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

  Sophia Dembling was born and raised in New York City, but at age nineteen discovered life west of the Hudson. She is a freelance writer who lives in Dallas and is the former assistant travel editor of The Dallas Morning News.

  I spent four months working as a volunteer with the Karen tribe. I learned to speak their language and now know how they feel about tourism.

  The Karen people already feel odd when they visit their local towns because they are so different from most Thais. When outsiders trek through their villages they feel even worse. The older Karens feel that this affects the young badly. They think it makes them start to see it as being “backward”; they want to have Western clothing and music in their villages; they may want to leave their Karen village to seek other lifestyles; they may try to copy what the Karen elders see as foreigners’ “immoral” behavior.

  Whatever the faults of organized tours, it seems that they are better than do-it-yourself tours as the Karen elders in a “trek village” can control the influence of the foreigners. They can also choose which parts of their culture to show.

  The Karen people are very private and are likely to retreat when they see foreigners. They feel strongly about the way people dress, so travelers should not wear skimpy clothing when trekking.

  —Jay Griffiths, Letter to the Editor, Great Expeditions

  SIMON WINCHESTER

  Relics of Old Siam

  In the much-visited ruins of Ayuthaya, the former Thai capital, there is a place most day-visitors miss.

  FOUR HOURS UP RIVER FROM BANGKOK ON THE CHAO PHYA river—or perhaps sixty minutes, if you decide to risk your life in one of those pencil-slim, water-borne Concordes currently favored by Thailand’ s gondoliers—lies a most spectacular ruin, much visited but very little known. Ayuthaya was the capital of Siam for more than four centuries—from 1350 until 1767, when the Burmese sacked it and trampled everyone to pieces with their elephant cavalry. Now it is one of the great ruins of Asia, and as such it appears in all the tourist leaflets and is as obligatory a stop on a tour of Central Thailand as the Wat Arun or a live show in Patpong II.

  But hardly anyone spends time in Ayuthaya. Each day, after luncheon, the great white boats from Bangkok slide up to the landing stages at Bang pa-In to disgorge their invading armies of package tourists, and at dusk the charabancs growl away with them in full retreat, leaving the old capital once more silent and deserted. Four hours appears to be the maximum permitted exposure to this most glorious display of Siamese history. To any but the most purblind visitor, it must seem that just as the tragic languor of the place begins to sink in, so a motor-horn barks and a guide bellows some instruction, and you are summoned away.

  Yet it is entirely possible to stay a while in Ayuthaya—possible, inexpensive, delightful, and, for anyone attempting to understand the complexities of Thai history, eminently desirable. But to do so you have to make a show of your independence—ignore the persuasive arguments of the Bangkok boatmen (though by all means take up their offers for lesser journeys, to the Grand Palace or the Floating Markets) and insist, though they will advise you otherwise, on a northbound bus, train, or car. Travel up from Bangkok early one evening; the plains are dull, so there is no need to go by daylight. Take dinner at a café in the bustling little country town which is the sole living remnant of the old capital, and rise before the sun and then take a local boat. (A word of warning, drawn from the bitter experience of others: if you were incautious enough to allow the café-owner to flavor your curry with too much of that murderously hot green chili known as prick kee nu, you will have risen long before dawn. So it is as well to demand, in a town that entertains so few farangs to dinner, that the chefs go easy on the peppers.)

  I took my boat, a slender “long-tail” with its propeller set on a pivoted stem to help avoid the floating clumps of water-hyacinth, just before dawn.When King U-Tong established Ayuthaya in 1350 he chose a site at the confluence of three rivers—the Lop Bur, the Pasak, and “Thailand’s Mississippi,” the Chao Phya—and then had a small canal constructed to turn his city into an easily defensible island. island, lozenge-shaped, two miles by one, is itself incised by dozens of narrow klongs, or canals—meaning that a boat, and especially a narrow boat, is an essential means of exploring the city.

  I found mine moored behind my hotel, the steersman puffing contemplatively on a ragged cheroot. He agreed on 25 baht—a dollar—an hour, and once the deal had been struck and the cheroot tossed away, declared himself proud to be able to show me the city that 16th-century wanderers called the most beautiful in the East. “They said it was like your Venice,” said my boatman, who was called Mr. Sak. “Many canals. Much water. Many lovely buildings. But so many are knocked down by the Burmese. You have to imagine what it must have been like before the Burmese came.”

  Ayuthaya was a mere vassal state during the closing years of that most glorious and idyllic period in Thai history, the age of the kingdom of Sukhothai. The kings who ruled from Sukhothai are regarded even now with nostalgia and reverence—they were deeply religious, kindly, learned, accessible, paternal figures, men whose wisdom brought a golden era to Siamese history. But they were ultimately weak rulers, and down in Ayuthaya a new class of more martial figures began to assert themselves. By the mid-14th century these men had seized power from the pious monarchs of the north. The kings of Ayuthaya, the so-called “Lords of Life,” were quite different. They ruled as absolute monarchs, ambitious and nationalistic men who ran disciplined and ruthlessly organized courts: a strict ban on “amatory poems,” amputation for anyone who kicked a palace door, a code of laws laying down that errant princes could be beaten to death by means of sandalwood clubs drummed against the napes of their royal necks.

  The island-city built by the thirty-three Ayuthaya kings during their five dynasties and four centuries was appropriately regal in scale and style—a mix of architecture that managed to be both bombastic and reverential. There were huge palaces, wide moats, magnificently expensive temples, towering prangs, whole forests of brick chedis, endless rows of Buddhas and icons in gold and jadeite and marble. The Dutch, the French, the British, and the Japanese were in Ayuthaya too. King Songham had permitted his cities to be used as entrepôts, and there was a bustling trade in silk, spices, hides, teak, tin, and sugar. The traders built their embassies and houses and, in the case of the Dutch, a huge cathedral. Ayuthaya at its zenith had all the trappings of a major world capital, and was respected and admired by everyone who visited it.

  But it was not to last. The Third Burmese Empire had designs on the Thai fiefdom in the south, and Ayuthaya came under attack—first by King Alaungpaya in 1760 (though he withdrew, having been injured by his own cannon-fire), and then again, and fatally, by Alaungpaya’s son Hsinbyushin in 1767. The city was under siege for more than a year before the Ayuthayan guards gave up the struggle and the Burmese poured into the city on their squadrons of battle-elephants. Then, in an act of collective vandalism that is almost unmatched in Asia, they set this lovely old capital ablaze, ruined its palaces and forts, and melted every ounce of gold from every Buddha and icon in sight. By the end of the year the place was a total ruin, only the stumps of its temples and the foundations of its palaces remaining for the jungle grasses to reclaim.

  I stood frequently in admiration of the strong great city, seated upon an island round which flowed a river three times the size of the Seine.There rode ships from France, England, Holland, China, and Japan, while innumerable boats and gilded barges rowed by sixty men plied to and fro. No less extraordinary were the camps of villages outside the walls inhabited by the different nations who came trading there, with all the wooden houses standing on posts over the water, the bulls, cows, and pigs on dry land. The streets, stretching out of sight, are alleys of clear running water. Under the great green trees and in the little houses crowd the people. Beyond these camps of the nations are the wide rice fields.The horizon is tall trees, above which are visible the sparkling towers and pyramids of the pag
odas. I do not know whether I have conveyed to you the impression of a beautiful view, but certainly I myself have never seen a lovelier.

  —Abbé de Choisy, a Jesuit priest, French diplomat in Siam in 1685, and once famous Parisian transvestite, quoted by William Warren in Thailand, Seven Days in the Kingdom.

  But Thailand herself was to survive the assault. A young general, Phya Tak Sin, escaped the siege, set up a temporary headquarters on the Gulf of Siam and some months later traveled back to drive the Burmese occupation garrison out of the capital. The devastation he saw was too terrible: he spent barely a night among the ruins before leaving for the south, for the riverside town of Thonburi and the place they call “the village of wild olive groves”—Bangkok. But that is another story. While Bangkok was to grow and prosper, Ayuthaya was to moulder and decay in the steamy heat of the tropics, waiting for its rediscovery as a treasure-house of old Siam.

  Old Mr. Sak steered me slowly down the Pasak River, under the single road bridge that is Ayuthaya’s only physical link with the outside world. Even at dawn the river was busy. Long trains of huge old rice-barges lumbered by. Fisherwomen cast nets, and sat smoking cheroots as they waited for them to fill. A boatload of young Buddhist monks, all in their deep red robes—one shoulder bare, as is the Thai custom—flashed past on the way to worship at a wat nearby. Their driver gunned his Evinrude to show off, and the monks stumbled over each other as the prow rose from the water. But they grinned and waved. Such a cheerful religion, Buddhism—so very little that is solemn.

  We stopped at a temple, the Wat Phanan Cheong, which was built a few years before Ayuthaya herself and has long been popular with the local Chinese. The Buddha is almost unbelievably large—so tightly jammed inside the temple that it appears to be supporting the roof. Even at this hour the temple was full. Old ladies were lighting incense tapers, men were pasting tiny offerings of gold leaf on to the Buddha’s feet and shins, schoolchildren were bowing low and reciting their morning mantras. Outside I paid ten baht for a tiny caged bird, and set it free above the river to carry my wishes where they might be answered.

  (After flying a few circles, the bird went straight back to its mistress, who re-caged it and sold it again ten minutes later. She did the same with terrapins and, said the ever-skeptical Mr. Sak, made a small fortune doing so.)

  Beside Phanan Cheong is a small Shinto shrine and a little cemetery—the remains of the Japanese community that once thrived here. But when in 1682 the shogun refused to recognize the usurper Prasattong as King of Thailand, the Japanese were murdered, or fled. To modern Japanese the tombs are holy relics, revered as war graves, and they are carefully tended by their Thai guardians.

  A clockwise progress along the river—the way Mr. Sak insisted on taking me each day—leaves the old city itself on the right bank. I would stop the boat every few yards and walk, or paddle up along a tiny klong, to see the various ruins within. Some are magnificent; the Chandrakasem Palace has been turned into a most agreeable museum, and the Wat Raj Burana has been splendidly restored with huge prangs, superb gateways, rows of chedis standing on freshly mown lawns. The old royal palace, Wang Luang, was totally destroyed by the Burmese; but close by its foundations is the marvelous line of the three identical chedis of the Wat Phra Sri Sanphet, as dignified and harmonious an example of Buddhist temple-building as you will see anywhere in Asia.

  The huge Buddha at Phra Sri Sanphet is even more impressive than that at Phanan Cheong, and the throngs of the faithful are greater, their devotions louder. But this is where the foreign tourists tend to start their wanders (the boats from Bangkok arrive around 1 p.m.), and it can become unbearably crowded. There are souvenir stalls, too—an eruption of commerce that sits uneasily against the tranquillity of other ruins nearby.

  Pleasant hours can be spent wandering in the old city itself. One can start at the island’s western end, at the monument to the heroic Queen Suriyothai. (In the great battle with the Burmese in 1549 the Queen, a great feminist, dressed in men’s clothes and fought, on her elephant, alongside her King. In one memorable cavalry charge she saved her husband’s life, but died in so doing. The chedi that holds her ashes is one of Thailand’s most sacred.) And one can finish at the east, by the Phom Phet fortress, or the attractive Wat Suwan Dararam, a place which is quite lovely at dusk as the monks, framed by the magnificently restored columns and frescoes, chant their plain song devotionals. And then, being nearby, one can dine at a floating restaurant on the Pasak River: there are two beside the Pridi Damrong Bridge, and the road home.

  However my own preference in Ayuthaya is for the unrestored, the ruins sensu stricto, where some of the sadness of the saga of the capital remains embedded in the stone. To see such a place one is forced to look at the river’s left bank, not the right. My own favorite—somewhere that tells the essence of the Ayuthaya story, I like to think—is beside the old Dutch cathedral of St. Joseph (which still stands, and from which you can hear Christian hymns on a Sunday morning, sung in Thai.) Called the Wat Chai Wattanaram, it is a place of silence and forlorn beauty on the bend of a river. There is a mighty prang, covered with foliage, with small bushes growing from its cornices and parapets. A single Buddha looks down from a pedestal. Surrounding the prang are the subsidiary chedis, all more or less intact but weathered like ancient stalagmites, the brown of their stones rendered green by the plants clinging to every horizontal surface. There are dozens of headless Buddhas, still sitting in contemplative attitudes, still somehow radiating peace, still somehow managing to look beatific and even forgiving to those ancient vandals to whom they fell victims.

  Cattle wandered through the ruins and small black pigs rooted among the tussock grass. Flocks of brilliantly-colored birds rose in alarm from the recesses of the old stones, like sudden rainbows and bursts of fire. Lizards lazed in the sun, prompting Mr. Sak to wonder if there might be snakes in the deeper grass. He may well have been right. There was no one else in the grounds of the temple; boats no longer stopped here. The whole place had returned to the jungle, swamped in a green and feral wilderness beside the slow river.

  It was like a lost city, somewhere which had slumbered for centuries, unvisited and undisturbed. Indeed, I thought, Wat Chai Wattanaram looked today as Ayuthaya itself must have looked before it was rediscovered and placed foursquare on all the tourist maps. It was perfectly quiet that morning but for the chatter of song-birds as I stood beside the river, gazing at the wrecked spires and domes and all those ranks of statues…despoiled, but still serene.

  Two hundred years ago all of them—statues, temples, monuments, tombs—were intact. But then the Burmese elephant-squadrons made their final attacks, the fire-boats crossed the river, the soldiers from the North began their final rampage and the era of Ayuthaya was over. Elsewhere, where temples and palaces have been restored, the sights are impressive. But in this temple, above all others, the sense of deep and abiding tragedy—the real sense of Ayuthaya—remains. On this one spot beside the river stands a poignant reminder of the troubled history of the Thai people and their land. It is a discovery that the average day-visitor will never experience; but it is one well worth making, an essential way-station on any serious progress through the story of Siam.

  Simon Winchester is the author of many books, including The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Pacific Rising: The Emergence of a New World Order, from which this story was excerpted. He is also editor-at-large for Condé Nast Traveler and his work appears in many other major magazines and newspapers. He lives in a farm-house on an island in Scotland.

  Don’t be shocked to see women holding hands with other women when walking down the streets and men walking with their arms around each other; however, men and women never touch each other and travelers should avoid any public display of affection.

&nbs
p; —Elizabeth Devine and Nancy L. Braganti, The Travelers’ Guide to Asian Customs and Manners

  JOHN REMBER

  Highland Carnival

  The author finds sanuk in ancient Chiang Mai.

  CHIANG MAI IS THAILAND’S FOURTH LARGEST CITY, AND YET, next to Bangkok, it isn’t a city at all. The capital has 6 million inhabitants, while Chiang Mai is home to only 160,000. In the last decade or so Bangkok has become one more borough in a huge ocean-orbiting metropolis that includes Los Angeles, Seoul, Tokyo, Seattle, and Sydney. But Chiang Mai province still provides glimpses of rural Thailand, of old Thailand, of 800-year-old temples, small villages, and rice fields where monks in saffron robes walk the berms between electric green paddies.

  Less worldly, less driving than Bangkok, this old city of the north, founded in 1296, has grown and shrunk and grown again over the centuries. A large part of it still sits inside a square of ancient brick ramparts, crumbling and broken, edged by a moat a half-mile on a side.

  You can travel the 427 miles north from Bangkok to Chiang Mai by air—and most visitors do. But you can also get there by train, or by bus as I did. It is not the safest or most convenient way to go—the two-lane roads the buses travel are narrow and winding, and there are occasional dramas involving oncoming rice trucks. But there was wonder in the journey north through a flooded green landscape gazed upon by great hilltop statues of Buddha.