THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 12, 1995 TAG: 9511100075
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, TRAVEL EDITOR
DATELINE: BANGKOK, THAILAND LENGTH: Long : 290 lines
IN THIS CITY of more than 300 Buddhist temples, I have come to this unique temple of words, seeking understanding, seeking answers.
The question: What is Bangkok really like?
This is the Author's Lounge in the fabled Oriental Hotel. If the words come to me, certainly they will come here.
Everyone who comes to Bangkok comes to the Oriental. This much-made-over former palace (made over much, much grander after World War II) overlooking the murky Chao Phraya River is full of history and tradition. It has been to Bangkok what the Raffles was to Singapore, the sort of address true travelers ``collect.'' It is the place to be.
Literary guests whose writings have made great impact on the world's stage have been memorialized in this lounge: Joseph Conrad (who came in 1888 as a fledgling ship's captain, a writer still in the making), Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Alec Waugh, Graham Greene, S.J. Perelman, James Michener, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, John Le Carre and Sir William Golding.
This is a place, if you will pardon me, where names are dropped. And where, I hope, words will continue to be shaped into meaningful sentences.
The Author's Lounge is an unabashed throwback to the days of Conrad, or at least to those decades later - say the late '20s - when Maugham lived here . .
Tall, slender bamboo trees reach up whitewashed stucco walls that are covered with photographs of the Thai royal family at the turn of the century. Also a picture of Charles and Diana in happier times and another of the Crown Prince and Princess of Japan from just a year ago.
Casually dressed guests sit in cushioned wicker chairs and sofas around small tables. A duo of flute and violin plays behind me.
I am having afternoon tea, as proper an afternoon tea as one would expect in the finest hotels in London.
I could just as easily BE in London, perhaps at the Ritz, except the stuffy formality one often experiences there is totally absent. And maybe that is a point I should begin to make here. Nothing is quite as it seems in Bangkok.
Tea is served by a young Thai woman, silent except for her smile which speaks volumes, her raven-black hair pulled tightly back, her slender body wrapped in a stunning, ankle-length silk sarong (called a pasin in Thailand) of deep blue and shocking pink, brocaded with gold threads.
With all the trappings - delicate porcelain tea service and four-tiered tray containing fresh-baked scones with rich Devon clotted cream and strawberry jam from Surrey, finger sandwiches of smoked salmon and egg and watercress, and rich pastries - set before before me, rather like a temple offering, I ponder the question.
What about Bangkok?
When I arrived here days ago my knowledge of this place, once called Siam, was embarrassingly shallow and largely skewed, as superficial as the film from which it was gleaned. I brought only vague memories of scenes from the mid-1950s musical ``The King and I.''
I examine my notes. This much I have learned.
If Bangkok was once exotically Eastern, it is not now. Today it is a highly Westernized Asian metropolis but still a perplexing place for most Westerners, a place of such proportions that it is difficult to comprehend. From the air it seems to stretch to the horizon.
A city of 10 million people spread over 626 square miles and bisected by an undulating olive-brown river, Bangkok sprawls like Houston on steroids. It is like New Orleans in July or San Juan anytime; the heat and humidity are gripping.
And yet, Bangkok is not really quite like anything else.
There is no discernable city center, no defined business district, no great square of intersection of major avenues where the heart of the city could be definitely located either in fact or sentiment. The road system is without logic; it just happened, six-lane roadways covering what once were canals that snaked through the city.
Traffic is incredibly congested, even on the airport-to-downtown superhighway the Thais call a ``freeway'' but which is actually a toll road. Cars, trucks, fume-spewing tuk-tuks and motorbikes by the thousands vie for a piece of the pavement that . . . that just isn't there.
Thais spend HOURS each day in these traffic jams, and yet without rancor. No horn blowing, no shouting, no shaking fists. A total lack of hostility. Thais go out of their way to avoid confrontations. Nice.
Bangkok is seductive and mesmerizing. It is color and chaos and contrasts and contradiction: steel and glass high-rises juxtaposed with open-front, tin-roofed shops and houses, enormous American-style department stores, midrise, laundry-festooned apartment blocks that uglify cities throughout the world, and timeless Buddhist temple complexes with decorative winged roofs and gilded conical stupas reaching to the sky.
Its grand hotels - the Oriental, along with the Regent and the Shangri-la where I stayed - are some of the grandest in the world, and yet the tap water in them is unsafe to drink. Fortunately, bottled water is available.
Bangkok is a maelstrom of sights and sounds and especially scents - of fragrant flower markets with their profusion of orchids and jasmine and the fetid stench of stagnant and backed-up sewers (monsoon runoff meets incoming tide), of burning incense and the street-cooking smell of woks, braziers and soup pots and fish sauce.
It is not a city of strollers. Broken sidewalks, the heat, noise and exhaust fumes quickly defeat the most determined walkers. The air quality index must equal in wretchedness that of Athens, Cairo or Mexico City, where traffic also is out of control. Surgeon's masks are commonly worn.
And, yes, in small sections of the city - particularly Patpong, a three-block street of infamy where prostitution is rampant (albeit illegal) - Bangkok is a hedonist's delight. Maybe you've seen it dressed up as Saigon's Tu Do Street in the movie ``The Deer Hunter.''
Because of all of this, or in spite of it all, I have found Bangkok delightful. Bangkok is a city that must be experienced.
This may surprise: Bangkok is not an old city, certainly not in an Asian time frame. It is, in fact, only about as old as the United States.
Gen. Chao Phraya, who became King Rama I and founder of the still reigning Chakri dynasty in a rather bizarre manner, moved the Thai (or Siamese) capital to what became Bangkok in 1782, mostly to put some distance between his people and their enemy, the Burmese.
Not before disposing of the previous king, Paya Taksin, who, according to the official story, had gone completely over the top and had declared himself the reincarnation of Buddha. So, in accordance with the protocol of the time, he was put in a sack to avoid spilling royal blood and beaten to death.
The dynasty moved along rather uneventfully, through Rama II and Rama III, until the reign of Mongkut, Rama IV. Enter Mrs. Anna Leonowens, who was to give us - the West, that is - The King and I. In a roundabout way.
I was to discover that ``The King and I'' told me about as much about Siam/Thailand as a film about the presidency of Abraham Lincoln written and directed by John Wilkes Booth would tell me about the United States.
Mongkut was a Buddhist monk for 27 years until he succeeded his half-brother as king in 1851. Rama IV is regarded as the father of modern Thailand. He was a philosopher and scientist with a particular interest in astronomy who brought technology to the country; he was architect of Thailand's first foreign policy that held potential colonists at bay; and he taught himself English and Latin.
But he was NOT Yul Brynner.
To educate his children, he sent to England for ``Mrs. Anna,'' whose book on her experiences reveal her to have been dowdy, ill-tempered and more than a little ridiculous. Deborah Kerr she was not.
Ah, but that would hardly have made a good movie.
The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical (and the stage version before it), is based loosely on a book entitled ``Anna and the King of Siam'' by Margaret Landon, a missionary's wife. She had based her book, also loosely, on the original Anna's Victorian memoir, ``The English Governess at the Court of Siam,'' which was drawn most loosely of all from the experiences of the authoress.
Et cetera, et cetera, et cerera.
While the musical gave the world such wonderful songs as ``Hello, Young Lovers,'' ``Getting to Know You'' and the spirited ``Shall We Dance?'' it gave the Thais, who adore their royal family, past and present, a fit of apoplexy.
They felt and still feel that the movie trivializes the monarchy with a paternalistic, European attitude and that the idea of the austere Mongkut dancing the polka, counting ``One-two-three and One-two-three,'' and romancing the dowdy Anna is too offensive to contemplate.
In one scene, Anna calls Mongkut a barbarian. Barbarian, indeed.
Crown Prince Chulalongkown (taught by Anna), who became Rama V in 1868 and was to rule for 42 years, traveled throughout Europe and sent his sons to study there, abolished slavery, introduced electric lights in 1884 and opened Bangkok's first hospital in 1886. In 1888 he engaged Danish engineers to build an electric tram system 10 years before Copenhagen had one.
Thailand today has a constitutional monarchy, the absolute monarchy dissolved by a 1932 coup d'etat during the reign of Rama VII, who went off to England the next year and abdicated in absentia in 1935.
He was succeeded by boy prince Ananda Mahidol, who spent the next 11 years, a period of Japanese domination, studying in Switzerland. At war's end he returned but died of a gunshot wound to the head under mysterious circumstances a few months later.
His 18-year-old brother, Bhumibol Adulyadej, succeeded to the throne as Rama IX in 1946. He was born in Cambridge, Mass., while his prince-father was studying medicine at Harvard. Next year his 50-year reign, one of the longest of any monarch in world history, will be celebrated with great pomp and endless ceremonies.
It should be noted that while Thailand has a somewhat fractious coalition government, the Thai people maintain a reverence for the monarchy that transcends the comprehension of most Westerners.
This reverence for the royals manifests itself today throughout Bangkok as the Queen Mother (of both Rama XIII and IX), who died this year at the age of 94, is mourned. Her picture, draped in black, is everywhere on the streets.
Large numbers of Thais pour through the gates of the Grand Palace to pay homage and make prayers and offerings at the various temples.
She will be cremated sometime in early spring after a special royal crematorium is completed in the Sanam Luang, the long oval royal playground surrounded by tamarind trees outside the palace.
The Grand Palace, where the kings and their extended families lived until recently, is a remarkable showplace that defies description. I'll try anyway. It is a vast complex of buildings set on terraces covering 61 acres. In architectural style, it is sort of Far Eastern Baroque-Rococo with European Belle Epoque touches, strong Buddhist spiritual influences and delicate Southeast Asian folk art overtones.
It is decorated in gold and vermillion with touches of blue and green and orange in such fanciful ways as to suggest it may have been the work of some demented and wildly talented child - or of a firecracker dropped in a paint factory.
Versailles would be jealous, maybe even humbled.
The centerpiece of the complex, judging from the crowds, seems to be not the various halls and pavilions from which Mongkut and Chulalongkorn and the most of the rest of the Ramas ruled but rather the Temple of the Emerald Buddha.
This is the personal chapel of the king, and the statue is considered the most sacred image in the kingdom. It has watched over worshipers here for more than 200 years.
The Emerald Buddha is actually quite small, just 30 inches tall and 18 inches wide, and is not emerald at all but - I've got two stories here - either jade or jasper. In any case it is a deep green and highly polished. It sits, in an attitude of meditation, high on a golden altar, surrounded by the scent of burning incense and floral offerings.
A seemingly endless stream of shoeless people enters and then leaves. Mostly in silence.
Three times a year the king changes the Emerald Buddha's robes, according to the season. Now it wears the robe of the rainy season: a gilded, blue-flecked, over-the-shoulder raincoat of sorts.
Nearby is the Temple of the Reclining Buddha. This most extensive monastery in Bangkok contains the largest image in Thailand, representing Buddha when he attained Nirvana. It is an awesome 152 feet long and 50 feet high, and is made of cement-covered brick and coated with gold leaf. The soles of its feet are filled with mother-of-pearl inlay depicting the 108 auspicious signs of Buddhism.
Away from the palace complex is a third remarkable Buddhist temple, off the standard tourist track. It contains a 22-karat solid gold Buddha about 10 feet tall. Thought to be about 800 years old, it was, until 1956, covered with plaster. No one realized what was underneath - or how much it weighed, about 5 1/2 tons - until an attempt was made to lift it and the plaster cracked.
Leaving Bangkok, I fear that I have only scratched the surface, that I have seen, and drawn here, a caricature of little substance.
I'm relieved, having just read a passage that Maugham wrote about 1930, that I am not the first to sit here somewhat mystified.
With a somewhat chauvinistic stroke of the pen, he suggests that there is nothing really there . . . or at the very least something is lacking.
But then he adds:
``. . . (W)hen you leave then it is with a feeling that you have missed something, and you cannot help thinking that they have some secret that they have kept from you. And although you have been a trifle bored, you look back upon them wistfully; you are certain they have after all something to give you which, had you stayed longer, or under other conditions, you would have been capable of receiving.''
That is it, I suppose. Bangkok needs more time to work on me. I must go back. MEMO: Pilot Online, The Virginian-Pilot's home on the Internet, has added a
Travel-Outdoors section to its Fun page. The section highlights the best
travel articles from the Pilot, plus links to travel resources on the
Internet. See Page A2 for more information on Pilot Online, then point
your World Wide Web browser to http://www.infi.net/pilot/
TRAVELER'S ADVISORY
THAILAND'S POPULATION is about 65 million (95 percent of them
Buddhists, 80 percent of them connected in some way with agriculture,
only about 3 percent unemployed); about 10 million people live in
Bangkok, the country's capital since 1782.
Getting there: Bangkok is the transportation center for Southeast
Asia, serviced by more than 50 airlines worldwide, including Northwest
and United; I flew China (Taiwan) Airlines from Taipei. The principal
Bangkok airport is 14 miles from the city center, a distance that can
take up to two hours to travel in incredibly congested traffic.
Getting in: Valid U.S. passport required, along with proof on onward
passage; no visa required for visits of 30 days or less. Don't carry
dope; there are two penalties: life in prison or death.
Getting around: Renting cars is discouraged in Thailand, because of
traffic congestion and attendant pollution; if you do, driving is on the
left-hand side. Taxis are metered and plentiful; the noisy, open-air,
three-wheeled, motorcycle-driven cabs called tuk-tuks are not metered,
so agree on fare in advance. Tipping is not customary. For travel
outside Bangkok, it's best to rely on a local tour operator, which have
English-speaking guides.
Language 101: Thai, like many Asian tongues, is difficult for English
speakers. Fortunately, English is the language of international trade
and tourism, especially in Bangkok. Mastering a ``wai'' (bow with palms
pressed together in front of you) will pay off with dividends of
respect.
Many taxi and tuk-tuk drivers don't know English, so ask a bilingual
Thai at your hotel to write down your destinations and addresses in
English and Thai.
Climate: Generally tropical with three distinct seasons: hot
(March-May), rainy (June-October) and not-so-hot (November-February). In
Bangkok, 14 degrees north of the equator, the climate ranges from tepid
to torrid.
Staying there: Thais are a particularly gracious and hospitable
people; their hotels reflect their personality. Bangkok is a place for
a real splurge. It has some of the world's greatest hotels, including
the Oriental, the Regent of Bangkok, the Shangri-la and the Royal Orchid
Sheraton which are on almost everyone's list of superlatives. I stayed
at the Regent and the Shangri-la; both are world class. Expect to pay
about $250 a night for a double an each of those. There are less pricey
choices.
Dress: Light (cotton is best) and casual, except in Bangkok luxury
hotels where some restaurants may require jackets for men. Avoid shorts
and miniskirts.
Info: Tourism Authority of Thailand at 5 World Trade Center, Suite
3443, New York, N.Y. 10048; (212) 432-0433.
- Stephen Harriman ILLUSTRATION: Color photos by Stephen Harriman
The fanciful Grand Palace complex...
Young Buddhist monks...
Damneon Saduak...floating market
Eastern Bangkok
by CNB