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Photos are by Gronot and are used by permission from thailandphotos.com.
"What's so special about Thailand?"
by Harold Stephens
I am forever asked that question when I talk to people who have never been here before. What is so special about this country?
The world has an image of Thailand that's hard to live down: a land of enchantment, with golden temples, and tiny bells tinkling in the breeze; a country with tropical forests and endless off shore islands; a nation of smiling people and happy children, and monks in saffron robes moving in silent animation; a country interlaced with rivers and canals, called klongs, with rice barges, "rafts" of teak logs, ferry boats and river buses all gliding along in a kaleidoscope of changing colours. It's a Mecca for shoppers looking for the exotic, for superlative silks and gemstones, and intricately decorated objects of art and handicraft; a country of tropical resorts with palms and white sand beaches; a country with great food.
The truth is, Thailand is everything we read and hear, and then some. More than seven million visitors come to Thailand each year-many of them coming back for the second time, and even the third time.
What is Thailand's secret? Very simple. Thailand is real. It's not fake, not a replica of something that had once been. Nor has it been created to attract tourists. Visitors do not need to go searching for the exotic. It's all around, at every turn, even in the streets-a woman vendor, in tribal hilltribe dress, selling primitive jewelry, the beguiling children, the food and flower stalls, the shops, the noisy tuk tuks,. And the temples and palaces, not hidden behind stone facades, with their artifacts locked up in museums. These you see bare their souls for all to see. Living in Thailand has been likened to residing in a museum-a living, open museum, not one of those stuffy uninhabited places with signs saying DO NOT ENTER and DON'T TOUCH.
Thailand is a museum that's alive, functioning and being used by the people. A few years back, a large Buddha, while being moved to a new location, was dropped. It cracked open. Examination revealed the Buddha was coated with a concrete veneer--placed there, no doubt, to fool an invading Burmese army centuries ago--beneath which was a statue of solid gold, weighing some 5 l/2 tons. The government tried to place the Buddha under guard in a locked museum, but the monks and people objected. The Buddha, they said, belonged to them, meant to be seen and worshipped. Today, the Golden Buddha is in wat in downtown Bangkok near the railroad station, where devotees go to pray and tourists come to ogle.
And imagine, Bangkok has 400 temples, and Thailand some 30,000 more. Furthermore, the numbers increase daily.
Thailand is art that's seen everywhere. Glittering temples, so numerous that no matter where you are there are always one or two in view. Shrines and stupa towers, protruding above shops or glimpsed between modern high-rise buildings, poking up from forested hilltops, jutting up on rocky shores. Palaces with crenellated walls, like those in storybooks. Monuments at every turn. Formal museums and galleries, too.
Thailand is more than a place; it's also a mood, as early claimed by a seaman who sailed up the Chao Phraya River a hundred years ago to take his first command, a square-rigged bark anchored a sort distance up river from where the Shangri-La Hotel stands today. He was Joseph Conrad.
What better introduction to Thailand can have than the one written by Conrad a little more than a hundred years ago when he sailed up river to Bangkok: "One early morning we steamed up the innumerable bends, passed the shadow of the great gilt pagoda, and reached the outskirts of town. There it was, spread largely on both banks, the oriental capital which had yet suffered no white conqueror. Here and there in the distance, above the crowded mob of low, brown roof ridges, towered great piles of masonry, king's palaces, temples, gorgeous and dilapidated, crumbling under the vertical sunlight, tremendous, overpowering, almost palpable, which seemed to enter one's breast with the breath of one's nostrils and soak into one's ribs through every pore of one's skin."
The mood that Conrad found is still there. You can find it on Bangkok's river, as he had, or at a simple temple procession marching down a dusty lane in Chiang Mai, or upon a lonely sun-drenched path leading to a hilltribe village. In Thailand you can feel very alive, and like Conrad, feel life to the very tips of your fingers. There is always something happening, or not happening. In the weeks to come I will take you into Conrad's world, in and around Thailand. It's a world of discovery, even in our modern times.
Harold Stephens
Bangkok
Used by permission from:Harold Stephens.
Originaly published by theBangkok Post
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