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

by James O'Reilly

Alms bowls at Baan Baat come in various sizes, though the standard models have diameters of seven to nine inches. Occasionally monster pieces with 24-inch diameters are made for holding sacred water at temples, though these are special orders. The finished products sell for 150-400 baht, depending on size and the quality of metal used. That compares to a cost of 40-70 baht for a machine-made bowl. Profit margins, however, are low and with the rising price of metal, production costs can be 75 percent or more of the selling price.

  From Baan Baat the alms bowls are sold to retailers in the Sao Chingcha district which has long been the centre for shops specializing in the objects and offerings employed in Buddhist rites.

  As with all arts and crafts in Thailand, alms bowl making has a wai kru ceremony in which the people of Baan Baat pay their respects to the leader of their community and to the spirits of past craftsmen. The ritual is held every year in April and, by tradition, always on a Thursday when for one day at least, the “village” assumes something of the vibrant atmosphere that must have typified it in more prosperous times.

  The present 80-year-old elder of the community leads the ritual and presides over prayers at the spirit house. The villagers then gather to pay their respects while the old man acknowledges the gesture by placing a daub of fragrant paste on their foreheads. Traditional Thai dancers perform at the main spirit house and food offerings are made to the little individual shrines in each worker’s home. Typically these spirit houses are made out of a pair of bellows used in forging. Adding a festive air to the scene are the pretty little flower garlands incongruously draped over the tools of the trade.

  On a normal day Baan Baat is scarcely a hive of activity and production is carried out at a leisurely pace. How long it can continue is uncertain. “Most have just given up,” commented the chairman of the Almsbowl Association of Thailand in a local newspaper article. “Many of the dealers at Sao Chingcha who used to be our patrons have turned to the mass-produced bowls. Cheapness aside, the alms bowl mass-producers offer a better deal by giving a few months’ credit, while we ask for prompt cash.”

  He added that the days of Baan Baat were surely numbered. “Without a definite market in sight, we people around here, one after another, are just saying goodbye to this profession. The younger generation goes out seeking day labouring jobs to make ends meet.”

  The half-dozen craftsmen working when I visited Baan Baat on a Saturday morning were more optimistic. They proudly explained how hand-made bowls were of better quality and lasted longer than the mass-produced items. Because of this, they claimed, their products still found a market. While young men entering the monkhood only temporarily might choose the cheaper factory made bowls, the hand-crafted products were preferred by full-time monks, especially those belonging to the stricter Thammayut sect, founded by King Mongkut.

  It is hard to say how genuine this optimism was, as mixed in with forthcoming answers to questions about the craft’s process and background was a less than subtle sales pitch. Indeed, a few of the bowls are now and again sold as souvenir items and anyone passing nearby Baan Baat is likely to be invited in to take a look.

  This could account for the optimism. “We are not worried about the future,” said one bowl-maker. “We make enough money and there is a new generation coming up to carry on the craft. It’s okay; people today are more aware, more appreciative of handicrafts.”

  There is no doubt that hand-made alms bowls are in danger of vanishing completely as factory products corner more and more of the market, and Baan Baat is now certainly a very pale shadow of its former self. But there is optimism and one hopes that it isn’t ill-founded.

  John Hoskin is a writer who lives in Bangkok.

  I remember the Ajahn’s warning never to speak to the givers of food. Once in the past a farang novice actually thanked a woman for a handful of rice. She was so offended she came to the monastery and told the senior monk she and her family would never give alms to the wat again. Devotees give to the robe, not to the wearer. They believe it is a ritual for the making of merit, for a better rebirth. If a monk thanks the giver, then by treating it as a personal favour, merit is not gained.

  —Tim Ward, What the Buddha Never Taught

  SOPHIA DEMBLING

  Take to the Hills

  While trekking the hills and visiting hill tribes have become commonplace, the experience hasn’t.

  I KNEW, BEYOND A DOUBT, THAT WE WERE SOMEPLACE ELSE WHEN they killed the pig.

  Our host grabbed it by a leg and, as it squealed with fear and pain, bludgeoned it with a piece of firewood. Then, holding its snout closed with one hand, he stepped on the hapless creature’s throat until it suffocated.

  This was to be our dinner.

  This was not an adventure for the faint-hearted.

  Our trek into the primitive villages of Thailand’s hill tribes had started earlier that day in Mae Hong Son, a small, pleasant resort town near the border between Thailand and Burma (which now calls itself Myanmar).

  For three days and two nights, my companion, Mary, and I would leave behind showers, plumbing, electricity, and farang life. We would be completely dependent on our guide, Jack Saw, a member of the Karen tribe, as we explored the world of the hills.

  Six hill tribes—Karen, Lisu, Lahu, Akha, Yao, and Hmong—have populated the Thai hills for the past 300 years. Each has its own language, customs, crafts, costumes, and beliefs. While there are Buddhists and Christians among them, most are animists and believe in spirits. Many aren’t even Thai; they came over the mountains to escape Burma’s oppressive government. It is a complex subculture, existing on the outskirts of modern life.

  In just one day, we traveled far from picturesque Mae Hong Son and far from our very first Lisu village where a beautiful girl, perhaps twenty years old in a bright tribal costume waits for tourists to take her picture; an elderly woman stitches up brightly colored wristbands and purses to sell; and children know enough English to beg tourists “Five baht?”

  The girl, says an obviously smitten Jack, is a “first-class girl”—both beautiful and a hard worker. Jack, a middle-aged widower, would gladly marry her if he could afford the 30,000 baht her hand would cost him.

  But after this village, the truck in which we’re riding drops us off in a grim, dirt patch of a town—devastated by heroin, Jack informs us, and now controlled by the army—and we continue our trek on foot.

  Our destination is the Red Lahu village where tribes will congregate this week to celebrate the new year. There will be music, dancing, and whiskey, says Jack.

  But first, there is the climb. It is March, the beginning of the hot season. The thickly forested hills are tinged with brown. Wearing sneakers and hiking boots, carrying day packs with clean socks and underwear, fresh water, and some toiletries, we can barely keep up with Jack, who traipses along in an army jacket and flip-flops.

  When we stop to admire the long, rolling view, he points out mountains that mark the border of Burma, the site of years of fighting between the Burmese and the Thais.

  Between feeding us information about the area, Jack tells us stories of farang who have been robbed, raped, or murdered on treks. It is difficult to know how to react except to silently assure myself that I could easily hurt him—as with most of the people of Thailand, he is small and delicate.

  After a couple of hours, hot, tired, and wearing the red dirt of the hills, we reach the village, a collection of wood-and-bamboo huts on stilts. Pigs, chickens, and threatening-looking dogs roam untethered. Small horses are tied up in the shade under the huts. Children—runny-nosed all—stare as we pass.

  Jack brings us to our hosts’ home, a tidy hut where we are served much-welcome hot tea brewed over a fire built in sand in the main room. It is dark and almost cool inside. The bamboo mats on which we will sleep are in one corner. In another is a shrine to the house spirits, a high platform with strips of pork and colored streamers. Sunlight filters through slits in the woven walls.

  We drink our tea,
lulled by the sounds of the animals—nosing about in the muddy puddles that form under every porch, where dishes are dumped and washed—and the voices of men discussing who-knows-what in their unfamiliar tongue. The family goes about its business tending the fire, children, and animals.

  We take a walk around the village. Compared with others, the hut in which we are staying seems to indicate relative affluence, and our host’s children are far cleaner than many of those who clamor to look through the viewfinder of my camera.

  Thailand’s hill tribes are sometimes described as peaceful people living in idyllic harmony with nature—something of a forgotten Shangri-La—but nothing could be further from the truth. Most are extremely poor and live in dirty wooden shacks without running water, adequate sanitation, medical facilities, or educational opportunities for their children. Illiteracy, disease, opium addiction, and deforestation are other problems. Uncontrolled erosion and soil depletion have reduced crop yields while land, once plentiful and rich, has become scarce due to tribal overpopulation and the arrival of land-hungry lowlanders. Royal aid projects provide help and encourage alternative cash crops to opium, but tribal political power remains minimal since tribespeople are stateless wanderers, not Thai citizens.

  —Carl Parkes, Thailand Handbook

  It is shortly after we return to the hut that the pig is killed. Our host—his lips stained black with the betel nut that many like to chew—walks around the rest of the afternoon with dried pig blood up to his elbows.

  After whispered consultation we tell Jack, apologetically, that we don’t eat pork. We do not tell him that we are afraid of becoming ill from meat prepared under such unsanitary conditions. He is flustered—he no doubt bought the pig and had it slaughtered for us—but fixes us a vegetarian meal.

  Firecrackers have crackled all day in anticipation of the night’s festivities. After dark, the party begins in a central spot in the village. It centers around a lantern-lighted altar decorated with streamers and three pig heads. Around this, the villagers dance to a tune in a minor key played on a multi-tone flute—the same dance to the same tune around and around and around. Occasionally, someone grabs a drum and beats on that.

  The village headmen are young and solemn. One has an infant in a sling around his body. A little away from the dancing, men pass around the whiskey. The dance becomes more spirited as the whiskey is consumed.

  New year’s celebrations are very important to young men and women of marriageable age. Jack enjoys teasing two girls, fourteen and fifteen years old, who are dressed in colorful finery, their china-doll faces made up, their expressions solemn as they dance. They are ripe for marriage, as are many of the young men growing sloppy on whiskey.

  We watch a while, then return to our hut to sleep. In the distance, the flute plays its mournful tune as the dancing continues into the night.

  I wake early the next morning and lie quietly, watching our host’s daughter start the day’s fire on the wood stove, put a pot of rice up to steam, and scrub the wood floor of the hut with a damp rag. “The all-purpose rag,” Mary and I call it, as it is used to wipe noses, faces, hands, floors, and feet. The flute music, which stopped for a while overnight, resumes.

  When he awakes—with a hangover—Jack reveals that a dog bit him on the leg in the middle of the night. Our host has tied a piece of string around his wrist to ward off illness, but Jack seems skeptical. He accepts a bottle of antiseptic I offer. Still, he does not remove the string.

  When our host family sees the medicine, they offer sores, fungal infections, and wounds for me to treat. I swab them all with the over-the-counter antiseptic. It is probably a futile gesture. Then I give one woman a gift of sewing thread, needles, and safety pins, which she carefully distributes among the other women gathered.

  After breakfast and a wash in the communal spigot—shared with children hauling water to their huts—we press on.

  We pass fields farmed by the Lahu village. All the tribes subsist on “slash and burn” farming, cutting down and burning the natural vegetation to clear the fields. When the soil is depleted, the tribe moves on.

  Poppies are the tribes’ primary cash crop. Some grow but don’t smoke the opium, others do both. While opium addiction is a problem, says Jack, the introduction of its derivative, heroin, has been more devastating yet. A joint Thai-German government project encourages the tribes to grow other crops, but no mere vegetable can bring in anything near the profit that a good poppy harvest can.

  Jack gathers a few poppies and cuts some slits in a seed pod from which a thick, white sap oozes. This is opium. We look but don’t touch.

  We hike through bamboo groves and teak forests and up to mountaintops. There is no point in taking photographs. The exotic, virgin beauty will not fit into 35mm. It is the scenery that begets religion.

  Finally, we arrive at Jack’s village, where his children live with his elderly in-laws and where he lived with his wife until her death, three years ago, from asthma. His father-in-law once was the village headman, and his hut is large, the main room is built entirely of smooth, dark teak.

  This is a larger village than the last. It has a school and even a small store where we are able to buy warm bottled water and Coca-Cola.

  But we are hot and tired and the combination of these factors, the strangeness of the adventure, and the barrage of primitive conditions, runny-nosed children, and squalor has started to wear on Mary and me. We sit on the porch, trying to smile at a filthy young woman, a dirty towel wrapped around her head, one dirty breast exposed, and her toddler daughter, also grubby and without pants.

  And suddenly, we are overwhelmed.

  We walk down to the river to wash. As we try to scrub the tenacious red dirt from our clothes, we decide to tell Jack that we’re ready to go back, we have had enough.

  But it is too late, he says. It’s an hour’s walk to the nearest town and the last bus leaves in 30 minutes.

  We cannot face the porch again, so we sit down on a tree root in the packed-earth chicken yard.

  And, rather than cry, we laugh.

  We laugh about the pig and about the all-purpose rag and about mucus, which has become a recurring theme. We laugh at my white cotton shirt streaked with red dust, and our dirt-caked feet. We laugh at the grubby rice cake that Mary tasted when a little girl handed it to her the night before. When she handed it back, the girl threw it forcefully to the ground, indicating that she certainly wouldn’t have nibbled the nasty thing.

  We laugh at ourselves, two giant (to the villagers) farang sitting in the chicken yard laughing like loons.

  We laugh until tears run down our faces and we are short of breath. And then we feel better.

  As the sun starts to set, we join Jack’s mother-in-law at the window of the hut to admire the peaceful view. She hawks and spits out the window. We do not laugh, although we want to.

  Jack cooks us a chicken curry. He kills and plucks the bird, chops it up—bones and all—and throws it into the pot with savory seasonings. At each meal, he prepares far more food than the two of us can eat. It is probably intentional. Our hosts finish what we cannot.

  We sit on the floor to eat and the children gather around us. I distribute several small boxes of crayons and drawing pads, and the children pounce, a semicircle of little, shiny black heads. They draw furiously while we watch.

  A couple of older girls tell us the children’s names and write them in Thai. They all make us gifts of drawings of flowers and houses and people, textured with the same kind of elaborate and complex patterns that decorate Thailand’s temples.

  Then Jack’s little daughter and a bashful friend get up and sing and dance for us, their little hands like birds fluttering in the air.

  Thank goodness we didn’t leave.

  The night is excruciatingly uncomfortable. The bamboo mats are hard and it is cold.

  In the morning, we sit with the family around the stove, like farang families gather around the breakfast table.

  Lat
er, returning to the hut after washing up, we pass the village’s three monks, walking single file on their way to the village’s Buddhist homes for their food. They stop at one house and stand silently in a row as a little girl comes out, bows, and scoops rice into each of their bowls. Then they march on to the next house.

  When it is time to leave, we shoulder our packs again and start trekking down the road. Just when we think we are too hot and tired to take another step, a truck comes along and we hop in the back with a group of Lahu boys on their way to town to buy whiskey for the coming night’s new year’s celebration.

  The truck takes us to the town of Soppong, where we catch the bus back to Mae Hong Son, which now seems like a bustling city.

  The day after returning to the United States from Thailand, I went out for breakfast in a suburban restaurant. Surrounded by women in makeup and tight jeans, men in sweatsuits, and plates laden with food, I knew—without a doubt—that I was Someplace Else again.