RAWBangkok

The Thai words are hing hoi (หิ่งห้อย) and the first time I ever heard them was about two years ago.  I was working in an English school, and I saw a group of more than a dozen students early one Saturday morning at around 7 a.m.  Curious what they were doing together at such an early hour, they explained to me that they were about to catch a van to go out of town for the day.  They planned to go see the hing hoi.

They then asked me a most perplexing question:  “What” they wanted to know “is the English word for ‘hing hoi’?”

Hmmmm…… let me see.

I first established that I wasn’t mis-hearing, because the phrase “gin hoi” (with a hard-g sound) is slang for eating a girl’s pussy.

Laughter all around — no, not ‘gin hoi’ … ‘hing hoi’.

Okay, I said, I know ‘hoi’ means ’shellfish’ so…

“no, no, no” they all cried out.  It’s different.

Fifteen voices then proceeded to pronounce the syllable ‘hoi’ a dozent times each in a vain effort to illustrate the vast difference in tone between shellfish ‘hoi’ and hing ‘hoi’.

Well, I was a bit flustered.

After a bit of gesticulating, lengthy descriptions and more than a few incorrect guesses we established that I did, indeed, know the English word for hing hoi.

Fireflies.

Hing hoi are fireflies.

Why were they going to see fireflies, and where were they gonna see them at 7 in the morning?

No, not in the morning, I was told — they were going to see them at night.  The trip would be an all-day affair with stops at a temple and at a floating market before getting to the glowing insects.

Now, oddly, perhaps, fireflies are one of my favorite things.

I don’t know if most people had the kind of childhood I did, or if mine was a bit special. Mine was spent mostly in the dirt.  I grubbed around for beetles and bits of slate, and had dirt-clog wars with the neighbor-kids.   Mud was a welcome material for most kinds of creative play, and I was constantly trapping beetles or digging up worms for fun.

One of my most common memories from my youth was watching lazy summer afternoons turn into lazy summer evenings, and knowing that it was getting dark out when I started to notice fireflies lighting up my back yard.  They were fascinating creatures that floated slowly and lazily in the lazy summer air on those lazy summer days — nearly indolent in their ability to simply hover as though they had absolutely nowhere to go and nothing to do.  They seemed, somehow, kindred spirits in those days when  my only scheduled event was a late dinner.

In my memory, there isn’t a summer’s day that came and went that I didn’t cup my hands around and capture at least one firefly in the evening.  I loved to get them in my hands, then hold them so that there was just a space near my thumbs for the light to escape, then watch the yellow-green light glow on again, off again, like a lighthouse at the shore.

I never tried to keep a firefly.   They were so easy to catch that I never regretted letting them go again.

I remember the fireflies of my youth as having a long, slow rhythm to their shining.  Brightly lit for (one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two) two full seconds before going dark for a similar interval, then lighting up again.  That slow but steady beacon somehow in perfect rhythm with the quiet constant darkening of the summer sky.

There is little in my life that makes me as happy as thinking about fireflies.

So, two years ago, when my students told me they were going on a firefly trip, my heart beat a bit jealously and with a sense of longing.  I had a vision in my mind of these fifteen people romping in an open meadow, surrounded by millions of large, lazy fireflies doing their slow dance of light in the air.  Giggles of delight as first one person then another captured and set free the silent, glowing insects.

I smiled wistfully, wished them a happy trip, and went inside to work as they piled in to a van that seemed like a time machine to my childhood.

Last week I heard the term hing hoi again.  A girl I know asked if I knew about hing hoi.  It took a minute.  First the thought that she was asking  me about oral sex, then the fast forward to some kind of shellfish before the slow dawning of memory… fireflies!

Yes, I assured her, I knew about them.

Had I ever been out to see them here in Thailand?

No, I hadn’t.

Well, you know where this is going and I saw it too.  Before long I was promising to take her firefly watching someday soon.

That day came sooner than I expected.  I realized that I had Friday off this week, and that I had a movable meeting on Saturday morning.  So, with a little re-arranging I managed to clear a day to go out of Bangkok.

Initially the girl told me that we had to go to Samut Sangkhram to see them.  This was correct… it’s a tiny province just south and west of Bangkok, but all the Googling in the world wasn’t getting me any useful information about the fireflies.

After a while, I called a friend and asked if he’d been before.  Sure enough he had.  Any tips?

Google “Amphawan” he said.  It’s the town where you go to see the fireflies.

I did as he suggested and hit paydirt.

There still wasn’t a plethora of good information about the town, the fireflies, how to get there or what to do there, but I found a little.

I found one or two good entries on travel forum threads, one with some really great pictures of Amphawan, and I also found a few really useless blog entries.

A picture began to emerge about my trip.

Since I don’t drive my own car, I had pretty much three options for travel:

1. Take a tour bus from the Southern Bus Terminal.  I couldn’t find any printed schedule, though I did get a phone number for the bus station.  I never called.  I had to use the Southern Bus Terminal to go to Cha’am last year.  Getting there from my home is time consuming and expensive; enough so that I was gonna choose either option 2 or 3.

2.  Get a van — probably from Victory Monument.  If you don’t already know, the option of choice for a lot of travelers who are going only an hour or two outside of Bangkok is to go by van.  It seems as though nearly every one of these vans uses Victory Monument for their point of departure.  My problem was that I couldn’t find information on a number to call, name of company or location.  It was all seeming a bit hard, so we decided to use option three to go to Amphawan.

3.  Hire a meter taxi.  I checked the distance and found that the fare should be about 800 baht.  A driver negotiated a set price of 1,000 baht.  Realizing that he’d probably make most of the trip back to BKK empty I agreed.  For no reason that I know, he actually turned on the meter during the trip, and it clocked 793 baht.

The next thing that became clear about my trip was that I wouldn’t be traipsing through a field or a grassy meadow.  This was a boat trip.  I would be seeing fireflies from a long-tailed boat on the river.  I’m afraid this shattered my illusions somewhat, but wasn’t a deal breaker.

I also learned that the trip normally includes spending time at the Dtalad Nam, or Floating Market in Amphawan.  The image of the floating market is one of the most vivid for many would-be Thailand tourists, as it is one of the most common on Thailand tourist posters around the world.

I used to think that there was only ONE floating market — a special place in Thailand of immense sacred cultural value.  Later I was to learn that there were actually two — which I understood to mean that there was a ‘real’ floating market, and then a poor imitation that was not so far away and inconvenient — a place to fool the tourists.

I later learned that this was an idiotic piece of knowledge.  There are, indeed, many many floating markets in Thailand.

I no longer know which one is the ‘magic’ one that features on all the tourist posters (and I presume in the Lonely Planet Guide as well).   Wherever the ‘real’ floating market is, I have never been there and I doubt I ever will, so I don’t worry about it’s actual location.

But one of the nations many floating markets is in Amphawan, and it seems that when you go see the hing hoi, de rigeur demands that you first spend time at the Dtalad Nam.

A floating market is a market where the sellers (mae-kaa and paw-kaa) have their goods (mostly fruit and cooked foods) in boats on the river or canal.  Buyers can either be on a boat as well, or they can access the sellers from the land.

As it turned out, in Amphawan, just about all the boats pull up to set positions along the banks of the canal and people come down, sit on small stools and eat food prepared by the seller who is in a long, shallow wooden Thai-style canoe.

Along each bank of the canal in the area of the floating market there are a few kilometers of teak-wood buildings.  They house lots of commercial shops and some accommodation.  Most of these teak wood houses are surprisingly lovely.  The wood is polished and in good repair.  The canal itself, in contrast to the fetid, stinking water of Bangkok canals seems reasonably clean, although a dense green colour and quite opaque.  It has no unpleasant smell at all.

The last thing I learned about the area is that accommodation comes in roughly three forms.  First, home-stay involves a room and a mattress or bed.  Maybe air conditioning.  These rooms are crowded near the river, and if the ones I saw are anything to judge by, they do not represent great value.

One guy showed me a room that was beautiful polished teak wood just a few steps from the canal and the market, but it’s only furnishing was a single thin (2″) mattress and a portable air con unit.  He was asking 800 baht a night.  No linens, towels or hot water, and you had to walk 20 meters to shared toilet and shower facilities.

We opted for choice #2, which is called baan pak in Thai.  Baan means house, pak means ‘break’ (as in, we’ll have a ten-minute coffee break) so my best translation is ‘holiday house’, though ‘guest house’ probably serves better.  The one we stayed in cost the same price (800 baht).  For this we got a small room with a proper bed and (Thai style) mattress, a tv, air conditioning, private bathroom with flush-toilet and hot water.  A nice breakfast of Khao Tum Kung (Rice soup with prawns) included, along with linens and towels.  An additional 25 baht got us soap, toothpaste and toilet tissue.  It was located 1-block from the canal.  Very convenient and pretty quiet.

Quiet was a relative idea.  The room was built of wooden slats and no insulation for temperature or sound.  We could hear any noise — motorcycles, truck engines, even the tv and voices of the people in the next room.  It was a quiet location so this wasn’t a big deal, but it wasn’t perfectly serene.

The space featured a nice large fish pond full of colorful fish, picnic tables and shared refrigerator and kitchen facilities.  All in all, quite charming.  The lady in charge of the place was a rotund Thai woman who was absolutely lovely and bursting with desire to be helpful.

The name of the place we stayed was Baan-pak Ploynam, and the phone number is 081 856 2729 (but you’ll need to speak Thai to make arrangements).  I’d stop short of saying it’s ‘recommended’ but I think it’s a nice space for the price.

The third option — which I would have taken if we were staying several days — is a ‘resort’.  Prices on resorts seemed to run from 1,500 baht to about 4,000 per night.  Figure 2K would get you a decent resort spot.

The last thing that the internet let me know was that this was not going to be a farang-filled tourist town.

It is a tourist town, but it is primarily a destination for Thai people.

A lot of the signs for businesses were written in Thai and Chinese.  I got the feeling that that was related more to the fact that the proprietors had Chinese heritage than any strong influx of Chinese tourists.

I enjoyed Amphawan partly because it’s a tourist town, but it is identifiably a THAI tourist town.  The accommodation, food, transport, service and everything else feel like Thailand.  Although only an hour by car from Bangkok, it’s a thousand miles away in terms of the people and service.

We spent 24 hours in Amphawan, and I met only one person who spoke any English at all.  I was stared at a lot.  People obviously are not accustomed to lots of foreigners here.  On the day that I was in Amphawan there were probably another dozen or two white faces, so it’s not like farang are unseen here.  I think it was my size that made me such a spectacle, along with the fact that I seemed to be walking alone.

The area around the market is very crowded, and the pathways fairly narrow.  It was difficult to walk with my girl, so I was often ahead of her or behind her.  Eyes in brown faces were constantly locked on me as I moved around the village.

Speaking of crowds, there is only a single footbridge across the canal, and all the foot traffic goes back and forth across this single stone bridge.  With the night market stretched out on either side of it, you have hundreds of people trying to cross back and forth between the two sides of the market as sunset approaches.  Of course it’s the best spot in town for photos, so you have people trying to pose for photos with the river and the floating market in the background on one side of the bridge while friends with digital cameras or mobile phone cameras are trying to line up shots as hundreds of people squeeze between them in both directions.

Chaotic!

At the market, between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. we ate enough food for 3 or 4 dinners.   The most common food for sale was BBQ-grilled squid.  I didn’t have any, but the girl I was with did.  We also ate BBQ grilled scallops in the shell with a nice spicy sauce, Khao Tum (rice soup), a couple of different types of fruit, a dessert like bread-pudding baked in a terracotta pot, and large grilled prawns, peeled (but not beheaded) and skewered on a stick.

In addition, we bought Todd Munn, deep fried fish cakes, to take back to the room and eat after the firefly tour was finished.  At 9:30 in the evening we added a bowl of noodles each to our list of food consumed.

I ate less than half the food, finding myself stuffed to the gills in no time flat.  My tiny 46-kilo friend however, ate non stop the entire time she was awake in Amphawan.

The firefly tour costs 60 baht each.  We boarded a boat around 7:30.  We had purchased our tickets around 5 p.m., and it was honestly a bit confusing knowing exactly where to go and who to see, as there were dozens of boats picking up and dropping off passengers at multiple points on both sides of the canal, with no signage at all to direct people.  We were not the only confused people I saw either.

As I mentioned, there isn’t a lot of English being spoken in Amphawan.  I relied fairly heavily on the Thai girl I was with to sort out things and make sure we were where we needed to be, and to solve difficulties.  I might have found it much more frustrating if I had to rely only on my limited Thai, or — even worse — on the non-existent English of the people of Amphawan.

We piled in a boat that was full to capacity — maybe 20 people — and headed off into the night.

We plowed through the water quickly.  One thing I read on the internet is that there have been noise complaints from residents on the river about the boat motors.  Apparently, the compromise is that everything goes quiet by 10 p.m.

The total boat trip was just over an hour.  It was a pleasant night time boat ride.

As to the fireflies, they were a surprise to me in many ways.  Not at all the vision I had in my mind.

First of all was the reality of sitting on the hard wooden-plank seats of a long tailed boat instead of the fantasy I’d had of romping freely though an open meadow.

Second was that the fireflies were not floating freely in the air, rather they were gathered in specific trees, presumably eating the leaves.  This meant that there were clusters of fireflies… colonies if you will, defined by the availability of the proper trees.

I had read a comment from one fellow on the internet who said that he couldn’t tell if the fireflies were “twinkly lights” simply put into the trees to imitate fireflies.  I had thought this to be a particularly uncharitable description… until I saw them.

He was perfectly correct.  Because the fireflies were on the leaves of the trees rather than flying, they looked like nothing more than small white Christmas tree lights.

And a startling thing that seemed to conflict with all my childhood memories of fireflies was that they were blinking rapidly, and seemingly in unison.  The on-off-on-off flashing seemed to happen twice per second, rather than the once-per-two second rate of my memories.

Lastly, they seemed smaller.

My memory of fireflies from when I was a boy was that they were large, lazy, fat bugs.  These were small.  Surely much smaller than what I caught every summer night four decades ago?

Well, I’m grown up now.  Perhaps they only seemed bigger back then.

The boatman  would run us up near a cluster of the hing hoi, then cut the engine and we would coast slowly by.  I have to say, after the initial rush of excitement, this pattern of motoring and coasting became tiresome and often monotonous.  I longed to see the fireflies do something.

Finally one of them did.  A maverick of McCain-like proportions broke away from the pack, and actually flew out from the tree just inches above the water line.  We could see him clearly, as well as his reflection in the water.

All the souls aboard my boat babbled with excitement.  For a moment I thought that the ghost of Princess Diana resurrected must have appeared, but soon realized that the excitement was simply for this lone firefly and his solo flight across the water.

He flew perhaps two or three meters before turning around and flying back to the tree.  The feeling of disappointment on the boat was palpable as he settled back into the comfort and security of the colony.  I think all of us on the boat felt somewhat let down by this abandonment of independent spirit.  For a brief shining moment we were all flying free with that firefly.

My girl and I were sitting in the seat closest to the back of the boat, very close to the boatman.  She exchanged a few words with him, asking him if he could steer us close enough that she could grab a firefly off of a tree.  He explained to her that if she splashed water at the fireflies they would fly towards her.

At the next low-lying tree she tried out this theory.  Sure enough, in response to the splashing water a firefly left the tree and flew towards her, attracted for some reason I am unfamiliar with.  She continued splashing water towards the firefly, and he progressed ever-closer to her.  Finally she got excited and stopped splashing, preparing to cup her hands and try to capture him.

But when she stopped splashing, the firefly stopped moving towards her.  Slowly he flew upwards, then turned 180 degrees and floated lazily back to the tree.

I had now seen two fireflies in actual flight and I realized that my memories of fireflies from my childhood might be more intact than I suspected.  Both of the insects, while in flight, had slowed down their blink-rate noticeably.  In other words, when they were on the tree and part of the pack, they blinked rapidly… like Christmas tree lights on speed.  But flying, they had the slow rhythmic pulse that I remembered.

My girl and the boatmen were still in league.  He agreed to drift past a tree close enough for her to try to reach out and grab a bug.  He was true to his word, and she stretched out across the water leaning as far as she could without falling in.  Her hand was an inch or two away, but couldn’t quite reach.  Ah! So frustrating.

Half joking, I pointed out that there were branches above her head that might be within reach if she stood up.  To my horror, she did!  I quickly grabbed her pants at the belt line to keep her steady and in the boat as she went on tip toe in the wooden long tailed boat trying to capture her own little hing hoi.  Again, the branch was just outside her reach.

I encouraged her to sit down, and was relieved when she did so without incident.

As we got into the latter stages of the firefly tour we crossed to the other side of the river, so that I was on the side closest to the trees and the fireflies.  We coasted in very close to one group of the glowing insects and one of them flew directly towards me.  I actually felt him hit my neck near my ear.

I turned to my girl to tell her that I’d had physical contact with the little bugger, pointing to the spot on my neck where I thought he had hit me and bounced of.

She shrieked with delight.  He had not ‘bounced off’ but had landed and was crawling slowly across my face.

She plucked him off my cheek and held him in her cupped hands… thrilled to have finally captured her own personal firefly.  She played with him for five minutes or more as the boat sped across a large expanse of open water.

When we finally slowed again at the next cluster of fireflies in trees she released her captive, sending him to join a strange colony of his cousins.  I hope that fireflies are not a tight knit family unit, because we probably took this guy 4 or 5 miles from his home group.  I certainly hope he was adopted easily by the new family and that he didn’t leave a wife and kids wondering where he was, how he disappeared or why he abandoned them.

The excitement, such as it was, was over.  We had about ten minutes left on our boat ride, before being put back on the land exactly where we had been picked up.

On Saturday we took the sawng taew — a pickup truck with two benches in the back — to the ‘bus station’ area at a cost of 10 baht each.  We found the van to Bangkok and paid 140 baht passage for two people, and climbed aboard.  The van doesn’t depart on a set schedule; it goes when all the seats are full.  We had to wait about fifteen minutes before the driver fired up the engine and we were off.

It took almost exactly 60 minutes to arrive at Victory Monument.  My girl and I ate a bowl of noodles (man the girl can eat!) and then hopped on the train for home.   We went different directions at Asok Station.  I managed to walk in the door of my apartment at 2:30.  I got showered and dressed and managed to make it to my business meeting (near my home) at 3:00 p.m.

It was about 26 hours from the time I walked out my front door on Friday until I walked back in on Saturday.  A nice little ‘day trip’ out of Bangkok.  If you’re looking for excitement, you might prefer bungee jumping, but for a mildly romantic little one-day getaway with a girl, Amphawan makes a nice destination outside of Bangkok.