“Some of Lonely Planet’s guides tend to do the basic minimum on these subjects and concentrate on the nitty gritty—how to get from point A to point B, where to stay and eat,” he explained. “I’m trying to impart a sense of place. I’m hunting for ethnic markers.”
Like that of many former Peace Corps volunteers, Cummings’s’s affinity for the developing world dates to the late ’60s and in his case grew out of antiwar activism. “All of my papers in college ranted against U.S. policy in Southeast Asia,” he says. He read omnivorously about the region but was drawn to Thailand because of its Buddhism and fierce independence. When he signed up for the Peace Corps, he insisted on being posted in Thailand. He became such a keen student that he went on to earn a master’s degree in Asian Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1981 he was considering getting a Ph.D. in Thai literature, a choice that would have led him into academia. But having already spent seven years in school, Cummings asked himself,“Do I want to spend five more years at this or parlay my skills into a job?”
He wrote a letter to Tony Wheeler, asking if he needed someone to cover Thailand. By then Lonely Planet had been in business about eight years. It had grown from an operation that “could fit in the boot of a Ford Cortina,” as one writer recalls, into an established publishing house. Gone were the days when Wheeler and his co-publisher wife, Maureen, could rely on gonzo contributors; they needed specialists like Cummings. Wheeler agreed to the proposal, and Cummings hit the ground running.
For a person of his scholarly bent and nomadic upbringing—the army-brat variety—Cummings and his job seem a perfect fit. “That’s what everyone believed. I’m planning to write a book called Confessions of a Travel Writer to give them the reality of it,” he says, only half joking. “It’s bloody hard work, slogging around for months with your luggage, sleeping every night in a new bed, and walking—a lot of walking. There’s also the loneliness, the deadlines, the tropical diseases, bus crashes, drownings at sea….”
Miraculously, he’s dodged serious encounters with most tropical diseases, except amoebic dysentery, which he contracted at an ashram in India “doing the dharma-bum thing” after the Peace Corps. Before he kicked the bug, his weight fell to less than a hundred pounds. “He looked like a concentration-camp victim,” says his wife, Lynne. But he did come perilously close to drowning in 1988, when a fishing boat that he and eleven other WTs had hired to take them from Java to Krakatau conked out in a horrific storm. They spent a terrifying night pitching and rolling in the Sunda Straits. In the morning the gale subsided, and the crew ingeniously dismantled the engine with a hammer and chisel to replace a blown gasket. “Actually,” says Cummings, “I wasn’t so worried about drowning as about losing my notes from the previous two months. I had an image of myself treading water, keeping my notes over my head.”
Fifteen years on, the romance of travel has dulled, but only slightly. “It’s not boring,” Cummings says, “just ordinary. I’ve lost the awe of travel. It used to be like going from one world to another. Now it can be like going from room to room in a house.” He must also cope with the rote of covering familiar ground over and over. But traveling six months a year jogs him out of a routine, he says, and “refreshes the relationship” with Lynne. “By spending time apart, you appreciate being together more.”
“When he returns from a trip,” Lynne says, “it’s almost like a honeymoon. As long as there is that trust between us, the separations are tolerable.”
The bottom line for Cummings is that he is his own master, free to roam. “A Thai monk told me, ‘You know why you like to travel? Everywhere you go nothing belongs to you. When you’re home surrounded by your possessions, you’re weighed down.’ I think he was right. It is liberating being stripped down to one suitcase.”
The air in Phitsanulok had none of the oppressive heaviness of Bangkok’s, but the sun was still broiling. Making the rounds to hotels and guest houses was more than “bloody hard work”; it was drudgery. Cummings verified every listing in person and spent a few moments nosing around or chatting with the manager. Afterward, he recorded the changes in a much-annotated copy of his book.
Much had changed since his last visit, and much remained the same. The town’s main attraction, the temple Wat Yai, had been there since the 14th century and wasn’t going anywhere. But new hostels had opened, room rates had ratcheted up, and in the city center, mere blocks from the historic riverside temples, a luxury hotel and a bank were under construction. In its sleepy provincial way, Phitsanulok was feeling the effects of tourism and Western culture as much as Bangkok was.
We hailed a pedicab to take us to our next stop, but on arrival the driver demanded double the fare Cummings had negotiated, protesting lamely that the quoted price had been a per-person rate. Cummings scolded the man and turned angrily on his heel, while I paid the agreed-upon ten baht, about 40 cents.
“That is so un-Thai,” Cummings steamed. “Some sleazy operator started this with the package tourists, who’ll pay anything. Pretty soon all the drivers will be pulling it. I feel an obligation to travelers to keep rates at the local level or close to it. I don’t mind paying a couple of extra baht, but double is ridiculous.” He made a note to himself to warn his readers about the scam. I ventured that people might misinterpret his motives as neocolonial. “Fuck ’em,” he shot back.
Later he regretted snapping at the driver. Cummings claims no formal religion, but the outburst had violated the Thai prescription of keeping a “cool heart,” which has stood him in good stead while traveling. “Getting angry in Asia is always counterproductive,” he said. “Everyone loses face.”
By now Cummings was becoming worried about our progress. To meet his deadline—and he had never missed one yet (“It makes me too anxious to be late,” he says)—he had to cover the entire northwest, including the immensely popular hill-tribe trekking area, in less than three weeks.
In Mae Sot, on the Burmese border, we found room in a guest house near the city center. It was owned by a handsome young Thai with a bright smile, but his aloof and officious German girlfriend seemed to have usurped the role of manager, check-in clerk, and breakfast cook.
“Among any group of travelers, there’s always a little competition as to who has been on the road the longest, who was in Kathmandu first, who got the cheapest airfare,” Cummings later explained. “The pecking order is set according to who has been in Asia the longest. The old hands hold court, and the newcomers have to pay deference.” Having “gone native,” the German woman was one caste above the WTs in guest-house society and lorded it over everyone. When Cummings mentioned our plans to travel by motorbike she looked at us as if we were daft. “Take the songthaew,” she said, actually managing a smile.
Literally translated, songthaew means “two rows,” referring to the wooden bench seats bolted lengthwise to the bed of a pick-up truck. They became our primary mode of transportation as we pushed north into the mountains of the Golden Triangle, heading toward Mae Sariang. We shared space with illegal refugees from Burma, hill-tribe families in traditional dress, one carsick infant, many bundles, and five Karen girls and their stern brother. The girls tittered at the sight of two farang. They wore cream-colored sarongs fringed in hot pink, and their hands were dripping with pink Burmese rubies. Leaning over, Cummings whispered, “They’re virgins. After they sleep with a man, they switch the cream outfits for red.” A mile beyond their village we passed a work elephant lumbering along the road. The mahout wore a carbine slung across his back.
The views were becoming more exotic, the country more vertical. This part of Thailand was a Lost World landscape of dome-shaped limestone peaks and dense forests of bamboo and teak. There were few settlements, and eventually Cummings and I were the only fares. Careening down one hill we passed through a cloud of butterflies; grinding up the next, I counted their corpses littering the back of the songthaew.
In Mae Sariang Cummings pounded the pavement for about an hour, but he�
�d come down with the flu and turned in right after dinner. I stopped for a beer in the busiest bar and shared a table with two urbane Londoners on holiday, David Bosdte and James Selfe. They’d been on the world-traveler circuit before—this was Bosdte’s second trip to Thailand—and in the jaded manner of well-traveled Brits he bemoaned the difficulties of finding the country’s undiscovered remnants. When I mentioned I was with Cummings and asked their opinion of the Lonely Planet guides, they rolled their eyes.
“One always picks up a copy,” said Bosdte, “although I wonder if the series hasn’t contributed to the ethos that the traveler with his backpack is somehow superior to the tourist who stays in a Holiday Inn.”
Selfe added, “Personally, I wonder if we aren’t sort of turning the Third World into a theme park for our amusement and polluting the culture with our money. Are we enriching people’s lives as cultural ambassadors, or just making them feel deprived?”
I related the conversation to Cummings the next morning. “Oh, they should have just stayed home,” he said in a huff. “It’s hypocritical of them to wonder if they should have come. It all goes back to everyone wanting their own private Asia.”
Beyond Mae Sariang, we lumbered through the mountains in a huge bus with air-conditioning and a full entertainment center—TV, VCR, and stereo—above the driver. From the jungled ridges we dropped into valleys beribboned with irrigation channels and rice paddies. It was harvest time, and field hands gathered in circles to thresh the grain, using giant rattan fans to winnow the chaff. Soon we were cruising past the Holiday Inn Mae Hong Son. Downtown, on every corner, travel agencies advertised TREKS LEAVING TODAY. Backpackers roamed the streets, and several groups of package tourists sat in their parked minivans, looking nervous and impatient to leave.
“Welcome to the new Chiang Mai,” Cummings said. He had recommended Mae Hong Son to an adoring young traveler we’d met earlier as a less-rutted jump-off point than Chiang Mai, long the departure point for hill-tribe treks. Cummings feels a real ambivalence about trekking the Golden Triangle. On one hand, his book lists 24 trekking outfitters in Chiang Mai alone; on the other, he’s uncomfortable with the voyeuristic aspect of “ethnotourism” and the inevitable overcrowding it brings.
By comparison with Chiang Mai’s souvenir stands and “trek buses,” Mae Hong Son seemed positively authentic, but there were signs of things to come. A woman who had opened the first guest house in Mae Hong Son had recently relocated to a secluded spot away from the carnival atmosphere of town. “Things are getting weird,” she said. “The other guest-house owners hire touts to hang around the bus station and say my place is closed. Once someone put black magic on my poster down there. Nobody came for days. I had to hire monks to bless my place. The next day we got some guests.”
Cut off by the corrugated country along the border, the town of Pai, our last stop together, had escaped much of the tourist-boon fallout. Unfortunately, its isolation and the availability of cheap heroin had attracted a number of junkies. A $50 a day habit could be supported for less than a dollar, and the junk was pure. Even so, Pai had retained its charm and friendliness and still had a strong sense of community. In spite of having been discovered by WTs and trekkers, it felt like the kind of refuge where one might kick back for a couple of months, years, or longer.
But Cummings, as usual, had no time, not even to nurse his flu, which had grown worse. “Never enough time,” he said over our farewell dinner in a hectic farang restaurant called Own Home, where nothing but Creedence Clearwater Revival was allowed on the sound system. “There used to be these little explosions of tourist activity here and there. Now…well, I really ought to hire assistants.”
In the next week, Cummings intended to cover 500 miles of back roads by motorbike. He brightened at the prospect of exploring the region around Nan, which he predicted would be Thailand’s new frontier of tourism. Would he try to steer readers away from the area, to limit the impact? That was not his job, he said, although sometimes he did refrain from writing about a sensitive area. “People complain, ‘Oh you’re giving away all the secret spots,’ but that’s not true,” he said. “Half the time I hear about a place because travelers have been there. Anyway, it’s presumptuous of someone from the West to tell the Thais how to manage their tourism. That is neocolonial paternalism. The Thais have resisted colonialism for centuries, and they can handle tourists, too. They’ll just absorb it and take the good.” Khao San Road and Chiang Mai’s trek buses seemed to contradict him.
Tourism is something we all love to hate, but we’re better off putting energy into becoming better guests—not bemoaning the loss of the good old days when the road was less crowded.
—JO’R and LH
In the morning I rented a motorbike, which I planned to take as far into the mountains as possible—my private Asia experience. First, though, I went to see Cummings off at the bus depot. He plunged into the jostling crowd but ended up without a seat. Standing in the aisle, still ailing with no headroom, he faced four hours of twisting mountain roads. Another farang might not have had such a cool heart. At the last moment, as we said our goodbyes, he reached into his yaam and pulled out a stack of business cards. “Here,” he said, shoving them at me. “Pass these out on your ride. And take good notes for me.”
What drives every true WT, Cummings believes, “is to be able to say they were there when”—when the cultures were pristine. That day I reached a Karen village isolated from Pai by 40 miles of badly rutted road. Initially, my notes to Cummings said that the settlement seemed untouched by Western civilization. But it was a hasty and naïve observation. Inside the hut that served as a community center, every child in the village was glued to a TV set, watching a show about the Statue of Liberty.
Michael McRae is a contributing editor of Outside magazine, in which this story first appeared. A collection of his stories entitled Continental Drifter, which includes “Farang Correspondent,” was published by Lyons & Burford. He lives with his wife in southern Oregon.
Upcountry the typical Thai bathroom consists of a tall earthen water jar fed by a spigot and a plastic or metal bowl. You bathe by scooping water out of the water jar and sluicing it over the body. It’s very refreshing during the hot and rainy seasons, but it takes a little stamina during the cool season if you’re not used to it. If the “bathroom” has no walls, or if you are bathing at a public well or spring in an area where there are no bathrooms, you should bathe while wearing the phâakhamaa (sarong for men) or phâasîn (sarong for women); bathing nude would offend the Thais.
—Joe Cummings, Thailand - a travel survival kit
JOEL SIMON
In the Dark
While the power grid has improved since this story was written, the question remains: how many farang does it take to change a light bulb?
QUITE UNEXPECTEDLY, TINA AND I ARRIVED IN BANGKOK DURING a waterfight. It was no ordinary skirmish involving the occasional balloon or bright orange plastic pistol, this was an all-out national splash. Fire hoses, garden hoses, in fact every hose in the country was turned on, Thai on Thai. Water from buckets, cups, cans, and leaky vessels was being hurled off fourth-floor balconies, the backs of pickup trucks, ox carts, and from every window facing the street. The avenues, the pedestrians, and whimpering dogs dodging droplets with tails tucked between their legs, were all awash. Everything was wet; everyone was smiling. Laughter and cooling water filled the air.
We had arrived during Songkran, the Thai New Year, and waterfights were the order of the day. In fact, they were the order of five days. Like flags on the fourth of July, the Buddhist spirit covered every available space. Frustrations pent up for a year were released in refreshing and harmless exhilaration and we were in the midst of it. Welcome to Thailand!
Eventually we dried out and made our way to the North. Doesn’t everyone? The heat increased, indications of English, spoken or otherwise, decreased. We were, more or less, on our own, separated by that invisible curtain drawn between people as
when Babel descended.
The afternoon that Tina and I reached Chiang Rai, we checked into a small outlying guest house. A deal at a few dollars. The room—rustic, small, dark, with hinged shutters across the window—was graced with a single bare 15-watt light bulb hanging by a bent and wiggly wire from the ceiling.Thinking ahead to peaceful moments of turning pages and writing notes before bed, we decided to look for a higher wattage light bulb.There was a shop on the corner, a small room crammed with at least one of everything, floor to ceiling and then some. We entered, approached the counter and communicating with hands and pictures, made our request.
The shopkeeper, a gentle elderly fellow with a quiet smile, proudly brought out a 15 watter. It was time for specifics. When the bulb was carefully laid down on the counter, I responded with a drawing of the same bearing a bold “100” across the rounded top. A small, nearly indiscernible frown replaced the shopkeeper’s smile. He disappeared into the back room. We heard a stepladder being jostled from one location to the next. After several minutes he returned with a dubious expression on his face. He slowly placed a 60-watt bulb on the counter. Perhaps he thought that all rooms in Chiang Rai came with 15 watts as standard equipment. Everyone smiled and nodded and the deal was struck.
Travelers' Tales Thailand: True Stories (Travelers' Tales Guides) Page 29