Shit show in the "City of Gold"

The ElDorado is a fuck story. It's so bad even the fake flowers in the rooms are wilted. As we begin this little journey please allow me to excuse one Mr. Marc Anderson (Front desk manager). Seriously, somebody hire that guy away. Now, you must be asking yourself why anyone would take the time to go to a shithole like Reno for a vacation. Well, it all goes back to a clusterfuck during the "Elvis' birthday pub crawl". I wont go into the details but they were bad. As a result, we were graciously offered a free nights stay in one of their suits on our next visit, along with tickets to their new show "Benise" at my request. By all accounts, it seemed the ElDorado had undone the nonsense from our first encounter.

Now, for our return to The City of Gold. We decided to come down a night early and stay at The Sands 2 star hotel spectacular. I had stayed there on the way back from the Burning Man 2012 and enjoyed their clean, no frills approach to a room as well as two dollar Sierra Nevadas 24/7. $31 + a $2 fee and we are in our spacious room with a great view of the Sierras. They even put us on the floor we requested at the last minute. The Sands is cool like an old dude storytelling who smells more like whiskey and smokes then piss, but everybody seems to catch the faint whiff of urine and miss out on all the culture. I'm glad I stuck around past the first impression. We slept soundly on the surprisingly comfortable bed and enjoyed the view in the morning. Check out at 12 leaves us with a few hours to kill as the ElDorado's check in is at 3. We decide to stop by at 2 to see how its coming along. We approach the front desk and are helped by the worker at the time. "I am moving you to a better room because the one they have you in is not clean" This comment strikes me as odd, I am certain that Mark would have put us in something quite nice as he understands the situation. I can't help but feel I'm in a shell game (though I was informed later that she had technically upgraded us). I choose to believe her and check in. My mistake.

When we come to the door of SP109 at the very end of the hallway on floor 10 (Surprising considering there are 28 floors) I am uncertain rather I should use the door key to jimmy it open through the gaping hole between the knob and door jam (You can see me through the crack in the picture, taken a foot away) where someone has broken into the room in the past or try the card apparatus. We open the door, to our surprise the suit is barely larger then our room at the Sands and sports a lovely view of the ass end of the Sands itself, our view literally obstructed by the room we were staying in the previous night. Between the miss matched wallpaper, terrible carpet work, four different types of bargain marble, spray painted silver (slightly broken, and isn't this the city of gold?) TV pop up box complete with 90's style standard def Zenith (ironically we had a flat screet hi-def in the regular room we stayed in here last time), miss matched knobs on the spa (of which 5 out of 6 were broken), broken base board on the spa, mismatched silver and gold screws (some stripped), exposed wiring on curtains, and a lovely secondary view of the kitchen stacks and parking garage. I have become certain that they have given us this room as a fuck you for complaining the first time. To think, we haven't even seen the show and I'm ready to go back and rent another room at the Sands, I can see the room from here.

Why don't you suck a "Benise" out of my asshole. Nough' said. But then not really, though I don't know there are words to explain the fuck job that is the next 40 minutes of our lives. We are, as we find out, the youngest members of the audience as well as the only ones dressed up for the show. No shit, beautiful Chilean dress and knit Pancho on H-bot (My lovely girlfriend), loose fitting slacks, tailored shirt, square tip boots and fedora on me. To our horror, we are lead like a fucking side show act to stand in the far corner of the stage while they fish out extra chairs; which they lovingly place in the handicapped section (At least one of the seats. The other was, as were rudely told by the showroom manager, in the way of the performers). Our faces beat red with embarrassment, we sit and immediately begin talking over leaving before the show starts while covering our faces in mortification. Are these people fucking serious? Just as we are about to stand up the manager comes over and moves us to better seats. They must have realized their mistake I think, until we are informed that we are only being moved because we blocked the performers access to the audience. The manager literally made me feel like an asshole for having those tickets as if I had picked the shittiest seats in the house on purpose. Then there's the show. I never knew you could lipsinc a guitar, or for that matter every instrument in the show. From the super cheese video presentations of who I'm guessing is Benise 20 years ago, to the out of time dancers running into each other and laughing through the performance. This may be the most pretentious and badly strewn together live performance I have ever seen. Seriously I've seen Scott Wieland of STP so fucked up he couldn't stand and had to lay down for half the performance, I'd pay for that show over this for free any day. After about 20 minutes of this nonsense we quickly follow a couple in front of us as they walk out.

Back at the room we discover the right side of the spa is the only one with working jets and most of the knobs are broken, not to mention the cracks in the tub. We decide the steam room/shower may be a more promising idea. I open the door to the shower and double over from the loud screech it makes in the echo filled space. To our shock the next morning we discovered the toxic avenger was growing wildly in the drain. We had sat inhaling fungus/mold for hours in the steamy space.

This is enough to make me slightly ill in the morning when the maid walks into our room at 8:30am after a short knock. That's right, who the fuck rents a suite and checks out before 9? I'm not certain, but I imagine even our damned president does his business from the room and checks out at noon. And yes, you read that right, she opened the door to our room. H-bot was barely able to wrapped up in a towel (we had to use her supplied robe to hang over the hole in the door) and stop her from walking in. We attempted to go back to sleep but could not. I figure a quick call telling the front desk what happened will garner a late check out. To my surprise I receive negative attitude and am told I will be charged extra if I stay any later than 1. "Have Marc Anderson call me the minute he gets in" I reply and hang up the phone. 10 minutes later she calls back explaining housekeeping has approved a late check out of 3. Did i hear that right, they take their orders regarding costumers staying in suites from the housekeeping and not the management? I decide to get dressed and go down when Marc comes in. As usual, he is the ever pleasant customer service anomaly in this decrepit building. How did they get this guy? Seriously, somebody hire Marc Anderson away from this shithole. He's wasted on a place like this. In short, "Benise" is shit and if your coming to Reno, skip the "City of Pyrite" and keep driving to the Sands. Their 2 stars slaughter this sham in northern desert any day.

P.S. As a matter of courtesy we make the bed upon exit. H-bot found this spot of blood (which appeared a few days old but had obviously not been washed, as blood was flaking off) on our sheets, tucked under the bed. Niether of us are bleeding, go figure. Nice to find you've been sleeping in dirty sheets. The maid aslo tried to clean our room twice while writting this blog, at the time of posting, we still have an 1hr 3omin to check out.

Benny's Car Chop and Cock Fightery

8:30 am marks the latest I've left my apartment since I rented it. The usual routine, get up. First thing, into a shower, it's hot enough by five a.m. to sweat straight through your sheets. By seven-thirty you know rather it's a sweltering "Why did I leave the mountains" kind of day, or one of the much more manageable "Hide in the shade when the sun comes out" varieties. Seven-thirty is like ground hog day for me, today will be a fun kind of day. The air will move quickly from a marginally uncomfortable degree to ungodly hot by ten a.m. This is when the aging of the dense smog comes to its full flavor, by noon it will be the only flavor on your tongue. One-thirty p.m. comes and the atmosphere will be veritable soup, like the deep end of a swimming pool neglected for several seasons, only filled with car exhaust. It's fuck off days like these that lead to magical nights... really. These are my thoughts as Gong Ju and I round the corner into the side alley leading to her school. Just as we do five days a week, we pass what I have deemed "Benny's Car Chop and Cock Fightery". Sporting ten or more steal cages, each with a rather proud rooster, and a line up of ever changing cars it seems business at Benny's is booming. (Forgive me for the photos. I took them while driving by on my motorbike and don't have the best lens for the job) This further points to Thailand's split














(Notice the lack of license plates)



personalities. Even the criminals need two jobs. Benny's is a half block away from the best Thai Massage school in all of Thailand. But then, where else is Benny's suppose to be? The difference between neighborhood and just plain hood can be as little as ten feet. I love this about Chiang Mai. You can find anything if you walk for twenty minutes in any direction. Hop on a motor bike and in twenty minutes your in a temple on mountain tops. Possibly stop in at the jade factory on the way up the steps. Even when the sun booms like death there is always somewhere to hide here. It is in these places I have met people from every corner of the world. I would never have thought the first place I would stay here would be with a crazy German who constantly mixes up the three languages he speaks. Or that the first Tuk Tuk driver I meet would not only find the exact apartment I was looking for, but would negotiate the rent down by a thousand baht. There is many a crook in Thailand, believe me. But I don't think this experience is exclusive to me. This is what it's all about here. For me to pay forty baht for a large beer, some asshole Falang has to pay eighty, this is the balance of Chiang Mai and everywhere else for that matter. I've been the guy getting ripped and the guy catching the deal many times over here. And to think, I've only been here just over two weeks. I've been running down every dark corner and bright vista this city has to offer and I'm still far from the whole experience. From ten year old contortionists in front of temples, or boxing Muay Thai to the teaming streets of famous night markets held every evening all over the city. The pants I'm wearing cost just over one USD and they probably saw me coming, but who cares when it's the difference of ten cents to me. All and all it is easy to forget about the heat and cut with a knife kinda smog when you just sit back and let the city take you. Maybe a cock fight or a boxing match, an electronics market or roof top reggae bar, a chicken from the backyard or a five dollar Thai massage. Go anywhere, do anything, see everything. Chiang Mai is as happy to show as you're willing to look. Toss in a few extra baht and you might just have the night of your life...

Connecting Sacrament

In my experience, the Thais are a clean people. They'll have a market two square miles wide, so packed you can barely shimmy through the flow, let alone look at anything. Two hours later, You'd have no idea it was ever there. Rarely have I caught a whiff of body odour in this country, and when I have, it's almost certainly coming from the Falang down the way. This place is hot, and humid. Perhaps too hot and humid. So much so that you find yourself showering as often as new couples fuck. This general hygiene is however lost when gazing upon the Chao Phraya River. As I stand on a bridge overlooking this magnificent body of water I come to a startling realisation. I could be in Sacramento, CA... right now. Like I stepped through some fucked up wrinkle in space time and ended up at a crossroads between Juarez, Detroit and the town of Walker. You can almost feel Bangkok trying to sleaze its way up stream. "Water seeks out it's own level". Something my father always says makes me wonder as to the strategic placement of "Chinatown". Neatly backed up, right against the filthiest place in Chiang Mai. Did the Chinese here simply identify with the passing muck of the Chao Phraya? Or did the Thais humorously plan to cordon them off next to it. I imagine it was a bit of both. From this vista it is hard to believe that a few short meters away sit some of the most architecturally pleasing religious monuments of the past thousand years. But this is the duality of Thailand. Just behind the paint on the walls and the handy craft light strings are the true components. From the three hundred pound Falang hiding in the back, designing your meal to the liquor on the breath of your Tuk Tuk driver. The things that make this place tic are usually not the stuff of bed time stories. Fuck if it doesn't make for a good night of Muay Thai however. A hundred Falangs will sit and talk the awfulness of child labour. Then march around the block and lay down a few hundred baht on the seven year old standing in the red corner. They foam at the mouth, smashing down Chang after Chang screaming as he postures up to send a knee straight through his tiny opponent and on to oblivion. If he wins, maybe tonight he eats better, if not... Well, maybe we don't talk about that. I walk to the bathroom and the teenager from two bouts prior is still being propped up in the sink, trainer splashing water in his face. No win = no money and a beautiful night of porcelain god prayer for this gentleman to my right. I slide my hands in next to his face, catching a splash of water and I'm back on my way. Into the night, open to whatever may find me.

The Surface

Chiang Mai has a foot work all its own. If you should choose not to study, most of it will dance right by. You'd never even know it. This is the surface. A comfortable enough place to live. After all it's prepared for just this reason, in just this way, so that you will stay on it and ask no questions. If you walk the Night Baazaar you are sure to find whatever materials please you and at a price you will feel is fair. But a few more blocks to Chinatown and you'll feel every bit like chum in a shark tank, doing the stuffed wallet saunter through the valley of money wolves, all dressed neatly in their varying gimmics. Pants, three dollars, shirts often one and a little of the special spice just under a twentieth of the state side price. Meal's at three quarters, beer's at the same and women not much more then a steak dinner and thirty USD, this is reality in Lanna. If this is not your speed, you can walk a hundred Wats and pick up antique Buddhas from one inch to six feet all day long. Jade beads, crystal, silver and gold all slung on the market. It's easy to find yourself full on relics, no hands left to carry and ghost towns for pockets. Want a blessing, drop twenty baht in the bucket and this no problem. Good luck is plentiful at small prices in Thailand.

But there is more to Chiang Mai then gimmics and relics. More than the tourist hungry trecks, rock climbing and soaring over jungles. Look down and there are depths little imaginable, and above are dizzying heights. There are good men and bad, both controlling and partaking in the underbelly landscape making up the meet of this northern palace. I have come across both. It's been all to easy to lay back and forget that I am barely more than handfuls of red bills to the people I have met. They like me. But then, why wouldn't they... I pay them a fair price. Often much more then fair. Buy a few rounds and you'll be called friends, come back with friends for dinner and a few more, they'll call you family. Rather to believe them or not depends on what you came here to feel. It feels good when people are welcoming. When they are just as welcoming to the fat, half bald, greasy, pony-tailed chester negotiating sex at the other end of the bar, you may feel differently about your affections. But this attitude may not be so negative. If you treat them well, they will do the same almost without question. Where in the US, my mother wont watch a movie starring Tom Cruise because she doesn't like the way is in the tabloids. Here, you pay your bill and act like a good Falang, nobody cares what you do. You go to the right bar and you will safely find what ever you are looking for. But, it must be the right bar, taking care of the right people, taking care of you. It pays to observe here, if you watch close you will find the real price on everything. The truth here, is not far from the surface, should you choose to scratch. But, be careful, you may really enjoy what you find...

Somwhere in Time

It's morning. Sweet fuck all its come on me quick. After pounding as many beer Chang's as possible in pursuit of some form of sleep my stomach is left bent, and my head nearly broken. There is a special kind of dirt caked in every corner of this of this train car named uncomfortable. Perhapse the morning meal will help to settle this dispute between my body and the now rotten lager infecting my system. On a positive note, one day in Thailand and I haven't caught the travelers "Shit your pants". This fact is enough to perk me up a bit, along with constant shit can swaggery-jig our boxcar is doing. Our train and its tracks, like confused tango partners on the second days lesson, just can't seem to figure it out. I stand up in an attempt to hit the bathroom, a lovely squatter toilet between somewhere and forever. A place I can never seem to find when my brain has packed all it's shit and leaves in search of something better. At every stop, street vendors board the train hustleing everything from sun dried stink to deep fried whatever. With every inch we creep away from Bangkok I grow fonder of Thailand. We have now been on this train for nearly ten hours and there is no end in site. Passing village after unnamed village, nothing on the map to help us catch our bearings. Fires burn up and down the tracks so close that my hand catches a quick singe. I whip it back screaming out, everyone on the train turning to see what the Falang is on about now. Shack after rickety shack drifts by my open window until peices of something brilliant begin creeping out of the jungleSeveral hours pass and we roll into Lampoon Lampong. The first place resembling real civilization as well as the first city on our map. With any luck, we'll be in Chiang Mai sometime between never and now, give or take an hour...

Border town fuck around

Bangkok... A mad jumble of bright lights, slick fashion and dim futures. This place thrives only on the hustle, the worlds greatest college for con men. Six minutes in this city takes six hours to wash off and I feel as though just being here has changed my core. Brings me back to dark days and bare knuckles in Carson City, as this is the only place that compares to the brute trickery of Thailand's evil empire. Lucky enough, I'll only remain in hell for a few long hours... or as it turns out, a few more then anticipated. Not one hour into Thailand and we've fallen victim to our first scheming fuck off. Two first class sleeper car tickets on one late night train to the northern Kingdom of Chaing Mai. Simple enough. It is explained to us we must show up at twenty minutes to nine o'clock, once again, simple enough. "Now is very popular time Chaing Mai, all hotel sold out. This ok, I get you nice room, come me." Barks the 4' 9" teenage hustler selling us these tickets, I can taste the fuck around in the air. "No thanks" otherwise translated, Fuck you. With this we're off screaming into the Siam night like two fat Falang
(Literal translation "French", but they call everyone this and somehow don't think we can tell they are talking about us) wallets just waiting to be plucked, fried and stuffed in the mouth of this leering hungry metropolis. Weather its the Bang or the Kok I don't know. We return a half hour early, just in case, only to find our tickets were for the seven o'clock train. We are kindly informed that we will recieve no refund and the only available seats for the nine o'clock train are third class. I puke in my mouth and come just shy of spitting it in this assholes smug fuck face I'm so angry. First thoughts, Fuck Thailand, get me to Cambodia... So we wait, and board a rickity shack on wheels headed for something better. A hard jolt begins our fifteen hour journey in filthy seats and hanging stink. Leaving behind the mad meth fueled banter of what must be the border town on the lake of fire. What lies ahead in Chaing Mai? If only I could have imagined...

72 hrs, 1234 miles: Round One

7:00am on Wednesday and my phone snaps me out of a sleep I fell into while sitting up. A Sick hectic daze from the last 12hrs of chaos claimed me while strapping on some pants. Flat broke and busted, but why not scream off into oblivion like bats out of hell. I'm late, The Devil, my counterpart on this little journey, is less then happy with my lazy approach to this the first moments of our 72 hour grind. Camera in hand I tear out of the house en route to Satan with only the thought of getting the fuck out of here thrashing around my mind, this is my emergency. I screech into The Devils abode and damn near tuck and roll out the drivers door, I am frenetic. Get me the fuck out of here. We waist no time and rip up the asphalt as we disappear over the grade screaming flat out into the skyline. There are ghosts where we're going and demons in the places left behind.

"Stockton's only a few miles away" said in a joyous fashion brings me to the realization that even the worst places, when framed against the bleak and gruesome back drop of a journey down the I-5, can seem promising. However Stockton is exactly as we remembered. The Devil pressures the gas just enough to get us through this spectacle unscathed. Perhaps luck isn't as far off as I'd imagined.

The passage between Heaven and Hell is soul splitting sexy on this, the thirteenth day of May, as we crest the top of our searing ascent from the lake of fire they call the central valley. I can feel the grime of drug traffic and field work strip away, cowering to the altitude and clarity as we step into the final hours in segment one of The Devil's fantastic journey. Even The Devil needs alignment at times.


My brain moves gently side to side as we hammer and glide through the sultry curve's making the mid spring body of our road goddess. The Devil and her seem to have come to agreement, though I wait with every racing dotted line for that to change.
Something like 7:15pm and the last of a flat golden dose of the old alch spins like black holes into my gullet. I reach down smashing the "Max Bet" button on the empty whore spread eagle in front of me, baiting the bartender to comp out another round, when the Devil herds us together in common pursuit of a sky on fire. Once again I've fucked off the task at hand. "Dear faceless Godhead, thank you for the Devil" I jot down on a mental napkin stored safely somewhere at the bottom of an empty glass reverie.

We charge outside and fire off snapshots like Korean war soldiers at the surging Tahoe skyline in a frantic attempt at capturing a moment passing at breakneck speed. My head digs in and out of a spiral stemming from the six beers I slammed attempting to make the most of my ten dollar investment in the greed machine.

The sun finally gets the best of our twilight affair and skates off out of sight, without even leaving her number. I check for my wallet and valuables. With that we make our path back into the great currency machine, checking only hope at the door and dreams for the cover. The Devil makes his way off into the night in preparation for tomorrows decent into the mad jungles of southern Nevada.

12:30pm, Our current conversation, terms of my apprenticeship in the Pro Leisure Tour, winds to a close and I raise a glass with The Devil's brother in celebration. With that he steps off into the void as Brother Ilk materializes out of it. With every blink I move deeper and faster into the closing seconds of round one in The Devil's fantastic journey. Until they close the final time on reality as I know it. All bets are on tomorrow, may the godhead be kind while we reset our minds.

-CB-