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

by James O'Reilly

  The light faded unnoticed. After a few bowls everything takes on a loose, underwater feel. If you close your eyes you can easily imagine that you’re floating, that these ripples of sensation are carrying you off through the darkness, and when you open your eyes again you’ll be somewhere else: but where?

  Harry quotes Rimbaud, of course: “Comme je descendais les fleuves impassibles….”

  Everything is now done in the horizontal position that opium exacts. Appa is propped on one elbow, smoking, preparing, face close over the lamp, restful and intent. When your turn comes round, you crawl into the smoking position, lying on your side, head resting on a pillow of old clothes. You are like a child in your posture. Someone could come and cover you with a blanket, and you’d smile and say “Thank you” without looking up. Your eyes are on the pipemaker, his grimed hands nudging the gear into the bowl, his face lit up from the wick lamp, his Chinese eyes with the pin-prick pupils. He swings the long stem towards you, the opium sputters, you suck the woody smoke down as slow as you can (though taking three or four draughts where Appa only took one). You can taste the smoke but hardly feel it, it’s so mild. The taste is sweet. The taste is bitter. Your eyes are still on the pipemaker. You fear that if you look too long into his eyes you will disappear into them, tumble slowly down long black tunnels, like Alice down the rabbit hole. But nothing matters, least of all your fears.

  Harry said this was high-quality opium, this was stuff the tourist trekker would never get. I said benevolently, “You get it right, don’t you, Harry? You get the best out of things.”

  He said, “Code of the road,” and we laughed.

  Harry told me I would probably be sick for some time. This was natural, because I didn’t “have the habitude” for opium. I had already felt twinges of nausea, but found that as long as I didn’t move too much, as long as I lay still, with my eyes shut, the sickness remained somehow apart from me. It was happening in some distant region: my body. Most of all you don’t want to stand up. Your two-legged self, upright and uptight, has gone off somewhere, and left this smiling cadaver with enough motor energy to talk, to light cigarettes, and to crawl into place for the next bowl.

  We lay side by side on the bed. We talked up to the ceiling. Harry drifted into reminiscence: his “smoking days” in Vientiane, back in the ’60s.

  The Laotian capital in those days probably had a heavier concentration of opium dens than any other city in the world, he said. “The spooks at the U.S. embassy had done a survey, you could say, considering the stakes the Yanks had in the opium business in those days. They found there were a thousand fumeries in Vientiane, give or take. That’s about one for every fifty men, women, and children in the city.

  “There were fumeries in the centre of town, and all around The Strip, but the best opium I ever smoked was out on the edge of town. You’d get a rickshaw boy to take you there, to the places where they smoked themselves. These were rough places. I mean, these were the shanties, nothing fancy. But the opium was so sweet, man, so strong. You could spend a night and a day in there, never realize the time.

  “In the next shack there’s the rickshaw boy’s coffee shop. Here they sell you café électrique. That’s strong black coffee with amphetamine laced in. Speed coffee. So the boys would come in, have a few bowls, then a shot of café électrique, and then they go out to work again. The rickshaw boys, they never slept.

  “The fumeries in the residential quarter were something else. They were high-class dens. Like Madam Chang’s. That’s where you went if you wanted to discuss a little something, some beez-ness clandestin, perhaps. It was a very cosmopolitan clientele. You’d meet the colons there, the good old trading boys. I remember one old man, his name was Mazarin, so of course we called him the Cardinal. He was a teak merchant, had a Lao wife or two, knew the country better than his own village back home. He was what we call un vrai Indochinois. He’d be there every night at Madam Chang’s, had his own pipe, his special pipemaker: she was a lot prettier than this guy here, I can promise you!

  “I remember he said to me once: the first time you smoke the opium, he said, it is like the first time you look into the eyes of a beautiful woman, and you know you’re going to regret you ever met her.

  “Sometimes I’d smoke it up in the hills, with the montagnards. The Hmong tribe: they call them Meo in Thailand. They had a kind of legend about the opium poppy. There was once a Hmong who fell in love with a fair-skinned farang girl. The girl died and out of her corpse there bloomed an opium poppy. The montagnard says: the sap of the poppy is sweet, as she was; the sap of the poppy relieves my sorrow, as she did.

  “There is another opium legend too, but perhaps you do not know. It is the story of Narcissus. The flower Narcissus is not the daffodil, as we have it. It is the opium poppy. It is from the Greek word narke, numbness. My friend the Cardinal told me about this: he was a scholar of such things. Narcissus is the opium smoker. He stares into the black pool of the opium reverie. He sees there his own face, his own self. He finds it beautiful. When you smoke the opium you look inside you. Some people, they don’t ever want to look outside any more. They fall in love with the dream. They die beside the pool, like Narcissus.

  After eight or ten pipes we were no more disposed to talk. We lay sprawled on the bed, like Narcissus beside the pool. When I shut my eyes I started to get the visions.

  I see faces, but not my own. I see the faces of Appa, and of Harry and Katai, and of the Shan man who grew the poppies and the Haw trader who sold the opium. Then the portrait gallery takes on a random life of its own. I see my mother and father as I knew them when I was small. They are sitting in the Old Hillman brake that got stuck on the one-in-three at Lydford Gorge. Faces come up of people I haven’t seen for twenty years, the mathematicians and carpenter’s wives of my life, and now here is L’Italienne, the beautiful woman you regret you ever met, seen exactly, in a certain garden, wearing my check shirt, laughing as I tell her in my teenage poetic frenzy that she’s like the Hyacinth Girl in The Waste Land. But now the faces are beginning to speed up. They are taking on elasticity and movement. Some of these people I definitely don’t know. They are twisting and deforming. They are growing pustules and carbuncles. They are doing Les Dawson faces. They are entering cycles of decay and putrefaction before my eyes.

  Then I start to think I might be dying. This is the movie, the roll-call, passing before the drowning man. It strikes me that, of course, it has to speed up like this, to get it all in before you go. Drowning is what this death would be like, drowning in the black pool. This is for a moment a real fear, but so distant, like a voice calling far enough away to be ignored. The fear passes, as everything passes, serenely across and out of mind. Perhaps when you die you are silently inwardly laughing at these visions, as I am now: laughing at this Keystone Cops caper, laughing scared through these crummy ghost-train tunnels, laughing so hard your lips don’t even move.

  I know I can snap out of it if I want to. All I need to do is flick open my eyes. I look up into the rafters, try to make out the shapes up there, things stored, rags and bones and corn-cobs. I close my eyes again, and now there’s nothing there, just these ripples spreading through my body when my hand moves to scratch an insect-bite, or when Harry shifts beside me, or even when there is a murmur from Appa or his wife; the tiniest disturbance registering on the quiet black waters.

  We slept where we lay, like drunken peasants in a Bruegel painting. Once in the night, as Harry had warned, I had to get up and be sick. There was a convenient spot not far from the hut. It was hardly like being sick at all: it came easily, copiously, painlessly. Out there in the midnight I knelt and covered my vomit with dust and leaves, and in the morning there was no trace of it at all.

  Charles Nicholl also contributed “Moonsong and Martin Luther” and “Mekong Days” to this book, excerpted from his book, Borderlines: A Journey in Thailand and Burma.

  Breathe in, calming the mind.

  Breathe out, calming the mind.<
br />
  So taught the Buddha.

  —Tim Ward, What the Buddha Never Taught

  PART FIVE

  THE LAST WORD

  VATCHARIN BHUMICHITR

  By the Sea

  A Thai man reflects on subtle changes near his childhood holiday home.

  H OLIDAYS AT THE SEASIDE HOLD THE SAME ATTRACTIONS FOR THAI children as for those of any other land: swimming, building sand castles, beach football. I, however, always found greatest pleasure in walking alone for hours down an endless strand of white beach. I liked to stop and stare into a rock pool, watching a creature tentatively peep out of its shell, and I was always amused by the near transparent ghost-crabs scuttling sideways, as if turning cartwheels, before diving into their impossibly tiny holes in the sand. The only things which ever worried me were the giant jelly fish, washed into the shallows during the rainy season. These monsters could be found on the beach when the tide went out and I would sometimes pick them up with two sticks to throw them out of reach of the sea, so that there would be one less danger for swimmers.

  As a child I would stay at my great-aunt’s house at Hua Hin, a beach resort a half-day’s drive from Bangkok, on the western shore of the Gulf of Thailand. As the daughter of a prince, it was almost obligatory that my great-aunt should have her holiday house in Hua Hin which, since the ’20s, had been a second home for the Thai nobility. The region around Hua Hin had known royal visitors since the last century, but it was the construction of the railway link between the capital and Malaya, after the First World War, that put the sleepy seaside town within a four-hour train journey of Bangkok. In 1926 King Rama VII began work on his villa, Klai Kangwan, “Far from worries,” and this brought in its wake beach bungalows built by princes, princesses, and other court officials in the then fashionable style of English suburban bungalows. Visitors could stay at the Railway Hotel, a fairy tale construction of wooden verandas with Victorian-style fretwork awnings, with topiary hedges carved into the shapes of animals apparently grazing on the well-watered lawns.

  The king was to discover that “Far from worries” was hardly the most appropriate name for his new residence for, in 1932, word came that there had been a revolution in Bangkok. Overnight His Majesty had been transformed from an absolute to a constitutional monarch. None of this affected Hua Hin, which spent the next thirty years as a pleasant place for the well-to-do, away from any unrest in the capital. The town remained the country’s principal resort until the Thai government started actively to promote tourism about twenty years ago. This led to the booming growth of Pattaya as the Miami Beach of Southeast Asia, a gaudy promenade of skyscraper hotels, discos, massage parlours, and international restaurants on the opposite side of the Gulf from sleepy old Hua Hin. The tourists have flocked to Pattaya. European ladies bare their breasts by the swimming pools, Arabs from the more puritan parts of Islam come to enjoy the sins of the flesh, and every nationality can be found along its garish neon-lit main street, out for the evening stroll.

  The more discriminating visitor has had to go further round the Gulf to enjoy the real pleasures of Thailand’s coast, its wide deserted beaches and its simple fisher-folk life. Until ten years ago, those in the know made the journey to the island of Phuket, off the western side of the narrow isthmus that divides Thailand from Malaysia. Set in the Andaman Sea, the island offered simple accommodations in beach-side huts and the pleasures of freshly caught fish and lobster grilled on an open fire. Nearby was Phangnga Bay, one of the world’s most extraordinary natural beauty spots, a seascape dotted with surreal limestone outcrops; thin yet dizzyingly tall, rising dramatically out of the placid green waters. Built out into the bay on stilts, a fishing village offered wonderful food in a setting of breathtaking beauty. Too good to last, for in 1979 an international airport was opened and the hotels began to spring up. However, there is no need to despair, Thailand has many islands, and the adventurous can always keep one jump ahead of the builders. Today, young travellers backpack their way to the island of Koh Samui or continue down the coast from Pattaya to Koh Samet, a journey which takes them to the town of Rayong—famous as the main centre for the most essential ingredient in Thai food, fish sauce. There’s no mistaking it, the whole place smells of drying fish. To offset the odour is the intriguing sight of thousands of pinkly translucent squid hung on lines to dry in the sun, like hosts of strange butterflies caught in gossamer nets.

  While new resorts like Pattaya were springing up, Hua Hin still remained largely unchanged. There was the addition of one or two more modern beach houses built by successful companies to provide weekend rest for their tired executives, but overall it was felt that the brasher aspects of the tourist trade should not infringe on the Royal Family’s holiday home. A few miles to the north, at Cha’am, a modern hotel was built, but it is so neatly secluded from the old town that most of the tourists who stay there do not know that a short distance from where they are staying is a piece of fantasy well worth finding—near the local army barracks, right on the beach is a pleasure house built by King Rama VI, a series of airy wooden rooms on stilts, linked by walkways and verandas, one of which goes on out into the sea like an English pier. This was a place for parties and dalliance. Until recently, no one seemed to be responsible for looking after it and it was slowly crumbling away. It had the look of a haunted palace, a place of dreams, the only visitors an occasional group of young people who had ignored the warnings and clambered out onto the pavillion above the water to eat a picnic, play music, and laze an afternoon away. Happily, a decision has now been made to try to restore this magical place.

  Today, Hua Hin’s atmosphere of gentle decay may be ending. Faded scions of the older aristocracy still come for their holidays but the place has acquired a new smartness among the sophisticated young, who are drawn to its old world charms. Change has been modest. The old Railway Hotel was spruced up with a coat of paint for its role as the Phnom Penh Hotel in the film The Killing Fields, and in 1986 the French Sofitel chain with their Thai partners undertook a sensitive restoration, keeping all the ’30s fittings, so that the pleasures of the past have been improved by only the barest touches of modernity. My only complaint is that they have not kept the old name “The Railway Hotel,” with its nostalgic image of pre-war travel. However, as we Thais believe that your luck is improved if you walk under an elephant, so for me the best way to savor Hua Hin is still to enter the hotel by its gardens, passing under an enormous bush shaped like an elephant. In the foyer of the hotel one can admire a photograph of Miss Thailand 1940, and look into cabinets displaying the porcelain and silverware once used by the old Siamese Railways—worth more than a glance. After an apertif you can ride in a samloh (a bicycle rickshaw) to the jetty, brightly flood-lit, where the larger motorized fishing boats have anchored. These are manned by tough deep-sea sailors, their arms blue with protective tatoos depicting religious or magical symbols.These wiry men live dangerously, often staying out for at least three days and nights at a time. The haul they bring in is huge, a tumbling avalanche of silvery fish destined for the shops and restaurants of Bangkok. At night, the scene is almost overdramatic: weird figures wear cloth hoods with eye-holes, like Halloween ghosts, to protect their skin from the sharp fish scales; ships about to depart are loaded with crushed ice which steams in the hot air, adding to the aura of mystery. After the best of the catch has been tossed from hand to hand, from boat to truck, the tiny sprats and the sweepings are loaded into baskets destined for the duck farms that supply Bangkok’s insatiable appetite for that delicious bird.

  Having admired the haul, it is time to sample it. There is a fish market at the entrance to the jetty and beside that, a row of restaurants. It is to one of these wooden rooms, jutting out on stilts over the water, that the visitor must go for an evening meal. At the entrance is a brightly lit stall groaning under the results of the owner’s bargaining session with the fishermen: a cascade of glistening clams, white and purple squid, a tank crowded with so many fish only the fisher-
folk know their names. But the diners will have no problem choosing their meal, a young helper will offer a book of photographs illustrating the cook’s specialties. She can be seen just behind the stall waiting near her wok for the choice of ingredients to be made. A fish is pointed out, the net dips into the tank; mussels are selected, a handful are scooped up—all go into the wok so fast you can barely follow her movements. It is all as easy and as abundant as the seas and rivers of Thailand itself which teem with fish so that the smallest child can be sure of a catch. If Bangkok floods in the rainy season, shoals of fish migrate up the city’s highways, darting and weaving about the half-submerged cars as if they were so many rocks.

  After the main meal, diners can stroll from the restaurant to the Hua Hin market in the center of town where nighttime food stalls are set out with tropical fruit, sweetmeats and puddings, ice creams and cold drinks to finish off the evening’s dining. If you are lucky enough to be staying in a beach bungalow you can return via the moonlit sands where the final pleasure is to watch the lights flickering on the boats of the in-shore fisherman waiting for the night’s catch to enter their long line of nets. In the morning these shallow-bottomed boats will be dragged as near shore as possible offering the haul to the occupants of holiday homes. Crabs will be bought by the bucketful for a great steamed feast. There will be lobsters and prawns, floundering and scrabbing about in the bottom of the vessel. But at night these boats are merely dark shapes gently tossed on the returning tide while on the nearby headland a giant statue of the Buddha silently watches over the waters, offering protection to all those who live by the sea.