Thailand and Laos, 1998 (c) Robert Hale 2000
Day One, Monday 2/2/1998
There is a story of four blind men and an elephant. The first blind man feels the elephant's leg and declares that an elephant is very like a tree. The second man feels its trunk and says that an elephant is like a snake. The third one feels its tail and says that both of them are wrong, an elephant is like a brush with just a few bristles on the end. The last one feels the tusks and says that an elephant is like a spear. I feel the same way about Bangkok. It is an elephant of a city, it changes with every new mile and every new district. As we left the airport my first impression was that it was grey and dusty. It looked as if it had started to fall down before they had finished building it. Soon however vegetation appeared lending it an air of lushness, albeit overlaid with a greasy patina of pollution and in the distance, like Jurassic Park brontosaurs, the great towers of the city could be seen rising between the trees. It managed somehow to look simultaneously verdant and drab. But it was already changing again and becoming a proper city - a little more crowded, a little more polluted and with a lot more traffic, but like any other city nevertheless. The driving was as eccentric as I have come to expect in the Far East. The rules seem to be that people drive on the left unless it is more convenient to drive on the right, that they stop for red traffic lights unless it is more convenient to go and go on green unless they feel like stopping. Merging and overtaking are based on a simple 'chicken' principle and the general rule of the road is that the biggest vehicle has right of way. The city is filled with motor cycles and motor scooters, multicoloured taxis and the ubiquitous tuk-tuks - noisy, dirty two-stroke vehicles consisting of a narrow bench on the back of a motor cycle. There is so much traffic that often it is faster to walk and taxi fares are charged by the kilometre but with a surcharge when the vehicle is motionless.
We swept round onto a wide thoroughfare past a series of temples whose red and gold roofs brightened the view considerably and along a road lined with giant formal portraits of a man in military uniform and a woman in evening dress. Briefly I pondered who they might be but jet-lag robbed me of any real interest and afterwards I forgot to check. My interest flickered again momentarily as we passed what looked like another elaborate temple with a sign outside saying, in English, Buddhist Protection Front. The name conjured up vague images of pacifist terrorism.
We had arrived early in the morning and reached our hotel, the Royal, before ten. The Royal is the oldest hotel in Bangkok and like an old woman in too much make up is less grand than it thinks it is and far less grand than it once was. The group of us who had arrived on the plane, David and Janine, Hugh, Francesca, Fiona and myself checked into the hotel and met up in the lobby to go exploring. Following Janine's map we went down past the Grand Palace and to the river where we paid 200 baht each for a boat tour finishing up at Chinatown. The tour took us around the waterways where there is a comprehensive thriving waterside community. Set back from the water behind green lawns there were frequent glimpses of temples with orange-robed shaven-headed monks going about their daily business. Nearer the waters edge the buildings were of wood, sometimes with corrugated metal roofs, and built on stilts around which washed the flotsam and detritus that filled the greasy green water.
Eventually the boat came out of one of the narrow side channels and rejoined the main river. A few hundred yards downstream it docked at a Chinatown pier. We disembarked and made our way down through a narrow crowded street lined on both sides with rows of stalls selling cooked food - strips of miscellaneous meet grilling over hot coals, baked fruit, bowls of thin vegetable soup, bread and cakes. The mixed odours were unusual but not unpleasant. I was still feeling the lack of hunger that several consecutive airline meals always cause in me so that I was untempted by either the sights or the smells. Our 'plan', such as it was, revolved around a walking tour of the area that we had found in one of the guide books but to make any use of it we first had to establish where we were. In Bangkok many, though by no means all, of the signposts have been transliterated into English script but as the phonics of oriental languages do not lend themselves to western alphabets these are inconsistent with the guide books and of limited use.
At the corner of the road we guessed where we where and turned right. When the sought after temple failed to appear it became apparent that we had guessed wrong. On the other hand the street was lined with gold and jewellery shops which might correspond to one of the descriptions on the map. We crossed the street and turned into a narrow alley. This was a fascinating place. No more than a few feet wide, the buildings on either side loomed above us claustrophobically. Brightly coloured canopies stretched across between them filtering the light that did make its way to street level and painting the walls and pavements with pastel stripes. This was Trok Itsarranuphap, one of the many market lanes in Chinatown. The stalls were filled with an abundance of prepared foodstuffs. At one stall there were quivering masses of what looked like multicoloured jellies, at another plastic containers were filled with fried or baked strips of fish and squid. A row of greasy looking blackened chickens hung above another stall and yet another was selling plates of cooked vegetables, laid out in neat rows on a table.
We made our way through the crowd eventually emerging onto another street which we soon determined was where had originally intended to be. The alley market was part of the walking tour we were supposed to be doing albeit part that we shouldn't have done for another hour. We backtracked the description and soon found the Wat Mangkon Kamalawat, the temple that we had been seeking. This was approached through its own car park which was hung with dozens of red paper lanterns. Whether this was normal or part of the celebrations for the Chinese New Year, I couldn't tell. Inside the temple was crowded and busy and it took only a few moments for my eyes to be stinging and tears streaming down my face from the heavy scent of burning incense. A row of monks sat at tables selling joss sticks and papers on which were written prayers to be burnt inside the temple. I found that I couldn't spend more than a few minutes in the smoky atmosphere and went back outside to wait. Before very long the others had joined me and we considered our options over a brief lunch and a cold beer at one of the many hotels. David and Janine wanted to head back to the hotel and Francesca said that she would go with them Fiona and I decided to walk down to the Golden Buddha which was about fifteen minutes away along Yaowarat Road, at Wat Traimat.
This is a five and a half tonne Solid Gold Buddha set in a small and plain Wat on the edge of Chinatown. The place was crowded with tourists but the Buddha itself was impressive. Outside a row of what looked like slot machines turned out to be an automated equivalent of the fortune telling apparatus that is found in all Buddhist temples. The fortunes, I noticed, were printed in English as well as Thai. Clearly the Golden Buddha is now considered more of a tourist attraction than a religious icon.
Back on the street we took a tuk-tuk back to the hotel, hanging on grimly at the apparently suicidal driving and after a shower I had a couple of hours sleep before the evening briefing.
At the evening briefing, when we eventually found where it was, I had my first look at the rest of the group. There were sixteen in all and I spoke so few words to any of them that it was impossible to form any kind of opinion. By now I was starting to feel hungry and Wit, our local guide in Thailand, said that he had arranged dinner and a show at a local restaurant. In the restaurant we all sat at a long low table and ate the excellent meal. The show was one of the interminable cultural shows that are inflicted on tourists the world over. The girls were pretty enough - even if they did all look as if they had been cloned from the same cell - and the costumes were colourful and the music was innocuous and after ten minutes I stopped watching it and concentrated on eating. There was a brief section in the middle with a well choreographed routine of stick fighting in which the slightest misstep could have resulted in serious injury but otherwise it was the usual cultural fare which left me as cold as ever.
Back at the hotel I went straight to bed and in minutes had fallen into a blissful and dreamless sleep.
Day Two, Tuesday 3/2/1998
After a filling breakfast from the Thai buffet we were ready to start our official tour of Bangkok. This began with what was by and large a repeat of yesterday's boat trip but this time with fifteen of us present on two boats. This morning the light glinting off the temple roofs made them look like gems set in the green and brown of the banks. Having taken my pictures yesterday I could relax and just take in the view. The riverside community was busy about its morning tasks. In spite of the surface scum and the floating rubbish people were bathing in the water and even washing the breakfast dishes. We came to one of the talàat náam, the floating markets. This was not Wat Sai market which is the one illustrated on all of the postcards but another less tourist oriented one where goods were being sold from a mixture of buildings built out over the water and long narrow boats moored at the edge. It was still early and not very busy although there were a few customers, also on their boats, doing their shopping.
We went on, eventually returning to the main river and docking at Wat Arun, the Temple of the Dawn on the western bank. This temple, which looks extremely impressive from the river even with the scaffolding being used in its renovation, is a little more drab close up. Nevertheless it is fairly grand. Outside its grounds there is a thriving market of tacky tourist stands and photographers with snakes that, for a few baht, they will drape around your neck. If reptiles don't appeal you can pose instead with alluring Thai women wearing traditional head-dresses and costumes. Should you prefer to buy something there are plenty of cheap pieces of jewellery or masks or carvings. Instead of any of these things I took the opportunity to chat to Wit about Buddhism. He told me that almost every male Thai becomes a monk for at least a short period of his life. This may be as little as a week or may become a lifelong vocation although the normal period is about three months during the Thai rainy season. He had been a monk for six years. Depending on whether you are a novice or a monk there are different numbers of commandments to follow, ten for novices and two hundred and twenty seven for monks. These range from not watching television or listening to music, to not having money or eating in the afternoon. Apparently the 'not killing any living thing' rule no longer applies to mosquitoes.
As we talked the others gradually gathered around us and when everyone was there we took the ferry across the river. Here we walked through a noisy, smelly food market where the stench from great wicker baskets of fish combined nauseatingly with smell of blood. When we were finally through it, it was a relief to be out into the dust and the petrol fumes of the street. Across the road from us was Wat Pho, a substantially more impressive temple than Wat Arun had been. Wit led us around the side and into the main entrance. Inside he gave us a quick run down on what we were looking at. Here, he told us, we would find the largest reclining Buddha in Thailand, the largest collection of Buddhas in any single temple and the national school for teaching Thai massage. Before we went off to explore he took us into the wihan where the reclining Buddha is housed. It is certainly impressive. Forty nine metres long and fifteen metres high - the foot is twice the height of a man - it is made from brick and plaster and covered in gold leaf and mother of pearl. It completely fills the wihan leaving just a narrow footway around it for worshippers and tourists. The rest of Wat Pho is no less impressive. There are dozens of incredibly ornate towers and what appear to be thousands of statues of the Buddha filling the galleries between them. It took over an hour to explore the extensive temple grounds and even then I could have spent more time there but Wit had given us a time to meet up at the exit.
It was my intention in the afternoon to go to see the Grand Palace, a structure that I had so far glimpsed only over its tall white outer wall. Outside the temperature had climbed another couple of notches and combined with the humidity the heat was stifling. I spent fifteen minutes trying to cross the road and then walked down to the Palace which was only about half a mile away. Inside it was magnificent. I ignored the guide book and just wandered round taking pictures and looking at the architecture. This random strategy had its good points and its bad points. Chief among the bad points was that I didn't get to look at any specific attractions, in particular missing the Emerald Buddha entirely. On the plus side motion without purpose leads to the pleasure of the unexpected. On a series of galleries that most other visitors seemed to have missed there were walls filled with murals of epic mythological scenes of battles and palaces, heroes and princes, demons and animals. These depict the story of Râma rescuing his abducted wife, building his Empire, battling evil magicians, waging war on his enemies and so on. All of them were executed in a painstaking stylised form that appealed to the comic collector in me more than the art critic. As for the architecture, well all Thai temple architecture makes the most ornate of western cathedrals look drab and the Grand Palace is ornate enough to make even Thai temples dull by comparison. The predominant colours are red and gold with a substantial amount of green and white. The overlapping roofs look like the scales of some great animal and the statues and carvings are so abundant and so detailed that any individual piece becomes a work of art. With a shock we realised that it was three O'clock. I had to be back at the hotel for four to drive to the railway station where we were catching the overnight sleeper to Chiang Mai. Reluctantly, and with four fifths of the palace unseen, I hurried back.
