It’s 7:45 am, I’ve already endured a stuffy, 30-minute ride into the city on a packed village bus, I haven’t had coffee yet, and all I want to do is put my pack in the baggage compartment below the bus. I’m in for a 3-hour ride to Ratchaburi and the last thing I want to do is hold my overstuffed pack on my lap, but the bus driver just looks at me and says, “No, no. Water” while pointing to baggage compartment and holding his other hand, palm down, near his knee. It’s too early for me to play the miming game, so I board the bus, pleased to find that I can stuff my bag in the back of the near-empty bus and relax under the air conditioning vents. Thirty minutes later I wake up and realize that all forward movement has stopped, along with the A/C. The flustered bus driver barks something incomprehensible to us, and I follow everyone else off the bus, shouldering my massive pack and smaller backpack. Soon enough, another bus comes for us, and again, I ask the new driver if I can put my bag under the bus. He shakes his head and says, “Water”. Too tired to ask anyone for clarification, I board the bus and immediately fall asleep. About an hour later, my boyfriend, Zach, nudges me awake.
“Jackie, look outside the window.”
We were slowly making our way through several inches of standing water, remnants of the September floods that inundated Bangkok and its surrounding regions, killing nearly 400 people and affecting some 2 million. We couldn’t peel our eyes from the destruction and the evidence of the attempts to repair fractured lives; the half-buried houses with people’s belongings stacked on the roofs; people living on the pedestrian bridges hovering above what should have been the road; sand bags piled in store-fronts; the occasional yellow traffic line emerging from the murky water.
Belongings have been piled on top of the house for safe-keeping
Small boats seem to be the best mode of transportation in this area
We see signs for floating markets and laugh at the irony. Then we see shanty towns-cum-Atlantis next to towering office buildings with barely a water mark. As we sit in our comfortable, climate-controlled bus, we watch old men and whole families scooter by in plastic boots, just trying to arrive dry. I see a garden of animal shrubs for sale, woven from vines and trapped behind a sand-bag fence, waiting for Noah to guide them onto the ark.
It’s a sobering sight, and we’re humbled. We spent several days in Bangkok two weeks ago, and the only evidence we saw of the flooding was one tiny street in a market where we watched people wade through the water barefoot or in plastic boots. Then we moved on. After Bangkok, we headed to Chiang Mai, another city I heard had been flooded. But when we arrived, it was as if the flood had never happened. On that bus, I couldn’t help but think that the best thing a city has going for it is its tourism industry; it seems that if only those roads we were lumbering through supported tourist towns, the water would be gone and the establishments restored.
A market in central Bankgok
Sandbags protecting a university from the nearby river
“I feel like a disaster tourist,” Zach says, as he shoots photos of people trying to rebuild their homes or transport vegetables and children to dry land in boats. They look determined, muscles straining with each hammer blow or paddle, faces set to the future. I’m reminded of watching tourists snap my picture while doing disaster relief work in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, and I’m grateful when we finally pass into the city. Out of sight, out of mind is so easy when you watch such disasters through a TV screen or on the right side of a bus window, and I’m disappointed with myself for tasting the joys of Thailand without doing my part to alleviate the suffering I’m witnessing with my own eyes. But today calls for Cambodia, so another bus driving through more water, until it’s out of sight again, but never out of mind.
*Photography by Zachary Cole
