by Alex Gunn
Back out in the street I look at some vest tops with 1980s Acid House smiley faces on and some badly faked football shirts along with a few somewhat surprising Phantom of the Opera shirts. On top of the shirts there is a shelf with hundreds of coffee mugs. Most of them are nonsensical; a picture of a parrot beneath which is the statement You Are Number 1, another one which just simply said “Samui In The Morning” with a name of a coffee shop underneath. It was an odd message for someone trying to promote a coffee shop on the Thai island of Samui. I wondered what they were trying to get at. I ran the phrase through my head and muttered it to myself wondering if there was a clever double entendre hidden somewhere. Of all the slogans that you might put on a coffee mug in order to promote your Kho Samui coffee shop, I bet you wouldn’t think of that, would you?
Then I saw it. Lurking behind a snoopy mug was Paul Michael Glaser. Not the real Paul Michael Glaser but a picture of him as Starsky from Starsky and Hutch on the side of a mug. It was a big picture of Starsky leering right at me with his iconic red and white Gran Torino car in the background. Hutch was conspicuous by his absence. I wondered whether he was supposed to be on the other side but a printing error had left him absent. Or perhaps it was made by a firm who just didn’t like him, or perhaps by Paul himself. Whichever, for 30 Baht, it was mine.
I walked on, past various shops stuffed full of Lego, and flat screen TVs and mobile phones and lace table clothes. My wife and kids were further ahead of me with bags of stuff I guessed were soon to be Christmas presents. They were looking at computer game discs which hold as much interest for me as The British Chamber of Commerce.
While they were pondering which games to buy I popped into the shell and illegal artefacts shop. It must be the only place on earth where you can choose between coral napkin holders and ivory napkin holders. There are crocodile skin handbags, purses and wallets along with a few stuffed baby crocodiles in glass cases, just to make sure you know this is the real illegal deal.
Along with useless nick nacks made from precious and disappearing natural resources and parts of rare and protected animals, there is a range of sea shells and sea shell ornaments. There are lamps made from large Conch shells, wind chimes, blinds and door hangings made from thousands of little shells and, somewhat surprisingly, a bikini made entirely from shells and string. Who would have thought it! I couldn’t help imagine that it must be incredibly uncomfortable and wondered if anyone had actually tried to wear one. I stared at it for a long time. I suppose it goes to show how much time shell shop proprietors have on their hands, and the kinds of things they have on their minds.
As I looked along the rack of small boxes containing hundreds of little shells I came across a large selection Cowrie shells. You know the ones with the leopard spots on. These however had been beautifully hand carved in cameo relief with star signs and other designs, mostly tropical scenes with palm trees and desert islands and seascapes with the sun disappearing beyond the horizon. Some though just had really odd messages inscribed on them. Perhaps they had also been commissioned by the people who ran the Samui coffee shop now famed for the snappy catch phrase “Samui in the morning.”
Along with carefully carved tropical beach scenes and star signs there were messages that were profound and quite arresting. One read “The finger points to the moon yet the fool looks at the finger.” I stood reading this over and over again not quite comprehending the weirdness of the situation. Who would painstakingly inscribe such a message on a shell...come to that who would buy it?
I couldn’t quite work out whether it was me that was weird or the shells. Why had these not caused a riot when they first appeared, surely these are front page news somewhere, or at least a glossy centre page article in a posh magazine. Surely inscribing sea shells with profound messages is a niche market, something unusual, something to shout about. It’s a celebration of pointlessness. How come I didn’t know about these message shells sooner? Surely it’s the kind of thing that should be covered at school... or at least on a dish cloth.
I seized another one, it read “you are but a tiny part of the cosmos,” followed by a highly effective picture of Saturn with all its rings carved in beautiful shelly relief. It felt like abstracts from a new age education system. Along with information already gleaned from dish towels these shells could provide an almost complete education.
A lot of them had quasi religious sounding messages; “The man who has nothing to give has the greatest gift of all,” which I am happy to confirm is a complete load of rubbish. Some actually have psalms quoted directly from the bible, but my favourite, not because I am especially religious, has the entire, entire, Lords Prayer carefully and painstakingly inscribed on the back. It must have taken hours of careful work. It’s a lot of words, 70 to be precise (I counted them in the shop), including the “amen” at the end.
How on earth do you fit 70 words onto the back of a shell no bigger than a small mans fist? And, more importantly why would you want to?
All I can think of is that there is a market for these things in churches. Perhaps priests and vicars sell them to their congregations. Perhaps they are particularly popular in church communities by the sea, where the combination of mainstream Christianity and sea shells is not as weird as it feels right now, sitting in my land locked office in Chiang Mai. Or perhaps they are just made for people like me, as, of course, I bought one immediately.
I catch up with my family.
“It’s time to go back,” said my wife.
“I’ve brought a shell with the Lords Prayer on and a mug with Paul Michael Glaser....but no Hutch!”
“That’s nice,” she said kindly.
“I was going to buy a brass Moroccan Tea set but the guy was a bit grumpy as he had the lights on, so I didn’t.”
She didn’t answer this but led the way back to Thailand. Across the bridge and towards the three hour journey through the mountains, past Chiang Rai and home.
As we walked back towards the Thai immigration I looked back across the bridge to where people were still arriving to complete their visa run and go Christmas Shopping.
Amidst the back packers, day trippers and other tourists, I spotted a large elderly western gentleman with his very young Thai wife who was holding hands with their young child, toddling along. I saw the pack of young street nippers descend upon them wielding Viagra and Lego, and suddenly this weird and disturbing combination of products made complete and perfect sense.
Chapter 17
New Year
January: Dry and hot, but cool at night and the swimming pool still feels cold.
“Chiang Mai is a special place and special things happen here.” Khun Sonthaya.
The New Year began, with myself and Khun Sonthaya in the central police station of the old city reporting the theft of my motorscooter. It was taken just before New Year from outside Big C super market on the Hang Dong Road. In keeping with the rest of Thailand the police station is a very weird place.
The few police stations that I have been inside in England are at best plain and uncomfortable; they are unfriendly, the people who work there are unfriendly, the surroundings are decidedly functional and the general atmosphere is one of foreboding.
You may not be massively surprised to discover that the police station in Chiang Mai’s old city is very different. It’s quirky and easy going and you can park right outside the front door in their handy little free car park. Once inside the airy station there are uniformed officers wandering around, joking and chatting, and bemused foreigners bumbling about trying to work out why it’s all so relaxed and who they should report stolen motorscooter to. The whole place oozes unhurried laid-backness. You kind of get the feeling that doing anything here will take forever so it’s no use hurrying. If you’re there, you’re there for life, or at least half a day.
Apart from the unhurried laid back atmosphere it also struck me as unusual that everything
was so accessible, that you can park your car at the front door and just wander in and walk about. For a central police station there was surprisingly little security, it was a creepers paradise. (Creepers, are thieves who specialize in wandering into large institutions like hospitals, schools, universities and creeping around looking to steal whatever they can, ideally unattended handbags in staff rooms, or cash from locker rooms. I only happen to know this as I met a professional creeper many years ago while working in a secure mental health unit for convicted criminals.)
Evidently, the Chiang Mai police have either not come across many creepers, or perhaps, the creepers have just not thought of having a go at police stations. I suppose it would take a creeper of considerable self confidence and bravado to target a police station. If they did they would get my vote for Creeper Of The Year.
Khun Sonthaya was doing his best to find a police officer who wasn’t on his lunch break, and to also unravel the complicated system for reporting the theft of a motorscooter. Apparently we had to meet with different police officers, each of which had to fill out many forms and record lots of things in huge medieval leather bound ledgers, similar in shape and style to tenth century hand write bibles.
In the absence of any useful police officers qualified to record the theft of a motorscooter Khun Sonthaya and myself did what any right minded middle aged gentlemen would do and went straight outside to a toothless street vendor and bought two small plastic bags of bright red strawberry fanta. The absence of teeth was not a great advert, but hey, Son and I like to live dangerously. We had two straws each. We ambled along the road, and of course went to lunch.
After a long and uneventful but delicious lunch of catfish curry, pork salad, roast chicken, several varieties of chilli dip, sticky rice and more strawberry fanta we ambled back to the police station and on our way bought home-made ice lollies from the same guy with no teeth.
As is so often the case here, what should have been a grim and boring hour or two was slowly becoming a day out. We had enjoyed a great lunch, had mouths and tongues stained a frightening shade of red the like of which can only be achieved by powerful, unregulated chemicals and were now bowling back into the nice airy police station slurping home-made mango ice lollies.
Sunlight poured through the windows of the airy waiting room and fans whirred away busily as police officers settled down to the rigours of an afternoon writing in medieval ledgers and dealing with bemused motorscooter-less foreigners.
From one waiting room we were led away to another smaller waiting area which was really just four plastic chairs in a corridor, and from there we were led into a surprisingly large busy office of uniformed police officers, and plain clothed admin staff all tapping away on keyboards and leafing through huge leather bound medieval ledgers and peering into old fashioned computer monitors the size of hat boxes.
The first thing you notice is the bewildering amount of black electricity cables that snaked madly all over the office. It was like a cable bomb had exploded. There were black extension cables everywhere; over desks, running along floors, across the backs of chairs, up walls, over sealed boxes full of medieval ledgers, all of which connected printers and computers and gi-normous 1980s photocopiers (of course) to multi point extension cables that in turn were plugged into other multi point extension cables all of which were occasionally, and rather half heartedly, taped to the floor with thick black tape. All of these were plugged into one flimsy little corner shop multi pin extension cable which was plugged into the only power socket in the room. It had the entire electrical power of the main office of Chiang Mai’s central police station running through it and was slowly melting into the floor accompanied by that special smell of burning electricity. It was the most dangerous looking arrangement that I’ve seen since my childhood friend Peter strapped two homemade fireworks to my sisters Barbie Doll Horse which he suspended from the guttering of our garage.
I fought my way through the jungle of snaking wires and smoking cables and sat down next to Khun Sonthaya across the desk from a kind faced, young uniformed police officer. With the help of Google Earth he asked me to point out exactly where I had last seen my motorscooter. We zoomed along the Donger and veered recklessly off into the car park. I pointed to the empty spot where I had left my bike. The young officer shook his head gravely;
“Many bikes are stolen here.”
“You know it then?” I said.
“Yes, many many bikes are stolen from here…many smuggled to Burma.”
The obvious thing, which of course we never said was, “if you know that bikes get stolen there why don’t you do something about it?” And, why take them to Burma, why don’t they steal their own bikes. But of course we didn’t pursue this either. We all just sat there and nodded sagely, as though there was an invisible force over which we had no control that sucked motorbikes into Burma, like space rockets through a black hole.
We sat there for some time while he filled out various forms and asked me to sign lots of papers covered with small print Thai writing. I joked that for all I knew I was signing up to join the Thai police force, but he said rather soberly that I would not be able to join on account of my immigration status.
The last thing he asked me was what time the motorbike had been stolen and whether it was dusk or completely dark. I replied that it was dark. Apparently, crimes committed during the hours of darkness carry heavier penalties. He went on to explain that I was more vulnerable at night, although what he actually said was that I was more “easy” at night.
It seemed the process was over so we stood up, but, Khun Sonthaya explained that this was only part of the procedure, we had simply recorded the theft; the next bit was actually meeting with a plain clothed detective from the Auto Theft and Recovery Department. Wow.
As it happened, it was rather “wow” actually. We were led out the back of the main building and across a large courtyard that was full of impounded and recovered vehicles. The young police officer gave us a mini guided tour of the yard and pointed out various cars and trucks that had been used for smuggling drugs. He explained that the smugglers try to use expensive, top model cars and trucks so that police officers will feel a bit intimidated and not search them properly. He pointed out a very expensive looking Toyota truck that had recently been on the local TV news which Khun Sonthaya recognized. The police officer walked over and showed us, with some pride, the bullet holes in the driver’s door.
It all seemed bizarrely cavalier and I wondered whether he talked as openly and freely as this to everyone who had a motorbike stolen. Perhaps this was some kind of compensation or perhaps he was just a particularly talkative type of fellow. Either way, I hoped that for his own sake he would never have to work under cover.
He led us past a compound full of motorbikes, all of which he said had been stolen and recovered, but neither reported nor collected. I asked innocently what would happen to them, and he said he didn’t know. I asked whether I could choose one to replace mine, and he rather apologetically said no.
He led us to a side door of what looked like a huge whitewashed shed, which was in fact a huge white washed shed. Inside there were more motorbikes and bits of motorbikes and bits of engine and wrecked cars, and for some inexplicable reason a large, top of the range jet ski. As we are some 450 miles away from the sea with no large waterways big enough to accommodate a flashy jet ski I couldn’t imagine what it was doing here. It looked completely out of place. The mysteries of law enforcement know no bounds.
The young officer rang a little door bell on a small internal door which was opened by an even younger man who was evidently on his way to a fancy dress party as an undercover cop from a 1970’s American police TV series. Jerry would have loved him. He wore dark tear drop sunglasses, black jeans, black vest top shirt and white Nike trainers, no doubt for when he has to chase villains down side alleys full of empty cardboard boxes.
He took off his su
nglasses, smiled and beckoned us inside his office. The uniformed officer saluted, spun on his heals and walked back to the main building. The office was plastered with thousands of still pictures from surveillance cameras of cars and bikes and shady indistinguishable human figures.
In the corner of the office was another detective who was much bigger and tougher looking, the type of guy who looks like he could run through a house. It wasn’t exactly Starsky and Hutch, but it also wasn’t exactly a million miles away.
As the young detective looked through our paperwork he looked up and with some pride and with excellent English explained again that this was a very popular place to steal motorbikes. He said it as though it were some kind of reassurance for me, as though I would say, “oh that’s okay then, it’s a popular spot for motorcycle thieves is it? Well how lucky was I to leave my bike there. Thank you.”
He explained they not only regularly visited auto theft “hot spots,” as he called them, but they go one step further and use decoy vehicles. He said this very proudly.
In a bewildering moment he showed me a picture of my own Honda Dream motorbike, and told me this was their decoy motorbike; a black and green electric start 125cc. He explained that the black and green 125cc is the most stolen model of motorbike in Chiang Mai. It took me a moment to realize this wasn’t actually my motorbike, just exactly the same model. An unhappy coincidental irony, and you don’t get many of those about these days.
They could go one step further and employ a decoy victim, such as myself, to drive the decoy bike into the theft hot spots. The problem I guess would be that in time this would be countered by the thieves hiring decoy thieves to carry out the crime. The whole decoy situation would rapidly escalate to a point where the decoy bikes would be stolen by decoy thieves who in turn would be apprehended by decoy police officers, which if I am correct would mean that we can all stay at home and have a nice cup of tea, while the hurly burly of decoy life was going on elsewhere.