At Peace in Phuket

Once upon a time I viewed with scorn and derision those who traveled great lengths of the world to do nothing more than bake on the beach of some faraway getaway. What....no beaches at home? Not even a backyard hammock or public park to just put up the feet and sleep the day away, they have to go to Bali, Tahiti, Fiji and the Seychelles just to get a tan? Feh!

I didn't understand it then but I kind of do now.

Work in 2007 was stressing me out beyond anything I'd ever experienced and I needed desperately to get away. Because I was in retail I didn't have much time as everything at work was always urgent, a priority, just around the corner and almost here. Including the days scheduled for travel I had ten days in July of that year to experience Thailand for the first time though only six usable days on the ground once I'd arrived. This time around, for the first time in my life, I was going to schedule in some much needed "down time" to do exactly what I had always viewed to be a complete waste of money and time on vacation: sleep.

After the first three days exploring Bangkok, Ayutthaya and Kanchanaburi I found a Southwest-style fare on Air Asia for about $100 round trip between Bangkok and the resort island of Phuket, 60 minutes south of the capital. In a country loaded with seaside nooks and crannies to explore or just chill and enjoy, Phuket is the place to be.

I did not know until then that Phuket was an island. Instead of building any anticipation for the next three days of sun and sand ahead of me the hour long bus ride from the airport at the northern end of the island got me to thinking about travel time to get back for the long journey home. Come on, bus!

July is the monsoon season and thus the "low-season" for travel to Thailand. It is equally rainy and extremely hot and humid - the monsoon of 2004 did considerable damage to the local infrastructure and confidence of foreign travelers that Phuket depends on. For these reasons the Best Western Karon Beach that I chose was offering a rate of only $37 per night, a major factor in my choosing to visit Thailand in the first place. The entire country was on sale and once I arrived at my resort I do not exaggerate in saying that I and maybe 10 other guests had the entire property and accompanying beach to ourselves.

There were taxi offers to drive up to Patong for only $5 whenever I wanted to partake of the Miami Beach style nightlife there; I didn't. There were other offers to drive to some view point farther south for a glorious ocean sunset; ANYWHERE on the beaches of the Andaman Sea offer glorious sunsets, so I didn't. Numerous boating, fishing and sailing tours were on offer as well, some including a day trip to the famous "Scaramanga's Island" where scenes from the James Bond thriller "The Man with the Golden Gun" were shot but I passed again. Exotic and nearby, yes, but it wasn't the best of the Roger Moore films, anyway. I walked a bit within the village and almost bought the then newly released final Harry Potter book to have something to read on the flight home but figured I could get it cheaper when I got back.

However inexpensive the tours or tempting the trinkets I was done spending money. I was through ripping and running trying to get the most of every day touring, taking pictures and waking first thing in the morning. My room was comfortable, the property beautiful and the beach was all mine. In two more days I would begin the grueling flight home, so as much as I needed to get away from work and after three days of taking in the sights, it was time, finally time, to kick back, relax and enjoy the beach, the ocean and the sunset. Hmmm, this do-nothing seaside holiday thing wasn't so bad after all!

Like I promised myself I would that first day at the beach, I slept. For eleven hours.........without sunscreen.

Gotta go.

The Burma Railway

High prowed "long-tail" boats buzzed up and down the River Kwai, carrying villagers, livestock and other goods and adding to the exotic surroundings I found myself in on a day trip to Kanchanaburi, Thailand. My purpose was to see the famous World War II bridge over this river that served as part of the "Burma Railway" supply route for the Japanese but I had also never seen a long-tail either. In this case it was little more than a wooden canoe with a car engine and drive shaft and a propeller stuck on the end. Strange, yes, loud, definitely but it works.

After leaving the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery I pressed on to the north towards my goal of "Bridge #277" as the Japanese called it during the war. Over 240,000 indigenous laborers and allied prisoners of war constructed a 260-mile railroad supply line between Bangkok and Rangoon when the Japanese believed this route to be easier to protect in their campaign to control Burma. Disease, starvation and brutality killed many of these workers, including more than 350 Americans.

At the end of the war Japan was ordered to rebuild the bridge in reparations to Thailand after allied bombing raids had destroyed the middle portion of the structure. Before I got to the bridge however there was a simple, square park next to the road known as the War Reparations Memorial, built by the Japanese where an annual ceremony is held in atonement for the atrocities committed over the length of the project. Right around the corner from here sits a museum as chilling as any commemorative exhibit associated with the war anywhere in the world.

The Thai-Burma Railway Museum displays artifacts of clothing, weapons, tools, supplies, mess kits and other items discovered, left behind or donated by survivors of the construction project. Guard towers, a push-car and examples of living quarters for both overlord and laborer are also on display including a brooding hulk of a rail engine, rusting but still imposing as the unforgiving and unfeeling monster the laborers were pressed to serve. Then there were the models, life-sized recreations of gaunt, unkempt and malnourished men engaged in various stages of work, exhaustion and death. Wearing hardly so much as a loin cloth it required very little imagining of the sweltering heat, festering wounds and biting insects every day of every week these lost souls endured.

Only 80 miles of this rail line are usable today. Access to "Hellfire Pass," so named because much of the work in cutting this pass through the mountain was done under torch light at night, farther along but still well within Thai territory is possible via walking trails from nearby camp grounds and river hotels. When the properties themselves say that getting to them is "well worth the effort" it becomes clear that heat, bugs and bad memories keep all but the most intrepid tourists out of this part of the country.

If there were a way to expand the museum and de-commercialize what the bridge has become today the entire experience would have a stronger emotional impact. Today's bridge looks like any rail trestle one might find in the Southern United States with arched and squared supports over concrete stands holding an iron and steel rail bed. The exhibits around the eastern shore are placed for maximum information, aesthetics and commercial dining and shopping including ticket sales for a tourist train to trundle across the bridge, ride about 15 miles of rail on the other side and return. Spoon-fed tourists with cameras and misbehaving children gleefully riding the rails with little sense of place? I wasn't about to "honor" horrible suffering in such a Disney-fied fashion and abstained.

It was time to go home.

Gotta go.

Catching Kanchanaburi

This time it was on a bus. Once again in the wee hours of the morning I asked the reception desk how to get to ... and they pointed me this time in the direction of the main bus station for the city of Bangkok. Here is perhaps where my greatest moment of apprehension occurred: I'm in Southeast Asia relying on the honesty of a local cab driver to take me to a bus station that does not normally cater to western travelers which led me to believe that few if any signs would be in English nor would there necessarily be anyone on staff familiar with my language. Be that as it may, I said to me self, I was going to Kanchanaburi with no more thought about it. At least I wouldn't have to transfer on the way.

There were signs in English and the ticket attendant knew enough to get the foreigner, me, situated. Not knowing how or if services were announced or called for boarding I stood on the platform where my bus was supposed to be, ticket in hand like a two-year old and waited for the number on the bus to match the one on my ticket, boarding when everyone else did. Before long we were all bouncing along Highway #323 heading west out of the capital, across the first of many rivers and into the rice field and cow pasture countryside.

Towns and villages with colorful names like Tha Pha and Saen To rolled past the window with signs for active and ancient Buddhist temples running nearly as close together as mile markers under the rolling storm clouds threatening a deluge if I so much as dared to look at them. I just wanted not to sleep through my stop but I needn't have worried; Kanchanaburi rolled up soon enough and it was the turnaround point for the bus back to Bangkok. Did I mention that it was July, the height of the rainy season?

The Burma Railway is not infamous to many Americans as it is to the Dutch, British and Australians. This 260 mile line was to be the main supply route in to Burma from Japanese bases along the River Kwai during the Second World War but it first had to be built. Some 240,000 local workers and prisoners of war from Thailand, the Dutch East Indies, Hong Kong and Singapore were pressed in to service under vicious task masters in the thick of horrendous conditions through the jungle, mountains and rain forests near the river and, worst of all, through the high country between Thailand and Burma.

Bridge #277 as it was identified by the Japanese at the time is the "Bridge over the River Kwai," the most famous and easily accessed part of this link between Bangkok and Rangoon. Walking steadily towards this goal I chanced upon an unexpected yet compelling part of this history at the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery. Here almost 7,000 ANZAC, Canadian, British and Dutch men rest in peace. Anything from murder at the hands of their overlords to death from cholera, dysentery, starvation and sheer exhaustion felled these men, some in mass graves, some "Known unto God" and others like Private H. J. Lampard of the 2/29th Australian Infantry Battalion at least as young as 21 years of age.

Even more wrenching discoveries lay further up the road to the bridge.

Gotta go.

All The Way To Ayutthaya

Ayutthayah lies in Thailand a couple of hours to the north by train from the capital of Bangkok on the main line to Chiang Mai. What a difference time and distance can make from how the city looks now to what it once was roughly 350 years ago and at least a full century before Anna Leonowens arrived on the scene. I had spent the day before, my first day in Thailand exploring the contemporary, cutting edge version of the country in touring the capital city. Day Two in Thailand began very early the next morning through the help of the reception desk at the hotel in catching an 8AM train north to the heart of the country.

At the main station and not completely knowing what I was getting in to I took the cheapest option for Train #75 which was a round trip ticket there and back for the astounding total of 40 Baht or about $1.25 in U.S. dollars. I mean, seriously, who passes up a two hour train ride in to the countryside for the equivalent of a fare on the subway? Track 11 was empty when I arrived at the platform but provided an interesting mix for people watching as westernized Thai mingled with saffron robed monks, villagers and foreigners cooled their heels as well as possible in the morning heat.

Soon enough the train pulled in to the station and I boarded my car and found the reason for the cheap fare: bench seating and no air conditioning. Oh me, oh my. I managed to snag a window seat and opened this as wide as possible for whatever breeze the journey would create. Despite a shower that morning I knew it wouldn't be long before the Right Guard went left on me but hey, I was alone on vacation and nobody else on that train would care or smell any better.

In its heyday Ayutthaya was once likened to Paris in size and beauty. Reaching a population of nearly 1 million strong the city hosted trade compounds on its outskirts for major Asian and European cultures, from Japan to Portugal and had strong ties to Louis XIV of France. The people called themselves "Tai," hence the current name of the country. All this whetted the appetite with visions of grand palaces, temple complexes and elaborate carvings and architecture as far as the eye could see. Instead of a major rail terminus, however, we pulled in to a three-track thru station on the edge of a town best described as a combination of boiling hot and yet simultaneously dusty beyond reason at the same time.

Ayutthaya today is like Thebes in Greece. Where both were phenomenally powerful centers of culture and commerce each is today a near completely forgotten backwater, way posts on the road to somewhere else, Ayutthaya home to 55,000 while Thebes is barely half of that. Gone, too, were the thoughts of an immense and well preserved ancient ghost town Ephesus-style as I paid a small fee to cross the river in to the heart of the city.

Several unique compounds were in fact dotted around the city and in various states of preservation behind walled grounds and offered unobstructed, full access views of the buildings. No gift shops or guided tours, the size of each building and a few informational signs provided the only indication of history and purpose. Sometimes that is the best way to really explore and imagine the scene around you. After a few hours I began to discern different architectural styles and cultural influences out of what at first seemed to be one after another of the same thing. And thanks to the walking tour of living temples in Bangkok only the day before, I could recognize different areas of a complex and understand what they were for, from a bell-shaped "chedi" to what once must have been a splendid Hall of Buddhas." Right out of Disney's "Pocahontas," however, was the highlight of the day for me in seeing a carved Buddha face in the trunk of a massive tree on the grounds of the Wat Mahathat, once the ritual center of the city. It looked for all the world like of "Grandmother Willow."

This was surely an adventure that would have been far more enlightening and enjoyable with more time, research and company. I felt satisfied in skipping over the kitschy attractions such as elephant rides and enjoyed making the most of the history all around me. I only had a day available and a train to catch back to the city but with more time and planning, Ayutthaya is a corner of the world that deserves more than just a day out of the way.

Gotta go.

Krung Thep For Short

I couldn't believe that I was actually, finally, in Bangkok, a small trading post turned in to a metro area of over 11 million people. After 25 years since I'd first heard of the place and over 30 hours of flying I woke up that first morning in Thailand to a massive urban expanse stretching to the horizon, the Chao Phraya river snaking to the southeast through the heart of the city with glass skyscrapers and Buddhist temples all fighting for the eye's attention. The full name of the city in the local language almost requires a complete article in itself but suffice to say that "Krung Thep," the much shortened version, means "City of the Deity" in Thai.

For my first day I planned an easy walking tour around the main tourism district of the city which also housed the most appealing concentration of sights, attractions and venues, none more than three miles in any one direction and edged by the river to the west. Patpong, Pattaya and other infamous red-light districts and sex resorts were not on the list of objectives - I'm not that kind of tourist.

The photo opportunities started right at the steps of my hotel, the Prince Palace where a lively street market was in full swing. The ordinary people buy everything off of the street bazaar style, leaving the high end shops to the hoi polloi and foreigners unfamiliar with the language who also don't know any better. Just about everywhere there was a tall, flat surface were massive portraits and renderings of Rama IX, the beloved King of Thailand and his wife, he bearing a striking resemblance to the Canadian actor Victor Garber. Universally adored by the people of Thailand, the wise tourist says nothing disparaging about the royal family.

After fending off a few "friendly" cab and "tuk-tuk" drivers trying to pick me up as an easy mark for a day tour fare around town, I continued my walking tour. A Buddhist temple is called a "Wat" and the first on the tour was the "Wat Sraket," meaning "Hair Washing" because King Rama I built the entire complex as a place to bathe and pray on his way back to Ayutthaya after returning from the fighting in neighboring Cambodia! And I had stopped merely because of the striking oranges, greens and gold in the architecture.

The nearby Golden Mountain was added later and contains over 300 stairs to the top for an impressive view of complex and the surrounding area. From here it was a leisurely walk down Thanon Ratchadamnoen Boulevard to the Democracy Monument. The circular structure with four arching wings was commissioned in 1939 as a symbolic representation of the first constitution following a 1932 coup d'etat that created a constitutional monarchy that still governs the country today. The monument and the ceremonial boulevard it sits astride are not unlike the Champs Elysees and the Arc de Triomphe of Paris.

The Grand Palace is a mixture of temples, colors and architectural styles, simply being added on to through the ages by the royals that once called the place home. It's most famous attraction is the Emerald Buddha, a foot and a half tall, clothed in gold and requiring an admission fee (foreigners have separate entrances and unique fees to just about everything related to temples and palaces). I only had one day in Bangkok and more to see so I passed.

Lunch by the river featured a spectacular view of the "Wat Arun" or Temple of the Dawn, the landmark temple complex on the river that just oozes old world Siam. Nearly 300 feet tall, much of the exterior is decorated with sea shells and porcelain which give it a glowing pearl sheen when the morning sun lights up the entire complex.

By now I was well and truly tired from travel, jet lag and a solid eight hours of walking in what is actually a very small part of Rattanakosin Island or the "Old Town" area wedged between Chinatown to the east and the river to the west. I was technically lost but I had a tourist map to guide me home for the "rest of the day at leisure." Most of what draws almost 12 million tourists a year (3rd behind London and Paris) is concentrated in this area so for a one day self-guided city tour I felt that I had largely done what I came to see and do.

On the way back I passed Wat Pho, the Temple of the Reclining Buddha but decided to press on to the hotel. If I had actually paid to go in and seen his 150-foot body all stretched out I might have fallen asleep right beside him.

Gotta go.

Time Warp to Thailand

In a previous life I had traveled the world extensively but had skipped around the fabled land of Siam for some reason as if repelled by two positive magnetic currents. I had first heard of this country through my two sisters who in our childhood years had scored roles in an amateur production of "The King and I," my younger sister playing one of the children while the older sister playing one of the junior wives. From Broadway through film adaptations and a little delving in to actual history on my own I discovered the charms of Thailand as well as the food. Time to see it up close and personal after all these years.

The journey begins as such journeys always do at the airport, in this case Washington/Dulles. The line of flight would take me first to Dallas/Ft. Worth on American Airlines, then Tokyo/Narita and from there on United Airlines for the final leg to Bangkok. Some people like to add in all the time ahead of and in between the actual flying to paint a picture of how long it really took to get from A to B? This is one of those occasions! I woke up at 3:30AM to make the drive from Baltimore to Dulles Airport in time for a 7AM flight to Dallas that would give me about an hour at the massive facility to find my nonstop, the all important international flight to Japan.


A slight mix-up at Dulles almost caused me to miss that flight but I made it and connected with no problems to the gleaming Boeing 777 waiting quietly at Gate D33 to carry me to Tokyo. The flight was on time, the service impeccable and the seat just the ticket for a trip that, even after 12 hours in the air, was really only just beginning.

We landed at 12:30PM local time but the United service was not scheduled to leave until 6PM that evening. Three hours before leaving Washington, three hours to Dallas, an hour in Texas plus twelve hours to Japan equals nineteen hours since I last kissed my pillow at home with almost a six hour layover before my last and final flight of the day. Gott in Himmel bitte mir helfen!

Boarding is finally called and I'm seated next to a chipper guy just in from Denver who makes the trip once a month. That announcement clams up my grousing pretty quickly as we settle in for the, wait for it, five and a half hour flight to Thailand. I kept telling myself that it will all be over soon; I needed this vacation. At some point I will have a chance to kick back and relax as planned.

On in to the East Asian night we flew, with every mile taking me literally back in time towards ancient Siam. The 747 flew straight and true, threading the needle of the Formosa Strait between Taiwan and Mainland China, riding the edge of the mainland before skirting Hainan, hanging down like some uvula in the throat of the Southeast China Sea. We made landfall just north of Da Nang at Hue, Vietnam, images of the Evening News with Walter Cronkite playing in my time-warped mind while the country itself slept peacefully below. We continued on over south central Laos and across the northern border of Cambodia before finally entering eastern Thailand where the engines droned our imminent arrival as they throttled back for the descent.

It is midnight and we're pulling on to a remote parking stand at the new Bangkok International Airport some 30 miles to the east of town. The plane is tired, the crew is tired, everyone else is tired and I'm almost in tears from being tired. Without doubt the longest single travel experience in one direction that I have ever endured with everything operating exactly to plan, 30 hours from door to....almost door. Never was anyone so happy to see the plane door open for the last time, sweltering as it still was in the Southeast Asian humidity, as I just then. It wasn't over yet, though; I still had to get to my hotel.

I paid the equivalent of $30 for the journey in to town which was not altogether unreasonable but I would discover later was three times what I could have paid with a little haggling. At midnight after the marathon I've just endured, though, that delirious vulnerability is exactly what the taxis and limo drivers are counting on but I didn't care. They could have driven me to Singapore for all I'd have known. I was an exhausted novice who just wanted to get to a bed so I could get this desperately needed vacation started.

Welcome to Thai.....Zzzzzzz!

Gotta go.