Page 8 - Nomads Magazine Issue 7

The day of my departure from Thailand, I received a message from Lawrence Osborne with very simple ight instructions: “Gin and tonic, all the way.” When I rst read the pages of Bangkok Days and imagined this man sipping that very beverage on a balcony overlooking the Chao Phraya River, I never expected this image to come to life. Yet, just a few weeks before his liquor advice, I found myself shaking his hand at a small restaurant off the Phrom Pong BTS stop in Bangkok.He introduced himself as “Lawrence.” I admit, I had some expectations about the famous author and explorer. After all, I knew a lot more about him than he did about me, but Osborne proved to be as interesting in person as he is on a page. He was tall – yak farang, a foreign giant – and just a few days unshaven with a face that bore a striking resemblance to Bill Murray at rst glance, but less so as the night continued. During our meal, he sometimes stopped mid-sentence to curse about the chilli pepper he bit into or to lean back and moan about the incredible avor of the coconut soup, but he always found his way back to stories of Wang Lang or Tokyo or the Gobi Desert. In a loose white button-down shirt and slacks, he looked like you could drop him on a ritzy Mediterranean Coast with a glass of wine and he would t right into place. But for him, those kinds of places lose their charm after a while, at least in comparison to Bangkok. “I mean, Italy is always Italy. It’s always beautiful, it’s fantastic. I came back here after two months in Florence and you can feel the energy – you can feel the kind of street life in Bangkok that has just disappeared from Europe.”Osborne was born on a cool October day in the UK, but spent most of his childhood in Italy, “the core of civilization, a sacred place.” A student of Cambridge and Harvard, he graduated as a successful writer, publishing travel books about Paris and Bangkok; contributing pieces for magazines like The New York Times, Playboy, and Forbes; and releasing many short stories in America. Recently, Osborne’s focus has turned to novels, “Being a journalist isn’t the be-all-end-all for me, frankly. Writing novels is more pro table. I think it has more lasting power.” His novels certainly seem to be pro table, most of them receiving critical acclaim both in the United States and in England, including his latest book, Hunters in the Dark.Osborne’s nomadic life has allowed him to live and write across four continents. He’s made homes in the USA, France, Morocco, Mexico, Istanbul, and Thailand. He rst visited Bangkok in 1990 and moved into a little apartment in Wang Lang just a few years later, citing cheap dental care as his excuse. The real reason was that he had fallen in love with the motorbikes, taxi cry and steaming street food, which are the few inner organs of the ever-changing city.His early days of living and being broke in Wang Lang are the focus for his book Bangkok Days. This book is a narrative of expat experiences that became a personal guide for me while I spent ve months living in Bangkok. The Wang Lang life didn’t last too long. Osborne spent many years going back and forth between Bangkok and New York before nally escaping to his Asoke apartment where he currently resides.7