Thailand - Part II

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Thailand - Part II

Ayutthaya

I was researching the Net during the lunch-hour and came across the famous photo of the “Buddha head in a Bo tree” at Ayutthaya. I was highly intrigued. How this was at all possible? Stone idols do not grow on the trees after all.

I called my junior colleague over.

“Dev, Just look at this, How this sort of thing came about, I can’t imagine” I said, showing him the photo.

He also could not imagine how a stone Buddha head can appear in the trunk of a ‘Bo’ tree. It looked more like a miracle than anything else.

We researched further and found a very simple explanation for the photo. The Buddha head was encircled not by the trunk of the tree, but by the ‘arial’ roots of the Bo tree, which had grown down and taken root. However, the illusion and wonder still remained.

I decided to drag Avi to Ayutthaya to see this ‘miracle’.

We went to Ayatthaya from Bangkok in a train and it was a very memorable journey.
We wanted to buy first-class tickets but they were not available, so we went there by second class. After all, the journey lasts only one and a half hours, so, even if the train was crowded and we had to go standing, it wouldn’t be so bad. We are veteran ‘local’ travelers of Mumbai.

At the Hualamphong station in Bangkok, we tried to talk with fellow-passengers and tell them that they should warn us when we arrive at the Ayutthaya station. However, most of the people did NOT know English. Indians always find this very strange, forgetting that the British did not rule over Thailand and so the Thais never found it necessary to learn English. (However, now everyone tries to learn English. It HAS become the universal language for communication.) Only one lady, who was a retired schoolteacher had a smattering of English, that too because her daughter had settled in USA and the lady had visited her.

The train was crowded, and our ticket did not entitle us to a seat if all the seats were taken by the legitimate ‘seatees’. We were perfectly willing to be ‘standees’ and travel, but it did not conform to the notions of hospitality and decency of the schoolmarm. She bullied one or two military-looking chaps into giving up their seats for us, and we traveled to Ayutthaya in comfort, rather reluctantly. In fact we were feeling quite guilty about ousting the rightful ‘seatees’, but when we tried to protest, the schoolmarm bullied us also. “You are our guests.” She told us.

I suppose one just cannot argue with a schoolteacher. Our deep-seated childhood memories do not allow us to do so. So, even those hefty and ferocious-looking militiamen just got up and went away.

Ayutthaya made me sad. At the height of its prosperity, it must have been a great city, but now it is in ruins.

Burma sacked it really thoroughly 1767.

Why and how does a city grow, become prosperous and then decline, and sometimes is taken over completely by the jungle, while some other city is on the way to prosperity at the same time? Our dear Mumbai started from a fishing village, has now grown to a very large metropolis, but it MAY decline and become a fishing village once again in some distant future. The thought saddens me.

Phuket

The Phuket bay is a marine paradise. It is dotted with so many islands that I have lost count of them but the James Bond Island (Koh Ping-gan) stands out in memory as well as the Phi Phi islands, where we had an excellent lunch. The beautiful colors of the sea and the lovely ‘carst’ formations of the rocks give the bay an enchanted look.

We had taken a cruise of the Phang Nga (Cobra Hood?) bay. The cruise was very well planned but I went there in a totally unplanned way. Avi had packed his swimming trunks, but my own swimsuit was in Detroit, because I had forgotten to pack it. I was pensively contemplating jumping in the sea in my salwar-kameez, but then the problem of changing into another dry salwar-kameez daunted me.

But, those touristy places cater very well to the tourist’s needs. The swimsuits were available in the shops on the pier, but we had just enough money for one suit that I liked, in the Thai currency Baht. (They would not accept credit card.) When we bought that, we had no money at all even for the hire of the ‘flippers’.

However, now I was well equipped for snorkeling.

They first made us familiar with the gear meant for snorkeling - the life jacket and the snorkel. Avi thinks himself to be as good as Mark Spitz, the Olympic swimming hero, and so he refused to wear the life jacket, however, his stamina was not as good and so he got tired in this practice session. Sensibly, I had worn my jacket.

Then they took us to another island where the ‘real’ snorkeling was. Here, Avi consented to put on a life jacket after a lot of tearful entreaties from me, and I really had to put all my histrionics in it. “What will happen to me if you drown? At least, think of the children if not me!” etc. etc. He still was not ready to don the jacket, but then I used the last potent threat. “I also won’t wear a jacket if you don’t. Let us drown together. I will go ‘Satee’ not on a funeral pyre but in a watery grave” I said melodramatically. “Oh, cut the ‘nautanki.’ he said, but put on the jacket, knowing fully well the amount and sort of swimming skills I have. My idea of ‘swimming’ is just floating on the water.

We put the snorkeling masks on, practiced a bit and jumped in the sea.

Oh! What a wonderful sight!! How lovely and colorful the gently swaying corals were, and the fish that were swimming in and out of the coral were striped, polka-dotted or just colored with different patterns. All were pervaded in a mild, pale blue fluorescence. Here was a purple coral with many branches and each branch ended in a tiny 60-watt pink light bulb. At least, that is how it looked. I do not suppose corals grow electric bulbs on their branches. They have not progressed enough to produce a Thomas Alva Edison yet.

No land-based garden can ever compete with a coral garden in beauty. Our flowers and leaves do not ‘pulsate’ visibly, and there is no movement except caused by the wind. However in a coral garden, everything moves in silence, which has a wonderful charm in the pale blue ambience

Here an orange-colored cock’s comb was slowly undulating and blowing very tiny bubbles with each wave of its undulation. Another pale white coral was pulsating and throbbing with the water intake and output. The whole coral garden was dancing joyfully. (Actually, the poor corals were not doing anything of the sort, but were just leading their mundane, day-to-day existence. Maybe, we also look the same way to the Aliens.)

However, snorkeling is not easy when you do it for the first time. I lost the grip of my mouth on the snorkel tube and started suffocating, so I removed the mask, which hung limply about my neck. Now I could not put my face under the water and had to swim about with my neck forced back, which tired me no end. I knew I could not reach the bottom with my legs because it was a good 10-12 feet under me. I panicked.

“Help, Help!” I tried to shout.

Nobody was paying me the least attention. The person who had promised to be my 50% partner in achieving “Dharma, Arth, Kama, Moksha” before the Sacred Fire (Agnidev) and Brahmins, was peacefully swimming nearby looking at those *&^# corals and fiddling, while Rome burned. (Or, in other words, had vowed that he would look after me ‘for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health” etc.)

“Help, Help!” I croaked again.

This time, the sailors of the cruise boat heard me and one boy jumped in the sea and WADED towards me and helped me to the boat. To my chagrin, now I realized that the water was only 4 feet deep because it came up to the waist of the boy and he was a short boy. I was drowning in 4 feet of water? How and why did I get the impression that it was 12 feet deep?

I sat on the gunwale and reasoned the things out and understood that the snorkel magnified everything to three times its actual size. The coral, the fishes, the depth, everything looked larger than life.

When Avi came to the boat, I said to him peevishly “You should be ashamed of yourself, fiddling while Rome burned”.

He is used to my allegories and allegations by now. So he just said “That was Nero”.

“Yes, Nero did that and you? You snorkeled while I was drowning”

He was bemused. “But you were wearing the life jacket, you couldn’t have drowned” he said.

Well, I could have. There are lots of things I CAN do, which other people cannot.

After the lunch, they took us to the sea-caves. You can enter into them only when the tide is high. The cave was so narrow and low that at some points, we had to practically sleep in the rubber dinghy which gently scraped against the side of the cave. Suddenly, the cave opened up to the sky and the lagoon inside was illuminated by the daylight. It was a magical moment. The steep sides of the lagoon and the mangroves roots through which we sailed did give a very eerie feeling.

We could not spend much time in the cave because there was a regular traffic jam of the boats, and also they have to return before the low tide, so we came back with wonderful memories of the setting.

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Photos

Buddha Head
Buddha head in a Bo tree

Buddha Line-up
Identical sitting Buddhas in a row

Some ruins
Some ruins and some modern structures

More ruins
More ruined Wats

A modern Wat
This is rather easy on the eyes after the ruins