When visiting Thailand keep a calm and polite demeanour at all times, no matter how hair-raising you may find the situation, and everything will be fine. I keep being reminded of this fact, one of the early occurrences of which I have written about below.
A few weeks into my stay in Bangkok I was invited on a trip with my students, to make traditional lotus-flower-shaped banana leaf floats, which are cast into the river for the Loy Kratong Festival. It is a Buddhist light and water festival and takes place on the 12th full moon of the year. Specifically the floats symbolise letting go of the bad parts of oneself, such as anger and grudges.
We spent a peaceful few hours on a riverbank on the edge of Bangkok, folding and pinning the leaves. Mine left a lot to be desired and my sloppy piece of work was half finished compared with the students well crafted, intricate and fully completed floats.
However, we all went to cast them off in the water, as is the tradition. The place we were going to launch them was a calm section of water, a little way up the river, so we all forty of us, picked up our floats and started making our way up the narrow pathway. I immediately regretted wearing sandals as the mud squelched in between my toes. I regretted it even more as I started noticing the biggest red ants I had ever seen in my life, and the fact that they weren’t running away from my feet as I walked but were instead running towards them. To my horror they began attacking and biting my feet.
I panicked and looked behind me to see if I could run away from these terrifying beasts, back the way we had come. No, there was roughly twenty students packed into the tiny pathway behind me and ahead there was a similar amount. I was sandwiched in the middle. And anyway, we were on a mission to float our offerings into the water. I couldn’t turn back. To make it even more worrisome the procession had stopped moving. I was now stuck in one spot with nowhere to go with the biggest red ants I had ever seen biting my feet. And the bites hurt, like being stabbed and pinched with giant nail clippers.
I had to think of another way to deal with these terrifying creatures so, after brief consideration, began screaming and running on the spot. This didn’t seem to hinder them, it only made them more angry and many more appeared, they started getting stuck in amongst the leather straps of my sandals, my skin and the mud and they continued to bite.
Occasionally the procession would move along a bit but it was never enough to get away from these venomous creatures. So for what seemed like a lifetime I was screaming, jumping, running on the spot and trying to stamp on my own feet in a frenzied attempt to deal with them.
All this time I was still holding my banana leaf float and wondering how the students could remain comparatively calm in what I thought was a terrifying situation. I’m sure the contrast in our demeanours was interesting for any spectators to behold. All I could think was that I must float my banana leaf offering then make a run for it. We were now by the section of water we were going to use to launch our floats. I could see the end.
In an embarrassingly alien manner compared to Thai culture I blurted out, ‘What if I just throw it?’ referring to my carefully crafted, yet lot to be desired, banana leaf float.
As soon as the words left my mouth I knew this was the not the best thing to have said. It was one of those times you try to alleviate fear with a joke, in a desperate attempt to deal with something out of the ordinary, and sometimes it just doesn’t work.
One of my students answered my outburst with, ‘Then no-one will like you’.
This reply brought me back to down to Earth. I noticed the ants had all gone and I felt like an inconsiderate foreigner. I was next in line to go down to the river and offer my float to the water. My calm and graceful students told me the best way to get down the riverbank, avoiding the mudslide and using the branches as support, and I set my float free into the water.
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