Four Moments in Thailand by Bradley Winterton

My first encounter with Thailand was inauspicious. I’d made landfall at Bangkok’s Hualampong station in the immense heat of an April noon after a two-day train ride from Singapore. I felt disgorged out of an iron mouth into the heart of a fiery furnace. I was immediately lost in a maze of alleys where metalworkers hammered and rended steel in high-pitched, searing whines under a torrid tropical sky.

For a devotee of quietness and tranquil ease, things could only improve after that introduction to one of the great cities of Asia. I saw, I wandered, and I quickly returned. And if I sometimes longed for a frosty morning or the brilliance of stars on a cold northern night, I was nonetheless genuinely entranced by the gorgeous beaches, the languid Thai afternoons, and the fun-loving hospitality of an essentially generous-spirited people.

And the travelling was as good as the arriving. I loved the buses with their monks and cheerful pop songs, the taxis and tuk-tuks with their swaying sprays of jasmine heavily fragrant in the hot nights, the stocky, determined trains, and the sleekly efficient modern aircraft that served every corner of the kingdom.

Writing a guidebook about a country, as I did about Thailand, means that you see, not everywhere, but everywhere of importance. So I’m slightly surprised that, when friends ask me what I found most memorable in the country, I come up with some rather off-beat replies. Of course Bangkok’s Grand Palace is incomparably magnificent, shining out in golden splendour in the white heat of the sun. Of course Chiang Mai’s Doi Suthep is breathtakingly lovely as it looks out from its high summit over the level plain below. Of course Phuket’s bays are admirably cut out of the bony land, one after another all the way down the west coast of the island. And of course Samui and Trang, Sukothai and Samet, Kanchanaburi and Phimai are all worth the effort of travelling to, and are fine havens every one to any traveller with an eye for the picturesque, the resplendent and the unique.

Nevertheless, what stay in the mind’s eye most enduringly, and endearingly, are somewhat out-of-the-way places, pools of quiet that many a voyager in his haste passes by, anxious to be on his way, eager to take up his reservation or make that beach party. What I remember most fondly of Thailand are a temple and a lake, a river and a ruin, none of them major tourist destinations (and undoubtedly the better for it) but all of them replete with a spirit that for me is close to the heart of the country.

Water features prominently in three of the four, and this is hardly surprising. The Thai heartland is a broad, low-lying river plain, and Bangkok was not so long ago a city of canals like Amsterdam or Venice, and still is in some suburban areas. For centuries the Thais were a river people, and the King still makes an annual stately progress on the Chao Phraya river by royal barge, as if to symbolise the fact. Muddy creeks alongside which Buddhas recline in ornate temples are as quintessentially Thai as are the statuesque ruins of Ayutthaya reflected in the floodwater in the rainy season. Central Thailand is as wedded to water as Venice of old was to the Adriatic, and long lines of chained-together barges bearing rice down the Chao Phraya are carrying the lifeblood of the country down in greatest waterway.

And the first of my cherished memories is of an incident that took place on this great arterial river. I was on a pleasure cruiser that was churning its way downstream from Ayutthaya back to Bangkok. The scenery was unvarying, with the distant banks a uniform and restful green. The broad expanse of the river itself was brown and gently gurgling, and every now and then luminously vivid temples, like jewels dropped from some passing god’s pocket, shone out at the water’s edge.

Then suddenly it was apparent that the sky was moving. Above the placid riverine countryside the air was thick with birds, drifting upwards on currents of warm air, then arching over like slightly ungainly acrobats.

My spirit rose with them. But what were they, these white phantoms of the wind, circling and playing in the high air, then gliding down to land in the tall trees that stood round one particular temple, dazzlingly multi-coloured on the low-lying bank of the river?

Our boat juddered onward and the extraordinary spectacle slowly receded behind us, eventually vanishing from view as a phantasmagoric dream slips away at the ringing of an alarm clock.

They were, I later learned, the Indian open-billed storks of Wat Pailom. Since early in the century, and almost certainly for far longer, these fearless birds have been flying across the Bay of Bengal from the subcontinent, across Burma, and then nesting here on the banks of Thailand’s premier river, 32 kilometres upstream of Bangkok. And, in a reciprocal arrangement, the monks of the temple have blessed them and protected them, even as they have received the incomparable blessing of their yearly visitation. At the height of the Thai dry season, 40,000 of these large white birds roost in the trees surrounding the temple, arriving in October, and the following May winging their way back to India, their numbers swelled by their fully-fledged young now making the long journey for the first time.

If the storks of Wat Pailom filled me with awe at the heroic capabilities of non-human nature, Thale Luang gave rise to an appreciation of the Buddhist feeling for the beauty of stillness, and the ecstasy that can rise silently out of emptiness.

Thale Luang, though, is itself far from empty. Situated immediately to the north of Songkhla in the country’s far south, it’s Thailand’s biggest lake. It is cut off from the sea by low dunes and sandy hills and is home to over 200 species of water birds. Purple herons, grebes, egrets and cormorants, purple gellinules, teals and black-winged stilts make this expanse of shallow water a paradise for bird-watchers, and, as the whole lake has been declared a water bird sanctuary, no doubt a paradise for the birds themselves as well. The lake is huge - 364 square kilometres in all - and the most tranquil place I know in all Thailand.

It’s easy to get there. Sonkhla and nearby Hat Yai are major centres of the long southern panhandle, and a hired car will have you at a low wooden jetty pointing out into the heart of the silence in no time. Then youths in broad-brimmed straw hats will pole you out through the reeds until the shore is a distant shimmer and the sky arches over you like a bowl crafted by a potter to whom simplicity is the heart of beauty.

Empty the heart of all attachments, say the Buddhists, and the soul will float free, upward toward Nirvana. This creed is embodied in the serenity, the purposeful quiet, of Thale Luang. The plop of the water as the punting pole is raised is the bell ringing in an empty sky of classical Buddhist contemplation. Yet, in protecting its birds from the hunter’s gun, this sanctuary is advancing a cause close to the hearts of all who love the natural world, and the wild creatures that would perish for ever if it were lost. Consequently, though it’s as far removed as could be from the frenzy and sensuality of Bangkok or Pattaya, Thale Luang is in fact a very Thai place, Buddhist both in its devotion to nature and in its solitude.

If, after all this water and birds, you expect me to opt for something more urban in my third favourite place in Thailand, I can at least claim that Chiang Saen was once an important city. Today, though, this utterly charming cluster of temples, crumbling monuments and more recent houses is little more than a very modest market town. It’s sited in the far north of the country, as distant from Thale Luang as you can get and still be in Thailand. Its monuments testify to its former eminence, but today it’s a place to sit back and enjoy the view across the Mekong to Laos, brightly picked out in sun on the far bank.

The magnificence of the river, its enormously wide surface a dun brown, and giving off a light haze that causes the opposite bank to waver slightly this way and that in the heat, overpowers little Chiang Saen. Yet the place is content to be what it is - small, largely forgotten, but immensely pretty with hollyhocks in proud lines of mauve, pink and yellow outside its temples.

And charm is Chiang Saen’s speciality, something totally unexpected and innocent. You arrive, dusty and hot off a battered local bus, and the inhabitants smile and carry on with their work, confident that they inhabit a corner of paradise and that you can be trusted not to betray their secret to the great world over the hill.

It has something of the kindly, remote quality of Venice’s Torcello, or of somewhere half-remembered but real in western Ireland, self-contained without being smug, placid and congenial to its small circle of admirers.

Over the river is Laos, with all the vivid remoteness of a dream-vision in Medieval European poetry. Yes, you feel, if only I could be there, then all my problems would be solved, then I would finally be happy. Laos is not hard to get to now, across the bridge downriver at Nong Khai. Even so, here in the remoter far north, the vision remains. But little Chiang Saen smiles coyly, shrugs its pretty shoulders, and says “Well, you can go there if you like. But why not stay here with me? I think you might find this happiness of yours right where you are now. Of course, it’s entirely up to you.”

There’s no water at Phanom Rung. A rocky outcrop, it rises high over the great plain of Esarn, and hence, in earlier times, controlled it. A fortress and temple from Khmer times crowns its crest, cream-coloured in the afternoon sun, tawny and casting a long shadow over the plain towards sunset.

Phanom Rung is the most impressive of the forts the Khmers built in north-eastern Thailand. Like the Roman fortresses in Britain, they formed a chain of command, and thus enabled a martial people to pass quickly from one to another through hostile, conquered territory.

The Khmers were the great power to the east, in modern Cambodia, just as the Burmese were the power to the west. When the Thais emerged on the scene, migrating south from China over a thousand years ago, they had to prise a space between these two giants, and much of their subsequent history involved playing the one off against the other.

Today, Phanom Rung has become what it was never built as, a magnificent work of art. The wind tugs at its square-cut stones, the blue hills of Cambodia are discernible far to the east, and parties of schoolchildren laugh as they clamber over its many ancient and unyielding steps.

The Khmers have been compared to the Aztecs, a formidable power that to us seem, in their art, rigid to the point of monotony, their carved figures repeating themselves over and over as if in a drugged but determined delirium, blindly, stubbornly forging a path outwards from their homeland. Spartan they certainly were, and the bare temple that is Phanom Rung bears little resemblance to what the Thai sculptors were to produce in their sinuous, almost Athenian artifacts.

It would be too easy simply to equate Thai art exclusively with the proximity of water, and that of the Khmers with aridity and stone. Nevertheless, there is a fluidity about the finest Thai creations, and an impermeable solidity about the Khmer, that inevitably invites one to make the comparison.

These, then, are the places I would recommend to any world-weary voyager engaged on the quest for tranquillity and insight. In the final analysis I love them not for any symbolic content they may have but for their quiet, their isolation, and the sense they give me of inner peace. I have stumbled on them largely unaware of what they might hold, and the joy they gave me came unasked for.

A northern outpost, a southern lake, an eastern ruin and a central monastery - each gave me that most precious of things, a visionary moment. Perhaps you will see what I saw there too, but more likely you will come across your own moments of enlightenment elsewhere. For as almost all oriental sages have said of such experiences, “Don’t struggle to look for them. Relax, and they will be there.”