Death of an Adventure Traveler
By Rolf Potts
Matthew, the small Burmese Kayin man who worked the front desk at the Lotus Guesthouse, was the first one to suggest that Mr. Benny might be dead. “Benny went back to Burma so he could die near his family,” he told me, his eyes fixed on the TV set as flickering Shiites danced in the streets of Iraq. “He was too sick to live in Thailand any more.”
I had just returned to the rainy border town of Ranong, Thailand, after an absence of five months. It was April 9, 2003, the day U.S. tanks rolled into central Baghdad. Matthew had been squatting in the guesthouse lobby, translating BBC commentary for the other hotel workers all of them illegal migrant workers from Burma. Deciphering the images from Iraq proved to be a difficult process, since even the BBC commentators didn’t seem to know what was going on. Had Baghdad fallen or not? Were the U.S. soldiers welcomed or reviled? Nobody knew for sure, but when a soldier on the TV flung an American flag over the head of the Saddam Hussein statue in Firdos Square, the Burmese workers had let out a cheer, as if Rangoon’s junta would be next.
When the BBC cut to a commercial, Matthew finally looked over at me. “How did you know Benny?” he asked. Matthew’s eyes were dark, fringed by faint yellow; he wore a crisp Oxford shirt, and his black hair was just beginning to show gray. A devout Baptist like many ethnic Kayin, he was painfully earnest in his beliefs a quality that would eventually get him fired from the guesthouse.
“Mr. Benny was my barber,” I said. Benny had also been my best friend in Ranong, and one of the most remarkable men I’d ever met. He’d evaded death so many times in his life that I found it hard to believe that he would submit to a quiet end back in Burma. “Are you sure he’s dead?”
Matthew shrugged. “I didn’t even know him. You should talk to Phiman. He’ll know if Benny is still alive.”
Phiman was a Thai man who owned the dusty little TV repair shop where Mr. Benny slept. Since I didn’t speak enough Thai for Phiman to understand me, this meant I had to get translation help from Ezio, a barrel-chested Italian who lived with his Thai wife on the other side of Ranong. I’d sold my motorcycle when I’d last left Thailand, so I headed off to Ezio’s place on foot, skirting the hot, murky puddles that dotted the streets after heavy rains.
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Of all the places in the world where I’d lived for more than a couple of months, Ranong was by far the most obscure. A frumpy border town of 30,000 people in the rainiest part of Thailand’s isthmus, it held little appeal for tourists apart from its proximity to the southern tip of Burma, where backpackers enamored with the country’s meditation retreats and full-moon parties could get a cheap re-entry visa in a couple of hours. Besides fishing and tin mining, timber poaching and amphetamine smuggling seemed to be Ranong’s principal industries, and scores of refugees from Burma’s repressive dictatorship lived in squalid huts at the edges of town. Heavy rains resulted in power blackouts that could last for days, and the sour-fresh scent of rainforest competed with the fishy smell of the port. Though just four hours by motorcycle from the tourist resort of Phuket and 10 hours by bus from the modern hum of Bangkok Ranong felt years away from the rest of Thailand.
I’d first arrived in Ranong two years earier, while writing an article about the Moken sea gypsies who lived in the islands on the Burmese side of the sea-border. I’d been trying to build my career as an adventure-travel writer, and a Major American Luxury-Travel Magazine had underwritten my journey to investigate recent tourism ventures into Moken territory. I didn’t have a permanent address at the time, so I’d rented a studio room at the Lotus Guesthouse to write the sea gypsy article. When it was finished I decided to stay in the sleepy town to work on my first book, a philosophical how-to primer about long-term travel.
Writing my book required long stretches of isolation, and I didn’t socialize much during my stint in Ranong. I tried to get out of my room to explore the town from time to time, but even six months into my tenure, Thai kids who lived just a few blocks away from my guesthouse would shout “farang!” at me as I walked past, as if I was just another random backpacker in town for a visa run. The word, which means “foreigner,” was a reminder of how little I really knew about the daily workings of Ranong, or of Thailand in general.
Besides Ezio and Matthew, the only person I saw regularly when I lived in Ranong was Mr. Benny a thin, sexagenarian Burmese émigré who worked at a humid storefront barbershop in the center of town. His haircuts cost 40 baht (about $0.90 at the time), and afterwards he’d invite me to a dim café next door and spend most of his fee on coffee thickened with condensed milk. As we sipped from dented aluminum cups, he would tell me stories about his younger years, when he would make ends meet for his family by smuggling tin to Malaysia, or diving for pearls off the coast of Burma. Sometimes he’d invite me to join him for Sunday services at the local Catholic chapel; other times he’d ask me to meet him at his cramped bunkroom in the TV repair shop to practice English vocabulary. When he learned that I hailed from the prairies of North America, he told me that his favorite English-language book was an old cowboy novel called The Big Sky. I’d found a used copy of the novel when I was back in the U.S. on my book tour; one reason I’d returned to Ranong was so that I could present The Big Sky to Mr. Benny.
The other reason I’d returned to Ranong was to find some isolation so I could finish a magazine article that was weeks overdue. The adventure stories I’d written two years earlier for the Major American Luxury-Travel Magazine had attracted the attention of a Major American Adventure-Travel Magazine, and I’d been discussing possible assignments with an editor for months. Unfortunately, no story I proposed exploring fishing villages along the upper Cambodian Mekong, mountaineering in Turkish Kurdistan, visiting the isolated tribesmen of the Andaman Islands seemed quite right for him. We’d finally settled on a how-to feature about “classic adventures” in Asia. I’d spent much of the previous three years adventuring through the distant corners of the Asian continent, but this experience had put me at a weird disadvantage in reporting the story. “You’re giving us too much geography,” my editor would tell me every time I submitted a new list of destination summaries. Readers of Major American Adventure-Travel Magazines, he told me, didn’t want to read about journeys that were obscure or complicated; they wanted exotic challenges wherein they might test or, at least, imagine themselves testing the extremes of human experience.
For weeks, I had trouble understanding exactly what this meant, and my increasingly irritated editor returned my story drafts marked with comments like, “Is there a helicopter service that can get you there faster?” and, “Would you recommend some cutting-edge outerwear for this kind of trek?” and, “Can you think of any celebrities who’ve visited the region recenty? In time, I discerned that adventure itself was far less important to the magazine than creating a romanticized sense of adventure preferably with recommendations on where to buy a cappuccino and a Swedish massage afterwards. The Major American Adventure-Travel Magazine, it seemed, wanted me to create a tantalizing recipe for the exotic and the unexpected, but only the kind of “unexpected” that could be planned in advance and completed in less than three weeks.
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