|
|
| Songkran trip - April 17, 2006 | | Date Created: Apr 22, 2006, 11:44 AM |
|
Above photo: Prae and I enjoy the sunset on the deck of our bungalow on Koh Kood.
April 13-16 was the Songkran, or Thai new year, holiday. After our experience last year going to the center of Songkran festivities in Chiang Mai, where we ended up barricading ourselves in our hotel to escape the water and talcum powder-throwing that goes along with the holiday, Prae and I decided to go the budget route and to try to escape the party by traveling to the most remote place we could find.
We chose Koh Kood, the easternmost island in Thailand, very near the Cambodian border. It is a place that is accessible only by boat, has just a few roads, and it is visited almost exclusively by vacationing Thais. I was in fact the only Westerner of the 60 or so staying at Koh Kood Resort, and as is the case whenever a farang does anything seen as unusual by Thais, I seemed to get laughed at a lot. Thais love the novelty of a farang doing as they do, and their laughter was certainly not derisive; rather it was the same laughter that I hear when I try out the few words of Thai that I know.
Our plans to escape Songkran revelers were only moderately successful. We left Bangkok by bus (about $6 for each ticket, which included a snack served by a uniformed ride attendent and the movie "Garfield" dubbed into Thai) for the five-hour ride to Trat on April 13.
When we arrived in Trat, which is a mean little city of about 25,000, we found that we could not entirely escape Songkran. The main street our hotel was on was blocked by people riding in the back of pickup trucks, throwing water on each other. Such is the nature of Thai new year celebrations. What started as a welcome of the rainy season with a symbolic washing of the hands with scented water has, over the years, turned into an all-out splash fest. They particularly like to float a huge block of ice in the barrels from which they draw pails of water to throw on you. It is simply impossible not to get soaking wet with this water they draw from local canals and open reservoirs by gasoline-powered pump. The water is often just filthy, and it makes you wonder how many eye and ear infections are an aftermath of Songkran reveling. On top of all this -- and I do not understand this part of it at all -- they come up to you and spread talcum powder on your face.
What is particularly remarkable about this water-throwing is that if you are older (and obviously I am not old enough yet), you are entirely immune from it, if you choose to remain dry. So, on a crowded street with people throwing buckets of water on each other, soaking each other to the bone, you will see older men and women walking along, neatly dressed and completely dry. Often, soaking wet people will come up to them and gently pour water over their hands, carrying out the traditional celebration and showing their respect.
I garner very little respect, however, and our pickup truck taxi had to drop us about two blocks from Meung Trat Hotel, where we arrived sopping wet about five minutes later.
For Prae, Songkran festivities are a love-hate relationship. While she too feels as I do about being soaked, it is so much a part of her culture and tradition that she can't help but enjoy it in theory if not in practice.
In Chiang Mai, where we visited last year for the holiday, the partying is at its peak, and it goes on for as long as 10 days. We were discouraged at arriving in Trat on the first day of the official four-day festival, thinking it would be similar to Chiang Mai, where after one day, we wanted to escape the water-throwing.
We checked into the Mueng Trat Hotel, discovered exactly what $10 a night gets you in a hotel room and decided against ordering room service if any were offered. Our room had a/c and its own bath, but the bath contained a squat-style toilet with a scoop of water from a tank to flush it. Our view was of the wall of windows of the other wing of the hotel about 12 feet away. Two bare flourescent lights hung overhead. It was not a place you wanted to spend a lot of time -- not at all a good haven from the water-throwing going on outside.
Because of the holiday, we found that most of the restaurants were closed. I joked to Prae that the only places you can find open in the States on Christmas Day are Thai and Chinese restaurants, so we ought to look for an American restaurant. Trat, however, is a small city, visited by few Westerners, and the chances of that did not seem great. Interestingly, however, on our second night there, we were walking along a narrow street, wide enough only for motorbikes, and came across a stylish garden-style, very Western-looking reataurant that was open. It turns out the place is owned by a Thai man who said on the menu that he had worked in one of Washington, D.C.'s finest restaurants. Prae was the first to note that he did not say what he actually did in the restaurant and very well was the one who cleaned the toilet, and I got a good laugh out of it, because those were very nearly my own unvoiced thoughts. The food, however -- including a $2 steak dinner -- was surprisingly good. I have to admit that it was not I who ordered the $2 steak, because I figured how good can a $2 steak be? I ordered the firey-hot jungle curry, and once again Prae proved her uncanny ability to know exactly what to order just by (literally) gut feeling. The steak was no Gallagher's, but it gave The Outback a run for its money. The best thing about the restaurant, though, was that it actually felt like we were sitting in a chic little garden restaurant in Adams Morgan.
Our second day took us to Koh Chang, which is an island reachable by ferry from the Trat province. We had left Trat very encouraged on the second day of Songkran festivities, because the people of Trat had stopped almost entirely their water-throwing. But when we made it to Koh Chang, which is the second-largest island in Thailand next to Phuket, and which draws a fair number of Western tourists, the water-throwing was on in force. Koh Chang is a beautiful place, looking much as Phuket must have looked 30 or 40 years ago, but we both decided that even though it was not as populated as Phuket, Phuket has more to offer and more charm. Perhaps our impression was too influenced by our dripping clothing, however.
Prae had been particularly excited to go to Koh Chang restaurants, which serve a particular type of prawn. I think we call them rock shrimp. They are as large as small Florida lobsters but do not have the antennae. She kept saying, "I want to find a place where we can eat that animal!" I explained to her that typically in English, we use a vocabulary for food that distinguishes between the animal itself and its edible flesh: A pig's a pig, but we eat pork, for instance. She understood, but she still can look at a chicken pecking around someone's yard and say "Looks yummy!"
Almost daily, it's great fun to hear some of Prae's English idiosyncracies. I'm constantly impressed by the extent of her English knowledge and fluency, even if she remains self-conscious about it, but there are often some nuances that she hasn't fully learned that keep me smiling. Sometimes I find that I like the idiosyncracies too much to correct her. For several months last year, for instance, she would say to me, "You are very stink!" if I needed a shower. I enjoyed that so much it was months before I could bring myself to explain the difference between stink and stinky, and, of course, when I did, it was a bit of innocence lost, and I now am "stinky" when I require a shower, which I do not think is nearly as fun.
That reminds me too of her sometimes limited gamut of synonyms, particularly with regard to parts of the anatomy. Last year, she returned from a visit home, where her nephew had just undergone some sort of operation on a certain very personal part of his anatomy. We were walking along the street in Phuket, surrounded by all sorts of English-speaking families of tourists, and she's telling me very matter-of-factly about what exactly the doctors did to her 5-year-old nephew's cock. In horror, I stopped, and we immediately had a vocabulary lesson that included more clinical terms for both male and female parts of the anatomy. Coming from someone who still knows no more complicated Thai sentence than "The boy is under the table," I can hardly fault the minor gaps in her knowledge.
Alas, we were not able to find a restaurant where we could "eat that animal," and we were left with a low impression of Koh Chang.
We headed to the speck of a town called Khlong Yai to meet our boat to Koh Kood the next day. This area of Thailand is a very narrow strip between the Gulf of Thailand and the Cambodian border. We rode in the back of a pickup truck that was bringing fresh fruits and vegetables to the resort, and we leaned on bags of pineapples, which are not very comfortable.
On the way we stopped at a memorial where in 1979 had been massive refugee camps of Cambodians fleeing Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. While the memorial itself was not that impressive, our drive down this narrow strip of Thailand was rather haunting. On one side were tall mountains of jungle that came right up to the road. Over those mountains just a couple of miles is Cambodia, and for some reason it was very easy to imagine thousands of terrified Cambodians tramping through the mountain trails under the jungle canopy and just popping out to safety on this road. It was very easy to picture a family of refugees emerging from the roadside jungle, and it was very moving to think that this road we were travelling down was such a symbol of freedom and safety to those people -- even if that safety came in the form of overcrowded Red Cross refugee camps on the beach, run personally by the queen of Thailand.
To this day, the area is heavily populated by Cambodians, and when we were awaiting our boat to Koh Kood, Prae went to buy a couple of bottles of water. I have to admit that I rely on Prae and her Thai speaking far too much. It is simply too easy to rely on her, and probably far too often she's the one doing all the communicating for us. In restaurants, I always have her order, but that is actually based on her uncanny ability to know to order the best thing that any restaurant has to offer.
At any rate, she came back from the water-buying errands a minute or two later without any, saying to me, "No one speaks Thai here!" So I volunteered to do the translating, and sure enough the restaurant I went in had all its signs in Cambodian -- which I still say looks exactly like Thai -- and the woman working there not only did not know the Thai word for water, she did not know the English or Spanish (I figured, what the hell, might as well try) words. Having once successfully acted out the term "down-filled bed pillow" to a Thai salesperson, a couple of bottles of water was no strain on my thespian talents. I returned to Prae triumphant, for once bearing the responsibility myself of communicating the basic necessities of life. That was the last time that was to happen on that trip, however, where from then on, everyone spoke nothing but Thai, and there were precious few boys under the table for me to point out.
We joined about 60 others -- all of them Thai -- going to Koh Kood Resort and settled into the two-hour boat ride, and thus began a luxurious two days of numerous naps, lots of reading, eating more seafood than we could stomach and basking in the sun.
Koh Kood Resort (a three-day, two night stay for two is roughly $250, including meals and the boatride from Khlong Yai) consists of about 20 bungalows built on stilts over a tidal pool of crystal clear water. They are actually pretty luxurious, each with running water and a bathroom. The toilet is grandly perched up two steps on a dais, much like a throne -- presumably to accomodate the plumbing. Windows face the water on three sides, and a deck has a ladder straight down into the water. At night the breeze actually picks up, and it makes for a wonderfully relaxing place to spend a couple of days.
The first night we went out squid fishing with a group from the resort but had no success. The next day, we spent the whole afternoon visiting snorkeling spots, which were corwded and not as fun as we -- both scuba divers -- would have liked. On the other hand, we could spend much of the day lolling about in lounge chairs, reading, listening to our iPods and drifting in and out of sleep. Our last morning there involved a boat ride to a small town on Koh Kood and then a pickup truck ride to a waterfall, notable for its carved graffitti made by a former king of Thailand and a former king of Cambodia. The waterfall itself was not much to see, as it is the end of the dry season here, and the flow was reduced to a trickle.
We left Koh Kood about 1 p.m. and had a long journey before us: a two-hour boat ride, an hourlong pickup truck taxi ride to Trat, a six-hour bus ride back to Bangkok and an hourlong taxi ride home -- about 12 hours of travel time, all things considered. |
|
| Above photo: At Koh Kood, we were greeted with a heavy tropical shower upon arrival. |
|
|
|
|
