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

by James O'Reilly

  “Will it come to me in this lifetime?” I laughed.

  “Ahhh, you wish much,” he said, smiling. “I am only a little older than you. I have worn the robes for eight years now, and have been seeking much longer than that. I am far from wisdom yet.”

  “I’m not greedy,” I said. “I only want a little wisdom.”

  “Me too, my friend, me too. Maybe you have more than you think.”

  Alan Rabinowitz is a research zoologist who contributed four other stories to this book.

  From the outset of his ministry the Buddha emphasized a Middle Way of conduct lying between self-indulgence on one hand and extremes of asceticism on the other. His doctrine was based on the incontrovertible, undeniable truth about humanity’s suffering, a truth that he embodied in a formula of four parts to which he gave the adjective “noble.” These Four Noble Truths, constituting what might be termed the Buddha’s diagnosis of humanity’s sickness, took a simple form: 1) No one can deny that existence involves a great deal of suffering for all human creatures. 2) This suffering and general dissatisfaction come to human beings because they are possessive, greedy, and, above all, self-centered. 3) Egocentrism, possessiveness, and greed can, however, be understood, overcome, and rooted out. 4) This rooting out can be brought about by following a rational Eightfold Path of behavior in thought, word, and deed that will create a salutary change in viewpoint.

  This Eightfold Path is the Buddha’s basic formula for deliverance from the kind of crippling invalidism that comes with having a “body- identified mind,” as Gerald Heard has described mankind’s general state. The eight requirements that will eliminate suffering by correcting false values and giving true knowledge of life’s meaning have been summed up as follows: “(I) First, you must see clearly what is wrong. (II) Next decide to be cured. (III) You must act and (IV) speak so as to aim at being cured. (V) Your livelihood must not conflict with your therapy. (VI) That therapy must go forward at the ‘staying speed,’ the critical velocity that can be sustained. (VII) You must think about it incessantly, and (VIII) learn how to contemplate with the deep mind.”

  —Nancy Wilson Ross, Three Ways of Asian Wisdom

  GAYLE DETWEILER

  Thai and Dry

  If you want to develop a deep appreciation of water, try running in Thailand.

  I RUN ON DIRT ROADS BAKED A DEEP ORANGE BY THE SUN. THEY snake around rice paddies and through villages of houses on stilts whose wood has been smoothed by the rigors of the monsoon rains.

  As I run, children suspend their play and yell, “Allo farang!” Elders, just returning from the fields, stop and stare, balancing loads of rice stalk on a bamboo pole. Some smile broadly, showing betel-stained teeth, and yell, “Lawn mai” (Hot, isn’t it?). Others shake their heads and mutter something that I can’t hear—but I imagine it’s a prediction similar to the one my father made when I started running fourteen years ago: “You’re going to kill yourself with all that running!”

  Currently still alive, I’m living in Thailand, training for the Bangkok Marathon. If there are those (and there are) who think that running is silly, then I suppose they would proclaim racing in Bangkok inane, what with all the heat and exhaust fumes. But I’m going to do it anyway. Mostly because I hear they’re giving out free water every two kilometers.

  My exaggerated appreciation of water began seven months ago when I and twelve other volunteers arrived in Bangkok to teach English. That was our long-range goal. The more immediate goal was to survive the heat of the first night with just a cot, a fan, and one bottle of water.

  One month later and settled in my little village, I decided to take a short run around the block, a mere 2.1 miles. Hello heat! It sat on my shoulders, inflamed my face, and clung to my chest. Once home, my body demanded water—every cell cried in unison: Water! Water! Water! I grabbed a water bottle and sucked it down.

  There are three seasons in Thailand—hot, hotter, and hottest. (They brag of a so-called winter—three months of sunshine with temperatures in the 80s and a cool breeze.) Two of these seasons, hot and hottest, from November to May, are dry—no rain for six or seven months. Then, mercifully, the god of Rain, “Phra Purin,” indulges. The earth gratefully takes in the rainwater, drinking…like a marathon runner.

  The Bangkok Marathon is held one month into “winter.” Race officials optimistically predict that the mean temperature on race day will be 75 degrees with 70 to 80 percent humidity. I don’t know how many gallons of water the 5,000-odd entrants will soak up on race day, but I know I’ll be drinking my limit. I’m sure it’ll be the best damn water I’ve ever tasted.

  Why do I run? So I can drink more water. Of course, I use this sort of complicated justification only for the benefit of non-runners. Real runners know why they run. The reason originates in the soul and needs no explanation. In fact, it defies any.

  So, I don’t mind when the villagers I pass laugh, clap, point, or scold me. If my running entertains the Thais (who are generous to a fault) then that’s a bonus.

  Besides, if one girl, today sitting astride her water buffalo, feels the urge to run on those same dirt paths someday because she remembers that crazy farang doing it, then I’ll be thrice blessed by the sport I love so well.

  Meanwhile, there’s water.

  Gayle Detweiler runs and drinks water in Baltimore, Maryland.

  The average daily temperatures in Bangkok in December range from 68˚F (20˚C) to 87˚F (31˚C), with the highest recorded temperature 100˚F (38˚C). The range of temperatures in April, the peak of the hot season, averages from 77˚F (25˚C) to 95˚F (35˚C), with the highest recorded temperature 106˚F (41˚C).

  —JO’R and LH

  JOHN SPIES

  Under the Golden Triangle

  Better known for poppy fields and drug lords, the Golden Triangle harbors another kind of underworld.

  A LAHU HILL TRIBESMAN LIGHTS SOME RESINOUS PINE-WOOD AND places it under the edge of an enormous stack of felled trees and bamboo, parched dry by a hot summer sun.

  The flames spread rapidly and the bamboo begins exploding, the blasts booming like cannon fire off massive orange and white limestone cliffs circling the field clearing. Thick smoke rises in huge whirls, turning the late April sun a deep ruby red.

  Half a kilometer beneath this searing heat, a group of four Australian spelunkers—cave explorers—huddles together around flickering carbide lights: cold, wet, and exhausted.

  We are deep under the Golden Triangle in Thailand’s rugged and remote Mae Hong Son province, twelve hours’ tough subterranean walking and swimming from the nearest natural light, and, in a place no humans have ever been before. We are lost.

  Dorothy has suffered a short fall and her ribs are aching—bruised, possibly broken. I have smashed my shin into a jagged underwater rock and movement is painfully slow. Dorothy’s husband John, and Atilla, a hardy Tasmanian, are both unhurt but have little energy left.

  The roof of the monstrous river tunnel we have been exploring has collapsed in gigantic house-sized blocks of limestone. Some of the collapse looks menacingly fresh, as recent as the last wet season.

  A quick tally of our survey readings measured against a topographical map tells us that we are within a kilometer of where the river, the Nam Lang, sinks in an impenetrable hole on the eastern side of the mountain.

  We clamber up into the loose jumble of broken roof, squeezing through small gaps between boulders, hoping to discover an unknown exit, an easier passage into daylight, forest greenery, and some cold beers in a local village.

  Across the collapse, a more treacherous rock pile stretches ahead of us, covering the entire tunnel. A few hundred meters more and the passage becomes totally jammed with rock.

  Disappointed, we start heading back to find our only exit blocked by the awesome maze of a collapsed cave roof, bigger than a football field. None of it looks familiar and we cannot remember which of the many holes between rocks we had come through.

  To save time we break up our
search. Dorothy and I begin working along the southern wall while Atilla squeezes down precipitous slots towards the river level. The constant roar of the Nam Lang, deep below us, echoes ominously in the huge chamber. We have been underground more than 30 hours and have limited batteries and carbide, and virtually no food. Nobody talks about the unthinkable.

  It is close to an hour before John finds a recognizable rock in the pile and the way back to the main river passage. It takes us another four hours of hard caving over slippery rocks and through deep water to reach our supplies and campsite from the previous night, a “dry,” higher cavern, away from the river, more than five kilometers inside the cave.

  Despite our fatigue we cook dinner on a kerosene stove and tally up our survey measurements. We had extended Tham Nam Lang (“Tham” is the Thai word for cave) to 8.3 kilometers, making it the longest known cave on mainland Southeast Asia, and, with an enormous main passage rarely less than 10 meters wide and 20 meters high, one of the biggest river tunnels anywhere in the world. In places the cave roof is well over 100 meters above the river level—black holes beyond the reach of powerful flashlight beams.

  The campsite is quiet, the stillness broken only by the distant rumble of the Nam Lang and perpetual cave drips.

  After twelve hours of fighting our way along what seemed like Mother Nature’s alimentary canal, sleep comes deeply and securely, as if we are now safely inside the womb of the earth.

  Next “morning” we wake early, our clothing damp from dripping stalactites and heavy cave mist. Our plan is to explore a higher cavern, an ancient tunnel of the Nam Lang, on our way out. John and Dorothy had discovered this cave on an expedition a year earlier and claimed that it was so stunningly beautiful that it was their main reason for returning to Thailand.

  With heavy backpacks we climb down to the river level where we had left an inflatable boat two days earlier. For the next kilometer we are able to enjoy a pleasant drift down the Nam Lang until rapids and rocks block our way.

  The climb up to the higher-level cavern looks dangerous. From the river the rubble slope looms over us, almost vertical. I cannot imagine how John had been enticed to risk climbing this rockfall for the first time, not even knowing whether there was a cave up there.

  John and Atilla ascend one at a time to avoid the risk of loose rocks in the clay matrix starting a new slide. After much procrastination I follow, while Dorothy, her ribs still aching, waits by the river. As I climb, her carbide light diminishes to a hazy speck in the cave mist. I hear John and Atilla on top, then nothing but the incessant roar of the river. I feel very alone and vulnerable climbing in such a huge and forbidding place.

  I finally reach the top ledge and hurry to join the others in an enormous cavern, several hundred meters long. The cave is magnificently decorated with columns and stalagmites towering to more than 30 meters high. The passage ends in a precipitous drop back down to the river level.

  We sit in silent awe in this chamber, listening to the cave grow, the drips sounding eerily loud as they splatter on stalagmites. We are dwarfed by the massive formations and my mind boggles at the aeons that have passed since this limestone was formed under the ocean, lifted and twisted into mountains, then carved and sculptured by so many millennia of flowing water and drips.

  At one side of the chamber we find a small stream with scores of small white cave fish, without eyes. It ends in a sump and Atilla, an experienced cave diver, peers underwater into a deep and distant blue.

  Safely back in the main river passage, we move on slowly towards the light. We stop only once, at an immense set of of rim-stone pools, to eat the last of our food. The glittering formation is 50 meters long and 15 meters high: terrace upon terrace of white crystalline rimpools, brimming with aqua-clear cave water. In the intense blackness I find it almost impossible to photograph. Firing off over a dozen flashes, I can illuminate only a small part of the sparkling terraces.

  The first faint glow of daylight in the tunnel appears as a mystical gray haze, intensifying with each painful step. We round a bend and, after 54 hours of immersion in the most complete blackness known to man, our eyes feast on the breathtakingly beautiful sight of rich beams of late afternoon sunlight streaming into the cave’s exit.

  The blue sky and the lush greenery of the forest have never looked so intense. The smell of the forest air and the rotting leaves is refreshingly strong.

  We almost limp the last kilometer back to our campsite where the rest of our expedition greets us with blasts from bamboo tubes filled with carbide and water, and a bottle of Thai rum.

  It felt great to be out.

  Virtually unknown except by a handful of cavers and a few local hunters, the great cave systems under the rugged limestone hills in Thailand’s far northwest corner are truly world class.

  In the region there are some ten caves more than a kilometer long. Two of these, Tham Nam Lang and Tham Mae La Na, have over eight kilometers of mainstream passage with more upper-level caverns yet to be discovered.

  Fortunately one doesn’t have to be a spelunker (spelcologist, if you are British) to enjoy the enchanting subterranean world under the Golden Triangle. Even the totally inexperienced, equipped with a good flashlight or rented lantern, and a sense of adventure, can safely explore several large caves in the area.

  The adventure starts when you board the morning bus in Chiang Mai, headed northwest for the small Shan town of Pai. The road through to Mae Hong Son was originally built by the Japanese Army during the Second World War—one of several invasion routes into Burma. The road is currently being improved but sections of the original track still exists—as rough as ever.

  Daily several buses ply the 110 kilometer mountain stretch between Pai and Mae Hong Son, and passengers are treated to some of the finest scenery in Southeast Asia. Sheer limestone pinnacles and knobs—craggy peaks exquisitely sculptured by nature—jut from dense sub-tropical forest. In the distance, range after range of rugged mountains, foothills of the mighty Himalayas, stretch northward into Burma’s Shan State.

  Near the market village of Sobpong, a little less than halfway from Pai to Mae Hong Son, are several easily accessible tribal villages where the way of life has changed little for centuries.

  The best place to start caving is at Tham Lod—“Through Cave”—near Ban Tham, a Shan village, seven kilometers, walk or rented pick-up ride north of Sobpong.

  Tham Lod is a huge river tunnel carved through a limestone hill by the Nam Lang. The cave is about 20 kilometers upstream from Tham Nam Lang, and its main passage, though much shorter and easier to negotiate, is similar in scale.

  It is possible to walk from the enormous entrance chamber of Tham Lod through to the even larger exit, fording the Nam Lang six times. Lanterns can be rented at the nearby forestry camp but it is advisable to take along a flashlight also as a back-up.

  There are three upper-level caverns in the cave, the largest one well decorated with an immense column over 20 meters high dominating the chamber. The other side passages can be reached only by ladders.

  Deep inside a cavern, high up in the wall of the gaping exit chamber, are the remains of several ancient wooden coffins. Carved from teak logs, the coffins are about four or five meters long and resemble dugout canoes. The locals believe they were built by “pi man,” unfriendly spirits that lurk in the caves.

  Archaeological excavations in a few of the dozens of “Tham pi man” in the area tell a different story. During the mid-1960s, Chester Gorman, an American archaeologist, excavated a small coffin cave near the Burmese border and found evidence of human habitation stretching back 14,000 years.

  Digging through successive layers of earth to the bedrock floor of the cave, Gorman discovered carbonized plant and animal remains, pottery shards and stone tools. Subsequent radio-carbon dating enabled Gorman to reconstruct the primitive cave dwellers’ steady advance from basic hunting and gathering to the beginnings of agriculture, ceramics, and advanced stone tool production.

&nb
sp; What makes Spirit Cave such an important archaeological site is the antiquity of the plant and seed remains, which Gorman believed were almost certainly cultivated. If they were, what is now north Thailand may well have been home to the earliest agriculturalists in Asia, more than 10,000 years ago.

  The coffins are much more recent, the oldest being around 2,000 years ago. Most likely they were made by Lawa tribesman who lived extensively over the northern hills well before the Thais arrived from the north. The Lawa were animists and in their coffins they left clothing, food, pottery, and jewelry for the deceased’s use in the spirit world. Some of the coffins are huge, up to ten meters long, perched high up inside caves, twenty meters up a cliff-face. One assumes such burials were reserved for the old and important.