by Alex Gunn
Thailand was also developing massage as an effective medical intervention at a time when Europe was still labouring under the dreadful misapprehension that illness was caused either by an imbalance of humours or infection by evil spirits. If you were really unlucky you might have both at once. The standard course of treatment for both of these misfortunes was an unbelievable amount of blood letting with big black slimy leaches. It seems barbaric compared with a gentle coconut oil massage and herbal compress, preferably in the cool shade of a palm tree down by the beach. Which one would you prefer?
More than all this though, through my numerous hospital visits I realized that Thai people are so very kind and seem to instinctively know what makes us feel better. Little things like smiling, not panicking, gentleness, respect, acceptance and a sense of humour go a very long way in any treatment of anything. It is no wonder that some of the world’s best health spas are found dotted throughout the country providing a reclusive haunt for international celebrities.
So, if you ever feel like getting ill, need an operation, cosmetic dental care or just being bitten on the leg by a rabid beach dog I really can’t think of a better place to be. It was a holiday that we will never, ever forget.
Chapter 18
Supporting The Tigers
If you love football, move to Thailand.
There cannot be a nation in the world that has taken England’s national game to its heart with such unbridled enthusiasm. I have yet to meet anyone, from our attorney (Spurs FC supporter) to our landlord (Liverpool FC supporter) to my wife’s favourite tuk-tuk driver (Manchester United supporter) to my friend down the market who sells rice (Arsenal FC supporter) who isn’t mad keen on football, following either the English Premier league or the Northern Thai league and often both, with the dedicated fervour and critical eye of a professional football pundit.
Over the last ten months the majority of casual conversations that I have had with shop keepers, tuk tuk drivers, waiters and waitresses have been about football. It’s a magical international language of harmony, a conversational doorway into a mansion house of chit chat.
Driving past all the bars on a Saturday night when the English Premiership games are being televised live on satellite TV is a wonderful sight. Big screens with crowds of supporters line the streets cheering their adopted teams. In the night bazaar square there’s even a huge public screen showing live football late into the night.
I knew it was just a matter of time before I got drawn into watching our new local team, Chiang Mai United, or “The Tigers” as they are known to the blue and white army of supporters. My first match at their home stadium towards the end of our first year was an incredible night that, like our holiday, I will never forget. Over the recent months me and my wife and kids have become die hard followers, singing and cheering them on at every home game we can get to.
Their home ground is a sight in itself; it’s huge and fantastic. It’s a massive concrete 1970’s sports stadium that was built as part of an olympic standard sports complex. It’s a huge project that houses every sports facility that you can think of from a rifle range to high diving, in celebration of Chiang Mai’s 700 year birthday. It was the site of the Asean Games and has since been used as a resource for the whole community. It’s aptly named The 700 Year Stadium and at full capacity can seat about 30,000 but on a good night the 8,000 strong army of local supporters can rival the biggest stadium crowds in the world, well, in enthusiasm and merry making at least.
The drive up to the stadium is wonderful as it’s located just outside the city nestled into the side of the mountains and has a wonderful view across the eastern plateau with a fringe of mountains disappearing into the distance. I can’t think of a more dramatic backdrop for a home ground. It sure beats the Roots Hall ground where I stood as a child watching Southend United get beaten on a regular basis. Some things never change!
As the whole 700 Year Complex was built to cater for hundreds of athletes and thousands of spectators everything is on a giant Disney World type scale with a car park the size of Luxemburg. The short walk from the car to the entrance of the stadium, (yep, you can park right outside) provides most of us with the opportunity to buy dinner, as kick off is always at 6pm just when the sun is beginning to go down and the sting is evaporating from the heat of the day.
Unlike the approach to lots of football grounds back in the UK where the air is heavy with the smell of fat from the mobile burger and chip vans, the warm tropical air just outside the stadium is scented with lemon grass, basil, chilli and ginger from the numerous stir fry noodle stalls and grill and barbeque stations. We usually buy either some stir fry chicken and ginger with noodles or some grilled pork kebabs marinated in honey with sticky rice and a few cans of ice cold beer and coke, all of which you can take in with you to enjoy while watching the match. The phrase, “it don’t come better than that” comes to mind.
Some groups of fans really go to town, this being the highlight of their one day off from work. They buy whole roast chickens with mountains of sticky rice, slow barbequed pork, and grilled spicy sausage with fiery red chilli sauce, big fat grilled catfish on a stick and enough beer and whisky to get a football stadium very jolly indeed. There’s also home made ice cream, violently coloured soft drinks in worryingly thin plastic bags, small mountains of fresh chopped pineapple, mango, melon and rose apple and Thai sweets so sweet that they’ll make your eyes water and teeth drop out.
When you are suitably loaded with food and drinks the best bit of the outing is still to come…and I’m not talking about the football. Ticket prices are approximately 200 times cheaper than any Premiership match I’ve ever watched. My last match that I watched in London at the Emirates stadium cost the equivalent of approx 6,000 Baht or a months wages for most working people in Thailand. If you want to stroll along to support the surprisingly excellent Chiang Mai United Football Club it will set you back the grand sum of 50 Baht. If you know of anywhere or anything where you can have a better time for less money please let me know.
Once inside, despite the gigantic size, the atmosphere is great. There is a real carnival atmosphere with loads of singing and flag waving from the already feverish groups at the front. There are giant flags and banners being waved and much iced whisky and beer being passed around. The home crowd is a real friendly mix with lots of families, groups of young women and children zooming about full of coca cola and sweets. There’s also a growing number of us foreigners who are always warmly welcomed.
It’s a lovely feeling just before kick off, anticipating the match to come. Everybody is happy, singing and joking, the sun is just setting over the mountains turning the sky dark blue and deep red. Millions of insects swarm around the floodlights, which in turn are dive bombed by hundreds of giant bats. You occasionally see this on TV if you watch the African Cup of Nations or football in some other hot and mysterious tropical country. I think huge bats flying around floodlights should be compulsory at all football matches because it just looks so fantastic.
Often before kick off the crowd will start an impromptu Mexican Wave, just like they do on TV. Our children love it and join in enthusiastically. It’s a far cry from going to the football in England and makes me happy and appreciate how lucky I am to be here, with my family and be part of it all. The kind of unexpected happy that I felt that first day taking the boys to school.
As the teams come out we all go mad. Chiang Mai is a team on the up, gathering more supporters each season, acquiring better players and playing some excellent football. Recently there’s been a few signings that have created some memorable moments of real footballing magic. At the point of kick off a huge cheer goes up, we all go wild and the party really starts.
With a great sense of fun huge fake red and yellow cards are produced by home fans who wave them wildly any time one of our players gets fouled, whether the referee sees it or not. Interestingly there is very little booing and
jeering and although my Thai is limited I’m not aware of any swearing or bad language or any hostility at all. I dread to think what a Thai family would think of a lower division football match back in England, I only hope they never wander innocently into the Roots Hall ground when the Shrimpers are 3 nil down at half time. You would need to do some very diplomatic interpretations of some of the chants and suggestions directed towards the opposing fans, and the referee.
Shortly after kick off, the mascot (a big friendly tiger of course) will come up from the touchline and do the rounds amongst the crowd with lots of photos, arm in arm with children and adults alike. By the end of the match whoever is inside the big fluffy costume will have worked their way around the whole crowd arriving back to welcome the team off the pitch.
One thing that works remarkably well, that has been imported from America via the Indian Cricket league is the addition of Cheer Leaders. Being a bit old fashioned and English I would have been very much against this before I started going to the home matches. The four glamorously dressed women usually come on at half time to massive cheers and camera flashes after the universally dreary presentations and announcements. They then stay on for the second half, getting the crowd going during injuries or other times when the ball is out of play. It really adds to the spirit of carnival and enjoyment rather than detracting from the game itself. I’m sure that some of the young men down the front might not be concentrating as fully as they might on the game and miss a few second half goals or free kicks but they don’t seem to complain and overall it works surprisingly well.
After the match everyone pours out into the warm still night overshadowed by the adjacent dark mountain. The night insects are chirruping away for all they’re worth, and if we’ve won so are the crowd. The huge bats continue to swoop down, drawn in from the jungle by increasing swarms of insects around the lights. The food stalls in the car park do another brisk round of business, the last round of songs are sung and flags waved and we all move off into the night to get ready for another week in Chiang Mai and life supporting The Tigers.
Chapter 19
Fancy A Cock Fight?
This was the unexpected question that Son confronted me with one afternoon, towards the end of our first year. At first I was a bit flustered and didn’t know what to say. He made it sound so normal, like I was used to going to see cockerels fight each other every other day.
During this final third of the year business was okay and ticking along nicely thanks to the work that Ozzi and Glen had put into the web site. Also, the owners and staff at Puripunn hotel were absolutely wonderful and made all our guests feel special. It is an exceedingly beautiful hotel run by exceedingly good people. People really liked their Life Change Holidays, and social media meant that good news travelled quickly and across the world. We were receiving regular enquires from all four corners of the globe and for the time being the roller coaster ride seemed to have leveled out.
The boys were at school loving every minute and I figured that an afternoon off to go to a cock fight would be okay. My wife, rather wisely, thought that she would give it a miss.
Cock Fighting must be the unofficial national sport of Thailand. Some people here are absolutely mad about it, fuelling an industry that involves thousands of people and hundreds of thousands of baht. If I cycle from where I am sitting now down to the main road through the little village next to us I will pass at least two or three or maybe more men fiddling about with chickens. There are some men who I am on nodding terms with that I have never seen without a cockerel dangling from their hands.
Thailand remains one of the few countries in the world where cock fighting is legal. It is in the august company of such illustrious, forward thinking nations such as Mexico and the Philippines. Although the UK banned the sport, along with most mainland European countries back in the mid 1800s I know for a fact it still goes on in some parts of the English countryside. America dragged its heels in banning the sport with Louisiana making it legal to enjoy a good ol’ fashioned cock fight as recently as 2007. Yes, I was surprised too.
Paradoxically, although cock fighting is legal in Thailand, the gambling associated with it (the main purpose of going) is strictly forbidden. Therefore the money that does change hands (and by golly there’s a lot of it) is done not as part of gambling but as “prize money”, or “gift money”. So everybody’s happy, except perhaps the cockerels.
Again, a bit like Thai driving, most things in Thailand, are seldom what they seem.
I know a little bit about chickens and have kept them for nearly twenty years, presiding over a motley flock of over fifty assorted misfits at the height of my chicken mania. I’ve cured sick hens, fought off vicious cockerels with the help of a dustbin lid as a shield, nurtured baby chicks into life and had to pull the necks of the infirm. I’ve angrily intervened when I’ve seen chickens mistreated and been moved near to tears when I unwittingly stumbled in to an intensive chicken farm in Spain whilst on holiday (my son said he could hear screaming).
It was therefore with great naive delight that I realized Thailand seemed to be the chicken capital of the world. Wherever you go, especially the more rural parts, you won’t be far away from the comforting sound of a cockerel or two. In the village next to us there are cockerels, hens and chicks everywhere, in and out of the 7 Eleven, nesting at the side of the road and peeping out of the front baskets of bicycles.
Early in the morning outside front doors and in back yards the fighting cockerels are washed, groomed and exercised. Yes, exercised. Not with little weights and jogging machines (although it somehow seems a plausible image thanks to Walt Disney) but by holding the cockerel in a tub of water and allowing its little legs to cycle round furiously, so building up it’s all important leg muscles. The cockerels seem to enjoy all this pampering, especially the grooming as it must help to get rid of all the little mites and ticks that love a nice big warm fluffy bird. Well who doesn’t.
The role that Cock Fighting plays in everyday Thai life is so common place that there is even a very well run, and informative Museum of Cock Fighting near to where Son lives the other side of Chiang Mai. We popped in there quickly on the way back from dropping someone off at the airport.
It’s friendly and family orientated with big educational wall displays. As I ambled about I wondered if these displays were aimed at school parties. Although I try to remember that in Chiang Mai anything is possible and things are rarely what they seem, I couldn’t quite visualise coach parties of primary school children, with their Sponge Bob lunch boxes, coming here and toddling off to see the “live demonstrations”. I wondered perhaps if it was for the older children, it certainly would have gone down a treat at the school where I first started working in South London.
As well as being a popular national pastime, cockfighting also involves big money. On our way back from a run over the border into Burma, Son took us to his wife’s families “cockerel farm” the other side of Chiang Rai. I was allowed to hold a prize cockerel and was told that it was worth a staggering 25,000 Baht. To put this sum into perspective it’s roughly equivalent to 5 months wages for an unskilled manual worker, or two month’s wages for a school teacher. It was a magnificent tough looking bird though, a Mike Tyson of cockerels, a magnificent hybrid between the popular Thai and the sturdy Burmese breeds, or so I was told.
Organised Cock Fights can range between small impromptu village affairs on market grounds or in the back yard of bars or houses, to huge gatherings in big purpose built arenas with hundreds of spectators and big money being won and lost on important fights.
There is such a building, in a particularly out of the way location not far from where we live. You would never, ever find it, unless you were taken there, or were badly and horribly lost. It’s so far off the beaten track that by the time you got there you’d have forgotten what a beaten track was.
When there is nothing going on it looks like a huge
lonely odd shaped barn, the kind of place that’s only used once in a while for sheep shearing or some other occasional rural activity. Between the building and the nearest road there is a vast expanse of waste land that looks like it’s suffered from some very heavy wear over many heavy years. It’s the kind of landscape that’s created by the army after years of practicing “maneuvers,” it’s full of pot holes, stunted trees and broken bits of fencing. If you drove past you probably wouldn’t even notice it, unless you happened to be passing on a day of a fight in which case you would be forgiven for wondering why the whole world has descended upon it. Apparently, it’s one of the biggest cock fighting stadiums in Chiang Mai.
On the Sunday afternoon that I went there with Son the expanse of waste land fills up with hundreds of motorbikes, cars and trucks. There’s no posters, no advertising, no bill boards, no announcements, it’s just one of those things that people in the know just know about.
Immediately outside the stadium there are dozens of impromptu food outlets that spring up next to motorbike side car kitchens. There’s a lot of action around the food stalls; furious stir frying, children running and playing, men drinking whisky and smoking and women holding babies and chatting. It’s all accompanied by the occasional, eye watering, choking smell of chillies being cooked.
Just inside the wide entrance doors there are bars selling beer and whisky. Just in front of these are the preliminary fighting rings with the main concrete stadium and fighting ring to the back of them.