Chapter 20

The Middle of Nowhere

Ceduna, South Australia

January 14

Everything is relative, and after two weeks in funky old Rajasthan, Bangkok—with its elevated highways and forty-story office towers—looked every bit the First World city. My body was still wracked by bronchitis and some sort of Indian crud, so as soon as we checked into our hotel room, I slung out the “Do Not Disturb” sign and put myself in quarantine for forty-eight hours. After that, I felt practically human again, but the moment I was back on my feet, Devi and I had to contend with the first serious injury of the trip.

Initially, it didn’t seem like much. Kara and Willie were chasing each other around the hotel room, and Willie slammed two of Kara’s fingers in a heavy wooden door. Devi and I repeatedly assured Kara—who tends to suffer theatrically—that she’d eventually recover. But the third day after the accident, her fingernails were black and the tips of her fingers were a disturbing shade of green. At that point, I trotted Kara over to the hotel nurse. She took one glance at Kara’s fingers and immediately dispatched us to nearby Bumrungrad Hospital.

As Kara and I rode through the muggy, crowded streets of Bangkok toward the hospital, I didn’t know what to expect. But the taxi dropped us in front of a large, modern facility that would have looked right at home in any American suburb. Inside, a nurse directed us to a pediatric waiting room decorated in bright primary colors. We filled out a simple form, and ten minutes later we were introduced to Dr. Chiraporn, a prim professional woman in a white coat who spoke English with a cultured accent. Dr. Chiraporn cut the bandages from Kara’s fingers and promptly made her diagnosis.

“Abscessed subungual hematomas,” she said.

“I told you it was serious,” Kara said, vindicated that her injury had such a grave moniker.

“So what do we do?” I asked.

“The fingernails must be removed to relieve the pressure,” replied Dr. Chiraporn, “then she’ll need a course of antibiotics.”

“They have to cut off my fingernails?” wailed Kara. “Oh, no!”

“Is that something you can do, doctor?”

“No, it’s a surgical procedure. But, if you like, I can arrange a surgeon here at the hospital.”

“I’d really appreciate that,” I said, trying to imagine what sort of bureaucracy we’d face trying to organize an operation in a foreign hospital.

Dr. Chiraporn talked on the telephone for a few minutes, then directed us toward the emergency room. “When you get there, ask for Dr. Wongsrisoontorn,” she said.

“Could you repeat that?” I said, demonstrating the ferang’s²⁷ usual lack of facility with long Thai names.

“Wongsrisoontorn,” she replied. “Amnauy Wongsrisoontorn. Don’t worry. They’re expecting you.”

Dr. Wongsrisoontorn turned out to be a rather elegant University of Southern California Med School grad in his mid-thirties. He confirmed Dr. Chiraporn’s diagnosis and said, “I can remove those fingernails now.”

“Right now?” I asked, amazed that everything was so easy and efficient here.

“If you like.”

Kara was quickly laid on a gurney and wheeled into the operating room. She was terrified, so I stayed by her side comforting her as the surgeon injected anesthesia into her fingers. When it took effect, the doctor deftly sliced two fingernails off with a scalpel and drained the accumulated blood and pus. It was a gory procedure—painful even to watch. When the surgeon finally wrapped Kara’s fingers in gauze, I held her in my arms, and asked if she was all right.

“I told you it was serious,” she said, tears running down her cheeks. “I told everyone it was serious, but no one would listen to me.”

“You were right, Kara. We should have listened to you,” I said, stroking her hair and wiping away her tears. “Are you feeling better now?”

“I guess so,” she said, gazing at her bandaged fingers, “but I couldn’t even watch while they were doing it. Was it really gross?”

“Really gross,” I said, “I thought I was going to throw up.”

She laughed and said, “Stop it, Daddy.”

Of course, our medical insurance wasn’t going to cover any of this, so as we walked toward the discharge desk, I wondered how much this whole fandango was going to cost. The cashier called out something vaguely resembling Kara’s name, and handed me a bill addressed to “Girl Kara Cohen.” It was for 1,927 baht—slightly less than seventy-eight dollars—and that was for everything—two consultations, the surgery, anesthesia, nurses, the operating room, supplies, dressings, antibiotics, the works. Any American hospital would have taken three times as long and charged ten times as much to achieve the same result. Obviously, the cost of living is lower in Thailand, but not that much lower.

“Are you sure this is right?” I asked the clerk. “It doesn’t seem like it’s enough.” He looked at me quizzically and reconfirmed the figures. Then he ran my MasterCard and sent us on our way.

Needless to say, I’m sorry that Kara got hurt, and I feel bad that she had to go to the hospital and have a minor operation. But, in one sense, it was good to get this out of the way. Before we left San Francisco, our deepest fear was that one of our children would get sick or injured someplace that was either too remote or too impoverished to provide competent medical care. Those fears may have been justified in Botswana or India—fortunately we didn’t find out—but in Thailand, we received more efficient, more courteous, and far less expensive health care than we could have ever gotten back home in Marin County. I would take any one of my kids back to Bumrungrad Hospital without hesitation—though in the future that might prove somewhat inconvenient.

The next day, we flew four hundred miles north to Chiang Mai. I’ve never been to Chiang Mai before, but Devi spent several weeks here shortly before we got married. That was eleven years ago, back when Chiang Mai was a quaint provincial capital marked by serene Buddhist temples and laid-back handicraft markets. The temples and markets are still here, but now they form little oases in a bustling, polluted city full of hotels, shopping malls, American fast food outlets, and swarms of buzzing tuk-tuks.²⁸ Still, we enjoyed a placid day touring the city’s shrines and temples. Devi and I attempted a Thai cookery course, and the whole family enjoyed a nearly perfect day on, of all things, an organized bus tour.

As you know by now, we’re not really big on tours—especially really touristy ones like this one—but it turned out brilliantly. The bus left the hotel in the cool early morning and rolled thirty or forty miles through the gorgeous tropical countryside to Elephant Nature Park—a retraining facility for elephants formerly employed in Thailand’s logging industry. The park was set beside a muddy stream that ran between acres of rice paddies on one side and some thickly wooded hills on the other. It had ten or twelve trained elephants, some nice bamboo paddocks, and a primitive little reviewing stand where visitors could watch the animals do their tricks. The best thing about Elephant Nature Park, though, was its utter lack of rules and regulations. Obviously unconcerned by lawsuits, the mahouts let Kara, Willie, and Lucas mingle with the pachyderms to their heart’s content. After spending so much time observing wild African elephants from a respectful distance, the kids had a wonderful time playing with their domesticated Asian cousins.

There were two baby elephants at the park—playful three-foot-high creatures with stubby little trunks. The kids patted their heads and fed them bananas for more than an hour. I thought Lucas would burst with delight. The mahouts showed the children how to wash elephants in the river with a bucket and a brush. Then we took a long elephant trek through miles of brilliant green rice paddies up into the wooded hills. We finished the day with a river trip on a raft consisting of a dozen bamboo poles roughly bound together.

As we gingerly climbed aboard the raft, Devi recalled riding a similar raft the last time she was in Northern Thailand. She told us it broke apart, dumping everyone aboard and all their backpacks into a shallow, muddy river. With that in mind, Devi slapped a pair of water wings on Lucas. (Only a mother would have a deflated pair of water wings in her purse.) Fortunately, that precaution wasn’t necessary. The raft stayed intact, and the whole family floated lazily past tiny riverside villages and gorgeous jungle scenery.

I realize that the whole shebang—the elephants, the bamboo raft, the rustic ox carts, and everything else we saw that day—was a set up for tourists, but it was still a memorable day in the splendid Thai countryside and a sweet parting image of Asia.

After a week in Chiang Mai, we flew back to Bangkok airport and boarded a three-thousand-mile flight south to Perth, Western Australia. This gleaming metropolis set on the shores of the Indian Ocean is a long way from anywhere else. It’s separated from Australia’s East Coast population centers by more than a thousand miles of bleak desert, and the closest major city, Jakarta, Indonesia, is four or five hours by air. Blessed with vast mineral resources, a balmy Mediterranean climate, crystal waters and miles of clean white beach, Perth’s one million inhabitants live their lives in splendid isolation.

Our hosts in Perth were friends of friends named Rick and Bettina Cullen. Both were lawyers with some old family vineyards and a fine wine shop on the side. Rick’s family has lived in Perth for generations, and he and Bettina were the best possible people to show us around. The nice thing about visiting people at the far ends of the earth is that they’re usually happy to see you. Even so, Rick and Bettina raised Australian hospitality to a rarefied level by foolishly taking all six of us into their oceanfront home, on and off, for three weeks.

I’m not sure I’d want one houseguest for three weeks, let alone an entire family, but the Cullens, who had three young children—including a newborn—accepted us with easy grace. We celebrated Christmas and New Year’s Eve with their many friends and close-knit family, and when Devi’s brother showed up, they ignored our feeble protests, and took him in too.

It wasn’t too hard to get into the W.A.²⁹ swing of things. We enjoyed the traditional Christmas morning champagne on Cottesloe Beach. We packed an esky full of stubbies, grabbed our sunnies, and floated out to Rotto for the day.³⁰ We strolled through grocery stores barefoot, like almost everyone else in town, went to an outdoor film festival, and showed up for dinner parties bearing the requisite two bottles of wine and two six-packs of beer. (“I hope you’re not one of those Americans who doesn’t touch the stuff,” said one concerned party guest.)

Using Perth as a base, we flew a thousand miles north to the remote pearling town of Broome and south to Eagle Bay, where we enjoyed fine wine and water sports while battling swarms of demon flies intent on burrowing their way into every orifice in our heads. Insects aside, we somehow got used to perfect days on perfect beaches, five-hour lunches at bucolic wineries, body-boarding sweet four-foot ocean curls, and swimming with curious dolphins near the mouth of the Swan River. (You should have seen Kara’s face when that happened.)

I hesitate to say this, because word might spread, but Perth’s hundred-mile-long beaches, pristine streets, crystal-clean air, mild weather, cheap rents, and general joi de vivre may combine to make it the most livable city on the face of the earth. (And as the comedian Dame Edna says, it’s only thirty hours from anywhere.) As a matter of fact, I wasn’t particularly anxious to leave W.A., and if I had my way, we might have rented an ocean-side cottage and settled here indefinitely. But Devi convinced me to stick to the plan, which was to settle in Sydney for a few months in order to get the children some formal schooling. Finally, the sad day came when we bought a clunky second-hand Mitsubishi Starwagon and prepared to drive ourselves across the wide Australian desert.

The only road traversing the southern half of Australia is a lonely, two-lane affair called the Eyre Highway. It begins in the small town of Norseman (named after a famous horse who kicked up a gold nugget) and runs 1,500 miles along the Great Australian Bight. Most of this stretch is a wide, arid plain called the Nullarbor—Latin for “no trees.” Although the highway has been paved from one end to the other since the mid-1970s, only a tiny percentage of Australians have ever driven it. First of all, not that many East Coast Australians (or anyone else for that matter) ever go to Perth, and those who do invariably choose a comfortable five-hour flight over a grueling seven-day drive.

When we told the dozen or so friends and acquaintances we made in Perth that we were preparing to “cross the Nullarbor,” as this journey is commonly known, we invariably got one of two reactions. The most common, by far, was, “Why on earth would you want to do that?” The other was usually a macho account of the listener’s own Nullarbor passage.

“Ah, yea,” said one fellow, “the time I drove ’cross the Nullarbor, it was so hot, the birds were falling dead by the side of the road.”

“I made it ’cross the Nullarbor in a beat-up old ute³¹,” said the mechanic who inspected our van. “It had four bald tires and a bad carbo—and that was before the road was even paved. Miracle I made it.”

Despite these colorful tales, we followed our usual MO of taking all reasonable precautions—but going nonetheless. We loaded ten-gallon cans of water and gasoline into the back of the van along with an extra fan belt, four quarts of motor oil, flashlights, flares, jumper cables, and a spare tire. Then we bid a fond farewell to the incredibly hospitable Cullens and drove east into Australia’s empty heart.

It was an extraordinary seven-day journey. We didn’t hit the desert right away. Initially, the cool southwestern landscape was marked by picturesque coastal towns and towering old gum trees called karris and jarrahs. After that, we whisked past mile after mile of yellow wheat fields where literally hundreds of pink and grey parrots stood by the shoulder of the road and took flight, one after another, as the van approached. Further on, there were expansive sheep ranches that gradually gave way to scrubland, unsuitable even for grazing. The scrub eventually got shorter and sparser until there was only a level plain in dusty tones of grey and lilac beneath an immense ultra blue sky.

At that point, there were practically no hills or curves in the road, and the black line of the highway ran endlessly to the horizon. In the dead center of the Nullarbor it was nearly impossible to drive for more than an hour at a time. There is a hundred-plus-mile stretch of highway in the middle of the Nullarbor that is billed as the longest perfectly straight road in the world. With no trees, no telephone poles, no road signs, or even any big rocks to break the monotony, my eyes were inexorably drawn to the white dashes that ran down the middle of the road. These had a strong hypnotic effect, and even though it was the middle of a sunny day and I wasn’t particularly tired, I inevitably fell into a daze. At that point, there was nothing to do but pull over, slide out of the van, and switch drivers.

And those were the magic moments—when we all piled out of the van and stood by the side of the road in the vacant heart of the Nullarbor. The lucent air and crisp, white light made the landscape look like a hyperrealist painting. The wind blew from west to east rustling the low grey spinifex and hardy blue bush. And wisps of cloud, borne on the wind, cast mercurial shadows that flew down the road one after the other. There was no other living soul for miles, and nothing aside from the highway itself to suggest that anyone else had ever been here.

“Well,” I said to Devi putting an arm around her shoulders, “this has got to be the middle of nowhere.”

²⁷ Thai slang for foreigners, literally Frenchman

²⁸ Thailand’s ubiquitous three-wheeled taxis

²⁹ Western Australia, the name of the state that covers the western third of the country

³⁰ Translation from Australian: We packed a cooler full of beer bottles, grabbed our sunglasses, and took a boat out to Rottnest Island for the day.

³¹ A pickup truck, short for utility vehicle