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

by James O'Reilly

  Although there are seven or eight principal beaches in Samui, the setup at nearly all of them is the same: a row of simple, clean, thatched bungalows, lined up beside the beach, within whispering distance of the sea. Some of the cottages come equipped with bathrooms and air conditioning, others with nothing but hammocks and six-dollar-a-day price tags. Nearby are little settlements to take care of all one’s unworldly needs: a paperback exchange, a lazy garden restaurant, a shop for buying incense or bikinis, all with the natural, easy camaraderie of a baby Bali. All a visitor has to do, really, is select his fantasy—Is he hippie or hedonist? Does he want action or quiet?—and then settle down on the appropriate beach.

  The rest is pure leisure, set to a rhythm as gentle as the waves. One of the great blessings of Ko Samui is that it offers almost no diversions save for some laid-back windsurfing. There are a couple of waterfalls and a temple or two, but these can be seen in a single afternoon from a rented motorbike or jeep. Occasional claims are made for the cultural value of Thai boxing, and once, as I drove along an empty road, a Thai man pointed to two torpid water buffaloes standing in the trees, and announced, “Buffalo fighting stadium!”

  If ever you have any pressing needs, you can always travel to the bustling little port town of Na Thon, which features all the conveniences you could want: tattooists, ear cleaners, Scandinavian food, and mannequins with neon eyes.

  Mostly, though, Ko Samui is a place for escaping need, and lapsing into a simple island fantasy of food and rest. A lazy game of Ping-Pong in the shade. A waitress rocking on a swing between the palms. The smell of incense from a local shrine. A topless Swedish girl in fez and blanket sashaying down the empty beach. The occasional thunk of a falling coconut. A sign behind the bar saying, “You can’t change the past, but you can ruin a perfectly good present by worrying about the future.” And as you walk around a corner in the magic light of dusk, there, all of a sudden, you may find a Crusoe island, a boy and girl stretched out on it alone, unclothed, like Adam and Eve returned to the Garden.

  Traditionally, the majority of Samui’s visitors have been young Europeans seeking out quiet places in the sun—girls with topknots, boys with dangly earrings, eager to undress and to unwind. (Most of the heads one sees here are blond.) Many of the island’s facilities still flaunt their ironies, and their countercultural defiance of all bourgeois comfort. The Swiss Country Club is a series of tiny huts, and World Bungalows offers “the Great World Tourist Information Center.” One little shack calls itself the Beverly Hills Café, and the Hilton Garden Resort is no misnomer if you delete the first word, and the last.

  Impermanent are all conditioned things. Unsatisfactory are all conditioned things. Not-self are all conditioned things. This is the Dhamma taught by the Buddha.

  —Tim Ward, What the Buddha Never Taught

  But as Thailand has become the leading tourist hot spot of Southeast Asia—the number of its annual visitors surging from one million to five million in just five years—Hilton hotels do not seem so implausible.The Danish couple’s parents can now stay just around the bay from their children in a resort like the Tongsai Bay Hotel, whose red-roofed, white-stuccoed Mediterranean villas are scattered across a hillside thick with brilliant orchids and hibiscus. Everything is silent save the chirping of a bird. One could almost believe oneself in some sunlit pocket of Sardinia, except that every detail here is touched with the lovely Thai gift for design. Silver salvers of fruit—lichees, melon, and papaya—in every room, with flower scented finger bowls. Clusters of flowers streaming out of sea blue pots, and fresh asparagus for breakfast. Mandarin orange juice that tastes as if it just fell off a tree in Eden. A book of Buddhist proverbs by one’s bed. And, on every side, the supple courtesy of slow-moving sylphs waiting to cater to one’s every need.

  Everything the Thais touch, they turn to seduction, and Tongsai Bay, with its scarlet tropical umbrellas and its cool wicker chairs, is graced with all the country’s vaunted sense of elegance. The main problem with Samui, in fact, is simply that it is so paradisiacal—and that it is the nature of human nature to wish to discover and develop paradise. (The Thais, moreover, are particularly adept at marketing their charms.) Thus, the poor man’s utopia is fast becoming a Burgermeister’s dream—the “German Riviera,” a friend of mine calls it—and one can almost see Samui develop before one’s eyes, as quickly as the photos at the 23-Minute Film Center in Na Thon.

  In Thai, the third person singular or plural that can be used for farangs or othercan nationalities, is mun, “it.” It’s not, “he” or “she,” “his,” or “hers,” or “they.” It’s “it” the whole time. When we talk Thai and we want to refer to you in the third person, we call you “it.”

  —Kukrit Pramoj, Kukrit Pramoj: His Wit and Wisdom

  Already parts of the island are awash in banners advertising new reggae bars, fancy discos, or “Kick in the Bollocks” cocktails (two for the price of one), and the stillness of the coconut groves is broken round the clock by the relentless sound of drills and banging hammers. And already the island’s two busiest strips of beach—at Chaweng and Lamai—are bristling with beer gardens, V.D. clinics, and “cobra shows.” Amenities are beginning to take the place of pleasures. Whole clusters of bars are cropping up each week with typically insouciant Thai names (No Problem, Good Friend, Why Not?) and a surplus of young girls on hand. And at night, amid palm trees strung with lights, restaurants vie for customers by showing “V.D.O.s” such as Mutant on the Bounty. (Hardly had Batman hit the screen than a high-tech new singles bar was bouncing up, all in fluorescent green and purple neon, called the Bat Cave.)

  “Last year $6, this year $60,” exults a local sharpie, handing out cabana brochures and insisting “nicht so teuer” (“not so expensive”) to some German tourists off the boat. “Next year $150. Everyone much change. Before, family-style. Now, better service, clean room! Air-condition!”

  It is precisely that intimation of the Ghost of Samui Future that is sending more and more visitors, these days, to the neighboring island of Ko Phangan. Phangan is still Samui five years ago, and four times cheaper. There is no airport yet, and electricity only in the evenings (from 5:30 till 11, they say, but you wouldn’t want to set your digital clock by it). Where the bungalows in Samui these days boast upscale, Miami Beach names—Tropicana, Coconut Grove, Casanova’s—those on Phangan are still called Sun Dance, Moonlight, Half Moon, Green Peace, Sea Flower, and Serenity Hill. In Samui the ad hoc signs for pub crawls are nailed to trees; in Phangan the notices for full moon parties are simply painted on the bark in happy children’s pastels.

  Phangan, therefore, is still a place where time moves slowly, and girls weave baskets in the shade. Water buffalo leading wooden carts pad placidly along the sea, and children engage in languorous games of badminton (without any nets). In the distance is the faint tinkle of temple bells. A little boy sports a t-shirt—apt, for once—that assures, “I may be slow, but I’m good.” In Phangan I slept for four dollars a night in a bungalow supplied with two pillows decorated with pigs, rhinos, and elephants, and the slogan, “Let’s Go Now.” When I wanted to go to town to post a letter, I hitched a lazy ride on a fisherman’s boat, and then on the back of one of the motorbikes that serve as the island’s taxis.

  Phangan is a place for aimless wandering. Monkeys hop and skitter across the paths. Gnomic chunks of wisdom adorn the trees. (“Do not stare too close at a buffalo ear-hole.”) People leave messages on bulletin boards that say, “Sorry I couldn’t communicate very well. I wasn’t really ‘awake’ the whole time I was on the island.”

  Follow a steep path, up and up, around a hill, and you come upon a whole group of cottages at the tip, and top, of the cape, the ocean on three sides. Down below, the hidden Lighthouse Bungalow has an entire beach to itself, a slow, empty place, where ponytailed fathers, naked, lead their toddlers by the hand at sunset, and two-tone lizards slither through the grass. Nothing seems to stir here. One hut contains a shower, one hut a meditati
on center. That is just about all.

  Not surprisingly, perhaps, this charmed tropical forest is quickly being colonized by hippies—or, at least by that moveable feast of global villagers always on the lookout for the next ideal. Many of them stay here for a month, or year, and already their loose, free-floating community has begun to set up its polyglot amenities—iced Ovaltine, the finest pastries this side of Nepal, chimichangas, and nut casseroles. Explanations of the chakras hang from trees, next to ads for “Tai Ch’i Shoes—7 different kinds available.” Bare-chested longhairs sit in cafés, sipping lemongrass tea and reading Krishnamurti, The Magus, even Ovid. And every afternoon in a clearing near the beach, there is a kind of tribal gathering, and everyone—iridologists, turquoise jewelers, Dead Head jugglers, and musicians—gathers in a swirl of beads and bangles to trade rare goods and tales. Phangan is the place where the dreadlocked Swede who used to play Dylan songs on the streets of Kyoto ended up, along with the shaven-headed shiatsu girl from Angola.

  Ko Phangan is not, then everyone’s cup of herbal tea, but it does offer the gentlest and least intrusive life imaginable: an Indian Summer of Love. And there are worse things to do than just sit in one of the restaurants serving “no name with vegetables,” and take in the passing scene. Tanned Israeli soldiers talk of the intifada, from which they have just come, while white-robed nuns shine with an unnatural glow.

  Trust fund dropouts from the Upper East Side discuss Kali and Long Island, and meditating matrons from Montreal pull out the envelopes on which their short-time German boyfriends drew nude pictures. Brits sit back and take it all in sardonically.

  At night bleary-eyed blonds with silly smiles recline on cushions around a low table, munching “special mushroom” omelettes and looking at one another dreamily. What do you do for a living? I asked an Aussie girl. “Oh, I sell battery-operated panda bears on the streets of Tokyo,” she said carelessly. “Set up a couple of speakers, put on some Milli Vanilli, wave the bears about, collect $300 a night.”

  Ko Phangan is not, thankfully, all peace, love, and understanding; it is, in a sense, too unspoiled for that. One golden twilight, as I wandered from the sunrise to the sunset beach, I saw a huge circle of men gathered on a hillside shouting and screaming and howling. I wandered closer, and began to guess what was going on when I saw other shifty men squatting around the hill, cradling cocks.

  Closer still, around the cockfight itself, everything was a frenzy of waving and shouting and urging. Rarely have I seen so rough and wild a scene. Men with the red eyes of lifetime bong smokers, men so old their cheeks were sunken, men with evil scars across their cheeks. A reek of Singha beer. The fighting cocks pecking one another like angry lovers, while a fat man in shorts with a gold pen, and a thick gold bracelet, waddled around, calling out for bets.

  A whistle blew, the keepers grabbed their birds and ran, furiously, to a clearing. The crowd followed in a disheveled mass. The guardians set their fighters on the ground, swabbed them frantically, poked feathers in their ears and down their throats, smoothed their wings with the attentive care of Porsche owners. Elegant women sat on wooden benches waiting for the next fight.

  But soon the darkness fell again, and the moon was silvering the sea. Wind chimes sang across the dark. The sound of a guitar carried from a distant beach. In the soft tropical breeze the island was so tranquil, so transporting that one hardly need consult the fortune-teller who sits in the shade of Samui’s Big Buddha to know that as soon as Samui is full, people will be talking of Ko Phangan, and then, and then…why not?

  Pico Iyer also contributed “Love in a Duty-free Zone” to Part One.

  Thais give farang a wide berth, as one might a large muddy dog.

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

  JOHN HOSKIN

  The Alms Bowl Village

  Saffron-robed monks with their alms bowls constitute one of the most enduring images of Thailand.

  ALMS BOWLS, INTO WHICH PEOPLE HEAP RICE AND OTHER FOOD offerings, are quintessential to the daily rituals of monkhood, virtual extensions to the monk’s body. They are not begging bowls, for the monk does not beg, rather in accepting alms he is allowing the giver to make merit, a crucial concern in Buddhism.

  One of the eight material possessions permitted a monk, the alms bowl has been hand crafted for many centuries. Today machine production has largely taken over, though in one tiny corner of Bangkok the forging of bowls clings tenuously to the old traditions. Tucked away in a tumbled down area off Bamrung Muang Road, between Chinatown and the Golden Mount, is Baan Baat, meaning literally “alms bowl village.” Here an interrelated group of half a dozen families continue to produce hand-made bowls.

  Baan Baat is a throwback to the old days before Bangkok began its metropolitan sprawl, when areas of the capital were designed largely by the occupations they housed. Such identities have long since vanished and Baan Baat is now an anomaly. It is scarcely a quaint spot and by no means a picturesque one in its untidy huddle of corrugated iron shanties nestling amid piles of rubble. Only the lines of washing strung out to dry on bamboo poles lend a splash of colour to the otherwise drab scene.

  Yet in this improbable location a score or so workers carry on the trade their ancestors established more than a hundred years ago. It was in the mid-19th century, during the reign of King Mongkut, Rama IV, that earthenware alms bowls, which were easily broken, began to be replaced by more durable metal ones. The new, stronger type of bowl quickly became popular and Baan Baat became established, flourishing as Bangkok’s major supplier. Today it is the capital’s only source of hand-made metal alms bowls, though business has fallen sharply in decline in recent years.

  The rules governing the use and care of bowls were extensive and sometimes strange. Still, one could easily imagine the human foibles which led to the creation of these rules. A monk must not look inside another monk’s bowl. A monk must not cover up the curry in his bowl with rice to make it appear he hasn’t been given any curry. A monk must not scrape the inside of his bowl with his fingernails. A monk should not leave his bowl near a ledge or on the edge of a table. A monk should not leave his bowl where it may be kicked. The majority of these rules reflected a time when bowls were made of clay, not metal. A single moment of carelessness could produce unpleasant changes in such transitory and unstable objects. The Ajahn explained, however, that although the modern bowls could not be broken, the rules have been maintained so monks can develop mindfulness.

  —Tim Ward, What the Buddha Never Taught

  In its heyday the “village” numbered about 100 families all engaged in the craft and the average production was some 400- 500 bowls a day. Now the output is not even one-tenth of that. Nevertheless, all else remains much as it always has been and the handful of craftsmen—and women—presently working keep alive the cottage industry, performing the same tasks and using basically the same tools as their ancestors. It provides a living—just.

  Alms bowls are commonly made out of steel (the brass lids are not produced at Baan Baat) and, following long-held Buddhist principles, are comprised of eight separate pieces hammered and welded together. Thin strips are cut from sheet metal and beaten into curves. One long strip forms the bowl’s base and curls up at either end to make the beginnings of the sides. Six other pieces complete the body of the bowl while an eighth is looped to form the rim.

  Each segment is beaten and curved over a ball-shaped anvil attached to a short stem stuck in the ground; it looks curiously like a half-buried dumbbell. Shaded under crude corrugated iron shelters, these anvils mushroom around Baan Baat’s working area to give the place its characteristic trademark.

  In the fashioning of the metal strips teeth are cut along the edges so that the pieces can be interlocked and hammered together. Copper granules mixed up with a paste are then glued along these rough joins. After the bowl has been buried in a wood fire for a few minutes the copper melts, welding the joins in a rather crude yet effective fashion.


  Craftsmen next hammer the squarish form to produce the bowl’s rounded shape. The surface is then filed to give a smooth finish. Finally several coats of lacquer are applied and the bowl placed in a low heat fire to give it a black glaze. The entire process takes one person one day to complete.