Tag: Thailand

Was Phra That Doi Suthep is perched up on a mountain overlooking Chiang Mai and the valley it sits in and would be a fantastic vantage point even if it wasn’t also a sacred site in the history of Thai buddhism. Taken together, those factors pretty much make it a must-see stop for visitors to Chiang Mai.

Of course “perched on a mountain” and “visitor” leads to the question of transportation, since it’s not a quick walk even if the heat index were manageable, which it’s not. Getting a lift up the hill is the only sane way to the temples, and there is a predictably Thai solution to the problem.

Public transportation in Chiang Mai consists largely of a fleet of multi-colored little Toyota pickups, referred to generically as songthaew (“two benches” which accurately describes how the beds are outfitted) which cruise around semi-randomly. If you want to go somewhere, you flag down a songthaew (for destinations within or close to the city, a red one–called “rot dang” or “red truck”), tell the driver where you are heading, and if he feels like going that way and you can agree on a price, you hop in the back.

They pack in ten folks (all heading more or less the same direction) which is not problem if the folks are Thai, but a tight squeeze for people built on a Western frame, such as myself.

Demand is such to go up the mountain to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep (I’m just going to start typing “Doi Suthep” because it’s a lot easier; that’s the name of the mountain itself) that there are a number of designated stops around town where you can go to be matched with like-minded people for the ride up. The rates are fixed from those points, so they wait until they can fill a truck before they send you on your way.

I wandered to the nearest of these stops early in the day and managed to get a seat right at the back door of the truck (they have canopies over the bed, a concession to both the rainy season and the difficulty of keeping drunk tourists contained in the back of the truck in Thai traffic).

The ride quickly turned into a nausea-inducing machine as the driver stormed up the hairpin curves ascending out of the city. One poor Chinese girl near the front of the truck got dry heaves. None of us in the back looked too healthy by the time we arrived, I don’t think.

Fortunately, the distance up the hill is relatively short and as we spilled out of the back of the songthaew, the cooler temperature and fresher air breathed new life into us. Which was important, because the next challenge is getting up the stairs.

A bit of background as to why the long truck ride and stairs are involved:

The monastery was founded by King Keu Naone in 1383 to enshrine a bit of bone said to be the from the shoulder of the Buddha. The foundation story is one of the most remarkable in a region where nearly every temple has an extraordinarily meaningful and involved tale to its establishment. The bone shard was brought to Chiang Mai by a wandering monk, whereupon (and there is probably a long story detailing this incident, I simply haven’t heard it) it broke into two pieces.

At the place where it broke, the King established the temple of Wat Suan Dok, which is just outside the old city, a bit north of the current airport, and enshrined one of the pieces.

The other piece, apparently in line with the custom at the time, was fastened reverently onto the back of a sacred white elephant, which was then allowed to wander the jungles until the end of its days. Where it died, Wat Phra That Doi Suthep was established.

That elephant had apparently only recently been reincarnated from a cat or a monkey or something (I’m making this part up), because it scaled a pretty impressive mountain on its dying legs and collapsed for all eternity at a suspiciously scenic place overlooking the valley below.

This abbreviated version of the story leaves out the supernatural powers of the relic, the symbolic trumpeting of the dying elephant, and the vision that possessed the monk to search out the shoulder bone of the Buddha in the first place.

Anyway, the climbing prowess of the elephant means that the approaches to its final resting place require some energy and lung capacity. Today, 306 (or 309, depending on the source or where you start counting, I guess–I didn’t bother) stairs lead from the roadway up to the wat, a climb that would be oppressive further down the hill, but isn’t particularly taxing in the higher, cooler climate.

The temple has a meditation center and healthy population of nuns and monks, and presumably they get about the business of worshipping in the less public places or in the evenings, because by day the place is overrun with tourists.

Nonetheless, it manages to be quiet, beautiful, and contemplative. Decorated with ornate carvings, gorgeous statuary, and an impressive golden spire, Doi Suthep is worth the trip. You imagine that elephant, the monk with the relic, and old King Keu Naone must be well-pleased with themselves in their current incarnations.

I spent a restful couple of hours on the mountain top, partly contemplating the story of the temple, the grand (if smokey) vistas, and other fine philosophical subjects suitable to holy places, but mostly dreading the prospect of the ride back down to town.

The little Toyota rot-dang hadn’t been able to get up a good head of steam charging up those curves; going down, I feared, was going to really test the limits of the driver’s skill and the g-loads on the balding tires.

I dithered amongst the stalls of the vendors set up at the base of the stairs and tried to pick a sensible-looking driver out from the pack, but in the end just got in the queue and left my fate to Buddha.

He smiled that day (as on most days); after jamming the ten of us into the back of the rot-dang, we pulled out onto the road and immediately got stuck behind a big, lumbering tour bus that was inching down through the curves at almost a walking pace.

Although this occasioned our driver to swing out into blind corners from time to time in vain attempts to pass, it made for a leisurely and entirely un-nauseating ride back down to Chiang Mai. The donation I’d left at the temple, apparently, had earned a little serenity.

Chiang Mai and I got off on the wrong foot.

Doing dishes in my AirBnb condo, I bumped a plate that was drying, which knocked over a glass mug, and both of them exploded spectacularly across the hardwood floor. I promptly began to clean up the glass with the bottom of my bare feet–you don’t wear shoes in a Thai house–a process that has continued (despite much sweeping and mopping) for much of the week.

It was only one metaphor among many that came to mind during my one week stay.

The largest city in northern Thailand, Chiang Mai has an international reputation as the hub of international digital nomadism.

Digital nomadery is a phenomenon that has largely emerged in parallel with the rise and spread of the Internet, which has enabled folks with jobs that don’t require being in a particular physical location to perform them from pretty much anywhere. Although this has made for a lot of disruption as companies in high-cost countries have realized they can now hire staff in low-cost countries without dealing with all that pesky immigration business, it has also worked in reverse: knowledge workers in high-cost countries have realized they can improve their quality of life and indulge in a sort of permanent vacation by traveling to the low-cost regions of the world.

Chiang Mai is the poster child for digital nomad destinations. Low cost of living, moderate climate, many Western amenities, and rock solid Internet access made it a prime destination for early waves of nomads.

Now, the whole scene is a little sick of itself, having hit a tipping point recently where almost as many foreigners are here selling other foreigners on the wonder and freedom of the digital nomad lifestyle as there are actually living that lifestyle. But there are still a lot of expats here with the tourists, some of them actually doing real work and enjoying life.

It’s a strange combination of noisy and quiet. The condo building I am in is older and looks vaguely run down, a reminder of more optimistic days. Half the lights are kept off, most of the commercial spaces are abandoned, and flower pots sit empty on every floor.

Yet there are always noises from adjoining apartments, coming through the paper thin walls.

The town, too, is like that. It is overrun with tourists and expats, but there is little of the street market liveliness of Bangkok, and the place seems to shut down at 8 pm (apart from the night market, near the river). The area where I am staying, Nimman, is supposedly the hub of a thriving expat scene, but it must be happening in bars and coworking spaces out of my view.

Everything here just seems a little tired and run down.

I’m having trouble figuring out if I really don’t like it that much or if I am just missing Bangkok.

As long as I’m here, though, in addition to doing my own semi-digital nomading, I thought I’d check out the sights.

I started with the old city (“Chiang Mai” actually means “new city,” which it was, when it was established in 1296), a square chunk carved out of the modern city by an ancient moat and fragments of the original city walls. It’s not unlike many European cities in that respect, and like them, there is as much modernity inside the “old city” as out.

It does seem like the narrow, twisting alleys there are the center of the granola-chomping, coffee-swilling, Western backpacker element in town. There are dozens of hostels and a coffee shop on the ground floor of each of them, clouds of incense drifting out and tattoo and pseudo-spiritual trinket shops to either side. A few temples round it off as the complete tourist precinct.

Just the other side of the old city is the strip of shops and open lots that host the night market. As a rule, most Thai towns seem to have one or more of these, and I hadn’t gone to any yet–they’re most about buying stuff, and what am I going to buy? I came with a full backpack.

But I did decide (probably too late) to pick up a couple of new shirts, better suited to weather and circumstances than what I bought. We’ll see if I can actually fit them into my pack…. Anyway, leaving in the dead of winter, I had to pack clothes to do double duty, which meant a lot of synthetics. Cotton, of course, is preferable in this environment. I got some really good, lightweight but sturdy pants at REI before I left to maintain propriety when visiting temples, but I figured a decent cotton polo shirt would be better than the dark synthetic stuff I’d packed.

Unfortunately, it’s all but impossible to find any sort of shirt in a tourist market here that isn’t a counterfeit knock-off of some name brand. Indeed, buying those cheap knock-offs is the primary point of visiting those markets for many people. But I just wanted a plain old generic shirt, preferring not to encourage counterfeiting.

After spending a couple hours walking the market, though, I gave up. I’m now the proud owner of:

• 1 poorly-fitting black (ostensible) Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirt
• 1 poorly-made white (ostensible) Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, with an embarrassingly bad replica of the Polo logo on it

All this was in service of the next day’s expedition up the mountain to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep… the subject of our next blog entry.

My original plan for getting from Bangkok to Chiang Mai involved a relaxing and scenic overnight train ride through the open Thai countryside and up into the northern mountains.

As exciting as that prospect was, getting sick pretty much put an end to it. There aren’t really any reliable ways to buy train tickets online here so I had planned to just take a day and head down to the station to get things booked. Since the train fills up quickly–or at least the air conditioned sleeper cabins which I was set on do–I wanted to both get the ticket early and give myself time to still book a flight if the train was already booked up.

But I was out of action with the flu during the window I had to make that happen. So I shrugged, booked a plane ticket, and resolved to make the train trip another time.

The only problem with this was that I had left a one night hole in my accommodations bookings… which would have been spent on the train. Now, I had to find somewhere else to sleep, and since I booked the flight the same day as my condo started in Chiang Mai, it was going to have to be somewhere in Bangkok.

I figured somewhere near the airport would be cheap and easy, with an emphasis on cheap, so I got a room at the Rafael Mansion.

It was in the same neighborhood as the hotel I stayed at when I first arrived, so I was pretty comfortable with the area. It’s largely industrial apart from the hotels, but no one is staying there for the scenery. It’s just a place to get your head down before or after a late flight.

Something else that is missing is any nearby rail or subway line. Hotels either run their own shuttles or you take a cab. It’s not expensive, but there was another option I had been wanting to try since I got here, and this was the perfect opportunity: the Bangkok bus system.

I walked by Bangkok buses all the time but the system is famously obscure to Westerners: four or five (or six or seven, depending on the websites you read) different classes of buses, signage only in Thai, no English-language system maps worthy of the name, complex and impenetrable fare structures. The buses are dirt cheap compared to other transit options, but then, those options aren’t exactly expensive so it’s easy to avoid the bus entirely for most visitors.

Buses are my primary means of transportation back home, though, so I had a perverse urge to try them here at least once. And Google Maps identified an air-conditioned route from the airport train line (which I would, together with BTS, take for most of the distance).

So, one stop before the airport, I hopped off the rail system and made my way down to street level to seek out the bus stop for the 553 on Lat Krabang Road.

Just getting from the train station to the road was a challenge, though. The airport expressway was in between, as was a canal. I walked through a parking lot beneath the elevated expressway until I got to the canal. There was a lower road bridge, but I didn’t see any sidewalk leading to it. Walking a Thai road without anywhere to jump to is sheer insanity, so I figured I’d have to backtrack to the train station and admit defeat by getting cab.

Then I saw a man on the road bridge, leaning out over the canal and looking down. Suicidal? Or had I missed something?

I backtracked to the end of the bridge. Sure enough–there was a sidewalk across the bridge… just no sidewalk to the bridge.

I bushwhacked as far as I could along the shoulder then took my chances on the busy road, waiting for a gap before hustling up to the start of the sidewalk and continuing across.

That obstacle overcome, the next presented itself: locating the bus stop. There are no signs. But I hoped there would at least be a bench or something, and there was, with a shade thoughtfully stretched over it and three people already waiting. I was glad to see that, because the bus won’t automatically stop (with as many people as are always on the sidewalk here, they’d never stop stopping)–you have to signal it. But waving, apparently, is inappropriate and possibly insulting, so a weird palm-down gesture is used, one that I had not mastered.

I was feeling pretty pleased with myself and figured I could overcome the final two obstacles of figuring out how to pay and when to get off, but as the minutes ticked by and no bus passed, I started to worry.

Google said every ten minutes, and there were three different buses that were supposed to serve that stop. There are different classes of bus, and I was looking for the blue and beige air-conditioned buses. Eventually, one of the ubiquitous red and white open buses came by, but no one signaled or got on, and the number on it wasn’t 553, so I didn’t think that was it.

But no 553 appeared, only red and white buses with 1013 on them. I saw a few blueish buses on the other side of the road, but they were all heading the wrong way.

Eventually, all the other people at the stop all trickled away and I started rethinking my options.

I could grab a cab–several swung in and gestured to me while I was waiting, on the probably accurate theory that no farang in his right mind could possibly be on the street in that neighborhood unless looking for a cab driver to rescue him. Or–I consulted my phone and checked the distance to the hotel. Only five miles… a quick stroll at home, but not nearly as trivial in the Bangkok heat on Bangkok sidewalks.

But I figured I could at least start in that direction. I had already been waiting an hour; if a bus came by along the way, swell. If I got overwhelmed by the heat, I’d duck into a 7/11 (three on every block!) and get a drink and something to eat. And if I tired out and there was still no bus, I could flag down one of the ubiquitous cabs.

So off I went, stumbling over broken cobblestone and sweating like a pig.

After I made the turn onto King Kaeo Road, though, I recognized all the various flaws in my logic.

One, the side of the road the hotel was on was opposite traffic. The road is large and divided and there’s no crossing it for miles at a stretch. So I wasn’t going to be able to catch a bus even if one eventually showed up. If I flagged down a cab, it would be going the wrong direction and have to go almost back to where I started to turn around.

Two, it was a largely industrial area, and there were no 7/11s to be found.

So it was a long, hot hike down to Soi 33, the alley leading off to the hotel. I did eventually find a 7/11 (I knew there had to be one) but there were also a few mom and pop street vendors selling food and water so I didn’t pass out.

When I showed up at the front desk, the girl there was appalled.

“Why you all…?” and she waved her hands up and down over her face, making the international sign for a raging waterfall.

“I had a little walk to get here,” I told her, smiling.

Fortunately, there was water in the room, but no food anywhere nearby. After the sun went down, I resolved to hike back to a Tesco Lotus mini-store at the head of the soi and get some dinner.

But on my way to the Tesco, suddenly I ran into a lot of traffic. For after-hours on a sleepy little soi dominated by container storage yards, it was unexpected.

Then I saw why–an empty dirt parking lot I had tramped through earlier in the day had magically been transformed into a night market.

So I had a good meal of some sort of delicious meat on a stick and some sweet crackers that I have learned to identify but still don’t know what they are made out of.

The hotel was supposed to have a shuttle service but it turned out that they didn’t; they would just call you a cab. I went ahead and scheduled one with the front desk for check-out time the next day, and I distinctly remember saying “noon” to avoid any potential confusion about AM/PM (although theoretically they use a 24-hour clock here, just as boaters do, in practice everyone I talk to seems to use 12-hour references… maybe because they think I expect it?).

So when the soft tapping at my door woke me up at midnight, I didn’t immediately make the connection. In fact, it was so soft I wasn’t even sure it was my door at first. The hotel was such that late night visitors to the neighbors would not be unexpected. But the tapping didn’t stop and I started to think maybe someone just had the wrong room. Or maybe it was a prelude to something nefarious… the doors had no deadbolts and the locks could easily be defeated. So I got up to peer out the peephole.

Whoever booked her for the night is in for a serious disappointment, was my first thought. Then I realized it was the night desk clerk, and what must have happened.

She was very apologetic, although I imagine she probably thought it was my fault. I wandered down in the morning to make sure they had re-scheduled one for noon again (although I was in no rush; my flight was later in the afternoon) and they had. Although “booked” has a somewhat transitive meaning here… when noon actually rolled around, the girl at the desk had to run out to the main road and actually flag a cab down because their usual service didn’t have anyone available. Which is just another example of how accommodating the Thai people are… I could (and would, had I known) have walked out to myself and flagged one down if I’d known. It makes me a little upset to read reviews that complain about staff here, which I think are mostly a result of miscommunication rather than indifference or neglect… I have yet to run into anyone who is less than friendly and helpful anywhere I have stayed. Just like in the U.S., they spend most of their time at the desk looking bored and staring at their phones, but as soon as they notice you, they are sunshine and smiles.

The extreme customer service focus continued at the airport. In addition to a very easy passage through security, I got to spend most of my wait for the plane in a free economy-class lounge thoughtfully provided by Bangkok Airways. The price for the flight was only about $30, but there was free Internet, free food, free drink, cable TV, newspapers and other reading material. The lounge was busy but it was an incredible touch for economy class. Passing back through next weekend on my way to Krabi, I have a four-hour layover and fully intend to take advantage of it again.

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.

When they think of the Pacific Theater in WW II, most Americans picture vast stretches of blue ocean, criss-crossed with aircraft carriers and kamikazes, speckled with the occasional jungle bloodbath on tiny islands like Guadalcanal or Saipan.

But Japanese ambitions went west as well as east. On December 8, 1941, as American sailors were still battling the flames at Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Thailand. Three days later, Burma. While America was still reeling, the Japanese forces were consolidating their grip on southeast Asia and preparing to attack into India.

This left them with the logistical problem of supplying and defending these relatively remote places, particularly as naval setbacks started to render oceanic lines of supply vulnerable.

In June of 1942, the Empire began an ambitious project to connect Bangkok to Rangoon by rail, linking two existing supply networks.

In slightly less than a year, the railway was complete. It was an astounding project in almost every respect–the number of miles, the primitive conditions, lack of tools, and local environmental factors presented unheralded engineering challenges. The terrain was no picnic, either. More than 600 bridges had to be built to cross rivers and chasms along the way.

One of those bridges was to become famous.

Pierre Boulle was a Free French fighter turned author after the war, and he had a story to tell about a maniacal English colonel forced to build a railroad bridge by his Japanese captors.

English and Australian forces had been captured in large numbers in the fall of Singapore. Many of them had later been forced to work on the Burma Railway, and one of those 600 bridges, Boulle thought, would make a plausible setting for his story, “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”

The novel is a work of fiction and Boulle is sometimes held to too high a standard for historical accuracy in telling a tale that was always more about personality than history. But Boulle’s experience as a POW was largely spent in a Hanoi jail cell, which gave him a fine appreciation for the brutality of the Japanese and the dynamics between captor and prisoner, but little engineering practice.

But by consulting a map he could see that the Burma Railroad largely followed the route of Khwae Noi River. Thai spelling being what it is, this ended up being Kwai (although, pronounced as English would seem to dictate, that actually means “water buffalo” instead of “tributary”) and Boulle assumed that the bridge he was modeling the construction of –Bridge 277–crossed it.

But in fact that particular bridge crossed a river called the Mae Klong.

After the success of the book and the film, the Thais realized they had a tourist bonanza on their hands, but the name of the river was inconvenient for promotional purposes. With a certain Asian practicality, then, they simply renamed the Mae Klong “Khwae Yai” which means “Big Tributary” and sounds close enough to “Kwai” for farang purposes.

The construction of Bridge 277 hadn’t been intended for the purpose of attracting tourists, however. In fact, more than 100 of the Japanese military officials involved in the Burma Railroad project probably wished that it would have remained unheard of, since they were prosecuted for war crimes committed during its construction. Thirty-two were sentenced to death for acts far more horrific than any Boulle’s detailed.

The track of the road was littered with corpses when it was finished. More than 110,000, most of them impressed Asian workers, perished during the year-long project.

The lion’s share of the attention, and the major draw for Westerners coming to the town, however, are the POW victims. Twelve thousand Allied prisoners of war perished along the line. Nearly seven thousand of them lay buried in the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery.

The cemetery is right along the main street in Kanchanaburi (another 1,693 rest in a smaller cemetery on the outskirts of town), unmissable.

A walk among the gravestones tells the tale of an army that all but evaporated after early defeats. Headstones reveal 30 year old privates and corporals, long-service men enlisted in the regular army during the calm interwar years when promotions came slowly, if at all. Captured after their first battles (ignominiously lost, in many cases, against Japanese forces only a third of their strength), many of those old men had almost no chance at surviving a long war in Japanese custody.

There is little rhyme or reason to the brutal deaths they suffered at the hands of the jungle and their captors, but one pattern emerges as you wander the grassy graves. There are improbable clusters of headstones all dated from June of 1943, approximately halfway through the project.

June is the rainy season here, and Japanese engineers, under time pressure, refused to slow construction work to allow for the realities of the jungle. The surging water table affected already poor sanitation in the camps, and a cholera epidemic quickly broke out up and down the line. In one camp alone, there were 219 deaths from 315 cholera cases in a one-month period.

Unlike the austere, dramatic rows of graves in American military cemeteries, the graves at Kanchanaburi are low and tucked close together and colorfully decorated with lovingly maintained flowers. A few understated plaques explain the conditions and circumstances of the line. Tourists walk quietly in the warm, humid air. A few leave flowers and notes: still paying respects to fathers, grandfathers, and uncles who died there.

The scene at the bridge itself is far more raucous.

For some reason, perhaps conditioned by the scenery of the movie and the harsh reputation of the railway’s construction, I had expected the bridge site to be outside of town, in heavily forested, mountainous terrain. But instead, you could see it right from our hotel. The Japanese engineers were no dummies–the crossing site is in the flatlands, easily accessed from both sides.

Where there are tourists in Thailand, there will be street vendors, and the town-side of the bridge is more like a street fair than a war memorial. Monica bought some fries to tide her over until dinner.

Although the bridge is still in use, there are no restrictions on wandering across it, and everyone does. In a concession to safety, several platforms are built off either side for frightened tourists to rush onto when a train appears.

Monica and I started across near dusk. In real life, no ad hoc Allied commando squad attacked the span, but American bombers took out two sections from the air in 1945. The rounded girders are the originals, while the straight segments are replacement sections installed after the war.

Before we had got even a third of the way across, a train showed up.

The deficiency in the safety arrangements became quickly apparent as the platforms filled up rapidly and we were left with nowhere to go.

The trains move slow and honk like they are heralding the apocalypse but there is no outrunning them. Attendants wave flags and let you know it’s coming, but you are pretty much left to your own devices to figure out what to do when there is nowhere safe to go.

Since neither Monica nor I are particularly hefty people, we opted to hug the rail and hope for the best.

There’s about a two foot gap between the rail and the side of the train, it turns out, but it feels more like six inches when the engine comes at you. Mindful of random gear sticking off the side, I kept my eyes low and focused on what was coming, but Monica, in my lee, as it were, was free to interact with the passengers who were leaning out the windows right over our heads.

She waved and held up her french fries. A man leaning out to take some pictures reached down and grabbed one for the road.

As the last car came alongside, I noticed something dripping from the bottom.

Leaking hydraulics? I wondered.

But as it came closer, it became clear the the liquid was coming out by design, not accident, and it certainly was not hydraulic fluid. One big tube and one little tube coming out of the bottom of the train were dribbling, in varying quantities, onto the bridge deck, and as they passed I felt it splattering on my legs and shoes.

“What was that?” Monica asked as it got her, too. “Wait… gross!”

Apparently someone had elected to use the facilities on board while everyone else was out gawking at the scenery.

“Yep,” I said. “Exactly. Let’s walk on the other side of the tracks, shall we?”

I felt like I took the whole splattering remarkably in stride–after all, poop splattering is hardly novel to someone who regularly works on marine sanitation systems–but something in my tone must have indicated otherwise to Monica. She stepped across the tracks then stopped, turned, gave me a look that said Stupid farang, what did you expect? and said, “It’s Asia!”

It is, indeed, Asia.

I really enjoy Bangkok, but I want to see a little more of the country while I am here. This past weekend, I took care of a little bit of that with a road trip to Kanchanaburi, about three hours west of Bangkok.

Although the name itself isn’t familiar to most people outside the country, the place it is associated with is known worldwide: it is the site of the Bridge on the River Kwai, made famous through Pierre Boulle’s book and later the David Lean Movie starring Alec Guinness and William Holden.

Also nearby is the gorgeous Erawan National Park, a forested, hilly area with a gorgeous waterfall complex, numerous trails, and limestone caves.

I’ll cover both of the destinations in later posts but the process of getting there and back gave me a long, rolling look at the Thai countryside and smaller towns that I hadn’t experienced before, not to mention the Mad Max carnival ride that is the Thai road system.

Kanchanaburi is too close to fly to, really, and the train takes all day to get there so I had planned to taken one of the many dedicated tourist passenger vans that run between there and Bangkok before Monica realized that she had a three-day weekend coming up (the Buddhist holiday of Magha Puja) and could come along.

It turns out it’s probably best that I didn’t; as we were driving past one of the vans out on the road, she mentioned conversationally that they were unregulated death traps and that a major crash last month had the country up in arms about them.

When I sat down to write this post, I decided to look up news about the crash she was talking about and it turns out to be pretty much impossible: there are so many stories about fatal van crashes it’s hard to pick out any single one that seems particularly more horrific than the rest. Here’s one example, though.

Anyway, I have to admit I wasn’t feeling that much more secure going in Monica’s little Toyota Avanza. She’d been hit by a motorcycle the night before. No one was hurt and the damage to her car was mostly cosmetic but, she admitted, it might have been her fault.

I couldn’t see how fault could possibly be established in the chaos of Bangkok traffic, but I hoped that outside the city might be a little more sedate.

First we had to get outside the city, though. The first hour or so was mostly spent in stop and go Bangkok traffic.

It cleared so gradually I couldn’t tell exactly when it happened. Like American cities, Bangkok sort of just thins out at the edges, suburbs becoming indistinguishable from small towns blending into farmland becoming unpopulated scrubland.

I’d post pictures, but at the speeds we were traveling, it was really all just a blur.

As the road opened up, so did the throttle. We seemed to go about 75 mph as long as traffic allowed, regardless of the surroundings: small town main street or open road, there was no difference. I kept looking around for speed limit signs and kept track of how many I saw on the entire 400 kilometer trip.

Speed Limit Signs: 6
Drivers Paying Attention To Them: 0

Many of the roads are physically divided, which is all that prevents even more astounding road fatality rates. The lanes are all too narrow by American standards, but that’s all right since no one pays any attention to lane markers anyway.

There’s no such thing as following distance. Everyone is about three feet off the bumper of the vehicle ahead of them, regardless of speed.

Drivers seem to take their mind off this stressful state of affairs by spending a lot of time talking on the phone or texting as they drive.

I had an enormous number of questions I thought of to ask as we made our way out into the countryside but I sat as quietly as possible so as to avoid taking even the slenderest portion of Monica’s attention off the road. She apologized several times for various near misses, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. It’s just the culture.

The Lonely Planet guidebook I brought with me explains all this as an outgrowth of the Buddhist conception of predestiny. Conventional aspects of road safety are all but irrelevant in the face of your karmic debt load. If your number is up, it’s up.

This is a world away from the defensive driving techniques taught in the U.S. What it most reminds me of, in fact, are some of the tactical driving techniques that police are taught. Aggressively establishing position, last-minute braking, rapid but controlled swerving… it’s the only way there aren’t constant pile-ups here.

Well, there are constant pile-ups here, actually. But it’s astonishing that there aren’t more. Their techniques work, as long as everyone is on the ball, just like on a racetrack. It’s not so much that it’s all fantastically reckless as that there is simply no margin for misunderstanding or error.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, this makes Thai drivers excellent signalers. You can’t count on the guy next to you to let you in, so you had better let him know you are coming and brazen it out. And you’d better be flashing your brake lights or tapping your horn if you don’t want to eat the grill of the guy behind you when you’re slowing down. I have only heard a handful of honks made in anger–mostly it’s just light blips, a “hey, I don’t think you see me, but I’m coming through that gap at 80 miles an hour, so back off!”

It takes a great deal of energy as the driver but as a passenger it’s just plain nerve-wracking.

I was relieved when we stopped for lunch about 3/4 of the way there.

You’ll never starve in Thailand. There are restaurants every 15 feet or so along any given stretch of Thai roadway, few with any apparent signage or clear differentiation from one another. Thai cuisine has a solid reputation among travelers–“the food” was consistently one of the top reasons I heard for visiting when I was talking to people in the States about it–but I was a little curious how the locals went about choosing the best places. Was it just whatever was closest, or was there some signal I was missing?

I asked Monica about it when we had come to a safe and complete halt.

“I’m starving,” she said by way of explanation.

So, whatever was closest.

The place she picked was, like the rest, just an open-sided hut with a few tables scattered around. There are no menus–you just wander over to the pots and point at what looks good.

None of the pots were being kept heated and so none of them looked particularly good to me but I picked out a couple of stew-like pork dishes with rice and we sat down to eat looking out over a muddy pond and open fields.

The dishes seemed to consist mostly of highly spiced bones and gristle and I pretty much just stuck with the rice. Monica’s choice didn’t seem much better (it’s worth noting at this point that Thais typically eat family style; whatever is ordered is considered community property, so you either pick together or share what you chose).

As we left, we passed the proprietor chopping up beef on a bloody, fly-covered chunk of wood.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a great choice,” Monica said.

Back on the road, I enjoyed the unusual variety of vehicles that we were sweeping past at high rates of speed.

Like much of Asia, Thai truck drivers are given to decorating their rigs in bright and kitschy color schemes, often with glittery bits glued on for emphasis. I don’t know the purpose of this, if not simple pride of ownership, but a positive side effect is that it increases visibility.

Some bus companies take it to a whole new extreme though.

Not only are the colorful murals eye-catching, but there are all manner of loudspeakers and lights, flashing like fire engines and blasting rock music out the sides at all hours. And, for whatever reason (perhaps because his rotund physique bears passing resemblance to that of certain Buddha figures?) most are adorned with small, inflatable Michelin Man figures. This photo is a rather sedate example. One truck we passed had so many of them tied across the front that the driver could barely see out the windshield.

Apparently these are simply regular old charter buses–I thought the anime influence might mean they catered primarily to Japanese tour groups but Monica shook her head.

“Japanese,” she said, “too conservative.”

I wondered, then, what they must make of the local driving conditions?

But we arrived intact–and, to alleviate any concerns at home, made it back to Bangkok in one piece afterward as well.

It’s taken me a little while to get settled in here, but I’m pretty comfortable now.

I got a condo in the On Nut area off AirBnB for the first month of my stay. I’d read that there are much better deals to be had by just looking around on the ground once you get here and from what I can see that is true–signs advertising sublets in this same building that I see on the street are a hundred dollars or more cheaper per month.

But I was just as happy to have the arrangements all worked out before I got here, since I didn’t want to try negotiating all of that for the first time while jet-lagged and confused, and the place is still very inexpensive by American standards.

It’s probably also small, but, then, I’m used to living on a boat. So the little studio seems palatial by my standards.

It’s close to a BTS stop (the Bangkok sky-train line) and several shopping centers. Although the BTS station is in easy walking distance, there’s a regular bus that runs from the condo to the station… an understandable amenity when you get sweat-soaked from walking a block. And a little golf-cart shuttle goes from my condo building over across the canal to another building closer to shopping.

I say “close to shopping” but really there is shopping everywhere. There’s a mall right across the street, new and modern, with one of the ubiquitous 7/11s in it and a variety of restaurants, banks, and other services. And tucked into nooks and crannies where you would never expect them are little stalls, shops, and restaurants.

There are several construction sites nearby (more condos going up, and a new school), but tucked in next to them is a really neat little open-air restaurant that I never realized was there until yesterday. You can see it from my window once you know where to look. But it’s just another random collection of tarps, shanty-structures, and footpaths unless you happen to know what it really is.

I’ve gotten used to juggling the air conditioning to keep the place tolerable without wasting electricity, and acclimated enough that I actually just leave it off except during the hottest parts of the day or while I’m trying to sleep. There’s a nice breeze at this level on most days. I still haven’t gotten used to the view, which is (if one ignores the busy construction site in the foreground) terrific.

Morning, before the heat settles in like a steaming, wet blanket, is the only sensible time to go outside and do things, but the Thais don’t seem to see it that way–very little is open before 10 o’clock (except, of course, the ubiquitous 24/7 7-11s). So I get up, have some breakfast, and write for a while before taking shower #1 of the day.

Although Thailand is a well-known producer of some excellent coffee beans, it’s strangely difficult to find decent coffee here–Nescafe seems to be the gold standard. On the other hand, they, by default, dump a ton of sugar and creamer into anything you order, so it’s pretty much to my taste anyway.

Breakfast varies. This morning it is “Vanilla Cereal” which is basically oatmeal with rice in it. Thai food is cheap but portion sizes are small–two sachets of the stuff is about half what I would normally eat. You would think I would be losing weight, but although I’m certainly eating less and my appetite is a lot lower than normal, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I chose this condo in part because it has a gym and pool. So most days I wander down to take advantage of that, incentivized because the gym looks out on the pool, which is often populated by ladies with very skimpy bikinis on even in the middle of the day.

The TV only gets channels over the air, which are all Thai, but some of them have SAP programming in English (usually the news) that I watch sometimes. It also has a USB plugin, though, so I can watch movies or shows downloaded from my computer.

Staying hydrated is a challenge and I have to force myself to be drinking throughout the day. Municipal water isn’t safe to drink so you have to buy bottled water, which gets old after a while. Fortunately, there are a lot of excellent fruit juices to be had, many of which I cannot identify, but they are all so heavily sugared that the actual fruit content is probably a very small percentage of the whole.

The view from the condo is good, although humid mornings sometimes lead to a dense smog crowding out the buildings and hanging low over the nearby canal. I check the air quality website before opening the windows on days like those.

Going out to see some of the tourist sites keeps me from getting into too much of a rut, but it’s really easy to just sink into neighborhood life here. The amenities are equal to anything available in the States and often less expensive. I could live a fairly complete life in about a three-block radius.

I have finally been able to identify differences between neighborhoods, but there is still little of the specialization that you find at home. There are shops and street stalls selling every conceivable thing almost everywhere you turn, anywhere you go here. There may be differences between the alley to the west and the alley to the east as far as the context and flavor of what is available, but it’s indiscernible to my Western eyes. And the same is true across the breadth of the city. I went to a large market on the other side of the Chao Praya the other day… pretty much the same as all the large markets over here, if a little more rustic and less overrun with tourists.

I haven’t even been here a month yet but it’s easy to see how people come here and stay forever. The culture is friendly and accommodating, life is inexpensive (in all the senses of that term), and things are just generally comfortable. I assume life is different below the poverty line, and many people clearly are, but if there is foment on that account, it is not obvious to an outsider. There is much about the place that remains mysterious, but I don’t get up in the morning to find myself surprised by any cultural oddities or circumstances. It is, however, fascinating, and perhaps endlessly so.