Travels: Thailand/India 1997

Travel Letter #2

Meditation, Koh Phanghan

Bangkok, April 1st, 1997

This time I'm sitting in an office 12 floors above ground in the suburbs of Bangkok. We're at the Assumption University, a private, Christian graduate and undergraduate college with some 15.000 students. It looks very wealthy and modern with plenty of well-equiped computers connected to Internet. The formal reason for our visit here is to bring greetings to a professor who is teaching at the philosophical and religious department here. But since he is not present at the moment, we take advantage of the facilities while waiting. This time it's not the same rush as last time I was connected, so hopefully this fact will also be reflected in the writing.

Last time I wrote to you we were just about to join a buddhist meditation retreat at the very same island where we stayed 3 lovely weeks - Koh Phangang in Southern Thailand. The retreat was held at a small Wat - which means monastery - in a hillside overlooking the coast and the sea. During the last 10 years an American-Australian couple called Steve and Rosemary eissmann have been teaching here. They have themselves been been part of the "hippi-wave" to the East in the 70s, and have been trained in buddhist meditation in Thailand and neighbouring countries. Their teachings are a mixture of sitting, standing and walking meditation, as well as something they call `reflexive' meditation and training in beeing aware of all other activity with speech, body or mind.

The center/monastery was located right in the middle of a tropical forest. This had both positive and negative impact. Positive was the very strong and pervasive experience of the nature through all the senses. There were all kinds of birds, insects, reptiles (including cobra-snake!) and small animals. I've never seen so many different types of ants at the same place! This fauna wasn't always benevolent. It's quite hard to sit quiet and mindfully observe as you notice a mosquito is biting you! The flowers were everywhere, blossoming continously, and - I have to admit - sometimes interrupting the walking meditation. But a forest also protects from the cooling breeze that constantly sweeps in from the sea. Therefore my biggest challenge was keeping up with the scorching heat that made us all sweat in streams. Some days I got a bit of a headache, and the clothes had to be changed and washed every day.

But all in all, the retreat was a good experience, especially since this was the first time Anne Anita and me did something like this together. We had to keep silent for the 10 days the retreat lasted, and didn't quite know how the other was doing. I was therefore releaved to know that she had found the retreat interesting and good for the mind. This first experience together has insipred us to do something similiar again in the future.

After the retreat we were longing for some more sun, beach and bathing, and therefore went back to Bottle Beach for another week. On Easter Sunday we then returned back to Bangkok, and went to an Easter Mass with the Swedish congregation in the Anglican church. Earlier that day we spend a copule of hours reading Aftenposten at the Swedish Seamans Church and understood two things: We haven't missed too much in Norway so far, and the Easter weather seemed to be horrible up North. Maybe we should just be happy with our 37 sweating degrees?

The plans for the next half of our trip have been changed. Instead of going to Laos/Vietnam/HK, we will fly to Calcutta in India on April 8th, and stay in India untill the travel budget is empty. Maybe travelling in Thailand has been too easy, maybe I'm longing back to a country which made such impact on me 6 years ago, maybe Anne Anita has simply got too curious to see for herself why everybody keep talking about the country - even years after they left. Probably all of these reasons have played together and put us in a situation were we look really very much forward to go to that crazy chaos.

OK, I have to finish now. Finally I would only like to encourage you to send us news about yourselves and your doing. We haven't received very much yet, and the Internet is really the best medium for us. But if you can't email us, send mail to [adress].