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

by James O'Reilly

  I had to keep going, if only to show there were not as many bandits as some were trying to make us believe.

  Some things in life couldn’t be explained in words. And certainly one of those was fear, that mysterious cloud on the human spirit. Why some were so willing to be its slaves, while others chose to challenge it to the last round would probably be something I could spend a lifetime seeking an answer to….

  Respectfully, I eased myself onto the cold earth behind the five men, just outside the globe of the candles’ glows. And with much inner groaning, I tried to coerce my stiff legs into the lotus position favored by the monks.

  From atop a low altar in front of them, a golden Buddha with feline eyes, long ears, and a benign smile gazed down upon the disciples. Mountains of candle wax lay at its feet, a yellowing stratum of ancient prayers and long sultry nights spent in silent meditation.

  While the monks’ attention retreated inside themselves, my own flitted about the temple, darting from shadow to shadow to see what surprises their holy grotto held. There were many: a pair of long deer antlers protruding from a skull like gnarled stalagmites; enormous hand-sized spiders resting on their webs; a dozen moldy and stained paintings of the Buddha’s mortal life in India over 2,500 years ago; short blank paper prayer slips, and squares of gold-colored foil stuck onto the statues like freckles run amok; portraits of the present-day king and queen dressed in the costumes of their ancestors.

  A rustle of rough cloth brought my eyes back to the monks. They were bowing low, as if in response to an unspoken command. I bowed, too, lest some misfortune fall upon my head for not being attentive. Deep chanting filled the cave:

  “Araham samma sambuddho bhagava. Buddham bhagavatam abivademi…The Lord Buddha, the perfectly enlightened and blessed one. I bow before the Buddha, the exalted one….”

  I had not expected to have any close contact with the religious community of this nearly totally Buddhist society. But because of the attack by the two bandits near Phet Buri, and the stories I heard of thieves who liked to slit their victims’ throats while they were sleeping, I knew I could no longer walk at night. And so I had decided to seek refuge in the wats whenever I did not have a family to take me into a home.

  While a few of the wats I had stayed in since that frightful night were large and centerpieced with a tall and glittering temple, most were a tiny cluster of stilt-legged plank huts deep inside a forest or at the base of some half-wild mountain. Gardens of tranquility, those little wats were normally occupied by a handful of elderly monks who wanted a place to spend their final years undisturbed. Occasionally, there might also be a lone maichee (nun), humbly dressed, her head also shaved. Always there were the stray animals and chickens, dashing about in search of food scraps.

  Though rarely visited by anyone other than the village children and the farm wives bringing food and idle conversation, the monks did not shy away from my unexpected appearance. They always showed me the bathing well or stream, then waved me up rickety steps to their one-room bungalows for some hot Ovaltine and a meal of rice, fish, and boiled bamboo. Furnished with little more than a straw sleeping mat, a mosquito net, a kerosene lamp, a small altar, and perhaps shelves crowded with old prayer books and a few chipped teacups, their dwellings reflected their humble views of man’s existence.

  The south of Thailand is a distinct part of the country— there are more Thai Muslims, as opposed to the central and northern Buddhists, the closer one gets to the Malaysian border.

  —Peter Aiken, “Thai Waterways”

  At most of the wats, my stay was no longer than one night. I stayed at one, though—Wat Suan Moke—near the city of Surat Thani, for over two weeks. Its head monk, the Venerable Buddhadasa, was said to be one of the world’s greatest living masters of the Buddha’s teachings, but it was from the monk just under him, the Venerable Poh, that I received an invitation to pause and rest my body and soul.

  I decided to try the life of a monk while I was there, both the mental and the physical aspects. To do so meant I had to dissociate myself from all my normal habits and, most important, from my own ego. Like the monks, I was to live a life filled with inner meditation and learning to achieve harmony with the forces of nature. It was a demanding and—contrary to popular image—a very grueling life-style. I had to learn to go every day without doing anything that might distract me from concentrating on my inner “light” or peace. I could not speak to anyone other than my teacher (Poh), could not make eye contact, write, read, listen to the radio, make music, eat meat, leave the wat’s secluded compound, or kill any living creatures, including ants and mosquitoes.

  In the end, my mind proved too restless. Nor were all the scorpions and snakes that surprised me on the paths of that forest monastery helpful to my concentration.

  The monsoon rains had caught up with me at Wat Suan Moke, and with them had come hordes of what I hated more than snakes—mosquitoes. It was bad enough trying to take a bath in a creek where I had to dance around leeches and scoop up the water in a droopy plastic pail. But to have to fight off a million frenzied bloodsuckers at the same time was more than I thought even Buddha could have endured…

  “You must see that this ‘I’ and ‘mine’ is the main cause of all forms of pain and unhappiness,” Poh said in a very low voice the last night I was there, as the glow from a ring of kerosene lamps played off his impassive eyes. “Whenever there is a clinging to anything, then there is the darkness of ignorance. There is no clarity, because the mind is not empty.”

  “And what of my dread of another attack by bandits?” I asked.

  “One does not look on anything as ever having been, as currently being, or as having the potential to be self or belong to self. There is no self in the present and no basis for anxiety regarding self in the past or future,” he replied in his usual serious, indecipherable way.

  One thing of Poh’s I did decipher, though, was his worry for me, on the morning he came to see me off. It was at the same huge front gate where we’d met two weeks ago that he said, “I wish you would consider taking a bus. Otherwise, I will worry so much.”

  “But I am walking. You know that,” I replied.

  “I know…I know,” was all he said, letting his eyes say the rest.

  When I walked through the monastery’s tall front gate to continue on my way to Malaysia, I told myself I was unquestionably a much calmer person…even if poor Poh was still fretting.

  Steven M. Newman also contributed “Flying Kites” in Part Three of this book.

  The railway network in Thailand, run by the Thai government, is surprisingly good. After traveling several thousand kilometers by train and bus, I have to say that the train wins hands down as the best form of public transport in the kingdom. It is not possible to take the train everywhere in Thailand, but if it were that’s how I’d go. If you travel third class, it is often the cheapest way to cover a long distance; by second class it’s about the same as a “tour bus” but much safer and more comfortable. The trains take a bit longer than a chartered bus but, on overnight trips especially, it is worth the extra time it takes.

  The trains offer many advantages; there is more space, more room to breathe and stretch out—even in third class—than there is on the best buses. The windows are big and usually open, so that there is no glass between you and the scenery—good for taking photos—and more to see. The scenery itself is always better along the rail routes compared to the scenery along Thai highways—the trains regularly pass small villages, farmland, old temples, etc. Decent, reasonably priced food is available and served at your seat or in the dining car. The pitch-and-roll of the railway cars is much easier on the bones, muscles, and nervous system than the quick stops and starts, the harrowing turns, and the pot-hole jolts endured on buses. The train is safer in terms of both accidents en route and robberies. Last, but certainly not least, you meet a lot more interesting people on the trains, or so it seems to me.

  —Joe Cummings, Thailand - a travel surviv
al kit

  CHARLES NICHOLL

  Poppy Fields

  On the opium trail, the author comes face to face with “Old Longhead”—and himself.

  INSIDE THE HAW’S GLOOMY STOREROOM APPA WAS PURCHASING opium. I watched through the bead curtain. The trader had a fat black wedge of the stuff, two or three kilos, wrapped in banana leaves and polythene. I guessed it was produce the Shan men had sold him. He tore off a small piece, showed it to Appa, said something which sounded like a price. Appa nodded.

  Harry was at my shoulder. “Let’s go in. He won’t mind. This is just a casual deal.”

  They looked up when we walked in but didn’t say anything. Harry asked to look at the opium Appa was still holding. He said to the Haw, “Chandu, mai?” The Haw nodded. He asked how much for this piece. The Haw said, “One hundred baht.” Harry said he would buy some too.

  “Is that a good idea, Harry?”

  “You wouldn’t want to leave without tasting some of the local produce would you?” He said it lightly, but I saw the skulking look in his eye. There are some battles you never win.

  Chandu, Harry explained, is proper smoking opium. The raw opium, the stuff we saw on the poppy pods, is dissolved in hot water, strained through a cotton cloth, then the water is boiled off. It is one stage purer than raw opium. From chandu they then make morphine base, and from that heroin, but neither the hill-tribe grower nor the Haw trader would have anything to do with those later stages.

  The trader took down a wooden case, teak, shaped like a small violin case. Inside was a set of iron balances, and, each nesting in a separate compartment, half a dozen weights sculpted in the plump shape of the Chinese Buddha. He chose the second smallest. It squatted in the shallow iron bowl of the weights. I remembered the shrine at the Gipsee Rose strip club: you meet the Buddha in the strangest company, and I suppose that is one of the beauties of Buddhism.

  Opium, and its medicinal derivative morphine, was introduced to the West in 1815 after a German pharmacist isolated the principal alkaloid and named it for Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. Public usage became commonplace in the early 20th century after Bayer, the pharmaceutical company, promoted diacetyl morphine (heroin) as a miracle cure and packaged the pills in small boxes marked with lions and globes.The Bayer trademark was later used by Laotian traffickers who sold their product under the Double-Globe brand.

  —Carl Parkes, Thailand Handbook

  Actually—as Katai soon pointed out—Buddhism is not at all in favour of intoxicants. Monks, of course, may take no drugs or alcohol, though they can and frequently do smoke tobacco. She told of the legend that the Buddha, when he was struggling towards the light of dharma, cut off his eyelids to stop himself from falling asleep. Where his eyelids fell there grew the first opium poppy, a symbol of the falsehoods—false rest, false visions—that the bodhisattva must cast aside on his quest for the true light.

  We walked to another village, an hour’s walk, then a steep climb. This was a Lahu village: less colourful than the Akha—in none of the Lahu villages I visited did I see people wearing traditional costume—but very friendly. Here we were invited to drink and eat. A huge burri of local tobacco was tamped into a bamboo pipe and passed around.

  One of the Lahu boys got out a musical instrument. It was a kind of banjo, wood and hide, with three wire strings fastened to pegs at the neck. He played a mournful, striding sort of tune, three chords, hill-tribe blues.

  Inside, the women were preparing us a meal. Strips of pork fat were torn from a row of meat hanging from the rafters. These were fried in a wok on the fire. In another rice cakes sizzled. I passed round the tea wine that Katai had given—“a present for my two farang”—when she came back all breathless across the bridge at Mae Sai.

  The hut was filled with lumber and rags, broken farm tools, cobwebs and shed dust. Appa was quiet, aloof. Perhaps he was just relaxing. Perhaps, though I couldn’t really believe this, he was tired. We ate our meal. The Lahu squatted on the balcony opposite, watching each mouthful with pleasure.

  One of them told a mischievous story about the Akha, how in the “early time,” the Great Creator’s sons and daughters all paired up, and out of their unions came the various hill tribes: the Lahu and the Lisu, the Meo and Yao, and so on. But the Akha boy had no partner, so he was forced to marry a monkey in the jungle in order to found his dynasty.

  Appa laughed, showing his betel-blackened teeth. In his village, he said, they told the same story about the Lahu.

  Harry and I sat side by side on a low bed in Appa’s house at Pa Kha. He had invited us back to smoke the opium we had acquired from the Haw. Katai had declined and returned to the guess how [guest house].

  Appa’s wife brewed Chinese tea in a kettle. She squatted by the smouldering fire, muttering at it as she fanned the embers. She was a small, quiet, amiable woman. She wore no headdress, just a scarf of cloth on her head, but she wore the embroidered leggings, and the short indigo skirt with the long sash hanging down, for modesty’s sake, when she sits or squats.

  Their son was there too, a stocky boy in his teens. He wore a t-shirt that said, for no particular reason, “Block Bust.” He was shy at first, though later he talked with us.

  The house was dark and low and redolent of woodsmoke. Chinks of light glowed through the bamboo walls. Apart from the low doorway, curtained off with blankets, these were the only source of light in the hut. It was a “ground house,” built on a floor of packed earth, rather than up on piles with air underneath. We were up at about 5,000 feet here, the higher altitude range for hill tribes. The mornings can be misty and chilly, and these low-built houses retain the warmth better. In terms of tribal status, elevated houses are more up-market, because they’re harder to build. There were some of these at Pa Kha but not Appa’s.

  There was a raised area to the right of the doorway as you came in. There were two mattresses here, covered with blankets, and between them lay the blackened clutter of Appa’s opium kit: bamboo-stem pipes with small metal bowls, a wick lamp, dibbers and needles, and a small rusty knife.

  Also among the impedimenta were several sachets, one or two revealing white powder inside. For a moment I thought it was heroin but I knew this was unlikely. The hill tribes have nothing to do with heroin as such. I saw more of the white powder scattered around, mixed with the black ashy detritus of previous sessions.

  I asked Harry what the powder was. He looked down at the sachets. Something seemed to surprise him. He reached out to pick one of them up. “I don’t believe it,” he murmured.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s Old Longhead!”

  “What do you mean, Old Longhead?”

  He laughed, “It’s just aspirin. Chinese headache powder. They mix it with opium.” I asked him what for. “It’s mostly to bind the opium. When its fresh, it’s a bit too wet, unstable. They put the aspirin in, like straw into the mud to make a brick. Some people say the aspirin also stops you getting a bad head after you’ve smoked.”

  He handed me the sachet: it had smudgy Chinese characters on it, black on green, and a line drawing—done in the timeless, tacky, joke-shop style—of a man with a hugely elongated forehead.

  “The strange thing is,” Harry said, “I haven’t seen Old Longhead for maybe twenty years. When I was a smoker, in Vientiane, the rickshaw boys used to mix it in. It was always this brand: the guy with the great long headache. So after a while we—not the Lao boys: I mean the French—we used to make it our word for opium. Monsieur Tête Longue. Allons visiter Monsieur Tête Longue…”

  He tossed the sachet back onto the tray, laughed dryly. “Well, here I am back again, mon vieux.”

  Appa lay on one bed, propped up on his elbow. We sat on the other, drank the tea his wife gave us—muddy and luke warm, nothing of the pungency of the Haw lady’s brew—and watched him preparing the first bowl of opium.

  First he scraped out the bowl of the pipe, made a small pile of black residue: ash and oxidized opium from the previous
session, the “tailings” as Harry called it. He explained that they often mix this with the opium, to make an inferior but cheaper smoke. Tonight we would be smoking pure chandu.

  “Ngan” has two diametrically opposed meanings: “work” and “party.” Thais approach each with the other’s attributes. On the one hand, they take a relaxed approach to work, seldom burning the midnight oil. Conversely, they may stay up until dawn several nights running to prepare a floral float for a festival.

  —Steve Van Beek, “Thailand Notes”

  Appa gently tore a small piece off the wedge of opium. In the lamplight I saw the rich colour of the opium, where it was stretched and pulled. It was a deep reddish-brown, the colour of a young conker, the colour of plum jam. He kneaded the piece between his fingers, mixed in some of the powdered aspirin. He now had a rounded pellet the size of a large pea. He impaled it on the end of a dibber, a thin metal spike about six inches long, and heated it over the meager flame of the wick-lamp. He held it so that the ball was just at the fringes of the flame, never quite touching. He kneaded some more, his fingers grimed with opium and carbon. It was now ready for smoking. He pushed it into the shallow bowl of the pipe, held the bowl at an angle over the flame, and wrapped his lips around the bamboo mouthpiece. Still the opium must not touch the flame. It sizzles and sweats but never quite burns. He used the dibber to prod and tease the melting pellet, to keep the airway open, to keep the smoke coming. He took the smoke in, slow and level, in one long grateful draught. The mellow, sickly smell spread through the dark hut.