A romance in Thailand 30 years ago. But in the light of new photographic evidence, how reliable is my memory of events?
In the early 1990s I was backpacking around South East Asia when I had a brief love affair with a Dutch woman, who I’ll call K. We met on a truck in Northern Thailand heading for the small border town of Tha Ton. I was 27; she was around the same age, funny and bright, tall with wavy hair and a brilliant smile.
The truck broke down before we reached Tha Ton and, as black smoke rose from the engine compartment, the passengers spilled out onto the side of the dirt road. Among us was a German man, a Canadian couple, a Thai teenage girl and K.
The Thai girl was carrying a boom box and I fished a cassette from my daypack and we listened to some indie tunes, laughing and swapping stories and, right there, I found myself falling.
The bus was soon repaired, the journey resumed, and we arrived at Tha Ton, found a guest house with clean rooms and five of us arranged to meet that evening for dinner. We ended the night at a bar with live music, drinking whisky and coke around a bonfire. Within 48 hours, K and I were a couple.
I know all the details of that day - and the next day’s boat trip along the River Kok to Chiang Rai - because I kept a journal, which I have open before me now. If I’m honest, without those diary entries I’d be struggling to tell this story. Some details I remember vividly - the boat ride, K’s smile, our first drunken kiss - but many details are lost in time. I didn’t actually remember the truck breaking down, the Thai teenager with the boom box or the bar with the live music and the bonfire.
But here’s the thing about memory: now that I’ve studied my old journals and written - and rewritten - the paragraphs above, my recollection of that episode has been fleshed out. The new details are starting to solidify and become part of my long-term memory. Next time I think of that day, the broken-down truck will be there, and the bonfire.
We know from experience that memory can be selective, self-serving and unreliable. Most of us rely on photos to jog our memories of the past, and often the photo takes the place of the actual memory. Events in our lives - even momentous ones - become reduced over time to the photos that we keep.
Writing a journal ought to be the surest way to commit details to memory, but that’s assuming a reliable narrator. What if the 27-year-old version of me was tempted to embellish, exaggerate or omit key details?
Recently, I started sorting through hundreds of old travel photos - prints, slides and negatives - and had some digitised. Among them were half a dozen images of K. Feeling wistful, and planning a return trip to Asia in my fifties, I tracked her down on LinkedIn and left a message: “Hi there, remember me?”
A few days later, she replied to my message and we tentatively started to chat, sharing brief details of what we’ve been doing for the past 30 years. By chance, K was also in the process of sorting through and digitising her own photos of that trip. Would I like her to send me the photos? Yes please.
In its way, it had been a perfect holiday romance. For five weeks we spent almost every hour of every day in each other’s company and then, before we had time to get bored or argue, she had to fly home. We wrote long letters and enjoyed reunions in London, Amsterdam, The Hague and Berlin before the relationship petered out.
Scrolling through the scores of images now, I felt both nostalgia and a little bemusement. Over the years I had crystalised a series of memories of that trip into a fixed narrative: here was a photo of me at a beach hut at Koh Phangan, studiously writing my journal; there was one of K walking out of the sea, silhouetted by the low sun. I had my memories, my version of events.
But now I was presented with dozens of new images that frankly I didn’t remember. A whole new narrative. Here’s a photo of me sunbathing on a beach, my face pointed skywards, helping to form what would later be diagnosed as a basal cell carcinoma. What was I thinking?
But one particular photo stopped me in my tracks. I’m wearing jeans and a black-and-white striped football shirt, watching a Thai woman fill a rented motorbike with petrol from a makeshift pump. Had we rented the bike together or had K - holding the camera - rented her own bike? In my mind I had only once rented a motorbike in Thailand, before I met K, and it had terrified me. I had managed to get lost, found myself on a steep unmade road and lost control when a snake slithered across my path.
But if we had ventured out again by bike - to where? - then what other episodes had I forgotten entirely?
I headed back to my journals and found an entry that may have gone unread for three decades. My eyes strained to read the faded handwriting.
According to my journal, we were in a small town called Sangkhlaburi near the Burmese border (what is it with border towns?). We had rented a 100cc Honda motorbike from the P Guest House (still going strong, according to Google) for the short journey to the border.
Once at the border we handed over our cameras, signed a book and strolled into a Burmese village without getting our passports stamped. We bought sarongs and went to a cafe where we chatted with locals over Burmese doughnuts and sweet milk. I don’t actually remember any of this. Well, maybe some fragments, but the border guards had confiscated our cameras, so there was no photographic evidence. No pictures, no memories.
But K had photos of the border guards, huddled around a small pile of confiscated cameras, and a view across the river to the Burmese village. New memories. Or lost ones revived.
Re-reading those journals is both thrilling and embarrassing. It’s me, yet it’s not me. Sometimes I feel a bit scornful of my younger self, sometimes I feel a warm - almost paternal - affection.
I thumbed forward to the point where K flew home. We had parted at a guest house near Khao Sarn Road in Bangkok where I stood on a balcony waving her off onto a waiting minibus. Either it hadn’t occurred to me to accompany her to the airport, or she had forbidden me.
Alone, I spent the evening in our room, drinking whisky, listening to melancholy music and scribbling in my diary, my handwriting getting steadily untidier as I became increasingly drunk and maudlin. I clearly felt lonely but was I heartbroken, or just indulging in some youthful self-pity? It’s hard to say.
Next day I woke and pushed the beds apart, went for breakfast and met a new group of backpackers. Like me, they were planning to fly to Vietnam in a few days and we discussed visas and air fares. This next trip was to become the most thrilling experience of my life in travel. It seems there was little time to dwell on what had passed.
All photos by K, reproduced with kind permission.