To the River Kwai

At the train station. Romance of the departing express. “The onlookers go rigid as the train goes by …” (Kafka). Copying down the sights – hawkers, stalls, our luxurious sleepers.
“Got some beers,” says Jeff as he passes on the platform, gnawing a chocolate bar.

The teletext spells out a perpetual stream of complex instructions:

20 baht charge for ordinary fan seat 50 baht for Air-Con seat or berth (seeper) tictek Allowed twice only Refund of fare Have to apply for the refund more than 3 days from the date of travel deduct 20% and not more than 1 hour from the train departure time deduct 50% …

Drunken orgy in the train. On my second Singha beer now (donated by Jeff).
Amazing misty Northern Thailand landscape streaming past.

•

At the War Grave cemetery in Kanchanaburi. Almost unbearable to read the inscriptions. So much emotion there. One in Gaelic. Some from the Bible – others little verses. Immaculately maintained.
The most interesting thing was the display of pictures of old POWs revisiting the camp. The colour prints have sun-faded to virtual invisibility, like ghost photographs. Only the oil paintings survive.

•

Our luggage was taken to the hotel by some very spirited Samlar [=rickshaw] drivers, who then bicycled us around town in a little tour.
“Otherwise the ancient art may die,” says Lien.

4 - Ayutthaya

The following should not be trusted:
Rivers, persons holding weapons,
Those with claws and horns,
Women and royal families.

– The Hitopadesha

Victory Chedi of Naresuan the Great


That fish they caught
the Mekong catfish
was half the height
of this thing …
A cat inclines one ear



The Squirrel


Put flowers in your hair
the spirit-house
has Pikachou in plastic
wrappersyellow billows
round Buddha’s behind

[Summer Book from Eye Street, ed. Raewyn Alexander
(Auckland: Bright Communications, 2005) 5].

The Débâcle

I would rather have stayed in the temple. That’s the point I need to stress. There was a moment when the chanting began, and the curtains were pulled, and the monks were sitting inside shielded against the chill of the mountain air, when I wanted to join them, put on an orange robe, give myself permission to be an ascetic, instead of this fatal inversion: mixture of boredom and concupiscence.
The guy videotaping the monk’s blessing was a good example. Whatever you think of the merits of such gestures, filming it makes it experience kept at a perpetual second-hand. The only thing the girls took seriously, I noticed, was the fortune-telling with yarrow stalks. Frighteningly so.
All of which leads me to last night. I knew the others were intending to find another bar, but I needed to collect my jacket and go to the men’s. There was a queue in there, and when I got out I stood for quite some time at the front waiting before I realised that they weren’t coming.
Going back in, I found Chris, who informed me that they’d gone “next door.” But the main bar, the riverside one which they’d been talking about, took a lot of hunting through. I should know. I ransacked the whole place twice.
After the first futile effort to find them, I set off to walk home, only to realise I wasn’t even sure which side of the river our Guesthouse was on. Or any other details about it. Like its name.
After that I went back and searched again, more desperately and assiduously. No-one. I finally remembered that it was near a McDonald’s and a Starbucks, as Jeff had been using them as landmarks.
Luckily the tuk-tuk driver knew McDonald’s, and still more luckily it was the only one around, so I did find my way back.
I felt a bit peeved with them for ditching me, but it now seems to me part and parcel of the attitude – the arm’s length approach to experience. Empathy is impossible for the voyeur, as it wipes out the element of desire. It’s therefore unnecessary to worry at all about other people’s feelings or convenience.
I guess I’d like to contrast it with the temple. The almost – just possibly – successful eclecticism of all that garish gold, and decoration, and absurdity, and silliness, and dignity. Just a pipe-dream? Who can say?
Those frescoes were the best thing of all. Damaged, but still beautiful genre scenes, life under the beneficial influence of the Buddha, in all its variety and outpouring. One must have something to rely on, after all. Scam vs. transcendent domesticity.