Back of Beyond (45 page)

Long before the sun rose, a pink light filtered through the high wall of trees surrounding the village clearing. Cocks crowed like alarm clocks in jarring disharmony, and you could hear the always-ravenous pigs shuffling around the house, which smelled of charred meat (at least it kept the flies and mosquitoes away).

The headman, who told us he was forty-two but looked double that age, lay sleeping on his split-bamboo bed, raised a foot or so off the ground on little bamboo legs. His wife, Nao, rose to wrap her long black hair into the traditional beehive-shaped topknot and adjusted her rich hand-embroidered skirt, while her two tiny daughters scampered off in their sarongs to bring water from the well in long bamboo tubes. On hot days, Nao would wear her red-and-black turban but, as we were on the edge of the monsoons, the weather felt a little cooler.

San and I watched with half-open eyes as she tied around her forehead a scarf embellished with strange embroidered symbols. She saw us smiling and explained: “This is my magic for hunting. We are short of meat so I’m going hunting with two other women if the signs are good.”

Nao went outside to grind rice between two enormous stone wheels for breakfast cakes, which she later served with sweet tea in cups made from round bamboo segments. We sat with the family on the earth outside the house enjoying the early sun. The headman joined us, and during the meal, he leaned forward to rub the scarf around Nao’s head. She smiled again: “He has seen the signs and it is good to hunt.” (I had watched earlier as he stood by the spirit shelf gently touching the horn and each of the old bones. Apparently he had decided that the signs favored the hunt.)

Observed by a bunch of curious piglets, three young boys practiced target shooting with crude crossbows. One had been selected to accompany the women in their hunt and strutted like a peacock in front of his peers. He wore his newly washed black waistcoat and knee-length baggy trousers proudly like a knight’s armor. The other boys watched enviously as he left. (San and I had been told firmly that guests did not join the hunt but would be expected to enjoy the results.)

Most of the women and a few of the men left early to work in the tiny rice and tobacco fields below the village, scattered alongside the stream that bubbled down the hillside in miniature cascades. One small bunch of elderly women sat outside a lopsided house at the edge of the jungle. I had noticed them there for a couple of days, sitting silently and looking very dejected. The old women looked up, one pointed inside, and we stepped through the open door. The air was almost unbreathable—thick fumes combined with black smoke and an odor of something sickly sweet, presumably opium.

An elderly man lay naked on his bamboo sleeping platform breathing heavily. His eyes were closed and his skin yellow. Sitting cross-legged at his head and wrapped in a richly decorated red shawl was the village shaman—an even older man with enormous hands and two deep scars across his left cheek. The earth around his feet was covered in offerings brought by the villagers: tea, smoked meats, two silver neck rings, a large pumpkin, and piles of sweet potatoes. He was fast asleep.

We talked quietly with the group outside. They told us the shaman had been asleep for almost three days and that when he woke, his “patient” would be cured. There was total trust in their eyes; faith was tangible and I felt ashamed at my Western scepticism. San smiled and nodded with them. “I have seen it happen. These people know many things the big city doctors have never been taught. Belief is very powerful medicine in the hills.”

By late afternoon the weary hunters returned carrying two scrawny wild chickens, a number of enormous gourds and taro roots, and a sad little collection of dead frogs, which are enjoyed as delicacies by the Meo tribe.

Within an hour or two the rather modest foraging trove was transformed into a wonderful feast serving four families. Somehow over twenty of us ate long and well and lay on the warm earth watching the sun sink behind the hills, turning them scarlet, and listening to the birds singing. Someone played a kaen and two young girls danced a sensual “corn dance” by the grinding stones, their bent-back fingers fluttering like butterflies and their eyes filled with smiles beneath silver headdresses. They danced so lightly they seemed to float over the dusty earth. The villagers, who had seen the dances so many times before, sat as mesmerized as San and I. The women even stopped their ceaseless embroidering and the old men grinned like young boys. It’s a scene you carry with you forever.

But eventually after a series of these long slow days we had to leave. The old men of the village forecast rains—the beginning of the monsoons—and we still had a lot of jungle walking to do. Somehow though, the trek seemed much easier now. The blisters had burst and healed, the bites had stopped irritating, and my mind was full of bright images of life in these wild hills.

We made one more impromptu pause in an Akha village where everyone turned out in magnificent headdresses to worship their “great all-power God”—Apoe Miyeh. The feast afterward included such jungle delicacies as wild boar, porcupine, roasted cicadas (locustlike insects), and (oh dear!) local tribal dog, which is considered a key ritual ingredient.

A few days later we were back in Chiang Mai among the noisy scooter-taxis (known locally as
tuk-tuks
) and street salesmen and all the tiresome trappings of modern Thailand. It doesn’t take much—even now—to make me think of my days in these mountains where life-ways have changed little in thousands of years.

And who knows, maybe I’ll go back one day.

“You want to drive to the south!?”

“Why not? It’s only six hundred miles or so,” I said.

My host in Bangkok was an ex-Peace Corps worker, familiar with the zany antics of newcomers to Thailand and usually a man of placid nature.

“That road is crazy. Honestly. It’s a ‘chicken-run’ all the way. Those trucks don’t brake for anything. You’re just asking for trouble. Why not forget it this time? If you fly down you’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

“Yes, I know that. But I’d like to see what’s in between.”

“You’ve never even driven in Bangkok! You’ll be lucky to find your way out…. You don’t understand what it’s like…”

“Listen,” I said, “why don’t I give it a shot, and if I find it’s not what I want, I’ll come back. And then I’ll fly.”

He paused and played a final card. “It’s my Jeep you’re driving, you know.”

Dirty move.

“Ah, yes.” He’d got me. “You’re right. It’s not fair on you. I’m being selfish. I just thought with you being away on vacation…the Jeep’d just be sitting there…” Silence. We’d reached the crux. He sighed one very exasperated sigh.

“How long will you be gone?”

“Couple of weeks. Tops. I’ll be back before you are.”

More silence. A fan whirred. I needed all the air I could get. Bangkok melted in that overwhelming wet heat, and I was desperate to get back on the road.

“You’re crazy. You know that.”

“Yes, I know.”

He smiled a wry smile and kicked the keys across the low bamboo table with his bare foot.

“Two weeks?”

“Yes, two weeks. And I’ll have dinner waiting for you here when you get back.”

“Lobsters?”

“Lobsters, chateaubriand, caviar. The lot!”

He laughed. “You’re crazy. And please, David. Remember I said that.”

Of course he was right. It was a crazy idea. Even getting out of Bangkok was a nightmare. I left early in the morning before the rush-hour chaos of clogged streets, gridlocked intersections, useless traffic signs, one-way systems that became Escher labyrinths, sending you every which way only to bring you back where you started. And leaving early didn’t seem to make much difference. I became disoriented, then lost. My glossy map seemed to bear little relationship to a street system that would test the patience of a Tokyo taxi driver.

But hours later, using the smoggy sun as my only orientation, I was out. Windows wide open, fresh breezes blowing in off the rice paddies, clusters of villagers in coolie hats tending the bright green shoots in a shimmering heat.

I paused for a Coke at a roadside stand. Bottles are a valued commodity in Thailand so the young girl poured the soda into a plastic bag, threw in a couple of pieces of ice, added a straw, and bound the top tightly with an elastic band. What a novel form of conservation!

Only it didn’t work. I took a couple of sips, placed the bag on the passenger seat and rejoined the busy throng of traffic on the narrow main highway to the south. Next time I looked the bag had fallen on its side and the soda was gushing out from around the straw all over the brushed velour fabric.

I wondered what the poor Jeep would look like when it finally arrived back in Bangkok. If it ever did.

It’s hard to resist the little roadside stands. A lopsided table piled high with just-picked pineapples: you stop; a lady in a wide-brimmed palm-frond hat tells you to make your selection; you hesitate, so she carefully picks one for you, slices off the skin to reveal the golden flesh, dripping with juice, and whops it all into bite-sized pieces, deposited neatly in another plastic bag. Five cents please. You give her double the amount. And why not? It’s a beautiful bright morning, and the day is all yours to do with what you will.

More snack stands, each cook specializes in his, and her, own delicacy: tiny chunks of barbecued chicken dipped in crushed peanuts, sesame oil, and chili paste sauce and served on a banana leaf; boiled chunks of soft-textured snake meat in a soy, ginger, and coriander sauce; rubbery strips of squid pounded flat as pancakes, brushed with a chili and fish-sauce marinade, and roasted over hot coals; slivers of crisp-skinny wild duck with melt-in-the-mouth flesh; a couple of crabs, scooped from a roadside marsh, baked in salt, and cracked open to release their aromatic delights. A bonanza of totally new taste experiences for this footloose gourmand!

The first hundred miles were the worst, jousting with convoys of trucks hauling pineapples and sugar cane (and invariably topped with piles of baskets and huddles of placidly smiling Thai field-workers). Disabled scooter-vans and battered cars became a familiar sight. One young man flagged me down and asked for a lift to the next village to fix a flat. His English was remarkably good, and he sat happily next to me, oblivious of the Coke-soaked seat, nursing his torn tire and telling me tales of South Thailand. He seemed to have a particular grudge against his Burmese neighbors who share occupancy of the long narrow finger of land linking southern Thailand with the Malaysian peninsula.

“You wanna hear joke?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. I hadn’t heard—or at least I hadn’t understood—many Thai jokes.

He pointed to the ranges of wild mountains on our right, across the verdant rice paddies.

“That Burma there.”

I looked at my map. He was right. The border was somewhere in that jungly wilderness, a mere ten miles away.

“In Second World War, forty years ago, okay, much fighting. Japanese. Burmese, Thai,” he pounded his fists together. “Okay? So, plane carry many soldiers from many different countries. And when plane up to the air, pilot says in announcement, ‘Attention please. Now we have overload. Should be three of you soldiers jump out of the plane. Okay?’ And all soldiers—many, many soldiers—keep quiet. Nobody wants to suicide. Right? So then American soldier—very brave—the first one, he says, ‘Okay, I go first.’ Before jumping off plane, he shout—very strong shout—‘Long live President of America’—and then he falling down out of plane. Okay?

“Second one—soldier from England—before jumping he shout, ‘Long live for King of England’—and then he jumping.

“The third one, Thai soldier, like to do like that but thinks it crazy, so, he shout, ‘Long live King of Thailand’ and kick Burma soldier out.”

His laughter carried us all the way to the next roadside village and a tire-repair shack.

“Okay. I thanking you. Don’t forget joke—he kick Burma soldier out! Good joke eh?”

By late afternoon I had the road to myself. Strange cone-shaped pillars of eroded limestone, hundreds of feet tall, rose from endless rice paddies. I was entering karst country, the eroded stumps of a once-vast limestone plateau formed under ancient oceans and then lifted high by restless tectonic plate movements. Everywhere I looked I could see tiny villages—clusters of mahogany-plank and bamboo-walled houses raised on stilts and topped with palm fronds, gathered around the soaring profiles of layer-roofed temples adorned with patterns of gold, green, and ochre tiles.

Vignettes of delight were all around: Two young children riding the back of a lumbering buffalo home to their village, haloed in a golden evening sun; a line of straw-hatted paddy farmers moving slowly in silhouette across the muddy rice fields; a young girl in a bright red sarong leading a procession of waddling ducks on a raised path between the paddies; the ubiquitous spirit houses—tiny dollhouse-size temples raised on posts and littered with candles, flowers, and daily offerings of fruit and rice—outside many homes and roadside stores; the delicate spires reaching skyward from stumpy domed chedis.

The images never cease: Five children whispering to one another as they lift four-cornered fishing nets suspended on a bamboo frame from the shallow waters of a roadside stream; the placid, otherworldly smile of a golden Buddha sitting cross-legged on a raised plinth in a village temple; a young mother lying by the side of a rough-carved, hollowed-trunk fishing boat watching her two naked children frolic and splash in the slow-moving evening ripples of the ocean across a palm-fringed bay.

I was saturated in images. Time to rest for the night. Bangkok was well and truly banished from my senses now. The spirit of the road had returned. The days were mine again and two weeks was a wonderfully long period to be free and frisky, to go anywhere I felt like going, soaking in all the serendipities of Thailand.

It couldn’t have been better. A beachside bungalow in the small village of Bang Saphan for the price of a hamburger dinner back home. The Gulf of Thailand stretched out beyond my front door, purple and gold in the lingering sunset.

The sand was evening-pink, and palms rattled their welcome in a warm breeze. A long cool shower, a change of clothes for a stroll in the dusk along the beach to a small bamboo and thatch snack-shack for a dinner of squid soup, tiger prawns baked in a clay-pot casserole, and a plate of fresh-cut pineapple, banana, and papaya. I returned to my little house, read for an hour or two until the moon shone, big and silver, through my window. A perfect night for a swim. So off I went, blissfully naked, splashing through the soft water and then floating, happy as a sea otter, lying on my back, looking at the stars….

Morning was just as good. The dawn came in right through the window. I could hear the sloppy surf and smell breakfast cooking down by the beach. None of your cornflakes and waffles here. Instead, a typical Thai spread of rice porridge flecked with chilis, onions, and shrimp; a plate of crisp wok-tossed vegetables in fish sauce with fried rice, and more fresh fruit.

Dull thuds kept coming from a plantation of coconut palms near the beach. I could see a bunch of men standing around the base of trees holding long lines of rope that disappeared into the treetops and shouting instructions into the high palm fronds. Coconuts fell, hitting the shadowy ground, and the men moved slowly, kicking them into piles.

I was curious to see how the coconut pickers worked, fifty feet up in the swaying tops. How did they get there? How long did they stay up?

One of the men shouted a warning. I jumped sideways and a coconut missed me by inches. Lots of Thai giggles. I could have been maimed! Surely the picker had seen me coming. I looked up and a pair of anthracite eyes stared back. A pair of eyes set in a furry face with a big nose. A monkey! And apparently a very belligerent monkey getting ready to aim the next coconut right at me…

So that’s how they do it down here. A labor force of trained monkeys with the men just standing around bawling out instructions. I moved back out of firing range and watched. The monkeys were tireless, leaping from one bunch of coconuts to the next, moving each nut from side to side to test its readiness to fall, spinning the looser ones with one hand until the stalk snapped and the fruit came tumbling to the ground. They’d cover the whole treetop in a matter of minutes and then scamper down the vertical trunk, listen to more shouted orders, and vanish up another tree to repeat the whole performance.

Between the falling coconuts and the shouts I managed to piece together bits of information from the men about their monkeys. These were very valuable creatures, worth hundreds of dollars each. Even a young graduate of the three-month-long coconut-picking course could be worth as much as twenty thousand baht (eight hundred dollars), and its untrained offspring around four hundred dollars. Work in the trees usually begins when they’re around two years old and lasts for up to seven years, at an expected rate of at least five hundred coconuts per day, seven hundred for the real stars of this unusual labor force.

Someone neatly sliced the top off a newly dehusked nut with one blow of a panga knife and offered it to me. The sweet water inside was cool and delicious. I smashed the shell on a rock and used a finger to scoop out the soft gelatinous flesh (the best part of the coconut) that covers the harder meat.

I couldn’t leave this little village. It had everything the perfect hideaway should have—simple beach bungalows, excellent fresh fish and fruit, a cluster of bamboo shacks for the fishermen further up the beach, maybe a trip out into the bay with one of the fishermen later on…

Eventually—much later than I’d planned—I was on the road again. The vegetation was more lush now. Jungles surrounded the bases of the high karst towers and rubber plantations took the place of rice paddies, each tree trunk neatly scarred with cuts that allowed the white latex sap to drain into coconut shell cups.

Doormat-like rectangles of coagulated latex were drying by the thousands along the roadside. The deep, almost black, shade of the plantations offered delicious relief from the pounding sun.

Another form of relief came quite unexpectedly in the form of a roadside ashram—a place of Buddhist meditation and worship—set in thick jungle and open to anyone. The architecture was unusually zany for Thailand. None of the traditional curved roofs decorated in golden tiles here, rather a Corbusian fantasy of concrete temples and dormitories, one of which was fashioned after an ocean liner and surrounded by a turtle-filled moat. Most peculiar, and with an even more peculiar mélange of orange-robed Thai monks mingling with a truly international representation of bearded world wanderers, sparkle-eyed freshmen from European and American colleges, and “just-for-the-day” tourists armed with cameras and tape recorders.

“We’re on a meditation course,” a young California student explained quietly while his companions sat staring blankly around a picnic table. “Ten days of silence and meditation.”

“I’m sorry. Should I be asking you questions?”

“Oh, no, that’s fine. We start after lunch.”

He seemed to be taking the course very seriously. His scalp was shaved and his forehead was marked with ochre dye.

“Can anyone participate?”

“Well—yes, I suppose so. We made arrangements, though, months ago to come here.” He looked disparagingly at some of the other visitors, wandering around the neatly kept grounds.

“When you come here you’re expected to participate in the schedule. Fasting, meditation—no talking. It’s not a summer camp y’know.”