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Phra Baidika-Anant Thammashoto appointed Superior Monk of Naklua Sub District
Festivals and Events From the Tourism Lampang, the capital city of the province of the same name, is known to have been inhabited for some 1,300 years. It is a city rich in northern Thai culture and traditions, possessing a unique charm and with much to offer visitors. Two of Lampang’s claims to fame are that it is the only Thai city still using horse-drawn carriages as public transport and that it has the world’s only camp for training young elephants. Reflecting public-private sector cooperation, the “Amazing Lampang 2000” campaign has been initiated by the provincial authorities with the enthusiastic support of Lampang residents keen to make Lampang Province a preferred tourist destination. The promotional campaign features a yearlong calendar of events and cultural presentations which highlight the diverse natural as well as the cultural attractions, activities and the local way of life Lampang Province offers.
Two of the key highlights are: The “Commemoration of the Arrival of the Northern Railway and the First Horse Drawn Carriages” which celebrates the anniversary of the arrival of the northern railway at Lampang and the introduction of the horse-drawn carriages as public transport in the city, held from March 31 to April 2, 2000. And the “Bo Sang Umbrella and San Kamphaeng Handicraft Festival” from January 21 - 23, 2000. In preparing to welcome visitors from all over the world, Lampang is also promoting the infrastructure necessary to highlight the many attractions of the province.
The Bo Sang Umbrella & San Kamphaeng Handicraft Festival January 21 - 23, 2000 - The Bo Sang Umbrella and San Kamphaeng Handicraft Festival is one of Chiang Mai’s best known traditional festivals. Instrumental in keeping the art of umbrella-making alive, the Bo Sang Umbrella Festival plays a significant role in the promotion of this local cottage industry. The annual event presents a colorful spectacle with a cultural parade being held during the opening ceremony. Other event activities include a range of contests from a contest of umbrella-decorated vehicles to umbrella-making, paintings featuring umbrellas and fans as well as the traditional beauty pageant. In addition there will be folk entertainment, cultural shows and sales of handicrafts at attractive prices. Trotting Down Memory’s Lane - “The Railways & Horse Carriages of Lampang” March 31 - April 2, 2000 - In recognition of the all important role of railways and horse carriages in the local economy and Lampang community in its social and economic progress, festivities in the city of Lampang are being held in “Commemoration of the Arrival of the Northern Railway and the First Horse Drawn Carriages”, also paying tribute to the province’s historical past.
Lampang Province is offering a special tour package featuring the following highlights. On the morning of April 1, 2000, visitors will be welcomed at the Lampang Railway Station. From there, the delegation spends two full days exploring the many attractions of Lampang Province. These include - * The Wat Phrathat Lampang Luang Temple In addition, 4 other side trips highlight a few of Lampang’s key attractions - nature, culture, adventure and way of life.
* The Chae San National Park with its natural springs and
waterfalls Other Amazing Lampang 2000 Festivals And Events February 3-4, 2000: City’s Longevity Ceremony. Venue: Lak Muang (City Pillar), Lampang. Pay respects to Lampang city’s foundation stone on February 3 - 4, 2000. Buddhist and Brahmin rites are performed at the Lak Muang, the revered city pillar, that guides and guards the destiny of the city. This is an annual propitiation to the spirits that protect the city and its residents. Lampang municipality has further details. Phone: (054) 228348. February 5, 2000: Homage to Lampang’s Founder. Venue: Phor Chao Thipchang Statue, Lampang. Pay homage to the statue of “Phor Chao Thipchang”, the founder of Lampang City on February 5, 2000. The citizens of Lampang pay annual homage wearing traditional dress and parading the offerings to be made to their city’s founding father.
February 4-6, 2000: Sixth Elephant Satoke (Khantoke) Fair. Thai Elephant Conservation Center, Hang Chat, Lampang. The sixth Elephant Satoke Fair takes place between February 4 and 6 at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center to the northwest of Lampang town in Hang Chat District. “Satoke (Khantoke)” is the northern form of dining, seated on the floor around a circular table. Additionally there are captivating shows featuring elephants at work, the elephant’s Satoke parade and exhibitions of local culture and tradition. February 14, 2000: Valentine’s Day. Venue: Baan Sri Wang Lampang. On February 14, 2000, Valentine’s Day, loving couples will be warmly welcomed at the Baan Sri Wang, a magnificent residence, located in Amphoe Muang, Lampang. This is a great chance for those wishing to be married in the ancient Lanna traditional style. A tour of Lampang city is also included. April 1, 2000: Wang River Thanksgiving. Venue: Wang River Bank, Lampang. On April 1, 2000, join the people of Lampang in giving thanks to the Wang River, the lifeblood of the city. This event will take place along the banks of the Wang River in Lampang town. There will be merit making with food being presented to Buddhist monks. A Buddhist ritual will be held and a parade of Buddha images. April 10-14, 2000: Songkran Festival and Sa Loong Luang Procession. Venue: Khelang Nakorn Public Park Lampang City. Enjoy the Songkran festival in Lampang from April 10 to 14, 2000. Songkran will be celebrated along with Lampang’s unique Sa Loong Luang (silver bowl) festival. Organized events will include a parade of Lampang’s own Emerald Buddha image through the city streets, merit-making, drum beating contest, beauty contests and traditional Thai New Year ceremonies. The Sa Loong Luang procession will take place on April 12, along with a northern food fair. April 29-30, 2000: Chao Phor Pratu Pha Shrine Celebrating Ceremony. Venue: Ngao District. The Chao Phor Pratu Pha Shrine Celebrating ceremony takes place at the Chao Phor Pratu Pha shrine in Ngao District of Lampang from April 29 to 30, 2000. When visiting the shrine, there is an opportunity to view ancient rock drawings dating back between 3,000 to 5,000 years. Entertainment featured includes folk games, traditional dancing and Thai boxing contests in the ancient style to commemorate this famous historical figure.
June 2-4, 2000: Pineapple Fair. Venue: Lampang City. Pineapples are one of the farm products for which Lampang is justly famous and the annual Pineapple Fair, between June 2 and 4, 2000 celebrates this favorite fruit. There will be a pineapple contest with farmers displaying their finest fruits, pineapples for sale, as well as products made from them. A “Miss Pineapple” beauty contest will also be held. July 5-8, 2000: Lampang Food and Fish Fair. Venue: Wang River Bank, Lampang. On the banks of the Wang River from July 5 to 8, 2000 the Lampang Food and Fish Fair will be held. There will be an exhibition of local fisheries, a chance to release fish into the river, and aquarium and drawing contests. This is also a great opportunity to sample the many mouth-watering local delicacies that will be on display. August 6, 2000: Mae Mor Mini-Marathon in Honour of Her Majesty Queen Sirikit. Venue: Mae Mor District. There will be a mini-marathon held in Mae Mor District, Lampang, on August 6, 2000 in honor of Her Majesty the Queen’s birthday. Participants, whether runners or walkers, are warmly welcomed. October 6-8, 2000: Gew Lom Rafting Weekend. Venue: Gew Lom Dam. Gew Lom Dam will host the Gew Lom Rafting Fair from October 6 to 8, 2000. There will be boat racing between crews of enthusiastic oarsmen, diving in the waters and fabulous raft trips on the reservoir. There will be many ceremonies, parades and different kinds of entertainment. November 3-4, 2000: Loy Krathong Festival. Venue: Wang River Bank. Lampang has its own special Loy Krathong celebration called “Long Sapao Chao Viang Lakorn” Festival. It will be held on November 3 and 4, 2000 along the banks of the Wang River as it flows through the city. Enjoy the beauty of the full moon as it shines on the Krathong contest. Hot air lantern, fireworks and the foliage archways decorating competition are some of the other event highlights. December 4-12, 2000: Floral Carnival. Venue: Suan Pha Thoong Gwian Hang Chat District. Suan Pha Thoong Gwian in Hang Chat District is hosting the Floral Carnival, being held from December 4 - 12, 2000. There will be parades of floral floats and of elephants as well as competitions to judge the finest flowering and foliage plants. There will also be displays of cut flowers, of plants and of wooden handicraft items. December 4-10, 2000: Ceramics Fair. Venue: Big C Department Store Parking Lot, Lampang City. Lampang is famed for its ceramics, which will be celebrated at the Ceramics Fair to be held in the parking lot of the Big C Department Store in Lampang City between December 4 and 10, 2000. There will be contests of unusual ceramics, exhibitions of the products and ceramic ware for sale at bargain prices. December 28, 2000 to January 5, 2001: Winter Fair and Red Cross Fair Gymnastic College, Lampang City. Lampang has an annual Winter Fair and Red Cross Fair. It takes place from December 28, 2000 until January 5, 2001. There will be much typically northern entertainment and an interesting range of stalls operated by various government agencies. Traditional products and handicrafts will be the best buys, and the night will be alive with beauty contests and other entertainment. For more information on any of the above, contact the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) Northern Office Region 1, phone: (053) 248 604.
by Johny Live, coiffeur extraordinaire Hi everybody, please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Johny Live. I’ve been working in London for the last 25 years, where I owned three of London’s most funky salons. Now I am over here in Pattaya to sort out all of your hair problems! I trained at Vidal’s and Leonard’s - he’s the guy who invented the Beatles famous mop tops - with clients ranging from Twiggy, Joan Collins, Mary Quant, the list is endless, and I’ve only been given 600 words. My training was the very best that London had to offer and I’m sure that if I can’t make you look like sex on toast then my life’s work has been a complete waste of time. The secret of making any client happy is quite simple: you have to understand how to communicate, find out first what you like, and most importantly find out what you hate. Everybody has their own set ideas of the image they would like to portray, first to themselves, and then to other people. There is very little that I cannot do to your hair, as hairdressing is not only my profession, it is also my obsessional hobby. I never get tired of making women look sexy and glamorous. It is my drug, it is my addiction, and I never tire of it. When I cut your hair you can throw away your brushes and set fire to your curling irons. Unfortunately, the paper won’t let me print what you can do with your carmen rollers. Johny live is in town! My ideas for colouring will more than please the fussiest of you, and my butter perms will make you cry with joy! I’ve had a few readers asking me about the problems involved with keeping their hair in good condition while sitting around the pool. Their hair is getting exposed to the elements of the sun. Even the fumes from exhausts from the cars and many bikes over here can cause problems to your follicles... don’t worry because help is at hand. There are many hair preparations that are easily available from Boots the chemist (thank heavens for Boots). They have their own hair repair serum; it costs about 250bt, and you just add a couple of dabs to the palm of tour hands and wow, instant gloss! It repairs your hair at the same time. This will also protect your hair from the elements of the sun. Living in paradise has its own costs; I guess life isn’t perfect! A young Thai guy came into my salon for a consultation. He wanted to look like the guy in the Levis advert, or at least I thought that was what he wanted. My assistant wasn’t there to interpret... Anyway, I’m snipping away, 40 min’s later, I show him the back. He looks worried. My assistant shows up, he tells her something in Thai, she explains to me that he isn’t sure about the haircut I’ve given him. I said he was a little vague. I told her that he asked for the guy in the Levi ad. She said, no, not the Levi ad, he wants to look like Elvis. I told her the guy in the Levi ad was Elvis! He paid his bill, told her I was a hound dog and left. In the next few weeks I shall be running a Dear Johny live hair problems column, so come on ladies of Pattaya, you can write in to the paper or email me at [email protected]. Here’s the first: Dear Johny Live, whenever I have my hair highlighted over here, my hair goes more orange than blonde. I’m getting fed up. Is there a reason for this? I want to look like the girl from Baywatch, not Mavis from Coronation Street! What to do? Dear Marmalade, they’re obviously not using the correct strength of developer, or they are getting scared and taking it off too early. Maybe they are underestimating the darkness of your hair in the first place. This is the sort of thing where communication and product knowledge are crucial. Don’t forget, the average Thai only trains over here for a year. Where I come from, London, it’s about 5 yrs. That’s the biggest part of the problem. Johny Live is now appearing live at the Royal Garden Spa& Fitness Centre.
by John D. Blyth A Gift From A King Experience has taught me that it is far easier to research Thai railway history from an apartment in West London than it is from a similar home here in Pattaya! This is due mainly to the large number of railway students, whose interest are often world-wide and to excellent libraries provided by some of the railway societies in the U.K.; this is balanced by the absence of reliable information, even in the records of the State Railway of Thailand, the inaccessibility of the National archives to myself as farang, and not least the language difficulty. I often receive letters from my friend Reg. Carter, Assistant Librarian of the Stephenson Locomotive Society and a person with wide knowledge and endless enthusiasm, and one which came in about in 1995 was an eye-opener. The short note accompanied a single sheet extracted from a list of locomotives built by the small Belgian firm of locomotive builders, Couillet, to be found in the town of Marcinelle, in the French-speaking area of the country. He had marked a line of entry and it was almost in code! It read: 343-4 1876 Bt 915 Roi De Siam 343-4 were the serial numbers allocated for identification purposes, for example when spares are ordered; 1876 was of course the year of building; Bt was the German way of indicating a four wheeled locomotive carrying its fuel and water supplies on its own frames and not in a separate ‘tender’; 915 was the track gauge (the distance between the rails as laid and measured between the inner surfaces of the rail-heads) in this case in millimetres; and Roi De Siam (King Of Siam) was the individual to whom the locomotives were to be delivered. An eye-opener indeed! We knew about the model train, a
gift from Queen Victoria of Britain to H.M. King Mongkut, Rama IV, in 1856.
Presented during an audience by diplomat Harry Smith Parkes, it was a
‘persuader’, aimed at allowing the British to build a railway ‘across
Siam’. Britain had already colonised Burma and Malaya, both sharing a
frontier with Siam, and was now casting greedy eyes on this Kingdom. His
Majesty wisely said ‘No’. As far as we knew the first ‘real’
locomotives to reach the Kingdom were two small German-built examples for
the tiny Pak Nam Railway, opened buy King Rama V, in 1893. But for a chance mention in a letter to a former lecturer at the British Science Museum in London, now living in France in retirement, it might have ended there. However, my friend’s retentive memory led him to take from his bookshelf a book in French by Andre Dagant, Belgian Locomotive Builders. There is a description of locomotives passed between Royalty as gifts and mentioning the two locomotives for the King of Siam, with which came some track and a saloon coach. The photograph is a poor one taken from a bad angle, but my friend, in his letter, ‘turned it round’ to make a free-hand sketch as from one side. From this I developed the drawing shown herewith; I make no claim to the precise accuracy - all I could do was make some assumptions as to the right proportions and guess the rest! I think it is as good as we shall get unless some Couillet drawings turn up, by now not likely. Two things strike me at once. Firstly it is not a ‘Bt’, but has a ‘tender’ for its fuel and water supplies. A well-known hand has made some additions and amendments to the list and I think he put in the errant ‘t’; I have asked him and in a letter he admits that it was too long ago to remember! Secondly, remembering that such gifts are usually for ‘Garden Railways’, the 915mm track gauge (just three feet in imperial measurement) is quite astonishingly big - not much less than the 1,000mm in use on the State Railway system. I recall that at the time it was Grand Palace that was the Official Royal Residence and I suspect that even in 1876 the area was fairly crowded with buildings of all kinds. I could not visualise curving the track sufficiently to enable it to run around all these structures. So where was it laid out? My mind at once thinks of the Royal Residence, Chitrlada Palace; a look at the long walls that surround the grounds suggests this as a possibility, and a look at the current map of Bangkok and it seems that the actual Palace is in the middle of quite extensive grounds with footpaths and lakes; but I do not know even the date it was built and certainly not its status at that time - was it even Royal Property? Equally obscure is what happened to these items, a gift from the King of Belgian to the King of Siam! Do they still exist, and if so, where? Is it possible that for some reason they failed to arrive? This is also a possibility in the case of the final pair of locomotives of the original 1894 order for the first section of what became the Royal State Railway of Siam, but at the time known as the Bangkok-Negara Rajesima Railway. They would have been Nos. 7 and 8, but in 1897 two ‘second-hand’ locomotives arrived from the U.K. and were allocated these numbers. The truth, if it is known, is buried somewhere very deep indeed! If any reader has any clues or suggestions, please write to me at P.O. Box 97, in Pattaya City. I have my own ideas for both, but it is not quite the time to put them to print.
Copyright 1999 Pattaya Mail Publishing Co.Ltd. |
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Madam
Claus with two of her children.
Witnessing this amazing sight were crowds of local
residents who brought along their children to join in the fun and games.
It was purely magical to see the look of wonder on the children’s sweet
faces and to watch them running and jumping around attempting to catch the
never-ending falling snowflakes.
Sexy
Wahines perform in the Polynesian Dance Show.
The
Dean Monk of Region 13 Phradech Phrakhun Phrathep Wethi presided over a
ceremony at the Chayamongkhon Temple in Pattaya bestowing the Buddhist
Mandate of Dean Monk of Naklua Sub-District to the Abbot from
Chayamongkhon Temple Phra Baidika-Anant Thammashoto.
Former
Mayor of Pattaya Pairat Suttithamrongsawat and the President of the
Pattaya Business and Tourism Association (PBTA) Surat Mekhawarakul, with a
number of other honoured guests hold the charter of appointment
Parading
the Buddhist Mandate through the streets of the city.
out
for the indulgence of the hungry. Indian songs were sung and dancing was
non-stop. The highlight of the evening was the arrival of Santa
“Singh” Claus. The roof almost came down as children of all ages
shrieked with delight. Santa Singh had a huge bag of presents. All the
children swarmed poor Santa, but no fear, he had more than enough for
everybody. Children and adults played games and won prizes. Many door
prizes were also given away, generously donated by businesses in Pattaya.
You thought the Indian community were a shy lot? Never has there been so
much pent up energy expensed on the dance floor. It was sheer delight to
behold. Congratulations are in order for the organisers who were
instrumental in ensuring that this was a millennium night to remember. The
dance floor was still packed at 4 a.m. when the party was declared closed.
Lets do it again next year!
Bo
Sang Umbrella and San Kamphaeng Handicraft Festival
Salang
Luang Festival
Salang
Luang Festival
Horse
and buggy in Lampang
Elephant
Conservation Center
Wat
Phrathat Lampang Luang