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

by James O'Reilly

  Every evening at dusk hundreds of thousands of Himalayan swiftlets swirl into the exit chamber of Tham Lod, while thousands of bats leave for the night—changing shifts, sharing space. Just before nightfall the twilight sky is thick with spiralling birds while large bat-eating hawks soar high above. The sounds of the jungle combine with the incessant whistles of the birds. A pterodactyl or some other weird prehistoric creature, winging out of the cave gloom, would hardly seem out of place in this eerily primeval setting.

  Mae Hong Son’s most well known cave is Tham Pia (Fish Cave), 17 kilometers before town on the Pai Road. The surrounds have been developed into an attractive picnic area, popular with the locals. The cave itself is an impenetrable stream rising—a pool teeming with hundreds of large carp, believed to be sacred.

  Across the road from Tham Pia and 100 meters back toward town is a dry cave, well over a kilometer long. The entrance is 30 meters off the road, above a small stream rising.

  Virtually inaccessible but certainly worth a mention is the cave in the “Spirit Well,” the biggest natural hole in Thailand. Hidden among rugged peaks about 50 kilometers before Mae Hong Son and an hour and a half walk from the road, few people know of its existence.

  A “bad death,” greatly feared by the Lahu, is one resulting from a tragedy, generally involving bloodshed. Death caused by stabbing, shooting, wild animals, childbirth, drowning, and lightning are all considered bad death.They believe that if the victim was calling out at the time of dying the “bad death” spirit will repeatedly call out in the same manner at that site. Consequently before the body can be buried a religious specialist must be called to drive away the evil spirits.

  —Paul and Elaine Lewis, Peoples of the Golden Triangle

  Named after its shape and unnatural dimensions, the Spirit Well is an awesome pit, 90 to 140 meters deep and more than 100 meters across, with sheer rock sides.

  The cave opening is 100 meters high, set in the highest cliff face of the Well. In May, 1985, two Australian cavers used ropes and climbing equipment to be the first people to descend into the Spirit Well. They explored the forest and cave but could find no way leading into the mountain. Later that night, back at camp, one of them, the fittest caver on the trip, suffered a stroke, partially paralyzing half of his body.

  Sometimes it is more than just fear of malicious spirits that keeps the local hill tribes out of the caves. When a Lahu hunter first showed me the small hole leading into the extensive Tham Mae La Na, he claimed that no one had dared enter the cave as several years earlier he and his friends had shot and wounded a large “buffalo bear” and it had escaped into the hole.

  We went in anyway and were about 200 meters inside when we noticed a deep impression in the sand that looked just like a bear’s paw print, claws and all! Then suddenly, up around the next bend we heard a loud splashing noise. We froze—it sounded like a large animal walking along the stream. Gingerly we crept forward and shone a light around the corner. Thankfully the large “bear” turned out to be large fish swimming in shallow rapids against the current.

  And as if the caves aren’t already laden with enough archaeological and natural treasures, there has long been a rumor around Mae Hong Son that the retreating Japanese armies left a huge amount of gold—looted from Burma during the war—inside a cave. The cave entrance was reportedly sealed with dynamite and the gold is yet to be found.

  Rumor has it that the cave is close to the road, on a hill, about halfway from Pai to Mae Hong Son.

  John Spies is a spelunker who spends so much time in caves we couldn’t find him—until his mother wrote from Lilli Pilli, New South Wales, Australia, to tell us that her son has two trekking and caving lodges in northwest Thailand.

  The blessings which the Lahu so avidly seek are expressed in couplets, called taw pa taw ma (male word, female word), and may be stated either positively or negatively.

  Positive

  Give us easy minds and hearts.

  Give us sufficient food and drink.

  Give us health and strength.

  Fulfill in us the hopes and longings of our hearts.

  Purify and cleanse us so we will have good health.

  Unite us in the same purpose and thoughts.

  Separate us from evil and deliver us from misfortune.

  Protect and care for us.

  Give us enough from our toil and labour to live on.

  Negative

  Don’t make us worried or sad.

  Don’t make us suffer hunger and starvation.

  Don’t let us fall sick and die.

  Don’t let evil spirits and people deter us.

  Don’t let us get the 33 kinds of sickness.

  Don’t let there be fighting and quarreling.

  Don’t cause us suffering or tragedy.

  Don’t let farming tools, wood, and bamboo wound us.

  Don’t cause us to have to stretch out our hands as beggars and supplicants.

  —Paul and Elaine Lewis, Peoples of the Golden Triangle

  CHARLES NICHOLL

  Mekong Days

  In the Mekong River, near the Laotian border, a young woman’s spirit flees.The only way to get it back is to call on a spirit-man.

  HARRY WAS DUE THAT NIGHT BUT HE DIDN’T SHOW. WE SAT OUT on the verandah, burning joss to keep the mosquitoes at bay. I got hungry and suggested we go down to Porn’s noodle shop on Main Street. This had become our regular eating place. Katai had no desire to “experiment” in the farang way. We had happened into Porn’s on the first evening: the atmosphere was friendly, the bean-curd soup delicious, and from then on we took just about every meal there.

  Harry is a French trader; Katai is his young Thai girlfriend, who works as a chambermaid in a Bangkok hotel. At this point in his narrative, the author and Katai are in Chiang Saen.

  —JO’R and LH

  Katai said she’d wait, in case Harry came. “We can leave a note,” I said.

  “I’ll wait anyway.”

  She sat on the floor of the verandah with her chin on her knees. She had put on that same t-shirt again, freshly laundered, the one that reads: “Hurts So Good.” Harry had given it to her.

  When I got back from Porn’s, the light was on in her room. I tiptoed past, but the verandah creaked. Her door opened.

  “Oh, hello Charlie.” She tried not to sound disappointed, but I knew she was, and I knew that was why I had tiptoed.

  “Harry’s not here, then.”

  She shook her head.

  “He’ll be here tomorrow. You’ll see.”

  She leant in the doorway. The cicadas trilled, the dark smell of the river came up at us: the unseen so close around us all the time. She had a dreamy look. I thought she might cry, and I might have to take her in my arms.

  Instead she grinned, put on her cynical Bangkok drawl, “Yeah. Mad dog come tomorrow. Mad dog say he sorry. I should kick him away, but…”

  I nearly said, “Maybe you should,” but I stopped myself. The room behind her, half-seen through the doorway, exuded an indefinable softness, and her voice was soft again as she said, “Goodnight, Charlie.”

  “Goodnight, Katai.”

  Her door closed and I went to my room, where old tobacco smoke hung in the air, and my clothes lay where I had left them.

  Waking in the little wooden room, chinks of brilliant light in the shutters, strange birdcalls, a rattle of pots and pans in the cooking area, another hot day on the way. A gecko cackled above the door as I walked out onto the verandah.

  Katai was down in the yard talking to Suree. She had got the morning organized. We were borrowing a couple of bicycles and going for a picnic.

  At the market we bought fruit and beer and Coca-Cola, and a bagful of cooked rice and vegetables, and some quids of miang (fermented tea and spices wrapped in a leaf: you hold it inside your cheek, refreshing and faintly stimulant). We set off south, into the sun, past the tobacco factory, across small bridges, the river on our left and the promise of the hills in front
of us. Katai wore a wide-brimmed straw hat she had borrowed from Suree. It was a bit too big, and blew off her head as she cycled. She chattered and joked, talking back over her shoulder. I could only hear half of it. She had lost the melancholy of the previous evening. Harry wouldn’t come till tonight, she said, so we might as well enjoy the day.

  Watching her pedal down the hot dirt road, hat on her back, baggy black trousers and black singlet, she seemed to me the quintessence of Southeast Asia. I thought of a phrase of Harry’s: Indochine, mon amour.

  The heat shimmered in the trees, mostly low and scrubby, occasional giant shade-givers. Passing vehicles set up a cloud of dust which left us choking by the roadside. After a while we stopped to rest and wash the dust out of our throats. Katai grimaced at the taste of the sterilizing tablets I had put in the water. On we went, past Chiang Saen Noi, with its old temple on the hill. The road curved east. We crossed the Kok River, which here joins the Mekong, and at a village called Ban Sae we left the road and followed a bumpy riverside track, skirting an alluvial plain filled with rice stubble.

  By early afternoon we were ready for our picnic. We found a track leading down to the river’s edge, past scorched plots of tobacco and maize. There was a palm-thatch shed, too small to live in, perhaps a crop-store or a fisherman’s shelter. It was shaded by a stand of banana trees, the unripe green fruit clustered, the mauve tendril hanging down like a tasseled bell-pull in a Victorian drawing-room. Here we left our bikes. I took a swim. The river was very low: I was still in my depth several metres out. A long pale sandbar basked in the middle of the river. The water was surprisingly cold. Despite the appearance of slowness, the current was powerful as soon as you left the shallows.

  The Mekong River flows 2,600 miles from its remote source in Tibet into China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, emptying into the Gulf of Thailand.

  —JO’R and LH

  We ate and drank. The Singha beer was sweet and warm. I lay back in the grass, drowsy and content, content in a way I hadn’t felt for years. Bangkok seemed like another world. Even Harry seemed distant and vague, someone I had known long ago. I wondered if he was really going to turn up at all: part of me wanted him to come, and part of me didn’t, and I was too sleepy to work out which part was right.

  Then Katai said, “I want to go across.”

  I said sleepily, “Across where?”

  “Across there.” I looked up, squinting in the glare. She was sitting cross-legged beside me, looking across to the hazed, scruffy tree line of Laos on the far bank.

  “You’re crazy,” I said. “No one goes to Laos. They lock you up in a re-education camp if they catch you, and then they throw away the key.” This is the basic lore about communist Laos.

  “There’s no one there to see us.” She was on her knees now, scanning the horizon. “Look, there’s nothing there.”

  “So why—”

  “Because I never been to another country before, that’s why. Because I got no passport, no money, no way to travel in the world like the farang. I want you to take me to Laos, Charlie.”

  “And back,” I muttered, still thinking of the warnings I had heard about Laos, but the way she looked at me right then, I would have taken her to the moon.

  “Look,” she said, “We can get to that sandbank there, and then we’re almost there.”

  “It’s deceptive,” I said. “How well do you swim?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead she told me to turn my back. When she was ready—a sarong knotted above her breasts and tucked between her legs, the traditional bathing gear for a Thai woman—she put out her hand to me, and we walked together into the Mekong.

  We got across to the sandbank without too much difficulty. We could wade until we were about fifty yards from it. Then we had to swim. The current was strong, but the sandbank stretched for a good half mile, and there seemed no danger of getting swept out past it. We let the river take us, swimming diagonally. Katai swam like a child, doggy-paddle.

  Our feet touched ground again and we waded ashore.The sand was speckled with fool’s gold. It was strangely elastic: our feet sank in, but didn’t break the crust. We left no footprints behind us. We walked back along to the upstream apex of the sandbank, and contemplated the second leg of the crossing. It was not much wider than the stretch we had come across, but it looked faster and deeper. This was the business side of the river: the stretch we had crossed was a meander in comparison.

  “I don’t like the look of it.” I said.

  “What does the farang fear?”

  “Salt, sugar, and getting drowned in the Mekong, that’s what.”

  She looked disappointed. “Well, I’m sorry, Charlie, but I must go over alone then.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said again.

  She stood resolutely on the shoreline. I saw birds rising and wheeling above the trees on the far bank. Then I heard a voice behind us, away down the far end of the sandbank. A man had come across on a bamboo raft. He was waving at us.

  We walked on down. He was an old man with a wizened monkey face and close-cropped hair the colour of tarnished metal. He was from a village called Ban Suan Dok a few miles further up the riverside track. He had a plot of vegetables here: tomatoes, cucumbers, and a small root-plant that looks like a refined type of potato, and has a sweetish crispy taste. He must have carried earth over to mix with the sand.

  Katai asked if he thought we could swim across to the Lao bank. He laughed and wagged his forefinger at her. “Ra wang,” he said. “Take care. The river is very strong.”

  “Will you take us across in your sampan?” I asked. “We will pay for the crossing.”

  He looked at me suspiciously. He said to Katai. “Why does the farang want to go over?”

  “We just want to go to Laos,” she said.

  He shook his head, grinning. “But little girl, you are in Laos now.”

  We stared at him. I said, “You mean this is Laos, right here?” He nodded. He took up his bamboo punt-pole, and ran it along the shoreline of the sandbank.

  “Chai daen,” he said. The border.

  He ambled off to his plot, watered it with scoopfuls of river water. The opportunism of the peasant farmer: this stretch of land would be covered when the Mekong was in spate, but meanwhile he wasn’t going to waste it. After a while he started pulling the raft back down into the water. He asked if we wanted a lift back.

  I said, “It’s O.K., we’ll swim.”

  “Ra wang,” he said again, and punted off downriver towards the Thai bank.

  “So how does it feel to be in another country?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Same same,” she said.

  We should have taken up the old farmer’s offer. On the way back to the Thai bank we were careless. We set off from the sandbank further downriver than where we had arrived. We soon found the channel was deeper and the current stronger than before. We tried to push back upstream, but the water was up to our chins, and every step was an effort.

  Katai started to get frightened. “Charlie, I don’t like this.” Her voice was shrill.

  I said, “It’s O.K., if it gets too strong we can go back to the sandbank, try further down.”

  “Yes, let’s go back, please.”

  But somehow we couldn’t. The river seemed to have closed in around us. Whichever way we turned the water deepened. Just to stand still was getting an effort: the current wrapping around our legs, the silt squeezing between our toes, pulling us off towards the China Sea.

  “We’ll have to swim for it,” I said, trying to sound calm. I wasn’t at all sure about this—there seemed a real danger of getting swept out past the sandbank, and then we’d really be in trouble—but there didn’t seem any choice.

  “Charlie, I’m frightened.”

  “Swim!” I shouted. We struck off together, towards the Thai bank. The current beat against us, and for a while we were swimming furiously without seeming to move forward at all. I heard her choking, belching. I knew
that once someone starts to take in water they get weaker by the second. I treaded water, ready to help her, and as I did so my feet touched bottom.

  “Look, I can stand!” I shouted. She was looking pretty wild, breathing heavily. I held her in my arms, keeping her chin up, letting us both rest. “It’s O.K.,” I said. “We’ve crossed the deep part. We can walk now.”

  Or could we? The topography of the river was strange and treacherous. We were just a hundred yards downstream from where we had set off—I could see our clothes piled on the bank there—but everything was different. As soon as we started towards the bank I felt the river-bed shelve away beneath us. I noticed too that the bank was steep here, red earth and roots showing, a good four or five feet between the water and the level ground.