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The Trip to Thailand in 1986 |
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In 1986 we (
Dolf and Carin )
made our second trip together:
8 Weeks, starting in Thailand:
via Bangkok and Koh Samui
to the Golden Triangle,
On to Malaysia and via Penang
to Sumatra:
Medan, Lake Toba,
Bukittingi, Menangkabau,
Padang
and with the Pelni Line to Jakarta |
For English click on the Flag
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A Journey
through Thailand and Malaysia
It was
close to Christmas and we were going on a trip, my first one together with Carin,
who had never been further away than Spain. She used to travel for the hotel she
worked for. Went to Fairs and the like, with a beauty-case full of cosmetics and a
Samsonite stuffed with lovely clothes. This would be different now: we went
backpacking and would stay away for eight weeks. We both had bought a new
rucksack, not a pretty one but a practical one and we each packed our own stuff.
Carin’s pile was three times higher than mine and, after we agreed that each had
to carry his/her own things, her pile diminished by the day, but still much too
much…
We planned to visit Thailand first and flew to Bangkok. When we had landed, a red
carpet was displayed. Not such a short one, no, about hundred meters long.
Soldiers were aligned, hundreds, and a band was playing. We were pleasantly
surprised, hadn’t expected this and were immediately in the mood. A person
alighted from the plane and all the soldiers presented their arms. Well, was this
a reception or not…But we were not allowed out, the plane took off again and we
didn’t understand what was happening. Later we heard that we had traveled together
with Queen Poemie, although she surely will have had a wider seat…
The first week we stayed in Bangkok and Pattaya to acclimatize; it was Carin’s
first experience with the Tropics and she was continuously amazed. So did I,
because I had ever been to Thailand either. We stayed in a gorgeous hotel with all
the luxury you could dream of and a very
pleasant
service. We were astonished about the traffic: tuk-tuks, fanciful painted trucks,
open busses, whatever, and all disorderly, so it seemed.Vast
slabs of vegetable soup floated on the mighty Mekong River
(Water hyacinths) and long trails of barges were being towed by old
steamers; water-taxis, stopping and departing so fast that you nearly missed the
boat. The golden Royal Palace, the golden temples, the weekend market with all
sorts of tropical fruit, vegetables, flowers, locusts, snakes, frogs, crickets,
bats, lizards, various birds and fake watches for a mere trifle and much more…
And Chinatown with its Chinese and their merchandise. Then the Floating Market
with hundreds of small boats laden with vegetables and fruit. Monks, clad in
orange, going around early in the morning to ask for alms. At night we dined on
big lobsters Thermidore and Carin tried the fried locusts and liked them. The
prostitutes in Pat Pong, playing with razor blades, the body-to-body massage
parlors where dozens of women behind the windows were watching television so it
seemed that they were looking at you. We chose two and went upstairs. First we got
a massage in soap-bubbles and when they asked if we wanted to do “it” with them or
with each-other, we decided to do “it” with each-other after all…
The hundred of thousands prostitutes in Pat Pong, sitting at the horse-shoe shaped
bars, just staring, the elephant’s performances, the transvestite shows; it was an
orgy of impressions, that first week. |
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Then came the time to start back-packing. The live of luxury was over. We were going into the real Thailand. We looked for a guesthouse and Carin fell
from five stars straight down to the bottom of the categories, boom…
This was the first time she had to carry her own rucksack, from the bus to the
guesthouse, five hundred meter, and she was exhausted and in a sweat but she
didn’t complain… The real adventure had started.
We had a small room just for the two of us, but a communal bathroom. You could
shave in the dining room because there was a washbasin and a mirror. The price:
ten guilders, breakfast included. Now, for the first time we saw people with a
same goal. People from all over the world, young and old.
Everybody talked about their own experiences. It was very enjoyable to listen to
these stories in the evening and we learned a lot. We had not much privacy. If you
had to pee at night there could be another person taking a shower and if you had a
crap, maybe someone else needed the toilet also and had to wait beside you for his
turn, amongst the cockroaches. But we learned fast and Carin had made our little
room comfortable and cozy.
Some French came in, exuberant and elated: a beautiful, large woman dressed in a
long, black robe and an enormous torch on her head, together with two young men
and they asked for the lift…
On the tenth
day we decided to go to Chiang Mai, seven hundred kilometers to the North.
Usually, tourists take the night train, but we wanted to see a lot
and took the day bus.
That was not easy at the bus station because all directions were written in Thai,
but after a while, we had a seat. The seat before us was occupied by a sweet little
Chinese, but when his chair collapsed he nearly sat on our lap, the whole twelve
hour trip.
Out of town we were surrounded by rice fields and so it was going to be the whole
twelve hours…And during all that time, a Kong Fu movie was shown with the sound
blaring as loud as possible, so now we begun to understand why the others had
preferred to take the night train.
Nearly dead and melted we arrived in Chiang Mai and moved into the My Way
Guesthouse where we would stay the coming days.
The next day we celebrated Carin’s birthday.
Chiang Mai is the oldest town in Thailand, dating from the thirteenth century and
with a nice climate. Not too hot during the day and nice and cool in the evening.
Also more quiet and less hectic than Bangkok.
We had planned to visit a hill tribe and looked for a good guide.
We found one and he took us in a rented car to the cottage-industries in the
vicinity: silver-factories, furniture-makers, parasol-makers, laquerware and a
silk weaving-mill, where Carin bought a beautiful piece of silk and had a dress
made for her birthday. It was finished the next day and she looked like a queen…
She could resist more and more the temptation to buy because of the transport. And
that afternoon I spoiled her even more: there were beautiful dresses for sale,
made after the |
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costumes of the local tribes with matching jewelery and I had promised
to pack it in my luggage. A lot of fun and she went back several times to complete
her collection. In the end she was dolled up like a Christmas tree. Complete with
bags, a hair ribbon and the jewelry.
We did our shopping for the trekking and were ready for our next adventure. Five
Australians, one Brit, one American, one Israeli, the two of us, the guide and a
bearer. Altogether twelve persons.
All packed and ready to go. We even brought a water-bottle. And there we went in
an open truck. After about one-and-a-half hour drive we were dropped and went
directly into the jungle, following the guide, like geese in a file. We met our
first snake and the guide told us that meant “Good Luck”. We climbed higher up the
mountain but after the first steep part, Carin gave up already. “I over-estimated
myself”, she moaned, wet with sweat. I took her rucksack and looked now the same
from the front as from the back. As I was the instigator of all this, I bore it
bravely… We asked the guide to slow down a bit and afterwards it went smoother.
Our first stop was at a K.M.T. village where the Chinese who didn’t flee for Mao’s
Red Army with Sjang Kai Sjek to Taiwan, lived.
We were led by Raht and Sjat and they took food for five days with them, except
for rice, which could be bought on the way. Every time, when we stopped for a
meal, it was being prepared at a local house where the fires were always burning.
After a rest of two hours, we then trudge on. The group split itself very soon:
five Australians and the rest. Those five would stand aloof during the whole trip.
They kept to themselves too much and had basically only joined to smoke opium, as
we found out later.
You had to be very careful were to put your feet. The abysses were
deep and the footpaths narrow and uneven. After one hour we reached the Yaho’s, a
tribe originating from Yunnan, China. It was unforgettable, this totally other
world of peace and friendship in an environment that would have made Breughel
jealous: it crawled with chickens, pigs and dogs. The people were beautifully
dressed, but apart from their clothes and jewelry, only possessed a small fire,
water, rice, a spoon made from a fruit, one or two old pans, a kind of broom and a
roof made from leaves. There was no electricity and at six o’clock it became dark
and cold. The pigs and dogs fed on excrements and we had to be careful if we
squatted in the bush, because they nearly ate directly from where we excreted. We
looked at this tribe as curious as they looked at us. It was a real show and a
mutual putting out feelers.
The women and girls are decorated from top to toe. Children carry their little
brothers or sisters on their back and play together without quarrelling about
toys, because they have none.
Raht started to cook in the hut which was filled with blue smoke and we were
singing with the children, sitting on bamboo beds.
After the dinner came the opium and everybody but the guides and us, smoked a
pipe. We fell asleep on the wooden “bed” encircled by blue smoke. It was still
pitch dark when we were woken up by the crowing cocks, sitting in a basket next to
our bed and we were putrefied. It was five o’clock and the women were already busy
making a fire and preparing the rice. Hunger |
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is the best sauce, so when we were given a limp piece of dough, we
just ate it. Armed with a stick we made our way to the toilet. It had been neatly
cleaned by the pigs.
The village was situated on the top of a hill and everybody was busy preparing for
the New Year festivities, which would last for two days. Nearly all the chickens
were already slaughtered before 9 o’clock. Also the ones in our hovel, but one was
allowed to live and another one was offered on a paper altar to Buddha. It was
plucked and incense sticks were put in its body and soon the smell was heavenly…
A fat piggy also had to pay the piper. Its hairs were scalded off, its blood
drained and from there on we didn’t have the courage to keep on looking because
some of our group were given an “appetizer”: a piece of raw meat that was dipped
into another part of the pig…Enjoy your meal…
The women were busy with their new clothes, because once a year everybody wore a
new dress, a lovely sight, all those colors and beads. The children were bathed
and family members from afar came to visit.
I had brought a set to blow bubbles and demonstrated it to the kids. That was
great fun and they fought over the dancing bubbles. I distributed some pipes and
now they could do it themselves.
We had to journey on and it was again a difficult climb. Going higher and higher
up the mountains and the landscape was beautiful. In the afternoon we reached a
Karen village. These
people come from Burma, where they fight for an independent state. The
children wore white dresses and it was very clean. No dogs, no pigs, so we could
go to the toilet without a stick. The kitchens were separated from the bedrooms,
so we could sleep without smoke.
After dinner we sang again with the children. It was a lovely evening with all the
happy faces. They sang lustily and suddenly they all stood up, lovely in their
white dresses and in the quiet tropical night, in that humble hut, lit by some
candles, the familiar “Silent Night, Holy Night” sounded. They turned out to be
Christians and it was Christmas Eve. We hadn’t even thought of it.
The following day we climbed higher up again.
We all had sticks because the dogs could hear us approaching and
swarmed to us. There is a lot of rabies here, so we were a bit frightened. We
begun to get used to the climbing and became less and less tired. Also Carin had
fewer problems.
When there is a death in one of the KMT villages, all the huts are connected with
white ribbons. We passed a lot of villages and many had those ribbons…
In the evening we arrived at an Akha village. Here they wore the same
colorful dresses as we had bought in Chiang Mai.
The opium man came every night and the Australians smoked the whole night long; no
wonder they walked like Zombies the next day.
We wondered: it was said that the girls were freely available, but you had to be
able to stand the smell because they never bathed. We declined the honor…
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Opium Fields |
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Opium Fields |
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We saw many women going up and down the mountain carrying bamboo tubes
to fetch water and they mastered the steep slopes twice a day, where we had needed
three days. At this village there was no water at all.
Then we came at the opium fields, the “Poppy Fields”. Beautiful poppies as far as
one could see, in full bloom. One hectare would yield half a kilo of opium, just
enough for one family to live poorly for a year. The Government did all it could
to win over the farmers to plant other crops, but a mule can easily carry one kilo
of opium to the town, which is more difficult with thousand kilos of coffee.
Because there are no proper roads everything has to be taken down over narrow
mountain trails. It was a strange feeling to stand there amidst all these flowers,
grown to make heroin, which is forbidden all over the world. Everybody pretend
these fields don’t exist because also in Thailand it is strictly forbidden to own
heroine and here it lies, drying in the huts. Unbelievable…
And then, it was the end, the five days were over and we were grateful to the Gods
that we had been able to go on this trip, because we probably will never see such
a strange world again.
We were taken back to the town by truck and had our Christmas meal. Never had food
tasted so well.
I always attracted a lot of attention because of my beard. Men here
are nearly beardless and often they tried to touch it to feel if it was real. They
asked me how I could ever have grown so much and my answer was:” By praying and
with a lot of fertilizer” and then they looked incredulously at me.
We went to Chiang Mai, two hundred kilometers to the North. The city had nothing
special to offer and we slept in a dirty guesthouse. We visited a Karen village
and went the next day to Mae Sai, about hundred kilometers farther.
Mae Sai is a prosperous little town where everything can be bought what the poor
Burmese lack. The border post is on a bridge over a river; one of the few frontier
crossings both countries share. The whole day Burmese are crossing this bridge,
carrying refrigerators, radios, televisions and etc. on their heads, bringing
vegetables and firewood from Burma in exchange. The beautifully dressed Thai Akha
women and the poor, dirty Burmese: a wider contrast is unimaginable.
It took us four hours with an overloaded, leaking boat from Mae Sai to reach the
elephant camp in a Karen village.
Peter, a nice American who wasn’t scared of anything, accompanied us. We had a
nice sleep in a guesthouse run by the elephant man and were awakened in the dark
by cock-crowing. When the first light came we saw the elephants “filling up “, or
grazing. After breakfast we had to move on, to the elephants, already waiting at
the four meter high, big scaffolds. On their –
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Akra People |
Akra People |
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Akra People |
Akra People |
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Akra People |
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sideways sloping – backs a kind of ramshackle throne for two persons
was fastened and the driver sat on its head. My goodness, those beasts were
large…You could easily walk underneath their bellies.
Our driver was a little kid who drove without using his hands, in the meantime
playing and singing. To mount was already very scary, because the throne kept on
wiggling, but finally we sat. Carin’s excitement was quickly over; she had never
been so scared. Every step the beast did was hellish and the bones rattled in your
body. You had to braze yourself constantly not to fall of the throne. It was not a
big problem if we went over a smooth and even path, but as we begun to climb and
descend, the path became very narrow. We waded through rivers and stepped over
rocks; it was a disaster. But deep inside, I liked it and our friend Peter enjoyed
himself tremendously. He was lying on his back, sunning on his throne and even
sometimes took over from the driver. He sat then on the head of the elephant, his
feet behind the enormous ears and drove. The elephants were eating constantly.
They were especially fond of the young banana trees that were hanging over the
edge of the cliffs and when they bent down to get some, we looked about two
thousands meters straight down. If the elephants had to climb up the mountain and
weren’t fast enough, the drivers set some straw afire and rubbed the elephant’s
enormous buttocks what made them run fast and gave us a good shaking on our
thrones. After half an hour Carin insisted that she wanted to get off and called
out desperately that she would walk. Now she wasn’t afraid anymore of snakes,
crocodiles, turbulent rivers; all was better than
this and she walked behind
us. And we didn’t hear her squeak any more: she walked through rivers, scrambled
over rocks and didn’t complain. And we all survived.In the afternoon we had reached the top of the mountain and came in an
Akha village where they still ate dogs. We were welcomed by those dogs that had
not been eaten yet, but it was not very pleasant to walk trough the village
because of their barking and growling. The people were very friendly but already
spoiled by the tourists. They begun immediately to try to sell clothes and jewelry
and the children were begging. They took the sweets right out of your pocket, a
pity. They were all too dirty to be touched and reeked unpleasantly because there
was no water here on top of the mountain so they had to walk for miles to get
some.
We stayed the night and thus could observe the village life very well. The women
worked until they dropped and the men were taking opium. Thus the cores were
shared out. The little boys shot with rubber bands at the dogs to tease them and
the girls had to join their mothers working. All women were pregnant or had a baby
suckling at their bare breasts, but – in spite of the dirt – they looked beautiful
and stately in their local costumes.
In the open air was a school. The chairs and tables were tree trunks and there was
a real blackboard. The teacher usually didn’t show up. He was supposed to come two
days every month but hadn’t shown his face since three months. |
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Our guide preparing the food |
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After our plates were licked clean by the dogs and thus could be used
again for breakfast, Peter took opium and we tried to sleep. Not easy with the
cacophony of noises during the night.
We woke up with the sound of rice being pounded. Everybody has equipment to sift
the grain from the husk. The children were already dirty and snotty all over their
faces, while the women were making brooms.
After breakfast, a lovely Akha girl guided us down the mountain and we arrived at
the main road after a beautiful walk through the jungle. Here a truck was waiting
for us. It was New Year’s Eve and we went to the Golden Triangle, the infamous
point where three countries meet. Burma and Laos, separated by the Mekong River,
have both a border here with Thailand. Laos was still a communist Country at that
time, as was Burma. We had arrived at the “Iron Curtain” and one could feel the
tension. We found a simple guesthouse and a restaurant where they didn’t
understand what we wanted. We would celebrate the Old- and the New Year here and
enjoyed the idea to be at such a mysterious place to make a toast at twelve
o’clock.
The next day we took the bus back to Chiang Mai. A murderous journey of seven
hours over three hundred kilometers in an overcrowded bus and with a movie
playing.
We had enjoyed the North and wanted to go to Burma, which meant: first back to
Bangkok. We sorted out our luggage and gave away all the warm clothing. Instead,
we took the many hill tribe souvenirs with us.
The nightly train journey took fifteen hours and we arrived at
nine in Bangkok. All sleepers were full, so we had to sit upright. The train
stopped everywhere and nowhere and kept on hooting so we had not much chance to
sleep.
At the station we asked about a train to Koh Samui, because we wanted to go
directly.
And we could get a sleeper, as this train also rode at night.
Six hundred kilometers southwards. What a vast country this is…
Completely rested we were raised by the steward at half past three and had a nice
breakfast on the train. At six o’clock we were in the bus to the harbor of Surat
Thani. There were two busses and they competed to be the first at the next stop to
snatch away the waiting passengers. Another hellish journey…
There were a lot of Farangs (the name for foreigners in Thailand) at the harbor.
Thailand has never been colonized. Only the French had a trading station and the
Thai word for a Frenchman is “Farang”.
After having sailed past some ten islands (and we supposed all the time that we
had arrived at our destination), we moored in the harbor of Koh Samui...
This was Carin’s first encounter with a tropical island, with palm-groves,
pristine beaches and lovely small villages. The few inhabitants lived of coconuts
and the produce of the sea. There was nothing else. |
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Christian Karen People |
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Christian Karen People |
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Christian Karen People |
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We planned
to relax here for a few days, lie on the beach, walk around and do nothing.
Some women were working on the beach and we went to have a look. As it turned out:
with every wave small shells were washed ashore which rapidly dug themselves under
the sand, where they were caught. We joined the women for about an hour and here
Carin discovered her future hobby: beachcombing. She could amuse herself now for
hours…
After three days idling on this virgin island, where only a few other tourists
were, we set out again.
How could we know that -twenty years later during the crisis in Indonesia - we
would be here again to find out if we could live here and would find a kind of
Benidorm, with even an airport…?
By boat we went back to Surat Thani and from there by bus to Hat Jai, a day-long
journey, passing beautiful Thai houses on stilts. At four o’clock we arrived in
the town which is one large brothel for the Muslims from Malaysia. We roamed
around the city, had a nice meal and couldn’t resist the temptation to take a good
hotel. We listened to Thai music, said “kap khun ka” and “kap khun krap” to
everybody, because we were going to leave Thailand. But we certainly will be back,
because you are the land of our dreams…
Then five
hours in a chartered taxi; four hundred kilometers in an old Mercedes together
with a fat Chinese who took too much place and snored fiercely all the time and
with a driver with suicidal plans. After many road-blocks, put up because of Thai
Muslim guerillas (so there were many soldiers on the roads), we arrived at the
border and got nice stamps in our passports.
We had traveled two thousand kilometers through Thailand for one month and now we
were in a country where they eat Nasi Goreng and where they even understood us
when we ordered it: Malaysia.
Another hundred and twenty kilometers and we arrived on the island of Penang, the
“Dream Island” of Malaysia, but how disappointed we were after the pampering in
Thailand!
The people were not friendly, the island modern and expensive and nothing
interesting to see. And the women walked around with “nun-caps”… No, we preferred
the dirty, beautiful Akha women. We wanted to get out of there as soon as possible
and were “homesick” for our sweet Thais… |
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