Travelers' Tales Thailand: True Stories (Travelers' Tales Guides)

by James O'Reilly

  And for all my unease in Bangkok, I could not deny that it was quite the most invigorating, and accommodating, city I had ever seen—more lazily seductive than even Rio or Havana. For elegance here was seasoned with funkiness, and efficiency was set off by mystery. Sugar was blended with spice. On Sunday mornings, I often went early to the Temple of the Dawn, and spent several noiseless hours there, surrounded by Buddhas and gazing at the gilded temples that lay across the river like slumberous lions; the minute I grew hungry, however, I could jump into a ten-cent local bus and savor a delectable lunch of watermelon juice and spicy chicken while watching Eurythmics videos in a spotless air-conditioned café. In the evenings, I would sip Twining’s tea from porcelain cups in an exquisite teak-tabled restaurant, soothed by the sound of George Winston, then saunter outside to find the wind blowing around the sleeping canals and three-wheeled tuk-tuks puttering through the tropical night.

  Bangkok was the heart of the Orient, of course. But it was also every Westerner’s synthetic, five-star version of what the Orient should be; all the exoticism of the East served up amidst all the conveniences of the West (“It seems to combine,” a fascinated S. J. Perelman once wrote, “the Hannibal, Missouri, of Mark Twain’s boyhood with Beverly Hills, the Low Countries and Chinatown”). And all the country’s variegated Western influences seemed, finally, nothing more than decorative strands that could be woven at will into the beautiful and ornamental tapestry of the country’s own inalienable texture (“We provide attractive Thai, Australian, Japanese, Chinese, Swedish, Dutch, Danish, Belgian, Austrian, and French girls,” offered one escort agency. “Also handsome and nice boys [gay] entirely at your service.”) The Thais, moreover, seemed to know exactly what their assets were—melting smiles, whispering faces, a beseeching frailty, a luxurious grace—and exactly how to turn those virtues into commodities that the West would covet. The carnal marketplace known as the Grace Hotel was, to that extent, aptly named. “Experience unique courtesy only Thai girls can offer.”

  In the end, then, the lovely doubleness with which the bar scene enthralled its foreign votaries seemed scarcely different from the way in which the stealthy East had often disarmed its visitors from abroad. For had not the Buddha himself said that all that we see is illusion? And had not the war in Vietnam turned on much the same conflict between straight-ahead assault and tricky depth? Perhaps its truest representation, Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, had, after all, suggested that the struggle on the battlefield, as in the mind, opposed the usual hard slog of war with the phantom forms of imagination. And the war too, the result had been the same. Bombs could not annihilate shadows; guns could not demolish mirror images. Strength could not deal with what it could not understand. Throughout the fighting, the Americans had held their own by day. But the Vietnamese had ruled the night. So too, it seemed, in Bangkok.

  Ultimately, then, it began to seem no coincidence that Thailand, the most open and most complaisant of all Asian nations, was also the only one that had never been conquered or colonized. The one woman who never gives herself away, D. H. Lawrence once wrote, is the free woman who always gives herself up. Just so with Thailand, a place, quite literally, more ravishing that ravished. For though it was known as the “Land of Smiles,” the smiles here really gave nothing away; Thai eyes often seemed to laugh, and Thai smiles shone with the light of all that was left unsaid. Many years ago, some Americans had tried to unravel the mystery by calling the Thais “the nicest people money can buy.” But even now, the Thais, with a gentle smile, continued to confound their visitors from abroad. A Westerner was not exactly in the dark here; just always in the shadows.

  The effects of this silken sorcery were clearest, perhaps, in the alien residents who studded the country. For the expats I ran into in Thailand were very different, by and large, from the industrious yuppies who crowd Hong Kong, the vagabond artists who drift through Bali or the beaded seekers who traipse around India. A surprising number of them were underground or marginal men—professional renegades, mercenaries, freelance writers, drug dealers, proprietors of girlie bars, men (and only men) whose wanderlust was spent. And all of them, in their way, seemed to have slipped into the city’s restless lifestyle as into the tempting embrace of a goddess. By now, therefore, they seemed almost stranded here, immobilized by their addiction to cheap drugs, to memories of the war or to the same “soft beds of the East” that had once seduced Mark Antony away from his official duties. “This,” said Emmanuelle, “is a place where doing nothing is an art.”

  Yet the hardened expats were at least victims of their own worst selves; visitors to Bangkok with even a touch of naïveté were more likely to fall prey to their better impulses. For the bars provided a perfect setting in which susceptible visitors could lose themselves in thinking they had found themselves, shadow-loving their mirror girls, playing hide-and-seek with their consciences. They tempted their subjects to exchange ideals for fantasies. They teased them into circles of self-doubt. And they invited them to ignore the prudent spinster’s voice of reason, in favor of the coquettish flirtations of pride—I am the one who can save her, I only think of her as a daughter, she really does care for me. Girls with dreams trigger daydreams in men, and make them feel like boys again.

  One man, Ead told me, had stayed with her for five weeks, and had never laid a hand on her; when he left, he had given her a video-machine. Others I knew invariably kept up two girls at once, in the hope that they would fall in love with neither. But even that seemed something of an illusion, and on my third day in Thailand, the Bangkok Post, ever sagacious about the salacious, ran on its front page a pointed warning from Auden, “Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.”

  Yet still each day, the would-be conquerors kept flying into town in droves, old men and young, Arabs and Australians and Americans, on pleasure or a kind of business. Some of them had come many times before, some still had a first-time innocence. And as the airport bus left John behind and drove past the Garden of Eden, Ltd., they could still be seen in the half-light, poring over crumpled pieces of paper (this is Soi Nana, the sex show is here), asking whether the girls were pretty and clean and safe, and concluding, with somewhat shaky assurance, “I think I’ll relax this evening with a good Thai massage.”

  And all night long, in darkened hotel rooms across the length and breadth of the city, from the Sukumvhit Road to Suriwongse, uncertain foreigner and shy-smiling girl kept whispering a ritual litany amidst the mirrors and the shadows.

  Do you really like me? Do I really like you? Why did you choose me? How much? How much? How often? When again? How much? Why not? You have a good heart? You will write to me soon? Can you? Will I? Should we? No problem, dah-ling. No problem.

  Pico Iyer is the author of Falling off the Map, The Lady and the Monk, and Video Night in Kathmandu, from which this story was excerpted. He was born in Oxford, England, and lives in Santa Barbara, California, when he’s not on the road.

  A visitor quickly learns that to ensure he receives accurate, relevant information, never ask a question which can be answered with a “yes” or “no.” “Yes” can mean “Yes, I heard you” without a modicum of understanding of its content.

  —Steve Van Beek, “Thailand Notes”

  MICHAEL BUCKLEY

  The Secrets of Tham Krabok

  Travel can be a form of escapism as addictive as drugs. The monks at Wat Tham Krabok seem to have an answer for both.

  WAT THAM KRABOK, 7 A.M.: THIRTY YOUNG MEN ARE KNEELING in two long lines, heaving their guts into buckets—the sound of violent retching shatters the air. A motley crowd of monks and onlookers is banging drums and cheering them on. And why, you ask, cheering them on? Well, this all has a perfectly rational explanation: we’re spectators at the world’s most unorthodox—and successful—cold turkey program. It’s an awful way to start the day, but in this fifteen-minute session, Thai heroin addicts are given a vile brown liquid that induces vomiting, and then consume a pa
il of water. The session is supposed to rid the body of toxins.

  The secret potion is brewed from scores of wild plants that grow in the valley around the monastery; it also appears to contain nicotine, which acts as a harsh emetic. It is rumored among addicts that traces of the brown elixir stay in the body forever, and will kill the recipient if he or she ever touches hard drugs again.

  The abbot of the monastery, Pra Chamroon Parnchand, claims he can wean any addict off a habit in an intense ten-day period; addicts often stay up to a month to consolidate their cure. Upon entering the monastery, addicts make a commitment never to touch drugs again—the oath is written on rice paper and swallowed. This amounts to a religious vow: drug addiction, it has been suggested, is a spiritual thing, and requires a spiritual cure. For the first five days, patients take herbal medicines; for the next five days they have steam baths, which ease aches and pains and lead to a feeling of cleanliness and well-being. They are given spiritual counseling to strengthen their resolve and abandon drug use. After this period, patients can opt to stay on—joining work crews to cultivate the monastery’s maize fields, or helping with other projects.

  Pra Chamroon claims a phenomenal 70 percent success rate, based on follow-up research with clients interviewed two years after taking the treatment. If this is so, the rate is exponentially higher than any rehabilitation program in the West. To date, over 80,000 addicts have passed through the gates of the monastery.

  Pra Chamroon is a living legend. In his twenties, he was a police officer with a family. His work involved highly dangerous detection and arrest cases—some of them undercover narcotics operations. Like the historical Buddha, he had a powerful vision of saving people from suffering: he turned his back on police work, left behind his wife and children, and disappeared into the jungle for a lengthy period. He decided to become a monk, but wasn’t interested in following an established Buddhist school. His aunt, Luang Poh Yai, was his spiritual mentor.

  Wat Tham Krabok lies in a valley midway between Lopburi and Saraburi, and 130 km from Bangkok. It can be reached on a daytrip from Lopburi. Tham Krabok means “Bamboo Cave”—in 1957, Luang Poh Yai, Pram Chamroon, and a few monks withdrew to a cave among the limestone crags behind the present monastery to meditate. In 1959, bowing to international pressure, the Thai government outlawed the use of opium. When two addicts approached the caves asking for treatment, Luang Poh Yai—an expert herbalist—recommended some medicines. The word spread that addicts were being cured at Tham Krabok, and buildings were put up to house patients and their relatives, with projects paid for entirely by donations. In 1975, Pra Chamroon won the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Services for his work with addicts. Such is the reputation of the monastery nowadays that entire Hmong tribal villages from the north have arrived for the detox program, prompting opium barons to issue threats on Pra Chamroon’s life because of loss of “customers.” Other steady clients at the monastery are the “walking dead”—heroin addicts from the slums of Bangkok.

  I got to try out the detox process—well, the more pleasant part of it: the herbal steam bath. The sauna is wood-fired, and heavily scented with lemongrass and morning glory. The fire was being stoked by Gordon, a black American who didn’t care to talk about his experiences, although he did let slip that he was a Vietnam War vet, and that he’d taken a lifetime vow to stay at the monastery. There are two sets of saunas at Tham Krabok—one for addicts, one for monks. Wrapped in a sarong, I spent a volcanic twenty minutes in the monks’ sauna—sweating like I’d never sweated before. But afterwards I felt terrific—renewed, invigorated, ready to take on the world.

  In the afternoon I was adopted by the resident photo-monk, nicknamed “Aye” (pronounced “eh?” with a rising tone). Speaking in broken English, Aye did an admirable job of showing me around. He was in charge of a work-squad of rehabilitated addicts—so he conscripted me to help lug equipment up to a building site. When this task was completed, he decided to take me off to a vantage point in the hills to photograph the monastery. Or rather, he bounded over rubble and rocks like a mountain goat, leaving me behind—huffing and puffing and cursing, and scrambling for footholds on the steep rocks. At the top of this climb, I got a rude shock: we were standing on a pile of rocks that formed a precarious overhang—right over a huge cliff. He flourished his Nikon and started taking photos of the monastery far below, and indicated I should stand right on the edge of this rock-pile overhang so he could include me in the picture. What kind of crazy monk is this? I thought, as he perched on the very edge to demonstrate.

  I found out why Aye was so nimble-footed.The monks at Tham Krabok belong to a separate order: by Thai Buddhist standards, they are a radical group. One of the vows the monks here take is never, ever, to use any kind of transport—no bicycles, no roller-skates, no elephants, nothing—just a pair of feet. This promotes a tighter-knit community as monks have to think twice about walking off to Bangkok—130 kilometers away—a trip of five days on foot, as opposed to three hours by bus. Wat Tham Krabok does have its own vehicles—but these are operated only by lay-people attached to the monastery.

  An understanding of “Jai Yen” (“cool heart”) is vital to smooth navigation. Losing one’s temper is a sign of bad breeding and a sure way to shut the door on a social or commercial transaction. Under the old royal legal codes, the punishment for a prince striking a commoner in anger was harsher than that for a commoner hitting his patron. The law reasoned that while it was expected that an ordinary man might lose his temper, a royal was an exalted, more fully- evolved person and should be above petty annoyances.

  —Steve Van Beek, “Thailand Notes”

  Cameras, on the other hand, are permitted. Aye proudly showed me his high-tech photo and video equipment. Decorating walls of his humble room were large black-and-white prints of activities around the monastery—Aye had taken all the photos. This surprised me because Thai monks don’t paint, take photos, compose music or make videos—indulging in such creative self-expression is something that no Theravada monk is permitted in Thailand, because these pursuits are thought to be forms of craving. Nor do Thai Buddhist monks make statues or temple decorations—at Tham Krabok, however, it is the monks who cast huge Buddhas for shrines at the monastery. And the brown-robed monks at Tham Krabok are actively involved in all the building and farming projects around the monastery—producing their own rice, maize, peas, honey, and other foodstuffs. These practices run contrary to the Vinaya, the 2000-year-old code of conduct for Buddhists, which forbids heavy labor, such as tilling the soil.

  Five percent of the addicts treated are female—the fact that monks at Tham Krabok deal directly with female addicts (often prostitutes) is another unorthodox procedure for Buddhism. In addition to the 200 monks, there are 20 nuns attached to the monastery, and about 150 supporting lay people. At any time there can be up to 150 patients and relatives in residence (an average of 50 addicts a week pass through the program.)

  Once a year, the monks of Tham Krabok go on “vacation” for a week, or maybe a month. Their idea of a holiday is very different from yours or mine. They go on foot, with a retinue of lay followers. Aye showed me photographs from one of these trips. Each monk shoulders a ten-kilogram (22-pound) white umbrella, which is used as a tent at night—the weight comes from a wooden staking pole, and from attached mosquito netting. The entire band of 200 monks and retinue carry their own supplies; at night the monks form a circle of umbrella-tents, light their lamps—and create their own village. This may sound like a camping trip but it’s not—the monks look at travel from a purely spiritual angle. Aye informed me that this walkabout is a kind of pilgrimage—to gain merit, and accumulate wisdom. Travel is limiting the comfort of the body to gain freedom of the mind.

  I mention all this because it is my firm belief that travel involves experiences, not sights. Real travel is coming across people whose viewpoints are completely different from your own, finding out that you still have much in common, that you can comm
unicate regardless—and that you can learn a lot. Travel is transformation—if the trip shook your ideas up, if the experience changed you, then the journey was a success.

  From the addict’s point of view, it’s a very different kind of learning experience at Tham Krabok: how to regain confidence in body, mind, and soul. Peter, from West Germany, was addicted to heroin for 25 years before visiting Tham Krabok. He underwent a month-long session, was completely cured, became a monk, and has been at the monastery since.