Nakhon Pathom
Even if you’re just passing through, you can’t miss the star attraction of NAKHON PATHOM: the enormous stupa Phra Pathom Chedi dominates the skyline of this otherwise unexceptional provincial capital, 56km west of Bangkok. Probably Thailand’s oldest town, Nakhon Pathom (derived from the Pali for “First City”) is thought to be the point at which Buddhism first entered the region now known as Thailand, more than two thousand years ago. Then the capital of a sizeable Mon kingdom, it was important enough to rate a visit from two missionaries dispatched by King Ashoka of India, one of Buddhism’s great early evangelists. Even today, the province of Nakhon Pathom retains a high Buddhist profile – aside from housing the country’s holiest chedi, it also contains Phuttamonthon, Thailand’s most important Buddhist sanctuary and home of its supreme patriarch.
Nakhon Pathom is easily seen on a day-trip from Kanchanaburi or Bangkok – alternatively, since it’s on train lines heading west to Kanchanaburi and south to Hua Hin, Surat Thani and Malaysia, the town works well as a half-day stopover from Bangkok. Everything described below – with the exception of Sanam Chan Palace and the Contemporary Thai Art Centre – is within ten minutes’ walk of the chedi.
Samut Songkhram
Rarely visited by foreign tourists and yet within easy reach of Bangkok, the tiny estuarine province of Samut Songkhram is nourished by the Mae Khlong River as it meanders through on the last leg of its route to the Gulf. Fishing is an important industry round here, and big wooden boats are still built in riverside yards near the estuary; further inland, fruit is the main source of income, particularly pomelos, lychees, guavas and coconuts. But for visitors it is the network of three hundred canals woven around the river, and the traditional way of life the waterways still support, that makes a stay of a few days or more appealing. As well as some of the most interesting floating markets in Thailand – notably at Amphawa and Tha Ka – there are chances to witness traditional cottage industries such as palm-sugar production and bencharong ceramic-painting, plus more than a hundred historic temples to admire, a number of them dating back to the reign of Rama II, who was born in the province. The other famous sons of the region are Eng and Chang, the “original” Siamese twins, who grew up in the province (see Eng and Chang, the Siamese twins).
The slow route to Samut Songkhram
The most enjoyable way of travelling to Samut Songkhram is by train from Bangkok – a scenic, albeit rather convoluted, route that has three stages, involves going via Samut Sakhon and could take up to three hours. It’s a very unusual line, being single track and for much of its route literally squeezed in between homes, palms and mangroves, and, most memorably, between market stalls, so that at both the Samut Sakhon and Samut Songkhram termini the train really does chug to a standstill amid the trays of seafood.
Trains to Samut Sakhon leave approximately hourly from Bangkok’s Wongwian Yai station in southern Thonburi (which is within walking distance of Wongwian Yai Skytrain station), but for the fastest onward connections catch the 5.30am, 8.35am, 12.15pm or 3.25pm (1hr). The train pulls up right inside the wet market at Samut Sakhon, also known as Mahachai, where you need to take a ferry across the Maenam Tha Chin to get the connecting train from Ban Laem on the other bank. Once you’ve left the train, cross the track and continue in the same direction as the train was going, through a clothes market, until you emerge onto a shopping street. Cross the street to the five-storey, blue-painted Tarua Restaurant, right on the estuary, adjacent to the busy fishing port, where you’ll find two piers. Boats from both piers will get you across the river: those departing from the pier on the right of the restaurant are frequent but drop you directly across on the other bank, from where it’s a twenty-minute walk to Ban Laem station (turn right and walk upriver, past a Thai temple); boats from the pier on the left of the restaurant go direct to Ban Laem station (5min), but leave infrequently, being timed to coincide with the Ban Laem trains. There are only four trains a day in each direction from Ban Laem to Samut Songkhram at the end of the line (1hr), a journey through marshes, lagoons, prawn farms, salt flats and mangrove and palm growth. Once again, at Samut Songkhram, the station is literally enveloped by the town-centre market, with traders gathering up their goods and awnings from the trackside for the arrival and departure of the service.
Don Hoi Lot’s seafood restaurants
Seafood is the obvious regional speciality in these parts, with the most famous local dish being hoi lot pat cha, a spicy stir-fry that centres round the tubular molluscs, known as hoi lot or “worm shells”, that are harvested in their sackloads at low tide from a muddy sandbank known as Don Hoi Lot at the mouth of the Mae Khlong estuary. This is probably the most famous spot in the province to eat seafood, and a dozen restaurants occupy the area around the nearby pier, many offering views out over the Gulf and its bountiful sandbar. Don Hoi Lot is served by frequent songthaews from Samut Songkhram market (15–20min); the restaurants are usually open daily during daylight hours.
Longtail boat tours around Amphawa
On market days and during the week, when the waterways are far quieter, you can take a longtail boat tour around Amphawa (around B500/boat/hr) – boats wait on the canal, just over the bridge from the memorial park. If you get the chance, it’s well worth venturing out onto the canals after dark to watch the fireflies twinkling romantically in their favourite lamphu trees like delicate strings of fairylights; any boatman will ferry you to the right spot for around B60 per head, but you may need to link up with others to get a good price. For boat tours in quiet areas further from the town, contact staff at Baan Tai Had Resort or one of the nearby homestays.
Eng and Chang, the Siamese twins
Eng (In) and Chang (Chan), the “original” Siamese twins, were born in Samut Songkhram in 1811, when Thailand was known as Siam. The boys’ bodies were joined from breastbone to navel by a short fleshy ligament, but they shared no vital organs and eventually managed to stretch their connecting tissue so that they could stand almost side by side instead of permanently facing each other.
In 1824 the boys were spotted by entrepreneurial Scottish trader Robert Hunter, who returned five years later with an American sea merchant, Captain Abel Coffin, to convince the twins’ mother to let them take her sons on a world tour. Hunter and Coffin anticipated a lucrative career as producer-managers of an exotic freak show, and were not disappointed. They launched the twins in Boston, advertising them as “the Monster” and charging the public 50 cents to watch the boys demonstrate how they walked and ran. Though shabbily treated and poorly paid, the twins soon developed a more theatrical show, enthralling their audiences with acrobatics and feats of strength, and earning the soubriquet “the eighth wonder of the world”. At the age of 21, having split from their exploitative managers, the twins became self-employed, but continued to tour with other companies across the world. Wherever they went, they would always be given a thorough examination by local medics, partly to counter accusations of fakery, but also because this was the first time the world and its doctors had been introduced to conjoined twins. Such was the twins’ international celebrity that the term “Siamese twins” has been used ever since. Chang and Eng also sought advice from these doctors on surgical separation – an issue they returned to repeatedly right until their deaths but never acted upon, despite plenty of gruesome suggestions.
By 1840 the twins had become quite wealthy and decided to settle down. They were granted American citizenship, assumed the family name Bunker, and became slave-owning plantation farmers in North Carolina. Three years later they married two local sisters, Addie and Sally Yates, and between them went on to father 21 children. The families lived in separate houses and the twins shuttled between the two, keeping to a strict timetable of three days in each household; for an intriguing imagined account of this bizarre state of affairs, read Darin Strauss’s novel Chang and Eng. Chang and Eng had quite different personalities, and relations between the two couples soured, leading to the division of their assets, with Chang’s family getting most of the land, and Eng’s most of the slaves. To support their dependants, the twins were obliged to take their show back on the road several times, on occasion working with the infamous showman P.T. Barnum. Their final tour was born out of financial desperation following the 1861–65 Civil War, which had wiped out most of the twins’ riches and led to the liberation of all their slaves.
In 1874, Chang succumbed to bronchitis and died; Eng, who might have survived on his own if an operation had been performed immediately, died a few hours later, possibly of shock. They were 62. The twins are buried in White Plains in North Carolina, but there’s a memorial to them near their birthplace in Samut Songkhram, where a statue and the small, makeshift In-Chan Museum have been erected 4km north of the provincial capital’s centre on Thanon Ekachai.
Sangkhlaburi and around
Beyond Thong Pha Phum the views get increasingly spectacular as Highway 323 climbs through the remaining swathes of montane rainforest, occasionally hugging the eastern shore of the Vajiralongkorn Reservoir until 73km later it comes to an end at Sangkhlaburi (often called Sangkhla for short). In the early 1980s, the old town was lost under the rising waters of the newly created Khao Laem (now Vajiralongkorn) Reservoir. Its residents were relocated to the northeastern tip of the lake, beside the Songkalia River, where modern-day Sangkhla now enjoys an eerily beautiful view of semi-submerged trees and raft houses. It’s a tiny town with no unmissable attractions, but the atmosphere is pleasantly low-key and the best of the accommodation occupies scenic lakeside spots so it’s a great place to slow down for a while.
Cultural interest is to be found in the villages, markets and temples of the area’s Mon, Karen and Thai populations, including at Ban Waeng Ka across the water, and there’s natural beauty in various waterfalls, whitewater rivers and the remote Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary. It sees relatively few farang tourists, but it’s a popular destination for weekending Thais (come during the week for better deals on accommodation) and resident NGO volunteers add a positive vibe. Though the Burmese border is just 22km away at Three Pagodas Pass, at the time of writing it was closed to foreigners.
The Mon in Thailand
Dubbed by some “the Palestinians of Asia”, the Mon people – numbering between two and four million in Burma and an estimated fifty thousand to two hundred thousand in Thailand (chiefly in the western provinces of Kanchanaburi and Ratchaburi, in the Gulf province of Samut Sakhon and in Nonthaburi and Pathum Thani, just north of Bangkok) – have endured centuries of persecution, displacement and forced assimilation.
Ethnologists speculate that the Mon originated either in India or Mongolia, travelling south to settle on the western banks of the Chao Phraya valley in the first century BC. Here they founded the Dvaravati kingdom (sixth to eleventh centuries AD), building centres at U Thong, Lopburi and Nakhon Pathom and later consolidating a northern kingdom in Haripunchai (modern-day Lamphun). They probably introduced Theravada Buddhism to the region, and produced some of the earliest Buddhist monuments, particularly Wheels of Law and Buddha footprints.
Over on the Burmese side of the border, the Mon kingdom had established itself around the southern city of Pegu well before the Burmese filtered into the area in the ninth century, but by the mid-eighteenth century they’d been stripped of their homeland and were once again relocating to Thailand. The Thais welcomed them as a useful source of labour, and in 1814 the future Rama IV arrived at the Kanchanaburi border with three royal warboats and a guard of honour to chaperone the exiles. Swathes of undeveloped jungle were given over to them, many of which are still Mon-dominated today.
The persecution of Burmese Mon continues to this day under Burma’s repressive regime (see Refugees from Burma: the Karen), and the Mon continue to struggle for the right to administer their own independent Mon State in their historical homelands opposite Kanchanaburi province in lower Burma. As one commentator has described it, while some of Burma’s ethnic minority groups seek to establish autonomy, the Mon are attempting to reclaim it. Though the New Mon State Party (NMSP) entered into a ceasefire agreement with the Burmese junta in June 1995, international human-rights organizations continue to report gross violations against civilian Mon living in Burma. Thousands of Mon men, women and children have been press-ganged into unpaid labour, soldiers occupy certain Mon villages and commandeer produce and livestock, and reports of beatings and gang rapes are not uncommon. In an attempt to wipe out Mon culture, the junta has also banned the teaching of Mon language, literature and history in government schools, and outlawed the wearing of Mon national dress at official institutions.
Not surprisingly, Mon have been fleeing these atrocities in droves, the majority ending up in three resettlement camps in a Mon-controlled area along the Thai–Burma border, the biggest being Halockhani near Sangkhlaburi; the 11,000 Mon estimated to be living in these camps as of October 2011 have no right of entry into Thailand. For more information, see the website of the Human Rights Foundation of Monland (HURFOM; wrehmonnya.org).
Like Thais, the Mon are a predominantly Buddhist, rice-growing people, but they also have strong animist beliefs. All Mon families have totemic house spirits, such as the turtle, snake, chicken or pig, which carry certain taboos; if you’re of the chicken-spirit family, for example, the lungs and head of every chicken you cook have to be offered to the spirits, and although you’re allowed to raise and kill chickens, you must never give one away. Guests belonging to a different spirit group from their host are not allowed to stay overnight. Mon festivals also differ slightly from Thai ones – at Songkhran (Thai New Year), the Mon spice up the usual water-throwing and parades with a special courtship ritual in which teams of men and women play each other at bowling, throwing flirtatious banter along with their wooden discs.
Weaving for Women
A community project worth supporting in Sangkhlaburi is Weaving for Women, set up by a group of Karen refugees in 1989. Their Hilltribe Handicrafts shop carries a huge selection of hand-woven items, much of it in mut mee design and all of it made from good-quality Chiang Mai cotton, including tablecloths, sarongs, shirts and bags.
Bang Pa-In
Little more than a roadside market, the village of BANG PA-IN, 60km north of Bangkok, has been put on the tourist map by its extravagant and rather surreal Royal Palace, even though most of the buildings can be seen only from the outside. King Prasat Thong of Ayutthaya first built a palace on this site, 20km downstream from his capital, in the middle of the seventeenth century, and it remained a popular country residence for the kings of Ayutthaya. The palace was abandoned a century later when the capital was moved to Bangkok, only to be revived in the middle of the nineteenth century when the advent of steamboats shortened the journey time upriver. Rama IV (1851–68) built a modest residence here, which his son Chulalongkorn (Rama V), in his passion for Westernization, knocked down to make room for the eccentric melange of European, Thai and Chinese architectural styles visible today.