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

by James O'Reilly

  I ran into the bathroom, dumped water over my body, and then ran outside feeling like I had just emerged from a late-night horror movie. Around me the forest was dark, quiet, and peaceful. It was peaceful, I thought—except for the ants, scorpions, snakes, gaur, elephants, tigers, and leopards. I crawled into the front of my truck and tried to sleep, but my heart was still racing. Every now and then I’d feel the movement of an ant that had been stranded somewhere on my body. It was two days before I could move back into my house. It was much longer before I could sleep easily again.

  The idea of working in the Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary was, in many ways, intriguing. This thousand- square-mile sanctuary forms the core of a forest area more than four times that size, one of the largest protected forests in Southeast Asia. Still relatively pristine and remote, this preserve supports wild popula- tions of tigers, leopards, tapirs, wild cattle, and elephants; it is the last refuge in the country for the wild water buffalo and green peafowl. Much of the sanctuary is comprised of dry deciduous forest, containing trees that shed their leaves season- ally.These forests contain good soil for agricultural development and thus have been quickly destroyed in most areas where they once existed.

  —Alan Rabinowitz, Chasing the Dragon’s Tail: The Struggle to Save Thailand’s Wild Cats

  When Lung Soowan appeared at my door the day after the ant invasion, I found myself staring into the face of a scarred, tough-looking 42-year-old man. He was dressed only in a short, saronglike wraparound called a pacomah and his chest and back were covered with tattoos, a practice common among men from the northeastern part of Thailand. He’d never worked with a farang before and spoke mostly Isarn, a northeastern dialect, different from both the northern dialect Amporn was teaching me and the more common central or Bangkok Thai which I had been learning on my own. I was just beginning to make myself understood, I thought. Now this.

  Soowan arrived alone. His family remained in his village about an hour from the sanctuary. After agreeing on a salary of fifty baht (two dollars) a day, he moved into part of Beng’s house and started coming over every morning at sunrise to go into the forest with me. Though he understood my Thai, at first he rarely acknowledged anything I tried to say. I made the situation worse when, several days after we had started to work together, I gave Soowan a hunting knife as a present. When he refused it, I thought he was being polite, so I stuck the knife in his belt. He turned and left abruptly. When I told the story to Noparat, I learned that in Thailand a knife is only given to someone you wish to hurt. It can be given as a friendly gesture only if you accept something in return. Noparat talked with Soowan, and the next day I accepted one baht (four cents) for the knife.

  Despite the initial lack of rapport between us, I could tell from our first day together that Lung Soowan was at home in the forest. He would glide through the underbrush, clearing vegetation with no more than a flick of his razor-sharp knife, all the while pointing out sights and sounds that I had difficulty discerning even after being shown them. Sometimes he’d pull up and freeze suddenly, eyes flashing, as he watched a sambar deer grazing by the water or a group of macaques moving through the trees overhead. But when it came to communication, he was Lung Galong’s exact opposite. Words were spoken only when necessary.

  The initial breakthrough came during the third week we worked together. As we chopped our way through a rough, scrubby area, I grabbed a thorny, poisonous plant that caused me extreme pain and made my hand start to swell immediately. This sent Lung Soowan into fits of laughter, producing the first smile I’d seen from him.

  “What was that?” I demanded in Thai, not at all pleased.

  “Elephant scream plant,” he answered, a big grin still on his face. “Even elephants cry when they touch it. It’ll hurt for many days.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about it?” I asked unreasonably.

  “I forgot you’re a farang,” he said, laughing.

  I suddenly realized that not only did Soowan have a nice smile but we had just held our first conversation. I laughed too in spite of the pain. Later, I learned how Thais often laugh at the misfortunes of those closest to them. If Lung Soowan had disliked me, he would have shown no emotion.

  Alan Rabinowitz contributed other stories to this book which are also excerpts from Chasing the Dragon’s Tail: The Struggle to Save Thailand’s Wild Cats.

  The word farang is actually a Thai derivation from “français,” but it is used to describe any fair-skinned, round-eyed foreigner from Europe or the USA. According to Thai tradition, the farang inhabit a far-flung region called the muang nauk, the “outside kingdom.” One chronicle, the Thai Nya Phuum, sums them up as follows: “They are exceedingly tall, hairy, and evil-smelling. They school their children long, and devote their lives to the amassing of riches. Their women, though large and round, are very beautiful. They do not grow rice.” When the Thai call you farang it is not pejorative. They disarm the word with a grin or a giggle. But they remain cautious. The farang does not have the great Thai virtue of jai yen, a “cool heart.” His heart is liable to overheat.

  —Charles Nicholl, Borderlines: A Journey in Thailand and Burma

  JOHN CALDERAZZO

  Meditation in a Thai Forest

  An extraordinary monk and two determined women are working to restore Siladhamma, the balance of nature, in Thailand’s imperiled forests.

  IT’S DAWN IN THE SHRINKING, DROUGHT-PLAGUED FOREST OF northern Thailand. Sitting cross-legged on the open platform of a hillside cabin, SueEllen and I listen to a faint clanking of bells ringing from the floor of the Mae Soi valley—the sound of water buffalo trudging to their fields. I take a sip of tea and smile drowsily at Nuni, our host and interpreter. Later today she’ll show us a meditation cave a short walk from here where her friend and colleague Ajarn Pongsak, a remarkable Buddhist monk, has conceived a plan to change the weather.

  But right now Nuni is eyeing us strangely. Then, in her crisp Queen’s English, she says, “I don’t mean to alarm you, but when I woke up this morning I found a snake on my kitchen counter. Big, smooth, olive-brown fellow. Cobra, I’m afraid.”

  I keep on smiling, but suddenly I find myself peeking nervously at the teak branches over my head. Snakes give me the creeps. My uneasiness will eventually pass, but I try to rush matters by telling myself that a snake belongs out here in the forest, by reminding myself that a huge snake, possibly a king cobra, once slithered peacefully across Ajarn Pongsak’s lap while he was deep in meditation.

  It’s no use. My equilibrium’s gone; gone yet again, for during the month that SueEllen and I have been traveling through Thailand, exploring national parks and wildlife preserves—or what we could find left of them—almost nothing has turned out as I expected.

  On our first day in the country, SueEllen and I sat in the atrium of our modern Bangkok hotel and watched a mandarin duck waddle hopefully under our breakfast table. After a while it plopped into a goldfish pond surrounded by enormous ferns. Above us, seven floors of hanging bougainvillea framed a square of blue sky, and when a breeze riffled the blossoms, a pink shower came fluttering down. Christmas was about a week away.

  The architects had done a spectacular job. And, as our first stroll outside the hotel walls made clear, it was also a necessary job. As we walked in shimmering 95-degree heat along Rama IV Road, one of the many cemented-over canals, unmuffled motorbikes whizzed past us like furious bees, and tuk-tuks—three-wheeled taxis which resemble souped-up golf carts—zigzagged through the crush. We came to a major intersection and just before the light turned green, the ratchety two-stroke engines began revving up with a noise like that of a thousand chainsaws. We looked up at each other with disbelief. SueEllen, shouting millimeters from my ear, sounded far, far away.

  Within minutes she had pulled out a handkerchief and clamped it to her mouth, a habit she’d picked up in the murky, coal-fouled cities of China. Over the years, we’d both breathed a lot of awful air, but I couldn’t recall ever inhaling so much sm
oky oil and pure leaded gasoline.

  Traveling on the Chao Phraya River a few days later, it was much cooler. As we moved upriver past floating vegetable markets, golden-spired wats, and the delicate rooftops of the Grand Palace, it was possible to see the charm and beauty of Bangkok. I momentarily forgot about the frantic traffic, the blocks and blocks of all-night sex bars, the hundreds of thousands of prostitutes, many of them refugees from the severe deforestation and drought of the northeast. As I listened to the soothing slap of water against the pier pilings, I could see why the city had once been called “The Venice of the East.” But every thirty seconds or so everything was drowned out by the airplane-engine yowl of “long-tailed” boats, river taxis that slashed through the water like food mixers gone mad.

  Now and then I caught some spray, but I knew enough to keep my lips pressed tight: Bangkok’s seven million residents (and another four million are projected within ten years) dump thousands of tons of raw sewage into the river every day. As we passed a series of barges plowing downriver with gigantic logs, I watched some dead fish bob gently towards the Gulf of Thailand.

  The architects of our hotel were looking more sensible by the minute.

  So were the builders of Bangkok’s nearly four hundred wats, those walled-in way stations of peace and quiet (and widely varying degrees of commercialism). Their leafy courtyards and blissful Buddha images were probably keeping a lot of Thais from going crazy. At least, during the four days before SueEllen and I made our escape to the south, that’s how they worked for me, and I’m not even a Buddhist.

  There were probably a hundred and fifty of us crammed into a peeling wooden boat designed for sixty. As we burbled along through the Andaman Sea south of Phuket, Phi Phi Islands National Park rose from a calm jade sea with the laconic speed of myth. First I could make out only two green specks floating on the horizon, then their fuzzy toppings of jungle, then their sheer cliffs steadily growing. Finally the two islands stood above us like moss-draped Chinese rock sculptures, unreal and unbelievably steep. They were spectacularly beautiful.

  Longtail boat

  We chugged around the schist walls of the larger island into a bowl-shaped harbor fringed with white beaches and swaying coconut palms and joined half a dozen boats at least our size sitting at anchor. When we got close to the beach I could see, behind the thick vegetation that started perhaps ten yards from the water, long lines of brand-new thatched-roof bungalows. Nearby were a couple of open-air cafeterias where several hundred other day tourists—Americans, Australians, Germans, Italians—were washing down curried chicken with Singha beer.

  The Western liberalism embraced by the Thai sex industry is very unrepresentative of the majority Thai attitude to the body. Clothing—or the lack of it—is what bothers Thais most about tourist behavior.… You need to dress moderately when entering temples, but the same also applies to other important buildings and all public places. Stuffy and sweaty as it sounds, you should keep shorts and vests for the real tourist resorts, and be especially diligent about covering up in rural areas. Baring your flesh on beaches is very much a Western practice: when Thais go swimming they often do so fully clothed, and they find topless and nude bathing extremely unpalatable. It’s not illegal, but it won’t win you many friends.

  —Paul Gray and Lucy Ridout, The Rough Guide Thailand

  Officially, Thai national parks allow five percent of the land to be used for development. Here, that five percent—if that’s all it was—took up just about all of the inhabitable land.

  After lunch, I tried to take a tourist-in-paradise picture of SueEllen on the beach, but things kept getting in the way: floating oil and toilet paper (ominous hints of the septic system) and nude bathers who seemed to think they were on the Italian Riviera. The sea gypsies who once lived here were long gone.

  A few years ago there was nothing here but island. In a few more years this “national park” will look like Ko Samui, where we spent Christmas Day strolling past hundreds of bungalows on once-empty beaches. And Ko Samui will soon catch up with Phuket, where a lush rainforest has fallen to plantations—rubber, pineapple, and papaya—and the shabby sprawl of uncontrolled tourism. Almost everywhere we went, incredible natural beauty was fading fast, one ecosystem after another on the brink of disaster.

  SueEllen and I walk with Nuni through the forest. As I watch the stars come out, I feel as though a calm has dropped over everything—the well-worn path, the trees, my uneasiness about cobras. We come to a campfire, and sitting before it in a wicker chair is Ajarn Pongsak, his skin glowing as deeply orange as his robes. He’s fiftyish, short and sturdy, a farmer’s son, slightly jugeared. He shakes my hand warmly, bows slightly to SueEllen. We take places around the fire and sip tea. After a while Nuni begins to translate my questions.

  “When you are in the forest, you feel its coolness in body and in spirit,” Ajarn says. “This is harmony, the correct balance of nature, or what we call Siladhamma.” He leans forward and pokes a stick into the flames. The fire crackles, and a few sparks sail up into the dark. “The balance of nature. It’s achieved and regulated by the functions of the forest. Hence the survival of the forest is essential to the survival of Siladhamma and our environment. It’s all interdependent.” For a moment Ajarn looks sadly bemused, as though what he’s saying should be, but isn’t, obvious to everyone. “When we protect the forest, we protect the world. When we destroy the forest, we destroy that balance, causing drastic changes in global weather and soil conditions, causing severe hardships to the people.”

  Until a few years ago, like many meditation monks (and unlike the more worldly “study monks” of the cities), Ajarn spent his life wandering the cool forests of the countryside. Occasionally he came here, to the Mae Soi valley, and from the highway he would follow a path to an ancient meditation cave. The path wound five miles through a forest laced with streams and shaded by enormous teak, ironwood, and mango trees, some of them seven hundred years old and wider than his arms could stretch. The forest was alive with great hornbills, civets, sambar, and barking deer. Sometimes at night he heard the cry of a leopard. The mist-shrouded ridgetops above the cave were chilly even in the hot season.

  Then one day, after an absence of several years, he returned to find that the forest had disappeared. Now there were almost no trees at all—only miles of knee-high stumps and bushes, cracked gullies, and scorched hills. Standing in the blazing sun alongside the road, he stared at a landscape that belonged more in the American Southwest than in what was once the lushest country in Asia. The valley was suffering unprecedented drought, and farmers in the lowlands told him they were getting only one poor crop a year instead of three good ones.

  The forest was always quick to remind me that becoming too comfortable was dangerous. One day, while crossing a stream, I was busily concentrating on the pronunciation of some Thai words when I stepped up onto the opposite bank; a break in the normal pattern of grass made me freeze instinctively. Just inches below my boot was the mottled, diamondlike pattern of a coiled Russell’s viper, one of the most poisonous snakes in the region. As I pulled my foot back slowly, the snake became rigid, head up, ready to go into action. I froze, holding my breath with my foot still in the air, not wanting even the backward movement to appear threatening. Finally the snake uncoiled and moved off into the underbrush. I sat down on a rock by the stream, letting my heartbeat return to normal, and pictured the consequences of this snake’s bite. Descriptions of vomiting blood, bleeding out of the eyes and nose, organ failure, and cerebral hemorrhaging came easily to mind.That was enough. The snake reminded me to tread much more carefully.

  —Alan Rabinowitz, Chasing the Dragon’s Tail: The Struggle to Save Thailand’s Wild Cats

  How could this have happened?

  First, Nuni explained to me, a company which wanted wood to cure tobacco logged almost all of the forest from the roadside halfway to the ridgetops. They had a concession to cut only smaller trees, but they ignored it.

 
Second, Hmong hill tribes moved onto the ridgetops with their traditional slash-and-burn farming practices, which shave bare the tops of the mounts. (Several years ago I saw evidence of this in southern China, the original home of many of Asia’s hill tribes.) According to Nuni, when the Hmong and other nomadic farmers first came to Thailand, their impact was small, but during the last few decades political instability in Vietnam, Myanmar (Burma), Laos, and Cambodia have sent them pouring in by the thousands.

  Buddhists cannot slaughter or witness the slaughter of animals; but they can eat ani- mal flesh as long as they are not responsible for the termination of the animal’s life… As Buddhists grow older they worry a great deal about complying with the ban on killing animals, but they can always get someone else to do the dirty work. In Thailand and Burma, to be truly virtuous, one should never crack an egg. Shopkeepers routinely evade this restraint by keeping a supply of eggs that have been “accidentally” cracked.Wealthy Buddhists ask their servants to break their eggs; the master escapes blame because he didn’t do the killing, and the servant escapes blame because he was ordered to do it.