Good & Plenty
Today was a big day for me on this trip. We had booked a full day tour out to the far western region of Thailand, some 3-4 hours drive from our hotel in Bangkok. That is only 115 miles, and the roads were decent, but Bangkok traffic is always an issue. We had a young lady named Angela (her Anglicized name for our convenience) who was our tour guide today. Her partner is a man just called “Man”, because his full Thai name sounds like about three lines long, and he owns a very jazzy van that was very comfortable for the eight of us for the day. They had loaded it with lots of water and even some much missed and beloved Diet Coke. That started the day on a very positive step.
Angela was as client-friendly and courtly as we have come to expect from Tours With Locals guides, but at first her Thai accent was tricky to decipher. But the more she spoke (and she did speak quite continuously at the beginning of our tour), the more I realized that her English was quite good and her knowledge base was quite abundant both about the history of Thailand and the current cultural trends. I found that the more she spoke the more I enjoyed listening to her, less because of what she was saying than how she said it. She responded to questions from us very indirectly, but always got around to an answer. She has the speaking pattern of a storyteller and she is not content with short answers, but has much more to say about that and related subjects in a way that leads one to believe that she has spent time thinking about these issues all on her own and is definitely not just winging it with her answers.
Angela recited Thai and regional history to us in a way that was both consistent with what I have recently listened to on my various Audible books on the subjects, but she had a way of explaining it with her ceaseless string of sentences that was captivating and brought it all to life for me in a way that no history text could. A few years ago I got very interested in a series called Big History, that took a broader contextual view of history that transcended pure chronological history and covered a review of all the disciplines that form the real context of any time. If I didn’t know better I would have thought Angela had studied how to teach history in that very way. She explained at one moment that she had been taught by her professors at University the importance of thinking rather than just reciting facts and figures and dates from history. That lesson has served her and her clients like us very well.
We spent time covering basic Thai history about the ancient kingdoms of Sukhothai and Chiang Mai, Lan Na, and the Ayutthaya Kingdom. She explained how they flowed and blended into one another under the continuous threat from Khmer, Burma and Vietnam. Strangely enough, while the influences of China and India were extreme in the creation of Thai culture and the eventual Thai state, she explained that Thailand was unique amongst its neighbors in not having been subject to colonial rule. Britain put both China and India (not to mention next door Burma) under their colonial rule while the French focused their colonization on Indochina and thus the countries of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. One of the most interesting things that Angela explained was that the indigenous cultures (which were some mix of truly indigenous and a blend of Chinese, Indian, Burmese, Mon and Khmer) didn’t tend to think in terms of land boundaries the way Europeans did, but rather thought in terms of cultures and peoples. But the Europeans couldn’t handle the randomness of that approach and wanted their maps to have boundary lines, which they then laid down.
The Mon seemed to provide more of a religious influence from Burma, following Theravada Buddhism, which has an originalist bent on the original writing of Siddhartha Gautama, known as Buddha (the awakened and enlightened one). The country was first called Siam by the Portuguese, but the Thai always thought of themselves as free men, so they took the name Thailand, which means the land of free men in their language. The Europeans, never particularly prone to caring how free or not free their subjects felt, for some reason liked the idea of a SE Asian Switzerland and allowed the country to exist as a buffer of neutrality between the English in Burma/India and the French in Indochina. In some ways this was ironic since it was the constant incursions from Burma, Vietnam and China that was their existence before the European colonial era.
Regionally speaking, the country now known as Thailand was a magnet for people all over Asia. It was like the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East since the country is a web of rivers that feed successful agricultural endeavors. With the influence of all sorts of foreign elements, especially the Portuguese traders, there was an influx of many ingredients for diverse agriculture that were not indigenous. This brought about the cultivation of all manner of grains, fruits and vegetables and made the area a land of plenty. The weather was equally cooperative since the country is much better shielded from the harshness of typhoons and tsunamis. The environment of plenty has a way of making people more intrinsic and goodly minded toward their fellow man since their lives are less hard than others around them. This is, of course, reinforced by the religious teachings of both Buddha and Vishnu, so whichever way the locals have come to worship, their basic religious tenets are culturally steeped in leading a good life rather than the pursuit of avarice. Angela had a wonderful way of explaining all of this and meanwhile using her own indirect path to getting to a place where goodness and kindness take precedence over material gain. It was impressive to see and hear.
The Thai did take on many of the British ways (they still have left side driving), but in other ways like in their governance structure, they have vacillated between democracy and military totalitarianism, but always under an overarching monarchical system that has a King in power. It is that King that has traditionally held Buddhism as the country’s religion of choice…whether the people wanted it or not…and many have traditionally been more prone to Hinduism and the ways of Vishnu. Nevertheless, there are golden Buddhas at what seems like every street corner temple as one drives through modern day Bangkok, the city of canals.
Our first stop was at the Bridge On the River Kwai, made famous by the 1957 movie with William Holden and Alec Guinness. I often find myself whistling the tune used by the British soldiers to keep their spirits up, The Colonel Bogey March. My WWII fixation made this a must-do stop to see where the Burma Railroad line was worked on by the British POWs. This otherwise obscure rail bridge had a strong spiritual draw for me and I thoroughly enjoyed our visit there even though it is now surrounded by market sprawl and floating tourist restaurants. The truth is that this and other rail bridges are not original as they were thoroughly bombed by the Allies during the war. But none of that detracts from the memory of the place.
Our other two stops for the day in the western provinces near the Myanmar (Burmese) border were at the Elephant Haven to feed a full array of elephants with sliced up watermelons, and then a quick climb up the Erawan Falls, surrounded as we went by more Russian tourists than I ever recall seeing before in one place.
As we drove back into town at the end of our day, we heard more from Angela about her life and belief system. She cares for her mother and considers that a sacred oath. She is driven to work to make their lives better at the margin, but not with blind ambition for accumulating material things. Right now she is working to get her mother air conditioning so that she can sleep better. She is a good daughter and a good person who impressed us greatly with her values and civility. She has found a path that either Vishnu or Sedartha (but perhaps less so the local monks who she feels are less than helpful to anyone other than themselves) would be proud of. It is a path aimed at good and a work ethic focused on reaching plenty but stopping at sufficiency, not excess. She is a stalwart soul for whom the term good & plenty was invented.