Where Time Means Nothing

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30811, 24 July 1965, Page 12

Where Time Means Nothing

(Specially written for "The

Press” by

GUY MANNERING.)

VOR some time since x I have been in Thailand I have had the feeling that I may be climbing backwards down a ladder and wearing a blindfold, for it was becoming increasingly difficult to make a footfall below. The senses of time and place and space were ever more difficult to hold in any sort of perspective.

And then I took the 500-mile road into Laos across the flat plains of Thailand- I came over that road in one of four five-ton trucks in convoy. Each truck carried as cargo one jetboat on a trailer wedged between the deep wellsides as well as it could be, something like a loose tooth in a 10-year-old; exactly what held it there was difficult to decide.

The lashings which ribboned the cargo by the end of the journey were lying mostly dishevelled and with pieces of truck or of the cargo dangling from tangled ends. The road begins from Bangkok with a reasonable seal, but at the one-third point deteriorates rapidly and from two-thirds is corrugated dirt which, in New Zealand, could only be classed as impassable. The trucks, which are Japanese diesels, have varnished wood superstructures and are brass bound and covered with coloured lights. They are most picturesque. The open cab may seat the driver and at least four others across a straight bench-type seat with a pillow seat, a wooden boltupright back and a noticeable lack of room for a larger European frame; it has been designed with great economy for the smaller Oriental person. Under way the speedo showed a steady 75 kilometres an hour under full power and in the later sections this required superlative driving for the truck swayed like a snake and the corrugations became like a tin roof, with the pattern here and there studded with deep holes. The speed of the trucks showed such a chatter in the springs, the woodwork and the,

instrument panel that, as passenger, I became filled with a horrible feeling of hopelessness of the consequences of a failure in the suspension or the steering. The chance ot keeping to the correct side—the left—of the road was nil; the choice of route was decided by compromising the truck’s lurching with a selection of roadsurface textures ahead.

I was reminded very much of driving a jet boat at speed in shallow water where correct reading of the surface of the river can mean the difference between success or failure.

The route was punctuated by customs posts which gave almost welcome relief for each one required a stop of up to 30 minutes for papers to be signed.

The only disadvantage of such stops was the loss of speed necessary to retain the timetable of the journey. It

was difficult to find a long enough stretch to regain the lost speed and anything slower threatened to dismember the truck and all aboard it.

I sat upright. If my head inclined forward or I was tricked into sleep from sheer exhaustion, I was quickly and painfully awakened by a crack on the head from the bolts in the woodwork above the windscreen.

The journey commenced in the orange glow of the Bangkok sunset in a haze of smoke and the bewitching dazzle of neon signs and continued on through the night and into the afternoon of the next day before we stopped for a rest at Übon. Then early the next morning we restarted for the last six hours’ trip to the banks of the Mekong inside Laos. After the Customs check at the border, the road suddenly

became nearly perfect—it had been laid only a few weeks earlier—and the trucks hummed along at 80 kilometres an hour for some distance until the older parts of the road showed where pieces of the chips had been lifted by the hurtling monsters. The progressive strikes by other vehicles on the day hollows had created a crater system even worse than the corrugations.

On the final miles through the scrubby forest plains I saw purple patches suggesting hills which I knew lay beyond the Mekong and suddenly through a grove of trees and 100 feet below there appeared the great dip which contains the Mekong. On the farther bank nestled the country town of Pakse and behind the town wooded hills rose gently intc the haze.

At our feet ran a clay road down to the bank of the river and down thia road some

women were rolling large fuel drums towards an old wooden ferry boat. The sense of peace was overwhelming after 3 days of the rattling roar of the trucks. The month of preparation to reach this point with the boats had been very full of arrangements and schedules and of encouragement and dismay, but always we had been very busy and now within half a mile of the long-planned destination the river lay big and quiet, but there was no sign of the ferry promised to take the trucks and their loads across to Pakse. There is no telephone or radio and there was not a soul in the world to whom I could speak even one word. The crews of the trucks had no English and there was no way in which I could make myself understood to get my cargos over the Mekong. Finally I did get a boat. To meh the town, deathly silent

in the afternoon heat, looking very much as though everyone in it had quietly deserted. Feeling more alone than I recalled that in New Zealand this journey had taken a few hours to arrange; from New Zealand to Thailand by air had taken three days: from the ship in Bangkok to the training ground in Laos the journey for the boats had taken one month and now in Laos, give or take a few years, I could be forever and I doubt if achievement would ever be noticed and certainly not envied.

I think a little more about this each day now when I lie on my bed in a room with a floor of concrete and walls without decoration, save for the cracks in the plaster, and relish my siesta which is as necessary in this situation as food itself. If time must have a stop, then this surely is the place in which it will run down.