Scary Buddha Theme Park

An
American in Asia:

His Quest for Cosmic Truth

(or at least a Decent Espresso)

The page is a little late this week, but I have a good excuse. I was lounging in a chair by the Mekong River, drinking a beer, looking across at Laos while a giant multi-headed serpent shot balls of flame into the sky in an attempt to get the attention of Buddha.

My magazine sent me to Nong Khai in the northeast of Thailand to cover the Naga Fire Festival. People from all over Thailand flock there in the hopes of seeing these little red balls of fire go shooting into the sky from out of the center of the river. It happens every year precisely at the end of Buddhist Lent: the full moon in October. Every year scientists and journalists try to explain the phenomenon as natural gas or Lao soldiers shooting tracer bullets into the sky. I don't personally think that the world needs us to explain away one more beautiful mystery.

Anyway, after seeing it, I would be hard-pressed to explain these little balls of red flame that go shooting straight up out of the center of the river. Gas can come out of swamps and make little balls of fire on the surface, but it doesn't send these little balls of flame a hundred feet in the air. And since they didn't have tracer bullets 100 years ago when this festival was still going on, I don't think that's the answer either. A big nine-headed cobra calling to Buddha? Sure, why not?

Since I am a journalist, everything was free. I got to stay 3 nights in a decent hotel in return for reviewing it. I don't even have to give it a nice review. I will though, since it was a nice place, right down to the rooftop Country and Western karaoke.

A representative from the Tourist Authority of Thailand was assigned to show me around and he in turn assigned two more people to drive us around and show us stuff. On the first day I went to an archaeological dig and dug it. On the way from there we passed the scene of an accident and I got to see someone wrapped in a white sheet. That was a little stark, so it was nice to get to a Buddhist temple and say a few words for the guy.

I interviewed the chief of the local airport. It is way upcountry, but capable of landing the Concorde because it is a US Army landing field from the Vietnam war. Might close to the Laos border there, Mr. Nixon.

The festival itself was awesome. It was pretty much the same as any festival in any town you could name. What made it cool was that it was full of Thai and Lao people. I got to jam with some drunk guys and break one fo the few remaining strings on their guitar. I drank a lot of beer, took a lot of pictures with the company digital camera and ate really good food.

Though at one point the really goodness of the food came into serious question. I was taking a leak in the bathroom and over the stall I saw the filthiest kitchen I've ever seen. There wasn't a shiny surface in the place if you didn't count the little happy smiles on all the really fat flies. Luckily I had already finished my dinner and it had tasted wonderful. Catfish stew, yum! I wonder how many bugs I ate.

These statues are super tall. Yup. The're tall alright. Tall 'n' kinda scary.

The neatest thing I got to see was this funky temple that was built in 1978 by this whacky monk who wanted to combine Buddhist and Hindu mythology, modernize it and make a theme park. The result you can see in living color here. Definitely one of the spookier places I've ever been. The Buddha with the pet snakes is 25 meters high. There was this cool garden set up to illustrate the process of life. You enter through an (excuse me) vagina with teeth, wander around among statues showing humans in the various stages and trials of life, and exit the way you came in. Neato.

I'm a tall guy, but man! Them statues is tall.

I was pretty wiped out when I got back to Bangkok even though I got to fly there instead of taking the bus. Wednesday I go to Pattaya, an hour or two by bus from the city, to view some architecture. In between I'm cranking out the articles. I have to say that more than once on my trip, good ol' Hunter S. Thompson popped into my mind and I thought, "What would Hunter do if he were here?"

Thai jails are much less forgiving that our cosy US ones though.....

OK, What the heck is this fruit?

More Pictures of the Mekong Trip

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Jeffrey Studebaker has been (in no particular order) a SE Asian correspondent for a Singaporean travel magazine, a teacher, consultant and translator in Japan, a guitarist with the band, Swoon 23 in every city of the US of A, a coffee roaster in Seattle, a bike messenger in Portland, a marine fire system repairman in Seattle, an osteoporosis clinic researcher in Providence, a mental ward counsellor on the night shift in Portland, a brief success in New York, and he has now returned to the US after nearly a decade in Asia to pursue a publishing career.