From Red to Green and Back

Whe

n we pulled off the highway and entered the hamlet of Pho Phra Doh, consternation furrowed the old doctor's brow. "This doesn't look like the place at all," he said. But then again, he hadn't been back for 32 years.

We're here in the district of Umphang on a twofold mission: to understand the dark past of one of Thailand's top tourism destinations, and to seek some closure for an ailing man. That destination is the World Heritage-demarcated Umphang Wildlife Sanctuary and the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary, which comprise an area of surpassing beauty and, until recently, myriad dangers. And that ailing man, Dr. Boonma Kanthakat, is my 72-year-old father-in-law, who is terminally ill with lung cancer.

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When Boonma left his native Chiang Rai province on a bicycle in 1956, he was a 25-year-old with a new medical degree and a broken heart. A few weeks later he found himself in Thailand's wild west, and quickly realized his woes were nothing compared with the hardscrabble existence of the Karen, Mon and other tribes. So he began tramping from village to village, dispensing medicine and medical advice.

In 1971 he was dispatched by the Thai government to Umphang, 670 kilometers northwest of Bangkok. Today, it's a region showered with ecotourism awards for its hill-tribe homestays and treks. But back then, it was a hotbed of communist insurgency. Five guerrillas had stopped Boonma at gunpoint one day and marched him to a village. "I was so scared," he recalls. "There were communists everywhere, more than 1,000 men, and I realized I'd stumbled upon their hideout. The leader introduced himself, put his gun under my chin and told me they shot government spies." Boonma was beaten and interrogated. "They kept screaming 'Spy,' and I kept saying 'Doctor.' I was blindfolded, and they made me drink something. It must have been opium because I lost track of time." Later he was put on a donkey, still masked and bound. "I thought they were going to take me to the jungle and shoot me," he says. Instead, they knocked him unconscious and abandoned him. An army border patrol found him a week later, filthy and incoherent.

The guerrillas surrendered their arms in 1982. The highway into Umphang was constructed a year later, but it took another decade before the first tourists arrived. "It cost 600 lives to build that road," says Sombat Panarong, former chief of Umphang's border police and the present owner of the Umphang Hill Resort. "The communists used to snipe at us from the jungle."

Back at Pho Phra Doh, Boonma hobbles off down a dirt track and stops with a triumphant smile before a ramshackle hut. A muscular Karen tribesman emerges, squints, then breaks into a smile. "It's the doctor," shouts the Karen, who introduces himself as Kanong. The last time they met, Kanong was a 13-year-old communist fighter. An old man appears, and Kanong says, "This is Noo, my father. Remember?" Boonma does. It's hard to forget someone who once held a gun under your chin. They shake hands. "No hard feelings," says Noo. "You're welcome here. We're not communists anymore."

But they still get sick. Noo confides that he has diarrhea, and asks, "Do you have any medicine?" Boonma rummages in his bag with arthritic hands and finds some antibiotics. "Try this," he says, clasping the arm of his former nemesis. "And sorry it's been so long between house calls."