There’s something about Ubon
****The solo rider gets his first look at Ubon Ratchathani and Ubon gets a look at him
Lloyd Sullivan
(Bangkok Post dd. 8 juni 2006 // DN)
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The Ubon Ratchathani National Museum offers visitors a good look at the history and natural history of the province.
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At OTOP fairs, the girls all made up as if they’re about to take a walk down a Paris fashion ramp.
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The vendor at this stall was down to her last bowl of bugs. Deep fried, she told me, and very tasty.
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This vendor at Ubon’s largest fresh food market must have had a hard night.
The Si Isan Hotel just down the street from where I was staying serves up a pretty good bowl of khao tom gai, but you can’t see the Moon River from the dining room - a disappointment. In fact, the Si Isan hardly acknowledges the Moon River, much less takes advantage of the fact that they sit practically on top of it.
One day this may change. The owners of the Si Isan, or somebody else, will wake up to the fact the Moon River, which flows west to east through Ubon Ratchathani, is about as beautiful and unspoiled an urban waterway as one is likely to find in this world - a country river flowing through a city - and they will exploit their good fortune through the medium of architecture starting a riverine renaissance which will make Ubon the envy of the nation. Exactly when this might happen is difficult to say.
For the present, though, Ubon Ratchathanians seem to regard the Moon not so much as a blessing but as a barrier, something that stands between them and where they want to go. They haven’t neglected it, haven’t abused it, nothing of the kind - and they cannot be too highly praised for the fact - but other than bridging it in two places, they’ve left the river largely to itself.
Stop to think about it, maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.
We’ll call it the benefit of distance. Ubon is remote; 629 kilometres from Bangkok it is father from the capital than Nong Khai, which for travellers headed northeast is the end of the line; as far as you can go in Thailand.
Remote can be the kiss of death for a town, but not for Ubon. Ubon is alive and fully self-contained. It’s a university town: Rajabhat has a branch campus there. It’s a recreational gateway: the Moon flows into the Mekong within the province not far to the east, and Sirindhorn Dam and its deep blue reservoir is just down the road.
Ubon is a cultural city, with at least two fine museums that I know about and a beautiful little park right in the centre of town. It has a number of places to stay, to eat, to listen to live music. And they never heard of the word, “traffic,” have no idea what it is.
After breakfast I crossed the parking lot outside the Si Isan to wander among the rickety wooden tables of the local fresh market, my camera swinging from my shoulder. By now I’d shot hundreds of market photos in cities and towns around the country. I can’t honestly say that they’re all very different.
Carrots and chillies and tam leung don’t vary from one place to the next.
Chicken is chicken, beef is beef. But I love the atmosphere of an open market. Thais are a gregarious people by nature and never more so than when they’re in their element and one cannot get more elementary than an open market.
The vendors, mostly women, are affable, curious, jocular. Ribald, too, would be my guess, if I could understand half of what they’re chattering about.
They love to banter with you if you give them half a chance, banter with each other about you if you’re taking pictures of them.
The decibel level goes up as I pass among the crowd at marketplace slipping off my lens cap, a general warning cry: beware the farang with the klong thai roop (camera). A woman selling garlic and corn pretends to be shy when I point the lens in her direction, but she can’t help laughing. Her neighbour, chopping cow parts on a big wooden chopping block, tells her to look sharp.
A fish monger urges me to check out her catch, a fruit seller her green mangos. It was all too much work for one produce vendor; she is stretched out flat, dead asleep among the cabbages and leafy greens.
I stopped at one table where there wasn’t much left to buy, a few bugs in a blue plastic bowl. They looked like a cross between a beetle and honey bee, fat and sluggish. Are they any good, I asked? Extremely good (aroi mak loei).
How do you cook them? “Thod,” (deep fried) the woman said, amused at my thorough-going ignorance. Anybody knows that.
A few blocks away on the grounds of the Ubon Ratchathani National Museum a crafts fair was in progress, part of the Thai national OTOP programme - One Tambon (sub-district) One Product - to promote regional wares and manufactures.
OTOP gatherings are a Thai version of American county fairs, but on a much smaller scale. There are crafts vendors and food vendors and musicians.
There always seems to be a stage on which sit half a dozen functionaries of some kind or other, their principle spokesman droning on in a sleep-inducing monotone as if he were plugged into an electric socket. Thais sit for this kind of thing with infinite patience and reserve.
Invariably there are a lot of kids involved in an OTOP programme, dressed up in traditional clothing, the little girls all made up as if they’re about to take a stroll down a Paris fashion ramp.
I left the fair and wandered down the tree lined walk to the museum entrance where I left my shoes at the door with about two dozen other pair. A bunch of school kids, bused in from somewhere, were moving in groups through the building, boys and girls, spotlessly groomed in their blue and white school uniforms. We walked on stocking feet from room to room, the kids and I, across the highly polished hardwood plank floors through rooms filled with historical artifacts, crafts, old musical instruments, textiles, geographic exhibits.
There was one particular display the likes of which I’d never seen: a betel nut “set,” like a tea service, but designed for masticating instead of sipping, with little dishes and jars and utensils. In times not far gone by people would invite their neighbours over for a “chew,” everybody sitting around getting a buzz on.
About fifteen minutes into my visit I noticed that a certain group of kids who’d left a room full of fish weirs and animal traps had returned with some other kids to get a second look. They didn’t seem to be as interested in the artifacts, though, as in the foreign man who was looking at the artifacts.
When I said hello they scattered in an explosive burst of nervous laughter like a flock of birds.
More and more grade-schoolers appeared in the wings to get a glimpse of me, the foreign man. What was going on here? This was Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand I was walking around in, not Burkina Faso. Hadn’t these kids ever seen a Caucasian before?
Only a couple of hours earlier at the TAT (the Tourism Authority of Thailand) office seven high school girls and one boy had asked me if they could take my photograph, very excited about it, as if I were some exotic animal: a Malayan sun bear or a wreathed hornbill. (Considering what most Asians think of Western noses, I might have looked to them something like a hornbill).
I could easily imagine a scene at the family dinner table that evening, a kid waiting for the right moment to whip out her cell phone, my picture on the screen, and exclaim, “Pho, mae, (dad, mom) look what we saw today!”
Ubon must be even farther from Bangkok than I thought.
- Copyright 2006 Lloyd Sullivan. To contact the writer, email to lsulli2@yahoo.com.