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

by James O'Reilly

  More and more Thais seek to strengthen the legal and political institutions which hold personal excesses—“power and greed in our hearts”—in check. Buddhist fundamentalism, with its distrust of capitalism and secular institutions, would seem to be taking Thailand in the opposite direction. The enormous importance attached to the personal benevolence of the monarch is part of the same world view. It might work if the monarch is believed to be truly benevolent, as appears to be the case with the present king. There is little reason to believe that the people in cinemas, or other public places, who jump up instantly as the portrait of the king appears, do so reluctantly. But if these were ever to change, the country could become dangerously unstable.

  King Bhumibol spends much of his benevolent energy in rural areas, bolstering the Village. When communist rebels installed themselves in large parts of the northeast, the king encouraged the government to make those areas more prosperous to undercut the communist cause. Khao Ya, a mountain near the northeastern town of Petchabun, not far from the Laotian border, was a communist stronghold until 1982. Now it is the site of a royal mountain lodge. A visit there seemed a fitting way to end my trip to Thailand. I had been told it was now a prosperous place, where farmers lived happily after the guerrillas were defeated by the Thai army in 1982. I also heard it had become a popular tourist destination.

  Khao Ya, and Khao Kor, the former rebel headquarters, must have been beautiful once. And in a strange way they still are. What was once a jungle has been transformed into a red desert, with the occasional tree stump scorched by fire. Great gashes of erosion, like nasty red flesh wounds, mark the bare mountains. On top of Khao Kor is an army museum and a memorial to the 1,300 soldiers who died in the battle against the communists. In the museum an officer explained to a group of Thai tourists how the guerrillas were flushed out of their camps. There were exhibits of guns, a few rusty AK-47s and M-16s. There were some tattered red flags, a few Chinese embroidered portraits of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and a book on Kim Il Sung’s thoughts, in French.

  We drove past the royal mountain lodge, perched in isolation on the denuded hill. We drove past the newly built villages along the excellent roads. There were signs in English welcoming tourists. But there were no people. The villages seemed completely deserted. In the valley we finally saw some trees. There were signs warning us not to “make noise to alarm the animals.” We saw no animals. There were a few souvenir stalls, where Hmong hill tribesmen in their native dress sold trinkets made by different hill tribes near Chiengrai, hundreds of miles farther north. The souvenir business was subsidized by the government, they said. But there were not many tourists around to buy anything.

  A group of Hmong men were having soft drinks in a wooden shack where snacks were served. “There were once ten thousand communists here,” said one of the men, before getting up to leave. “Look at the color of that river,” said the woman who ran the restaurant. She pointed at a river which looked like fluid caramel. “It was not like that before they came and chopped the trees down.” According to her story, the army had let loggers in from all over the northeast to take away the trees. The villagers were paid to grow corn. That way, it was hoped, guerrillas could no longer hide in the hills. The villages along the road were deserted because nothing would grow anymore. The government kept on busing new villagers into the area, so that tourists could be welcomed. “Still,” said the woman, “we feel safe here now that the troops protect us.”

  She fell silent and I looked at the rather sad-looking souvenir stalls, the signs about not making noise, the caramel river, the bald mountains, the empty Pepsi-Cola bottles. “Everything they try to preserve,” the woman said suddenly, “has already gone—the animals, the trees, everything.”

  It would be the perfect literary metaphor: the loss of traditional values, the destruction of the Village, the emptiness of capitalist development, and so on and so forth. Yet the metaphor would be too easy, too neat. For every image of loss can be countered with an example of gain. The mountains of Khao Kor have no trees, but the political destiny of Thailand is no longer decided by gun-fire in the mountains. More and more, it is decided by debate, choice, politics. The Hmong drink Pepsi-Cola, as do most Thais, as do most people. It is sad, perhaps, that popular consumption is often in bad taste and wasteful, but a poor choice is better than no choice at all. Modernity in Thailand is sometimes ugly, and perhaps Thais have lost something in their quest for material well-being. But they have managed to retain the thing that is most precious to them, their self-respect. This is their most attractive quality and it seems indestructible, in the villages, but also in the cities, among students, merchants, politicians, and peasants, and, yes, even among “the chicks of Fun City,” the dancing girls in Patpong.

  Ian Buruma lives with his wife and daughter in London. He is the author of Behind the Mask: On the Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, Drifters, and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes, and God’s Dust, A Modern Asian Journey, from which this was excerpted. He is also a regular contributor to The New York Times.

  At five in the morning, the boys and girls who have found no clients still walk the streets.There are still a few sex tourists looking for business.“The nice thing about Bangkok,” says Greg, “is that you need never feel lonely. You only have to go out, any time of the day or night, and you can find someone to go with you. Of course,” he says wistfully, “it isn’t a relationship, but beggars can’t be choosers. And we’re all beggars aren’t we? Economic beggars, emotional and sexual beggars. That’s the way of the world, my dear.”

  —Jeremy Seabrook, “Cheap Thrills,” New Statesman

  STEVEN M. NEWMAN

  Walking South

  On a solo walk around the world, Steve Newman encounters his worst nightmare in southern Thailand.

  IT WAS THE HEIGHT OF THE THAI SUMMER, AND EVERY STEP I HAD taken south from Bangkok seemed to be edging me closer to the fires of hell. Beneath the large striped golfing umbrella I held over my head, I felt as if I were inside a sauna. By each midmorning, my clothes were soaked; by midday, I barely had enough energy left to find some tepid shade to collapse into.

  By the time I had reached the city of Phet Buri on April 6, I was so sapped of strength by the unyielding humidity that I had no choice but to spend four days recovering beneath a cheap hotel room’s wobbly ceiling fan. I had gone only 60 miles, but my poor body felt it had suffered through 60,000. My worst fears about the effects of tropical heat on my Ohio-raised body were being realized, I thought uneasily. And, worse, since every step took me closer to the equator, I knew the battle to keep my strength would get tougher each day. I had never taken well to heat and humidity, and here I was trying to plod my way through the worst of it with fifty pounds of dead weight on my back and the monsoon season coming. The chance of my reaching Singapore, the end of the 1,300-mile-long walk through Southeast Asia, seemed remote.

  I decided that I was going to have to do more of my walking at night, when it was cooler. Yet I knew that if I did, I was brazenly inviting death. Ever since I had left Bangkok, cars or trucks had pulled over to the side of the road to tell me that bandits were everywhere. As the drivers drew their forefingers across their throats and let their eyes grow larger with their warnings of sure death ahead, it was all I could do not to laugh at their animations. But there had been frequent news articles about packed buses being held up in broad daylight by bands of armed robbers along the same highway I’d be following. If they were reckless enough to rob an entire busload of people in the daylight, then what chance did I stand, alone and totally exposed? Behind my seeming calmness there took root a nervousness that I hadn’t known since North Africa.

  Violent crime against tourists is not common, but it does occur, usually to people making an ostentatious display of their belongings. Be wary of accepting food and drink from strangers, expecially on long overnight bus or train journeys; it may be drugged so as to knock you out while your bags get nicked.This might sound para
noid, but there have been enough drug-muggings for Tourism Authority of Thailand to publish a specific warning about the problem. Finally, be sensible about traveling alone at night in a taxi or tuk-tuk and on no account risk jumping into an unlicensed taxi at Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport at any time of the day: there have been some very violent robberies in these, so take the well-marked authorised vehicles instead. In the north you should be wary of motorbiking alone in uninhabited and politically sensitive border regions.

  —Paul Gray and Lucy Ridout, The Rough Guide Thailand

  Still, I hated the heat so much, I was willing to risk walking at night. Even a police officer who rode up to me on his little motorcycle the evening I left Phet Buri and forbade me to go any farther on foot was not enough to make me change my mind. I tried to justify my foolishness by reminding myself of all the hundreds of times on the walk I had heard people cry wolf before.

  And so, deeper into the dusk and then into the night of that mid-April day I pushed myself, hoping that the same guardian angel who had helped me make it unscathed through so many of the world’s other danger spots would not abandon me for at least one more night.

  It was around 11:30 on a moonless stretch of empty road thirteen miles south of Phet Buri when I found out just how far I could go on insulting common sense. This time it was the wolf—or rather, the wolves. And, worse, there was no one to hear my screams. Nothing but empty pineapple fields, jungle, and the thickly muscled men behind the machetes.

  Then I looked down the tall bank on which the road had been built to keep it out of the quicksand and soggy peat of the jungle, and saw two men crouching in the tall weeds between me and a fire-blackened pineapple field. Quickly, deftly, they came at me with their long, thick machetes poised.

  I stood frozen with fear and shock that my life was to end in some snake-infested jungle. Why or how I even thought to do it I will never know, but at the last split-second something caused me to raise my folded umbrella to my right shoulder, take aim at the bandits’ faces, and yell through my mouth in a ferocious voice:

  “HALT! OR I’LL SHOOT”

  It was the craziest, most insane deception I’d ever tried, but it worked. It brought me that extra second I needed to think about how I might escape. For the slightest of moments, the men paused in their advance and looked confusedly at the long, metal-tipped object in my arms. Meanwhile, in my own head the voices of reason were running amok.

  Steve! What are you doing?! They’re going to see it’s only an umbrella. No rifle has red, blue, and yellow stripes running up and down it, for crying out loud! scolded one side of my brain.

  Well, what’ll I do! I don’t have any tanks or bazookas! pleaded a higher-pitched voice from the other side.

  Run! came the chorus.

  If I’d waited just a second more, I would never have made it away. The bigger and uglier of the bandits had already decided he was being made a fool of. Even as my body was turning to run, the machete in his thick right arm was swooshing past my face close enough to guarantee I would not blink again the rest of the night.

  Running for all my long, skinny legs and flailing arms were worth, I struck back out in the direction of Bangkok as though the entire Russian Army were on my heels. Desperately, I willed any car, truck, scooter, or policeman in Asia to come roaring down the road just then. But the long, dark ribbon of asphalt ahead of me stretched emptily on and on.

  Since my legs were probably nearly as long as the bandits were tall, I was able to get quite a jump at first. But that was soon dissipated by the awkward weight of my backpack causing my rubbery limbs to go everywhere, it seemed, but straight ahead. As the patter of the bandits’ own shoes drew nearer and nearer to my back, I was like a marathon runner at the halfway mark of the race, before he has caught his second wind. Yet the big bandit passing me on my left looked strangely serene and refreshed, as if he were out for a casual jog. He was carrying his machete in his raised right hand, as though he were a torchbearer in an Olympiad.

  “Hey! Stay away with that! I’m a nice guy, I never hurt anyone! You don’t want to rob me!” I said over and over, as he passed me as effortlessly as if I were standing still.

  But he stopped before me and waited. He knew he had me, that I was dead. And I had to agree, when I heard his partner’s shoes pounding closer from somewhere just behind.

  Then, with a howl, I did the only thing I could think of: I charged madly at the bandit in front, trying my very best to get him to eat my umbrella. He slashed away at the heavy umbrella stabbing and pounding at his face. Crying, screaming, cursing, spitting, yelling, barking, pleading a thousand words, a minute, I whirled and jumped and dived and dodged like a man who has half a dozen cobras and a couple hundred fire ants down his pants. And so it might have continued until one of us dropped from exhaustion, or my umbrella fell apart.

  But then the other bandit caught up with our strange sword fight. Grabbing my pack, he pulled me backward, away from his hapless partner, and let fly with his own machete. From the corner of my right eye, I could see his machete’s blade sweep toward my neck. My mind went blank, as if refusing to feel the blade slice through my skull and neck, but was jarred back when the blade hit my pack’s exterior frame, an inch from my jugular vein.

  Not for a second did my wild gyrations stop. If only to stay alive for another few seconds, I fought on with a new surge of fury. And suddenly the bandit in front looked as if he were seeing a ghost and ran off into the jungle.

  I whirled to confront the other—only to see headlights bearing down on me like two runaway comets.

  Waving my arms frantically, I charged the lights and screamed at the Datsun pickup truck as it passed me.

  The truck’s brake lights flashed on.

  I rushed to its back end, but it was piled so high with loose pineapples that I doubted even a monkey could have found a handhold. Wasting not a second, for I knew the bandits would come as soon as they saw the driver was not the police, I scrambled to the passenger door’s window. The front seat was crowded with a farmer, his wife, and two young girls. Even without my pack, I couldn’t have fitted a leg in alongside them. But I had to make the truck’s passengers realize I was inches from literally losing my head.

  With the ragged umbrella flailing in my right hand, my left one demonstrating my plight by slicing and stabbing me silly with an invisible knife, I ranted and raved outside the door, as the eyes in the truck expanded in terror.

  When I saw the shaking farmer’s hand fly to the gearshift on the floor, my skin leaped a mile. If they drove off without me, I was a dead man. Throwing all caution to the stars, I tore open the door and jammed my arms, shoulders, head, and what I could of my pack inside. Onto and across the girls’ legs I wriggled madly, my hands groping blindly for anything to hold onto.

  Over the next several minutes, as the truck sped down the road with my legs flopping out the side, it was a scene even a nightmare would have had difficulty matching for sheer confusion: everyone was screaming; my heart was pounding against my eardrums; and in my mind I saw the bandits sprinting alongside the truck trying to grab my legs so they could chop them off.

  Though I had no ideas what it was I had grabbed to keep myself in the truck, I was aware that it was soft, and screaming something frightful.

  Only when the truck eased to a stop in what was a tiny police shack’s dirt yard did I finally loosen my eagle grip. Then I found to my embarrassment that for two miles I had been hanging entirely by the poor farmer’s wife’s breasts. Though I had grabbed her in her stomach area, I had latched onto her bra-less breasts because they hung low.

  And it seemed I wasn’t finished tormenting her yet. While trying to act out for the two policemen at the post that I had just been attacked by bandits, I kept pointing frantically down the road, putting an imaginary rifle to my shoulder, and shouting, “Bandits! Go kill! SHOOT!”

  Only instead of putting some clothes on—they were in their underwear—and hopping onto their little Honda sco
oter to go after the bandits, they kept giving me the meanest looks. Because standing in the direction I was pointing was the bent-over old woman beside the truck, still trying to coax her chest back into shape. The policemen thought I was telling them to blast the poor innocent woman.

  Eventually, everyone came to understand what I was jabbering about. The policemen put on some pants and boots and puttered away with a rifle in the direction of the ambush. But of course they were too late. All they found was a silent road, and my crippled umbrella.

  Later that night, as I was lying on the floor in the back room of the wooden post, listening uneasily to splashing sounds in the swamp outside and watching the gecko lizards chase each other across the dingy ceiling, a familiar voice I’d struggled with so often the past years spoke to me again:

  There is nothing to be ashamed of in quitting, Steve. You have gone far enough. Everyone will understand.Why risk your life anymore? You can’t expect to continue to be so lucky in escaping from death.

  But I knew that quitting anything because of fear somehow did not seem “right.” To give up now would have been proof of how terrible the world is to those so eager to condemn it.