Thailand! What a wonderful mixture of order and chaos, air conditioned cool and overwhelming humidity and suffocating heat! Images of sudden beauty that take your breath away and then crowded lanes , traffic fumes (which also leave you breathless) and over populated streets! The sweetness and patience of puzzled Thais as you try to explain something or ask a question....the totally wrong answers they give which take you miles out of your way until you realise just how badly you have been misunderstood....the quick frustration of Westerners!
The greatest miracle of Bangkok, since my first visit twenty five years ago is the Sky Train; it rushes frequently from station to station above the traffic jams and ear piercing horns of cars and tuk tuks and takes you where you want to go in minutes instead of the hours one would spend in a taxi or tuk tuk. I just wanted george to believe me that the heat would be crushing and that we should take a cab from our SAS 'delivery' bus which dropped us in the middle of a street many miles from our hotel. Oh no says he (who has been pouring over Lonely Planets Thailand for days) we'll use the Sky train. I was not happy, what did he know? I had been there before. Full confession? He was absolutely right and we used it constantly. It is air conditioned and one usually stands all the way but for five minutes no hardship.
We went to the Golden Mount, (a Budhist shrine up a few hundred curving steps)the standing Budha and the Grand Palace all by tuk tuk for 30 THB which is about one US dollar! These particular tuk tuks are Government regulated and that's all they're allowed to charge. They are not air conditioned in the accepted sense but in every other.... you get blown to bits and cool off rapidly! They sound like motor bikes and weave their way through dense traffic fast....second only to the sky train.....
The temples and Palace are utterly beautiful and magnificent; the graceful Thai design of sharp peaked and sloping roofs, glittering gold in the sunlight, studded with brighly coloured "jewels" of glass(?) intricately painted. Every now and then you stumble across a quiet spot, hidden and shaded with deep crimson bougainvillea or white and pink frangipani hanging over heavy dark iron bells with perhaps a jasmine garlanded Budha sitting upright and cross legged in green or gold...a perfect corner for meditation and peace. Wreaths of tightly woven cream and highly scented jasmine are being made and sold on every street corner. When you look over the city of Bangkok from any height you see oases of trees and the sparkling red roofs of temples jutting through in the centre of tightly packed sky scrapers where you least expect to find them. You see a city of amazing contrasts laid out before you.
We met my cousin Ian on our second evening and in many ways this was the highlight of my visit. We hadn't seen each other since before my cousin Marjorie's (Ian's mother) death six years ago. Ian lives in Bali and his brother Jeff in Sri Lanka...we are all 'colonial children' who feel at home in the tropics; however my memories go back quite a few years further than theirs! Ian knows Bangkok well and we spent time eating and shopping. Ian I shall try to insert a photo of my last dessert in Bangkok....just to let you see how much I enjoyed the lunch you treated us to.... Mangoes and sticky rice!
George and I decided to take a day to visit The Bridge over the River Kwai, (This should be pronounced 'kway', which means 'river' so we've all been wrong for years...), and the site of the infamous Thailand to Burma railroad built by many thousands of Asians and European POW's and the death of thousands of them.
We were picked up from our hotel at 6.15 am (with a boxed breakfast of tuna sandwiches!) and after picking up another 5 people in our air conditioned Toyota van we set off through the countryside for the three hour drive. The others on the trip were an Australian couple (correction, he was from New Zealand) and and another couple from Yorkshire or Lancashire (I can never distinguish between those two accents) and, thank goodness, a delightful young German man who told me he had been proposed to three times already by young Thai women and he had only been in Bangkok a week! I have to say that by the end of our day I felt that if I were not to hear another Australian or North cuntry accent for a century it would be too soon! I am constantly amazed at 'tourists' (which they certainly are...not travellers) who talk about utter inanities when a foreign and fascinating country is literally passing them by. They complained bitterly that, having come all this way, they ultimately missed the wooden structure of the original old bridge which we crossed by train. This in spite of the fact that our Thai guide had told us about it at least twice.
We crossed the replacement steel bridge built in the nineteen fifties by the Thai government on foot. George went steaming ahead, I followed more cautiously (there was a long drop into the river which we could see below us as we walked, through the railway ties and steel girders) and I was followed by the young German. At the far end of the bridge I turned to speak to him, (his name was Jo for Joachim), and found him pale and sweating. He said to me "I am a fire fighter in Germany..I climb up ladders of burning buildings and I never think of the height or look down, I just focus on what I must do. But this bridge is different, I look down through the bridge and rails and see the river below....I am very frightened." So I walked back about two feet in front of him, very slowly, talking all the time until we reached the safe part of the railway over solid ground. I think he was really shaken because he stayed close to George and me for the remainder of the day.
From here we took a speed boat built in Thai style; a long slim canoe, painted and decorated in Thai style, with a motor. This to the train station from where we would take a train over the original wooden structure which the POW's and Asians had built. It was a journey of about one and a half hours in a train with wooden slatted seats. no window panes so lots of pretty hot air through the big windows, through mostly tropical jungle....very humid and lots of mosquitoes.
We tried to imagine what it must have been like to be forced in to manual labour to build a railway hundreds of kilometres long in this obliterating heat on little or no food (some rice with salt occasionally); being whipped, scorned and left to die (if you were not fast enough or fit enough) by the supervising Japanese soldiers. It must have been a living nightmare. The survivors in photographs look like the survivors of Auschwitz and Belsen. Earlier we had visited a reconstruction of the camp where the POW's were housed and a museum to their memory paid for and supported by one of those Japanese officers who so ashamed of what his country had done and that he himself had been a part of, he felt that this was a way of making amends. A statue to his memory stands overlooking the river.
I knew many men and one woman who had been Japanese prisoners of war in Singapore and in Malaysia and men who had worked on this railroad in Thailand, contempories of my parents. They spoke little about it; one Dutchman I knew well, Bill La Lau, (a great friend of your parents Ian in Calabar) was very forgiving, as I believe many of them were. The woman, Cheska, Bill's wife, whom we visited in Bilthoven (Holland), became totally frigid. She could not remain in their marriage and left to live alone...I know this because she waited for our visit to leave! There had been sexual abuse of the prisoners by the prison guards in the womens' camps and apparently many came out as Cheska did. We easily forget don't we, the impact of war on thousands of lives?
George and I found this whole experience very moving, especially when we visited the Allied graves in a beautifully cared for cemetry. There is a section there for the British, another for the Australians and another for the Dutch POW's. Each headstone has a small flowering plant beside it, lovingly tended by Thai gardeners. There are trees and flowers everwhere. Some headstones have personal messages from parents and loved ones, others have simply the name, regiment and age of the deceased. The ages ranged from 37 years down to nineteen where I looked; each body lying there had been found and identified.
To move on to somewhat lighter themes: we had wonderful meals in Thailand. We have always loved Thai food which George cooks often during the summer months at home. But this was even better....sorry George! We ate only in Thai restaurants which had gracious service; so correct and ordered. We had to ask how to go about eating our meals because obviously there is an order to doing so. Ian was a great help in this respect. All the food was placed gently and neatly on the table, everything. Soup, rice, starter, main course, water , wine and a finger bowl and bowl for bones and shells of shrimps etc. One eats it all together in various ways; have a spoonful of soup, a shrimp dipped in a tiny bowl of sweet/sour sauce. Then pour a couple of spoonfuls of soup over your rice (delicious!) before having another shrimp or some steamed vegetables, fresh steamed fish or satay chicken...........mmm good! End with a delicious dessert of fresh sliced mango and sweet sticky rice....I really got hooked on this....thank you Ian!
Shopping was fun. huge mall/markets full of tiny stalls, one after the other, with clothes, bags, hats, jewelry, shoes....you name it and it's there...somewhere. Same in the tech. market; binoculars, cameras, mice (pleural of computer mouse!) computers, all kinds of technical gadgets. One little treasure which Ian possesses is a translator of languages; vocabulary and phrases from the English into about five or six different languages, including Thai....very tempting to buy but we resisted.
It was all almost too much, there was so much choice I found I couldn't make up my mind so actually came out with very little. George bought binoculars, a new mouse and a new pair of sandals, this last from a tiny shoe display on the side walk and the whole transaction done in about five minutes....left his old falling-apart sandals there and walked away in the new which he has been wearing comfortably ever since. That's his kind of shopping.
We returned to the ship last night after a last supper in a little Thai restaurant near the Davis hotel, (which by the way was very nice.....lovely comfortable bedroom, and bed,...with a bathroom which was about the same size and had a huge glass wall into the bedroom....no privacy at all!) Our last meal was again beautifully served and we enjoyed every mouthful of the soup and rice. The soup made with lemon-grass, lime and spices in a fish base with four huge shrimps lying on top of the bowl. By this time we had learned the correct way to say thank you to those who served us and were younger than ourselves....no hands placed together as if in prayer, and a bowed head, which I had mistakenly done on our first visit causing giggles from the head waiter and a gentle correction; just a smile and nod of appreciation, if that. The level of your hands when you do show respect is determined by the status of the person you are addressing. The higher the esteem in which you hold them, the higher your hands. If you were to address the king you would hold your arms and hands above your head.
Speaking of the King of Thailand, there are photos of the Royal family everywhere you look. Many of him alone but others taken with the Queen at his side....huge posters above the buildings and on the sky train station walls. Smaller ones in shops and restaurants.
Tonight we are expected to rehearse and I am so steeped in Thailand I can't bear to make the necessary shift to The Persians. However discipline demands that I go and read the play yet again and see how much I remember.
No comments:
Post a Comment