The River Kwai

My wooden room sways on stilts over a swampy inlet of the Kwai, surrounded by a thick forest of bamboo that keeps the wind out and the humidity in. An enormous monitor lizard lies across the rickety walkway that leads from the bar to my veranda; it plops head-first into the swamp as I approach. Geckos click, cicadas keep up a chorus of undulating tst, tst, tst and more spaced out peeps and chirps and small spiders crowd my door frame, jumping onto my neck as I fumble with the padlock in the dark.

I strip off the day’s mucky clothes, wrap a sarong around my waist and mix up my developing chemicals in the shower room. The insect chorus is lovely outside. If only I could turn the fan off to enjoy the natural noises without the electric whir. But the heat is intense and I‘m a softie. I’ve been here a week now and still haven’t acclimatised and feel like I never will. The moon casts a beam through the slats in my wall making the darkroom not very dark at all but there’s nothing to hang a towel or sarong from to dampen the light any further so it’ll have to do. I sit cross legged on the floor, switch on the head torch - which with a red plastic covering acts as a safe light - and begin to develop the pinholes I‘ve taken over the last few days. Ants and spiders soon start to crawl over my bare legs, climbing into the trays of chemicals, dying immediately and sticking to my negatives. After an hour I move the chemical trays to one side and shower. It’s so hot, I have to try to escape the sticky heat somehow. I’d be naked but for the fear of the chemicals splashing me.

Occasionally there’s a resounding plop outside as another lizard nose-dives into the swamp. A three inch long gecko sits on the wall near my head, picking off mosquitoes. He sings happily as he eats, like a postman on a summer’s morning. After two hours I see that the pinholes are mostly underexposed. It’s a crushing disappointment. The jungle eats more light than I could’ve imagined; thirty seconds exposure in bright sun and the foliage is still not registering. Even the old trains by the bridge at dusk that got a fourteen minute exposure – nothing came out! I trekked twenty kilometres today to get some of these shots! Well, that’s pinhole photography. I’ve no choice but to try again tomorrow, perhaps concentrating a bit harder this time around.

I walk to the bus station at sunrise. Motorcycle taxi men in pink waistcoats shout

“Bu stay shun?” their mouths gaping like suffocating trout. On the bus I repeat my destination - Hellfire Pass, Hinktok - to the conductor several times. Her brow creases above her white anti-traffic-fume surgical mask. A fellow passenger repeats what I said, dropping the ‘H’s, syllables and endings.

“Ell Fire Pah. In Toch,” sounding like some sort of emotionless cockney.

“Ahh,” the conductor nods, taking my money. My fellow passenger has whitening cream on his face, as is the practice among many young Thai‘s who try to be as western as possible. But he hasn’t rubbed it in very vigorously so he looks like he’s wearing swirly aboriginal tribal paint.

At the gas station the driver keeps the engine running and sparks up a cigarette whilst waiting for his petrol tank to fill. Glasses of water, offerings to the Buddha statues that dangle from the ceiling, vibrate on the dash board. The black tar road is easily visible through the vehicle’s rotting floor.

HellfirePass, Hintok. Caws and peeps, twittering bird call, rustling, falling leaves and creaking, roaring bamboo...these are the sounds of the jungle here. Wasps feed on my sweat. I let them crawl over me. The way they amble over my hairy arms tickles. Orange flowers that look like mini water pitchers coat the rotting railway sleepers. I gasp for air; the wind is being cut off by a ring of mountains and it’s brutally hot.

The sight of a mountain equates to the concept of freedom to me. It must’ve been just one more part of the torture for the POW’s working here in 1943. To look out from this train line and see the wild hazy beauty of the Burma mountains and yet, for freedom to be such a distant dream.

Before I start making pinholes I open up my changing bag and shake it out. I don’t want to be surprised when I stick my hands in there. Scorpions like to sleep in such dark places. A thick black snake slides past as I stand motionless at Hinktok Cutting for a four minute exposure (it’s slightly overcast now and I’m upping exposure times to cope). Snakes usually scarper when they detect a human’s movement but since I’m perfectly still, counting down the seconds in my head, looking at the scene, trying to judge exactly what it needs, lost in calculation, it doesn‘t know I‘m here. This beautiful shiny reptile slithers past, a metre from my boots, and slides on up the tracks. I feel immediately lighter inside. Whenever I see a wild animal it’s like this, like I’ve got one foot back in the Garden of Eden.

Rain falls, the earth turns a deep red and exposures are up to six minutes. I count the seconds down. After a minute or so the numbers step into line with my heartbeat and the chirp of a nearby insect. A rhythmic boom-peep, boom-peep, boom-peep. I sway, light-headed and exhausted. Feel my energy draining into the fallen leaves, my eyelids closing and my feet taking root. Visualise the POW’s working here. Remember the old man shaking outside Granddad’s house. There’s no time between us all, nothing between me and them and us and the insects.

A day later, having dossed down in a very forgettable Namtok hotel, I’m walking along the still intact train track in the direction of Kanchanaburi and the Bridge over the River Kwai. Peasant cattle herders, their animals milling either side of the rails, wave at me with nervous surprise. They don’t see too many westerners out this way on foot, I guess. I keep to the track, stepping from sleeper to sleeper. It’s easier to walk that way, rather than hiking through the crop fields or even on the muddy paths. I can keep up a four mile an hour pace without problems. Many wooden sleepers are either rotten or burnt away (due to crop burning I think). I think of the well known phrase ‘A life for each sleeper’ and remember the POW’s with every step. The rails crack – sounding like sharp gunshots - as the day warms up. I pass the station of Wang Yai - a former transit camp for POW’s - and mountains crowd my left hand side. A temple tops the highest; it’s magnificent scenery.

Two hours on the track runs into deep forest. There’re rustles as snakes move away and the barks and coughs of baboon echo throughout the surrounding bamboo (I hope they’re baboon anyway; this is also leopard and tiger country and I’ve no defence at all, not even a penknife). The Kwai valley opens up to my right; it’s full of white sand beaches, green mountains, and a hot hot hot wind blowing over from Burma.

Chiang Mai

Bells jingle in the mountain wind, racing birdsong to my ears. Motorbikes whine beyond the perimeter wall. Monks in orange robes gather under trees. A middle aged monk, flea-ing a fat temple dog, is eager to practice his English. He’s a tutor, he explains, responsible for educating the younger monks of two monasteries in the city and he wants to talk of social problems. Especially terrorism.

“The Muslim terrorists here in Thailand,” he says, “they kill so many in the south, they are a bad people, our government captures some, regrettably six died, but they did do wrong, didn’t they, I read this in the newspapers, it had to be done...”

“Well, maybe...” Terrorism, in our world, is a non-subject for me, so often the excuse for a fit-up or a history re-write, and I don’t really want to waste time talking of it. So I ask him about Buddhist morals instead. For instance, how can Buddhists, who are meant to feel love and compassion for all things, pass by the many people who sleep on the streets in Bangkok without acting?

“Ahh, none of the homeless are Thais,” he smiles, as if that matters, “all are from Laos or Cambodia and you know, you can’t trust those Cambodians, they’re all liars...”

It’s thankfully beyond me how a nation supportive of Buddhism can be so thoroughly infected with such nationalistic fervour, which in our country would be called racism. We talk of the sex trade. I comment that it doesn’t reflect well on Buddhism.

“But if the Christian and Muslim tourists didn’t want it, would it happen?” he smiles, gently humouring my ignorance. I’d laugh and accept the lesson if what he said was true. But tourists account for just five per cent of the sex trade in Thailand. The other customers are all locals.

“And those children,” the monk continues, “it’s regrettable, but they’re not Thai you know, all are Cambodians...” he stops, realises what an idiot he sounds, repeating right wing newspaper gossip as he is, and finishes, “but they are nice people, yes, yes, we are all the same…”

Ultimately, you have to be a Buddhist to understand Buddhism. Likewise Islam, Christianity, Judaism and all the other organised religions. Otherwise the quirks and inconsistencies of it all are just too much for any real, free, living creature to swallow.

Where independent thought is not, racism reigns.

Reject worldly goods but go for that 4 x 4!

Reject worldly goods but love the king and all his immense riches!

Reject worldly goods but abuse those tourists. Milk the white elephant now!

Each time I feel down, sick of the lies, the racism and the hassle here, I think, thank God I’m only visiting. It must be as hard to be a good human here as anywhere, what with all the fake veneer, the gaudy temples and the forced King worship.

But I’m sure Thais would improve rapidly, as we all would, if only they stopped hiding behind their flag and began to realise that all this talk of countries and nationalities is a fools game, formed out of fear and mistrust and other emotions that we should be working to eradicate, not encourage. Here in Asia you have half the worlds population waving flags and pointing missiles are each another one minute and scooting off to the temples to pretend they‘re religious the next. That can’t go on, can it?

Mosquitoes and self-satisfied hippies control the south side of Chiang Mai whilst the north is given over to jowly European men sitting in sports bars pretending that they’re not sex tourists. I look to change my hotel to something inside the old city walls, central but nearer south than north. The clerk at the Julie Guesthouse, the cheapest of the backpacker hang-outs, looks at me like I’m God’s biggest fool.

“You say you haven’t got a reservation?” he asks, incredulously.

“No, I’m a backpacker, reservations aren’t really in the spirit of things, are they.”

“But everybody reserves by email nowadays,” he shakes his head. “Anyway, we‘re full.” I find a private room across the road. It’s just as cheap as the ‘Julie’ and nearer the off licence.

Cambodia

A girl, three or four years old, implores me to enter one of the two brothels that share the same street as my hotel. An old lady holds the kids‘ hand and beckons me towards a haze of purple neon. Behind them skinny haunted teenage prostitutes slouch in rattan chairs, smiling from behind wisps of cigarette smoke.

An open window shows a row of girls, all about ten years old. They’re facing an elderly Westerner (fat, baseball capped), who’s handing over banknotes to a teenage local lad.

My hotel staff talk as if the Kymer Rouge genocide was no big deal.

“Oh, yeah, the war, that was years ago,” says a young receptionist flippantly. A quarter of the population is executed - including all those who can read, write, paint or play musical instruments, in fact, anybody creative at all - and its no big thing? It’s perhaps no surprise, this casual denial. Former Kymer Rouge members are still in power here. Allegedly the current Prime Minister himself used to be an executioner. Even murderers become legit in our world if they jump on the democracy train.

Two gap-year travellers lie in front of the hotel’s TV watching DVD’s. I walk in just as ‘Apocalypse Now’ finishes and they’re reaching for ‘The Killing Fields’. They’re been in Siem Reap for three days and they haven’t even been to Angkor yet.

I have a fever coming on. A few doors away from the hotel a small chemists operates. A girl sits on it’s dirt floor, tending a baby.

“I’ve got diarrhoea,” I explain, “and a fever.” She nods and hands me a packet of pills. The box states that they’re to sooth inflammation of the throat.

“No, it’s my stomach,” I pat my belly, “I’m sick here.” She takes the pills back and picks up another box without looking at it. I read it.

“No, this ones for skin problems.” I say. “I don’t have skin problems. It’s my stomach.” The baby starts to cry. She lifts it to her breast and hands over two more packets of pills. They, predictably, have nothing to do with curing fever.

If you want to know what executing all societies’ intellectuals does to a country, visit Cambodia. Here it looks like you’re left with two types of people; those who did the killing and those who were considered too dumb to waste bullets on.

My main inspiration for visiting Cambodia is the book ‘Ghost Ships’, which among other things tells of the journey that the surrealist painter Max Ernst made here in 1924. His favourite sites at Angkor were the Temple of Angkor Wat itself, the Bayon, the Terrace of the Leper King, the Elephant Terrace, the Island Monument of Neak Pean, and the Temple of Ta Prohm. My primary intention is to pinhole them all.

An average Angkor day...Up at five, shower, breakfast and out by five fifteen. Cycle between ten and twenty kilometres along tracks and roads flanked by chilly jungle (watching out for elephants and other cyclists with no lights on as I go) to this ruin or that in time for sunrise at six thirty. Make photographs all through the day until sunset at six-ish. Cycle back to town, have dinner at a street stall and a shower by eight. Develop pinholes in the hotel bathroom until eleven. Then write up notes, plan the next day‘s tour and take another shower to wash the stink of the photographic chemicals off. Get to bed by midnight.

The daily pinhole process is slowed considerably by inquisitive tourists who take photos of me as if I were an attraction of sorts and continually ask questions about my ’funny little box’. Orientals are entranced, Americans amused, whilst the French show a well-hidden admiration.

It’s my birthday and I plan to celebrate by watching the sunrise from the summit of Angkor Wat. I sweat profusely and am extremely light headed as I load up my bag in the pre-dawn chill - a sign that the fever is taking an ever firmer grip.

But the trees are perfect companions this morning - the spirits are happy - and the bike ride is a joy. Angkor’s moat explodes with mosquitoes, dropping like demons’ tears onto the placid surface. I enter the stuffy airless precinct, pass the hundreds of people milling about on the approach way (this areas always so crowded, I call it the Costa del Angkor), then climb the narrow, steep ceremonial stairway to the summit of the temple.

There’re just two other people present - sitting quietly on the steps below - as I experience the jungle waking up. Insects and birds stir, calling the clouds into a being of gentle pinks, yellows and oranges. I love what these crumbling ruins and flourishing jungle represent; the folly of man, the supremacy of nature, the impermanence of an idea that was so arrogant as to believe it could last forever...

Gradually other travellers and locals trickle up. An old lady in pink silk pyjamas anoints all the female statues with perfume and paints lipstick and dots on the foreheads of the stone Apsara dancing girls. The first local guide to appear rubs an Apsara’s bare breasts and says to his group ruefully

“They are shiny and ruined because so many people touch them in the past.” In the past?

A local man prays before a shrine in the central Prang, shoes off, feet bent backwards, joss-sticks in ‘wai’ position. When his mobile rings Buddha and the Gods are put on hold. Religion is everything but business is business. An American girl hands over an offering of pre-packed sandwiches and a dollar bill to the shrine attendant.

As I begin to make a pinhole image a wave of Japanese tourists explodes over the top lip of the ceremonial stairway. Exhortations of deliverance are offered. Men, wanting to offer victory, turn at the top step and help women up, regardless of the fact that the women have easily managed the previous hundred steps on their own.

It’s day three of my tour of the Angkor ruins and word has spread throughout the Japanese camp that there’s a new, strange camera afoot. A small wooden box. Since yesterday afternoon, whenever a group of Japanese appears, it’s always the same.

“Hai, Hai! Peen-horl!” a small fat man in Bermuda shorts yells, clocking what I’m doing. The group swings excitedly as one, like they’ve been told of a rare species in the area - a cheetah or a leopard - and have stumbled upon it. They grasp their thousands of dollars worth of cameras and rapidly enclose me in rice breath.

My exposure, of a shady carving, will last about nine minutes, and I’ve eight minutes thirty to go. This is a lifetime for a Japanese whistle-stop tour group. They fart and belch loudly without embarrassment as they look on at me (I‘m impressed by this honesty). If I do anything interesting, like scratch my head, or check my pinhole angles, there’s a scuffle as each pushes the other to get the best camera position and take my photo. After eight and a half minutes of relative inaction - me, mostly motionless, counting the seconds down in my head, and they, equally motionless, waiting for ’that perfect picture’ of the man with the funny camera - I feel like I should do a little dance as the simple closing of my shutter must be a crushing disappointment for them all. Instead I allow the pinhole to fall from its tripod. The crowd audibly winces and mutters anxiously. I pick up the box and pack it away, unperturbed. The indestructible pinhole wins instant respect. Hushed, reverential whispers of

“Peen-horl, ahhh, cool,” abound.

I’m happy that these members of a modern culture that’s devoted to being very instant - instant noodles, instant reality TV, instant cameras, instant gratification -  are taking an interest in something that is really the opposite to all that they represent. Although, some still don’t get it and point to the back of the pinhole and, thinking that the wood is some sort of innovative digital screen, say

“When we see photo?”

Below us, in the outer precinct, despite Angkor Wat still serving as a functioning monastery, locals picnic and listen to over-loud mobile phone music. Tinny versions of ‘Crazy Frog’ and ‘Barbie Girl‘ fill the sacred air. I cannot begin to explain just how many tourists there are. Think of the most crowded place you have ever seen, perhaps Trafalgar Square on New Years Eve, or Times Square at rush hour, or the Vatican on Easter Sunday, and you may have a picture of how the causeway of Angkor Wat looks at any point throughout the day (apart from between twelve and two, when the tourists are safely caged in their hotel buffets).

Girls and boys in ‘traditional’ Kymer court clothes (except the girls have their breasts covered which never happened in Kymer times; they were much more advanced in the old days) pose for photos; one dollar a shot. Other locals offer horse rides and cowboy costumes for their punters. I follow birdcall (birds stay away from noisy tourists so where they are so is tranquillity) to a quiet spot. Which stays quiet for all of five minutes, until a Chinese tour group spies me pin-holing and decides that if I’m here making images there must be something interesting to see. Whilst most of them photograph me and the pinhole one of their number stands on a piece of ancient causeway, gets out a length of rope and starts skipping on one foot whilst grinning into his mates camera. I want to shake him and say

“Why!? Why do you choose to ignore all this beauty in order to take a photo that is completely pointless other than to highlight your idiocy!” I visualise travelling to his Far Eastern home and smashing his photo albums beneath my feet.

The group spies two mangy dogs mating and looses interest in me immediately. Cameras click excitedly. Don’t dogs mate in China? Do they get underpaid children to make their canines in a factory, somewhere between the sports clothing and electrical goods?

Most of the Angkor temples on the central tourist route have the feeling and depth of the average genocide-numbed Cambodian. But Pra Nei is different. A two kilometre jungle hike on a dirt track deters most tourists and a number of times I‘ve found myself here alone, or with just one or two others. The moss covered weathered blocks of the outer temple walls are laced together with white spiders webs. It’s cloudy today and since heavy jungle encloses the dark temple my pinhole exposures take ten minutes. Rain falling miles away beats upon the canopy. I hear it minutes before it reaches me. The raindrops are large and so far spaced that I can remain standing in one place awhile without getting too wet.      

Mosquitoes follow the rain. And huge buzzing beetles, which bumble into me as they weave head height through the jungle. Fever forces me to squat behind bushes every few minutes. Everything I’ve eaten over the past few days has come straight out. I sit cross-legged on a worn pavement and get lulled to a meditative state by rhythmic insect humming. All sound is magnified. The effects of Keytosis? Animal footfalls half a kilometre away are obvious, their exact direction easy to pinpoint. I watch red ants biting my legs and enjoy the pain. Their sense of endurance and purpose is admirable.

My injured spleen vibrates like a cartoon Tasmanian devil. I focus on it bouncing off my stomach wall and freeze then deflate sadly with the realisation of death.

Bangkok

Bangkok is raked by a fierce wind. Looking past the high rises that box me in I see flags pointing west, following racing clouds. But down here nothing stirs. It’s stinking hot and everybody labours the hours away under a thin coating of sweat. The market boys doze in sunshine bathed handcarts.

A sticker on a taxi window says

“I love Farang!”

Imagine if English taxis had

“I love Niggers!” stickers plastered over them and you have an idea of what this actually means.

Here it’s socially acceptable to think of foreigners as the English thought of them back in the 1970‘s ‘Love thy Neighbour’ days. We ‘Farang’ are just modern wogs to the Thais, tolerated only as long as we laugh along with the joke like good little white sambos. I’ve no doubt at all that the average Thai will before long start to spend their lunchbreaks moaning about refugees and begin every second conversation with

“I’m not a racist but…” and finish it with a chimp-like verbal-hand-in-the-mouth

“know what I mean?”

The Thai government has succeeded in many ways in making their country just like the west. Wherever possible it’s concrete and ‘humans rule ok!’ all the way. It’s the same in most countries you go to now. Either they’re like the West, or they want to be. We are their goal.

Pretty soon we’ll have to reclassify all humans. What can this new sub-species be though? A human, minus it’s primitive roots? Without nature in our hearts, are we not merely robots?

All writing and pinhole photos are taken from the book 'Siam Through A Pinhole', which is available from the online shop by clicking Here.