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

  Across the yard from his hut was a wooden platform raised 50 centimeters off the ground, enclosed on three sides by thatched walls and covered, like the house, by a thatched roof. It was just big enough for two people to sleep in cramped comfort. Like a manger, its floor was covered in straw which softened the hard wooden floor and covered the cracks between the planks. It would not keep out the cold but would shelter a sleeper from the dew. It was here that Sin indicated I would sleep for the night.

  On the hard dirt yard a small fire was burning. Sin brought more wood to build it up and I began unpacking my gear, hanging the sleeping bag over the front of the shed opening to dry. Tomorrow, it would stink of wood smoke but I didn’t care; dry beat smelly. Sin fingered its material and asked what I used it for. He was intrigued by my reply. “That would be useful in the hills,” he said. “Wouldn’t have to worry about the blanket slipping off in the middle of the night and exposing you.” I noticed that he adjudged everything in terms of how it would serve in a jungle situation and concluded that he had spent many years there.

  “When we came up here years ago, it was all jungle,” he said. “It was a long time before we had enough land cleared to grow enough crops to feed us. In the meantime, we had to forage for everything. In the old days, it was easy; the forests were full of game. Today…” he looked wistfully into the blackness, “…there’s not much. You can still find the kinds of fruits we ate when we didn’t have anything else, but the animals…I guess most of them have been shot.”

  A northern January night, even in tropical Thailand, can be bitterly cold. The fire was warm and I huddled close to it to dry myself. Sin squatted by it for a long time. Then, unhinging his legs and sighing, he got up. “I guess we should have some dinner. I don’t have much…. Can you eat Thai food?” I’d already told him I’d lived in Thailand for eighteen years so it seemed an odd question but I said, yes. “Phet? (spicy).” “Can,” I said.

  Hidden by the bamboo lattice that enclosed the porch, Sin puttered about with some pans, lighting a cooking fire in a firepit. “Sticky rice?” he shouted from the depths, assuming I bowed to the Central Plains abhorrence of anything—sticky, brown, scented—other than polished, fluffy white rice which the northerners believed was wholly lacking in nutrition or substance. “Can,” I answered.

  I knew it was going to be a meager meal but I didn’t care. It had been a tough day and I was very hungry. While he was making dinner, I recorded the day’s events in my journal.

  Eventually, Sin invited me inside to eat. It was now dark and the dingy interior was lit only by the glowing embers of the cooking fire and a single wick stuck into half a tin can filled with kerosene, a sooty, smoky lamp that served as the sole form of illumination in the rural areas. In the darkness, two ragged cats prowled, the firelight occasionally illuminating a broken tail or glinting eye.

  As I suspected, dinner was an unidentifiable mass of vegetables and something which crunched and from which I had to extract bones. Perhaps the dim lamp had its benefits after all. Uncertain of what to do with the bones, I set them on the floor. Sin put down his spoon, picked up the bones and, without looking, threw them in the general vicinity of the cats who immediately pounced on them, each growling at the other to keep clear. Some of the sticky rice that was left over was also dumped on the floor for the cats to eat. The rest was left in the pan which was set beside the fire.

  After dinner, we returned to squat by the outside fire. Sin threw a large mai daeng log onto the fire, angling it so it would reflect its heat into my lean-to. The cats, which had been wandering around the fire, jumping nervously each time the burning log popped, curled up on my now-dry sleeping bag and seemed determined to spend the night there.

  Over the next hour, in a leisurely manner, Sin questioned me about my journey and my time in Thailand. Listening but seldom looking directly at me, he paused after each question to absorb the answer, like his water buffalo ruminating before digesting a fact. He said nothing for a while. A few hard crickets provided music in the cool night.

  Then, as to himself, he said: “Farang women,” directing his comment at the fire. What? “Farang women. They’re so big.” I’d heard this before; Thai men intimidated by the height and bulk of foreign women. As in much of Asia, there was a fascination with the blondness and the—as perceived from movies—seeming sexual promiscuity of foreign women; their willingness to jump into bed in a flash. The concept was intriguing to Thais but there was a hesitation about what to do with all that mass of flesh. Sin must have shared that same awe and that same curiosity.

  “Thai women.” Ah, here we go, I thought. Thai women were best, didn’t I agree? “Thai women,” he repeated. “Too small, too thin,” he snorted dismissively. “Farang women. That’s the size women should be,” he said chuckling to himself. Hello? What a switch! Here was a man who knew no bounds, for whom size was a challenge, not a defeat. I had to smile at the intensity and certainty with which he said it. Not obscenely, not lecherously. Just plain fact. We lapsed into silence.

  A moment later, Sin spoke to the fire. “Jai rai (evil hearts).” He pointed with his chin to the riverbank. “When you get farther down the river, there are black people, especially around Chiang Mai. Plains people. You’ll have to be on your guard.”

  As in most countries, there is a natural antipathy between hill and plains people. As a foreigner, I fit into a third category. These hill people didn’t know exactly how to deal with me but assumed that I posed no real danger, even if they couldn’t figure out what would compel someone to paddle down a river, and alone, for God’s sake. That I was traveling alone made me even less of a threat. Almost. I noted as we prepared for bed, that unlike the Lahu tribesman who had invited me to sleep in his house, Sin had placed me outside. He climbed the notched log, bade me good night, closed the door firmly behind him, and shot the bolt. He wasn’t taking any chances.

  My journey down the Ping River had started years before on the banks of the Chao Phraya river which the Ping feeds. A chance encounter with friends had given me possession of a house in Bangkok past whose door the Chao Phraya flowed. Indeed, because the house was perched on stilts, the river flowed under it and, during two years of particularly bad floods, through it as well. Along some sections of the river [in Ayuthaya], the tree growth to the bank was almost jungle-like in thickness. I could rest from the sun under canopies of brush and liana-covered tree limbs, listening to birds and rocking in wakes left by longtail boats racing up and down the river. Even from the low vantage point of my kayak, I could see chedi towers, broad-based and tapering to great heights, wats and temple walls through surrounding foliage. At the river’s edge, grandmothers with short-cropped white hair led children to the water to bathe. Students in white and blue uniforms waited on a dock for a river taxi. I reached the Dutch cathedral of St. Joseph’s—out of place beside the gleaming orange, white, and green of Wat Buddaisawan— and was reminded of the Dutch colonial empire it symbolized that stretched from India across the Indonesian archipelago, harvesting spices for European tables.

  —Peter Aiken, “Thai Waterways”

  It sat on the river bank opposite the Grand Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha and just upriver from Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn, and for eleven years afforded me some of the best moments of my life. There are few pleasures greater than sitting on a porch in a wicker rocking chair, rocking in rhythm with the earth and watching the world roll by.

  It was a simple four-room wooden house covered by a tile roof, under which the rats scampered and fought, all with great din, the few periods of silence indicating that a green pit-viper had slithered down from the mango or bottle-brush trees and was dining among them.

  When I moved in, the bedroom facing the river had a small window in a high wall. I tore out the entire wall and replaced it with glass panels. Then, I cut a hole in the floor and put in a window so I could watch the waves wash back and forth under the house. Finally, I built a small bay window with a glass floor. W
hen it rained, I could pull up the floor and drop in a fishing line without getting a drop of rain on me.

  When one rocks back and forth for so many years, one begins to get curious about where all that flowing water is coming from. I asked many Thai friends about the river but got only rudimentary answers about a river system that was so vital to their lives.The Chao Phraya drained the northern and central regions of Thailand and was fed by four tributaries, the Ping, Wang,Yom, and Nan that began at the Burmese and Laotian borders and flowed south to the sea, a journey of about 1,200 kilometers. More than that, few people could tell me and books were even less helpful. It began to dawn on me that no one had ever run the river for its complete length. One day, my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to find out. I picked the Ping because it was the westernmost. It begins on the border with Burma about 150 kilometers above Chiang Mai and runs south along the Tenasserim Range that forms the border with Burma, flowing through Chiang Mai and Tak where it is joined by the Wang. It then heads southwest to combine with the Nan-Yom at Nakhon Sawan and drops south again as the Chao Phraya through Ayutthaya and Bangkok to the Gulf of Thailand.

  After exploring the headwaters with Lahu hunters, I had a small teak boat built in a village near Tak and set off on a journey that would end 58 days later in the sea. Eventually, I would paddle the other three tributaries, spending five months in all, sleeping in villages, Buddhist monasteries, the jungles, and occasionally in the boat when no other alternatives were available. It was after several days in the jungles, and bamboo forests that I had reached Sin’s hut.

  Like most tribals, Lahus are animists who believe their village priest can exorcise evil spirits with black magic and heal the sick with sacred amulets. And, like the Karens, they anticipate a messianic movement lead by Guisha, the supreme Lahu god who created the heavens.Their most famous post-war messiah was Maw Naw, the gibbon god who failed in his attempts to restore true Lahu religion and lead his people back into Burma.

  —Carl Parkes, Thailand Handbook

  The difference between Sin’s initial reception and his greeting the next morning was markedly different. It had been a cold, crisp night and a beautiful dawn with a clear yellowish sky. When I awoke, I could hear the water buffalo stamping their feet and someone making clucking sounds as he fed them.

  When he saw I was awake, he came up to squat and warm his hands by the embers of the mai daeng log. Barefoot, he wore short pants and a flimsy cotton shirt yet, aside from his hands, did not seem to feel the cold. With straw beneath me, I had slept quite warmly, awakening only once in the night when I had difficulty breathing. In my half-coma I was aware of fur covering my face and slowly realized that both cats had snuggled up next to my head. They were probably covered in vermin and I groggily tried to push them away. Half asleep yet alert, they responded by growling menacingly, a deep-throated warning that I thought it best to defer to. When I awoke in the morning, however, they were gone, stalking something in the darkness under the house.

  We talked for a few minutes and then he went inside to prepare breakfast. Finding it too cold for a shower, I shaved and began packing my gear. It was a beautiful morning and I wanted to get an early start.

  Sin had other ideas, however. “I want you to meet my son when he gets here. He should be here soon,” he said, peering into the jungle hopefully.

  In Thailand, “soon” can mean anything up to half a day. As Sin had not had a very clear idea the evening before of his son’s expected arrival time, I could see myself sitting impatiently for a long while.

  It was apparent that Sin had been living as a bachelor for some time because his idea of fixing breakfast was to warm up the sticky rice of the night before. The cold air had congealed it to a hard mass, the grains nearly as firm as they had been before they had been boiled. To give it some flavor, he stacked a few slabs of salted fish the thickness of crepes on the plate along with two fresh young bananas, and handed it to me. I had only sipped the water he had given me the night before because I was not sure of its purity but with this mass, it was going to take a great deal of liquid just to get the food to chewing consistency let alone to swallow it. As usual, I smiled as I accepted the glass which looked as though it had last held a paint brush and thinner.

  During breakfast, he kept telling me of his son’s imminent arrival as if his words might lure the phantom to quicken his pace. By the end of the meal, the sun was just beginning to clear the hill and we were still alone. It was apparent that this man who couldn’t wait to get rid of me the night before, had decided I was O.K. and now could not bear to have me leave. I’m sure that he didn’t get many visitors and certainly none as exotic as a foreigner, paddling a boat.

  “Come look at my garden,” he said. In the clearing, he had planted papaya and a half-dozen other fruit trees, as well as a small garden which fed him. Most of the area was given over to a pen made of bamboo poles set horizontally in rough-hewn wooden-slab fence posts. Behind it, nine black, bulky water buffalo with scimitar horns sweeping back over their broad backs sniffled and shot blasts of steam from their nostrils as they stamped to keep warm. Beside the pen, the garden began.

  I trudged behind him as he gave me a botany test. “What’s that?” he asked, walking by a tree, not even stopping to look at it. “Jackfruit,” I dutifully answered. “Um, um,” he said, pleased. “And that?” “Teak.” “Um, um. Geng (clever).” We must have gone through 15 plants and still had not exhausted the possibilities. In a Thai jungle there can be 300 varieties of plants, creepers, trees, bushes, vines, in addition to everything he’d planted in his garden and I could see my legs being walked off before we’d catalogued even half of them. Where in the hell was that son?

  After a moment, however, we’d completed a circuit and he seemed pleased with my knowledge. I’d failed on only one, probably the simplest plant in the world, one I’d seen at least a million times. He pointed at a knee-high plant with two stems reaching up from the ground, each stem fanning out with a broad, pleated leaf. “Uh,” I ventured, baffled. “Is it a kind of banana?”

  He seemed surprised by my ignorance and almost scoffed in giving the answer: “Coconut.” My goodness, I really was slipping.

  Finally, we arrived at his buffalo pen when he immediately began introducing me to each of the placid beasts. I repeated each of the names as he spoke them, like a good schoolboy.

  Sin seemed to have run out of steam. We went back to the shed where my pack lay and he seemed bereft of ideas for conversation. “Where is he?” he said, looking into the pathless jungle. He was so eager to have me stay that I decided, to heck with an early start, I’ll sit and talk with him. He obviously had a lot he could tell me about the jungle and would be a valuable source.

  I had slipped the pack onto my shoulder but now laid it down again. When Sin saw that I intended to stay a while longer, he perked up. He left to get me another glass of water and as he came out of the house, we heard sticks crackling among the trees.

  A younger version of Sin with a shotgun barrel sticking above his shoulder and shod in rubber boots strode into the yard. In his belt was a hatchet and had I met him in the jungle I might have run. He did not seem in the least bit surprised to see me, even after Sin had explained who I was and what I was doing. The son set the gun down and squatted by the fire. His had been a fruitless hunt; no game to be found, not even edible birds.

  He and Sin talked for a few moments. As they conversed, the son walked to the house wall and began looking along it. He stopped at one of the rough teak pillars which had a number of bird feathers stuck into it. Still talking quietly, he selected one, pulled the hatchet from his belt and with one swift blow, chopped the long end from the feather. I was puzzled. Was he about to perform a rite to call game to him? No. He used it to clean his ears, all the while talking with his father.

  Sin, in the meantime, pulled out a dried leaf that had been cut into a square. He flattened it with his thumb against the wooden boards of the shed. He saw me watchin
g him and, breaking off his conversation abruptly, held it up for me to see and said, “bai thong gloy,” a leaf I’d seen growing near his garden. From a small tin can he pulled out a few chopped tobacco leaves, also grown in his garden. From a piece of folded paper, he pinched a small amount of lighter-colored tobacco, “It’s called chaiyo (victory). Makes the jungle tobacco burn better.”

  Mixing the tobaccos, he spread them along the wrapper and then began rolling, tightening as he went. As the finishing touch, he extracted from his pocket a small pair of rusty scissors and neatly snipped off both ends of the tube. He then made a diagonal cut along one edge of the wrapper and from yet another paper, pulled out a bamboo sliver stuck with a bit of gum which appeared to be wetted with sticky rice. Applying it to the underside of the wrapper, he completed a cheroot. He offered it to me, reaching into the fire for a glowing brand to light it. The chaiyo had done little to refine the taste of what was a very rough tobacco. Down the valley, the Thai farmers grew a fine tobacco that was prized in the U.S. and elsewhere for its mildness. Up here, a straw fire would have produced a smoother smoke. The son borrowed his father’s scissors to complete the same operation, taking a glowing stick from the fire, touching it to the end of the green wrapper and inhaling contentedly. These men obviously had asbestos lungs.