by Alex Gunn
A standard size Cock Fighting ring is about 4 meters across and just high enough to stop the birds flapping out. The impromptu country cock fight rings are often made from bits of old wood or plastic. I’ve seen a particularly creative one on the mountain road out towards Samoeng made from discarded old doors and tail gate of a Toyota pick up truck (is there no end to the versatility of these vehicles?)
I went in aware that lots of people were looking at me. Everyone seemed to know each other, and there was a lot of excited chatter and money and cockerels changing hands. Son explained to me that unlike other parts of the world, (he said rather scathingly, but not mentioning what other parts of the world he meant) Thailand did not attach razor sharp “spurs” to the cockerel’s legs. This apparently makes the fight all the more gruesome and deadly. I was very glad I wasn’t in one of the other parts of the world.
Son went onto explain that Cock Fighting in Thailand had exactly the same rules as boxing in the west, or kick boxing in Thailand. As he explained, I realized they weren’t exactly the same rules but similar in that the fight is ended when a clear winner emerges. There is no fight to the death, there is no unnecessary cruelty and birds are quickly withdrawn and recovered if they are facing a relentless attack. There is no overt cruelty and in fact the birds are treated with care and respect. I guess at 25,000 Baht a pop you would want to look after your investment, wouldn’t you.
We stayed for a couple of big fights. I guess not being a gambling man a certain amount of it was all a bit lost on me. It was after all just two cockerels having a fight, a sight which is not entirely uncommon in every farm yard all over the world. There was a lot of flapping, jumping, squawking and bared claws and at some point a bloke with a dirty shirt and cigarette hanging out of his mouth jumped in and grabbed a bird and hauled it away while the victor was held aloft to much yahooing. And that was all there was to it really.
Son seemed very happy and glad that I was not recoiling with the vapours at witnessing such high drama. I have to say that what I saw I found fairly innocuous and nowhere near the horrors that I had first imagined. I’m sure, as in any sport where there is physical contact people and animals get hurt, but I am happy to report to you good people that I certainly did not see it.
I guess if push came to shove I would ban it, but to be honest I can think of a lot more things to get worked up about.
On the way home Son and I spoke about food, about the fantastic spicy sausage that we bought before going in to the fight, about the readiness of Thai people to eat at any time and how central food and eating is to Chiang Mai people. We didn’t talk about the Cock Fight much, and perhaps that says it all.
Chapter 20
Needing A Bit Of Luck
There can be few more surreal moments than when haggling over the price of a lucky charm wooden penis with a Buddhist monk. It’s up there along with all the other weird and wonderful events of the past year; the vanishing woman in the Club House Office, the pop up hospital receptionists, the elephant cowboys, the house with no kitchen, the crazy truck guy, cock fights, the free floating work permit inspectors and the blaring car horn.
It just felt that our business needed a bit of good luck. It was ticking over okay but could do with a boost, something to really get it going; an old fashioned tonic. When my Arsenal FC supporting, rice selling friend at the market asked how my business was, I shrugged my shoulders, “same same” I replied in Tinglish. He laughed and pointed to his money box…. “you need” he said. He was pointing to what many people here use to enhance good luck, especially financial good luck; a lucky wooden penis. He showed me his wooden penis good luck charm that he keeps in his money box on the market stall. He waved it at me and said “good luck will make money many”. I was in no real position to disagree and could certainly do with the money many.
The first time I saw one of these rather arresting lucky charms was very early on in our relationship with Thailand. It was actually about the third thing I noticed when we first visited a few years ago.
The first thing I noticed was how friendly and smiley the passport people were, playing peek-a-boo with our youngest son compared to the cold official stares at Heathrow. Secondly, their great love of football as evidenced by our taxi driver’s first question “you from England… you like Manchester United?” And thirdly, that there appeared to be a small wooden penis hanging from his key ring.
Sitting in the front of the taxi, zooming along, at an incredible gas assisted speed on the airport highway I kept trying to see whether it really was a small wooden penis or perhaps something else. I don’t know, a small plastic sausage or a novelty penknife perhaps? Admittedly a bit of a long shot, but surely it couldn’t really be what it looked like. What could be more unlikely than that? If you drew up a list of unlikely things to have on a taxi driver’s key ring I bet “wooden penis” would be very, very low indeed on your average list, somewhere below “working sat nav of local area” and “the right change”.
When we got out of the taxi I took a glance at his key ring. As we stood there on the pavement, feeling a bit dazed, as one does when they first arrive in Bangkok, two scenarios unfolded in my mind; firstly, we had been driven at high speed through dangerous traffic by a penis wielding sex maniac, and secondly, I was in a seriously interesting country. Thankfully it transpired the latter was correct.
Over the last year I have constantly been aware of these good luck charms in the background of every day life. Once you know they are there and keep a lookout for them you see them everywhere, in all shapes and sizes and in surprisingly odd places.
The best one I’ve seen so far is on a vegetable stall in the local market. It’s huge and quite impressive, a real work of art, beautifully carved and very highly polished. You can almost see your face in it. I look at it most days. It’s about the same size as my youngest son’s leg but a lot fatter, if you can imagine such a thing. It’s pretty big for a lucky charm of any kind, let alone one of, how shall I put it, such bold and arresting design. It’s usually poking out of the lettuces.
I tried to engage the lady behind the stall in conversation hoping to steer the subject towards her most impressive table decoration. It all broke down rather predictably fairly quickly, but not before I rather foolishly pointed at the penis and raised my eyebrows and nodded, as if to say “wow, respect is due for some substantial good luck” but by this time she was a little unnerved by the whole episode and thought that I was just a weirdo.
I left the market doing my best to look casual. I was keen to find out more information about these bizarre phenomena and hopefully buy one for myself. I could take it to the airport when we picked up our guests and rub it on them to ensure they paid us, although on second thoughts that would probably not be such a good idea.
As luck would have it, I didn’t have to wait for long to find out about them and buy one from an ancient but sprightly monk outside a remote country temple.
After having bought, on impulse, an incredibly cheap bicycle from the local supermarket I was keen to cycle about the countryside and look at things. I had bought it on a whim as a result of two bookings coming in on the same day (let the good times roll, international shiny life here I come) and it being amazingly cheap, the price of a round of modest drinks for 4 people back home. It must be the cheapest bike in the world, and made in China by a company who evidently only have the slimmest of slim grasps upon the basics of bicycle manufacture as well as the most cursory of cursory nods towards road safety.
The bike has no gears (of course), the front brake has the main spring thing missing and the back brake is all there but doesn’t work. As well as this inconvenience it feels alarmingly uncomfortable to ride and feels like you are constantly falling over the handlebars. It is also possibly the heaviest push bike in the world. It really is amazingly heavy. I can’t imagine what it’s made from, possibly a Mercury and Lead alloy. Just cycling a short distance mak
es my legs feel like jelly. It did cross my mind whether the tubular frame was stuffed full of some kind of illegal contraband and the gang who were supposed to make the “pick up” were biding their time waiting for an opportunity to bump me off to retrieve their cunningly concealed booty, but then I couldn’t think of anything illegal and heavy enough to make a noticeable difference. It’s probably just a crap bike.
I firstly cycled/ wobbled up the road and back, then around the massive Club House and then went further and further afield.
One afternoon I had cycled some way out into the country towards the mountains and predictably my legs were feeling like jelly. I started to cycle towards some buildings and a temple that I could see in the distance. When I arrived I pulled up outside the temple and rather shakily dismounted. I did my best to walk normally towards a small shop just outside the temple grounds.
Inside the tiny open sided shop, whilst reaching for a can of cold Fanta I noticed in the corner a little table with religious artifacts for sale; a sight not uncommon in this part of the world. Amongst the small Buddha statues, fragments of bone, hair, shells and pieces of magical writing there were three small but beautifully carved wooden penises. Due to an unfortunate combination of excitement and exhaustion I pointed at them and asked in an overly loud booming voice how much they were. It was one of those moments where quite inadvertently you come across in an unusually hostile way.
Startled, the young shop assistant realised she was alone in the shop with a mad booming voiced nutter and rushed out the back to get a grown up. Shortly after a man appeared, looked at me, smiled and left the shop and walked out into the road and towards the temple. I could imagine the conversation, “Daddy there’s a weird foreign man in the shop, he spotted the penises and shouted uncontrollably”, “Don’t worry I will fetch the village elders and we will kill him and string him up like the foul dog he is. Make sure he doesn’t leave the shop”.
I was seriously beginning to think about abandoning the Fanta and just making a dash for it. But of course riding the heaviest and most uncomfortable bike in the world it’s impossible to “dash” anywhere; it is quite possible for small girls and very old ladies with walking frames to out run me. I had no choice, I had to stay and fight it out.
To my surprise the next person to walk back in the shop was not a panting angry village elder with a pitch fork but a very old smiling monk. He looked about a hundred years old, heavily wrinkled, few teeth but bright sparkling eyes, just as you might imagine a proper holy man to look (with the passing of time I realize, in my imagination, he has turned in to Yoda from Star Wars). His manner was smooth and unruffled and if he was going to start a fight I reckoned that I could just about take him out. Luckily for both of us he had no intention of doing so. In retrospect I realize he had been summoned especially as I had taken interest in the religious artifacts. His English was good, which was lucky as my Thai is still appalling, usually making people fall about with laughter or bring me very odd things that I didn’t ask for in restaurants (last week I asked for a lime soda and was brought a coconut).
The first thing that the sharp eyed monk explained to me was that the wooden penis must never, ever be worn around the neck “very bad will happen”. It did kind of make sense as I imagined the response it might elicit back in England. I couldn’t help imagining the scene at Heathrow airport, with my Mum saying “and tell me again why you have this hanging around your neck” with a growing sense of unease.
The monk continued. Apparently as well as bringing general good luck to the owner, if it was “dibbed”, tapped lightly on objects, they would, by default, also be due some good luck. He kindly demonstrated this for me noticing that I was a little out of my depth in basic “dibbing”. He elaborated, if I wanted good luck with money I should “dib” the money, he “dibbed” the shop keepers coin box just to make sure I got it. He went onto explain that the penis was carved in a special way and made out of special wood.
Wow, how do you get jobs like that? I wondered if it’s something you fall into when your other plans don’t work out (like teaching) or whether it is a calling or perhaps a kind of weird unexplainable compulsion (“Derek if you make one more of these bloody things...”). It was hard to say, but being a lucky charm wooden penis carver must be one of the more unusual occupations in the world.
Despite my intrusive thoughts Yoda carried on enlightening me. I felt like Luke Skywalker in the swamp. Please bear with me if you have never seen Star Wars, I’ll stop it in a minute. He said that after the carving is finished and the polishing has been completed it is blessed by the Abbot of the temple. Wow again, I was genuinely impressed.
If all that was not enough it was also a sure way to keep away snakes! This seemed to be an unusual by-product of the lucky charm that he didn’t elaborate upon. It was almost as though, for some reason, he was slightly embarrassed about this fact but felt compelled to mention it. It certainly didn’t seem to have any relationship with the general “dibbing” and money thing.
I felt that I’d either been initiated into a magical world where I too could manufacture good luck and ward off snakes at will or I’d witnessed the most elaborate and unusual sales pitch in the world. In a moment of extravagance I enquired about the price for all three. It seemed rather expensive and I made a generous counter offer which the monk immediately accepted. Stepping aside he allowed the shop keeper to deal with the necessary exchanging of money and merchandise. The monk bowed gracefully and so did I. I got back on my bike and slowly wobbled away through the village with little girls racing me whilst I pretended that I couldn’t see them and didn’t want to win anyway.
I felt happier than any grown man should be after such an event. It felt like a real achievement getting hold of these things. Magical or not I had three wonderful wooden penises in my pocket all blessed by the Abbott, (and that’s a sentence I never expected to be typing a year ago).
As I made the slow journey home my mind spun with what could be dibbed first. I was certainly going to dib my wallet and both my UK and Thai cheque book. I thought of how pleased Neil our long suffering UK bank manager was going to be back in rainy Plymouth. In my excitement I almost emailed him but I’m glad I didn’t. I thought I might also dib the boys money boxes (how pleased their little shinning faces would be) and if my wife let me, I would “dib” her purse, which although I know sounds like a dreadful euphemism, or something Shakespeare would put in to make the groundlings laugh, I can’t think of another way of putting it.
I cycled homewards along tiny lanes, through patchworks of rice fields and mango orchards and realised that I also had acquired an unusually casual attitude towards snakes. I also felt that I had a kinship with Bangkok taxi drivers. I was lucked right up. What could possibly go wrong now.
Chapter 21
Turning The Corner
Coming up to our first year a couple of significant things happened. On reflection these things seemed to mark a point that cemented a bond between us and Chiang Mai and our continued life in Thailand; our furniture arrived and we hired a criminally insane Thai teacher.
When we moved we had a lot of stuff that we couldn’t take with us but didn’t want to give away or sell, things like our Chesterfield sofa which was the first grown up thing that my wife and I bought when we began earning proper money, two big boxes of toys, a guitar, three trumpets (remnants from an aborted musical career), a dinky little armchair that had belonged to Leonard Elmhirst, expensive kitchen equipment and various other trappings that were befitting a comfortably off middle class family. The plan was that we would put these things into storage with a removal company who would send it all over when and if we got settled.
Just after the new year when we took a flurry of bookings we sent an email and money to have our stuff sent over. We got emails from various removal and customs people saying “the shipment” had cleared various stages and was aboard some big boat.
I imagined our bundled belongings stowed away in some dark bough of a huge ship churning through the Indian Ocean, or wherever these ships go. For all I knew it could come via the Himalayas transported by teams of trained chimps, although admittedly this would be far less likely.
Anyway, enough time passed for me to forget all about it until I received an incomprehensible phone call from the Port of Bangkok. I had wrongly assumed that our stuff would appear from the back of a lorry in our front drive and I would perhaps tip the driver and his men a few hundred Baht. In reality our stuff was impounded in the Port of Bangkok, causing all kinds of trouble, incurring all kinds of fees with an excitable sounding bloke yelling down the phone that I had to pick it up or face further charges.
It was tempting to forget all about it. Pretend it wasn’t happening. But this was all our most special stuff, our sofa, the children’s toys, my Sabatier kitchen knives and Leonard Elmhirst’s bedroom armchair. I imagined all our stuff being looted by dock workers, who, for all I know, may well be within their rights to carry off such an eclectic mix of un-claimed booty. I imagined them dancing about the docks playing my trumpets, strumming my guitar and reclining on the finely upholstered cloth of Leonard Elmhirst’s chair. I could not let this nightmarish vision happen and fired off an email to the Port of Bangkok. Alarmingly, I got a response almost by return.
It was a very dignified curt response that recognized that a consignment of goods was waiting for us and incurring storage fees as a result. There was also mention of import tax duty that we had to pay as well. The meter was running and the fees were increasing with every passing moment. With rising panic I wrote back saying I was in no position to pick anything up from Bangkok, what with being hundreds of miles away, not to mention not actually being a transportation company. I got another speedy response this time outlining two separate figures and prices, one for payment of all fees including onward transportation with receipt, and one for payment of all fees including onward transportation without receipt. This second price was much, much cheaper. Actually less than half price. It seemed like a bargain.