last days in Bangkok

 Time to be leaving. It really is getting too hot here in Bangkok - 38 degrees . The whole northern part of Thailand is suffering from terrible smoke pollution, due to burning rice stubble and burning patches of forest. The newspapers report that government officials have told people to stay inside their houses unless they absolutely have to go out, but nothing is being done to stop the burning. Insane.

For the time being the wind is blowing from the south west, so Bangkok if smoke free.

I have discovered a vegetarian restaurant in a back stree in Bangkok, called Ethos. Low tables, cushions on the floor, hessian wall paper, beautiful old Thai wooden carvings and pretty paper lanterns create a relaxing, smoke-free atmosphere. The music is world fusion. The they have things to eat, like muesli with coconut milk, falafel, hummus and home baked brown bread. It is in a little street near to Kao San Rd.

Yesterday I took refuge in the Saigon Paragon cinema complex, which has arctic air conditioning, going to see The Ides of March, reading and drinking cold water. The canal boats that return from Siam square stop for a second at the landings, so if you don't jump on quickly, they leave you behind. I have seen passengers left behind, one after the other in the evening!

Bangkok Theatre Festival

Back in Bangkok I arrived just in time for the second weekend of a theatre festival, right in our local park in Banglamphoo. The park was built in the form of several Greek theatres, with tiers of semi-circular steps leading down to areas that can easily be converted into stages. Performances take place after dark and the floodlit tower of Phra Athit rises up behind the stages. There is a paved area with trees at the top of the steps and boats covered with coloured lights steam up and down the river beyond.

Much of the theatre was strictly for Thai speaking people, but a brilliant group from Taiwan, called Shinehouse Theatre, performed a stunning piece of physical theatre, a dystopia in which everything is organised and decreed by central government, when to study, when to marry, who to marry, how many children to have and even when to die. Subtitles in English and Thai were projected onto a screen to the side of the stage.

I spoke to one of the group afterwards and asked what their influences were. Pina Bausch, she said with reverence, and a French group I hadn't heard of. The show was about society's suppression of individuality. I said I felt it was a criticism of Chinese society. She said that was so, but it was also a criticism of Taiwanese society. Members of the group acted as a Greek chorous, speaking, moving and laughing in unison - a reflection of how society reacts unthinkingly enmasse. Interestingly the one male member of the group who rebelled against the demands of society was called Judah, and he chose to follow the Messiah. It was the persistent demands of society that drove him to betray the Messiah - an interesting angle on the Biblical story. He, in turn, was betrayed by the government.
The one female member of the group who rebelled was forced to marry by her companions. The treatment of the woman was far more violent than that of the man. The actors wore white masks, to express their clone like acceptance of government policy. They removed them when thinking individually.

Next year this group want to perform a piece all about the death penalty, which they oppose. Taiwan still has the death penalty.

Later I watched an excellent group of young Thai contemporary dancers and the last act was a popular Thai mime group called Baby Mime.

Prasat muang Tam

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A lot more money was spent on building Phanong rung tmeple than on Prasat Muang Tam (Murang Tam temple), whose towers were built out of brick, once covered with lime plaster, intricately carved, rather than stone, like in Phanong Rung. But like Phanong Rung, Muang Tam is a Hindu temple decicated to Shiva, also built in the 11th century. But Phanong Rung has four L-shaped ponds that almost constitute a moat.

Prasat Phanom Rung

The nearer you get to Cambodia, the more beautiful the temples become.

Prasat Phanom Rung (phanom Rung temple) was built between the 10th and 13th centuries on the top of an extinct volcano in Buriram Province. It's a Hindu Khmer temple devoted to Shiva, built out of huge blocks of rose tinted golden sandstone. The whole temple is covered in bas reliefs, carvings and statues depicting stories from the Mahabarata and other Hindu scriptures.

A very Khmer Shiva, the healer sits, surrounded by his bare breasted attendants, while other attendants lay their hands on a patient below. This bas relief is over the entrance.

Over the second entrance there is a dancing Shiva. His dance brings peace to earth.

This is Krishna

Sacred Banyan Tree Phimai

Tree worship is alive and well in Phimai, Thailand. The tree's branches extend hundreds of metres and from the branches arial roots have dropped down and taken root in the ground. People have placed wooden and concrete supports under the branches to keep them high off the ground and built brick pathways curving around under the branches. There are concrete tables and benches at frequent intervals.

The main trunk of the tree is festooned with garlands of plastic flowers, ribbons and sashes. People come to light incense, make offerings and pray to the tree.

From a distance it looks like a small forest. There's a temple in the tree with a statue of the queen on an altar, surrounded by monks on a lower level.

More Phimai

Sculpture on Phimai temple - Battle scene from ancient Hindu scripture

Decorative Sculpture from Phimai temple

Phimai

Phimai

I had to wait a whole day for a sleeper on the train back to Bangkok from Utaradit. Why Utaradit? Well I had gone to Sawankalot in order to see the ruins at Si Satchanalai, thinking that I could get a train from Sawankalot to Bangkok, but the only train travelled overnight without sleeping compartments. I spent an hour and a half in the station master’s office in Sawankalot, trying to make myself understood by pointing to dates on the calendar, pointing to times on the train timetable, drawing pictures of beds and bunks on trains and eventually managed to book a ticket on the sleeper from Utaradit to Bangkok a day later. So I caught a bus to Utaradit, after spending the morning replacing my computer charger. I arrived in Utaradit bus station and began asking for the train station, to be met with blank stares. No English. So I pointed to the rail track, marked on a map and someone understood and took me to the station. At the station I pointed at my luggage. People pointed to a stall selling biscuits and crisps. I went over. The woman pointed to the floor inside the stall. I took my luggage behind the stall, she gave me a ticket, I took money out of my purse and she took twenty baht off me.

I left the station in search of food. Markets in Thailand are either very early in the morning, after dark, or indoors. I found an indoor market and wandered about until I found a stall selling green papaya salad. The woman making the salad picked up a big, red chilli. I shook my head. She picked up two cloves of garlic. I shook my head. I nodded to all the other ingredients: peanuts, fish sauce, honey, lime, tomato and some other unrecognisable vegetables. She pounded it all in her pestle and mortar with the finely sliced green papaya.  Then she dipped a spoon in and passed it to me to taste. I nodded and passed her a plate.  I added dried miniature shrimps. She smiled as she watched me eat.

Deeper into the market I came across a woman selling banana cake. She may only have known two words in English, but those two words were Banana Cake. So I bought a piece and ate it there and then at her stall. She invited me to sit with her for a chat, despite the fact that I only know about two words in Thai. She and her neighbour stallholder were laughing about their “falang” (foreigner). They taught me ‘aloi’ – to like and fed me lychees. We exchanged gestures about getting fat eating cake. They laughed.

Later in the station someone stole the cover of my Kindle and the lead that connects it to my computer. Why? Exchanging stories with fellow travellers days later I discovered that people had had the most bizarre things stolen – e.g. swimming trunks!

The station master was careful to see that I waited in the right place for my train carriage and that I caught the right train. I climbed into my bunk, ate a tin of tuna that I’d been carrying around for a month, washed down with a can of beer and slept fitfully until the men who change the sheets came round at about five am, shouting to wake us up.

We arrived in Bangkok at six am and I bought a ticket to Nakon Ratchasima, which for some inexplicable reason is also called Korat. It was one of those trains with open windows that the smoke from the engine blows into. The ticket puncher/guard and I were wearing cotton masks. After three hours we went through some beautiful hills, covered in thick jungle. The pyromaniacs didn’t seem to have reached this part of Thailand yet. Everything was lush and green. The train laboured up through the hills, down the other side and then ran along beside them for some time. We went past a big lake. The ticket puncher/guard was keen to point it out to me. The teak trees were busting into leaf after their short leafless period (you can’t really call it winter). At 11.30 an army of lunch vendors invaded the train with all the usual pork and chicken offerings. Half an hour later they all left.

The slow train cost two pounds. The motorbike taxi from the train station to the bus station cost one pound. I caught a bus to Phimai, checked into the only guest house I could find, looked for lunch but didn’t find any, then retired to my dormitory bed to read until the sun went down a bit.

That evening I found a restaurant with a menu in English, down a little back street. I was soon joined by a Belgian man who told me about Phanom Rung, the next place I want to visit, which apparently is very difficult to get to. He said there was no public transport to get there, so he hired a motorbike. Well I’m not going to do that. We went back to the hotel and continued to chat on the terrace, where a group of very serious Germans were playing cards. I was glad to have someone to talk to after several days communicating with gestures.

I went to see Prasat Phimai (Phimai temple) in the soft, early morning light. There were about three of us there at that time. This is one of the biggest temple complexes in Thailand, built out of stone, like the Khmer temples in Cambodia. Many of the designs sculpted on the stonework depict ancient Hindu texts, like those on the walls of Angkor Wat. The whole complex reminds me of Angkor Wat, but predates it by at least a hundred years. The main Prasat (central building or tower) was built of huge blocks of white sandstone, carted from the mountains by elephants, or floated down rivers on rafts. Over the centuries black mould has discoloured this Prasat, but it remains beautifully carved. Other parts of the complex were built in red sandstone. Only a few structures are made of ugly black laterite.

Trees sprout out of huge piles of stones where parts of the temple complex have collapsed. Apparently reconstruction is taking place, but I didn’t see anyone working on it.

Four outer buildings point towards the central Prasat, their central corridors framed by a series of doors perfectly aligned and all focussed on the central space inside the main Prasat. The antechamber to the main Prasat has a stone roof, miraculously still intact, with carved nagas (river serpent gods) at the corners. Workers sweep and rake the grassy lawns that stretch between the different parts of the temple complex. Dappled light filters through the big old trees. This is a tranquil oasis in the middle of modern Phimai town. It was definitely worth coming all this way to see, I thought. So completely different from Ayuthaya and Si Satchanalai, so much more like Cambodian Khmer temples.

There is a holy water conduit that passes through the floor of the main Prasat to outside. It is my guess that a lingam stood at the centre of the Prasat, kept bathed in water. This would have been replaced by the Buddha statue that now sits in the central place.

Buddha statue with many-headed serpent protecting his head. A pigeon perches on the serpent

 

Several inscriptions in Cambodia refer to a town called Vimai or Vimayapura. This later became Phimai.  Vimai/Phimai was an important centre of the ancient Khmer Kingdom and was prosperous and glorious in the 12^th century. Several Khmer kings lived there, up until the Ayuthaya takeover, including King Jayavarman VII. In the 13^th century he built seventeen shelters and some hospitals along the routes from Angkor to Phimai, for travellers. He also transferred a Buddha image from here to Angkor.

The visitors’ centre at Phimai states that Prasat Phimai was built as a Buddhist temple. Clearly this is not true. It is covered in Hindu carvings, much like Angkor wat and it was built as a miniature universe on earth in the Hindu tradition. Hindus believe that there are deities in Heaven and people live on the earth, so they create temples to link the worlds of the gods and men. It is known that there was a lingam in one of the buildings, though no one will admit that there could have also been one at the centre of the main Prasat. All over the Khmer empire Hindu temples were converted to Buddhist ones and vice versa, as the different Khmer rulers tried to impose their different religions. Phimai was part of the Khmer empire so it stands to reason that it could have undergone a similar conversion. It probably became a Buddhist temple in the 13^th century, when King Jayavarman VII  installedthe bronze Buddha statue. The visitors’ centre also says that Prasat Phimai was the model for Angkor Watt but they have no evidence for this. There are some Buddhist sculptures on Prasat Phimai but there are also Khmer dancing girls and scenes from ancient Hindu texts.

Si Satchanalai

I caught a couple of buses from Old Sukothai to Sawankalok, arriving in the heat of the day. I had been told that this was the nearest place to Si Satchanalai where I could stay the night. No one spoke English and I could not see any hotels, hostels or guest houses. Eventually I found a westerner who gave me directions to a hotel. I walked a long way until it began to look as if I was leaving town. I stopped at a motor spare parts shop, where a man said "I am the owner of that hotel. This man will drive you there, free of charge." I was delivered to the door of a proper hotel, where I had to pay five pounds for a room (a bit above my budget) with clean sheets, hot shower, toilet, towels, soap, TV, room service and free wifi. Too hot to go out, I switched on the fan and finished reading the girl with the dragon tattoo.

Next day I woke up at seven and set off to Si Satchanalai. I found the unofficial bus stop outside the police hut. The police told me the bus went at nine and offered me a stool to sit on. I decided not to wait and set off along the road to hitch a ride. An electrician stopped, picked me up and drove all the way to the historic park, where he dropped me. What a kind man! I hired a bicycle and set off to explore the ruins in this calm and peaceful park. Thousands of birds flew about in the sky and called to each other from the trees. Apart from the birds I was alone in the park.

People were already living at Si Satchanalai in the ninth century, then in the 12th century the Khmers took over. In the 13th century the Siamese leaders King Bangklanghao and King Pha Mueng established Sukothai Kingdom and made Sukothai and Si Satchanalai both capitals.

By the 14th century Si Satchanalai had become the biggest ceramic producing site in the whole of South East Asia. They had hundreds of kilns and exported ceramics to Japan, Indonesia and the Phillippines. In the 15th century, the Ayuthaya kingdom, seeing this, conquered Si Satchanalai and it became part of the Ayuthaya kingdom, until 1767, when the Burmese sacked Ayuthaya. Si Satchanalai went into a decline and was eventually abandoned.

Archeologists excavated Si Satchanalai, uncovering 186 kilns. The earliest were underground bank kilns, basically a round hole dug into a river bank, exiting through the top of the bank. Later they built brick kilns on the ground. They made glazed stoneware ceramics in muted colours and elegant designs.

The historical park has wide expanses of grass. A Chedi with tranquil meditating Buddhas seated high up in alcoves appears between spreading trees. A multitude of birds sit in the trees, each making their different call. 144 laterite steps lead up to a Wat. Storks have nested precariously in the uppermost twigs of the trees lining the steps, covering the black laterite stones with white droppings. There is a potent smell as I walk up the steps. Whole groups of birds make their nests so close together that they are almost touching. They stand, sentinel like, in their nests.

A wall was built in the 15th century round the ancient city, running along a raised bank beside the river. The wall on this side of the city is about six metres high in places and three or four metres wide: an impressive, solid structure. In places trees have grown down from the top of the wall, their roots penetrating between the laterite bricks,  forcing them apart until the wall starts to crack and crumble. On the uppermost wall there were gun fire niches and side walks for soldiers on guard duty. There were seven gateways and forts.

The temples and monasteries were built in black laterite and plastered with lime. Then the lime was sculpted with delicate patterns, showing Chinese, Khmer style and Ayuthaya style influence. Tantalisingly few vestiges of these beautiful patterns remain. People leave offerings, woven out of banana leaves, lotus buds, ribbons and incense.

There is a Wat outside the city walls, where local people have put up a volleyball net within the walled grounds of the ruined wat. I discovered that there are several places to stay near the historical park.
Si Satchanali Homestay 04190 084 0488595 is right near the entrance to the park, run by an artist and his wife. The walls of the house are decorated with his paintings. On shelves in the entrance are a collection of old stoneware shards, bronze statues of elephants, Buddhas and Hindu gods, teapots, articulated wooden snakes, parasols, paper fans, miniature ceramic animals and two old mento liptus tablet tins. Since neither the artist, nor his wife spoke English, it was not clear whether these were for decoration or for sale.

I rode my bicycle through a village of wooden houses on stilts (where more homestays were advertised) to Chaliang, where there is a very fine Khmer Prang with restored plasterwork. Vestiges of the old sculpted decoration remain around the entrance, showing nagas (river snake gods). The battery in my camera has given out so no photo of the Prang I am afraid.

Goodbye Jacques

Jacques  and I took a couple of buses to Mae Sot, near the border with Burma. We travelled through straggly forest, much of it singed by the incessant fires the people light along the roadside. As we went up into the mountains the smoke grew so dense that we could not see far beyond the road. This smog continued all the way to Mae Sot. “I don’t like this smoke” I said. “Oh well” said Jacques “There’s smoke all the way to the northern border. It’s always like this.” “It wasn’t like this in January” I said. “I’m leaving”. We walked around the enormous market in Mae Sot, noticing the Burmese women with sandalwood paste smeared on their faces, who had come across the border to do their shopping. Even some of the shop notices were written in Burmese.

So we celebrated our last evening together with three bottles of beer and sushi, consumed in our air-conditioned hotel room (the first air conditioned room I have experienced in Thailand) and next day I caught two buses back to Sukothai. By the time I got to Sukothai, the smoke had reached there too. Maybe it’s time to leave the mainland.

     

Sukothai

Wat Si Sawai


We caught another slow train, through endless fields of rice and sugar cane, to Phitsanulok. In  places they've been burning the stuble, creating a dense haze over the whole area. Small hills rise up in the distance from time to time. A procession of food vendors walk through the train, mostly selling meat: pork cooked a multitude of different ways, pieces of chicken on wooden squewers, a variety of sausages and meat balls, bags of cooked rice, meat-filled steamed buns and dried meat. Jacques munches on dried meat happily. After two hours a woman comes past with some peeled grapefruit, which I devour.

The Kingdom of Sukothai flourished for 200 years until 1438, when it was absorbed into the Ayuthaya empire. The remains of the ancient capital city have been partially restored within parkland. We hired bicycles and set off in the morning to see the ruins. We cycled along asphalt roads and dusty pathways under spreading trees, beside lakes and canals. Much of the ruins are far better preserved than anything at Ayuthaya.

Wat Si Sawai (above) is ancient and has three prangs, (imitating Hindu shikhara Vimanas) built in the Lop Buri style, but better preserved than anything at Lop Buri. They are decorated with stucco with some designs similar to those of the Chinese Yuan dynasty. The carved lintel depicts the God Vishnu reclining on a Naga seat, while  fragments of Hindu images and a Lingum all indicate that this temple was originally Hindu. Later it was transformed into a Buddhist temple and the lingum was cut down to a stump.

Many of the temples and palaces were originally surrounded by water, symbol of purity, and some of them still are.

Streams of bicycles criss cross the park. Bicycles are the ideal way to see the ruins. Unfortunately, motorbikes, rikshaws, cars, vans and even buses, which disturb the peace from time to time, are also allowed into the park.

We came back to the main road, which runs right through the middle of the park, for lunch. I ordered a fish soup, which came with lots of pieces of galangal, lemon grass, fragrant leaves and lime juice -delicious.

Lopburi

We caught another slow, cheap train to Lopburi, though the green, green rice fields, stretching out as far as the eye could see, interspersed by fruit trees, villages, temples, rivers, canals and wild wetlands. Raised roads ran straight, a few feet above the fields.

Lopburi is one of Thailand’s oldest cities though we do not know exactly when it was first built. In the tenth century the Khmer empire absorbed it, destroying most of the buildings and creating the city that remains today in the form of scattered ruins. Lopburi became a frontier town for the Khmer empire and rose to prominence as a trading centre. However as the Sukothai empire grew in importance, Lopburi declined, until the Ayuthaya period, when it became the second capital of Siam.

What is left of Lopburi is much smaller than Ayuthaya and the ruins fewer and smaller, so not surrounded by beautiful parkland and waterways but just rising up, unexpectedly in the middle of the town, beside the railway tracks and in front of the train station.

The town is infested with monkeys, which the locals keep at bay with electric wiring and metals bars in front of their windows. Everywhere there are signs warning tourists NOT to feed the monkeys, but as we passed one of the temples, we saw a group of tourists feeding the monkeys.

In the evening we found lights in the trees inside the palace grounds, where a very large group of school children were rehearsing a show on a brightly coloured stage. In another part of the palace grounds, dozens of stage carpenters were busy building scenery: cardboard houses, battlements, a sailing ship, waves. . .

Ayuthayia day two





This is Wat Chaiwattanaram, built in 1630 by King  Prasat Thong to celebrate victory over the Khmer  The giant cucumber structure in the centre is called a Pram. It is surrounded by minor Pramgat in eight directions.

We hired bicycles to ride around Ayuthayia. The ancient ruins are surrounded by bicycle-friendly parks, where lakes and canals interweave between trees and little bridges cross the water at frequent intervals. The ruins are built of black stained red brick and were originally covered with plaster.

 Ayuthaya was named after Ayodha, Prince Rama's city in the Indian epic, the Ramayana. It was the capital of Siam (the old name for Thailand) between 1350 and 1767 and at it's peak controlled an area larger than England and France combined and had more than 400 temples.  When the Portuguese arrived in 1511, they were so amazed by its beauty that they called it the Venice of the East. Soon French,  English, Dutch, Chinese and Japanese boats were sailing to Ayuthaya to trade.

The Burmese put an end to all that when they invaded in 1767, sacking and pillaging the city, taking most of its treasures away.

Ayuthayia

Jacques and I took the slow train to Ayuthayia, capital of the ancient Kingdom of Ayuthayia, a mere two hours from Bangkok. The train took us through the rubbish-filled swamplands of central Thailand, where the houses all hover on stilts above the stagnant water and fertiliser-rich runoff from the rice fields turns the swamp water putrid and green with eutrification. In the midst of all this lie the ruins of the ancient city of Ayuthayia, surrounded by the modern city with its markets, bars, hotels, banks and railway station.

We checked into a cheap hotel and set off on foot in search of the ancient ruins. We jumped on a passing Songthau, which didn't take us in the direction we expected. But, after walking a stretch in the hot sun, we came to signs to a floating market. As we got nearer, coaches, buses and cars passed us on a narrow road. Shops and stalls selling trinkets and souvenirs grew along the roadside. Then we came to a Disney version of a floating market, beyond which we could see the coaches careering through clouds of dust. We followed and soon were in a field of ruins. Lovely red brick towers, the remains of a monastery, with a disintegrating statue of Buddha, who looked like a melting Buddha.

In the distance we saw the ruins of a walled monastery. We walked across the field and round the wall until we came to the entrance. The red brick walls of the monastery had been repaired and a new terracotta floor laid, but there was no roof. Thai people came with lotus flowers and joss sticks to offer to the temple, kneeling for a moment, lighting the incence, adding the lotus flowers to the already full vase, walking round the Buddha altar clockwise, then leaving.

We sat on the floor of the monasstery temple, listening to the birds in the trees all around us.

In the evening Jacques wanted to eat in a local Thai place on the street. He spotted some locals eating chicken feet soup and had to have some too. I decided on tofu soup and was not best pleased to find meat in my soup. That's the trouble with these local roadside places - meat (and chilli) in everything.

Chinatown

Yesterday evening Jaques and I caught a bus to Chinatown and wandered the streets filled with outdoor cafes and stalls selling birds nest soup, shark's fins (poor sharks, left to bleed to death with their fins cut off), illuminated signs in Chinese (that apparently Chinese people from China can't read) and crowds of people. We ordered a fried fish at an outdoor cafe and picked it to pieces between us, enjoying every last morsel. Jaques impressed me with his fluent Thai, though he said he can't read the newspaper. I am constantly amazed by the number of foreigners who speak Thai.

On the way home it started to rain. We caught a rikshaw which left us several streets away from Apple Guesthouse, so we had to brave the torrential rain.

My Indian visa is ready, so I'm off to the Indian embassy this afternoon to collect it, then I'm heading north tomorrow.

Jim Thompson’s house

An oasis of cool, green gardens, surround a large traditional teak house on stilts, right beside a canal in central Bangkok. Jim Thompson, the silk king, who lived and worked in Bangkok from 1945 -1967, had access to people and places that no other American could equal. He quickly became the go-to man for agents of the newly formed CIA. But he didn’t hide his support for nationalist fighters in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, or his opposition to America’s increasing military presence and support of the Thai generals. He was opposed to Washington’s ideological rampages in South East Asia and foresaw that  American anti-communist wars would wreak havoc, not only in Vietnam and Laos, but also in Thailand. And indeed everything that he had predicted took place.

Initially involved in Thai politics, he withdrew when US-backed reactionary forces took over. He set up one of the first fair trade silk industries in the world and revived the flagging Thai silk industry, providing a decent living to thousands of weavers in the countryside.

Eventually, when he had made enough money, he bought a piece of land in Bangkok and ‘built’ his house. He bought six antique traditional teak houses from the north east of Thailand, dismantled them and transported them by boat to be reassembled into one great house in Bangkok. He filled the house with beautiful pieces of ancient art and sculpture that he bought from junk shops as he travelled around Thailand. He entertained every evening, his guests including Eleanor Roosevelt, the du Ponts, Truman Capote, counts, countesses, film stars and politicians, both Thai, European and American. They would sit round his dining table, eating Thai food with the dim light from the chandeliers illuminating the gold lacquer bodhisattva statues and sandstone Buddha heads from the twelfth century, as they listened to his stories.


Thompson’s opposition to established American policy earned him plenty of enemies, especially among Thai generals, and towards the end of his life he told many of his friends that he fully expected someone to kill him. In 1967 he disappeared from outside a friend’s house in the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia, and was never seen again. Personally, I am convinced that he was abducted and killed.

Thompson's silk industry continues to thrive and now includes a farm, producing fruit and vegetables as well as silk worms. Thousands of tourists visit his house, where a highly organised gaggle of beautiful Thai women show groups round. I could imagine being entertained in his dining room and would have loved to have met him 

Map of Old Bangkok

I came across a map of old Bangkok. It was a walled city, surrounded by a moat. Rivers fed into and out of the moat and four canals crossed the island from one side to the other. Numerous smaller canals crisscrossed it in the other direction, themselves feeding into larger and smaller lakes. The canals, moat and rivers were crowded with thousands of tiny boats that looked like insects or fishes on the map. Large seafaring vessels gathered round the river that led to the sea. Turrets and drawbridges protected the entrance to the canals and palaces and temples were situated next to the lakes. It looked beautiful, but probably was a malaria-infested swamp.

Today the moat has become a semicircular canal, connecting to the river at both ends, the largest canal that crossed the island is now a busy thoroughfare for river buses, while many of the other canals, together with all the lakes, have been filled in, covered in tarmac and buildings. Remnants of the old wall, particularly the guard towers, remain to remind one of the former splendour of the city.  Modern Bangkok, with its high rise buildings, motorways, overground metro system and skytrain, crowd in on old bangkok, dwarfing the ancient city.

 Connie

Connie is a diminuitive American woman who has been travelling for sixty years.

"I'm eighty four now" she said "and I don't want to carry on travelling. There are just four places I still want to go to: Afghanistan is one. I understand that they take you out under armed guard to visit interesting sites. Anyway I don't care if I get killed. At this point what does it matter?

I also want to travel up the Nile. I've seen all the ancient ruins in Egypt but I haven't travelled up the Nile yet.

And I want to visit Libya. I realise that there are a few problems there at the moment but Libya is full of interesting things to see.

And I want to go on a cruise from Berlin.

Apart from that i don't want to travel any more."

A Vietnamese woman arrived at Apple Guest House on an old Chinese bicycle with no gears. "Everybody asks me how I go uphill" she said "but I don't peddle uphill. I walk. It takes all day to get to the top, then one hour to go down the other side.

I was travelling around Laos and China by public transport and I got bored, so I bought a bicycle, very cheap, because I said I was a student, so they thought the bicycle  would get stolen very quickly. But I left very quickly before it got stolen.
I want to cycle round India."
"It will be terribly hot" I said
"Oh I know," she said "I was in India before and it was fifty five degrees."

Geoff
Geoff is a giant from Finland, tall with a huge head, enormous shoulders, broad chest and sparkling blue eyes. He works as a night club bouncer when he is in Finland.
"I'm not really fit for work at the moment" he said "I'd have to spend a couple of months training" (presumably to get those bulging muscles back).

Suraj
Suraj is the original Don Juan, into whose arms women fall, one after another. Half Indian, a quarter Romanian gypsy and a quarter American, tall and dark with penetrating black eyes, Suraj flirts incessantly, with everyone. He chooses to sleep with tourist women who are about to leave because he doesn't want to be tied down to any relationship. Suraj holds court in the alleyway outside Apple Guest House, drinking bottle after bottle of beer, smoking cigarette after cigarette, laughing and joking with his mate Geoff and the rest of the crowd. I very quickly get bored with them, but they are the most friendly people I have met in a long time and make me feel at home at Apple guest House.

Mama
Mama told me she is seventyfive. She fell down some stairs three years ago and damaged her knee. She showed me. It's very swollen. "I no go doctor" she said "no sleep at night. Hurt".
Mama never goes upstairs now.
Apple Guest house supports a whole family -Mama's son, her grandson, who seems to do all the clothes washing, a great grand daughter and probably a whole load of other relatives. Mama is happy when every bed is full, which has been the case for some weeks.

Raiding the archives some more

Rather fierce looking temple in Bangkok

I spent another day in the all-too-cool arts and cultural centre (armed with pullover) watching experimental film from India, 60s HongKong and Malaysia. The strangest film of all was a Finnish film about a historical incident in French occupied Algeria. An Algerian boy killed a French boy, who happened to be his friend. The authorities were baffled. But to the Algerian boy it was clear - the French were killing Algerians, including children, so they needed to kill someone in revenge. The only person they could lure out of the city onto the hill was their friend, so they had to kill him. But the strange part of the film was the Finnish woman, in Finland, which interspersed the part shot in Algeria, conversing with Death, and later with her priest, saying she wanted the devil back.

Back at Apple Guest House, the party animals sitting outside last night kept Mama awake as they squawked and hooted, worse than the chickens and cocks at Lake Toba. I stuffed earplugs in and slept, until the suffocating heat woke me at eight in the morning. This is the hot season, which comes between the cool season (max 30 degrees) and the rainy season in May. And I thought the cool season was hot!

Raiding the Archives

I thought at first that this was some kind of Thai joke, but I realised that it was in fact a reference to the King of Thailand, who used to play the saxophone and even jammed with some jazz musicians in New York when he was a young man.

Bangkok Art and Culture Centre

I was caught in another torrential downpour on my way to the boat. Usually it’s a quarter of an hour’s walk from Apple guest house to the boat that takes you into the centre of the city. But in the rain the pavements turn into skating rinks and progress is slow. I was drenched to the skin, despite my umbrella. This kind of rain falls so hard and fast that it bounces off the pavement and splashes you right up to the waist. The ticket sellers on the boat were wearing plastic raincoats that only covered them to their waists. Their trousers were soaking.

Bangkok Art and Culture Centre is a gleaming new building with white marble floors, a huge central atrium open all the way up to the roof, with escalators connecting the various floors.

Raiding the Archives was an event featuring presentations by members of the film archive, curators and film historians, interspersed by short films, some experimental, some low budget local Thai, some documentary.

I was disorientated when I emerged from the Centre since the roads at this point are crossed by a kind of spaghetti junction of overpasses and walkways on multiple levels. A busker was playing a set of plastic dustbins and a skateboard at ground level. A huge audience lined one of the walkways above, their cheers rising above the noise of the traffic. I negotiated various staircases, walkways, a department store, more walkways and staircases and eventually found my very wet bus stop. The bus ground slowly through the traffic, past thick crowds of young people, all waiting for some form of transport to take them home.

Another overcast, thick, muggy day today. More rain coming.

Canal Trip

Yesterday I took the canal boat from the Golden Temple to the centre of town. The canal boat is the fastest way to reach Siam Square, but the boats only go during daylight hours, which is why I decided to go to the cinema at midday. More rain was forecast and the atmosphere was heavy and thick. The ticket sellers on the boats wear black plastic helmets and balance precariously along a narrow ledge that runs round the outer edge of the boat, their heads above the boat. They lean down to take people’s fares, sidling along the ledge from one row of seats to the next. The boat roars through the canal, past little houses, washing flapping over the canal and all kinds of junk piled up outside people’s back doors. The canal is surprisingly green. Every little house has potted plants. Trees, bushes and vines grow in every available space. At the boat stops, canalside cafes full of potted plants offer coffee and cold drinks to waiting passengers.

I stepped off the boat and climbed the stairs up to street level, finding myself suddenly surrounded by giant tower blocks, a gigantic shopping centre, thick traffic pouring through major roads that pedestrians are obliged to cross by bridge, a world away from the old Bangkok of the canals. Not so long ago Bangkok was crisscrossed by canals, much like Venice. But the great god, the car, has been responsible for devouring most of the canals, transforming them into traffic filled roads.

I went to see Luc Besson’s film “the Lady”, starring Michelle Yeoh and David Thewlis, about Aung San Suu Kyi. A lot of old video footage had been incorporated into the film, which was made in Thailand and the UK. The local paper here in Bangkok slated the film for not focussing on the intricacies of Burmese politics, just showing the generals as a clique of superstitious, shouting tyrants. But the film is about Aung San Suu Kyi, her relationship with her husband and sons and the heart-breaking choices she was faced with, her isolation under years of house arrest, the death of her husband, far away in England, and her courage and determination to stand by her people. Michelle Yeoh was magnificent and I found the film truly moving.

I made it back to Apple just before the torrential downpour.
More rain is forecast for today.

Indian embassy Bangkok

Yesterday I asked Carl if he knew where the Indian embassy was. He found it on my map and told me to take the number 2 bus to Sukomvit, then a motorbike taxi. So this morning I got up bright and early on a hot and smoggy day and caught the number two bus. I carefully followed the bus route on my map and got off at sukomvit and set out in search of sukomvit 22, as instructed. I joined a queue for motorbike taxis but in the end jumped into a regular taxi and said “Indian Embassy”. The taxi took me to Makkasan. I caught the metro back to Sukomvit and started my search again. Eventually I found Sukomvit 22 and started off, on foot this time, looking for the Indian Embassy. After a while I began to ask people and luckily found a woman who not only spoke English, but even knew where the Indian Embassy was. It had moved from the location marked on my map. “Go down here,” she said “turn left and when you get to Nana look out for it on your right. Ask an Indian. There are lots of Indians about.” And so I did.

I don’t know why India has to make it so complicated and difficult to get a visa. Every other country in south east Asia just stamps your passport when you arrive, sometimes asking for money, sometimes not. But not India. To get an Indian visa you must go to the embassy, go through security checks, queue up for a form, fill out the form, stating your name and nationality, your father’s name and nationality, your mother’s name and nationality, provide referees in India and addresses in Thailand, have your photo taken, pay for the form, pay for the photo, queue again, collect your form, photocopies of your passport and your passport, queue again, this time with a number, then hand over form, passport, photocopy of passport and sit down and wait – again. All this in a room with the air conditioning turned up so high that by this time you are shivering and sneezing with cold. Eventually you get to pay 2,230 baht and be told to check a website in a week to see if your passport will be ready to collect.

As I came out of the building the heavens opened and raindrops the size of cups of water started to fall. It was like standing under a waterfall. I took cover. When it stopped I made my way to the bus stop and caught a number 2 bus. The bus conductor decided to have his lunch at this point, not so difficult really because the bus spent such a lot of time stationary in heavy traffic that he managed to get in a few mouthfuls between each bus stop. The torrential rain started again. By the time we reached Kau San Rd the main road was flooded. We stepped off the bus into ankle deep dirty water. The pavements had become lethally slippery, so I was reduced to shuffling along with tiny steps, like an old Thai granny, in order to avoid falling flat on my face.

This took the better part of a day and I arrived back at Apple Guest House exhausted.