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

by James O'Reilly

  The museum is a reconstruction of a typical bamboo barracks for POWs. Inside, vintage photos, mementos, news articles, and prisoners’ reminiscences graphically describe the barbaric treatment its inmates endured. Among the prize military curios on display: an undetonated bomb dropped by a B-24 in a vain attempt to knock out the bridge. An American traveling alone notices other Westerners, but the noisy bustle of conducted groups is mercifully absent. Postcards, t-shirts, and bric-a-brac are quietly for sale, but the town is refreshingly devoid of tourist traps. And one can’t help noticing something else—Asian ambivalence about Japan, as when the museum juxtaposes its vivid documentation of wartime atrocities with a plea “not for the maintenance of hatred among human beings especially among the Japanese.”

  A short walk along the river yielded my first view of “modern” Kwai—pagoda-topped huts poking through the vegetation, motorized sampans chugging past, floating concession stands on wooden pontoons selling Pepsi and myriad Asian thirst-quenchers that I eagerly tried as the temperature topped 105 degrees.

  Given the heat, I hired a guide. It was a good move. For one thing, Kanchanaburi has become urban, devoid of whatever shade it once had, and most “Death Railway” sites are several miles apart. For another, tourism has not yet soured people here—they can be bargained with, minus the hostility that pervades other places.

  Veins popping as he propelled us uphill on his trusty samlor, my guide pedaled me to Chung Kai, smaller of the Allied cemeteries, and then to the imposing Kanchanaburi War Cemetery outside town (7,000 Allied POW graves, beautifully arranged and maintained). Farther along the road, he pointed out the surprisingly unheralded cemetery for the many more Chinese who died. Somehow, the scruffy look of these graves—Buddhist spires and idiogram inscriptions wedged together in the dirt, underbrush poking through in spots—was more moving.

  Next he took me through cliffside streets (named for the countries whose nationals worked on the railway) to a cenotaph erected by the Japanese—in memory of all who died there, on both sides. That Asian ambivalence again: no signpost whatsoever marked the way to the Japanese cenotaph.

  Finally, we reached the bridge itself: not the wood and bamboo edifice of the movie, but the real bridge on the river Kwai—thick wrought iron, steel tresses, concrete stanchions. With its black beams and rivets glaring downriver in the sun, this ominous bridge asserts, even if you don’t know its history, that it has a history.

  A plaque tells how and why the Death Railway was preserved. Nearby, one of the first locomotives to make the Rangoon run sits on display. Wooden slats permit easy walking across the span, affording long, graceful vistas of the river. But this is still a working bridge, a fact I realized when I saw a yellow diesel coming out of the mountains, headed straight for me. Fortunately, I hopped onto one of the original guard lookouts, a sort of wooden porch, and duly photographed the train as it passed by.

  I followed the track upcountry a bit, then doubled back, keeping in mind that where I stepped, men had died in agony. Other Westerners appeared to be doing the same. Back at the station, two young New Zealanders introduced me to an impressive old man—Trevor Dakin, a former Canadian POW. Dakin was celebrating his 70th birthday by standing on the bridge that, as a 23-year-old, he had been forced to build. He had no camera with him, so I took his photo, and listened as he discussed his life. Wife dead, children grown, he had immigrated, married a Thai woman, and now lived with her on the hill overlooking this spot. And here, where he had survived the most intense experience of his life, and so many of his youthful buddies had not, he would pass the rest of his days. “I’ll never go back,” he said. “This is my home now.”

  The sun was setting. My guide (whose labors had cost all of $6) took some final shots of me, then negotiated my ride back to town aboard a cigarette boat owned by a friend of his. In minutes I was streaking past the bungalows, docks, floating restaurants, and other signs of life along the river, looking over my shoulder as the big black bridge receded into the distance.

  I had done it. I had actually seen the bridge on the river Kwai—the real thing. But I’d done more than satisfy a long-standing passion. I had encountered the legacy of World War II in a way I never could have otherwise. And I’d seen for myself how, deep in the Asian countryside, life was reclaiming a site where once death had ruled.

  Kevin Mc Auliffe is a speechwriter and the author of The Great American Newspaper: The Rise and Fall of the Village Voice.

  About 10,000 snake bite injuries are reported in Thailand annually…Unprovoked attacks by snakes are rare. Most bites in Thailand are the result of stepping on the snake and many bites occur at night…The danger of snake bite is generally exaggerated and Bangkok’s traffic poses a far greater danger than snakes and tropical disease combined. There are probably less than 100 annual snake bite deaths in Thailand with a mortality rate of 0.2 percent per 100,000 people. The rates are much higher in Burma (3.3 percent) and Sri Lanka (16 percent). India alone has some 20,000 snake bite deaths annually. The United States, for comparison, has 45,000 snake bites per year of which 7,000 are by poisonous species. About 10 annual deaths are reported.

  —Henry Wilde, M.D., Supawat Chutivongse, M.D., and Burnett Q. Pixley, M.D., Guide to Healthy Living in Thailand

  TIM WARD

  The Spirit Likes a Little Blood

  Having just spent time as a lay monk in a Buddhist temple, the author returns to the city and is drawn into perplexing relationships.

  I WAS INVITED TO A ROOFTOP BARBECUE IN BANGKOK, MY FIRST social event with other foreigners in many months. Party chitchat felt awkward, a grueling ordeal after the silence of the temple. There I met Tham, a rich Thai businesswoman, who took me under her wing, perhaps because she had spent many years in the States becoming Americanized and felt a certain kinship with me in my attempt to immerse myself in a foreign culture. We danced together for most of the evening. She had almond skin, and thick black hair that fell like silk to her shoulders. Her mouth held an enigmatic Thai smile, her eyes a very American-like determination to get what she wanted.

  “How long are you staying in Bangkok?” she asked.

  “Just a few more days,” I replied. “I’ve almost finished my rough draft. Soon as it’s done, I want to get back to the wild. Probably I’ll head for Sumatra. Big cities don’t do much for me.

  “Bangkok can be pretty wild.”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t seen much of it, I guess.”

  “Stay a while.” She touched my arm. “We can have fun together.”

  Tham took me to Bangkok discotheques, sacred temples, shopping centers, the royal palace, and not-for-tourist Thai restaurants that did not know the meaning of the words mildly spicy. She owned a hundred silk dresses and bought jewelry for sport. She traveled first class or by chauffeured limousine and received the kind of respect paid to royalty—even from her family members who came from the village to visit her luxury apartment.

  Her estranged husband and business partner was a former CIA operative. They had met in Bangkok during the Vietnam war. James Bond, she called him, scornfully. She had used his influence to get herself a student visa to America. Years later they married, mostly due to his persistence, she claimed. He’d quit his job and set up operations as a middleman for foreign businesses seeking major public-works contracts with the Thai government, basically arranging bribes and keeping potential deal-makers entertained. In Bangkok, that meant frequent visits to the massage parlors of Pat Pong. It stung her deeply that James included the receipts for such services rendered to him with the lists of business expenses that Tham processed every month. She described him as insensitive, jealous, and brutal, but refused to divorce him until their business paid off with a major contract. Until then, buying jewelry served as a form of insurance and revenge. She could only tolerate her situation, she explained, because James was almost always out of the country, setting up deals in Singapore and Hong Kong.

  Thai police explained to somewhat startled [American] agents
that professional Thai criminals sometimes insert pearls in their foreskins as a boast of incarceration. A hardened convict with a number of long sentences behind him may have a ring of pearls encircling his penis.

  —James Mills, The Underground Empire

  Tham’s son’s birthday was approaching, and she had decided to celebrate it in the traditional Thai manner with her extended family in their village, near Petchaburi. She planned to invite local dancers and puppeteers to put on performances for the child. She assured me such an intimate Thai occasion was an opportunity not to be missed, and invited me to join them.

  The town of Petchaburi had, per capita, the greatest number of Buddhist temples and violent crimes—murders, rapes, and robberies—in the whole of Thailand. It was also famous for the multitude of syrupy sweet pastries and confections that its cooks produced. Serenely spiritual, unpredictably dangerous, cloyingly sensual, Petchaburi seemed as quintessentially Thai as the Siamese fighting fish for sale in the town’s main bazaar. Exquisite males floated in their individual bowls like suspended rubies, sapphires, and emeralds, nearly motionless save for the gentle rippling of their silken veils. Between the bowls the merchants had placed cardboard dividers so the fish could not see each other. When a potential customer showed interest in a particular fish, the divider would be removed. The males on either side would flare their fins, flashing colors of sunset and blood in preparation for the lethal battle so essential to the mating ritual of the species. No wonder betting on bloody fish fights—the perfect melding of violence, sex, and beauty—had become a national sport. When the divider dropped back into place, the combatants’ fins wilted instantly. Once more they became tranquil gems floating in isolated bubbles of glass.

  Situated on the western rim of the Gulf of Siam, four hours from Bangkok, Petchaburi missed out on most of the foreign tourist trade. Packaged tour groups could surfeit themselves with Thai exotica and glittering souvenirs in the capital without ever having to stray far from their five-star hotels. The most ardent of dharma bums could slake their spiritual lusts with the shrines and pagodas surrounding the City of Angels—or else head north or east, as I had done, for the ascetic life of a forest monk. Those seeking the worship of the flesh headed east along the coast to Pattaya, a vast expanse of brothels, massage parlors, and go-go bars, poorly disguised as a city. Trekkers passed up the wild hills west of Petchaburi, preferring instead to frolic in the opium gardens of the Golden Triangle, while those in search of the perfect beach drove past Petchaburi’s gray sands on their way to the sprinkled-gold islands in the south. A neglected city, filled with its share of wonders but cursed by an inconvenient location, Petchaburi’s only benefits from Thailand’s nationwide tourist boom were candy orders from the capital and the occasional bus robbery.

  Tham and almost-eight-year-old Sammy had gone ahead to Petchaburi by car, while I took the westbound express coach a day later.Thai coach rides were as alien to me as space travel, with their huge, high, shiny interiors and air-conditioning set just above freezing, as if it were a luxury to shiver when the outside temperature hovered halfway to the boiling point. Each coach had a uniformed stewardess who dispensed blankets and iced drinks, moist towelettes and snacks. I expected ours to demonstrate the use of oxygen masks in case of an emergency. As we crawled east out of Bangkok, huddling in our blankets and sipping chilled lychee juice, the driver turned on the video screen mounted in the front of the bus. Careful consideration had been given to the placing of the screen so that the driver could watch the movie while he drove.

  The film was a bloody tale about Thai army commandos fighting a band of communist terrorists holed up in the jungle. This public airing to a captive audience seemed as insensitive as showing Texas Chainsaw Massacre on a school bus. At one point, the terrorists had taken several commandos captive. They buried one up to his neck in sand and left him to fry under the noon sun while his bound companions looked on. The head terrorist, a huge bearlike man with a shaggy black beard and tiny eyes, emerged from his tent, saw what his henchmen were doing, and exploded into a rage. Amateurs! No imagination at all! He stormed back into his tent, came out again with a razor, soap, and a small glass bottle. He ordered a bucket of water dumped on the sun-crazed man’s head, soaped down his hair, and shaved him clean to the scalp.

  Kneeling down to show the buried man the straight razor, still dripping suds, the terrorist sliced open the top of the prisoner’s skull as if splitting the skin of a melon. The captives on the bench wailed while their companion shrieked in agony. To the Thais, the head is sacred. Even the accidental touch of another’s crown is an act of great indecency, for the head houses the soul. Horror filled the prisoners faces as their companion’s ineffable spiritual essence was cracked open, exposed, and made vulnerable before the grinning Thailand is in fact a very violent society, as one can tell from the lurid crime stories i the Thai newspapers. Packing guns is a common way of displaying machismo. Hired killers, one is told, are cheap in Bangkok, and seldom unemployed.Terrible stories did the rounds: Foreign homosexuals were stabbed to death in their hotel rooms. Rural policemen were accused of kicking the victims of a traffic accident to death to get at their valuables. A man in the Bangkok building where I did some writing blew his girlfriend up with a hand grenade. Many crimes appear to involve trickery of one kind or another. During my visit, the police arrested a group of robbers who went around disguised as monks.Tourists often fall victim to a notorious gang of transvestites. In a book about Siamese folk tales, written in 1930, Reginald LeMay commented that “the Siamese are realists.This is a very wicked world, and everyone is trying to get the better of you in some way or other.Your only means of protection is to be cleverer than your neighbor, and if you gain a reputation for being alert and keen in your business dealings, you will be looked up to and admired.There is little sympathy wasted on the dupe.…”

  —Ian Buruma, God’s Dust: A Modern Asian Journey

  bear. The bearded one knelt down again and showed the man the bottle. Sulfuric acid. Slowly, he poured the contents into the slit in his victim’s steaming skull.

  I covered my eyes, revolted, sickened at this depiction of the murder of the soul. Would the victim ever reincarnate? Or had his spirit been eradicated from the human realm as surely as an arahant’s? Thai mothers and children munched sweets and sucked lychee fruit while the movie continued. Finally the bus dropped me by the side of the road at the outskirts of Tham’s village. I plunged into the dust and heat 40 degrees warmer than the icy interior of the bus. Tham was waiting for me, as arranged, under a covered bus stop. Her silk business suit had been put aside in favor of a purple sarong and a simple white blouse. “You look sick,” she greeted me.

  “I have a headache from the bus.”

  The family’s rambling wooden house sat back from the road, surrounded by bushes, papaya trees, and bamboo. A wrecked car, a flower garden, and some rusted machinery parts decorated the front lawn. Inside, Tham introduced me to a dozen relatives who floated aimlessly in and out through a large, airy common room. Tham’s mother had been working in the kitchen, shredding coconut and squeezing out the milk for Sammy’s birthday feast. She wore only a sarong and a brassiere—the latter a proudly displayed sign of affluence for women of her generation in rural Thailand. Her arms were long and sinewy, the fingers tough. She had a handsome face with a strong jaw and a gravelly voice that muttered a curt greeting. Mother made her living as a cook selling homemade lunches at the local police headquarters. The outdoor kitchen area, covered with a rusted tin roof, sprawled along the entire side of the house. Twined strings of garlic and dried chilies hung from the beams next to suspended baskets of dried mushrooms, aromatic leaves, and spices. Huge steel pots with blackened bottoms lay on the table next to a large steel drum with a wood fire burning inside.

  “I bought Ma a gas stove and had a room inside remodeled into a modern kitchen with shelves and Teflon pans,” Tham told me. “But she never uses it. She stays out here, belching soot into the ne
ighborhood, everything open to the flies and wind. I suppose I should be thankful she at least uses the refrigerator I bought her last year, if only for sodas and ice cream.”

  Evidently, the infrequent visits of the prodigal daughter back to her family home were more like hurricanes than a breath of fresh air. Mother never cleaned or dusted, Tham complained. Tham always spent her first day home with soap and water, scrubbing grime and sweeping dirt. She enlisted me to help rearrange all the furniture. Ma kept a dozen green vinyl chairs in two rows facing each other down the center of the common room with tables between them, as if set up for two competing teams in a spelling bee. Tham directed me to pull them into tasteful, intimate clusters. She plucked dust-coated plastic floral arrangements from their vases and replaced them with fresh-cut flowers. Mother retreated, muttering, to her outdoor kitchen, the one place Tham would not touch—though given the opportunity, she gladly would have bulldozed it.

  The extended family seemed to treat Tham with a mixture of deference, envy, and a kind of confused resentment. The prodigal daughter had broken away from home and tradition, and had accomplished the ultimate fantasy, the impossible dream: she had gone to America, married an American, and come back rich. On her visits she dispensed electronic gadgetry and modern appliances like a visiting queen. She inquired as to their well-being and was quick to offer cash for repairs or medical bills. At least two members of her family had stayed with her in Bangkok, either to start school or to search for work. No one could accuse her of negligence, yet in keeping her mother, brothers, uncles, and cousins on the receiving end of her largesse, she had inverted the natural Thai hierarchy of status. For a daughter, submissive compliance to parents and male relatives was the natural order of things. But the steady flow of gifts and cash far beyond what was expected of a working daughter kept her family in the role of supplicants. Their social conditioning had virtually forced them to their knees.