The scenery was unchanging for a thousand miles. Paddy fields were dotted with lonely sea coconut palms and wooden houses each with a TV mast. Ditches of lotus and tufted water rush made for a weary landscape that was flat to the horizons from the South China Sea in the east to the Andaman Sea in the west. Train travel carries with it the voyeur’s fascination of prying unseen into the lives of others. A hundred years ago, Ford Maddox Ford summed up rail travel: ‘One is behind glass, gazing into the hush of a museum, seeing little bits of uncompleted life.’
Sleep was fitful. My carriage was next to the engine and the driver had a whistle blowing phobia that needed attention. The rail lengths differed too, so The Emperor kept changing to the Radetsky March and then to Honeysuckle Rose.
Bangkok is an unattractive city, sprawling and dirty, crammed with humanity and sectioned by clogged klongs. But like Singapore’s Christian churches, little jewel boxes of temples were dotted around so that suddenly, between the car breakers and the washing-hung tenement blocks, a little oasis of cool contentment appeared shimmering in gold and crusted in shining ceramics. In one of these, I fell into conversation with a young Buddhist monk. Asked if I knew about Buddhism I muttered something about reincarnation and hoped I might return as a dog. “Could I choose?” I asked. To return as a Chinese chow rather than an English setter would be an unfortunate error. He gave me the contemptuous look that such a facetious question deserved.
In the afternoon, I took a long boat down the Chao Phraya River and through a few of the wider klongs. The boat’s 40 ft (12m) of length and four feet (1.2m) of beam were propelled by a six cylinder motor that was wrestled by a teenager. Had the engine had a silencer, it would have been a more pleasant way to explore the back waters. I was back at 6 pm in time to hear the National Anthem broadcast over a school playground beside my hotel; rather a catchy number, it also made a jolly start to the day at 8 am.
The Floating Market of Bangkok now sells only hats, carved elephants and bags of wooden fish but I had heard that the water market at Damnoe Saduak, thirty miles away and on the road to Kachanaburi and the River Kwai, was still authentic. I was wrong; charter tours seemed to have reached there years ago. Marshalled by barriers, the paunchy and patronising, squeezed into local sarongs or sweating in ‘Thailand Loves You’ T-shirts, stumbled into long boats that left at fifteen second intervals. Like safari jeeps around a lion cub, a dozen of these boats circle a lone floating greengrocer and twenty-five shutter clicks later they zoom over to Handicrafts (MasterCard and American Express accepted). I fled for Kachanburi.
The River Kwai is 1,000 ft (300m) wide, brown, benign and fringed by bamboo, liana and many floating restaurants. The celebrated bridge, black-girdered and on concrete supports streaked by age and algae, seemed menacing and sinister and a rather tacky museum displayed many pictures and mementos of the brutal treatment and dreadful conditions of POW slave labour, but it was at the cemetery that my emotions spilled over. It was so neat, so well ordered and so dreadfully poignant. I sat down and cried in the shade of a spreading acacia tree beside the brave rows and the cross with its wreath of poppies.
Back in Bangkok, Patpong, the city’s Chinatown, is a wide, short street whose edges were occupied by girlie bars. Leggy but listless girls were clad only in what decency and the law required – this was satisfied by a single cardboard star. Extravagantly priced beer was topped up frequently by other less leggy but more active girls who offered something more than mere companionship. The centre of the street was taken up by stalls selling fakes and very good they were. I bought a Cartier ‘Santos’ for £9 (in Bond Street it would have been £2,000); I hoped it would still be going when I got to the airport.
With Ton and his tuk-tuk, we puttered off to Wat Po, home to a Buddha weighing in at five and a half tons of solid gold (5,600 kgs) where I was buttonholed by a stout English matron clad in several layers of frilly pink cotton; she continually complained of the heat to her insipid companion. When waiting for buses, boats and trains I had been compiling a list of characters from Saki’s short stories. These two filled my image perfectly of the alarming Mrs Packletide and her drippy companion, Loona Bimberton.
At 4 pm as the sun just started to dip, I took an Express Boat with Ton and we went to Nonthaburi, a suburb half an hour away, zipping past coal and rice barges, tourist cruisers and varied commercial water traffic. Each stop was an exercise in precision by passengers and crew alike. The skipper was in a little glass hut in the bows and the passengers got on and off at the stern. Coming alongside at each stop was controlled by a series of whistles from the man at the stern and another at the bows so that the skipper was a sort of marine sheepdog. It took an average of nine seconds at each landing point, which was exactly the time that slack was achieved between full astern to bring the boat to a halt and full ahead to zoom off again. In these critical moments, a crowd leapt on and a crowd leapt off; it was not an operation to be undertaken by those weak of limb or lacking courage, nor the tight skirted.
Just before our final landing point, a buckle from a girl’s rucksack got hooked onto my back trouser button. The boat was swaying, passengers were pressing, the shore approached fast, I had a plane to catch and here we were, back to back, inextricably connected. Just as I was thinking we had better get introduced, we were free and I leapt the yard to the landing stage. I waved to my ten second friend and she vanished into the spray and the sunset.
Thailand, Cambodia and Laos
February 1998
‘Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey’ – Fitzhugh Mullan
In Bangkok’s Luphini Park, dawn breaks at 6.00 am and by then all the best picnic spots are taken by the geriatric fitness clubs, each separately distinguished by coloured shirts. As the light comes up with tropical urgency, the yellow shirts are ballroom dancing, the reds are being schooled in theatrical grimaces and in blue, 90-year-olds are on their backs bicycle pedalling. At this time in the morning, it is the sanctuary of the elderly and early rising Chinese community, and solitary individuals battle in slow motion against an imaginary assassin in T’ai Chi. Breakfast picnics seem to be largely of women gossiping amongst great thermoses of green tea and wicker baskets of rice cakes and dried fruit. By 8.00 am they are packing up and on the hour, as the national anthem is broadcast over the city, they respectfully stand for a minute or two and then shuffle off to lonely flats and memories, passing the first of the office workers taking a short cut to crowded blocks of glass and steel.
A day trip to Ayutthaya was a disappointment. This tourist destination 40 miles north of Bangkok is billed as the ancient city of Siam, a UNESCO World Heritage site, the cultural, religious, political and trading centre of Indo China for four centuries. But all that I found were weedy ruins scattered over a large area within a town that had spread over and around them. Only one great monument of the thirteenth century remained impressive. Wat Phra Si San Phet with three great chedi (the Burmese influence – they attacked the city 24 times with their war elephants) is set in a great, peaceful, grassy park dotted with trees as gnarled as old olives and scented with pink and white frangipani.
To this archaeological bystander, an exception to crumbling piles was Wat Yai Chai, built to celebrate victory in an elephant duel. A phallic 80 feet (24m) of carved sandstone with an alarming post-prostate tilt, it is surrounded by trim lawns, potted bougainvillaea and topiary. Restored for daily use, there squatted at its base a group of Buddhist nuns packing joss sticks in tens, wafers of gold leaf into fives and stripping lotus blossoms of leaves. However, two contemporary images unsettled the antiquity and contentment of the place. Around the base, 100 images of the Lord Buddha formed a guardian square – each identical and each a clone of Barbra Streisand. Similarly, the great benign golden Buddha in the inner sanctum seemed modelled on Mr Neal, my prep school Latin master – it was the squint that gave him away. A fishy lunch beside the River Chao Phraya outside the old walls and near the old Portuguese colony brough
t reality home again.
There were just six on the flight from Bangkok to Siam Reap in Cambodia: two and a half pairs of back packers and a grandfather. I hoped the airline, new in the last two months and with a single aircraft, would last long enough to bring me back. At the airport we were outnumbered two to one by officials in identically styled uniforms with green for immigration, grey for customs and brown for police, but all with the same hat. The five green men took care of the visa formalities. The first applied the stamp, the next the seal, the third the date, the fourth signed and the last entered the details in a large book and took the money. The grey and the brown men chalked my bag, smiled and indicated my waiting guide and driver. At the hotel, everyone smiled. The door mat said ‘Welcome’, so did the bath mat and ‘Hello Welcomes’ was embroidered on the bed cover. The manager smiled the most when I brought him a cockroach from my room – flat on its back fortunately – and complained that my room was airless and that although it had curtains, they framed a window artfully painted on a white wall. His smile was as wide as his supplicating hands as he assured me that when the tour group left I would have the room with the biggest real windows. As for the cockroach – his smile stretched further, “You know how it is,” and a well-practised flick sent the beast into the bin.
On the edge of the town are the Killing Fields where tens of thousands of innocents were slaughtered or worked to death by the ruthless Khmer Rouge under the infamous Pol Pot. His influence seemed to lurk in the shadows and his guerrillas are said to be still in the hills to the north. In a country the size of England with a population of only 15 million, he ordered the city dwellers into the fields and the farmers into the city murdering two million on the way. Land mine clearance teams are still at work – mostly Vietnamese attracted by the high wages that compensate for a lost leg.
Chea Bunat was an excellent guide. His father and mother had been killed by the Pol Pot regime and he worked freelance as he had neither the relations nor the money to bribe the manager of the travel agency to employ him on a full time basis. A guide was important not only for information but also to make sure one did not stray to mined areas. In 90°F (32°C), the sweat that poured into my eyes would have prevented me seeing a mine even if I had stepped on it. Bunat was keen to improve his English. We both got confused with mind, mines and mined and we got into giggles with gaggles, goggles and gurgles. We rode around on bicycles, taking alarming short cuts over single plank bridges and weaving our way through little back gardens neatly planted with onions, radishes and pak choi. Pot-bellied pigs wallowed in mud as black as themselves. Resting under an old mango tree, Chea admitted to a passion for ballroom dancing and reeled off the names of big bands. Joe Loss, Victor Sylvester and Count Basie were his favourites.
Of all the 290 temples built between the ninth and twelfth centuries by the great Khmer empire around Siam Reap, Angkor Wat is justly the most spectacular. Seen in a setting sun across a wide moat, with a line of monks in marigold yellow walking across the causeway, is the iconic picture postcard view but the temple itself it is an extraordinary monument to the labours of a million men over 30 years. Soon it would have as many tourists in a single year. But for me the temple of Ta Prohm was the best. It seemed a model for a schoolboy adventure story, the set of any jungly film or as the backcloth of a romantic legend. Tarzan might have hollered from a crumbling tower or Indiana Jones dashed across a courtyard of tumbled boulders pursued by angry natives. But there is no conflict here, only peace, occasionally punctuated by cackling parrots or a toucan’s hoot against a continuo of cicadas. The temple’s 1000-year-old stones had been prised from their original positions by the roots of a dozen fig trees. Smooth and grey, some torso thick, they poured down walls, snaked over the floor, spread through the masonry, strangled Vishnu images, garrotted a dancing girl and girdled a door. A Buddhist monk, holding his saffron robes over one arm, was caught in a shaft of sunlight. I caught him too, in my lens.
Ton Le Sap is the largest lake in South East Asia and controls the floodwaters of the rainy season when it extends its surface area 10 times. It irrigates the rice paddies and a unique form of rice grows ten feet (3m) high to cope with the depth of water. The lake is extraordinarily fertile and supports a fishing industry around its shores. A floating town had grown up with a school, a hospital, a police station and a range of shops with floating houses from single shacks to large houseboats which are scattered randomly over its surface. Some had little floating vegetable plots, chickens coops and even pigs. We stopped by a catfish farm, where the fish were in a frenzied turmoil when fed baby versions of themselves. A tethered pet monkey was eating a fish – meticulously picking out the bones and three bedraggled pelicans in a cage were waiting the knife of a festival meal. As we chugged up the channel to a land based village, we passed a cumbersome barge stacked with beer being poled with great effort by a man and two women. It had been loaded from a small steamer moored in the lake. It was cheaper to bring the beer from Phnom Penh by boat rather than road; sweated labour was still exploitable. The stench of drying fish, eels and water snakes was appalling, the rubbish dreadful, the heat oppressive but the whole malodorous scene bustled with activity.
On the road back I passed a tree nursery irrigated by a great water wheel. By an enlightened law every citizen has to plant two trees during his lifetime. Leaving the nursery, a roadside policeman offered me his badge for sale; on graduation each policeman was given two, whether the second was to boost a poor salary I never found out – perhaps he had a suitcase full. My horoscope in the newspaper read ‘Be in touch with recalcitrant relatives. Gifts will add to your wardrobe; people will say, “You look spiffy”!’
The Secret War, when the CIA established a base against the Pathet Lao (Kurtz the crazy colonel in Apocalypse Now was modelled on the real life green beret Tony Poe), seems to be still running, although its cover was clearly blown. My immigration card at Vientiane airport had a space for ‘pseudo name’. I put in Bond. The town was in turmoil; the airport half constructed, new drainage being laid city-wide, dirt roads paved and the electricity off 8 am to 5 pm – the last being the most inconvenient with no air conditioning and drinks light on ice. The buildings were low rise, the streets full of cashew trees, palms and frangipani and there were even rice paddies in the centre of town. Traffic was sparse and made up mostly of mopeds and much patched tuk-tuks. After two obligatory temples and a dreadful concrete national stupa, I watched the sun sink into Thailand on the far side of the Mekong River.
A bit of dirt and dust outside the front door seemed inconsequential when at lunch, the lamb was pink and garlicky, the prawns were fat and the asparagus thin; eels from the river had been salted and smoked and were accompanied by crispy baguettes and fresh butter: give me an ex-French colony any day. If La Cage aux Folles came here the waiters would be first in the audition line; in tight white shorts they wagged their little bums and giggled a lot but were delightfully helpful and attentive – well, to me anyhow!
The currency changes have been confusing. The Thai baht fluctuated 20% a day; in Cambodia they used the dual currency of US dollars and riels and here I changed 50 dollars and got 128,000 kips in a stash of notes as thick as a brick.
Nothing much moved in Luang Prabang – the old capital of the Kingdom of Laos. A single set of traffic lights was stuck on red, there were chickens in the main street, no wind rustled the bamboo, and dogs lay around and snoozed. My hotel, the Villa Santi, was once the Villa de la Princesse, the home of the last king’s sister. Since the revolution in 1975 such names have been politically incorrect, nevertheless, it took until 1995 to get around to the name change. (The princess still lived in town but rather more modestly now and had to do her own shopping.) With just ten bedrooms, the hotel was cool and airy with much polished wood, stone floors and rattan ceilings woven in herringbone. I established my table on the first floor veranda and looked out on life ambling by, waving to the children across the street as they struggled with a mangle that extr
acted juice from sugar cane.
I hired an old fashioned ‘sit up and beg’ bicycle and for reasons that neither the lady renter nor I could work out, it was hard to turn to the right. Consequently, I devised an anti-clockwise route around town but dogs, chickens and stray children were at risk. It squeaked from every moving part and as I passed, people looked up and wondered where a pig was being slaughtered. Monks, with shaven heads and robes in a variety of orange tones from public park-marigold to forest-cinnamon and with a long cloth bag slung over a shoulder, were everywhere. It was as though a cargo plane had jettisoned a ton of orange lollies. Most were novices doing a mandatory three months or more and some, for personal reasons – the death of their father perhaps – sign on for another three months. Considering they were up at 4 am for their first mantras and lived on rice they had to beg for, they were a cheerful lot. Buddhism is deeply integrated into the culture of daily life and in Luang Prabang, the religious capital of the country, there seemed to be a wat on every block and sometimes four in a row.
The women have fine-boned features and appeared delicate and dainty until you saw them heaving a sack of rice onto a lorry or carrying a hod of bricks up bamboo scaffolding. They wear long skirts of woven cotton or silk, banded at the bottom with coloured stripes of gold and silver. There seemed to be a single size that fitted all so at the waist the fabric is folded and tucked in as necessary. The town typified the laid back life of the Lao. It lies at the confluence of the Mekong and Nan Khan rivers but there was little boat traffic and the water was mostly enjoyed by cheerful children playing with inner tubes around the sandy shores. It was a languid, listless and loveable place with a lot of laughing and a little work.
It was the dry season and there was a haze over the hills from smoke which rose from the slash and burn of the hill tribes. Many move their villages every two years and need new ground to cultivate. The Hmong originally came from Northern China – some say Mongolia – and live rather aloof from other tribes, growing a single crop of rice which they plant on the hillsides. Having slashed early and burnt late they had little to do. Children played in the dust with fat, contented pigs, chased turkeys, (chickens are for the valleys) and were cuddled by mothers wearing elaborately embroidered costumes. These were a long skirt, bright with coloured beads around the base, a loose shirt with white sleeves, the waist wrapped in a scarlet sash and an intricately embroidered square of cloth hanging over the shoulders. Their heads were usually covered with a sort of crocheted cap whose little balls of wool at each corner bobbled around their back. The men were universally clad in black shirts and baggy trousers and looked like stereotype Viet Cong. Their windowless long houses rested on stilts like arks washed up by a flood. They had palm woven roofs (renewed annually) and underneath were stacks of wood in Swiss precision, together with pigs and maybe a loom. The rice was winnowed laboriously by being pounded in a great mortar and was then put into sacks to be carried to the roadside slung over the back of a surefooted horse. A few men carried a homemade rifle which I judged as being more dangerous to the hunter than the hunted. The gun has a slim barrel about six feet (1.8m) long into which is stuffed gun powder and a pea sized lead ball and then everything is set off with a hammer blow from a child’s cap gun. They used much the same method at Edgehill in 1642, although I doubt whether the soldiers there could have hit a starling sitting 30 ft (10m) up in a mango tree. Small boys used catapults with similar accuracy; no wonder birds were scarce.
The Last Blue Mountain Page 7
