Let There Be Drums!
Earlier this month I was asked by my old company(*) if I’d be interested in joining an inspection trip somewhere ‘off-the-beaten’ track’, sure, count me in!
However, where exactly was this expedition supposed to go, not an entirely unimportant detail, right?
When they told me it was Ang Thong I felt any potential Indiana Jones adventure rapidly going down the drain…
Thailand is a great country, but unfortunately, some provinces are less interesting than others and in the case of Ang Thong that’s a massive understatement!
As far as I knew (**) there’s absolutely nothing to do and any visiting tourist would instantly die of boredom…
Location-wise too, it’s between somewhere (Ayutthaya in this case) and nowhere (Central Thailand) which says it all really!
Just as I was about to cancel my participation in this exercise in lethargy, the itinerary dropped into my mailbox.
Carefully I browsed through the proposed program and slowly began feeling a bit more positive!
Besides temples (jeez, never saw those before!) there was also a visit to a ‘drum making village’.
Immediately my imagination flooded with visions of scantily dressed natives dancing to Les Baxter’s drum beats, pretty cool really! (***)
As a result, we ended up a few days later driving through endless rice fields with a few temple stops along the way.
To my pleasant surprise, some of these were significantly different from the average temple and certainly photogenic!
Once in the village itself though the first impression wasn’t great, somehow it didn’t seem any different from the standard sleepy up-country place.
The first ’shop’ we stopped at was rather disappointing, granted they did sell various kinds of drums, but it seemed more like a run-down storeroom than anything else, the few locals even didn’t care much about what we were doing there.
By now my carefully build-up enthusiasm for the trip began to suffer a meltdown!
Luckily with our second stop we struck gold, another shop but with people actually working and not just a little bit either!
We got permission to walk around and were massively impressed by the different aspects of the drum production, from sawing tree trunks into suitable chunks to preparing the cowhides and more!
Local craftsmen making these drums use a very meticulous process.
This involves selecting the right type of (Rain tree) wood, treating it, hollowing the piece, proportioning the drum stem, and preparing the skin to cover it.
There was zero resemblance to my Les Baxter-induced hallucinations but I couldn’t care less, after all this was the real deal!
Most of the work has to be done by hand.
A slow but ultimately rewarding process as you can see!
Afterwards my impressions of Ang Thong were definitely improved by 100%!
(*) I used to work for many years for Khiri Travel but occasionally they like taking me off the retirement shelf for stuff like this!
(**) As you probably know by now I don't know that much but have enough imagination (on steroids!) to make up for it!
P.s. The title of this blog post refers to this instrumental rock classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjeEtHyV2DQ
It is a fine post, KK, and makes me want to visit this workshop. I think Kiri could use it in pronation...
Great and nice story!!