Back in May I described my itinerary - Chiangmai to Bangkok - 745 kilometers. I'm doing this on the bike trails of Anchorage. The original post gives a bit of background to this way of giving me a reason - beyond the sheer joy of being on a bike whizzing through the woods - for this technique. Knowing how many kilometers I have to cover gets me out on days my body would rather not. But once my feet are pushing pedals, I'm glad I'm out riding. There's also a map showing the distances between key points.
Kamphaengphet is kilometer 445, so I'm over half way. That's good, because biking season is also half over. ( I have an old bike with studded tires for winter, but I don't do long bike rides when there is snow and ice)
This stop is particularly special because I spent two years in Kamphaengphet teaching English as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1960s. Below are some pictures from that time - a world much more closely connected to the past than it's connected to the present.
These are from an album I put together while I was there. Black and white photos I could get developed at the local photographer shop. The place where people could get portraits done. But Kodak and Fuji slides had to be sent to Hong Kong or Australia to be developed. That was minimally a two week process. I think of my grandkids who probably don't even know about film and are used to seeing the picture the instant it's taken. (I checked with my oldest and she did not know.)
This picture seems appropriate - me on a bike on the road in front of the school with the temple ruins and the water buffaloes in the background. My house was on the school grounds, up on stilts, with two other 'apartments' for teachers in the same building. The soccer field was between my house and this road. So I had a view of the old temple chedis.
Here's a great link that explains the names of the different parts of Thai temples. My bike was my main form of transportation, though my colleagues had motorcycles too. Peace Corps didn't let us have motorcycles but at that time the current ban on even riding on the back of a cycle didn't exist. Peace Corps says the ban came after they figured out that most Peace Corps deaths came from motorcycle accidents. My experience would have been significantly different had I not been able to ride on the back of motorcycles. (Sorry for the blur, I didn't take this picture.)
This was one of my students. Soccer was a big part of school life and since the best soccer field was directly in front of my house, a big part of my life. It was out on this field that I set up the portable record player/radio that I'd bought when we stopped in Hong Kong on the way and played records in the moonlight when my trunk finally arrived. I also played soccer there and started my love of jogging running around the field. And the chedi was always there in the background. At that time you could walk over and climb up on it and sit and contemplate the world. Now it's part of a National Historic Park and has a fence and admission fee.
A short distance from the school in the forest were several more impressive temples. I used to walk or bike over to be alone with these ancient structures - about 600 or 700 years old. The Buddha on the left was part of a temple called The Temple of the Four Positions. This was the sitting position. There was a standing Buddha, a reclining Buddha, and a less common walking Buddha.
The elephants surrounded to top of another temple more in the hidden in the woods, up on a bluff overlooking the River Bing. [Mae Nam literally means mother water, or river and usually proceeds the name of the river. So sometimes you see names like Mae Nam Bing River. Which is sort of redundant.] I'm not sure how many elephants there were all around the temple (It was called something like Temple With Elephant Around it) but there were a lot. The English book we used had stories in every lesson - stories from British history, US history, and Thai history, so I learned about Thai heroes of various wars against Burma, Laos, and Cambodia. This temple looked out toward the mountains over which the Burmese army would have had to come.
There was no television reception in my town. So 'commercials' were live. Here's the medicine salesman gathering a crowd with his microphone and cobra. When enough people showed up, he'd get the mongoose out of the box and have a battle between the leashed mongoose and the well drugged cobra. And then he'd sell all sorts of medicine.
And this is why I was here. To teach English to MS 3 students at the boys' school. MS 3 translates to about 8th grade. They were fantastic students and we generally had a great time. Our teacher training back in DeKalb, Illinois had been excellent. We had 50 minute lessons for each chapter. Each class would start with about five minutes of pronunciation drills. There are lots of sounds in English that don't exist in Thai. There are only about nine final consonant sounds in Thai. Most English consonant clusters are real challenges for Thais because they don't exist in Thai. Steve became Sateeb. (There's no v sound in Thai, let alone a final v. The closest Thai has is a final b. Other v's become w.) Then ten minutes of vocabulary - lots of creative activities to get across the meanings without using Thai. Then we had grammar drills, ideally using the sounds from the pronunciation drills and the vocabulary from that drill. Then we'd read from the story and ask questions about the story. Everything in English. Thai not allowed. Some of the things they learned best were classroom instructions that got used every day. Stand up. Sit down. Louder please. Stop talking. Who wants to read first? Open your books. Repeat after me.
About the kid with the bare feet. No, it wasn't that he didn't have shoes. Thais just take their shoes off before they go inside. So outside the classroom would be lots of shoes.
This is the old Burmese stupa and temple across the river. On Buddha's birthday everyone went there and in the full moon, carried candles around the stupa. It was a connection they had to their ancestors who had done the same thing for hundreds of years.
So it was exciting Saturday knowing that I'd made it to Kamphaengphet on my summer biking adventure. While I rode through cool birch and spruce forests in Anchorage, I was imagining the dusty roads, the wonderful people and their smiles, the delicious food, and the temples as they were back in 1967-69.
This is just the tiniest peeks at my three years living with Thais. Three years that dramatically rewired my brain. The temple pictures are here because Buddhism wasn't really a religion, it was a way of life and permeated everything. A good Buddhist doesn't even kill a mosquito. And there was a tolerance for everyone. There were, of course, economic differences among people, but even the king prostrated himself before the great Buddha statues. I'm using the past tense here because I'm writing about that Thailand back then. I've been able to spend time in Thailand since then and while the basics are still the same, the gap between the US and Thailand technologically has gotten very small. Back in the 60s, Thailand was a different world, a different time, from the US. No longer.
Today I did another 16.5 km so I'm on my way to Nakorn Sawan. This is the longer between stops and I remember the dusty red dirt road in the last three hours of my trips back from Bangkok. Lots of rice and mountains that looked like growths on the mostly flat landscape. I'd note that all these roads have long since been paved.
