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

by James O'Reilly

  —Marvin Harris, The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig

  Now, whatever rain falls on the denuded ridgetops races instantly away, carving deep grooves in the sandy, treeless soil below.

  Third, the Mae Soi villagers, whose previously wasteful wood-gathering practices depended on having an enormous forest all around them, ran out and chopped down everything that was left.

  After meditating on what the villagers told him, Ajarn decided to stop his wandering and start a monastery in one of the small remnants of forest that had survived the devastation. “As a monk,” he tells me now, his gold tooth glinting in the firelight, “it is my duty to strive for balance in society. As the villagers lacked this aspect of Siladhamma, it was for me to bring it back to them.”

  Nancy Nash knew nothing about Ajarn Pongsak, but during the same year that the Mae Soi watershed was being destroyed, she happened to find herself one afternoon on the grounds of a large Buddhist temple near Bangkok. She was staring at a tree.

  Nash had come to Thailand for a break from her work with the World Wildlife Fund for Nature in Hong Kong. A self-taught journalist and environmentalist (more than twenty years ago, she’d left high school in Kansas City to see the world and never went back), she’s often called “The Panda Lady.” Somehow, after hundreds of phone calls and letters and dozens of trips to China, she had pulled off a bureaucratic miracle and persuaded the Chinese government to start its now famous “Save the Panda” program.

  But now she was too excited to rest. The tree she was staring at was crowded with rare open-billed storks placidly whitewashing the lower limbs with their droppings. Without the protection of the monks’ belief in the sacredness of all life, Nash realized, the storks would probably already have become extinct. Like most of the hundreds of wats in rural Thailand, this temple was an unofficial wildlife preserve.

  She remembered something the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s leader-in-exile, had once told her during an interview: the destruction of nature results from ignorance, greed, and a lack of respect for the Earth’s living things; the Buddha, who was born under the branches of a sal tree and attained enlightenment while seated beneath a bodhi tree, took great care not to harm his natural surroundings.

  Thai scholars said much the same. Ancient Buddhist texts and folklore are filled with sound advice about the interdependence of humans and nature, the dire consequences of cutting trees, the follies of poaching. Centuries before contamination of the Earth’s water would be the widespread threat to human health that it is today, the Buddha set down rules forbidding the pollution of water resources.

  Nash was all too aware that conventional approaches to conservation weren’t working. But the rare storks gave her an idea. Since 89 percent of Thais are literate and 95 percent are Buddhists—many of them educated in rural wats—why not use the wisdom of their religion, the major cultural force in the country, to teach environmental ethics? “A Buddhist Perception of Nature” was born. With Nash as the galvanizing force, Thai and Tibetan scholars, educators, and conservationists began putting together books— environmental catechisms, really—that monks could use to teach conservation at grassroots levels, where in fact many problems began. Perhaps the program’s influence would trickle up through the power structure, which recognized Buddhism as the official state religion. Perhaps, eventually, the program might be used as a blueprint for other cultures, other religions.

  In November, 1988, five days of rain fell on the mountainous jungles of the Malay Peninsula, the slender arm of Thailand that reaches south to Malaysia. Soon, flash-floods began to race through hillside communities in the provinces of Surat Thani and Nakhon Si Thammarat. Then the mountains themselves started to go. Entire hillsides pulled loose in great swatches the size of ski runs, and tidal waves of mud and thousands and thousands of flood-washed logs crashed down the slopes. In seconds, buildings that had stood for generations were turned to rubble, villages were entombed in mud a hundred feet deep, and more than 350 people were killed. Tens of thousands were left homeless. It was the worst natural disaster in Thailand’s history.

  It was also undeniable proof of what many environmentalists, forest monks, and villagers had been saying futilely for years. Illegal and unwise logging had been occurring on a massive scale, local corruption in the granting of concessions was endemic, and the legacy of logging-company and old U.S. military roads running deep into forest reserves let squatters and others get in to strip the forests. All of this helped make the floods more deadly. In addition, the huge hardwood forests of the northeast were all but gone. (“Just sand,” was the way one environmentalist put it.) Overall, Thailand had lost more than three-quarters of its original forest in only 50 years—from 80 percent of the land surface in 1939 to just 19 percent in 1991.

  These figures shocked even the laissez-faire Thai government, which within weeks of the floods declared an unheard-of nationwide ban on commercial logging. The decision launched a bitter debate which ran for months on the front pages of the major newspapers.

  One story quoted a timber industry representative’s claim that the ban would put logging elephants and their mahouts, or keepers, out of work. The result, he argued, would be a national crisis in “redundant elephants.”

  Nuni bends down and touches a spindly plant. “This one’s called ‘the little doctor’ because it’s used for so many cures. It once grew everywhere here. And this”—she drops a seed the size and color of a red-hot into SueEllen’s cupped hand—“will grow into that.” We all look up at a tree that must have been one hundred feet tall. She pockets the seed—saving it for the nursery where she’ll coax it along until it’s ready to transplant.

  She and Ajarn Pongsak and the Mae Soi villagers are trying to grow back an entire forest from seed.

  Nuni points out the tiny hut where Ajarn lives and the buildings for visiting students. She knows the name of every plant—in Latin, English, and often Thai. As a child in England, she spent hours exploring the woods and fields near her home. “I’d bring home lots of mushrooms,” she tells us, “and we’d eat them for supper. My parents always trusted me not to poison the family.” Now, after a successful career as a batik artist in Bangkok, she’s using her knowledge, the proceeds from her business, and her family inheritance to help finance this project. It’s still not enough, and so she and Ajarn, who’s an old family friend, have established the Dhammanat Foundation, which recently received a $44,000 grant from the Ford Foundation.

  We stroll through a field where Ajarn led the villagers in planting 20,000 seedlings one afternoon. Though he has no background as an engineer, he’s supervising construction of bridges and huge holding tanks of water for irrigation. “He seems to have remembered everything he’s ever seen during his travels,” says Nuni. “I don’t know how he does it.”

  She shades her eyes from the sun. “Of course we’ll never get our original forest back, but we’re lucky about one thing: what soil is left is rich in lime. If we can keep the water coming, things will grow quickly.” She shows us their teak grove—rows of thin trees some twelve feet high, all of them only two years old.

  Ajarn and the villagers have also been trying to work with the hill tribes, talking to them about the problems caused by slash-and-burn farming and offering to sell them valley land very cheaply if they’ll relocate. But hill-tribe issues are often politically delicate in Thailand, and so their success here has so far been limited. Besides, the plan would radically change the life-style of the Hmong. Meanwhile, to prevent further damage to their watershed, Ajarn and the villagers have fenced the ridgetops and set up 24-hour patrols.

  For Ajarn, the heart of the matter is education, and so he sits under an enormous mango tree and talks with the villagers. “The forest is our first home. Your own house that you cherish so dearly is in fact your second home. Without your first home, you cannot have your second home. So how can we live off the forest so thanklessly?”

  Thailand can always put its redundant elephants here, in Khao Yai Na
tional Park, northeast of Bangkok. That’s what I thought as SueEllen and I stood in an elephant path and craned our necks to see what the ruckus was up in the treetops. There was a whooshing of wings, a furious scraping of branches, and then SueEllen spotted a great hornbill, bright yellow and black, hooked to a tree trunk a hundred feet above us. Then: whoopwhoopWhoopWHOOPWHOOP! Through a profusion of air plants, giant ferns, and waist-thick, dangling vines, I caught a glimpse of a gibbon swinging through the branches of the same tree.

  We watched until our necks hurt. Then we moved a few more miles along the trail, a ragged, elephant-sized tunnel through undergrowth. Several hundred wild elephants live here. Although we didn’t see any of them, we found their signs everywhere—freshly broken branches, recent droppings. Once, from somewhere in the impossibly thick undergrowth, there came a slow and heavy crunching that couldn’t have been anything else. (Or at least that’s what I told myself. Some of Thailand’s last tigers roam this park, too.) Occasionally a hand-sized butterfly fumbled along through the late-afternoon sunlight, and we passed trees with buttresses so large that SueEllen, standing between two of them, disappeared. I was ecstatic: at last we seemed to have found a park free of frantic development and destruction.

  And so when we emerged from the trance of the jungle and walked into the clearing around the park headquarters, we were shocked to find ourselves surrounded by hundreds of Boy Scout leaders—singing, laughing, smoking like mad, drinking from bottles of Scotch that must have cost several days wages. As I watched, blinking, a few men strolled off down the asphalt road that ribbons through the park. One stopped for a moment to gaze into the green curtain of jungle, then walked on. The rest of them might as well have been in Bangkok.

  That evening, after SueEllen and I checked our feet for land leeches and pulled ticks off each other’s legs and arms, we met Randle Robertson, an education specialist at Canada’s Yoho National Park who had volunteered to work the winter season at Khao Yai. “This is one of the world’s greatest parks,” he said. “But in two months here, I’ve seen only one Thai couple walking the trails. Everybody else was a foreigner.”

  Raucous laughter rose from a nearby cabin of scout leaders. “Weekends,” said Randle, rolling his eyes. “But maybe you can’t blame them. Snakes, ticks, leeches, man-eating tigers, the chance of getting lost—no wonder they don’t like the jungle.”

  Then he told us about The Car. On a recent night a carful of weekend revelers came upon an elephant standing in the road, its trunk resting on the still-warm asphalt. Apparently the driver thought he’d have a little fun, so he honked the horn and flashed his headlights while his friends called out good-natured insults. For a moment, the elephant stood perfectly still in front of the car. Then it placed a foot on the hood, took one lumbering step, and crushed the engine. It kept on walking, shattering the windshield and caving in the roof.The terrified passengers scrambled out just in time.

  It’s too bad nobody captured that little morality tale on film.The park could use it. Like every place else in Thailand, Khao Yai, it turns out, is under siege. Poaching—of animals and trees both—is so frequent that armed guards keep watch every night. A villager on a dirt bike with a chainsaw slung over his shoulder can slip into the woods, cut a two-hundred-year-old tree in a few hours, drag out the pieces with elephants during the next week and build himself a new house.

  Park officials, helped by Wildlife Fund Thailand fieldworkers, are trying to convince the local villagers that they’re cutting down their own future.

  From where Ajarn Pongsak often sits, you can look up through a jagged hole in the cave roof—through a network of roots, clumps of earth, pebbles, and a silky, backlit spiderweb—and you can see blue sky. It’s like looking at the world from the inside out, like sitting in the middle of a seed.

  Over the fire the last night, Ajarn warned, “Times are dark and Siladhamma is asleep. We must wake it up.” In Bangkok the engines roar on. The fish die. The beaches fill up, and forests full of animals turn to dust. “Thailand is the whole world’s ecological history in microcosm,” says Nancy Nash. “We keep treating the Earth as if everything is still endless.”

  Several times during my travels I stood just 50 feet inside a once-vast jungle that had shrunk to a few protected acres. Even with my outsider’s perspective, it was easy to imagine that the huge trees and chaotic undergrowth ran on forever.

  Against all this, what can be accomplished by ecological catechisms or monks padding around in robes and sandals?

  It’s hard to be an idealist. But some Thai villagers have already changed their ways. The logging ban has caught the people’s attention—and the government’s. Activists from all over the country killed a gigantic hydro-electric project that would have flooded the largest wildlife reserves in Southeast Asia, home to more that 350 species of birds. Scientists have endorsed Nancy Nash’s project.

  And one night not long ago, Ajarn Pongsak, sitting in the forest, heard the far-off cry of a leopard.

  John Calderazzo is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. He has traveled widely in China and Africa, and he is finishing a book of personal essays.

  In the West, a philosopher’s theories and beliefs can be accepted as valid even though they remain entirely unrelated to his personal way of life. In Buddhist opinion, mere theoretical notions are considered useless, repre senting only sterile mental exercises. A man must act and live by what he has discovered to be true. Said the Buddha: “The man who talks much of his teaching but does not practice it himself is like a cowman counting another’s cattle.” And: “Like beautiful flowers full of color but without scent are the well-chosen words of the man who does not act accordingly.”

  —Nancy Wilson Ross, Three Ways of Asian Wisdom

  JOE CUMMINGS

  Island Entrepreneur

  Exploitation can be a two-way street.

  “WE DO NOT CALL OURSELVES THAI. WE ARE CHAO SAMUI.” BUT Naret looks Thai to me. True, he somehow seems even more relaxed than his mainland counterparts. His round, shining face absorbs rather than reflects my attention. He is certainly well-fed, and he wears his extra weight proudly. Like rural Thais in only the most remote areas of Thailand, he wears a phakhamaa, the all-purpose cotton wrap-around, knotted at his thick waist. Dressed for comfort.

  “Our food is different. Our language is different. Living here on Ko Samui is different from living in Surat Thani.” Surat Thani is a port on the east coast of the southern Thai peninsula, between the Isthmus of Kra and Malaysia. It is the closest mainland point to Samui, which is three hours away by boat. Traditionally-minded chao Samui (“Samui folk”) spend as little time as possible on the mainland, if they go there at all, marketing coconuts, the mainstay of Ko Samui’s economy. Thirty-six-year-old Naret has only been to the mainland twice in his life, and he is no longer in the coconut business.

  “Samui has everything I need. Why go to the mainland? Now the world comes to me.”

  The world comes to Naret to rent his beach bungalows—thatched palm-leaf and bamboo huts spread around a small Samui bay called Ha Phra Phuttha Yai or “Big Buddha Beach.” A colossal Buddha image seated on a minuscule island in the bay gives the beach and Naret’s bungalow village its name.

  Asia backpackers making the perennial trek between Goa in India and Kuta Beach in Bali often stop over for several weeks on this 247-square-kilometer tropical island of just over 80,000 people. Although international-style resorts have arrived at the island’s more well-known Chaweng Beach, Naret’s one-room huts still offer a cheap sleep for travelers who must weigh every baht. His wife cooks their meals, mostly fresh seafood and curry.

  Naret once had a family share in one of Samui’s several coconut-growing enterprises—Samui ships well over a million coconuts to Bangkok each month, as well as a modest amount of durian, rambutan, and langsat fruits in season. At the end of a particularly good year, Naret took his profits and, instead of putting them back into the coconut busines
s, built a handful of huts on Big Buddha Beach.

  “Now I make more money in six months than I did in a year of coconuts. I meet interesting people, too.” He smiles broadly and glances over at the young Frenchman who is drinking tea and smoking a cigarette. The previous evening the French traveler had sighted a very large flying beetle which frightened him out of his rattan chair as he was eating some of Naret’s famous grilled kapong fish. Naret promptly captured the insect, managed to kill it without disfiguring the body, and now kept it in a Chinese matchbox wedged in his phakhamaa. Today he was having great fun chasing the Frenchman around the village with the dead beetle. The harassed young man somehow enjoyed it, too.