to drive through the gates and park up ahead on the overgrown lawn. This we do and I sprint from the car back towards what was once the grand entrance to an enchanting playground, The Banana Breeding Station Bodles, where I once lived.

Revisiting the scene of a distant memory can be a tricky business. One is never quite sure, if the ghost is you, or if the place is ghostly. The net effect of this is like wandering through a dream wide awake, very eerie.

Three young Sparrow Hawks eye us from the scorching midday sky above. “Killy-killy-killy, yip-yip,” they cry in their rapid, high-pitched tone. They were lining up to pick at the bones of Bodles, and so was I.

“You probably don’t remember the great house,” Aubrey says, pointing towards the shell of what must once have been an impressive colonial home shaded behind perfectly elegant Palm trees. “That’s where the great Doctor Lecky lived. He was an imminent scientist and father of the Jamaican Dairy Industry.”

I of course have no memory of it.

“It’s all gone now,” Aubrey continues. “Last time I was here was for my brother Ren’s funeral in 2001.”

The last time I was there was on the day before by big return to England on August 19th 1973. And although my Aunt Annie’s house at the centre of this menagerie did not look completely beyond redemption, I too am applauded to see our once beautiful home dilapidated and in need of more than a little restoration (not to mention some brand new inhabitants).

Aubrey has already told me that his mother (my Aunt Annie) died in August 1994. She is buried a good few miles from here on the family plot somewhere in Saint Mary, apparently. I, however, want to pay my last respects to her in the place where I saw her last on the day before I left for England. I try her old bedroom door but it’s locked and securely fastened. On over to the main front entrance, a few feet away, but that too is locked and barricaded from within.

The house as I recall is built on a slight incline with four separate entrances to the three-bedroom property. There is a kitchen door on the right-hand elevation wall and one more door at the back, leading up from the orchard of sweet, fleshy mangoes, yellow grapefruits, and several species of lime tress. Shaded by an overgrowth of Guango trees at this end, it’s been easy for vagrants to enter in through the kitchen, leaving their empty beer cans and scorched signs of cooking scattered on the steps outside.

I half expect intruders but curiosity now has hold of me and I’m standing in the kitchen less than ten years old again.

A succulent hardwood floor polish smell fills the house. Fairy cakes, chicken soup, Ackee and salt fish, cherry pies, they all come back to me with the smell of hardwood wax. Why should hardwood floor polish suddenly remind me of my Aunt Annie’s good cooking? To be honest with you, I have had no thought of it in thirty odd years, but yes, Aunt Annie was a very good cook. She had lived in England, America, Canada, Cuba and Jamaica, you see, so she learned to make good food mixed with all these very different influences. It’s what she enjoyed doing most, I think, but she also enjoyed watching me eat because I was always so small.

“So when you gonna hurry up and put some meat and muscles on them bones then, man?”
“I eat a lot,” I’d tell her, “but it’s just that it doesn’t stick. That’s why I’m so skinny.”
“I was just the same,” she laughs. “I was exactly the same at your age.”

A rat jumps out from a hole in the ceiling just above my head and scurries off into my aunt’s room. Like cows, rats, and me, we just don’t get on. A rat once jumped in through the leg of my khaki shorts when I was a boy at school about seven years old. I didn’t let go of it until I knew it was dead. Rat eyes bulging, me screaming, and with my fingers’ prints squeezed into its lifeless carcass blood all over my tiny hands.

I pass quickly by my old bedroom on the way out. Our house was once built on a slight incline, remember, and when wind rustles surrounding trees, curtains blow, and doors slam as now.

“Did you manage to get inside?” cousin Aubrey wants to know.
“No, it’s all locked up.”
“So what kept you so long?”
“I was just checking to see if the mangoes at the back were ripe. You know I love mangoes, don’t you?”
“Wrong time of year for mangoes.”
“Is it?”
I can get someone to open up the place if you want.”
“No, thanks. Probably best to keep the old place locked up, anyway. Too many memories.”
“I hear you.”
“You two ready then?” David asks.
“Ready when you are, Driver.”

We take the new Super Highway all the way back home to Kingston because David wants to see just how fast he can go.

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Paul Boakye

Writer, editor and marketing specialist who sat on The Power Inquiry. Former editor and CEO of the consumer lifestyle magazine, Drum (UK), and author of five plays published for an academic audience by Alexander Street Press, USA. Recipient of business and writing awards, including prestigious accolades such as advising British government, BBC radio and TV commentator, and invitation to meet Queen Elizabeth II in 2007. Currently works as a communications professional, creating contagious ideas to help great brands change the conversation to their advantage, across the entire Central and West African region.

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Sexual Perversity in Bangkok

Paul Boakye — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:03:48 +0000

“HIV! HIV! – Go fuck yourself!” she said. And then I woke up. Or maybe it was the other way round. Maybe a whore outside my door was actually cursing her punter and I wasn’t dreaming at all, and then, I woke up.

“Why you don’t want condom? Fuck you! I don’t like you.”

“Fuck you too” said the English-speaking white male voice. “I don’t like either of you. Fuck off! Go on. Get out!”

Across the hallway a door slammed shut and the two Thai whores continued their cursing.

“You got no Willy. You got no Willy…he-he-he…Fuck you too! HIV! HIV!”

I must have fallen back to sleep because the phone rang and woke me up. It must have been about 10am, and for a moment, I had to think about where I was since I wasn’t used to a telephone being so close to my bed. I wasn’t going to answer it and had the sudden urge to pull the heavy cotton curtain that extra two inches across the crack left by the thin net curtain underneath, but sleepy laziness prevented me from rising up out of bed.

I thought I knew exactly who had called, and sure enough less than a minute later, I could hear William and Bineke’s voices outside my window. They knocked on the door three times and waited. Then I heard William mumble something in his distinctive Irish lilt as if he knew that I was inside hiding.

They had recently become my “new best friends” on a three-day jungle trek together just outside Chiang Mai. Eating roasted grasshoppers and sharing bamboo living quarters with seven others in our group, we had become close, while avoiding giant centipedes at nights our bodies covered in mosquitoes repellent. The tired-looking Dutch girl, Bineke, had been giving me the eye at first, but since William showed her more attention than I, they ended up copping off together in the middle of our first night, shagging quietly under sleeping bags beside me only revealed by their tiny breathless squeals. The two lesbians at the other end of our makeshift shack on stilts were pretty much up to the same thing too, of that I was certain, but they were a lot more successful at subtlety. In the morning, Bineka could barely look me in the eye, and William too, had zapped all of his energy and strength and was practically falling asleep everywhere.

Now here was his six foot shadow falling across my hotel window, just as I pulled over to the far corner of the bed, up against the wall, protected by thick heavy drawn curtains on this side. What’s the matter, couldn’t they believe that I’d gone out last night and got laid like the rest of this God-forsaken town? I’m a dreadlocked Rastaman from England with money in my wallet and ‘black inches’ in my pocket – what could be better than that in this phallically-challenged Asian sex city they call – Bangkok?

Yet despite my bravado, their doubts about me being out getting laid would have been exactly right because I just wasn’t feeling it. Hard to imagine, I know. I wasn’t behaving to type, they thought. I’d gone out with them last night for a few beers for a few hours and got bored and came right back to the hotel and promptly fell asleep. Something profound must have happened to me and my libido the moment I stepped off that plane here for the first time a few weeks ago and saw that every other person was either pimping their granny or selling their own flesh.

Now, I’m no prude, believe me. I’ve been around the block. I’ve travelled the world. But on my first trip to Asia it was as if something had got hold of me. To others it seemed unnatural; I wasn’t behaving like the “red-blooded” males from back home, and it was beginning to bother me. In fact, everything was beginning to bother me – and that in itself was beginning to bother me.

“You want boy? You want girl? You want Thai massage? You want Ganja? Where you from? Jamaica? America? You want nice young girl? You want 12-year old pussy? What you want? You need hotel?”

Bangkok was so frantic that I just couldn’t work it out. And while I really would have welcomed a relaxing spliff (since every taxi driver wanted to give me a joint), I was still trying to abstain and didn’t want to get set-up for a miserable life in a Third World prison. I’d heard about such people before, tricking vulnerable tourists out of their cash and into the hands of equally greedy police officers. But as I questioned everybody’s motives – quite apart from the obvious – I still couldn’t understand why everywhere I went someone was trying to sell me sex; sex with his misses; his mother; his daughter; his son. While on the streets, Hookers tugged on my arm trying to drag me into “girlie” bars. Yes, I’d been to underdeveloped countries before, spent several months travelling through Brazil for example, but I’d never experienced anything like this, and I just couldn’t comprehend exactly why life was so sexually permissive in certain parts of Thailand.

It didn’t seem to faze the mainly white European and North American males who were largely here for their sexual gratification and hedonistic pleasures. Most other foreigners seemed to positively welcome the added attention they got from the locals and even they began to infuriate me too after a while. Men that I could tell wouldn’t get much sexual play anywhere at home where suddenly walking the streets like the number one stud and all the time flanked by a bevy of Thai prostitutes, young girls, and boys, and everything else in between.

That was the most disturbing thing about the place, every other woman you saw wasn’t born a woman at all, but was some immaculately reconstructed “lady boy” almost indistinguishable from the real thing until it opened its mouth. And since that was more often than not around the end of some bloke’s knob, it was usually much too late before the unsuspecting dude realised that he’d just been…well, not that most men on holiday here were that bothered by that stage.

“If it looks like a chick and sucks dick like a chick, and swish like a chick, then it might as well be a chick for all intents and purposes,” Mr Cosmopolitan, a well-read and well-travelled American, was saying in the bar last night, ”and nobody here really gives a shit. That’s just the way it is and that’s why we come here.”

In reality, there were so many transsexuals around that after a while you began to think it perfectly natural that there were in fact three distinct genders – males, females and shemales. And that’s assuming you could tell the latter two apart, anyway.

So, according to the Yank in the bar last night who saw himself as a benefit to the local economy, sex tourism in Thailand could trace its roots back to the presence of American troupes on leave in the country during the Vietnam War in early 1960s. Today, of course, it is part of a rapidly growing sex industry that includes prostitution, online and offline pornography, bars, brothels and human trafficking. But while local males are said to make up the majority of punters paying for sex, it is the economic power of foreign tourists that continually fuels the lucrative trade and drives sex workers from across the country to major tourist destinations like Bangkok.

Rumour had it that convicted paedophile, Gary Glitter, had been living for a time not too far from where we sat drinking cocktails in a corner of Chinatown known as Phahurat, but you couldn’t always believe the tales people told you in a transient city like this one. What was true in fact is that around 30,000 to 40,000 children under eighteen years of age are exploited as prostitutes according to available estimates. Given the hidden nature of child sexual abuse, reliable figures are always hard to compile, but it is said that improvements in the economy, educational opportunities, citizenship rights and legislations have reduced the numbers to some degree. Nonetheless, the pitiful sight of it all had tugged at my mind so desperately that after the first week in the city I was back on a plane heading home to England, despite having booked a three month tour of Thailand, including all the usual tourist traps like Patpong, Phuket and Pattaya.

Things at home for me had hit rock bottom. In the months proceeding my first trip to Asia, my business collapsed, my relationship ended, and if it wasn’t for some creative accounting I wouldn’t now be in this hotel room complaining about my new best friends or the prospect of sitting around in glorious sunshine doing nothing for three months. After less than a week back in England, I had boarded another flight heading back to Thailand.

The intention, originally, was to get away for a while; to put some distance between me, my creditors, and the shit hitting the fan. I had actually fancied visiting Tibet. I had had this crazy feeling like I wanted to be in a remote Buddhist retreat somewhere, up there in the sacred mountains of the north, away from it all. The end of an affair can do that to a man.

Anyway, after checking up on Tibet on the Internet and realising that China probably wasn’t going to entertain any of my wishful thinking, I ended up in Thailand instead, after a major wrong turn at lastminute.com. Not exactly the Buddhist retreat I’d been hoping for now, is it? But maybe this second time around I’ll be able to cope better with over-sexed foreigners and exploited children and adults who are forced into helping their families by prostituting themselves.

I was just about to drift off to sleep again, but another knock at the door woke me, and then the telephone rang. What the hell were those two still doing banging on my door like the LAPD? Go away, please, will you, and leave me alone! Pulling the sheets up over my head, I snuggled up under the covers and held my breath.

Paul Boakye
Writer, editor and marketing specialist who sat on The Power Inquiry. Former editor and CEO of the consumer lifestyle magazine, Drum (UK), and author of five plays published for an academic audience by Alexander Street Press, USA. Recipient of business and writing awards, including prestigious accolades such as advising British government, BBC radio and TV commentator, and invitation to meet Queen Elizabeth II in 2007. Currently works as a communications professional, creating contagious ideas to help great brands change the conversation to their advantage, across the entire Central and West African region.
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