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Published: April 25th 2008
The first of April was a non-event. We spent most of the day on the phone to HSBC customer care in England, trying to ascertain precisely why Maya had been locked out of her online banking manager and, more importantly, when she could expect it to be reinstated. As it happened, she was basically told there was nothing that could be done until she got home. Tough shit. Applause HSBC. Luckily, Maya's mother is still able to manage the account from England and so we're saved, but no thanks to the 'world's local bank'...
We chill in the evening with a beer. Maya watches Jennifer Lopez videos over my shoulder as I'm far more interested in the cleaning habits of a six inch praying mantis that is companionably sitting on our table with us. It turns its delta-shaped head, with its elliptoid many-celled eyes staring, from side to side as its mandibles gently chew on a long, delicate antenna. It's like watching someone elegantly suck the sauce off a strand of spaghetti. Eventually growing bored, or perhaps hungry, it launches into the air in a flurry of multicoloured wings and spindly legs, zooming haphazardly through the bar and out of
the door. I have a real soft spot for praying mantids - I love their slender, threatening stance, their incredible ferocity and the way that if you get close and stare into the eyes of a mantis, it cocks its head to one side like an inquisitive dog and regards you with a blank, alien expression and menacing intelligence, making one fear for the wellbeing of the tip of one's nose.
2/4/08
Erawan Park is a good half-hour's drive away from Blue Star and when we eventually disembark from the open-topped pick up truck, hair blown all over the place by the wind, we're certainly wide awake. Still, the wind keeps us cool in the blazing heat. We walk into the park along a narrow track. It's incredible. This is a real, albeit nurtured and protected, tropical rainforest. Enormous trees form a canopy from which sunlight falls in blotches, forming myriad shafts of light through the mist. The butterflies are amazing - even bigger and more numerous than in Nepal's forests - lazily winging by, pausing on a flower to consider the nectar and then moving off again. We come across a group of these butterflies, of varying
species, sitting together on the ground with their wings slowly opening and closing, and as we walk past they lift into the air, surrounding us for a minute in a whirlwind of fluttering, silent confetti from which the most incredible iridescent colours and eye-shaped patterns jump out as the light hits them. Lizards, basking in the sun to get their body temperature to a level where they can get on with the day's work, drag themselves reluctantly and lazily out of our path. Again, the sounds are amazing - cicadas, crickets, frogs and birds all shout in their own languages, drowning each other out and competing not for food or mates but, it seems, simply for volume - it's a bit like Camden Market in some respects. Occasionally, the loud whooping of a monkey echoes from the canopy, and the vague silhouettes of macaques jump from branch to branch. The smell is of heavy, earthy, moist air, the temperature similar to the product of a good hairdryer. The rushing sound of flowing water grows louder as we walk deeper into the park and the air becomes dark and difficult to breathe.
Erawan's waterfalls are in seven stages - the
first two or three are close to the car park, thronged with tourists and rather placid. The further we climb up the hill, the quieter it gets and the more spectacular the scenery becomes, until we stop at stage five. Here are a group of tourists who are just heading off to number six, so we stop for a bit. The pools around number five vary in depth, with the one directly below us having a plunge pool of easily six feet deep, and in these pools large numbers of fish are suspended in peaceful shoals. You'd think they were frozen or fake, until you spot one making a minute adjustment to its position with the twitch of a fin or gently coming up to snatch a fallen fly from the surface. We peel off for a swim - Maya goes in first, while I sit on a rock with a cigarette. Later I'm persuaded in and we lounge around in the blue, crystal clear water of this tropical paradise. Maya saves a drowning bee and perches it onto a nearby fallen log, while I enjoy the sensation of small fish cleaning my feet of dead skin. It tickles, especially
in the arches of my foot and so I squeal and jump like a little boy who needs the toilet, which thoroughly entertains Maya and some other tourists who've stopped at the same pool. As the bigger fish move in, I decide to keep my feet moving - the little ones are harmless but some of the large fish are over a foot long and could easily fit a toe in their mouths - especially if it looks like a tasty little worm. Can this place be for real? It is the archetypal tropical paradise. But large, blue plastic, semi-concealed pipes in the vegetation reveal that the waterfalls need a little help with water flow at times. In such a wonderful, spectacular place, I am amazed that they haven't bothered to paint these pipes brown, or even black, or at least put some more plants in front of them. I shall have to photoshop them out of my photographs...
On the way back, as we cross a bridge over a stream, we look down and see a 'small' monitor lizard - still around two feet long - basking on a log in the middle of the stream. As we
stare, it blinks, lifts its long head, tastes the air with the tips of its blue forked tongue, and half-heartedly snaps at a large blue butterfly that flies dangerously close. In a few years it would be more like six feet long and feeding on anything that would fit in its mouth. A beautiful animal that, until now, I'd only seen in zoos and reptile pet shops.
Back at the car park, we wait for our minibus with a plate of noodles and I chase this with a can of Singha beer. When the bus arrives, with air conditioning up to full, both we and an American couple who join us all manage to fall asleep, much to the delight of the driver and tour guide who doesn't have to entertain us with sales patter. When we wake, we're at the 'Death Railway' - a stretch of railroad that clings precariously to the side of a cliff and was built by Allied prisoners of war from Japanese labour camps, at great cost. The Japanese, who weren't particularly pleasant to their charges and treated them awfully, managed to kill thousands and thousands of Allied prisoners through starvation, overwork, malnutrition and
plain old brutal mistreatment. Of course they killed a lot of Thais too, through a vicious invasion. The railway stands now as a testament to all of those who died. We walked out along the railway tracks, as with the train still an hour away we wouldn't get hit. A good thing, as the five foot-wide railway consists only of rails and sleepers - if a train did come, the only thing you could do would be to jump off the side and take your chances with a 40ft drop into dense vegetation and then, in all likelihood, roll into the fast-flowing river. Amazingly, having taken all this into account and (one would think) being mindful of the risks, I still manage to slip on a rail and very nearly disappear forever between the sleepers.
In a cave just by the railway is a giant gold Buddha. He is weakly illuminated with fluorescent lights which play off the surfaces of the idol, and his serene countenance gazes out across the tracks and down the river towards green mountains slashed with grey scars of rock. Bats, squeaking in a frequency we can only just about hear, fly around the cave,
missing walls, the Buddha and us by echo locating our position with sonar and taking the appropriate avoiding action. The only other immediately noticeable subterranean life announces itself with an irritating, frenzied buzzing in the ears - mosquitos.
Outside, the skies Lord Buddha is currently peacefully regarding from the mouth of his cave are bulging with the black, swollen pregnancy of another tropical storm, and we decide to walk back to the station before it breaks. Forks of lightning are hitting the mountains in the far distance and below us, the violent river is carrying with it chunks of leafy driftwood and even the bloated corpse of an adult monitor lizard. Easily six feet long, it is on its back, legs sticking in the air in rigid death, jaws agape as if still gasping for air. As the enormous lizard is rotated stiffly by the current like a dark parody of those inflatable crocodiles kids play with at the beach, a splashing at its side indicates where larger fish are already hard at work stripping nutritious white reptile meat from the bone.
The train arrives, missing the family of cute young kittens who had been playing on the
tracks only moments before, much to the relief of cat-loving Maya and most of the other tourists. We clamber on, settling by open windows and under rotating chrome ceiling fans. It's like a buffet car from the 1950s with bench seats fitted. Maybe it is. As the train rolls from the station and onto the suspended line attached to the side of the cliff, we realise how well-built this railway was. It clonks and wobbles as we roll slowly over it, but it holds and has done for sixty years or so. We curl around the side of the mountain like a rattling old spaceship orbiting a crumbling planet and eventually come out onto open plains and farmland. Despite being a top tourist attraction here, the railway is still a working and viable method of local transport and so Thais get on and off at various stations, commuting to or from work and staring out of the window with that listless despondency I recognise all too well from the faces of the commuters on the 8.10 to Liverpool St London on a Monday morning. Outside the storm breaks with incredible violence, and picturesque mountains and valleys are hidden from view
by dark clouds, dense mist and driving torrential rain. Palms and crops are bent double with the force of the wind and the train carriage bucks from particularly hardy gusts.
We are picked up from the station again by minibus and have one thing left to do on the itinerary - the Bridge over the River Kwai. It will be only a fleeting 20 minute stop for photos, so we spill out into tourist-ville and walk to the bridge, ducking and weaving in an attempt to avoid ending up as an extra in the album of some Japanese tourist's family. We stand on it, take photos of each other and walk back again. We don't learn much, other than this isn't the 'real' Bridge over the river Kwai - just a replacement after the last one was destroyed. The highlight of this stop is meeting a wonderful local dog with three legs - it is playfighting with another dog and running around just fine with only one front leg to support it. Eventually it comes to sit with us and allows us to make a fuss of it, and I christen it 'Tripod'. The storm has paused, but it
hasn't disappeared, and soon after we get back to Kanchanaburi it breaks once more.
We had started to think about moving on, and had kind of agreed to head to Koh Samui, the popular island paradise some distance south of Kanchanaburi. We'd have to bus back to Bangkok and then transfer to either the train or another bus for the overnight drive south (or of course fly, but we're not that rich). On the coming saturday night, the Black Moon Party was scheduled for Ban Tao beach on Koh Phangan, the island nextdoor to Koh Samui - the Black Moon Party being an apparently excellent, small and friendly alternative to the busy, crowded and commerical Full Moon Party beach rave at Had Rin. We'd have to work fast.
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Kate
non-member comment
Hooooray!
The wonderfully humourous blog is back, and two fingers up to muppets! hahahaaaa.... The waterfalls sound wonderful, saw the pics, wish I was there! Cant wait to see u guys on the 21st june! Be lucky! xxxx