Trakan Phut Phon (8)

2004: Mr. Pooma told me that together with Mr. Cheek they found some Nepenthes around here (I’ve seen some slides, they looked like N. thorelii!), somewhere on the road n. 2050 north direction.

2006: I went there. I arrived in the dirty, inhospitable, big and modern city of Ubon Ratchatani in the evening. I went around for ages looking for a cheap place to stay. Also thanks to a kind guy who brought me around on his motorbike with all my backpacks. We were looking for a specific hotel that was on my guide, but after passing from one “it’s just near the corner” to the other for 15 times (it seems local people have the same problem I have! They give each other wrong directions just to make each other happy!), we eventually found what is probably the cheapest place in town: a luxury room for 250 bat. It was 350 but I managed to have a discount when I first refused to stay. I must again underline here the great kindness of that guy, who went all around Ubon just to make me find a cheap room and he refused any reward! The following morning I ran to Trakan Puet Pon. The only cheap place to stay in Trakan was 2 km out of the city, a very nice resort on the famous road 2050, which comes from Ubon and goes all through Trakan up to Kemmarat. I didn’t even have lunch, and I started walking, around 12 o’clock, on that road. Soon I felt how heavy my backpack was. During the first hour a girl crossed the road and came to me, asking me to stop and have a drink and some food. I’m sure this would never happen in any western Country. Well, here is very common, just to let you know. She was having lunch with all her family in a place that looked like a big company of some kind. They called a lady who could speak English so that I could communicate with all of them through her translation. They gave me a coke (a wonderful, fresh, cold, restoring, energetic coke that I quite appreciated) and, as I wrongly asked for some “rice and chicken”, they gave me some boiled rice with boiled chicken pieces, without salt. I tried to eat it, but there was no way to swallow the chicken, whose skin was more or less raw and I couldn’t take it off from the meat not even with a knife. Anyway, they were very kind and I enjoyed the coke, which gave me a lot of caffeine and sugar, very precious stuff in these occasions. Next time I’ll ask for “fried rice chicken”, that actually is a completely different thing and edible indeed. Of course they told me that the road 2050 is very dangerous and “no mokao, no mokao, I’m sure”, but being used to this kind of words I was just ignoring them and trying to build up some energy to start walking again. And so I did, after saying thank you very much. On the way I found a lot of sites with dry sand, but just two were wet enough to host carnivorous plants, and there I found D. burmanni. After a while I met a joyful procession, with drunk, partying people, walking on the roadside like me, that were going all together to the temple following a pickup with a small orchestra on it. They offered me some beer and I saw among them the “boiled chicken” family. I made 12 km that afternoon, but no mokao. I went back to the resort thanks to a lift. At the resort I had some great fried rice with shrimps. And then I was also told by the young resort owner, while we were becoming always more friends, that the rice was free, as that night was the Chinese New Year’s eve.

The following day I went to Pha Taem np and Kaeng Tana np. Then I spent a very nice dinner time with my friend, the resort owner. After some whisky and cigarettes, and after having heard my adventures and targets, he promised to lend me his mountain bike for the following day. In fact I had to finish my work with the road 2050, as the previous day I was only able to check the first 12 km of the total 60 km to Kemmarat. With a bike the work could have been done faster and easier. So in the morning I had a good English breakfast, I took the bike and I left. I made 60 km, from 8:30am to 4:30pm. The saddle completely broke my cheeks and I had some difficulties to sit down for 3-4 days. The sun boiled my brain and that was probably the main reason of the many, strange and disturbing thoughts that can be considered normal when you ride for 8 hours on the roadside, under the sun, looking for some plants that have been found around there, somewhere, five years before. In particular I wondered why the thai professor who found the plants five years before never answered to my requests of help while visiting all the locations he had already visited. And I wondered why there are so many people here that insist to have your email address, they are so happy when they get it, they promise they will write you, while in fact they will never answer, not even to your most important messages. I stopped to eat something, at some kind of restaurant hut, but it took 20 minutes to make them understand that I was just hungry and I needed food. While they were laughing, as usual, I just took all the edible ingredients I could find around and put them on the table, showing with my hands that they had to cook them with noodles (incredibly, they had no rice!). In the mean time I had a wonderful, fresh, cold, restoring, energetic coke (believe me, I’m not paid by the coca-cola company, but sometimes that’s the best thing you can put in you mouth for days). The lady came back with some disgusting, jelly bunch of noodles, which could be hardly separated one from the others. I tried a bit of it, I said thank you for the coke, I paid and left. The coke was enough to go on anyway, with its sugar and caffeine. On the way I found 5-6 sandy swamps with U. bifida, D. indica and D. burmanni, but no mokao. One of these swamps in particular was very big (see here) but I could just visit the area that you see in the photo. Maybe the pitcher plants are growing beyond that area, who knows. I had another 30 km to check before the sunset, so I had to go. Maybe after 5 years the mokao isn’t there anymore, considering how many new houses and companies are being built. Maybe Pooma and Cheek had a guide or maybe they had some old herbarium specimen with the name of the precise site on the road 2050. With my broken cheeks and with the deep sadness that you only feel when you realize how many possibilities you have to spend two months in that Country without finding anything, I reached Kemmarat at 4:30pm, feeling some kind of fever, probably due to the sun and the effort. In Kemmarat I was told that there were no more buses to Trakan. For one hour I tried to stop a car, with no results. A very kind thai man, with a perfect English, stopped with his pick-up and told me, while his wife and kids were smiling in the backseats, that if I couldn’t find any way to go back, I could have slept at the church for that night, as he was the priest and leader of the local Christian community. I thanked him, I took that as my plan b and I went on with my hitchhiking. Eventually I remembered Niky’s words (see Pha Taem) and - as I usually do in these occasions - I took them as a sign. I called her and she was so kind to drive for 60+60 km with her car, up to Kemmarat, to bring me back to Trakan. Of course the following evening I paid her a dinner. Plus, I think I found her an extra job, doing some paid researches for me! As she heard about my intention to go back to Pha Taem to see the mokao at the Soi Sawan waterfalls, probably being afraid that I could find myself in some more troubles (Niky, you know, it’s never a real trouble if you don’t risk to die, and dying is not so easy) she offered herself to bring me there by car. See Pha Taem for the rest of the story and my last day in Trakan.

2007: This time I asked Mr. Pooma once more where they had found the plants. He gave me many details, so I was nearly sure about the place where I had to go. I went there by bus, and from 10 to 16 o’clock I carefully explored the whole area without finding anything. Unbelievable. The following day I went there with Niky. We stopped at another place which seemed to correspond to Pooma’s description. Nothing. I couldn’t really believe that the plants were there and we couldn’t find them.

A few weeks later, I was nearly at the end of my two months trip, from Trat I went straight to Bangkok and I took the first bus to Ubon where I arrived at 3 o’clock in the night. I slept on a couple of chairs at the bus station and at about 7 in the morning I took the bus to Trakan. Niky gave me the good morning with a lot of surprise for my nth visit and for my energy in trying to reach my target. Then she told me how being Sunday she wasn’t working and she could bring me around wherever I wanted. That was a great occasion to solve with her the problems with the road 2050, with Pha Taem and with Bung. I was quite happy about that, even if didn’t even know it was Sunday, as confused as I was because of my jumping for two months from one impossible place to the other. This time we concentrated on the second place we had found the previous time, even asking the people living in the area. Nothing.

When I went back to Bangkok I asked Mr. Pooma once more. Fortunately it seems that the reason of my bad luck was that the two places I had checked were not the right ones. So I can hope in some good results for the next time. A couple of months later Pooma sent me a photo of that plant, but it’s just an upper pitcher, it could belong to any smilesii-related species.

2008: I went to the BKF, this time to see Mrs. Kongkanda, who also went with Cheek to that same location, together with Pooma. She said they went in a completely different direction. Maybe they also stopped near Trakan, but from there they went strait to Khong Chiam, which is the town on the border, next to the southern side of Pha Taem. They stopped their car and asked some villager, who said he knew where those plants could be found and brought them in a close savannah, where our guys found that plant in the above picture, that is now clearly supposed to be N. smilesii. This year I went to Khong Chiam. Quite a lost and small town, very difficult to find anything to eat, I bought some peanuts. Kongkanda said with the car they stopped not very far from the town, so I started walking from the town border. As soon as you start going out of town, you are quite often surrounded, just out of the road, by flat stones and sandy fields. They are typical of Pha Taem, they are typical of N. smilesii and they must be typical of the whole province! I checked the most promising ones and, of course, I asked every single person I met on my way. Looots of people. I walked for hours, I made kilometres. Nothing. I had both my backpack on my shoulders, as that was one of those trips “in between”, when you’re not supposed to sleep there; after Khong Chiam I was ready for the next destination. I had lunch with my peanuts and with an ice-cream, but the 40 degrees of temperature of the full sun, my two backpacks, hours of walking and finding nothing became too much in the first hours of the afternoon. I had gone much further than I was supposed to, considering the distance from the city that Kongkanda was talking about. I reached a big, open area, with a food shop and a small police station. The “sheriff” (wearing a nice white t-shirt and a pair of shorts) tried to help me, while I was sitting, having a coke and another ice-cream bought at the shop. He stopped a few cars asking if they were going to Trakan, where I also had to go. Otherwise, he said, I could always wait for the last bus. After two hours no car. I asked about the bus, and the sheriff – who couldn’t obviously speak English – said “no bus, no bus”. He made me understand I could sleep there, inside the police station. No no no. Come on, I can’t loose time and sleep here in the middle of nowhere just because you stop one car every ten! “No no, thank you, thank you”, and I left. While he was looking at me with those eyes that are like “and now where the hell he’s going?”. I walked another ten minutes along the roadside and then I sat on my backpacks, I finished my peanuts and I waited about an hour for a lift. Eventually a car stopped, and brought me to Trakan. In Trakan this gentleman said “where you go now?”. “ Well, now I take the bus to Ubon”. “Oh, I go to Ubon too, you can stay with me!”. Damn luck! Once again, God bless these people kindness!