Sakon Nakhorn: With Friends and Tham Kham

Returning to Sakon.

Although I do love Sakon for being a place, I love it more for the people. Thai people in general are wonderful, welcoming, and friendly. People in Sakon are often even more so. This might be due to the lack of foreigners in the town, or it might just come from the rural atmosphere (much as rural America seems generally more friendly than a city like Chicago, New York, or LA).

Anyways, here are some of my friends in Sakon.

This is Mae Nang's house. We bought lunch at the market and brought it to her house to eat. Mae Nang (at the head of the table) is one of there most welcoming people I know. When I was a missionary, we held Thanksgiving dinner at her home, as well as a number of other activities.  

Here we are at dinner with some other friends. I was visiting the town at the same time as another returned missionary. Our paths crossed so we had a combined dinner with friends.

Here we are having Korean Barbeque at Baeb's house. She's in the background. Korean barbeque is a favorite here in Thailand. It gives you plenty of time to sit and chat while the meat cooks.

I sometimes think I should get a Korean Barbeque cooker thing for the US, but then I don't know if I have enough friends around to justify the expense.

Here we are eating again at one of the new restaurants in town.

I bet you are starting to wonder if we did anything besides eat.

We did. We went to visit Tham Kham, a sacred cave on one of the mountains near Sakon. The top of the mountain is a bare rock surrounded by miles of forest. The view is quite beautiful.

When I visited before in 2004, there was a small shrine to forest monks who used to stay in the caves in the area to worship. It was a quite place, removed from the modern world.

Since then, the abbot of the local monastery decided it was important to build a permanent temple on the location. He has collected money and built this temple on top of the mountain over the cave. He, along with the local government, are now billing it as a location for religious tourism.

I found it very, very unfortunate.

The cave and mountain used to be a very peaceful place. It was considered sacred because a few forest monks had used it as a meditation retreat. The forest surrounded it. A few monkey troops lived nearby, and you could see them in the trees. Also the birds in the area were very beautiful. I could truly envision forest monks quietly meditating in the caves.

Now many of the trees have been cut down to make way for a temple complex and the face of the cliff has been carved away for this Buddha relief. There is a road all the way to the top of the mountain that the monastery's new pickups use to transport construction materials. A number of monks now inhabit the area full time, and man-built meditation buildings hug the sides of the cliff.

The monkeys and birds were gone, chased away by the construction noise and permanent human presence.

 A new building nestled half-way in the meditation cave houses the hospital bed and other belongings of the monks who used to meditate here. It's all kept behind glass.

And there are plastic, life-size figures of two monks.

I was reminded of how we all hold different things in different esteem. I remembered Tham Kham as a beautiful place for its natural beauty. The monks who live there now obviously revere it as a place to worship and remember the two monks who lived there before.

Personally, I question the wisdom of their decisions about developing the area for a number of reasons, but this blog is not the place for such an essay. I'll just say that for being part of an order of forest monks who have vowed to live in poverty, they certainly cut down a lot of the forest and handled a lot of money.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps on the day I visited, the continuing noise of construction of new residences for the monks had changed to mood of the place, and once that stops it will return to its prior tranquility. I'll have to see next time I pass through the area.

 On the way back toward town, we stopped so I could take a few pictures.

 It's the start of the rainy season, which means it is time to prepare the soil for rice planting.

 We also started chatting with this woman who grows organic guava. She places plastic bags over them to protect them from insects and disease.

We visited her at her field house (most Thai farmers have one house in town and another in their fields), where we enjoyed the rural Thai ambiance. We also bought way too many organic guava. She sure saw us coming.