An RPCV searches for the past in Thailand
Searching for the past
Part One: Pickup to Bangsaen
02/27/03
The gateway to the beach resort of Bangsaen
It was a fretful night in Trat, what with Linda minding her scraped foot and Chai sweating in his non–ventilated room. I, on the other hand, slept like a baby dreaming of being shipwrecked on a beautiful tropical beach. Just as I found food, water, and native women, I woke up.
Mun fixed us pancakes for breakfast, a specialty for his American guests. The total bill — two rooms, six meals — came to $27. He even arranged for a taxi, actually a pickup with bench seats in the back, to take us to Bangsaen for $30.
This was preferable to the $5/each bus which left every two hours but took five hours to make the 140 miles.
The three of us piled in the back of the pickup and headed north. It was a fine highway, not the dirt track of 1962. At Pattaya, we stopped at a truck stop for a break, then took the expressway to Siracha. In my Peace Corps days, this was a small fishing village with a government conference center.
I directed the driver to where the center used to be, but all we found was a Chinese hotel–restaurant complex on a pier over the water.
We followed the beach road up to Bangsaen and stopped at the first hotel, the Bangsaen Resort Hotel. Luckily, they had two rooms available before the crush of weekenders from Bangkok. The price corresponded with the demand, too, $30 per room.
After a quick shower and rinsing of a week’s worth of high–tech underwear, we hit the beach. Vendors filled the spaces beneath double rows of palm trees along the shore. Food, clothes, and toys for sale; inner tubes, surfboards, and paddleboats for rent. The surf, however, was waveless and loaded with seaweed and plastic junk. Not a pleasant place to swim.
As we walked around, I tried to remember Bangsaen in 1962, when as a Peace Corps volunteer on a break from teaching I combed the beach, drank milk from the coconuts, and tried to practice my Thai with Thais who wanted to practice their English. Other than the beach and the trees, nothing was the same. Forty years had changed everything.
