Sense of Place

Preaching on Reason

Recently, our ACE expert guide trainees prepared a community trail map of the their village, and the NATR staff accompanied them as they led their first community-based tours. I was paired with five guides from Kuraburi, and we set out on a soaking wet monsoon morning to explore the town I've called home for for half a year now.

We started at Wat Passan, the town's Buddhist temple, where the guides explained various aspects of Buddhism as we made a clockwise circiumambulation around the gilded structure. A statue stands sentinel near the entrance, with hands held in the "double abhāya mudrā" position, the most common representations of the Buddha in south-east Asian countries. It represents preaching on reason, and is one of many philosophies about this religion I find appealing.

The other is its views of death. Buddhists believe that each individual passes through many reincarnations until they are liberated from worldly illusions and passions; they have then entered nirvana, Sanskrit for "a blowing out as of a flame." The three components of any Buddhist funeral ceremony are sharing, the practice of good conduct, and developing a calm mind. You see these often in Thailand: entire streets blocked off to make way for tents and shrines decorated with lights and garland, where people gather to generate good energy for the deceased in his or her new incarnation.

On the temple grounds there's a batik making operation. In this process--which the rain deprived me of partaking in firsthand--cotton fabric is stretched over a wooden frame like a canvas, then patterns varying from the traditional pha lai yang to gaudy ocean vistas are outlined in a paraffin template. The canvas is then painted using commercial paints, boiled in water to remove the paraffin, then shellacked to preserve the pattern. The fabric is used for shirts, sarongs, and wall-hangings.

Elephant Capture

The small village of Tap Chang, which translates to "elephant capture," lies just southeast of Kuraburi. As the name implies, elephants were once captured here for farming use. (You know your life has changed forever when the sight of an elephant walking down the street no longer merits a double-take.)

We visited several farms here, starting at a fruit farm of belonging to Waewueng, one of the guide trainees. After meeting her family at their rustic traditional home, we set ofaf to explore the orchards, where I sampled a bouquet of locally-grown exotic fruits: mangosteen, rambutan, durian, jackfruit, banana, coconut, lamhut, longkong, ratong, orange, and lemon. The farm also produces morning glory, lemongrass, ginger, chilies, sweet potatoes, bamboo shoots, sweet basil, and, for good measure, they also operate a humble catfish farm.

I had the opportunity to harvest some mangosteen, an apple-sized fruit with a thick earth-toned pericarp encasing a sweet white antioxidant-rich core. The first time I glimpsed this surreal looking fruit I half expected to see a group of Teletubbies dancing in the background and giggling. It's harvested using a fifteen-foot-long bamboo pole topped with a small woven cradle, like a stretched-out lacrosse stick, you simply cup the fruit and twist it loose.

Next we explored a rubber plantation. Harvesting natural rubber requires scoring the trees with a narrow grove that runs about a foot down the tree in a helical twist, which then fills with a slow-moving rivulet of latex like the white stripe on a candy cane. The rubber is gathered in small metal buckets or coconut shells and later processed into slabs that look like welcome mats, which are then sold in the local market or sent to a factory in Surat Thani for further processing into any product imaginable from tires to dive suits.

The sight of taps and buckets transported me back in time for a split second to childhood, and of maple trees dressed in rich warm colors dripping sweet syrup through metal taps and into buckets; the crisp upstate New York autumn air infused with the scent of wood smoke. I'm filled with an instinctive desire to explore and keep exploring and to try and make sense of every last drop of the mysterious beauty of the natural world, a memory always tempered by an abdominal-wrenching hopelessness at the mountain of homework I was supposed to have completed and the abstract notion of a competitive job market.

Oil palm is the most productive oil seed in the world, and has become the world’s number one fruit crop, trouncing its nearest competitor, the humble banana. The crop is used for myriad purposes, from an ingredient in food products to engine lubricants to a base for cosmetics. It has a high yield: a single hectare of oil palm may produce up to 6,000 liters of crude oil, and as oil prices ratchet above $70 a barrel it is becoming an increasingly popular bio-fuel source--Thailand's revered king Bhumibol has actually patented his own oil palm/diesel hybrid fuel (Coolest. Leader. Ever.). Unfortunately, oil palm plantations now pose a severe threat to Asia’s diverse rainforests, as pristine jungle is increasingly converted to oil-palm cultivation.

The Tap Chang primary school is located in the heart of just such a plantation. As they receive no financial assistance from the government, the isolated school relies completely on profits from the crop to fund everything from salaries to textbooks. Seven teachers educate the school's 90 students. I was introduced to a nine-year-old girl who’d apparently been sexually assaulted at her home while her parents were toiling the in fields. She's now suffering severe learning impairments. For several days I obsessed on the aggrandizing social injustices of runaway free-market economics, a maddening philosophical debate which every time ends in hopelessness.

He Who Controls the Spice ...

A thousand years ago the Nongyon River in Kuraburi was part of the Indonesian spice route, and tangible evidence of this can be found just below the surface of the river's muddy banks, a few kilometers from my bungalow. Ancient beads are mined by and our guide Ris was able to locate a few for me in minutes (I put them back, not one to contribute to the pillage of what ought to be protected archeological sites). We had lunch a little further upstream at failed resort constructed using traditional Thai architecture.

The day ended with a visit to the home of Mortieng, the "wisdom of local and traditional medicine," also a stone's throw from my house.