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

by James O'Reilly

  My friends were wrong when they said I did not understand the extent of the corruption and deviousness of the Thai officials. It oppressed me everywhere, even at the university. I learned to look with jaded eyes at most of the Thai politicians and many of the high-ranking civil servants…but they were not all of Thailand. The corruption was, after all, a way of life. In Siam a bribe is considered part of an official salary, for even an important official receives only a small legal wage. It is assumed that he will live by manipulation of his public power. I remember a headline in a Thai paper that illustrated this concept perfectly. The Thai government, bedeviled by American exhortations to abolish corruption, made a proclamation that henceforth all bribes over 200,000 baht ($40,000) were declared illegal. The official morality was a matter of degree.

  The Thai were as honest in their way and in terms of their own culture as we are. One of the most honorable men I ever knew was a Thai. He was our closest Thai friend in Bangkok, but it took me a long while to appreciate his character. His name was Khun Amorn. Like many men rich in spiritual values he did not take himself or the rest of mankind very seriously and his witty nature, flashing white teeth, mischievous eyes, and an uncanny resemblance to Yul Brynner in The King and I deceived me for a long time. There was a solidity about Amorn that impressed me and I became aware that he watched and observed and knew more than he spoke.

  He was poor. Khun Chern, the wealthy hostess of the Friday Night Group, was his cousin. She allowed him to live rent free in a tiny Thai house set toward the back of her enormous compound. In return his wife managed her household and servants, for Khun Chern despised this job.

  We could see his house from the veranda and when I listened to the versatile, witty, and sophisticated conversation of the well-traveled Amorn I found it difficult to reconcile him with the small lower-middle-class teak house on stilts. The Friday Night Group were gossipy about themselves and the whole of Thailand. No one was spared their caustic barbs save Khun Amorn. At parties and dinners and celebrations someone from the group was always at my side gleefully pointing out mistresses, second wives, and people afflicted with venereal diseases, but if one questioned about Khun Amorn their faces would soften and they all answered with exactly the same sentence, “Khun Amorn is a good man.”

  He had a high position in the Thai Civil Service and one night, when we were discussing corruption in high places, I stopped in the middle of a sentence.

  “Khun Amorn,” I asked, the words slipping out before I realized what I was saying, “why are you so poor when your position is so high?”

  It was not a polite question but Amorn did not take offense. He answered simply, “It is because I must maintain a cool heart.”

  In America we favor a warmhearted person, but a cool heart is the ideal of a Buddhist. It does not mean lack of compassion. It stresses the need to keep your heart free of entangling and destructive emotions of both joy and sorrow that assault you from the material world and make you act from greed instead of pure intent. If you seek more than your share of worldly goods you are not maintaining a cool heart.

  “I cannot take bribes,” continued Amorn, “because I have the knowledge that this is wrong and I am sickened. If you do not recognize the evil it is easier to do. One night I returned from work to find that a rich man had left an expensive gift with my wife because I had made a judgment in his favor. I had done this because it was the law and he was right. I took the gift and bicycled fifteen miles to his house to return it to him. He was very angry and shouted at me that I was a crazy man.”

  I stared out at the tiny thatched house on stilts in which he lived. There was nothing for me to say, but at that moment the dignity of man walked out of books and became as real to me as the bread I eat.

  Carol Hollinger went to Thailand in the 1950s as a diplomatic wife and university teacher and wrote an engaging book about her experiences, Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind, from which this story was excerpted.

  “We were led to expect that we should find rapacity intrusive, insatiable, and extortionate—every art employed to obtain much, and to give little in return. Far different was my experience. It seemed as if nothing was expected from me, while upon me and around me every kindness was profusely and prodigally showered…. In great things as in small, I found a hospitality that was almost oppressive, and of which I retain the most grateful memory.”

  —Sir John Bowring, writing about his 1855 visit to Siam in The Kingdom and People of Siam, quoted in Thailand, Seven Days in the Kingdom, by William Warren

  PART TWO

  SOME THINGS TO DO

  THURSTON CLARKE

  Lure of the Chao Phraya

  Unable to reach a friend a few miles away because of Bangkok’s choking traffic, the author discovers a better route to the city’s treasures.

  TRY TO IMAGINE VENICE, IF YOU CAN BEAR TO, WITH ALL ITS canals (except the Grand Canal) converted to roads for cars. Add to this an economic boom, vast traffic jams, and pollution. Imagine all this, and you are imagining Bangkok, home to 90 percent of all motor vehicles in Thailand. Question: If you were visiting such a Venice, would you not prefer a hotel facing the Grand Canal?

  Well, Bangkok’s “Grand Canal,” its last great “unfilled” waterway, is the Chao Phraya, a glorious working river, filled with sampans, barges, and ferries, beautiful in its wide curves, lined by many of Thailand’s best hotels, liveliest markets, and historic temples, and again becoming what it was a century ago, the city’s widest and most convenient highway.

  It was only after staying in Bangkok for several days that I discovered the Chao Phraya and its riverine pleasures. This tardiness was my own fault. My pre-departure Bangkok inquiries yielded mostly descriptions of traffic and pollution. My friend Martin, a fifteen-year resident, wrote back warning that, if I stayed in my proposed hotel, less than five miles from his home, he was afraid they wouldn’t be seeing very much of me. The journey, he explained, could easily take an hour and a half. My wife reported being told Bangkok’s air was so polluted that walking is “like a stroll through an underground car park.”

  Meanwhile, I read news clips lamenting, “Heavenly Bangkok is a traffic hell.” “So severe are Bangkok’s dawn-till-late-night traffic jams,” claimed the Sydney Morning Herald, “…[that] a lunchtime meeting across town can take most of the day, and an evening concert often may be reached only by abandoning the car and setting off for a long, hot, and choking walk.”

  The more I heard how impossible Bangkok was, the more determined I became to enjoy it. I would simply travel early or walk. I would be the kind of sensitive visitor who, according to one guidebook, is wise enough to look beneath Bangkok’s surface and “begin turning up shovelfuls of pure gold.”

  Established in 1782 by King Rama I, Bangkok was originally a walled city. It began as an artificial island, formed by a canal that was dug at a point where the Chao Phraya river curved.The earliest palace buildings and Buddhist temples, many of which can still be seen today in the Grand Palace area, were conscious evocations of structures in the former capital of Ayutthaya. As in the old city, an intricate network of canals, lined with floating teak houses and shops, formed the main avenues. This riverine, essentially medieval Bangkok, lasted barely a century. The city prospered from trade, and soon the Chao Phraya was crowded with ships from all over the world. Thousand of Thais came from the provinces to seek their fortunes in the capital, while other Asians, mostly Chinese, immigrated in growing numbers.The first proper street, Charoen Krung (New Road) was built in the mid-19th century. Others followed quickly, spreading out and replacing rice fields to the east and extending in time all the way to the Gulf of Thailand.

  —Gault Millau: The Best of Thailand

  My first afternoon in Bangkok I set out at 3 p.m. in a taxi to surprise that friend who had warned I would not be seeing much of him. The first hundred yards took fifteen minutes. A half hour later, I had traveled a mile. There was no accident or breakdown; just too many vehicles trying to cross
two busy intersections. The air conditioner seized up, and we rolled down the window. The pollution set my eyes itching. Other drivers read, dozed, or stared glassy-eyed. My driver muttered to himself, manicured his fingernails, and handed me tissues for wiping my face. At five-minute intervals he slapped his forehead and then turned to flash a beatific, apologetic smile.

  After an hour I abandoned the taxi and walked. The sidewalks were narrow and lined with monotonous concrete “shophouses”—with a store on the ground floor and apartments above. A yellow fog hung over the road. The air was thick with diesel fumes and tasted like the inside of New York’s Lincoln Tunnel. It was 95 degrees and humid, and in ten minutes I had sweated through my clothes. Some pedestrians and motorbike passengers wore gauze masks. A terrified family of tourists gripped one another like a string of paper dolls as they inched across a murderous intersection. Later, a Thai asked me, “Do you know what we call someone who crosses a Bangkok street safely? We call him ‘the winner’!”

  I hailed a second taxi but soon abandoned it in front of a hotel on Sukhumvit Road. It was now 4:30, the rush hour, and I was still two miles short of my destination. Through the tinted windows of the second-floor bar I saw stalled traffic to the horizon, a “traffic hell.” I spread out a map of Bangkok and circled the places I wanted to see. Almost everything was near the Chao Phraya river. A dotted line down its center showed the route of an express ferryboat. The next morning I checked out of my hotel and moved to the river.

  The Chao Phraya turned out to be everything the rest of Bangkok was not. The climate was cooler, and there was often a breeze. A trip that took an hour inland could be accomplished by ferry in ten minutes. Instead of the low growl of traffic, I heard the chugging ferries and tugboats. Instead of red brake lights, I saw fast-moving running lights and the colored bulbs of riverside restaurants. Instead of eating indoors in air-conditioned caverns, I ate on outdoor terraces.

  Inland, the view was of concrete skyscrapers, hermetically sealed atriums, and bowling-alley avenues decorated with signs advertising all the familiar cars, fast foods, and electronics. Along the river, you saw domed Portuguese churches sandwiched between pagodas and the colonial-era “palaces” of the European trading companies alternating with the river villas of Thai royalty.

  It is no mystery why riverine Bangkok is more interesting and pleasant than the rest of the city. The city was not settled until the late 18th century, after Burmese invaders destroyed the royal capital, at Ayutthaya. Bangkok’s first temples and government buildings, trading houses, and consulates were all built on the river. Wheeled transportation consisted of ceremonial carriages; for a century roads were thought unnecessary. Canals were Bangkok’s principal arteries until well after World War II. Once you realize the city was built for sampans rather than trucks, its chaos becomes understandable.

  Hopefully you won’t have an [auto] accident, but if you do, it’s very important to choose with whom you have an accident. It’s much better to have an accident with a cheaper secondhand car than it is to crash into a Mercedes driven by a police general. Avoid accidents with army personnel above the rank of colonel. Most Thai drivers do not carry insurance: minor traffic accidents are settled on the spot between drivers; other accidents are settled at the nearest police station. Taxi and tuk-tuk drivers are prone to taking off from the scene of an accident, and hit-and-run accidents are on the rise. I once saw a truck-driver come out of a sidestreet onto Sukhumvit and smash into a motorcyclist, flipping him through the air.The truck screeched to a halt, then turned around to take off. Dragging a limp leg, the motorcyclist leapt onto the back of the truck as it disappeared down a soi.

  —Michael Buckley, Bangkok Handbook

  The contrast between the river and the interior became most apparent during a combination bus-and-boat excursion to the ruins of Ayutthaya. First we drove north along Thailand’s ugly version of the New Jersey Turnpike. Billboards and plumes of black smoke marred the views, such as they were. The roadside towns were slapdash affairs, concrete egg boxes facing ditches black with waste water. There were prosperity and energy here but no beauty, and enough garbage to justify Claude Levi-Strauss’s observation, “The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.”

  But in Ayutthaya everything changed. The ancient ruins covered acres of moldering palaces and shattered temples, lines of decapitated pillars, and bell pagodas stripped of ornamentation and losing their brickwork but still showing graceful lines. The grounds of the Victory temple were a functioning monastery where monks lived in airy wood houses raised on stilts. The porches were decorated with flowering plants chosen for their lucky qualities. Signs tacked on trees carried Buddhist teachings, such as “The wise tame themselves” and “Contentment is the greatest wealth.”

  In this, as in other Thai temples, it was easy to find contentment. The compound was shady and silent except for tinkling prayer bells and songbirds the monks kept in cages. But just outside, our bus idled away in a parking lot made hot and noisy by tour drivers running their air conditioners so that they could stay cool while their passengers were off marveling at this oasis of beauty and calm.

  The trip back by boat was the opposite of the drive. Instead of concrete and cars, we saw water and wood. On the bus, passengers quickly tired of the scenery, and some dozed or read. On the river, no one slept or became bored. At first, the river widened; then it narrowed, in places becoming a jungle-hugged waterway, bordered by coconut plantations, fishing shanties, and fine villas perched on teak platforms over the water. Some had elegant peaked roofs; all had ladders leading to the river and a sampan. Flowers decorated their balconies, reminding me of alpine chalets with geranium-filled window boxes.

  As we neared Bangkok there was more industry. First a ramshackle café with three tables and a weathered Pepsi sign; then a huge Pepsi-Cola terminal plastered with the familiar logo, its crates stacked several stories high. Lines of black-hulled barges, loaded to their waterlines with sand or fuel, glided past buzzing sawmills and humpbacked rice barges. As we entered the city, golden spires and temple roofs glittered in a late-afternoon sun. The rush hour was on. Above us, every bridge was filled with double lanes of stalled traffic. On the water, express ferries and longboats sped between landings.

  Once I began relying on river transportation, it was easier to appreciate things that make Bangkok so alluring to foreign residents: its temples, markets, and food; its surviving canals; its splendid people. Unlike Hong Kong and Singapore, which have obliterated most of their traditional neighborhoods, this city of six million retains much of its Asian atmosphere, preserving its unique mixture of the traditional and the modern, the chaotic and the peaceful, the beautiful and the garish.

  The temples of Bangkok reflect this dichotomy. Serious places for worship and contemplation, they are also friendly and accessible to foreign visitors. As one sign in a Chinatown temple put it, “Tourists are welcome to visit and take photographs. Taking off of shoes not necessary!”

  A few important doors in Bangkok now have notices in English to request you to “Please step over the threshold.” This is not simply an invitation to enter. Apart from a desire to save wear and tear on historic buildings, there is a deeper, spiritual reason for such signs.

  In ancient times, only Buddhist temples were built of stone. Gods were eternal, humans ephemeral. In the museum at Bangkok’s Wat Bovornivet a series of slide viewers is arrayed along a table. A novice monk peers into the first and observes a cadaver. In the second, it has been skinned. He views each successive state of decomposition until, at the final viewer, he is looking at a skeleton. From it, he learns that even too solid flesh melts with time and he must order his life accordingly.

  —Steve Van Beek, “Thailand Notes”

  Bangkok’s scandal-loving newspapers and famous sex-trade areas might lead one to conclude that irreverence is a major Thai trait. Yet the Thais do not take their religion or monarchy lightly. Foreigners are
forbidden to export certain replicas of Buddha, The King and I is still banned as disrespectful to the monarchy, and temple signs remind visitors not to eat or smoke or sit with their feet pointing at the Buddha image. Even so, commerce seems to be the handmaid of religion. No temple compound is complete without souvenir stands, cafés, palm readers, astrologers, and masseurs.

  At Wat Arun you can have your picture taken as you stand behind a cardboard cutout of a Thai prince and princess. In the Grand Palace compound, near the temple of the much venerated Emerald Buddha (carved from a single piece of jade), is a snack bar with a jukebox. At Wat Po monks sit around reading newspapers, men play checkers underneath shade trees, children suck mango juice from plastic bottles, an astrologer’s sign says, “Please check your fate…. Your past, present, and future now available here,” and not far from the Reclining Buddha the temple massage school offers visitors an hour-long introductory rub.

  In all these temples you see visual clues that suggest why the sensitive Thais, possessed of such a fine eye for grace and beauty, could have built a modern city that is, as Alistair Shearer warned in his book Thailand: The Lotus Kingdom, “a smack in the mouth.” The temples’ curving roofs and pagodas barely escape being gaudy. They glitter with gold, verging on excess. Their colored tiles and gilt are not quite vulgar but are surely flashy and a bit too cute. When Bangkok began sprouting tacky modern architecture, the Thais perhaps crossed the taste line they had nudged for centuries.