Two Weeks Later...
March 13th, 2000Ayuthaya, Thailand
WHEN I left Ayuthaya at 6am a fortnight ago to attend the Greenway workcamp, it seemed like a sleepy town.
Now, on my return, it seems like a roaring metropolis. It hasn't changed, but two weeks in a small village in the Uthai Thani district has given me a different perspective on things. Fourteen days have passed so quickly - and yet we did so many things that it is hard to remember them all. I have to admit that the "work" portion of the workcamp was not overly onerous - there was rather a lot more fun, food and general tomfoolery.The theme for the workcamp was 'recycling' or more accurately 'reuse' (as opposed to refuse) - Greenway being ideologically green. It took place in what could easily be described as a holiday camp; but an unusual one in that it had been built by a scrap merchant millionaire and therefore almost entirely out of scrap (although you'd be hard pushed to notice this). It was within this ecologically-sound atmosphere that we were to be inspired to 'recycle and reuse' some of the left-over scrap around.
Now, to continue the story, I did consider downloading the contents of my two-week diary - but it would make somewhat repetitive and uninspired reading. So instead I cavalierly chose to discard chronology. This still may result in repetition and uninspiration, but at least it'll be a damn sight shorter. But not that short - you have been warned.
Language - "Good Morning Ohio!"
In Bangkok I bought a book on Thai, the plan being to learn a lot more once I got to the workcamp. However, it was perhaps the wrong book to buy. Why? Well, primarily because all the other volunteers on the camp were Japanese women. That they were all Japanese was less odd when I realised that it is the Japanese academic spring holiday right now, while their European counterparts are still stuck in lectures and libraries (theoretically anyway). Quite why they were all women however, was not clear.Our group leader, Sien, was male and Thai - so I did learn a little more Thai and culture, but Yumei, Naho, Kyoko, Tomoko, Chihiro, Shizuka, Maki, Yuko and Yoko ensured that it was Japanese jokes I learnt (and often fell foul of). The first words I learnt were Sugoi! (wow!), Oishii! (delicious!) and Ohayo! (Good Moning!). I got used to saying Ita Da Ikimasu before starting a meal and even learnt Japanese tongue-twisters:
oayaya oayayamarinasai - Mr Oayaya, please excuse
and Japanese jokes such as:
Ima, nanji desu ka?
oyaji denpun gabyou!
Which translates as:
What's the time?
Trousers, starch, drawing pin!
It loses something in the translation.
I was astounded to find the same nursery rhymes exist in Japan, for example: 
Kira kira hikaruI spent endless hours persistently quizzing my new-found friends about Japanese, hiragana and katakana, and the similarities and differences between the Japanese and Chinese use of Kanji/Chinese characters. Aside from these things I learnt that there can be a great deal of difference between the Japanese spoken at different ends of Japan. The word for "very" varies between Tokyo, Osaka and Kyushu - in fact everyone else said that Yoko (from Kyushu - in the deep south) had a very strange accent and that they couldn't understand her if she spoke pure Kyushu dialect. (For the linguaphiles amongst you, in Tokyo "it's hot isn't it?" is atsui desu ka?, but in Kyushu it's just atska?) My hopes of speaking fluent Japanese did not come to pass but, by the end of the camp, I could understand the odd word or phrase here and there, which I hoped might stand me in good stead later in my trip.
Yozorano hoshiyo
Mabataki shitewa
minnano miteru
Kira kira hikaru
Yozorano hoshiyo
To the tune of 'twinkle, twinkle, little star' and
Oyasumi oyasumi
Mata ashita, mata ashita
kanne ga na ru, kanne ga na ru
ding dong dang, ding dong dang
To the tune of Frère Jaques (and means the same).
Aside from the language, I learnt bits and pieces of Japanese culture - a bit of origami, Japanese practical jokes, card games and even a method of drawing lots that I had never heard of before. We had to decide who shared rooms and so all the Japanese decided by Ami da Kuji - or weaving lot (a lot like weaving threads but by drawing on paper) - very cunning and also impossible to explain without five or six diagrams, so I won't attempt to.
Food - sugar, salt, chilli, lime
Culture naturally leads to food, at least in my book. Aside from a few tastes of Japanese food - including the infamous salted plum, which I actually liked and which was almost like a slightly sweet olive (better than it sounds!), the food was predominantly Thai and predominantly wonderful for two main reasons (1) it was delicious and (2) there was a lot of it.Sien cooked almost every single meal for a fortnight and never ceased to conjure up delicious and varied dishes. What's more he was vegetarian and so my food anxieties evaporated and I added substantially to my culinary knowledge. I came away with ideas that I would have never considered, for instance boiling peanuts until they are soft. Delicious. I just hope that I can remember all of the ideas until I get back in a kitchen.
Fruit played a major role - we often had fresh papaya, pineapple or guava at breakfast (a side note: the Thai for guava - falang also means "foreigner") and I tasted jackfruit for the first time - rather like eating sweet perfumed flowers. Bananas, however, played the biggest role. At one point we had three huge bunches hanging up, ripening quietly - easily over 200 bananas. We all helped to consume them at breakfast, lunch and dinner. In the main they were the short and fat bananas that I had found so delicious in India. Banana consumption was dominated by Shizuka who once ate seven in one day, and was promptly crowned 'Banana Princess'. I have to admit I got rather obsessed with fruit and found it necessary to photograph every fruit-bearing plant I came across including mango, tamarind, coconut, giant oranges, jackfruit trees - with their head-sized dangerous looking spiky fruit - the ubiquitous banana plant, pineapple plants and even a cashew nut tree.
Insects - Bats aren't Bugs!
Food may not naturally lead to insects, but in Uthai Thani there is certainly a close relationship in one direction. Insects are perhaps the cleaners of the animal kingdom - eating the crumbs from everyone else's meal. In Thailand however, insects are more like the over-zealous waiter who comes and clears the table when you are half-way through your starter. My first encounter with this phenomenon began with ants. In Thailand, even with my uneducated eye, I managed to distinguish at least eight distinct species of ant, from 2mm micro-ants to 2cm monsters with nasty looking mandibles. We returned to the camp one afternoon to find a bunch of rather large red ants were attempting to make off with the open tin of sweetened condensed milk we had foolishly left out on the table inside. In the event we decided that it was better to let them have it as the recipe for ant and condensed milk sandwiches did not appear to be a popular one.My second encounter with ants (Ali in Japanese) was shortly after I sat down on a log in a forest to listen to someone talk. I was absentmindedly watching them running around my feet only to discover, minutes later, that they had executed a surprise pincer movement up the back of the log and were starting to attack my legs. Thankfully they were small and their bites not too painful, but it taught me to be more careful where I sat in future.
Delicious may be Oishii in Japanese, but in Thai it is alloi, and on the penultimate day Yoko had the opportunity to discover whether alloi ali was in fact the case. After popping a biscuit taken from a plate of many into her mouth she remarked "Mmm, very sour" - strange since the rest had been rather sweet. It was then discovered that the plate - and all the biscuits - were crawling with ants!
Despite their prevalence, ants are by far one of the least irritating insects. After all they move pretty slowly and you can generally get away from them. Much more irritating are their airborne colleagues. Flies and flying things are everywhere. Our kitchen was outside under a canopy and Naho and I were on kitchen-helper duty for the first time. She had the unpleasant job of chopping the meat. That this qualifies as unpleasant may depend on your point of view, but very few would not feel slightly queasy if they saw that, try as they might to dissuade them, the meat continued to crawl with big black juicy flies. A dull buzzing filled the air and after much useless flapping of arms we resigned ourselves and I tried to concentrate on avoiding adding chopped flies to my chopped vegetables.
Other less annoying insects were in abundance - gliding, graceful dragonflies, multicoloured butterflies, black beetles and large vocal moths filled the air. We even found a preying mantis; it was a great deal larger than I imagined. It sat upon my finger swiveling its small head this way and that, looking at me with large green bulbous eyes. Then someone mentioned that the last time they had seen one it had given them a nasty bite so I decided to encourage it to fly away and, after much hand shaking and a surprising degree of resistance, it flew off in search of smaller and more manageable prey.
At night the midges and mosquitoes appeared and, on their trail, the small ceiling crawling lizards that gobble them up. I had mistakenly thought that these finger-sized lizards were geckos but I was shown a real gecko by Sien one night as it sat in the darkness of the rafters. It was a large rat-sized lizard sitting unperturbed on a sheer vertical surface. Geckos are only concerned with larger insects and the odd mouse or two and this one answered my question about the weird bird call I kept hearing. It was in fact the gecko living in the roof and its call is how it gets its name - the sound is exactly "Gek-Ko" - a strange and unlikely sound for a lizard to make.
At night the air is filled with an incredible racket as the trees shelter chanting insects. I thought before that these were crickets or maybe cicadae squeaking when we attempted to move them. Advertising your presence by squeaking may not be the most sensible thing to do if you are a moth, mainly because there are a lot of bats around. I realise bats aren't bugs but the similarities were apparent one evening as we sat by a rockface in the middle of nowhere, waiting for dusk. At 6.15pm a few black specks could be seen leaving a large cave in the rock face - a second later they were followed by a thick stream of black squeakings. Open mouthed we watched as the long snaking line of bats issued forth from the blackness of the cave and disappeared into the night. For 20 minutes the bats filed past - there must have been hundreds of thousands. I have never seen anything like it.
Landscape = Seascape
Bats must be well off in Uthai Thani, what with the abundance of insects and suitable living space. The landscape is unusual: essentially flat but with the occasional steep cave-pocked tree-covered limestone cliff or mountain.
My geography failed me here in any attempt to work out how this might have come about - glaciers and rivers seemed implausible, until Sien said that this place was once under the sea - and then it all made sense. It looks so much like the pictures of southern Thailand: islands and bays, just without the water. All this area must have been under the sea at one time, maybe until India's tectonic dispute with the Asian continental land mass pushed it all up out of the sea and the deep beds of accumulated limestone were eroded to form this strange landscape. (Just a guess though.) The most spectacular example of this erosion was 'the forest in the cave'. Through a dark tunnel in a mountain we stumbled into daylight. The mountain was hollow; a ring of giant limestone cliffs. And inside: a small cool dark forest of palms and creepers. Vegetation spilled down from the limestone rockfaces - it was almost a lost world scenario.
Sounds - Music of the Night
Most music in Uthai Thani is heard at night - be it the chirping of the moths, or the sounds made by the human section of the animal kingdom. On our first night at Greenway we were encouraged to attempt to dance Thai style to one of the locals playing a Kaen - like two sets of pan pipes stuck together in such a way that you can play chords. The music had the same distinct rhythms that I had heard in Bangkok, but the music we heard at this Karen village was different. These people differed from my conception of a Thai hill tribe, which had been fueled by all the hill tribe trekking literature in Chiang Mai. They didn't wear traditional dress, they had TVs and motor bikes and they grew orchids not opium, but they were incredibly friendly and hospitable. As we sat and ate our sticky rice out of banana-leaf bowls by firelight and beneath the stars, we listened to Thai and Karen singing accompanied by only guitar and clapping. It took us an hour to descend in our 4x4s on the dusty winding jungle path down the mountain the next morning. We stopped to view the morning mist lifting from the jungle valley below - islands of green floating above a sea of white - it looked unreal.Stars - Frames of Reference
Many nights were spent staring up at the night sky in search of satellites and shooting stars. The sky was a great deal clearer than in Bangkok, Chiang Mai or even Ayuthaya. Even so, the humidity prevented a crystal clear view. I had hoped to get a clear view of the Milky Way. Orion still held its unfamiliar position overhead but one night, as we sped home in the back of the 4x4, I finally saw The Plough rise over the horizon. It gave me a familiar reference point and I almost felt I was home again.
| << Dan on his knees | Index | Leaving Thailand >> |
© 2002 Dan Hodson
Map © Graphic Maps
All Rights Reserved.