Chanà (15)
2004: at the BKF herbarium in
Bangkok Mr. Pooma showed me the photos of a plant that together with Mr. Cheek
they had found around here. It seemed a strange hybrid between N. mirabilis and
smilesii. They found it somewhere on the road n. 43, that goes from Hat Yai to
Chana, south direction.
2006: I went there. Hat Yai is
quite a big city, and despite the large number of hotels, it’s hard to find a
cheap one. The surroundings are not bad though, with a good number of tourists,
markets, shops and shopping centres, like the busiest areas of Bangkok, but
with cleaner and larger roads. Of course, like all the big cities, you’ll have
to get used to rats and cockroaches crossing your way while you walk around. I
woke up in the early morning, to reach the road 43, and the worse part was
getting to the beginning of it. I had to walk for one hour and a half in the
worse part of the city, the suburbs, with its traffic, noise and dirt. Then I
turned left to enter the n.43 and after a few tens of metres everything
changed. On both the road sides the forest, fields, hills and mountains began
to appear. The worse part was gone. The road 43 is 40 km long. As Mr. Pooma
said “south direction” and as I couldn’t check the whole road on both sides,
because it’s quite large, I only explored the left side, the side where the
lane goes south. For the first 20 km I just walked and I found nothing a part
from N. mirabilis. I asked for some water at a house/restaurant and I asked the
boy who was there if he knew where to find mokao moken lin; he asked to his
friend, who brought me to a very poor village where an old lady brought me
across a couple of fields and a little forest, and then we reached a very
large, open, sandy and clayey bog, covered with ferns and here and there some
N. mirabilis. After another hour, on the main road I found a couple of drunk
guys, and again I asked (I always ask, you never know). But they were mostly
laughing, without giving any sign of knowledge regarding the mokao, so I left.
After twenty minutes they reached me with their motorbike, shouting and holding
a couple of stems of a poor N. mirabilis (people who live in Nepenthes
countries are so used to these plant that they consider it like a weed,
sometimes a precious weed, that can make them earn some money, but they still
treat it like a weed! I was shocked looking how these two guys and the old lady
in the previous place were ripping off Nepenthes stems, offering them to me to
make me happy, while I was horrified!). I thanked the two guys, but there was
no way to make them understand that it was not the mokao that I was looking
for. Feeling sorry for the disappointed expressions on their faces, I left. I
had finished my first 20 km, and I was considering the idea of going back to
Hat Yai to start again the following day from that same point of the road. But
then a young man reached me. He was riding a bike but he slowed down and
started talking to me with a calm, relaxing, very broken English. He told me he
was going to Malaysia, where he wanted to make some money and then go to
Holland. He was so calm, positive and peaceful, that even if most of the time I
had no idea of what he was talking about, I stopped asking him to repeat, and I
started nodding and enjoying his tone and expression, while he looked so happy
of having this chance of talking with someone. After 15 minutes I took it as
the umpteenth sign of fate. I had already explained him what I was doing there,
so I said: “I ride the bike, you hold my backpack and sit on the back. You
know, with a car or a motorbike I can’t look for plants, but with a bike I
can”. That’s how we did the last 20 km. The most unlikely couple in the world!!
Imagine two guys, one farang and one thai, on a bike, riding on the roadside
while holding their backpacks and sometimes zigzagging while looking at their
left side. I found no other Nepenthes, even if I found some promising sandy
areas. Kilometre after kilometre we started doing the countdown to Chana, that we
reached at 5:30pm. While listening to his mesmerizing voice, I found myself
once again, after the experience in front of the river in Thung
Nui, in the conditions of wondering what the hell I was doing there and how
I had managed to find myself in such a situation. But at the same time I was
quite sure that I would have kept those moments in my memory for the rest of my
life as some of the most memorable and beautiful. Riding a bike to Chana for 20
km, with my strange new friend, probably sent by my good luck, looking at the
rice fields and forests on both our sides, with the sunset far on the horizon.
After some hand shaking I left my friend, who went downtown looking for a room,
while I crossed the road and started with the usual hitchhiking. No one
stopped, but I caught the attention of the driver of a big truck. He was
checking wheels and engines, and looking at what I was doing. Then he called me
and I said I was going back to Hat Yai. Ten minutes later I was aboard of the
big beast, with his family, listening and praising to their tapes of Karabao
(the only Bruce Springsteen in a land of Tony Bennets). They left me at the Hat
Yai suburbs, but this time I refused to walk. I managed to stop a motorbike,
and after asking around for 3-4 times where we had to go, we eventually reached
my hotel. I thanked the kind man, I went upstairs and I had one of the best
showers ever. Then dinner at seven-eleven and ice-cream. The following morning
I took the bus to Krabi, where I relaxed for a few more
days before going to Kanchanadit.
2007: This time Hat Yai
was my first target in the south, because first of all I wanted to check the
dry specimens at the Hat Yai university herbarium. There was no reason to visit
all the rest of the southern region before having checked all the possible
sources of pitcher plants locations. And then I had also spoken with Mr. Pooma,
to know something more about the location on the road 43, with those very
interesting plants. This time he gave me some more details, like how the plants
were growing near a restaurant, not far from the road etc. I arrived in town in
the early morning, after having spent the night on the bus. With my two
backpacks still on my shoulders, I went straight to the herbarium, where
unfortunately the most interesting specimens seemed to have been borrowed by M.
Cheek in 2001. Then I went looking for a place to stay; I tried in 3 different
hotels, but eventually the only one with rooms available was the same as the
previous year. It’s a strange hotel, there are no windows, there’s a strong
smell of humid and mould, and in each room you have a normal fan and one that
is inside the wall, to suck the humidity and send it out of the room! But,
strange to say, no cockroaches. I left my luggage and I ran to check again the
road 43. I found a restaurant; the owner had a good English and his face was
the same of Miyagi of “Karate Kid”. He said “mmmh…ok, just follow my friend,
here, he will show you the mokao moken ling, and you can take as much as you
want”. I followed his friend, but among the bushes in front of the restaurant
we only found a lot of very healthy N. mirabilis. I explained Miyagi how that
was not the species I was looking for and I left. But he said that there was
another restaurant 5 km from there, on the same road. I walked for about one
hour on the road side (4 km?), I found another couple of promising, sandy
areas, but I found nothing. But even if I hadn’t found the other restaurant, as
I was in the right area anyway, I decided to stop and ask some kids who were
playing near some huts, a few metres from the road. Actually I hoped they could
bring me a few hundred metres further on that road with their motorbike, I just
wanted to save time and energies, I wasn’t really hoping in some good answer
concerning the mokao. The kids brought me a piece of paper and I made a drawing
of a pitcher. Then two old ladies and an old man came. They had a long talk,
probably about the place where they had seen those plants. Then the kids moved
their hands to mean that they could bring me there with their motorbike. But
then they told me to sit down. In Thailand, when they tell you “sit down
please” is not a good sign. Usually it means they have no idea about what to
do. And to their point of view, as long as you’re sitting, you’re not a problem
anymore, so you can expect to sit there for 6 hours and they will just relax
and don’t think about the problem anymore, just because now you’re sitting. So beware, when they
tell you to sit down, just stand, say you don’t want to sit down and insist
with what you want, beware! They could really leave you there sitting until the
sunset, and then ask you if you want to sleep there, and so on for days, and
when after three days like that you will ask “so, where is this bloody
mokao?!”, they will say “sorry, no have”…many times a Thai friend of mine told
me “never try to understand them, they’re just Thai”. Unfortunately I was
tired, so I sat down, but I was not too unlucky this time. For twenty minutes
the old man, like an old sage, moved his hands to explain how many times he saw
nepenthes plants metres and metres tall, with pitchers as long as his forearm
(they always use the forearm here to tell you how big the pitchers are, even if
that’s untrue…it’s something similar to our last
year I caught a fish big like that, opening our arms wide). I started
thinking I was just loosing time there, as the motorbike was still there and no
one was even telling me where to go. I pointed and touched the motorbike, to
say how I wanted to go and see the plants they were talking about. Suddenly,
like one of my angels of good luck,
from the back of the hut one of the kids appeared carrying in his hand a
nepenthes plant, about 50 cm long. It took me one second to spot the beautiful
reddish, striped pitchers; nothing to do with N. mirabilis! I was shocked, I
ran to the kid saying “Where! Where! Show me! Show me”. He couldn’t understand,
and I didn’t know what to say more than that, so I just pointed at my eyes, and
then at the plant, and then I again pushed him a little bit, like to mean “go,
go”. They all understood at once, they became excited like me and we all ran
behind the house. THIS is the habitat that
appeared to me, just behind the home of these lucky people. No, it wasn’t N.
mirabilis at all. In Italian we use to say “che razza di culo”, rude words to
describe a damn luck. I was shown the first 2-3 plants, and then I was told
that those were the only ones they could find. Anyway, sorry, you’ve been
waiting too much, here they are: pic1, pic2, pic3,
pic4, pic5,
pic6 and a flower.
When the kids saw that I was just taking pictures, they seemed a little bit
disappointed; they were probably expecting something more exciting. After ten
minutes they left and went back to play. But I remained for a long time, even
if I couldn’t realize how long. In the immediate surroundings there were no
other plants, but then I walked for another ten metres distance, and then again
all around the area in circles, and eventually I found about 30 adult plants.
But for sure there were more, the savannah was very vast. Most of the plants
were in flower, many of them had big fruits, not yet mature though, and many of
them had their capsules already open. Not even one plant with seeds ready to be
collected. This type of savannah must be different from that of N. mirabilis –
that in fact wasn’t growing there – and those of N. smilesii and “thorelii” from
Trat or Trakan. All the
pitchers were in fact still intact and in good conditions. N. “Chanà” has
rhizomes as much as N. thorelii and smilesii have, but the latter two species
in the dry season loose most of their pitchers and a good part of their leaves.
So I think in this case the main difference is in the habitat, as here there
must be some water still present in the soil even in the dry season and even
when the sandy surface is completely dry, at least for the 5-10 cm of depth
that I checked. Lots of D. burmanni and U. caerulea in small number all over
the place. I was taking a picture of the plant with the biggest pitchers, when
suddenly I felt something like a big electric shock at my thumb. I gave a look
to see what it was and suddenly I felt another one at my elbow. I ran away
scared and in the run I lost my optical sun glasses. Fortunately I found them,
but I realized that I was probably too close to a wasp’s (or something else?)
nest. The pain didn’t last too long, but the following day, and then for a
week, my thumb and my elbow were 5 cm bigger and very red. All the plants were
growing in full sun, but always near a bunch of grass. I think that helps the
seedlings to survive the drought in the hot periods, helping them to find some
shade and humidity. N. “Chanà” looks like N. smilesii in many characters, but
the difference among the pitchers at their different stages are more dramatic.
Lower, intermediate and uppers haven’t much to do one with the others! That
could have given us the idea of finding ourselves in front of more than one new
species when we saw them in cultivation without the name of their location. As
soon as my cuttings will grow into mature plants (We’ll have seeds one day, trust
me!) I’ll give you the details about lid, glands, peristome and leaves
characteristics, but the most evident feature I noticed is that most of the
lower pitchers had small, dark red blotches in the inner surface, something you
don’t have too often with smilesii and thorelii. The latter two species are
usually green or red inside, or with blotches of paler colours (not darker than
the outside blotches anyway). But you know that colour is not really the best
feature to use to compare Nepenthes! N. “Chanà” is for sure the same plant that
many times has been called N. “giant thorelii”. But things are not so easy:
Nong said he found “giant thorelii” plants on an island in Phangà, but also that (personal communication) he
received some of them by a man who had a big need of cash. Now, was the second
group of plants coming from that same island? Was it coming from Chanà? Were
both of them the same species? Here we are again with the problems caused by
the wrong way of proceeding. The “thorelii giant” island seems to have lost all
his Nepenthes populations, because Nong says the beach was cleaned by all those
weeds with bulldozers, to make room for a new resort. Was the plant on that
island a new species or it was N. “Chanà”? If it was the latter, it could be
that in two years we passed from two locations to just one for this new
species. As long as the villagers will keep their mouth shut, these plants will
disappear year after year, without leaving us the possibility to understand what
they are and to keep them alive at least in cultivation. At the Hat Yai
herbarium I was told that M. Cheek considered that plant a new species, so
that’s sure. In Bangkok Mr. Pooma said that Cheek is going to describe a new
species and name it after the director of the BKF, Mrs. Kongkanda Chayamnarit
(what name will come out of that?), the lady who also went with him to Trakan.
