Some Kind Of Big Cat

I don't know what this thing is, but it's big. I had seen a photograph and I figured it was like an ocelot or something, but it's much bigger than that, approaching leopard proportions. The Sappraiwan Resort has two of them in a good sized paddock with nice play structures, and the animals look clean, healthy and well fed. Happy? I don't know. They did not seem thrilled to have company.

Elephants Are Good Luck In Thailand

This very well behaved family of elephants belongs to the Sappraiwan Resort in Pisanolok. The mahoots set them up out front a couple of times a day, and you can buy bananas to feed them.

The mahoots are from a local hill tribe, the Gariang. Generally speaking, being a mahoot is not a great job, and being from a hill tribe usually puts you in a low demographic. I found out, though, that all of the mahoots at this hotel live here cost free and provide their families with a good living, including lots of money in the bank. The Gariang are Catholics, and the children go to a local missionary school. My little group stopped by, it was a nice church with out-buildings and a school. "St. Nickolas." The Gariang children therefore speak good English, which will get them better jobs in the future. So much for cliches.

Traveling Around In Thailand

Buses go everywhere in Thailand, it’s all very easy really. And anywhere you want to go, anywhere at all, there are ways to get there from wherever the bus lets you off. It’s all cheap and relatively convenient, and you could do it too, honest.

From the bus stations there is always a local transportation network of some kind. There may be actual taxis, but probably not. More likely there will be tuk-tuks, three-wheelers with a bench behind the driver, some all enclosed and some home-made from motorcycles; or song-tao, pick-up trucks with two rows of benches in the bed; or motorcycle taxis; or three-wheeled bicycle taxis; or just some guy with a pick-up or a car. If worst comes to worst, someone at the station will call their cousin, who will leave work in the field to come and drive you somewhere.

When I show up at a station there’s always someone to ask me, “where you go?” At first I was very leery of these guys, it’s almost always guys. I drove cabs in New York, and it made me suspicious of anyone hustling rides at a bus station. In America, none of these guys are your friends, they all want to charge you a hundred dollars to go from La Guardia to Manhattan. My experience in Thailand is that they are all just trying to be helpful. (Except at the big airport in Bangkok, and there you can always get a meter cab.) They know you need to go somewhere, and maybe they can take you, and that helps both of you. And it’s almost always for the same fare that they would charge a Thai person.

For me, it’s a little easier, I admit. If I want a hotel, they’ll talk to me a little and find out how much I want to spend and what kind of place I need. This they can only do in Thai, so you they might just take to the best hotel in town, which you probably want anyway. Me, they ask, “do you want to swim?” “Do you want Farang TV?” Then they take me to the perfect place. I’m sure that the hotel kicks-them-back a few bucks, but they don’t ask for it from me. You, they might take to the hotel that gives them the best commission. You’ll be happy, don’t worry.

Not speaking Thai, you’ll still have some kind of guide book or something else written down that you can point to. Thais are not famously great English speakers, but almost everybody can sound out the A,B,C’s.

Hotel wise, I’ve stayed in lots of low-end places and I’ve almost always been comfortable. I say “almost,” there’s a cheap place in Bangkok that is popular with Peace Corps volunteers where the bad smell really put me off my food. By low-end I mean down to six dollars or so for a “Guest House” room with a fan, no phone or TV, and a bare-bones private bathroom, meaning small, and the shower and sink drain onto the floor, but I’ve never seen one with a squat toilet, all western style thrones. I think if you go down to three dollars maybe there’s a squat toilet, and maybe no windows or screens either, but no one would suggest that I stay there and there’s always something better.

Thailand is a wonderful place to travel around. It’s all very exciting and new, but it’s all very safe and hospitable too. The food, even from ramshackle restaurants or food carts, is safe to eat. Even the police are non-threatening: if you happen to get caught breaking the law they’ll be happy to “settle-out-of-court,” but they never set up foreigners to make money off of them.

My advice would always be to avoid the touristy places, who needs that shit anyway? What, you want to come to Asia to go to KFC?

The Vietnam Era Communist Insurgency In Thailand

I always knew that there had been one, but I had thought that it was very small and confined to a small area, deep in the Northern mountains. A few years ago I visited a mountain village that was so remote . . . how remote was it Freddy? It was so remote that the inhabitants were not really sure if it was in the province of Nan or the province of Phrae. There were caves nearby that had been used by communist insurgents, I didn’t take the hike to see them but I’ve seen caves in that area, they are deep and solid. In the 1970’s the area was so red that the present government, to be on the safe side, still maintains a permanent presence of fifteen soldiers, one truck, and a helicopter-pad. But the whole thing was much more widespread than I had dreamed.


Last weekend I traveled to a hilly region very near the central valley “Rice Bowl” of Thailand to visit a preserved communist encampment; an impromptu field cemetery for cremations; some battle sites; and a bizarre Antonio-Gaudi-like cluster of buildings that serves as a memorial to communist soldiers who died in the fighting. My guide/interpreter/sign-reader was perfectly suited to the task: she’d been a university student during the demonstrations which sent many students to the hills to join the communist movement, and she’d been a young teacher in the countryside thereafter who had been subject to the whims and entreaties for assistance of both sides. She remembered everything, and she was a great source of information.


The political situation then was ripe for insurgency: a bad economy; trouble everywhere in the region; a “President-for-Life” style strongman, an army general and self-styled “Marshall” who ran the country like it was his personal fiefdom and who planned to keep the entire thing in his family through inter-marriage with the families of lesser bosses.


There was the usual talk of “workers” and “farmers,” but most of the grunt work seems to have been done by students from the better universities. There was overseas involvement, not much from Vietnam, but from a bigger country to the north, not Russia, do the math. There was bombing, including napalm, and lots of running gun fights back and forth across the area. Lots of innocent people got caught in the middle. It lasted a long time. I need to read more about it.


The importance of history is hard to underestimate. The danger that cleptocracy and megalomania will lead to violent resistance from below can be witnessed in Thai society today, on a more limited scale and in a much more progressive way, to be sure, but it can be witnessed in events like the recent takeover of Thailand’s biggest international airport. Takeovers and large demonstrations are violent acts in the pocket of a vest.


We in America also have lessons from history that speak to us today with great authority. I hope that someone is paying attention.

The Geneva Conventions

“We will follow the Geneva Conventions.” It is a fact, though, that the Geneva Conventions are a lot like the Bible. People tend to pick-and-choose exactly what it is necessary to follow.

To my knowledge, the Geneva Conventions classify the Browning M1A2 Model 1918, 50 Caliber machine gun as an anti-aircraft weapon, and forbid its use against personnel. You can, however, witness its use against combatants in daily use today if you watch TV news. In the Vietnam conflict, American forces grafted four of them together to make “quad-fifties,” which were ubiquitously used for perimeter defense. In the Pacific during WWII, the Marines routinely stripped them out of junked airplanes and used them against Japanese troops. American troops love them, with good reason. They have a kill-range of about a mile, and used against soldiers attacking en mass they will blow through human beings a few at a time. I never remember any Geneva-Convention-based objections to their use against troops.

The “fifty,” land mines, white-phosphorous, napalm, cluster-bombs, these things aren’t going anywhere. They work, and they save lives, at least in the forces that employ them. Let’s worry more about preventing armed conflict in the first place.

Being 60

Lots of my friends and I are having to figure out this whole thing of being sixty-years-old. No one can know what it’s going to be like. It comes to everyone as a surprise.

It’s like touching the electrical mains for the first time. No one could have told you what it would feel like, and you could not have guessed.

“It’s like electricity, but lots of it.”

“It’s like the musical note “A,” two steps below middle-“C,” at 500 decibels per square inch.”

“It’s like purple.”

So we’re sixty: what’s it like?

It’s bloody annoying, that’s what it is.

Housekeeping

Dear D'munder,

I just spent another twenty minutes trying to comply with your request to delete your comment from an old blog post, and, to the best of my knowledge, it can't be done. I found it, finally, and I jerked it in every direction that I could think of and no-go.

If you have any suggestions, please let me know.