1,001 Voices on Climate Change by Devi Lockwood

Author:Devi Lockwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tiller Press
Published: 2021-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

6 THAILAND

SPIRIT SHRINE

The year of no flying ended like this: I gave up. After four months of trying unsuccessfully to secure a passage on a sailboat from New Zealand to anywhere-that-was-not-Australia, I bought a cheap flight to Bangkok in May 2016. I packed my bicycle in a cardboard box. I flew. It seemed, at the time, to be the only way forward. It was a strange feeling, being on a plane after having avoided air travel for so long. My feet hurt. The air was so dry. Cargo ships are loud, but airplanes are louder.

Two flights, an eight-hour delay, and a taxi ride later, I caught the sunrise in my open arms. A friend from my hometown let me stay at her sixteenth-floor flat in Sukhumvit. I ate a dragon fruit on her balcony, above the chaos of power lines, traffic, and trees. Some trees, decked out in lengths of colorful cloth, are protected. I melted in the heat. Nearly every building, I learned, has a spirit shrine. People bow at the spirit shrines as they pass.

Sema Thai Marionette is a puppetry company in Bangkok dedicated to preserving and performing Thai puppetry traditions. I went to their morning performance of a show about the Rambutan prince at a primary school, and then hung out at their puppetry workshop for the afternoon. The team of puppeteers helped me translate my cardboard sign into Thai so that I could collect stories on the street. They also let me try out a bicycling marionette—the pedals moved with a flick of my wrist.

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