Bangkok to Singapore - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 79

The film It Happened One Night , which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1934, takes place in
large part aboard a Greyhound bus motoring from Miami to New York. While it's made clear that Claudette
Colbert's character, an heiress, is traveling well beneath her station (she's trying to go incognito while on
the lam from her angry father), the movie depicts an overnight bus ride rife with camaraderie and romantic
possibility. The whole bus joins in a sing-along (I challenge you to try this the next time you ride Grey-
hound), and Colbert ends up fighting for a seat with the hunky Clark Gable.
By 1969, times had changed. Middle-class people generally owned their own cars. Buses—the mode of
transport for those too poor to afford a car—came to signify something much grungier than they had before.
That year's Oscar winner was Midnight Cowboy , which concludes with a bus trip from New York to Flor-
ida that's a sort of counterpoint to the cheery bus ride in It Happened One Night . This time the mood is less
Clark Gable and more Dustin Hoffman. His character—a greasy, tubercular bum named Ratso Rizzo—dies
aboard the bus, in the back row of seats, in the arms of a male hustler.
Things may have come full circle of late, as the bus seems poised to enter another golden age. Several
recently launched bus lines—including BoltBus, operated by good old Greyhound—now offer cheap but
comfortable service up and down America's northeast corridor. The key selling point remains price, as
these bus tickets are hundreds of dollars cheaper than the equivalent fare on a train or plane. But there's
something else: an attempt to rebrand bus travel for a new generation. These newer bus lines have attracted
a more youthful, upscale passenger by including amenities like wireless Internet access and electrical out-
lets for laptops. Nationwide bus ridership actually increased from 2006 to 2008—marking the first up-tick
in forty years.
The bus we're riding on now, going from Bangkok toward Thailand's southern border, boasts an even
more radical reimagining of bus possibilities. It's a luxury coach. Each seat features a personal video view-
er stocked with current Hollywood films. The seats themselves are spacious and sumptuous and almost
fully reclinable. The other passengers on board seem to be a mix of young Thai businessmen traveling for
work and middle-class Thai families setting off on vacation.
We should have no trouble falling asleep on the overnight ride. Our only real concern is for our safety.
There are no seat belts (as on most buses), and we're sitting at the extreme front end of the double-decker,
on its upper level. There's nothing in front of us but a wide pane of glass.
“If we crash,” says Rebecca, “please tell my parents I loved them.”
“If we crash,” I say, “you can tell them yourself. You're going through that windshield, and you're not
stopping until you land in Sarasota.”
THE bus arrives early the next morning in the town of Satun, on the Thai west coast, just north of the
Malaysian border. From the bus station we take a songthaew —a taxi fashioned from a pickup truck, with
benches welded onto the bed—a few miles to a boat dock. Here we catch a small, empty ferry that plows
southwest through the choppy waters of the Andaman Sea. After a ninety-minute passage, it docks at a
marina on the Malaysian island of Langkawi.
Langkawi has powdery beaches, a jungle interior, and five-star resorts. With plenty of time to relax be-
fore we need to catch our freighter down in Singapore, we decide to settle into this quiet paradise. On the
porch of our hotel room, we pop open two bottles of beer and gaze at the ocean.
Within minutes, a squadron of macaque monkeys interrupts us. They storm our porch railing, begging us
for food. I swear they're strategically shoving their cutest baby monkey front and center to win our affec-
tion. And it's working: Rebecca can't resist tossing them a few crackers from the minibar.
As soon as they scamper off, another band of primates swings into some trees overhanging the beach.
The hotel's guest pamphlet identifies these as “dusky leaf monkeys” and says they are a constant presence