Siamese dream

Saturday, 13/10/2012 – 121 A.D.

“Shoot nothing but pictures. Kill nothing but time. Leave nothing but footprints.”

-          Anon (from a wall in a remote hill village)

13^th October today, we first arrived in New York on 13^th June…four months on the road, ladies and gentlemen! What to say about our travels so far, eh? How to sum it all up in one brief reader-friendly soundbite? Ummm…I guess I’ll just dump the big speech and get on with writing the bloody blog!

Up at 7.15 this morning – OUCH! Could have slept until my name changed to James Van Winkle. Today we’d be going on the all-day adventure-type package that Longtip signed us up for, although this time she would not be driving us to and from our destinations. At the breakfast table, when asked which option I wanted I wasn’t quite ready for eggs, so I panicked and said rice with chicken. Bad move. The meals these days tend to be either rice or noodle-based, so for example, if you have rice for lunch, you have noodles for dinner, and vice versa. By having rice for breakfast I was risking having it twice in one day! Or was I? It tasted fine, but for some reason the old tum-tum wasn’t quite in the mood to be filled. I ate what I could, but there was no time to wait until the appetite arrived as our chariot awaited.

The minibus collected us, driven by a man, with a woman in the front seat with a tour guide tag around her neck. She had me down on her piece of paper as “Jane Gray”. Bad start. We were the first people onto the minibus and Tim was quite happy that for once he wasn’t going on one of these day trips alone. At a hotel across town we picked up a Dutch couple, then went to another place where no one got on. When I asked the tour guide, she said they were sick, before switching to the next sentence, which went, “You will eat local food today, okay?" Erm, okay! But if I get sick as well then I’m going to sue! Hang on, what’s the name of the company? 'Amporn Tours'? Oh dear. The final pick up is two English girls from a place called the Paradise Hotel. Judging by the state of the car park, it should have been called the 'Paradise Lost Hotel'.

Time for the trip proper to start. Our guide turns around from the front seat and introduces herself as Smile, though I hear “sur-my”. The driver is called Mister Beer and throughout the day he will say nothing to any of the punters, just look annoyed as he copes with the treacherous country roads and ker-azy drivers, himself included – the guy thinks nothing of using a two lane road as three and overtaking into oncoming traffic. Smile runs through the day’s itinerary and tells us that the ride up into the hills will take about an hour. No one says much on the way. I battle the urge to nod off after that 7.15 start.

Once in the middle of nowhere we pull up next to a couple of wooden huts on stilts. There be elephants here, and we be going to ride them! Oh yeah, and we have to spend 20 baht on a bunch of manky bananas to feed them on, which we weren’t told about beforehand. I kick myself, wondering how many more hidden charges they will throw at us as the day goes on, but even this can’t dampen my excitement for riding a big thing with a trunk. As we stand on the platform and wait for our rides to arrive, we discover that the two English girls, Cat and Zoe, are doing eight months around the world (damn - even more than us!), but there are only on their fourth day. Four days versus four months? On our fourth day we were still in New York. Cat and Zoe will be finishing in America, and obviously we had plenty of advice and stories to tell them about our time there. The Dutch couple (sorry, cannot remember names!) are on a three week holiday to Thailand. As a sextet, we all get on very well.

The first elephant pulls up, with baby in tow. Cat and Zoe board this one – all of the elephants are designed for two people to sit at the back while the handler either walks alongside or sits on the head. Suddenly there is the sound of wild trumpeting from behind one of the huts. Here comes the angry matriarch and guess who’s riding this one? That’s right – Grayboys Incorporated. Smile tells us that granny elephant isn’t angry, merely shouting for the other baby to get its arse into gear and join the rest of them. Me and Our Kid climb on the seat on her back without too much trouble, and put the safety bar in place, the bag of bananas sitting between us. Suddenly a trunk comes up from out of nowhere and points our way. “Baaaaa-nana!” barks our handler. I pull one off the bunch and put it against the trunk, and elephant duly takes it and stuffs it into its mouth. Immediately the trunk is back and asking for another. “No!” handler yells (or it could have been “Na!”, “Nuh!”, or some variation) and, after contemplating just how high up we are, we’re off!

     

What does it feel like sitting on the back of an elephant? Pretty funky actually. The only thing I can compare it to is when I was 12 years old and rode a horse across Dartmoor on a school trip. Except that elephants cannot gallop. And it’s rather more bumpy, especially when going up steep muddy hills. Despite our fears of granny matriarch being a grumpy guts, she was absolutely fine, so long as we kept her fed on a steady supply of manky bananas.

After a few minutes bumping through the jungle, the handler jumps down and we notice that we’re hanging back behind the others. “You want ride there?” he asks me and points to where he was sitting. Sure, why not? How hard can it be? H-A-R-D, as it turned out! Sitting on the back of an elephant’s neck and staying upright while holding on to the top of its head is no mean feat! Plenty of times I felt like I was going to fall off, but handler seemed unperturbed, as if I was playing it up for the camera’s benefit. Nope!

I was actually quite glad that we got to  go on the matriarch, because the others weren’t allowed to get upfront on their elephants, maybe because they both had babies with them, or possibly they weren’t as cool, calm and collected as granny. However, after a few minutes I was happy to be able to turn around to Tim and say, “Your turn now?” How could he refuse! I wasn’t sure what I could smell…fear, or elephant dung. And because I’d had my turn, the poor lad was out there on a limb for ages until he finally declared it was time to get back in his seat – handler wasn’t bothered!

The trek was great fun (despite several stop-offs to buy extra bananas), but it was sizzling out there with nowhere to hide from the sun. On the way back the herd walked through some deep muddy puddles. Fortunately matriarch didn’t dip her trunk in and cover us with mud for a laugh (though it might have cooled us down), but baby had a bit of a roll around and threw some over Cat. And on the way back someone spotted a large crab scuttling across the floor. It did well to avoid being stomped on by giant feet, but then the handler jumped down to pick it up and take it with him back to camp. I asked him if he was going to eat it, but he just grunted, which could have meant, “Yes”, “no”, or “shut up, farang!” [farang = foreigner]

After dismounting and trying to get some feeling back into certain muscles, Smile rounded us up and got us in the back of the minibus. Fifteen minutes later we stopped at a remote village, supposedly populated by a hilltribe who at some point in recent memory emigrated from Myanmar to Thailand. The village women make various crafts that are typical to Myanmar, but upon close inspection from my uneducated eyes they looked to me just like the kind of goods we’ve seen all over Thailand. And, of course, we could buy some of them if we felt so inclined / guilty enough. I, of course, just wanted The Gents and was pointed behind a hut, shrugging off a small girl trying to flog me ankle bracelets for five baht. She came to me and tried again about another four times during the quarter of an hour we spent there. As for the Gents, well, this is what you get (look away now if you’re eating lunch)…

Leaving aside the pig that was oinking from behind the wall, or the door with a big space in the middle so that everyone walking past could see in, the idea is that you scoop up the water in the bowl and pour it down the “toilet” to help what you’ve done through the pipe, in the absence of an automatic flush. Sorry about this, but I need to record this moment so that next time I feel like moaning about the state of the B Block toilets back at the office I’ll instead give thanks for them!

After fending off the hustlers, Smile realised we weren’t going to buy anything today, so she led us out of the village via the bridge in the above shot. Suddenly there was a massive bang and everyone jumped (bar me, of course). Pesky little village boys had set off a firecracker. Was it their way of getting us back for not contributing to their local economy? Either way Smile was livid with them. She hurried us on towards our next activity – the trek through the jungle to the waterfall. This was pretty good, but it had nothing on the boggy difficulty of the Forest of Bowland back home. Every now and then Smile stopped to tell us some interesting facts about various plants or trees we saw along the way. What we didn’t see, but I would have loved to was a praying mantis – apparently they were all around us, making a deafening racket which sounded like a burglar alarm gone wrong.

[Up hill...]

[...over bridge...]

[...and down dale.]

We eventually came to Maewang waterfall, where swimming was optional, but I didn’t want to feel left out, so even I went in for a dip, despite not having proper swimshorts. By this point Smile was only giving instructions to those closest to her, rather than waiting around for everyone to catch up So, it was lucky I heard second hand to stick to the left side of the rocks, because the right side contains a whirlpool that may well pull you under. It’s easy to suddenly respect over-the-top health and safety precautions when you find yourself in a place where there ain’t any!  

The dip was okay, but coming up to our allocated 30 minutes it started to get a little chilly. It was still a bit chilly as I got back to my day bag and realised I’d neglected to bring a towel with me! Errr…what do they do in the foreign legion? March or die! No, that doesn’t help me. Oh well, just have to change my clothes and hope I dry off in the sun, once it finds its way through the trees. Not fancying the option of getting changed in the nearby “toilet” (neither for the princely sum of 5 baht or for free), I looked around for a covered spot on the hillside where I could change shorts. When I thought I’d found one, I turned around to see a fresh group of trekkers making their way into the waterfall. If one of them had looked twenty metres up the hillside they’d have seen more of James A. Gray than they’d ever wanted to!

Smile reappeared (goodness knows where she went, not for a dip) and marched us back up the hillside, lagging well behind at one point, which seemed strange considering how often she must climb that hill. Then Mother Nature remembered that this was monsoon season and the rains came down. I got my rain coat on in time, but it didn’t really do much good. And I needn’t have bothered putting on my dry pair of shorts because now both were soaked. I remembered Longtip’s words from yesterday saying that it would only last ten minutes, but it didn’t. It rained all the way back to the minibus, much to Mister Beer’s annoyance that a load of drenched people were coming to sit on his nice dry seats. It was like that feeling from school when you’d be out playing football on the field in the rain, then come inside for lessons and squelch into your seat. Y`all remember that feeling?

By the time we reached the village where we’d be eating the “local food”, the sun had made a cheeky reappearance and all wet things were laid out to dry. The cuisine actually wasn’t bad at all and, even though it was my second rice-based meal of the day, I had second helpings. It was a good moment to tell tales and share stories and, after telling the yarn of the great train delay from hitting a cow and getting a huge laugh, I realised that every cloud has a silver lining. It doesn’t matter what crappy things happen to me in the next couple of months, so long as I get a funny story to tell. And, if you’re listening, Fate, I do mean “funny”, not “harrowing”.

The final short drive of the day took us down by the river for what, for me, turned out to be even better than the elephant ride (but only just). We would be doing bamboo rafting and all valuables and shoes and socks had to be removed from our persons. Therefore no pictures of me on the raft exist (unless Zoe managed to get any with her waterproof camera), but just imagine us on the following, with me sitting majestically at the back:

The Dutch couple had their own raft and the remaining four took the other. I did not catch the name of our rower, but seeing as he was wearing an Ev*rton shirt, we’ll call him Leighton. Leighton loved the sound of his own voice and he was one cheeky little chappy, taking every opportunity he could to get us that little bit wetter. Often he’d pretend it was a sharper turn than usual and he’d lean to make it feel as if the raft was about to capsize, howling in mock terror. At one point he shouted, “Look! Little monkey in tree!” and pointed behind us. When we all turned around, he brought his pole down against the water to splash us yet again. By the third time he tried this trick, substituting “little monkey” for various other jungle creatures, we were wise to him and didn’t look back. Frustrated at having lost such easy victims, he turned his attention to a group of westerners waiting by the riverside for their own raft to be lowered into the water. As he splashed them mercilessly with his pole, the response from one guy was cutting: “Typical Ev*rton fan!”

Things got even more crazy when he gave Cat the pole and told her to stand up and steer the raft. To be fair, she made a good job of it, but the Dutch couple’s raft caught us up from behind, causing their 13 year old driver to splash me with his pole. It was hilarious when he tried again and fell in the river. To level things, Leighton sneakily pushed Zoe into the river (it wasn’t deep) and then, while Dutch guy was steering his raft, the tail end hit a rock and then he also overbalanced into the water. I felt my time was soon! And I wanted to have a go at steering, but wasn’t given the chance. Instead Leighton took back control and played a new game – spotting snakes innocently basking on the riverside and knocking them into the water with his pole. It actually became quite disconcerting to realise that there were lots of snakes swimming about at the water’s edge as our raft drifted past!

Who was it who said something along the lines of, “Nothing in life is as much fun as messing about on boats”? I forget, but after plenty more messing about on boats, we sailed up to dock at what was the worst harbour in the world…ever! And now it was Cat’s turn to get pushed into the river by Leighton. Fortunately he did think twice about doing it to me or Tim, though we took great care when we shook his hand. As ever, Smile and Mister Beer were waiting for us, but by this point I had no dry clothes left and had to make do by sitting on my raincoat for the whole journey back, a lot of which I slept through anyway. As people were dropped off, we said our goodbyes to our new friends, wondering if we would see them again.

That brings us to the evenings “entertainment”. Over lunch, the Dutch couple had told us of a cabaret show they went to the previous evening, a cabaret show featuring ladyboys. They said it was a real hoot and we should check it out. I’m not a big fan of cabaret, and as for ladyboys, well, let’s not even go there! But we’re back to the old when-in-Rome syndrome again, and when in Chiang Mai…either way, Cat and Zoe said they’d go, so we thought it would be nice to meet up with them.

At 21:30 we were seated at our table in the open air bar, waiting for the lights to flash, the music to blare, and the show to start. It then clicked with me that our table was right at the front, by the steps up to the stage, and all other guests were to our rear. Oh please don’t say they get people to come up on stage with them because we’re in prime position! While I was still panicking, things got going. It was loud, proud, disco stuff with plenty of camp thrown in here and there. Songs like I will survive were given the mime treatment while backing dancers held their toothy grins fixed firmly forward. Essentially I found it akin to watching a load of drag queens on stage. At one point Cat leaned over to me and pointed out one of them, saying she (he?) looked extremely convincing, and she had a point. I believe that a “ladyboy” can be anyone from an effeminate man who wears make-up all the way to a post-op transsexual. Although they cannot legally change their sex, Thai society is more tolerant than most, mainly because Buddha recognised the third gender. I made the mistake of mouthing the “I love you baby” line from Andy Williams’ Can’t take my eyes of you, and got a bit of a reaction, but it was Tim who weathered most of the storm, sitting as he was in the closest seat to the stairs. Fortunately none of the acts dragged him up on stage with them, but one of them briefly tried to sit on his lap – damn the camera for failing me at that point! All in all, it was good value entertainment and a top way to end a top day. And some of the photos that actually came out…

But was it the end? No! Although it was for Cat and Zoe who had to catch an early flight to Phuket the next morning. Thai people like a bit of English Premiership football, but what they’re most passionate about is boxing…Thai boxing to be predictably precise. Chiang Mai has three Thai boxing arenas in town and we’d read that Loi Kroh Boxing Stadium opens its doors after 11 p.m. and you can see a few fights for free. So, come 23:01, we were there, doing the long walk down to ringside that is lined with highly dodgy bars where the type of entertainment on offer is even more blatant than the places where they play Connect 4. No sooner had we taken out seats at a table that was occupied by a snoozing pregnant cat, than a ropey-looking woman (ropey-looing, but definitely a woman!) had schmaltzed up beside me and was asking all kinds of questions, rubbing me in a clean but saucy manner, calling me “handsome man”, “funny man” and squeezing the back of my neck, which actually rather hurt. Eventually she got the message that I was only here for a beer and a bit of boxing and she schmaltzed off, but there was no end of girls coming up and saying they would be across the way in so-and-so bar and we could play a game of pool (no euphemism, they really mean a game of pool). In addition there were young children mingling with the seated punters, trying to sell holy flowers. They kept coming up to the dozing cat, stroking its head, then giving it a gleeful smack on the forehead, before affectionately stroking it again. A strange, seedy environment all round.

And what of the boxing? It was okay, but obvious that the best fights were over and these were the lesser quality battles to draw the evening to a close. And my shins hurt-by-proxy every time I saw the fighters kicking each other. After a while, the girls / hookers / drink-spikers started moving the seats away from ringside and back to the bars, so that me, Tim and pussycat were a tiny island in a surrounding sea of sleaze. Definitely time to drink up and go home, but happy to have enjoyed such a cracking day.

It’s been a hell of a four months, bring on the next two and then bring us back to Blighty, baby!