Kanchanaburi is Calm

Back when I first lived in Thailand, my old friends Hose and Vinnie passed though the country and we made a hilarious trip to the land of waterfalls and death railways known as Kanchanaburi. As I recall, we had adventurous plans on striking out for the province. Instead, we spent most of our time at one restaurant on an island in the middle of the River Kwai, re-living our school days. We had plenty of stories to last us, and the food was excellent.

This past weekend included a national holiday on Monday for the Queen’s birthday. I decided to head back to Kanchanaburi to see what I’d missed. A work friend wanted to go too. His sister has a place there. He’d never visited it before.

We traveled in his car. Neither of us had any goals. The air was clean and the mountains were tall and we drove at normal speeds along the pleasantly winding roads, stopping whenever we felt hungry.

Near our breakfast spot, elephants crossed the road three times, led by their mahouts. A couple hours later, we each had a bowl of noodles near a lovely seven-tiered waterfall, where loads of other Bangkok tourists had come to picnic. Two or three meals after that, we found ourselves at the edge of a small town square, watching teenagers circle slowly on their motorcycles, flirting furiously while pretending to do evening errands for their families.

In lots of ways this trip was just as slow and uneventful as my earlier one. I thought about something Thailand had taught me back then. At the waterfall, a few young monks were using one of the small falls as a slide. Dressed in their orange robes, they climbed it again and again, inventing new ways to slip down it each time.

On my earlier trip, we had shared a train compartment with some older monks. All of them were smoking cigarettes, in spite of what we were sure were rules prohibiting monks from such behavior, especially on public transportation. To this day, Hose and Vinnie jokingly urge me to beware of corrupt monks on trains.

What struck me again is that most monks are in fact just regular guys. Buddhism, at least as it’s practiced in this country, doesn’t seem to worry itself too much with the sacred. Surely, rituals and rules are central, but so, it seems, are walkmen and Marlboros and the occasional afternoon spent playing in the water, with no goals other than seeing what evolves.