By DONAL CONLON
Is it a mistake to return to a place which one has loved deeply and has had to leave behind? Possibly! But there is something alluring about the idea, even if you know that many of the things you loved are no longer there.
I lived and worked in Thailand from 1973 to 1978. I had no idea where Thailand was when leaving my job and setting out from Ireland with a rucksack, but a series of chance meetings led me there. When, seven months later, I arrived in Bangkok, almost all my money was gone. A fortuitous meeting helped me find a job as a teacher in a country where jobs for foreigners were almost impossible to find. It made me happy to imagine that I was going to live in Thailand; I had fallen in love with the people my first night on arrival.
Everything was brilliantly new: the way people related to each other, their courtesy to me, their graceful gestures, their houses, their food, their customs, and their philosophy of life. I marvelled at what I was learning. I thought, at times, I might stay forever.
While waiting to start work I asked some people who knew Thailand better than I where I might visit. The island of Koh Samui in the Gulf of Thailand was mentioned as a ‘laid-back’ place. I occasionally had a beer in the infamous Mosquito Bar in Klong Thoei. Long gone now, its reputation as one of the wildest sailors’ bars in the world lives on. It was in the dockland part of Bangkok’s deep-sea port. There, I discovered that a small cargo boat going to the island would take me. They were bringing construction materials down and would take back copra – dried coconut flesh – and fresh coconuts: the island sent millions of coconuts to Bangkok each month. I slept on deck for the two nights and ate the same simple rice dishes as the five crewmen. I was the only passenger.
We ate slightly apart; I could not speak any word of Thai. They gave me curious looks at times, wondering perhaps why I would choose to go with them rather than the train and a shorter boat ride. Maybe the idea that Joseph Conrad had sailed these waters gave me the sense of being some kind of adventurer – and added to that, it was much cheaper.
Later, it was the train and boat that I used for the dozen visits I made in the following years. Already in love with the country, I also fell in love with both Koh Samui and the trip down. Come holiday time – teachers’ holidays were generous in Thailand – I would get the slow train from Korat in Isaan province, where I worked, to Bangkok. I would spend some days in a city which was much less frenetic than it would become. There were new food tastes, bars with behaviour I had never seen before, American GIs on R and R from Vietnam throwing money around – manystrange people wanting to meet me. There was a sense that ‘anything and everything goes’. It was a fun city: scary at times.
There was the overnight train from the attractive central train station Hua Lamphong to Surat Thani. Opened in 1916 in an Italian neo-Renaissance style, the station had decorated wooden roofs and stained-glass windows. It was cool inside. There, I would reserve a seat, sometimes a sleeping berth for the trip. I would sit by the open window of the train going south, feeling my face caressed by the warm night air, and observe the night scenes. Clusters of lights flashed by – dark temple compounds circled by strings of rainbow-coloured bulbs. The train swung left and right, following the sinuous rail and allowing, sometimes, moonlight to splash on my face.
I would eat fried rice with an egg on top and drink a small bottle of Mekong whiskey mixed with unsweetened fizzy soda or a Singha beer. I would pierce the crispy deep-fried egg and let the yoke run down the sides of the piled-up rice. I would spoon on fish sauce mixed with the small chopped-up seedless chilies and eat leisurely and with pleasure, listening to the noises of the train and the night.. Afterwards, I would drift off to sleep, lulled by the old-fashioned clickety-clack of the wheels.
In the early morning, I would stand at the open door of the slow-moving train and watch the passing landscape and feel happy and at peace. I became familiar with the scenes: mud-caked water buffaloes in their paddocks or with their snouts showing as they wallowed in some pond; tall, elegant coconut trees arching in the wind; a man cycling on the narrow ridge between flooded paddy fields or translucent green ones before harvest; or a parent transporting two or three small children to school on a small scooter.
The ferry boat from Surat Thani was a dangerous one. It was a wooden two-deck affair, flat-bottomed and top-heavy. It was an eight-hour night trip and at times when the sea was rough the boat lurched like a drunken man. There were occasionally fatal accidents. The boat would tie up at the wooden pier at the end of which was the only hotel on the island. It was a wooden one-storey, tin-roofed building, standing on stilts. There were six or seven rooms with a communal bathroom at one end of the corridor. The bathroom was simple: a huge ceramic jar filled with water and a squat toilet. It was run by a Chinese family – a thin, livewire mother who I remember rushing around in her bare feet, a boy of 12 or 13 and a younger sister. The father was working in Bangkok.
To be accurate, it was not the only hotel. Nearby was a cheap, ugly concrete three-storey building which functioned as a hotel at times but also, and more regularly, as the local brothel. A few girls loitered around the entrance during the day and evening. Rooms were rented by the day or by the hour. It was rare that they got tourists, but there was sometimes a spillover from the Chinese hotel. The crews from the cargo boats slept there if they had no family on the island. At times, some travellers smoked a little pot on the roof and watched the stars.
I became friends with one of the ferry captains, a fat, jolly, smiling man about my age. He would sleep a few hours after his night trip and, occasionally, in the afternoon, he would take the boat out to fish a little and would bring me along. We would drop the lines in the water, have a couple of beers and fool around. What we caught the hotel would cook for us – it didn’t have a restaurant – and we would eat on the wooden pier and drink Mekong. Then the captain would sleep an hour or two and ready the ferry for the night sail.
In Koh Samui, one just ‘hung out’, there were no organised activities. There were few visitors, just some intrepid backpackers. There was no airport and getting there needed some travel knowledge and effort. In the morning, I would have a noodle-soup breakfast in a small thatched two-table place beside the hotel. I would linger over it, digging my bare feet into the sand floor, letting the sand trickle between my toes and watch trained monkeys, controlled by long cords, knocking down coconuts that were to be exported to Bangkok.
Some afternoons I might take a ‘songthaew’ out to beautiful Lamai Beach. During all my visits I never saw never more than five or six people on the golden sands that, fringed by coconut trees, stretched for kilometres. Indeed, it was probably the first year that there had ever been visitors on the beach. The road of sand and gravel linking the port village of Nathon to Lamai had only been completed that year. Previously, one had to walk the 20km, but conditions were so difficult in places through hilly terrain and some jungle that it was impossible to walk there and back in one day. I was lucky enough to be among the first visitors to enjoy its unspoiled beauty.
I left Thailand at the end of the Seventies and visited again sometime in the late Nineties and thought I had to see one of my favourite spots: Koh Samui. I was aware that it had become popular tourist destination due to mass travel, but I was ignorant of how popular.
The flat-bottomed ferries were gone; speed boats brought mostly young tourists to the island. It seemed speed had become important. The wooden pier had been replaced by a concrete one; the Chinese-owned hotel was gone and so was the brothel. The village was a hive of noisy activity, with buses and taxis ferrying clients here and there.
I went to Lamai. It was more garish and gaudier than I could have imagined. From end to end, there was a string of bars, restaurants and huts for sleeping. It was only 11am but already the noise was shrill. Each bar played strident music louder than the other. Many young western tourists were already drunk – a party mode that lasted all day. There were many services advertised: massages, sightseeing, snorkelling, diving, palm-reading, Buddhist meditation, Thai language courses and others. There were many languages being spoken. More people were enjoying, in their way, the beach than in the 1970s, but it was sad to think that they would never see the place in its unspoiled beauty with its simple background music of waves and winds whispering through coconut palms.
After a short stay, something happened the last evening that made my stay remarkable. I was wandering around the village of Nathon at dusk, unable to find any sign of the places I remembered. Suddenly I stopped, transfixed. On a simple tin-roofed shack I saw a door that froze me in my tracks. It was a beautiful, solid-wood door with some Chinese motifs carved on it and I recognised it immediately: the door of the old wooden hotel.
I knocked; I recognised him at once as he did me, even if 20 years had passed. He beamed. His English hadn’t improved and much of my Thai had slipped away with the years. I managed to understand that he was the one who had stayed. The money offered for the hotel had been too difficult to refuse; the family had gone to live in Bangkok. He had found a job with the local electricity company. He hadn’t wanted to swap the island for the city. His was a modest house and salary – he didn’t share in the wealth that tourists brought. He had kept the door. It looked incongruous on that simple hut, but I was happy to see it again. It helped bridge the years to a simpler island and a more innocent time.
In Bangkok, I found few traces of the places where I’d wandered. The commercialisation of sex that had started with the Vietnam War had peaked and parts of the city were full of leering Western men who drank all day and took different girls to bed each night. There was something sordid and squalid in much of the new tourism.
Years before, the dream I’d had of staying forever had turned to dust. I had left after five years, shattered by a hopeless love story…hopeless because of my cultural ignorance. But I had needed to go back, marvelling that almost nothing remained of the places where, for years, I’d been ridiculously happy. Still, I felt gratitude. I remembered that, leaving long ago, I’d told myself, “I’ll come back some day.” So perhaps I actually went back to say, “I haven’t forgotten you…and thank you.”
