2001 TRIP TO THAILAND AND LAOS--TRAVELOGUE SENT
TO FRIENDS, JANUARY 2002
So,
let's go back to February of 2001, and my obsession with the Land
of Smiles, which started
long before. Briefly, for those who don't know this, I have a long history
with Thailand,
dating back to when I was 21 & taught English in the Peace Corps
on the banks of the Mekong on the border
of Laos,
in a time when the world was going through convulsions which make the
evil Osama Gang look like penny-ante players. Back then I did love the
language, and got fairly decent at its spoken version, but somehow passed
over the beauty I now see in the place, to the point where I didn't
think seriously about returning for 17 long, difficult years. When I
did return I fell seriously in love with the place right away. Why?
So many reasons, topped by the most important one: the people. The Thai
people are the gentlest and most fun-loving of any I've seen in the
world. I imagine most of that comes from living in a land of plenty
(rich soil, lots of sunshine and fresh water), and much from the pervasiveness
of Buddhism, and especially that particular strain, which mandates that
all young men enter the priesthood as a novice for a period of months
in their early teens. The thought occurs to me that if we had a custom
like that here, there would be a lot less road rage. My former student
Narin has taken me several times to the temple where he did his vows,
a wild setting in the woods among caves and huge boulders strewn about:
the feeling of peace there is immense.
Anyhow,
once I started going back, I kept on doing it, at least every few years,
even lucking into a music gig in '92, and now it's become every year.
This last trip was one of the greatest. One reason was that my good
friend and fellow musician Bob Mocarsky, another serious Thai-o-phile,
popped into Bangkok a few
days after I arrived, and we got to have some good adventures together.
Another was that I (Bob came too) got to go to Laos for the first time
I'd seen it since pre-communist days, like more than 30 years before.
And then . . . I met some more really great people there, who make me
feel even more connected.
I
promised myself that Feb. that I'd keep a journal & write down everything
I could. Well-everything I could turned out
to be zip. I was lazy, or got swept away by every moment, or both, and
the upshot was that I wrote nothing down. So again I made a promise:
I'd write it all down when I got back. And guess what? I got lazy or
swept away by events. Or both? So here's a
quick synopsis of the trip, followed by an attempt to fill in the blanks
from then to here.
So: Last February--Arrived Saturday night, late, crashed
at the Windsor hotel just
off Sukhumvit, where my friend Heribert was General Manager. Hung out
in those environs for a few days, acclimatizing, visited with my friend
Angsana, Peace Corps buddy Brad Martin's fiancé (Brad busy being
a journalist in Japan at the time), made the Sunday jam session at the
Witch's Tavern, then on to play some more & hang with more musicians
at Brown Sugar. Cute little jazz clubs in Bangkok,
and there actually is a real scene, some great players & listeners
as well. Some amazing Russian expatriate guys who
sound like they've been living their whole lives for this chance to
bust loose. The Swiss, the French, the Norwegians, and . . . a great bunch of
up-and-coming Thai players, some who've really arrived. Pong,
the bassist at the Queens Park Hotel, is to my ear quite literally as
good as anyone I've ever heard, and what joy he puts into it-it's fun
just watching his face when he plays.
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Bangkok
used to be very hard to get around in. That's changed a lot. The traffic
is still horrible (though better: fewer cars, better air, more roads),
but there is now . . . the
Sky Train! It's an elevated railway reminiscent of BART, and in combination
with water transportation will get you anywhere you want to go in BKK
in a flash. And in a couple of years they've got some subway lines coming
in.
After
a couple of days Bob showed up. He actually had a month-long jazz gig
in a major hotel set up for a couple weeks hence. For those of you who
don't know, Bob Mocarsky is a really fine jazz pianist as well as a
great guy. And he's still over there. But at this point we were just
gonna play tourist. We hopped the night express sleeper to Laos,
the same train I first took upcountry in the 60's, and it hasn't changed
much. Second class is great, because even though it has Pullman-type
comfort, with beds which the porters come around about 10:30 to make
up for you, you're in a car with everybody else-it's a party-like atmosphere
and easy to make friends. Hang out, eat fried rice, drink Singh beer,
chat with the Thai army guy across the aisle who
just came back from peacekeeping duty in East Timor.
Flirt with the cute waitress. And, after a few beers, crash out with
a good book to the clickety-clack till ya drowse off. Choo-choo
ch'boogie, Siamese style. We woke to that incredible rosy, smoky
dawn I remember so well, over the scruffy flat rice fields of the Northeast,
and around 8AM pulled into Udorn Thani, a couple of stops short of the
border, where my former student Narin picked us up in his BMW (I taught
him well) and whisked us off to breakfast and a solid day and night
of nothing but socializing & entertainment, capped by dinner at
a restaurant on the Mekong with all the former students & former
colleagues we could dig up. Highlight for me: this gorgeous former student
of mine: “Professor Peter, we loved you, we thought you were great!
But your classes! They were horrible. They bored us to sleep! That was
the one hour of school I really didn't want to go to!” Oh, well-I can
take it now . . . especially with the moon coming up over the Mekong,
and that rice-whisky glow in my cheeks . . .
The
next day, after showing me & Bob the mansion he was building for
his family, Narin took us up to the border crossing to Laos at
Nongkhai. In the old days, Laos
was not communist. There really was no border. The river was full of
boats crossing all the time, landing anywhere they pleased. Virtually
the same language and culture existed on both sides of the river, so
that it was more like going from Tennessee
to Arkansas than between
countries. Now there's a damn bridge, and they stop you on both sides.
Almost no boats on the river at all . . . and you have the feeling they're
just letting you in because they want hard currency. But still . . .
this was my first visit in so long, and I did get that tingly feeling,
and it was a very, very cool thing to do. After we got past the border
bureaucracy, it was about a 20-minute ride into Vientiane.
What a rush. I was actually able to pick out landmarks. Some places
hadn't changed at all, but one of my favorite haunts from the old days,
a very funky, swampy nightclub district, had completely disappeared.
After getting our hotel, Bob & I were able to rent some very strange
bikes and trip around. The highlights of that jaunt I remember as being
a visit to Tat Luang, the biggest temple complex in Laos, and a shopping
round of the public market, which in the old days had been full of every
kind of vegetable, where in days of yore I had bought a maybe 2-pound
bag of weed for about 50 cents from an old lady at one of the stalls;
by this time, however, it had been rebuilt inside, and was a place to
get gold, silver, antiques, souvenirs, and electronic gadgetry &
other modern consumer junk.
Some
Lao schoolgirls (a couple still in school uniform) on a motorcycle stopped
and asked us to go to dinner with them. They were so young, we really
didn't know what to do with that, so we did nothing, just said “have
a nice day!” Instead, we had dinner at a French restaurant (the
culture of the former colonial masters strangely survives in miniature)
and went in search of night life. Now Vientiane
used to be the wildest, swingingest, loosest place on the planet, as
far as I could tell, wilder yet in its own small-town way than even
Bangkok. Now, however, by
edict it shuts down at twelve. Musicians working later than that can
get fined, or thrown in jail . . . unless they have connections, in
which case, anything is possible. I was really disappointed with the
sense of forced Puritanism that prevailed. You get the sense that this
is a police state that is trying hard to appear otherwise, but doesn't
even know how to do that. A real pity. There is a trip there I'd like to do, though.
One of the European tourists told us he'd just done a 3-day barge trip
up the Mekong to Luang Prabang, the former royal
capital of Laos.
Never been there, would love to do that. Someday.
Anyone wanna go with?
The next
day, before heading back to the Land
of Smiles, visited a place
called Buddha Park.
We had never seen anything like this place. Fantastic and bizarre statues
and structures, from a huge reclining Buddha to eight-armed Hindu deities
to Nagas to Confucian tableaus in 5 colors, scattered about with no
apparent theological continuity or esthetic purpose. It's a kind of
open-air, free-form museum of spiritual fantasy, and it is absolutely
fascinating. Bob's a very good photographer, and he got some great shots.
I got only a few, and those from him-- took a whole roll before realizing
there was no film in my camera! However, I do have some home video stuff
on it, in case anyone comes over to visit & wants to see. And we
met and talked to some of the Laotians, who still seem to have that
irrepressible fun-loving spirit I remember, whatever their government
is trying to do.
Back
on the Thai side, I did something I would never have imagined myself
doing. In one of those great riverfront shops in Nongkhai which are
filled with everything imaginable, I saw something so out-of-place on
the banks of the Mekong (and so cheap) that something
in me told me I had to buy it. What was it? A stupid banjo, believe
it. What did possess me?
Then
again, overnight train back to Bangkok-so much better than flying!!
On my first night back, Angsana invited me out to have dinner at a great
restaurant with a bunch of her friends, great food, great people, especially
one very interesting lady named Tee. So what did we do after dinner?
I had no choice-was just bundled into a car & driven off to where
they all wanted to go, which was . . . a KARAOKE
PALACE. This is one Japanese
invention that has really caught on all over Asia.
They go to these places, and they eat and eat and drink and drink and
one after another they get up and sing, and it goes on and on and on
and on . . . This was not the last time on this trip I would experience
this. In fact, I've decided I'd better learn to like it a little if
I really want to hang with the Thais. It is for that reason I now have
Thai Karaoke videotapes in my living room (thank you, Jon) and a Thai
pop CD in my computer. “Love Me Tender” was my personal big hit, and
it does get old fast.
Well,
the next day I went off to the glorious southern island of Phuket for
a week, did the obligatory scuba dives, and the obligatory daily 2-hour-for-7-bucks
massages, found all the local dives to play in, made more new friends,
visited the rainforest, and ate some-nay, much--incredible food. If
you ever get to Kata, Phuket, eat at Kwong's seafood. Wow.
On
return to BKK, Angsana, Tee, and another friend named Iang took me and
Bob down to Samutsakorn province, home to many seaside fishing towns,
for the annual seafood festival. Besides incredible eats, we visited
a temple & went to a fruit orchard owned by some friends of Tee's,
got maybe 20 coconuts laid on us to take home. Later that night we all,
plus a few others, went out to some clubs & Bob & I did some
sitting in. The band at the Queen's Park is awesome. I really think
that overused and misused word applies there. Every Sunday night they
have a jam session till 4AM,
and this was Sunday.
I'll
skim over the rest of the trip-all exploring once again the fabulous
town of Bangkok--except to mention hangin out again with Angsana &
Co., this time cooking lasagna for all, talking, joking, and once again
ending the night hanging out at . . . guess where? KARAOKE!!!! Wheee!
It
was a little hard to come home to the U.S.
from that. It always is, for many reasons besides the jet-lag; perhaps
“reverse culture-shock” is the prime culprit.
That’s
all for now. if
I don't see or hear from you, you'll probably hear from
me . . . after my next trip to Thailand
. . . this coming Jan/Feb. My how time do fly.
Peace and Love, Sawatdii,
--Peter
