Travel memoirILLUSTRATION LIZ ROWLANDStaying alive
T
hese days my people gather
on internet forums. They swap
tips on the best brand of
antihistamine, and discuss
how to ice hives. They talk rashes and
reactions. They assure each other
everything will be okay, even though they
know the world brims with risk, and this
is especially true in Thailand, where the
locals sneak peanuts into everything and
sprinkle peanut dust on the breeze.
If you have a nut allergy, as I do,
travelling to Thailand is the autoimmune
equivalent of a haemophiliac walking
on broken glass.
The Thais also love eggs, and I’m
allergic to those, too.
I did a backpacking tour of South East
Asia in 1995. The internet wasn’t so much
a thing in 1995, which means no internet
forums where my tentatively adventurous- but often itchy – brethren could gather
UNPACKINGNo eggs, no nuts, no problem.JACQUELINE MALEY
uses extreme caution and her best Thai to order dinner.
to share information on what to do if you
feel your throat closing over after gaily
eating a satay stick in Chiang Mai. There
was nowhere to confer on the polite way
to behave at a dinner where you’re offered
pad Thai, a dish whose existence I struggle
not to take personally, so well designed
it is to kill me.
I had to go it alone. There were
weeks lazing on the white-sand beach of
Ao Nang, overseen by forested limestone
rocks jutting from the azure ocean.
The staple food there was pancakes,
often smeared with Nutella. That’s
a no and a no for my kind.
There was a hill trek near the Thai-
Myanmar border, where magic mushrooms
were on offer, but they were buried in an
omelette. In truth, I was glad to have an
excuse not to trip. I was too scared anyway.
I learned how to say, in Thai, that
I’m allergic to eggs and nuts. The Thaiscouldn’t understand me, but they were so
kind they kept trying. Eventually
I realised Thai is a tonal language, and
there was no point sounding out the
words unless I got the tones right.
I was tutored by a group of local girls
who befriended me on an old train to
Kanchanaburi, and from then on I spoke
a good enough approximation of the
long, nasal Thai vowel sounds to ensure
I wasn’t inadvertently poisoned.
I crossed the border into Laos. I went
to Luang Prabang, gentle and full of
crumbling French colonial architecture
that mouldered, romantically, in
the humidity.
The languid rhythm of Luang Prabang
is matched by the flow of the two rivers
that surround it, where women bathed
and laundered their clothes, and
afterwards, twisted their wet black hair
into coronets in the soft afternoon light.
I sat in a restaurant overlooking the
river, and watched these women. I was
19 years old, and hungry. I had a novel,
and I felt loose-limbed and free after
several months on the road. I asked for
some spring rolls, and I communicated,
through a broken combination of French,
English and Lao, that they shouldn’t
contain eggs or nuts.
The straight-backed waitress, elegant
and inscrutable in her traditional sinh
skirt, assured me that was no problem.
About half an hour passed, then the
wait, as far as I could tell, inched closer
to an hour. I was several chapters into my
book, and my stomach groaned. I thought
they’d probably forgotten about me, or
given me up for being too much trouble.
Then the straight-backed waitress
appeared, bearing my meal aloft like a
holy object. In front of me she placed
the spring rolls, on a bed of fresh herbs,
attended by a dipping sauce in a glazed
bowl. The pan gai yoh were utterly fresh,
and I knew at once I’d waited so long for
them because they’d been made from
scratch, right there in the hot cupboard-
kitchen of this tiny restaurant. Someone
had spent the last hour bent over a ball of
rice-flour dough, and the result was this
cluster of delicate golden rolls, exquisite
as edible origami.
Nothing in them could hurt me.
I ate them as the sun set, and I can taste
them still.●170 GOURMET TRAVELLER