A more pleasant trip out of Kanchanaburi than the Death Railway is the excursion to Erawan National Park.
Scattered across the Tenasserim Hills northwest of town, the park is best known for a series of pools and waterfalls, a seven-tiered confection of carved limestone bowls that feeds eventually down into the Khwae Yai.
The park is popular with tourists and locals along. During a holiday weekend, it was bound to be busy, so we got up and got on the road fairly early to make the 60 kilometer drive from Kanchanaburi.
I’d been primed for heavy jungle (again, perhaps influenced by “The Bridge on the River Kwai” which was actually filmed in Sri Lanka) but the forests were dry and dusty, closer to the great evergreen stands of Eastern Washington than the rainforests of Western Washington. And although the trees here are primarily deciduous, there were forest fire danger indicators along the roads that would not look out of place near Leavenworth or Winthrop. All they were missing was Smokey the Bear.
Also like the highways of eastern Washington, there were plenty of animal crossing warning signs, only the silhouettes on the signs were of elephants instead of deer. But, like the deer, the elephants were nowhere to be seen.
Traffic jammed up at the park entrance but before long we were winding our way up into the hills, which, despite their relatively low altitude, serve to block some of the monsoon rains and make the east side of the range so dry. Monica, a flat-lander from the rice bowl around Bangkok, kept asking me if she should shift into low gear as we climbed what must have been a five or ten percent grade.
The Thai park rangers on duty were well-practiced at getting a lot of people into the park on such busy weekends and they quickly and efficiently directed us to parking after we’d entered the gates. There are concessions and bungalows near the entry, but no food or drink is allowed (in theory; more on the later) past the third pool so we just started up the trail.
It’s an easy walk to the first set of pools. They were already well-populated with families, an easy destination for anyone with small children or old folks along. Though broad, the falls at the low end are relatively unspectacular, but the pools are wide and inviting. If there is something that “The Bridge on the River Kwai” got right about the approaches to the bridge site, it is the lovely pools and waterfalls surrounded by forest and the sound of exotic birds.
The trail between each of the falls was hot but sitting beside or–better yet–in the stream itself was just about perfect.
The pools are home to tiny doctor fish which are known to cruise around and nibble at the succulent dead skin on people’s legs and toes. Sometimes they don’t stick to the dead stuff. Monica chirped as one of them took too big a chunk of her, but I was strangely unappetizing. Of course, I had my shoes on, but despite a crowd of fish hanging out around my legs, nobody took a bite.
“Too much hair,” Monica sniffed, pointing at my moderately hirsute calves. “They can’t get in.”
The falls were crowded all the way up (or as high as we went, which was somewhere between the 5th and 6th tiers) but there was always room to slip into the water and cool of for a while, watching kids splash and the elders wallow.
At the 4th tier, natural slides formed a popular attraction for the kids. A short climb up to a terrace led to a quick ride and a cool splash in the emerald pool at the base of the falls. I found myself wishing I had brought a waterproof phone case… I didn’t trust the ziplock I brought along to survive such a plunge.
Some of the tourists seemed like they were on a mission, charging hard up the trails to get to the fabled 7th fall (reputed to resemble the head of an elephant, explaining the name… Erawan being the mythical white, many-headed elephant ridden by the Hindu god Indra). But it’s the dry season and water levels are relatively low; each step up was less impressive than the last.
Not everyone was having a great day. At the checkpoint at the third falls where you are supposed to leave all food and drink (a measure to combat littering and monkey-feeding; we didn’t see any monkeys or litter, so it seems to work) a white guy got into a heated dispute with the park rangers.
It turns out that you CAN take bottled water higher up–only sensible in this climate–as long as you pay a deposit. For some reason, this discovery, made beneath the very sign claiming “No food or drink past this point!” incensed the farang beyond all reason.
He yelled at the bottle-deposit-taking ranger about how bloody inaccurate the signs were (he was, and I silently thanked god for this, British and not American) and then, perhaps launching in on his real issue, started blasting her for the dual rate structure for entry.
Like many Thai tourist attractions (or goods or services generally, in tourist areas), the park charges farang visitors more to get in than Thai people.
So far, this hasn’t bothered me at all–even though it costs more, it still doesn’t cost a lot, and I figure the tourists are both the ones creating most of the traffic and the ones with the most disposable income available to help pay for it, so why not charge us more? It would be a shame to price Thais out of their own parks and temples just to be “fair.”
This guy had had his fill of the practice, though, and possibly with good reason–he was a long-term expat, it turned out, with a Thai wife and two kids.
“I pay taxes and you charge me twice as much and the bloody signs still aren’t right!” he fumed. Then he launched into further excoriations in what Monica assured me was quite good Thai, but I could see from the expression on the ranger’s faces that they were unimpressed.
I didn’t think much more about it and we went on and enjoyed the rest of our day at the park. Then we ran into the farang again at our hotel–he and his family were staying there, too.
I don’t think he recognized us at all, since we had just been hanging around in the background, but we knew who he was immediately, and I started the eye-rolling immediately. I dread the reputation Westerners get as rich, entitled assholes, who expect to be accepted instantly into any foreign culture that they favor with a visit. The world has adapted to our norms remarkably over the past few centuries, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily appreciate it.
But at breakfast, around the pool, and elsewhere, the guy didn’t seem like a jerk… just an ordinary father, on vacation with his ordinary wife and kids. And so I started thinking about him, and the whole situation, more. And I think I changed my mind.
Not necessarily about the dual rates–I don’t see a way around that system that would both be fair to the Thais and allow tourists to do touristy stuff–or about the impossibility of ever truly fitting in to an insular culture you weren’t born into. You can’t make people like you; you can’t demand social inclusion. In fact, doing so usually just backfires.
The thing is, this is an old debate in the United States. And when I am there, I realized, I would be on the other side of it. If the entitled white British guy were, say, a Mexican immigrant who had similarly followed all the rules, paid his taxes, had kids and become a productive member of society, and storekeepers and public officials in the U.S. insisted on charging him twice as much and treating him as a second-class citizen, I would be incensed.
Maybe this simply betrays another unwarranted influx of Western values, but I decided the guy had a point. Maybe his Thai neighbors would never invite him to the BBQ, but if he moved here legally, contributes to society, and follows the rules, there’s no reason he should continue to be treated as a second class citizen.
I know there are plenty of people for whom there is absolutely no mechanism by which white people can be discriminated against (such is the vast level of power and privilege associated with that skin color), but if these heady principles cannot be applied to the situation and benefit of any given individual, regardless of race, color, or creed, I would submit that they are worthless as principles indeed.
Probably someone has done much deeper thinking than I have about the point at which appreciation of other cultures transcends into outright acceptance of racism and other abuses, but nothing has put it so clearly in perspective for me as this particular incident.