Oct 2006

To address everyones worries (a little late, I know): yes I am still in Thailand, no I wasn't in Bangkok when the coup occurred (I left the day before) or in Hat Yai when the bombs went off. To show you how far I am from the unrest in the deep south, here's a map of all the places I've visited in Thailand, with Hat Yai marked:

From what I've been hearing from people in Oz, and from what I've been reading in SMH online, it sounds like the Australian media have been overreacting a little to the amount of danger presented by the coup. This is probably in part because of the Aussie government's panicky recommendation that tourist get out of Thailand. As far as I'm aware, the Australian goverment was the only one that recommending that people leave Thailand, every other country is recommending people be alert to the situation and avoid public demonstrations. I think the Aussie govt copped a lot of flak after the Bali bombings for not warning travellers to get out of Indonesia when they knew in advance there was a high risk of terrorist attack there, and so now they covering theire arses by overreacting every time any kind of perceived danger presents itself.

From where I was when the coup occurred (in Kanchanaburi, a couple of hours west of Bangkok) there was absolutely no sign of any military presence or anything at all out of the ordinary. I had no idea that a coup had occurred until I saw it on smh.com that afternoon. I decided to wait it out and see what happened. From what I hear from people who had been in Thailand in previous coups (the last coup was 15 years ago), the military presence and upheaval that marks the start of a coup usually dies down within a couple of weeks. CNN were showing pictures of Thai women on the streets in their pyjamas taking photos of the tanks rolling by, and there were plenty of shots of kids giving food and flowers to the soldiers - it can't be too dangerous! When I'm back in Bangkok, I plan to just avoid any protests (if there are any) and give any military a wide berth (not that I saw any tanks or army since when I was there a week ago).

OK, enough of that. Back to my trip!

I was unsure about going to Kanchanaburi (the site of the famed "Bridge on the River Kwai") because the idea of something which is essentially a war memorial and a site of some horrible atrocities of WWII being a tourist attraction turns me off a little. The Kwai Bridge lies on the Burma-Thai railway, built by the Japanese between 1942 and 1943 to secure a supply line between Rangoon and Bangkok. Approximately 200,000 Asian labourers and 60,000 prisoners of war were enlisted for the project. Under the horrible working conditions, 16,000 POWs and 100,000 labourers died during the 18 months of its construction.

On my first day in Kanchanaburi, I went to the bridge and was horrified by the hundreds of tourists striking poses on the bridge, grinning for the camera - "say cheese, and think of the 120,000 people who died in the construction of the railway. I'm thinking that the vast majority of people there didn't put any thought to the significance of where they were. What's next? Going and copping cheesy grins at the war cemetary? Do people do that when they go somewhere like Auchwitz? I can only justify going to a site like that if it's a chance to learn something, but two museums recommended in my guidebook didn't improve my mood - they had a smattering of photoes and relics but no actual information - they certainly didn't provide the educational experience that I was after as an antidote to the bizarre touristiness of the bridge. But on the second day Kanchanaburi redeemed itself: I found the Thai-Burma Railway Museum, right next to the war cemetary. The museum is easily one of the best museum I've found in south-east Asia, if not anywhere, extremely well-researched and well-suported by primary-documents (archive film, photos, diaries, oficial war records, personal correspondance). Definitely go there if you find yourself in Kanchanaburi. I should say though, that I might have been a little biased by the fact that they had vegemite toast on the menu at the museum (I had been craving vegemite all through Laos and I thought that I was going to have to wait until I got back to Oz to satisfy my craving).

After Kanchanaburi I headed back through Bangkok and then set out on an arduous journey to Siam Reap, Cambodia. The roads here are absolutely atrocious, especially the one from the Thai border at Piopet to Siam Reap. It's a dirt road that carries all the trucks from the border which means that right now, in the wet season, it is more potholes than flat road. After being bounced up and down for six hours straight I was very bruised by the time I got to Siam Reap!

Thinking about my whole trip through Laos, it's clear to me that this is a country that encourages you to be a sloth. I really honed my mooching skills in Laos. How many hours a day do you think you could spend in a hammock, or lying with a book by a river bank, or sipping your drink watching at a waterfall? You can spend HOURS if you really put your mind to it and are determined to laze properly.

After our dissapointing (and brief) stay in Thakhek Savannakhet, the next stop, was instantly appealing. Disintegrating buildings left over from French colonialism, a night market on the river where you could eat great som tam (papaya salad), and watch the life on the streets, kids playing on a huge jumping castle/slide and teenagers hooning up and down on their motorbikes. We didn't do much actual sightseeing (ie. I practised my mooching) but we had a lot of fun relaxing and reading our books.

In Savannakhet we encountered a problem that was to plague us for the rest of the trip through Laos: no bookshops! This shouldn't really have taken me by suprise though. The literacy rate in Laos is low (around 60%), as is the per capita income (US$440 a year), so reading isn't a high priority for the locals. Also, as I was told by a bookshop owner in Vang Vieng, the government heavily controls the content of all books that are produced locally and charges huge fees to have books that are imported checked by the censors, which doesn't really encourage the opening of bookshops. Later in the trip we did find a few guesthouses that did book-swapping. If we hadn't found those, we would have been left stranded without reading material, which would have seriously curtailled my mooching!

After Savannakhet was Tadlo on the Bolaven Plateau in southern Laos. Tadlo is a tiny little town next to a river and a small waterfall in a really rural area (lots of cows, pigs, chickens) with many minority villages. A great place to chill out and do not much.

Chris and I went on an ill-advised adventure to try and find a big waterfall near Tadlo. We had checked out a map and had a vague idea of where the falls were and assumed it wouldn't be too hard to find, so when we got to the little town nearby and could hear the roar of the water we refused the help of the kids from the village who crowded around us and offered to be our tour guides (for a fee). I asked a woman for directions to the falls (using sign language) and was shown (I thought) the path to the falls. But perhaps my sign language isn't as clear as I might hope - I don't know where she was directing me to, but the path we took dfidn't get us any closer to seeing the waterfall. After about 10 minutes the narrow path became harder and harder to push through, overgrown with thorny brambles (ouch). It was raining, not too hard but enough to make the ground ankle-deep mud that frequently sucked off my flip-flops. Eventually we decided that we weren't gooing to get to the waterfalls this way (although we could still hear it!) so we took an even more overgrown sidepath heading in the vague direction of the falls, which lead us through a field, climbed over a fence and down a path past a house. I'm certain if we had continued on we would have reached the falls, but at that point the novelty value in what we were doing had worn off. So we retraced our steps back to town, wet, mud-spattered and bedraggled, without ever finding the bloody waterfall! Sometimes I wish that I wasn't so stubbornly independent that I baulk at the idea of a guided tour, but then again if we had taken a tour from the kids in the village, or the many tours offered in Tadlo, I'm sure the day wouldn't have been half as much fun.

A couple staying in the bungalow adjacent to ours were carrying a full-sized Scrabble board with them on their round-the-world trip (a brilliant idea, I thought) and Chris and I borrowed it for a couple of games. Wishing that we had one of our own, over a couple of beers we were discussing how we could make our own Scrabble set, where to find regularly-sized, flat pieces (we were originally thinking bottle-tops, but didn't know where we could get the one hundred that were necessary), what would make the best board. When we got up in the morning, still excited by the idea (yes, we are nerds) we headed out and spent an hour or two collecting smooth, flat pebbles from a patonque court, and then another hour or two labeling the pieces and drawing up the boeard on a travel towel of Chris's that was sacrificed for the cause. (Echoes of Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy?) Chris started making stands from lengths of bamboo, but almost cut off a finger with his leatherman in the process. We didn't end up needing the stands anyway - when our neighbours saw what we were doing, they very kindly donated two of the stands from their set (which they assured us they didn't need, as they only ever played with two players). I think the result was pretty good, but then I'm am biased. It certainly got a lot of use in our last week in Laos.

On Don Det, a little island in Si Phan Don (4000 islands) in Laos' far south, we spent a few days exploring and unwinding (because we weren't unwound enough already). We had a bungalow on the waters edge and spent a hell of a lot of time swinging in the hammocks on our balcony, reading and even attempting to play Scrabble without leaving the hammock (logistically difficult, but we managed it).

Rice paddies and lillypads on Don Det

After Don Det we had a 24 hour marathon trip on multiple buses to cross the border back into Thailand and head for Bangkok. Saw Chris off to continue his journey to Oz and NZ (he got custody of the Scrabble board, damn him!) and then left just in time to miss the spectacle of tanks rolling into Bangkok. But more on that later ...