by Alex Gunn
Spending time with Son makes you feel happy. There is nothing that he can’t do or work out. Chiang Mai is his town and while you are in it everything will be okay. We have become part of his family and in turn he has become part of ours.
Apart from being our guardian angel, Son and I love food. We talk about it all day long, swapping recipes, how I make Indian food, how he makes Thai food, where to get the best BBQ pork, how they farm catfish, why sausage tastes better cold and other topics that sound like excerpts from some late night specialist TV food programme.
Son loves to take people out to lunch, because of course, he knows all the restaurants in Chiang Mai and usually knows the owners and the cooks as well. His knowledge about local food is such that he will know what restaurants serve the best food on what days depending on who is cooking on which shift. Invariably the restaurant is off the beaten track, far away from the tourist trail and is serving world class food at world beating prices.
Recently, he took us all to a place round the back of a hospital which is only open for lunch and where every customer is either a nurse or doctor or porter. It felt wonderfully strange, as if we were eating on a film set where they were making an epic movie about a hospital.
Son always studies the menu and takes charge of the food selection. He introduced me to the delights of something that he said translates literally into “Pork Fountain”. Don’t you just love the idea of that. It was a kind of pork salad that was spicy but also sweet, with minced pork and fresh green herbs that I didn’t recognize. We also had amazing spit roast chicken and home made coconut ice cream.
Other private lunch tours with Son have included duck noodle soup and an incredible goose noodle soup, oyster omelettes, fish noodle soup, grilled pork with fiery chilli sauce, chicken with chilli, ginger and basil, spicy papaya salad, sausage and warm sticky rice not to mention countless bits and pieces from tucked away markets and street stalls. Son should host a TV series called “Food Hunters” where he travels around Thailand seeking out not the most unusual, but simply the best food that Thailand has to offer.
Thankfully, Son was very happy to be our nominated Thai national employee and joined in at our attorney’s office with the great festival of photocopying. He had his photo taken, both his Thai and American passport copied and counter signed many times, his driving license copied, his official Chiang Mai Tour Guide certificate copied and countersigned as well as a copy of his house book which proves that he owns his house. He laughed and joked with the women in the attorney’s office and as he always does made every one feel happy.
At last we would get the precious work permit and be able to legitimately run our own company. We were ready to start trading. All we had to do now was make some money.
Chapter 8
Elephant Cowboys
Northern Thailand and Chiang Mai, especially, is knee deep in elephants, there are; elephant parks, elephant sanctuaries, elephant shows, elephant camps and even street elephants trundling about the roads and markets with an owner hoping for a few baht for a quick photo. Even the hotel up the road from where we live has a couple of old elephants lumbering about the garden in case a bored guest fancies a quick ride.
It was only a matter of time before the inevitable demand to ride an elephant “through the jungle” was issued by our youngest son and to be honest I was kind of looking forward to it myself. We had been told about the various different elephant camps and parks from Son so had a fair idea of what was available. Wanting to be good citizens in our new host nation we wanted to go to an elephant nature sanctuary but feared that the minimum whole day attendance would be a bit too much for the children. We didn’t want to go to the “touristy” ones, as that would be far too easy for us and besides, we weren’t tourists, we lived here. I even had a shiny new work permit to prove it.
We decided upon an elephant park quite far away, a bit off the beaten track. The web site looked fine and I found it on the map, so off we set in a cheap 800 Baht a day hired jeep with dodgy brakes and air conditioning that didn’t really work.
The adventure began as all good family adventures do; apprehension, excitement and going back because I couldn’t remember if I’d locked the front door and our youngest son didn’t have any shoes on.
After this false start we set off again, full of renewed excitement, a full compliment of shoes and all doors securely fastened.
We turned off the main dual carriageway and began venturing up one of the mountain roads. You know that feeling you get when you are sure you’re going in the wrong direction, not because you have any evidence that you are, but just because it feels wrong. Well, I had that feeling very quickly. The mountain road seemed extremely deserted extremely quickly and the small villages that lined the road seemed to stop lining the road very quickly. There were only occasional ramshackle old huts with old ladies sitting outside who stared at us as we drove past. Huge towering clumps of giant bamboo, overhung the road, eclipsing the sun, and forming great dark tunnels.
We drove on, ever upward, with the underpowered little jeep engine straining away at 30 km per hour, children on the back seat strangely silent (always a bad sign), wife looking worried and me acting like I did this kind of thing all the time. I began to secretly wish that we had gone to the nearest, easiest, most convenient touristy Disneyland razzamatazz all singing all dancing elephant show around, rather than a family version of The Heart of Darkness.
Eventually and after several stops to look at the map and for our youngest to be sick (the horror, the horror) we saw an old sign with an elephant on it pointing up an even smaller road. The clouds had built up and what had started as a bright sun-shiny day was rapidly deteriorating into a gloomy and very un-sun-shiny day.
The next ten minutes rates very highly amongst the Top Ten Surreal Moments of all Time Awards along with the memorable episode in the Club House Office.
The small road we were driving along got smaller and smaller until a big empty open area on our left appeared, at the far end of which could just be seen an elephant and some bamboo huts and a few wooden structures.
I drove across this strange open area towards the elephant. There was nobody else around; no cars, no families, no fellow day trippers and no smiley faces. The elephant stood there just looking at us, chained by its foot to a tree. I turned the engine off and was suddenly aware of the intense silence. It was so quiet that my ears were ringing slightly with the sound of the whining 1200cc engine.
As I got out of the jeep three rather disheveled Thai men came out of a hut. It was now nearly lunch time and I’m fairly certain they had just woken up. “Are you an elephant park” I said. You know there’s something wrong if you have to ask. It’s a bit like saying “is this an airport” or “is this a train station”. The appearance of some very big objects should give the game away.
The men nodded enthusiastically. They produced a calculator, pounded in some numbers and proudly held the grubby little screen up to me. They wanted what, even in those early days, seemed a large sum of money. It was the kind of price that you would think expensive in the most touristy of touristy places in America or England. I gracefully declined and said confidently to my wife, “no this can’t be it, it must be further on”. So we all got back in the tiny cheap jeep with the men’s sleepy eyes still hungrily upon us. Thankfully the engine started first time and we drove back across the open area of land waving cheerily to the three men who stood silently watching us. I looked at them in my rear view mirror, standing, smoking and watching. I thought of the film Deliverance with Burt Reynolds.
We turned back onto the little road and I remember so wanting to see a big sign in English with the name of the elephant park on it, a big car park along with with some tour buses, a little friendly restaurant (both children were by now very hungry as I confidently said before we left that there’s always somewhere to eat “in these kind of places”), and just any other signs
of a lovely big and normal elephant park.
Instead the road just got smaller and smaller eventually trailing off into a tiny overgrown single track which ended abruptly in front of a tiny wooden house with a very alarmed elderly man waving me back. “I don’t think this is it” my wife helpfully observed. We turned back.
Our only option was to re-visit our three silent smoking friends. They watched us drive back across the open area. We pulled up and parked in the same place. It was incredibly quiet, the kind of quiet you only get in exams or before a gun fight or at the top of a mountain.
The third man was now sitting down in what I realized was a little wooden, broken down ticket office. Spread proudly before him on an otherwise empty desk he had a single, dirty, dog eared leaflet with the name of our elephant park on it. There was a picture on the front showing a packed car park, and lots of smiley people in front of some smart wooden buildings, the decaying skeletons of which we were now standing before.
You know that moment in the film The Shining where you discover that Jack Nicholson has been typing the same sentence over and over again, and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, or when Sigourney Weaver finds the abandoned space station in Alien? What had happened here? What had gone wrong? Where were the crowds of smiling day trippers, the cheery laughter, the over priced gift shop, the frazzled parents and a horrible cup of tea in a paper cup.
The second man was bringing around a second elephant. Both elephants were now saddled up (I’m not sure this is the right expression for putting a massive double wooden seat on the back of an elephant) and ready to go. In a mild state of confusion I handed over a lot of money, and found myself on an elephant next to my youngest son, my wife and our eldest on the elephant ahead.
It began raining, not the usual hard dramatic downpour familiar in Thailand but a gloomy steady drizzle, especially imported from England.
I was wet, tired and hungry, and on the back of an elephant in the middle of nowhere. The young disheveled Thai guy who sat on the elephants neck had a haircut like Debbie Harry in 1981. My school friend Kev assured me it was cut by herself, when she was drunk, with a bread knife. He also had ripped up old jeans, rubber flip flop sandals with the heel worn away and a grubby old T shirt. I was certain these were his only clothes.
I wondered what life is like when the only possessions you have in the world is one set of filthy clothes, a packet of cigarettes and an elephant. It is, you must admit, a bizarre combination. You would have to look long and hard to find anyone, anywhere with a stranger set of possessions.
At least our two children were happy, waving and laughing at each other, observing and commenting how lucky we were that it was an elephant park after all. I wondered if we were being taken off to be robbed at knife point until I remembered that they already had all our money, so that was alright. If the worst came to the worst the last laugh would be on them.
We trundled past a dilapidated old wooden building with an out of control Bougainvillea rampaging through the roof. It looked like, at some point, it had been a rather nice guest house or restaurant. We slipped and slid our way around the mountainside vaguely aware that if I were not so wet, hungry and worried that we were surrounded by wonderful and breathtaking scenery.
We eventually arrived back at where we started. We silently dismounted and got back in the cheap jeep. We were all rather quiet and subdued. I was, it must be said, rather relieved.
On the way back down we stopped at a lonely wooden house with a broken table outside. For 5 Baht I bought the worst bunch of bananas I’ve ever seen. Despite most of them being black and an unusual shade of purple they were the only food we had, so, I gave them to the children in the back seat who immediately screamed as they were swarming with tiny black ants.
We drove back down the mountain in complete silence. The rain still drizzling down and the tiny fun sized windscreen wipers scraped and scratched their way back and forth. Our youngest son was sick again, but this time inside the car. He kind of leant forward and was sick down my neck. Sometimes you feel so low that you really do know that things can’t get much worse.
We got back home. I washed the sick off and did my best to tidy up the inside of the jeep. I sprayed some of my wife’s super expensive Jo Malone perfume on the back seat to get rid of the sick smell. It didn’t. It just smelled like a combination of sick and expensive perfume.
To this day we haven’t talked about our unusual elephant experience and I don’t think we ever will. We have since been to other normal elephant places that do have tour parties and restaurants and even horrible tea in paper cups.
I have an uneasy feeling that should I mention our strange trip up the mountain to the elephant camp in the rain to either the children or my wife they might stare blankly at me and unnervingly say, “what elephant park in the rain” and then I really would feel like Jack Nicholson or Sigourney Weaver. Some days are best forgotten about.
Chapter 9
A Brush With The Law
It was a beautiful bright warm morning in early November. The rains had all but gone and the weather was as close to perfect as you can get with not a cloud in the clear blue sky. It still felt like we hadn’t been in Chiang Mai that long, although we had now settled into our new house and the children seemed to really like their new school and our business was officially up and running but yet to make any money. Still, it was early days.
Despite these signs of becoming slowly settled in our new life, I still got hopelessly lost around town and would have to wait until by chance I hit the moat road where I could slowly, like an alien on a new planet, work out where I was. It was during one of these many lost episodes that I found myself speeding along around the moat on my little hired motor-scooter, the sun on my face and the wind in what’s left of my hair (i.e. without a crash helmet) under the temporary illusion that I didn’t have a worry in the world.
The reason I wasn’t wearing a crash helmet was not because I’m a thoughtless law breaker harbouring sad middle age ambitions to join the Hells Angels but simply because a) nobody else seemed to be wearing a crash helmet, and b) the nice lady in the motor-scooter hire shop said I didn’t need one, “this is Thailand” she said gaily. I felt a little bit foolish and square, the silly old foreigner worried about his silly little foreign head. It’s a great shame the traffic police at the road blocks don’t share her sense of reckless abandon. In fact I discovered they think very little of people riding about at speeds up to 100km an hour without a crash helmet.
So it was, this bright jolly morning that I along with many other bared headed motorcyclists were pulled over at an imposing make shift road block just on the outskirts of the old city. I didn’t know this at the time but apparently the presence of so many traffic cops at these road blocks is to protect the public from police corruption. Son told me afterwards that police are not allowed to stop passing motorists unless they have a senior ranking police officer with them, and senior ranking police officers don’t go out without their full compliment of junior ranking police officers. It’s not unusual to see a party (the word party is accurate in more ways than one) of up to 20 police officers all flagging down a single teenager on a moped.
The party atmosphere is partly provided by the police uniforms, which I’ll come to shortly but, mostly from the presence of an open sided marquee. It’s the kind of thing you might buy if you were having a Sunday afternoon garden party and were expecting a group of old ladies who didn’t like the sun. Beneath this canopy sit the senior ranking officers on plastic garden chairs. There’s usually a little dinky picnic table and most wonderfully a big ice box full of cans of Pepsi. The officers sit around drinking coke and eating Pringles. It looks a nice day out for them, away from the office, a few snacks, a picnic lunch and the chance to arrest some polite teenagers for minor traffic infringements.
You can tell the officers under the marquee are senior ranking because their
uniforms were clearly designed when Thailand first discovered the sacred art of making costume quality gold and red braid. The outfits wouldn’t look out of place in a pantomime, especially The Village Scene, just after Widow Twanky helps Idle Jack escape down the beanstalk and everyone gets arrested.
In front of the senior ranking, Pringle eating officers is a line of junior traffic cops, with paltry amounts of braid, and no snacks, standing in the road, flagging down cars without tax certificates, motor cyclists without helmets and foreigners without common sense. They usually set up their road block/ picnic marquee in a stretch of road which is difficult to spot from a distance and where it’s difficult to turn around, or back up. Occasionally they choose a pretty mad spot that is visible for miles. When this happens it’s great, because most of the traffic that is breaking the law, (i.e. all of it), cars, trucks and motorbikes all turn around in the middle of the road and zooms off in the opposite direction causing mass mayhem. I have seen a roadblock where the police have run down the road after the retreating traffic, causing even greater mayhem and panic.
So there I was, bewildered as to why I was being pulled over. I noticed that my fellow motorcyclists didn’t seem at all phased and shrugged, paid a small fine, put the receipt in their pocket and shot off. Apparently you can either pay on the spot or choose to pay at the police station which on all accounts is not a good idea as it can take a very long time. I expect it’s a great excuse for a form filling and photocopying frenzy. At the time I didn’t know any of this. I had no idea how little money police officers earn and how most of them have to take on extra work as security guards and car park attendants to make ends meet.
I had no idea why I had been pulled over. All I knew is that a polite large faced traffic police officer was asking for my driving license.
Actually it wasn’t even my real driving license but an official looking plastic identity card that I had received along with an International Driving License Interpretation Certificate for a princely sum of £18 from the internet. It came from a dodgy address in Romford but I thought, quite rightly that it might come in useful. The policeman spent a considerable amount of time transferring the various bits of bogus information and made up numbers from my card onto a small sheet of paper.