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I'd decided to go back to Georgetown the other way, via Teluk Bahang and the north coast of the island, just to have a look at it. The number 76 bus to Teluk Bahang passed the bottom of the track up to the farm every two hours, so it saved walking into Sungei Pinang too. This road was much more interesting than the way we'd come. It wound its way through the hills, which around here were mainly covered in rainforest.
I had to change buses at Teluk Bahang, which seemed to be some kind of minor seaside resort. From there all the way to Georgetown, it was completely suburban and mostly pretty ugly. The road went along the coast for a bit of the way though and it was nice to be able to look out over the ocean.
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I didn't want to go back to the Plaza, partly because i wanted a change and partly because i'd found it a bit too big and unriendly. So this time i checked into the D'budget Hostel, which was also run by Indians, and was much smaller. It had a rooftop terrace with tables and a thatched roof over it, where you could sit and look out over the city or over the water towards the mainland. The roof was a welcome refuge from the city streets and a place where i ended up spending a lot of time.
From there you could watch the ferries weaving their way backwards and forwards from Georgetown to Butterworth, the large ocean-going freighters and tankers going in and out of the port on the mainland and all the other small shipping that went on in that stretch of water. Or, in the evenings, you could look in the opposite direction and watch the sun setting behind the hills above the city.
I ended up spending three nights in Georgetown, not particularly because i wanted to be in Georgetown, but because i had a few things i had to do before i left. Anyway, i was actually enjoying being there, although there wasn't really much in the way of things to do in that town.
The runup to a general election was happening in Malaysia at that time. There were masses of ugly plastic flags and posters being stuck up all over the place, making Georgetown look like a giant car yard. Malaysia was a one party state. Ever since independence, the only party to be in power was the national front or Barisan Nasional party and there was no reason to think it would be any different this time. A lot of Malaysia's repressive laws were handed directly down from the Brutish empire when they got their independence, including the national security act, which allows the government to put political dissidents in gaol indefinitely, without the need to charge them or have a trial. There were a lot of people locked up under this law for disagreeing with the government. Malaysia is really the ultimate in democracy. You can vote, sure, but it won't make any difference to who's running the country. It's the same everywhere, but at least there it's obvious what the score is. And it was illegal to discuss politics in public in Malaysia, so you ran the risk of getting put in prison if you grumbled about the system in a cafe or a park. I don't know if they would have locked me up for it, but i didn't feel like testing out my luck! *-*-*
The town on the thai side of the border crossing is called Thungmo, i can't remember what the malaysian side's called. Anyway, they both share one railway platform. The train comes in to the station, everyone gets out, walks in one end of the station building and goes through malaysian customs and immigration, then walks a few feet and goes through thai immigration and customs and then back out onto the platform again, to get back on the train.
After i'd passed through all the bureaucratic bullshit and was back out on the platform, which presumably had changed from being Malaysia to being Thailand while we were inside immigration building, i was looking back in through the window and i saw a sign. It said that no hippy types of people were allowed in "the kingdom" and then it went on to describe what to look for as a guide to spotting hippies. These included: slippers, unless part of national costume; loose silk pants; shorts, unless respectable; singlets or vests with nothing worn underneath them; and a few other ridiculous things. It ended by saying that anyone who's found looking like that after they've been allowed into the country will be immediately deported!
I started thinking, shit! i'd better move away from this sign, in case someone puts me and it together and i find myself unceremoniously thrown back out to Malaysia. I wondered if my sleeveless t-shirt, stubbies shorts and thongs sandals would pass for australian national costume - specially with my beaten-up old drizabone bush hat!
The rest of the journey to Surat Thani was uneventful. It was interesting being in Thailand in a way, although there wasn't a great difference really noticeable from the train. We arrived at Surat Thani at about eleven o'clock at night - an hour late. There was supposed to be a boat from Surat Thani to Koh Samui, the island i was headed for, at about half past ten, but it looked like it was too late for that. That was predictable. I decided to find a hotel near the railway station, which was actually about fifteen kilometres from Surat Thani itself, and go and catch a ferry in the morning.
However, somehow i got hijacked by these two people who'd been on the train. She was thai and he was belgian and they were married, mainly for immigration reasons, i think. Anyway, this bunch of kids in a ute had convinced them that there was a later ferry and they'd drive them into town to catch it. Somehow, they managed to drag me along, although i was fully aware that there would be no boat and that the people with the car just wanted to take us to town so they could charge us for it. Anyway, somehow i felt it was more interesting than finding a hotel and going off to bed.
And of course, there wasn't a boat. I don't know how much they charged us for the trip into town, but i'm sure it was extortionate. Anyway, there we were, at the dock where the night boat leaves from, in the middle of the night, and no boat till tomorrow sometime. Right next to the dock there was a night market, which was pretty lively and added a bit of interest to the situation. We sat down and discussed what to do. The other two were totally off their heads in a way. They didn't really seem to know whether they were coming or going. In the end, we sat there, in front of the dock, next to the night market, until the morning.
It was weird, but it was an interesting night. I went to the market and bought a half bottle of Mae Kong thai whisky and drank my way through most of that during the night. While we sat there, quite a few different people came up and spoke to us, but no-one hassled us, like they would have done in a similar situation in Indonesia.
One of the people who stood and talked to us for quite a while was, i think, french. He was obviously out of his head on something - probably speed, which you can buy over the counter at the chemists - and was raving on a fair bit. He was talking about people he knows who were in Surat Thani jail at the time. They were tourists who'd been busted for marijuana on the islands and were stuck in jail indefinitely in really apalling conditions, because they didn't have enough money to pay off the police. Apparently the police had been busting a lot of people on Koh Samui and Koh Pha Ngan, the next island to it, with marijuana. It was partly because there was money to be made from tourists and partly as a result of pressure from the united states government. What it's got to do with those interfering turds i'm fucked if i know, but they think the whole world's their "back yard" and they can stick their noses in anywhere that suits them.
At about five in the morning, the market was closing up and we got sick of sitting in that spot too, so we went round the corner to where there was a bus office, where you could get ferry tickets to Koh Samui. The daytime ferries didn't leave from the town, but from a port some distance away, and you had to catch a bus there to get the ferry. We waited at the bus office for about another two hours.
Not far away from there, on the other side of the dock from the night market, the daytime fruit and vegie market was beginning to open. I wandered down there and bought a large bunch of bananas. I hadn't eaten anything much at all since leaving Georgetown, well over twelve hours before. The Mae Kong was alright though, washed down with plenty of water, which is absolutely essential in tropical climates when you're drinking spirits - or any alcohol really. But i was beginning to feel the effect of hunger and half a dozen bananas were a welcome meal.
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The ferry to Koh Samui was a similar type of boat to the one we got from Sumatra to Batam on the way out of Indonesia. But it was much more beaten up and seemed slower. Virtually everyone on board were european tourists. The trip to Na Thon, the main town on Koh Samui took a couple of hours, during which time we were in more or less open sea.
Na Thon was pretty horrible. Very touristy and not really my sort of place. I changed some money at the bank there and got out as quick as i could. Someone i'd met in Georgetown had recommended Mae Nam beach as the best place to go on the island and i jumped in the first taxi going there. Here what they call "taxis" are more or less the same thing as they call "bemos" in Indonesia. In other words, small scale buses really. The ones here were really utes with roofs over the back and benches along either side. You could fit close to twenty people in them with a bit of a squeeze.
At Mae Nam, i found a pleasant, but slightly decayed bungalow, right on the beach for forty baht, which was really cheap. That was the same as four ringgits, or half of what a dorm bed cost in Georgetown. I was spinning out seriously by this time, what with not sleeping, not eating properly and drinking all that whisky. I had some food at the restaurant which was part of the bungalows. It was a really beautiful thai curry vegetables. This was a pleasant change from the food i'd been eating up till then.
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The next morning i decided to have a look at Cha Weng, one of the main towns on the island. When i got there, i was horrified. It was a really disgusting tourist trap nightmare hell! I'm sure it's no worse than hundreds of other european tourist ghettos, scattered around the world, but i hate them too.
I really can't stand places that just exist for tourists. And the bigger and more wanky they are, they more they disgust me. This was big, wanky, overdeveloped and expensive. I wanted to throw up - especially when i looked at the "british" bars with their fucking pathetic bulldogs and Brutish flags and drunk dickheads who probably don't even know what country they're in anyway. This form of colonization by tourism really pisses me off. At that point, i realized what this island was all about and i knew i had to leave.
A man in the bemo i'd been in on the way there had said i should go to Koh Pha Ngan. He said he used to live in Cha Weng and had lived there for ten years, but he couldn't stand it now. Koh Pha Ngan was much better, he reckoned. I decided to follow his advice and go there.
When i got back to Mae Nam, i found there was a boat from Mae Nam beach to Koh Pha Ngan at midday. This was good as it would save going all the way to Na Thon to catch a ferry. But i only had an hour to get my stuff together and check out of the bungalow.
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I thought this form of engine was a bit strange, as it must have been very inefficient in terms of fuel consumption, because of two things. Firstly, the angle of the propeller in the water, which wasn't in line with the direction of movement of the boat. Secondly, because of the angles involved, the propeller was very close to the surface and often even slightly out of the water, this created a lot of spray and splashing which wastes a fair proportion of the power of the engine. Still, they could get up a fair bit of speed with the things and as all the boats there were powered in that way, they must have been pretty good.
The journey to Koh Pha Ngan took about half an hour and we landed on the west side of Haad Rin, which is one of the two main towns on the island. There was a sort of dock, with a kind of breakwater or pier built from coral, which the boat stopped alongside. I asked someone on the shore where the best place to find a cheap bungalow was. She gave me a bit of an idea where to look and i wandered off into the town.
Haad Rin is more my sort of place. But only just, nowadays, by the look of it. It's on the verge of becoming another Cha Weng. However, it wasn't there yet. The streets were still only dirt tracks and the buildings were on a human scale and built in a sort of friendly way, rather than with the ugly efficient concrete prison archiecture that they use when they go more upmarket.
These places all start as a collection of roughly built huts with no electricity, running water or much else in the way of services. The only people they can attract to stay there are the more hippyish, traveller types of scumbag, who actually like the fact that the place not only feels natural, it feels like *Thailand* (or wherever it is). The straight, conventional people who live in television land and are scared of nature don't want to go to that sort of place. But then, after a while of the scumbags bringing money into the place, the locals can afford to build something better and the place gradually goes a little bit up market. Eventually it becomes a tourist ghetto cum prison camp and the original people who put up with the inconvenience and discomfort in the first place get driven out by the hoardes of two-week tourists who can afford to pay exorbitant prices because it's only for two weeks every year.
I'm not really blaming the two-week-tourists for it, although i can't understand why they live the way they do and why they have to imprison themselves in some kind of isolation unit where they don't have to deal with the real world. It's really the fault of the original scumbags, for wanting to stay somewhere where there's other people like them, rather than just immersing themselves in the local culture without a little colony. They're the ones who provide the initial money for the construction of these vast luxury prison camps that have destroyed, and are continuing to destroy vast areas of land and culture.
Anyway, i liked Haad Rin, it had a good feel to it, even though it was a fairly large european tourist ghetto. I found a bungalow high up on the hillside overlooking the north end of the east beach.
Haad Rin is on a peninsular, which stretches out into the sea sothwards from the island, so it has a beach on both sides of town. The west, or "sunset" beach was where the boats came and went from. There was a narrow strip of sand, along the edge of a generally totally calm stretch of sea. All along the beach were bungalows of various different types and prices. They mostly had thatched roofs, but some were built from timber and plywood and were very small, with just a single room and some were built from brick or concrete with bathrooms built in.
The east, or "sunrise" beach was a wide strip of white sand on the edge of a slightly rougher patch of sea. This was where everyone in town went to lie around in the sun and swim. In fact, this was where all the life of the place was focussed. The main bars were along here and there was a lot of accomodation next to this beach - some bungalows and some big buildings with separate rooms or rows of flatlets. At both ends of this beach there were rocky hills rising above the water, making it into a bay. And on the hills at both ends there were bungalows.
Mine was a long walk up a steep path. But it was worth it. The view from up there was good and it was a bit more isolated and quiet than the beach-level ones. It was also cheap. However, i got accidentally thrown out of it after being there for three nights, because the idiots that ran the place reckoned i hadn't checked in properly and thought the place was empty. They'd given me the key. It was their responsibility to tell me how i was supposed to check in. There hadn't been any checkin formalities at Mae Nam, so how was i supposed to know? Anyway, the bastards broke my padlock, which was on the door, and put someone else in there. I was really pissed off, partly because there was a big full moon party in a couple of days and the accomodation in Haad Rin was filling up. I didn't fancy my chances of finding somewhere else cheap. They said i could talk to the woman who was in there and ask her if she'd go, but i didn't want to do that, it would only put her in the same position as me and as i was already in it, i might as well stay in it. Anyway it had left a bad taste in my mouth and i didn't want to stay in their shitty place any more anyway. However, i'd stashed my passports in the roof and i had to go and get them back. As the woman wasn't there, i had to climb in through the window, which was really easy.
Oh well, i thought, it was time for a change of scenery anyway. I decided to move to the sunset beach if i could find somewhere cheap there. It wasn't actually as hard as i'd expected and i was soon in a bit of a tumbledown old bungalow right on the beach (that was the main reason why it was falling down!) It was cheap and pleasant, although it was smaller than the other one. But it was nice to have the water right outside my door and to be able to sit on the verandah and watch the sun setting over the sea, straight in front or the buungalow.
This period in Haad Rin was an unusual one for me. I spent most of the time out all night, listening and dancing to loud techno and drinking Mae Kong whisky and bottles of water. I slept a lot of the day and spent a fair bit of the rest of it on the beach. It's not a way i live very often these days, but it was just what i needed and i really enjoyed it.
I didn't get to know many people while i was there, in fact i hardly spoke to many people really. The only people i saw and spoke to regularly were a group of scandinavians who i got to know on a very shallow level. But that all suited me as i needed this space to myself at that point.
While i was in Haad Rin it was the thai new year, or Song Kran. This is a holiday for Thais and they all spend the day partying and throwing water over each other, which is their way of celebrating the event.
A day or two after Song Kran, was the full moon party. They had one every full moon at that time of year, although this was due to be the last as the police had got too heavy and were causing too many hassles and the organizers were giving it up. The party took place on the sunrise beach on Friday the fourteenth and hundreds of people came to the island just for that night.
On the Friday morning i ran into Kelly, a woman i knew from Australia. Neither of us had seen or heard of each other since the SkyRail blockade in Kuranda in north Queensland eight or nine months before. At that time we were camped in the middle of a patch of World Heritage National Park rainforest, trying to stop it being chopped down to build a tourist cable car. Unfortuately we didn't manage to prevent them from desroying the place.
Kelly was travelling with a woman called Yoki who came from Croatia and had somehow managed to escape and find a way to travel a bit around the world. She had a lot of problems though, as not many countries will allow Croatians in. They were there for the full moon party and only planned to stay in Haad Rin for that night. But they ended up getting a bungalow in the same place as me and staying there for three days.
The full moon party was nothing special. Just a massive crowd of people on the beach all night. I'd preferred the place when it had been a bit quieter, before all this. And i didn't stay up very long that night as i was tired and i couldn't really be bothered.
The following night, however, when the town was very quiet because everyone was recovering, i stayed up all night and watched the sun rise over the sea on the east beach. Although the thai calendars said that the day before had been full moon, i was quite sure it was actually the following night. I don't know why, but the moon's really full for three days and maybe they put down the first day, rather than the middle one. My british tide table agrees with me, but then there's eight hours time difference, and it's possible that it was really on the Friday in Thailand. Who knows? And, really, who cares?!
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On Monday, i went with Kelly and Yoki to a place a couple of bays round the coast to the north. We caught the boat there from the same place i'd arrived at from Mae Nam - in fact, it was the same boat. The place we went to was near Had Yuan, but i think the actual beach itself had a different name. There was a guest house there called the Sanctuary, which was run by europeans who had been given the land by some buddhist monks. I was told the story by an australian woman in Georgetown some time later, but i can't remember it exactly now. Anyway, it was a weird place, a sort of hippy ghetto, "traveller" guesthouse, but it was nice and the food was good.
The first night i was really tired and went to sleep at about five in the evening. I was sleeping in the dormitory, which was above the restaurant area and had eight or ten people staying in it. At about one in the morning i was woken up by loud, deranged shouting. One of the men who live there fairly fulltime was going off his head after drinking all evening. The way he was yelling really reminded me of two people i'd lived with at different times and in different cirumstances who went completely psycho sometimes after drinking. It was as if the alcohol - and they didn't need much - turned them into a completely different person. Which it didn't of course, it just borught out aspects of themselves that they'd managed to bury so deeply that every now and then, given the opportunity, they had to burst out violently through the suppression.
Anyway, this man sounded typically like the nasty side of this Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde schizophrenia coming out violently. It was that sort of situation where it doesn't matter what you say or do they won't leave you alone. They want a fight and they're not going to let you walk away. They'll follow you up the street screaming at you if they have to. Anyway, after listening to him yelling and smashing up the furniture for quite a long time, i got up and looked out the window. He was on the beach down below and he was holding a woman who was obviously his girlfriend in a very violent way. I watched for a while, getting more and more pissed off, but uncertain of what to do.
In this situation it's very hard to do anything that's not going to make things worse. If i'd shouted out "leave her alone!" he would have certainly got more agressive to her, and started saying she must have been fucking me or something... In the end, it began to look like he was going to seriously hurt her soon and i shouted out the window "Shut the fuck up! We're trying to get some sleep up here!" I figured that was the only valid possibility that would do anything other than increase the focus of his attention on her. I had to distract him and maybe give her a chance to get away.
I knew what i was doing, but i was a bit surprised by the speed and violence of his reaction. He immediately spun round, grabbed a handful of sand and threw it up at the window. Then he stood up and ran into the restaurant and up the stairs to the dorm, shouting some agressive shit. There was no way i was going to get into a fight with him. If he wanted to hit me, then i guess he would have had to, but i wouldn't have hit him back - not unless i absolutely had to to save getting killed. Anyway, i had no intention of allowing anything to happen up there in the dormitory. There were other people there who would probably get involved. As it had been me that had started it, it wasn't fair to drag them in too. Also i had visions of us going through the window and ending up crashing onto the rocks below.
I never knew exactly how i did it, maybe i just went invisible... But somehow i managed to get out of the door after he'd come in without him noticing. He was yelling and shouting "where are you hiding?" etc and i called out to him when i was almost at the bottom of the stairs: "I'm down here. I'm not talking to you up there!"
Of course, he raced back down the stairs and stood facing me. I think the fact that i was being reasonable and in no way aggressive disarmed him quite a bit. He gave me a funny look, unsuccesfully trying to size me up, a bit thrown by my attitude and the fact that i was quite calm. But he was shouting at me and still freaking out. In the end, he pushed me, in the way that these weak aggro bastards do - they want you to hit them first, so they can find out if you're going to kill them or not, while it's still possible to get out of it alive. Anyway, i was foolishly standing just in front of a low table and when he pushed me i fell over backwards onto it. It was quite funny really.
At this point, some of the other people there, who i presume were his mates, joined in, obviously thinking he was going to kill me, and jumped on him. This was a bit of a relief, as it should have been them that dealt with him in the first place. Eventually it all calmed down a bit and i went back to bed.
Looking back on it afterwards, the whole thing was really comical. I wish i'd been able to watch it. First there's me shouting out of the window and then him racing up the stairs yelling. Then me racing down and shouting up at him. Then him racing back down.... etc etc!
Anyway, i achieved what i set out to do and the woman escaped. Until the next time, that is. Apparently he goes like that quite regularly. They all do, don't they. I lived with a woman like that for two years. At the end of it i couldn't work out why i'd stuck it for so long. But i knew really. It's like being in the front line in a war, you're under so much stress you can't think clearly enough to decide to just get up and walk away.
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The ride in the taxi (or bemo) from Haad Rin was hell. It was a really rough dirt road with steep hills and we nearly slid out of the back on some of them. But fortunately it wasn't very far.
The night boat was good. It was a timber, asian-style boat, maybe eighty foot long, with two internal decks. the top deck had rows of double mattresses, pushed right up against each other, making long multiple beds on each side, with a few raised single beds in the middle, with room under them for luggage. The bottom deck, which was cheaper, had sleeping mats instead of mattresses. I got a space in the top deck, which was a pleasant and comfortable place to spend an all-night jorney. Unfortunately, though, it was only a six hour trip, but i got a decent night's sleep anyway.
We arrived at Surat Thani at four in the morning, at the same jetty where i'd spent the night a week or two before. I went and sat outside the same bus office, which was where i had to catch the bus back to Malaysia from. I only had an hour or so to wait.
It was a pretty boring trip in a minibus. And the driver was completely psycho, as all bus drivers seem to be. This bus took me to Hat Yai, which is a big town not far from the border. There i had to hang around for an our or so before getting on the minibus that would go the rest of the way.
Not long after leaving Hat Yai, the driver stopped at a shop and came out with two largish packages wrapped in brown paper and clear pastic, which looked like they weighed about ten kilos each. He stuck these in the back section of the bus, with the luggage.
Not very much later, we came to the border. After the bus had gone through the thai border control, and while the driver was waiting for us to come back from getting our passports checked, he moved one of the brown packages from the back into the inside of the bus, under one of he seats.
At the malaysian border, we had to get out and carry our bags through with us while the bus drove through the border control. The bus was checked fairly half-heartedly by two customs officers. One of them looked inside the brown package in the back, but ignored the one inside. Then we all got back in and the driver walked off to one side with the customs men. I was watching, fascinated. I knew there was something dodgy going on. I saw the driver give one of the customs officers some money and then he walked back to the bus and off we went. I wished i knew what was inside that package!
We arrived in Penang at about six in the evening malayasian time, which was five, thai time and I went back to the D'Budget hostel.
Fortunately the election was over. It had taken place while i was in Thailand and, surprise, surprise, Mahathir Mohammed and his Barisan Nasional party had won it again! Unfortunately all the shitty little plastic flags and all the stickers and posters were still up and there was no sign that anyone was likely to remove them before they fell down of their own accord. *-*-*
The next day, i met up with Nicki in Gelugor, where she'd been working the day before in the Penang Organic Farms office there. Gelugor's really an outer suburb of Georgetown. She hadn't been having an exactly wonderful time with Ong, who turned out to be really sexist and arrogant and thinks he's the only one who knows the right way to do things. She's thinking about staying on in Malaysia for a while though, although it would mean she'd ahve to stay at the farm and put up with that shit. Anyway, she had to go back up there that afternoon as there was a group of eighty visitors coming over the weekend! I wasn't interested, although i had been planning to go back to the farm. Eighty people didn't sound like much fun to me and anyway, the stuff she'd told me about Ong, which i didn't doubt for a second, because i trust her judgement in those things, had put me off going back there at all really. In a way i hadn't really felt like it beforehand. I already felt a bit uncomfortable about the place.
I went back to Georgetown, changed some money and got myself waitlisted for the flight to Mexico on the the thirtieth which, surprisingly, was the new moon! The next day the booking was confirmed and i got my ticket. I was leaving in a week.
That evening, i phoned Ray, in London, to find out the whereabouts of a friend of mine, Paula, who was in Mexico at that time as far as i knew. He told me she was in a place called Zipolite and gave me directions to where she was staying.
On Monday, Nicki came down from Sungei Pinang and checked into the D'Budget. She had all her stuff with her and had decided she wasn't going to go back. We spent the rest of the week together in Georgetown, which wasn't very exciting, but we had a good time.
At half past four on Saturday morning, Nicki caught a bus to Thailand. She just had enough money to spend a week there before flying back to Darwin from Penang. She was headed for Koh Pha Ngan. It was all happening really fast now, somehow. This was the end of nearly four months of travelling together. It was really strange and i began to feel a kind of hollow loneliness and apprehension as i looked forward to my own departure from this continent the following day.
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We were shepherded into the transit lounge by a standard-plastic, subservient, have-a-nice-day-saying seppo in a silly airport uniform. Yuk! We might not have been technically in the States, but we were still touched by its robots.
In the departure lounge, two ugly uniformed customs officers, one male, one female, checked our passports and proceeded to hassle us in their usual braindead manner. Seeing my tattoos and generally scruffy appearance as a threat to u.s. world domination, they drag me off downstairs to be thoroughly searched, hassled and interrogated.
They asked me a lot of really stupid quesions such as: "If you're on your way from Australian to Britain, why are you going in such a roundabout way? People normally go by the shortest route from one place to another!"
What???!!! Has this fuckwit ever looked around him? There he was, working in an airport, surrounded all day and every day by thousands of people, all travelling... Did he really think they were all just going from A to B by the shortest route and that travelling's just a means of geting there? Come to that, did he really think at all? I doubt it.
Then they hassled me about where i got my money from. It would really be an insult to my intelligence (or theirs, i'm not sure which!), if they actually did think i'd be stupid enough to smuggle drugs looking like that! But of course they didn't think that at all. They were just harrassing me because i looked different - even if they weren't fully conscious of it themselves. The other person who got similar treatment was being harrassed because he was mexican. They have to do it, it's part of their job description:
"s.17.A. Systematic harrassment of weirdoes and mexicans."
So they wanted to x-ray me, as part of the game, of course. "We want to subject you to proven cancer-causing radiation. You can refuse, of course, but then we'll take that as an indication of your guilt and keep you here for a couple of days till you shit out what you obviously haven't got inside you!" The old witch hunt days never ended did they? If you drown you were innocent, if you don't drown you were guilty and we'll kill you!
Of course, i had to agree - anything to get out of their poxy country as quickly as possible. Not that i was even technically in it, of course. So they decided against x-ray treatment and let me get back on the plane, which they'd delayed for at least half an hour with their pathetic games.
All this because we had to get off while the plane refuelled!
Of course, there are quite a few things which are legal in Malaysia and Mexico, but not in the u.s.. For instance, certain pharmaceuticals, without prescription. If these arseholes had found these on me they would very likely have busted me. The world police have arrived. It doesn't matter whether you're breaking the laws of the countries you're going from or to, we're imposing our laws on any traffic between the two countries that we can possibly get our hands on.
I'd like to see the reaction of the seppo government if arab countries, such as Bahrain, where alcohol is illegal and hundreds of planes refuel every day, started busting transit passengers for the duty free alcohol they were carrying between two other countries. They'd probably nuke them in self-righteous indignation at such an evil infringement of human rights!
I'll never catch a flight that goes via the United States again if i can possibly avoid it. Apart from the harrassment, some of the cost of the ticket goes to paying for the landing there and i refuse to pay those bastards for the privilege of being harrassed by them.
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