by Alex Gunn
Although I had said that they could keep the truck as long as necessary I did need to know when I would be getting it back. I needed to know whether I had to cycle home on the Super Sporty or back up the Hang Dong Road to the dealership.
By 4 o clock I was pacing the office, staring at the phone. I retrieved the form with lots of Thai writing on and phoned the number at the top.
“Sawadee Kap may I speak English?” There was confused talking in the background. Another voice came on and spoke Thai.
“Hello, can I speak English?” I repeated.
“Hello-wa” a Thai voice said.
“I am Khun Alex. You have my truck Hi Lux Super X”
“Hello-wa” the Thai voice said again. Then it said “Will phone Ha Natee ”
So, I waited for 5 minutes, pacing the room like a jilted groom at a wedding. The skies began to darken and thunder rolled across from the mountains. Bloody hell, don’t rain now. But it did.
Nobody phoned back in five minutes, it was now getting on for 5 o’clock. I had no option; I had to cycle back across town to the dealership, in the pouring rain, with no waterproofs, in Friday rush hour traffic on a child’s bike. It felt like a challenge on a stupid reality TV show.
It was pouring with rain and I was soaked in the first few seconds. It must have been one of the last big downpours of the season. It wasn’t particularly cold but just very uncomfortable. Imagine, if you will, being fully clothed and then lying underwater in a luke warm bath then getting out without drying yourself and cycling around on a child’s bike in the Saturday Night Stock Car Crash Rodeo. That would be similar to the journey ahead, but probably a little bit safer.
The traffic was, of course, murderous. It hadn’t rained in a while and the roads were greasy and wet. All around me was the screeching of tyres, the pounding of rain and the occasional thump where bumper met bumper. I weaved in and around the stationary traffic, most people too preoccupied with trying to get home in one piece to notice some mad foreign bloke on a miniature bike. It must have looked like I was escaping from a circus.
I cycled over Narawat Bridge and the fast moving brown muddy water of the river Ping. Huge clumps of Water Hyacinth swirled past, an indication that higher up in the mountains the river was flooding. The traffic was completely stationary on both sides of the road and both sides of the river, and backed right up along Thapai Road up to the moat.
Battling onwards, on the little Super Sporty 22, didn’t feel much like Thunderbirds now. The dark low clouds rumbled over from the mountains with cracks of lightening and thunder that shook the old town to its ancient foundations. It felt like the world was coming to an end. Water was pouring and flooding across the street. Shop keepers looked on from dark doorways; the electricity having gone out with the first almighty thunder clap. Motorcyclists who were still bravely battling on started driving along the empty pavements, at first just a few and then a steady flow in single file with brightly coloured cheap plastic water proofs flapping in the wind. A fat bloated dead rat bobbed along in the flood water at the side of the road, and everything smelled hot and fetid and wet.
The main thing now was to get to the dealership and pick up my fully repaired truck. It would be all nice and new again. I would put the bike in the back and proudly drive back home.
I got to the dealership just as the rain was dying off, gusts of hot air following the storm battering the soaked and dripping city. I walked in and 25 immaculately dressed young sales assistants froze and stared at me. I thought of saying something funny, but for once I just didn’t feel like it. It felt a bit like entering a new world, or being transported in time from the dark ages to some comfortable clean modern view of the future. The electricity and lights came on and I stood dripping in the doorway. The Toyota Ambassador came over and held out a hand towel to me. It was emblazoned with the words Toyota Winner Number 1. Sometimes though, it’s just difficult not to feel like a loser.
I dried my face and hair and as much of me as was decent with 25 people staring at you and sat down opposite an immaculately dressed young man. The Ambassador translated. An older man came out from a back room and came over to us with a stack of slips of paper. He looked severe and gave me a very business like salute. He launched into a long officious sounding monologue. The ambassador turned to me.
“He says that there are many things wrong with your truck.”
“Yes” I said, a little confused. “That’s why I brought it to you.” She looked nervous.
“He says that the Alternator is broken and the battery is not charging properly.”
“Yes,” I said.
“He also says the air con is broken.” As she said this he pointed at one of the slips of paper with a big red cross on it to emphasize the point that it really was broken.
“I know, that’s why I brought it here…how much will it be to fix these things?” There was much earnest talking in Thai between them.
“He says he cannot fix, he says they do not have the right fluids.”
The right fluids? The right fluids? My mind was blank and the exhaustion of the journey across town was just catching up with me.
“He says the radiator is broken,” she announced brightly.
“I know,” I said softly.
“He says the radiator is leaking and is dangerous to drive.”
“I know” I said softly again, realising the full madness of the situation. “That’s why I brought it to you. I thought you might be able to fix it,” I said, not to be clever, or sarcastic or awkward but just to be honest. I really did believe they would be able to fix it, why wouldn’t they?
“Can you replace the radiator?” I said, a little spark of hope not quite extinguished in the flood of disappointment.
“Yes, we can order a radiator, but not from Bangkok. We will have to order from Japan. It will be at least 65 days delivery…maybe more.”
“How much will it cost?”
She turned to the senior supervisor and there was again much earnest talking.
“He says it would cost 40,000 Baht, plus import tax, and labour which maybe another 10,000 Baht”
“But the whole truck is only worth about 100,000 Baht,” I protested weakly. She smiled, the senior guy saluted and returned to his office. I paid for the service, took the keys, walked outside and picked up the Super Sporty 22 and lifted it into the back. I felt tired. I was wet and deflated. As I got into the cab the Thai fore court assistant saluted me and repeated what I have come to know is a little speech in Thai which is welcoming me to Chiang Mai and wishing me good luck, which is handy as it will be 50 – 50 whether the bloody thing starts.
It did. It wheezed into life and I drove back home through flood water and puddles the size of Olympic swimming pools.
The next morning I charged the battery, topped up the radiator, wound the windows down and drove off across Chiang Mai, back across the bridge with everything looking fresh and bright in the early morning sunshine. I pulled off the main road and round the little back streets and into a little darkened yard.
At the back of the yard is Old Toothless sitting on his tiny wooden stool, smoking and watching his little black and white TV. He turns round and sees me and smiles a great big one tooth smile. He waves and gets up.
“Sawadee, sawadee, sawadee, ” he says enthusiastically, like I’m a long lost brother, and chuckles to himself and kicks at a scrawny chicken as he walks over.
As he works on the truck I notice there are only 3 kittens left suckling on their mother, and each one looks a little bigger since I saw them last. I feel sad about the tiny one that I assume has died. I look around at the piles of junk, the great pile of empty plastic engine oil bottles, and endless bits of broken old motor parts and wondered what happened to that tiny kitten, what Old Toothless did with that tiny frail little body.
I look up to the home made shrine on the back wal
l, the flashing fairy lights, the beneficent face of Ganesh and I look at the miniature prayer wheels covered with ancient Buddhist texts (and of course grease), written clockwise around the surface to remind us of the endless passing of the sun, from east to west, across the sky. The rising and falling rhythms of life, the never ending pattern of death and re-birth, and I unexpectedly feel at home in this ancient land.
I feel the quiet acceptance, the strength of the country and its resilience and the knowledge that there is no such thing as an ending. I realize that my truck will never be fixed, but that will be okay, as nothing ever is, really. Everything is just, well, ongoing I guess, just a temporary arrangement, a bit of quick welding over a leaky old radiator.
Old Toothy finishes his welding and I offer him a fifty Baht note.
“Mai pen rai.…prung nee,” he says (“ it’s okay…give it to me tomorrow”). He smiles.
I smile back, I know what he means and I have one of those unexpected moments when suddenly I love it here.
Chapter 15
Loy Krathong
Mid November : The official start of the Dry Season. Shouldn’t rain much until April.
“Loy Krathong is a waste of time...people should just stick to their bad luck... shit, I should know.” Thom
For a week in November everybody in Chiang Mai lets off lanterns and floats small candle lit rafts. Yep, when I read it the first time I thought “big deal” too.
There are popular post cards in Chiang Mai that show pictures of the night sky full of huge golden hot air lanterns swirling up into the heavens. The multitude of lanterns in these pictures is such that you automatically think, “it’s trick photography, it’s been photoshopped, it’s a few lanterns digitally copied thousands of times.” Well, its not.
The Loy Krathong Festival (Krathong meaning “raft”) pivots around the full moon of the twelfth lunar month. I just threw that in there for anyone still following the ancient Brahmanic calendar, for the rest of us this means mid November. During this time the good residents of Chiang Mai let off over two million lanterns, truck loads of fireworks and sail hundreds of thousands of beautifully decorated, small candle lit rafts along canals, rivers and streams. It must be one of the most incredible and magical experiences that takes place in the modern world.
The centre of festivities is usually along the river, usually by the old Iron Bridge and Narawat Bridge. Special Krathong launching sites are set up by the municipality, as well as cunningly contrived bamboo piers that drive the little rafts out into the main flow of the river. It amazes me and makes me happy that important city centre traffic light systems can (and often do) freeze up and stick on red for days on end without anyone bothering to fix them, and yet the Chiang Mai municipality dispatches teams of expert bamboo pier engineers to set up the Krathong launching sites weeks in advance.
I’d love to see the local councils list of funding priorities. I bet that at the top it would be Krathong Launching Sites, swiftly followed by local tax relief to fairy light manufactures and a hefty dollop of funding to the Department of Water Fountain Development. Way down the list past all the grown up, boring stuff like “sewage outlet monitoring” and “town planning” would come “traffic control maintenance.” In all likelihood, traffic control maintenance in Chiang Mai is probably just a couple of old guys on a motorbike with a box of spanners.
This weird reversal of priorities in Chiang Mai is such that it sometimes feels like having a major city run by a combination of Disney World and a group of school girls; roads are closed for Flower Festivals, traffic stands still if there is a disco dancing championship at a local school, police corner off main carriageways at rush hour to allow local carnivals to set up and forget buying anything if you are unlucky enough to be in a shopping mall when a Thai pop star arrives to open a coffee bar.
The build up to the Loy Krathong Festival is slow but steady. At the same time as the teams of pier engineers turn up by the river, stalls along major roads set up to sell lanterns of all shapes and sizes, fireworks, candles, incense, banners and flags. The closer to the festival, the busier these makeshift outlets become.
The good old Monk Supply Shops are also centres of feverish activity. For most of the year, as you know, these shops sell everything you might want to donate as gifts to the monks at your local temple, everything from toilet rolls to ornate silver Alms Bowls. At festival time they are packed with lanterns, flags, fireworks, candles and incense, in fact anything and everything that burns, explodes or flies. It’s a bit different from your average Christian Bookshop which I guess is the closest thing we have in the west. Perhaps they should start selling fireworks.
Loads of fireworks and lanterns are let off in the actual grounds of the numerous Buddhist Temples. A favourite activity is to combine the two activities at once by attaching a long string of firecrackers to the underneath of a lantern and float the whole aerial display up into the sky. This is not an activity for the faint hearted as the rising of the lantern and the exploding of thousands of firecrackers is hardly an exact science.
The most amazing of the Loy Krathong lanterns are designed to be launched during day time. These are called Khoms, hand made by rival groups of monks. They are works of art take weeks to make. Most are let off at mid day on the day of the full moon. They are brightly decorated and much bigger than their night time counterparts, and they all, without exception have an elaborate firework display hanging from strings underneath the lantern. Often the last big bang will unfurl a long silk flag that trails gracefully through the air.
A very special one that I saw from a temple near our house went one step further. As the long silk flag unfurled in the air above our heads, it released a beautifully made paper bird that circled slowly back down to earth. It really was the most amazing thing to watch.
At some time during the festival, the third day I think, there is also a huge night time procession of extravagantly illuminated floats. Most are built around old trucks and flat bed lorries but are transformed by teams of people who work year round to turn them into Disney World like creations, complete with millions of small twinkling fairy lights and heavily made up beauty queens. The procession is made up of about 30 different floats and takes a good hour to pass one spot. The whole festival in Chiang Mai is so massive that the parade is almost incidental. There can’t be many festivals in the world where the absence of a major street parade with 30 floats lit up like the sun would hardly be noticed.
So, what is this festival all about? Why are all these lanterns released, fireworks lit and rafts floated? Well, the same thing that drives most of the collective Thai psychopathology; the endless striving to enhance good luck. The releasing of the lanterns and rafts are symbolic of letting go of all your accumulated bad luck and a welcoming some good luck, (hopefully). The wishes, hopes and dreams of the Chiang Mai people drift with the lanterns up into the heavens along with the scent and smoke from the incense burning on the tiny little rafts that bob off down the river. It’s also traditional to place a few coins onto your banana wood raft, along with the incense, flowers and candles just to make sure that you really will receive good luck.
It makes great sport for kids to plunder the rafts that haven’t joined the main flow of the river (hence the importance of the pier engineers). I asked a Thai friend whether this would prevent good luck from happening to the person who launched the raft or whether the children who stole the coins would be blighted by bad luck for the following year. He paused, “probably” he said. I realised I was approaching things just a little too literally for the spiritual Thai way of thinking.
Unlike the festivals back in the UK the ones in Chiang Mai seem to go on for ages and are seen as an important part of everyday life, rather than an irritating irrelevance that gets in the way of it. The Loy Krathong build up literally goes on for weeks and the slow descent afterwards takes days. It feels like it’s not over until every single lant
ern in Thailand has been released and all the fireworks in South East Asia have been let off.
Days after the main full moon night, when there is more light in the night sky than darkness, it is still possible to see the odd, lone lantern drift up into the night sky, let off by someone in the dead of night not wanting the magic of Loy Krathong to die, just yet.
Chapter 16
Burma
December: Chilly at night up in the mountains and the swimming pool suddenly feels slightly colder and is deserted. The garden is beginning to die back.
“You like Starsky... you not like Hutch?” Burmese shopkeeper.
Burma’s a bloody weird place isn’t it? I am standing about 20 paces over the Burmese border surrounded by street kids who are trying to sell me Lego and Viagra. What the hell has been going on here?
Lego and Viagra is a distinctly disturbing combination. I’m not sure whether the weird (and disturbing) combination of these two products that are being touted by dirty young nippers is a comment on Burma or the people who have been visiting. Lego and Viagra...I ask you! Who comes here? Randy old men and toddlers!
The longer I am standing in the sun waiting for my wife, and boiling to death, the more time there is for word to get out that there is a vulnerable, dopey looking foreign bloke standing in the sun boiling to death who is clearly in the market for either Lego or Viagra and possibly both. After five minutes word has now got out to about ten kids who surround me jostling for front row positions to really grab my attention and stand a chance of selling me something.
Although sets of Lego and suspicious looking tablets are still being pushed fairly heavily they are now joined by offers of lighters, pens, a shoe shine set (who on earth is buying this stuff?), cigarettes, a model making kit of an F-111 fighter jet and playing cards with pornographic photos on that are being waved at me by an incredibly grubby little boy who must be about nine or ten years old. Another little enterprising boy, who has nothing to wave in my face, gamely offers to get me anything I ask for if I follow him.