| Phuket - Jan 2002 |
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| Written by Administrator | |
| Friday, 25 April 2008 12:35 | |
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On Jan 12th we arrived in Phuket, a beautiful island surrounded by the worlds clearest ocean, but, alas, this time of year, full of northern europeans. We rested a month here in a 2 br house rented for $300, and then rented a car and headed out. Our objective was the northern city of Chiang Mai, where we now repose, but we first headed for the deep south. The deep south is a strange land. The vegetation is tropical, and so are the crops. The rubber tree plantations are like vast cathedrals, shady and quiet, their vast canopies held up by rows of white slender tree trunks. They swoosh by metronomnically as you speed by. The oil pam, another african import, is a thick set, gigantic, hairy palm, with hairy, black fruit the size of human heads, hanging from its crooked shoulders. These plantations spread among the karsts -- limestone rocks from a few dozen to a few hundred meters high -- vertical, weirdly shaped, driven through with caves, overgrown with vegetation -- like gangsters huddling together in groups with murderous intent. The land is Muslim and the cities Chinese. The Muslims are a fundamentalist lot in the middle of a spiral descending into ever deeper radicalism. All women wear head scarves, all men wear skullcaps, mosques here, unlike elsewhere, are off limits to nonbelievers, there are Osama portraits everywhere. The process at work is a sort of Pascal's wager: clerics, in order to differentiate themselves, introduce every more radical practices. Each practice is in itself not onerous. Uncertain whether God really desires it, one is tempted to follow it anyway. If God cares, he will be pleased. If God doesn't care, He will at least not be offended. The result is an increasing radicalisation. Nobody asks why God should care how we dress or what we eat. After all, if God were really offended by the sight of women's hair, He would have made them hairless like frogs, perhaps? But no one asks, just in case God may be offended by the very asking. The process is a mental blind alley. The local Muslims, mostly ethnic Malays, have recently revived the custom of writing Malay in arabic script, something even the Malaysian Malays find quaintly antiquated. Weirdest of all, Pakistani clerics come here to teach the Thais how to live. I find the idea that people from medieval, backward, mismanaged, chaotic, poor, dirty, illiterate, corrupt Pakistan can have anything at all to teach people from clean, well managed, organized, literate, law abiding, and, relatively, rich Thailand a mind boggling proposition. But there it is. I have seen at least 4 different missionaries. The Chinese of the cities are fundamentalists in their own way. Taoism is here a vibrant religion practice entered into with gusto not seen elsewhere, not even in Taiwan. These are perhaps the only Chinese Taoists anywhere in the world who pierce their bodies and run over hot coals barefoot. Much of that is a demonstration calculated to piss off the Muslims. In Pattani, once an independent Muslim state conquered for the king of Thailand by Chinese mercenaries (we met his seventh generation descendants), right next to a grim mosque stands a gaudy Taoist temple, which answers every muslim call to prayer with a cacophony of firecrackers. There, eat this! We were there during a Chinese holiday and went in to light incense. The worship in the Taoist temple is quintessentially Chinese: there is no rhyme or reason or order to anything. Everyone does his own thing in any order he bloody likes, some light incese, others toss auguring sticks, others offer food or bunrn paper money,. Everyone is pushing and shoving. The place, like all of South China, is a bedlam -- it's simply wonderfully zany. The cities are Chinese cities, with buildings built in Chinese neoclassical, a Straits style from 1920's, where elderly Chinese gentlemen take their morning coffee in wooden coffee houses, and ladies take their birds out for a walk, and hawkers sell pork sausage and soy bean milk in the street. And hardly anyone here speaks Mandarin. Mandarin, you see, is not Chinese enough. Real hard-core Chinamen here speak -- what else - - Fujienese. From the south we drove 1500 km straight through heading north all the way to Chiang Mai. We stayed in clean, modern hotels with aircon and TV for $10-13 a night, ate cheap, delicious clean food, and were never bitten by anything other than an occasional mosquito. We ate breakfasts from street side vendors and dinners at the colorful, busy night markets, watching people around us doing what the Thais do so very well -- having fun in the course of living. Perhaps Thailand is not so much a place to vist -- its monuments are laughable, and its national parks ordinary -- but a place to stay: to enjoy the hospitality, the atmosphere, the mood. Perhaps a place to live. And now here we are in Chiang Mai, where we have taken a hotel and should be until at least April 10th: |