New wood doesn't burn, does it?

It's been a while since the last update. I left you as I was turning east from the main tourist trail at Phitsanulok to venture into Isan, which is the common name for the little-visited Northeast of Thailand. Tourists mainly use the region as a transit for night buses to Nong Khai and the border with Laos, and I guess rightly so, because the tourist appeal with respect to 'things to see' is indeed quite limited here. Yet somehow I liked to sample it, get a feel for it, if only by just traveling through for a couple of days seeing the landscape and the people. Moreover, torrential rains were still slashing the south (yes, now the south of Thailand was flooded), so I was in no hurry to make my way there, yet. And perhaps it was also my 'anthropological eye' opening up after my courses in Asian Studies: Isan is the region where the majority of city migrants come from. It is the poorest region of Thailand, largely agrarian (it's Thailand's rice basket), and the main source of cheap labour: many people migrate from a poor existence in a village in Isan to the city of Bangkok in hope of finding work and perhaps a better life. Ask a typical Bangkok taxi driver, construction worker, Thai massage girl, bargirl, etc. where they come from and there's a big chance they'll say: Isan.

The long bus ride from Phitsanulok brought me to Khon Kaen first, a large university city. I actually felt delighted: this was real Thai territory. No English menus here, no banana pancakes. Here, the only falang (Westerners) you see are some resident expats (some strange characters around), a few English teachers, and a handful of Westerners visiting the family of their Thai wife/girlfriend in a nearby village. Here, too, the Lonely Planet traveller's Bible is increasingly getting its maps and directions wrong (maybe the authors themselves didn't go for a long time). And here, it really helps to speak some Thai.

I had actually been working on my Thai since Sangkhlaburi, where Fa had taught me a few initial words and sentences other than 'Hello' and 'Thank you', which started my language effort. Subsequently I would regularly take my Thai phrasebook with me going out for dinner or a drink and sometimes when I asked or said a common phrase or word in English while ordering food or during some other basic conversation, I would ask how to say the same thing in Thai. Of course, next day you forgot already (in Thai there's really nothing to relate to) or otherwise you mix the syllables up or get the tones wrong, but when you repeat this a couple of times, the stream of tones that constitute Thai when you hear it (the Thai script does not use spaces between words, maybe that's why it's difficult to discern even words in spoken Thai) actually starts to reveal a few words, some patterns of forming sentences emerge and some standard sentences do tend to stick after a while.

By the time I was in Khon Kaen I actually got up to the point that I could more or less say where I wanted to go to, what I'd like to eat and that yes I like spicy, where the bus/train station and toilets are, ask the price of something and (arguably more important), negotiate for a better price (knowing the numbers), have some very basic conversation like asking for someone's name and how old they are (this is a common question in Thailand, if only to establish correct 'etiquette' towards an older/younger person), that it was nice to meet someone, something was good or beautiful, whether I could take a photograph, etc. Thai grammar turns out to be very easy, actually, so it's mainly words you need to learn, and ... tones! Thai being a tonal language, words acquire a (totally) different meaning according to the tone. For example: 'klai' means 'near' in one tone, but 'far' in another, which makes things complicated. I remain having difficulty not using our common Dutch/English 'questioning tone' (rising at the end of the sentence) when asking a question when the tone of the final word in a question does not actually have a rising tone. Nothing I guess illustrates the point better than the ultimate tonal sentence in Thai: "mai mai mai mai mai", which, when pronounced correctly, means: "New wood doesn't burn, does it?"

Khon Kaen had a nice night market, where I could sample the famous pungent Isan food, well-known to be the spiciest of Thailand. I've actually really started to appreciate the typical Isan som-tam (spicy green papaya salad), which I could hardly eat when I was in Laos on my previous trip (even though I had already been to India at that time and ate some very spicy food, but Indian spices are different). Additionally, there was a pretty lake with an unusually shaped temple in town, but that was it, basically. The surroundings had a few places of interest, though, and I chose to go the Ubol Ratana Dam, which I thought would be both nice to see and actually quite appropriate considering the heavy flooding in primarily lower Isan the weeks before in which this dam was involved too. It was about an hour by local bus and it was nice to spend some time walking around the area, which has an adjoined park and is apparently also very popular for primary school outings as suddenly the whole dam was populated with school children. Of course, as a Westerner, I got the privilege of talking to the headmaster while he was waiting for his class :)

From Khon Kaen I went to Mukdahan, really just to, as my friend Robert (whom I later visited in Ban Phe), put quite well (and nodding understandingly), 'see an old friend': the Mekong. No travel to Southeast Asia is really complete without having seen the Mekong and since I had no clear goal in Isan, I might just as well go that way. The Mekong forms the border with Laos in this area and as I was watching the mighty brownish river flow by, wide and high, at full stature because the rainy season had just ended, while looking over to the city of Savannakhet in Laos on the other side, I saw myself standing there, four and a half years ago, on the other side in Savannakhet, looking over to Thailand. It was almost poetic in a sense that the Mekong at this point should separate my previous Asian journey from this one. Then, the right and only thing to do in a quiet, pleasant riverside town at the Mekong is to eat a big fish and drink a large beer at the riverside, enjoying the warm tropical evening, so that's what I did.

Next day I visited That Phanom, about an hour north of Mukdahan, where one of Isan's most revered temples is located. Isan is always said to have its own identity, distinct from the rest of Thailand. The people are all a bit darker skinned (mostly of Lao-Thai or Khmer-Thai descent); they speak their own Lao-Thai dialect, and there is actually quite a bit of racism against the darker Isan people from the ethnic Thais. Culturally and religiously this temple at That Phanom is supposed to be contributing to Isan identity. The temple was clearly non-Thai and much more Lao style (like the golden monument in Vientiane for those who know) and it was heavily visited, many people burning incense and making koras around it and it breathed the religious atmosphere only important temples have. This was actually a sight to see and worth going to.

That same afternoon I continued my way to Ubon Ratchatani in the far east of Thailand. I arrived in the evening, so I stayed for another night to have at least one day to look around, but there is really nothing to see in Ubon. You might have noticed that I did my previous travel blog update from there :) I did ask around whether it was possible to visit Preah Vihear the next day, the contested Khmer temple on the border of Thailand and Cambodia which both countries have been fighting over. It's a bit of an effort to get there, but it's relatively near to Ubon and I thought it would be interesting to go, if possible. With a little effort (having hotel staff call the temple's administrative center, which did not answer and my Thai not quite sufficient to understand the staff), another person of the hotel finally told me it's closed, making hand gestures of shooting a gun. Skirmishes are not over, apparently, and the temple is beset by military. This was exactly what I wanted to verify before going all the way there and find out for myself (a week later in the south I read they're planning on opening it for tourism again, though).

Next morning I took the 8.45am train to Khorat, which only left at 1pm ('train delay' they told me when I had been waiting at the station for half an hour seeing several trains come and go in and asking everytime, but none of these were my train. I just couldn't ask anything else or ask why, as nobody would understand me. You learn to have patience when traveling, but when the train came in at noon, everyone got in, and then still it took 1 hour before we set off, I was actually getting a bit frustrated. Mm, not fully adapted still, I guess :) ). It was a beautiful ride through vast areas of farmland, though. Here, you could see the real Isan countryside one always hears about: yellow rice paddy after rice paddy, water buffalos strolling around, and scattered people in the fields harvesting rice, truly back-breaking work I'm told.

Khorat, or Nakhon Ratchasima as it's officially called, is a big city in the heart of Isan, with nothing much of interest either, but the nearby Khmer ruins of Phimai are worth a visit. Southern Isan has lots of scattered remains of Khmer/Angkorian temples, since this area in the vicinity of Angkor Wat itself. It is said that Phimai, predating it by about a century, was used as a model for Angkor Wat.

This concluded my brief Isan detour, which left me in a good position to take a 6-hour bus to Ban Phe, near Rayong, which is popular with tourists as a stopover, because the ferry to Ko Samet leaves from here. I did not come for Ko Samet, however, but to visit Robert, from Scotland, who I met while traveling in Vietnam for a month in 2008. We had a really good time in Vietnam, both traveling south to north and meeting up regularly, and it was good to see him again. We hadn't seen each other in two years, but it almost felt like two weeks, of course being in similar surroundings as well, only now in Thailand. Robert settled down in Ban Phe as an English teacher at a private school after his travels and it was really good to talk about all our travels, reminisce about our time in 'Nam together ;), hearing some 'local' perspective on Thai life, the facades of Thai 'face' and the quirks of the Thai education system he's involved in, and just to have a good time and a couple of beers, of course. I could stay at his and his girlfriend's house, which was very nice, and I spent a long weekend there from Thursday evening till Monday afternoon. It also just happened to be Loi Krathong that weekend, a major Thai holiday, so a big party was thrown at a local beach bar and everyone let up their 'krathongs' into the air, a sort of paper balloons which are lighted by a burning something in the middle, which causes it to rise slowly into the air. Quite beautiful to see the air filled with all these lighted krathongs flying over the sea!

Then I went back to Bangkok to continue my journey south for the two weeks still left on my visa. I intended to cover the islands in this update as well, since I've just crossed over into Malaysia two days ago, but considering the length of the above I think I'll leave it for another update, soonish.

All the best and good luck surviving winter!

Arnoud.