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

by James O'Reilly

  The climbers of Rimau swear by the revitalizing power of these birds’ nests. During harvest season, from February to July, the men work ten hours a day on the bamboos without carrying food or water. The collectors’ sole nourishment while climbing comes from the one or two nests a day they pry off the walls and eat raw.

  In a fine restaurant, preparing nests for soup is a lengthy process. First, they are soaked, developing the consistency of fine noodles. Workers pick impurities form the swollen mass with tweezers and then cook the nests in chicken broth or blend them with coconut milk as a dessert. For a more elegant dish, chefs concoct “Phoenix Swallowing the Swallow,” a whole chicken stuffed with birds’ nests.

  Asians have eaten swiftlet nests since the Ming Dynasty as a treatment for lung disease or fed them to children, the elderly, and convalescents. In Hong Kong, wealthy old ladies come to hotels once a week for a bowl of the soup, believing that it clears the skin and strengthens the body. The treatment certainly lightens the wallet—sometimes $50 per bowl.

  To see if medicinal uses have a scientific basis, biochemist Yun-Cheng Kong at the Chinese University of Hong Kong analyzed birds’ nests. He found a water-soluble glyco-protein that promotes cell division within the immune system. Ironically, making soup is not a good thing to do to this substance. “The water-soluble protein is destroyed during the cleaning process, and the therapeutic properties are lost,” says Kong.

  Nevertheless, harvesting birds’ nests has been big business for centuries. Kong believes swiftlets’ nests have been eaten in China for 1,500 years. In southern Thailand, collecting for export began about 1770, when an astute Chinese settler, Hao Yieng, recognized the value of the nests he had seen on two nearby islands. He presented the king with a list of offerings including 50 cases of tobacco and his land, wife, children, and slaves, begging the king to grant him the right to collect nests. The king accepted the tobacco, returned the list of people and property, and granted Hao Yieng a lease in return for an annual payment.

  China remained the biggest importer of birds’ nests until the Communist revolution. The new government frowned on the nests as a bourgeois extravagance. Today Hong Kong is the biggest consumer, importing about 100 tons, or 100 million dollars’ worth, annually. The Chinese communities of North America rank second.

  To feed this worldwide market, collectors gather nests from cliffs throughout Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Singapore, Burma, and Malaysia. Indonesia is the biggest supplier, Thailand ranks second.

  In most nest-producing countries, swiftlet colonies are diminishing. The birds need forests—where they feed—as well as caves, and the demand for timber has depleted the region’s forests. Another danger is the booming nest market itself. (Prices doubled in the past two years.) Kong says, “If harvesting continues on this scale, the species may die out within five to ten years.”

  The leaseholder at Rimau, Apichat, is concerned about the swiftlets’ survival and instructs the crews to take nests only three times during each breeding season. (Swiftlets rebuild the nests after every harvest.) Apichat employs Ip, Sahat, and about 100 other men to collect nests from caves and cliffs scattered over 70 islands. In the mid-1980s, he paid $1.5 million to the Thai government in exchange for exclusive rights to collect the nests for five years. Yields vary, but in a week at Rimau, Ip and Sahat gathered about 55 pounds of top quality white nests worth about $50,000 in Hong Kong.

  When the season ends, crews leave the caves to return to their other jobs. Ip is a boat carpenter; Sahat and Em are fishermen.

  Now, in the black cavern of Rimau, a sickening crunch of a breaking bamboo makes me look up. A torch plummets in a shower of sparks. I hold my breath until I see a replacement torch light up, and four glints of light waver some 200 feet above.

  Eric is following Em, who rubs dry guano on his hands to improve his grip, then disappears upward, climbing with his feet flat. At Eric’s turn, bamboo joints groan. His bare feet slip. But he regains his grip. In places the rock bulges over the bamboos like a paunch, forcing him to swing farther out over the abyss. He comes to a niche in the rock and climbs in it to rest, curling himself to fit. By then, even Em has pearls of sweat running down his chest. The climb is not easy.

  The bamboo leads up to a dark chamber. Here Eric’s feet sink into a thick carpet of guano rustling with roaches and smelling overwhelmingly of ammonia. From here another bamboo leads even higher. The bamboos creak when Eric takes hold. Finally, after more nerve-wracking steps on the straining scaffold, he reaches Sahat and Ip.

  From a rickety perch, they can look down into blackness. Almost 300 feet below them a pool of daylight illuminates the cave floor. People, Lilliputians from this height, move about in the world Eric left only 30 minutes before. There is nothing between the climbers’ bare feet and the abyss but a few bamboo poles.

  In the gloom, the young climber, Em, bangs his head against a stalactite. A long, low booming sound reverberates, echoing through the silence of the cave below.

  A light flashes briefly between the stalactites—one of the older climbers is checking the walls. A hand, invisible in the darkness, reaches out to lead Eric across a narrow bridge to the inner cave.

  Silently they move through a honeycomb of cave passages. Without warning, Ip shines his flashlight on the ceiling and shouts. Startled swiftlets brush against the men, the beating of wings and clicking calls the only sounds in the stillness. Ip searches the intricate rock folds above for more nests.

  The men climb higher still, holding lighted torches between their teeth. The smell of burning resin fills the air. Bats’ eyes gleam. Shadows of the creeping climbers dance over the rippled stalactites.

  Nest collectors concentrate on each step. The strength of the next bamboo is the key to survival. Some poles are so old that they crumble to dust. Men have died trusting their weight to a rotten bamboo. “Tap the bamboo,” one collector has said. “If it answers like cardboard, leave it.”

  “My friends tell me, ‘You have a dangerous job,’” says Sahat. “But that’s not true; otherwise we would all be dead. My father fell three times before he died. It was not his time.”

  Below, I pace around the cave floor and explore passages, returning to check for any sign of the climbers’ return. After several hours, they descend from the bamboos, covered in grime and guano, black as the shadows.

  Dinner that night is at the nest collectors’ camp, a loosely woven platform of bamboo hanging from stalactites at the cave entrance and jutting out over the sea. A fish stew simmers in a communal pot. Ip soon has all of us in fits of laughter with his impersonation of Eric’s heavy-footedness as he struggled on the bamboos. We are beginning to be accepted. We have passed the test.

  Diane Summers is an Australian lawyer who met Eric Valli while on a bus in Nepal. Living in the Himalaya with their two daughters, they are regularly featured in National Geographic and Geo magazines and have written numerous books, including Honey Hunters of Nepal, Caravans of the Himalaya, and Shadow Hunters: Nest Gatherers of Tiger Cave, a book about Rimau.

  Koh Phi Phi is billed as “paradise” by tour operators, praised by travelers in internet cafes, and dubbed “magical” and “idyllic” by local magazines. It is accessible only by motorized boat or ferry taking well over an hour from the mainland, and I arranged a full-day tour to enjoy some sights and sunshine.

  I wish I could say that I found the immediate scenery beautiful and breathtaking, but I cannot. Wandering around, trying to take it all in, I wondered what went wrong, why my perception of this place was so different from everyone else’s, not to mention the tour operators’. Could it be my age? Everywhere I looked I felt old. This island was a bastion of twenty-somethings who were tan, fit, tattooed, pierced, wearing itsy-bitsy bikinis and Speedos. Was it my nationality? I could hear German, French, Dutch, even an Aussie accent, but no Americans within earshot. Or was it my penchant for pristine beaches? This beach was littered with bottles, cans, wrappers, garbage, and sea detritus of all kin
ds. There was hardly a square foot without some sort of trash occupying the space. It could have been the lack of children—no happy toddlers playing in the surf, pre-teens splashing water at each other, or teens strutting their developing bodies. Maybe this was just a paradise for GenX. Cheap bungalows, cheap food, cheap beer.

  Or maybe I missed something. There must have been another part of the island that I didn’t know about and didn’t have time to explore.At least that is my hope. I could barely stand a day there, and people were coming for weeks. Such a remote island, lush and green, surrounded by beautiful water, has to have more to offer than what I saw. All those brochures can’t be wrong. Or can they? Has this once remote island been ruined by its popularity? Is this indeed Paradise lost?

  —Susan Brady, “Paradise Lost”

  IAN BURUMA

  Fooling Yourself for Fun

  Has Thailand lost its cultural sense of self ? Or have the Thais maintained their indestructible self-respect?

  ARRIVING IN THAILAND FROM MORE OPPRESSIVE NEIGHBORING countries is always a relief. The taxis smell of flowers. The people are gracious. Hedonism comes without guilt. So what if people want your money. And if the city is a little crass. After the air of slow death of Rangoon, I felt like kissing the ground of the newest Bangkok shopping mall. Here the king plays jazz.

  But soon, once blind enchantment has worn off, one begins to wonder about modern Thailand, or at least Bangkok. There is something a little over-the-top about the obtrusive desire to please. Delight is replaced with a no doubt puritanical skepticism, which can, it must be said, swing back to delight at great speed. How, one wonders, do Thais preserve their dignity in a world of coarse commercialism? How have decades of tourism, American GIs on Rest and Recreation, and a deluge of dollars and yen affected the urban Thais? Has capitalism indeed corrupted their souls, as some people like to think? Have they lost themselves in greed?

  The glossy posters, the orchids in the airplane, indeed all the grace of Thailand cannot disguise the basic truth about tourism: Many more foreign men visit Thailand than women. You hardly see any Japanese women, let alone women from the Middle East or Malaysia. Most visitors come from Malaysia, mainly to a city called Hadyai, a kind of Thai Tijuana on the Malaysian border, where the prevalent business is sex. Paid sex is one of the main tourist attractions in Thailand. If isolation has turned Rangoon into a stagnant backwater, Bangkok is beginning to resemble a sexual supermarket, a capital of discos, go-go bars, massage parlors, VD clinics, German beer halls, Japanese nightclubs, and brothels for Arabs. Bangkok is the playground for the world’s frustrated men. All this means big business—indeed, tourism is the largest foreign exchange earner for Thailand. But while the government, businessmen, pimps, girls, and policemen rake in the cash, Thais are deeply concerned about their image, about national Face. In a newspaper article about poor Thais selling the services of their young children to foreign pornographers, a police colonel concluded that the parents “should not be too greedy for money…and moreover, the image of the country will be tarnished because of their ignorance.”

  Economically, young Thai country women are just another kind of crop. By the stan- dard of their poverty, what they earn as sex workers in the city is phenomenal—more in a couple of years than their parents earn in a lifetime. For men in the city, on the other hand, where the average income is four times what it is in the country, sex comes cheap. “The fact that [prostitution] has become an integral part of the Thai economy,” stated an International Labor Office Study, “…undermines any realistic possibility of short-term cures…No amount of agitation is likely to change things while the cost incentives remain the same, and the opportunities for alternative employment are so limited…”

  —Richard Rhodes, “Death in the Candy Store,” Rolling Stone

  As an antidote to this bad image, a good image is presented to the world, that of ancient Thai culture. I was given some examples by the editor of a cultural magazine in Bangkok, an intellectual worried about the damage that tourism was doing to his country. Ordinations of monks, an important event in most Thai lives, are sometimes organized around special fairs for tourists, complete with folk performances and parades. When traditions are no longer practiced, they are revived, drained of all the original significance, or invented especially for foreign or even Thai visitors. Ceremonies are designed by the Fine Arts Department in Bangkok and local schoolteachers are put in charge to teach their students how to perform them. The old city walls of Chiang Mai appeared to attract tourists. Consequently all towns with walls were encouraged to build tourist facilities. A deep cave, a picturesque waterfall, a ruin, anything would do as an excuse to build a hotel, a disco, a coffee shop, waiting for the tourists. “I think people live in a fake world today. They fool themselves for fun,” said the editor’s wife. The editor smiled and said Thais think foreigners are gods.

  I had heard this said before, in Japan. This does not always mean foreigners are liked. Gods are outsiders with great and unpredictable powers. They are to be appeased, by all means, lest they mean harm and do damage. It is better still if their powers can be exploited. Therein lies the key to your own survival.

  The wish to impress visitors with traditional culture and then to exploit it for money seems inconsistent. It smacks of preachers on the take. “No,” said a good friend of mine, a prominent Thai journalist, “I don’t think so at all. It is pragmatic. The essence of those traditions is still valid. Making money won’t affect that.”

  It is easy for the visitor to Bangkok to feel that he is in a fake world, a world of images, of empty forms, foreign styles divorced from any meaning. It is easy to condemn Thailand, or at least Bangkok, for being so hopelessly corrupted by “Westernization,” “cultural imperialism,” “Coca-Colonization,” or whatever one wants to call it, that it has lost its identity altogether; indeed a place where people fool themselves for fun.

  Every night in Patpong, on three neon-lit streets in the midst of airline offices and international hotels, the pimps wait for the tourists to arrive. “You want fuck? You want live pussy show? Sucky sucky?” Before the 1960s, when Patpong became a major entertainment area for GIs on leave from Vietnam, it was a rather swank district of nightclubs and dance halls frequented by well-to-do Thais. Now it is a cluster of go-go bars, massage parlors, and live sex show joints. Patpong really is a bit like Disneyland, a jumble of displaced images, of erotic kitsch, Oriental decadence for package tours. Dark-skinned girls fresh from the rural northeast dance naked on long bars to deafening rock ’n’ roll, while overweight foreigners watch American movies or boxing on video screens. I was taken to such a place, called the Bunny House. Naked girls were carefully drawing the names of customers by swiveling their hips with long ink brushes sticking out of their private parts. Ah, I thought, giving in for a moment to the romantic fantasy of a provincial European, Berlin ’29, and in came a guided tour of white-haired ladies seeing Bangkok by night. They spoke German.

  AIDS came late to Thailand. It surfaced one day in 1984, slipping in as stealthily as Death slipped into the Masque of the Red Death in Poe’s story, inside a walled castle where “the prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure.” The first reported case in Thailand that year was a gay Thai who’d returned home from living in the United States.

  —Richard Rhodes, “Death in the Candy Store,” Rolling Stone

  “You buy me Coke.” “You my darling all night.” “You want body massage?” Sexuality in Patpong is so divorced from daily life, so utterly absurd, that it ceases to be obscene. It is more like a charade, a show for the benefit of foreigners, a fake world set up to make money. There appears to be an almost insulting contradiction between the image of the delicate Land of Smiles, of exquisite manners and “unique hospitality,” and the world of live pussy shows. Yet, to see these images as contradictory is perhaps to misunderstand Thailand. Patpong kitsch and Thai traditions coexist—they are images from different worlds, forms manipulated according to opportun
ity. The same girl who dances to rock ’n’ roll on a bar top, wearing nothing but cowboy boots, seemingly a vision of corrupted innocence, will donate part of her earnings to a Buddhist monk the next morning, to earn religious merit. The essence of her culture, her moral universe outside the bar, is symbolized not by the cowboy boots, but by the amulets she wears around her neck, with images of Thai kings, of revered monks, or of the Lord Buddha. The apparent ease with which Thais appear able to adopt different forms, to swim in and out of seemingly contradictory worlds, is not proof of a lack of cultural identity, nor is the kitsch of Patpong proof of Thai corruption—on the contrary, it reflects the corrupted taste of Westerners, for whom it is specifically designed. Under the evanescent surface, Thais remain in control of themselves.

  Perhaps because of this shimmering, ever-changing, ever-so-thin surface, Thailand, to me, is one of the most elusive countries in Asia. Thais clearly don’t suffer from the colonial hang-ups of neighboring peoples; they know who they are. And yet trying to grasp or even touch the essence of Thailand seems impossible, like pinning down water. But if I did not succeed in pinning down Thailand I did spend a lot of time talking to Thais who claimed that they could.

  One such person was the architect Sumet Jumsai. “We seem to take over only the veneer of other cultures,” he said, “but our essence is still there, like the wooden houses behind the modern department stores. Opposites always coexist in Thailand. At one point we were basically Chinese. Then, about seven hundred years ago, our literary culture was Indianized. A basically Sinicized people became Indianized. Quite contradictory, really. Funny thing is that civilizations seem to disappear without a trace here. No continuity, you see. People just start again. Sukhothai, in the 13th century, was a great civilization. Nothing much was left. Only two hundred years ago Ayuthaya was destroyed. Hardly had any influence at all on Bangkok. We had to begin all over again. Of course, the unwritten part of our culture, the reflexes, the ceremonies remained. But they may be disappearing now too. Would you care for some more tea?”