A Garish Magnificence — Honey and Dust

A GARISH MAGNIFICENCE.

"The hotel faced the river. My room was dark, one of a long line, with a verandah on each side of it, the breeze blew through, but it was stifling. The dining-room was large and dim, and for coolness’s sake the windows were shuttered. One was waited on by silent Chinese boys. I did not know why, the insipid Eastern food sickened me. The heat of Bangkok was overwhelming. The wats oppressed me by their garish magnificence, making my head ache."

From The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930), Somerset Maugham's account of a journey he made in the early 1920s from Rangoon through Burma, Siam and Cambodia to Haiphong in Vietnam.

When Maugham wrote this in the early 1920s, he didn't yet know he had malaria. He was staying at the Oriental Hotel on the Chao Phraya River, and the fever that was making the heat unbearable, the food sickening and the temples oppressive soon took hold. The story goes that the hotel's manageress, alarmed at the thought of a guest dying on the premises, asked for him to be moved elsewhere. He recovered, of course - and the Oriental now proudly names a suite after him.

Even without any fever, I totally feel what he felt a century ago in Thailand. It's so very hot that when you're outside everything feels garish and strange. You're pummelled by sun, your sweat stings your eyeballs, your head swims, you can't think straight without another coconut to sip on, and finally you crave sanctuary from the heat and the culture shock weirdness. But back at your hotel it's never quite the cool relief you wanted. And tomorrow it'll be sunny outside, there'll be garish things to see, and you'll do it all over again.

100 years distant, I hear + feel you, Mr Maugham. Things are still garishly magnificent.