TOAD, PHU KRADEUNG NATIONAL PARK
Is there no batrachophile out there who can identify this?
SUMMIT OF PHU KRADEUNG, 1300 meters
DINOSAUR AND PLASTIC PALM TREE, KHON KAEN
STREETLAMP, KHON KAEN
And now a few brief words about Phitsanulok. I went for an afternoon walk along the river, and there was some kind of Buddhist celebration going on, for the temples were packed with lay people in yellow and pink T-shirts. Outside the temples, on the riversides, were curious racks with bags of fish, snails, eels, and turtles hanging on them.
I immediately assumed they were food, as I have yet to meet a bilaterally-symmetric organism that Thai people don’t eat. This time, however, the poor creatures had been imprisoned by grubby, grobian folk of the lowest class. For a mere fifty baht (about $1.67) a “clean” person could improve their karma by setting the beasts free in the river. Presumably the shabby folk had such a low karmic score to begin with that they were willing to incur the karmic penalty for removing the animals in the first place, thus exchanging their spiritual well-being for liquid capital. I wondered if this was the Buddhist equivalent of selling one’s soul. I have seen the same practice with songbirds in other cities, and I find it detestable.
At sunset, I saw a new kind of sport. It employed the woven rattan ball and the fancy moves from takraw, a kind of head-and-foot-volleyball played over a low net. Takraw is an amazing game to watch, principally because the spiking of the ball involves an inverted bicycle-kick, which must be seen to be believed.
But today there were no such kicks. The players stood in a circle around a net basket, suspended some six meters above their heads. They took turns trying to kick or head the ball into the basket. To aid the head shots, they wore bricks of cloth strapped to their foreheads. Each time the ball missed, the next player would kick or butt it straight back up again.
It was amazingly graceful. When one of the players scored a head shot, he had to remove the cloth brick and only use his feet, knees, or shoulders. Several of the players were obviously in their forties or fifties, perhaps no longer suited to inverted bicycle kicks, but certainly still able to deftly kick a ball into a basket in the air. It reminded me of the Aztec ball game somehow.
Saphan Ekathotsarot Bridge, Phitsanulok
PHRAE (pronounced like the “pra” in “prattle”)
This is an old, old city – founded in the 9th century, but archaeological remains in the area go back far beyond. It has very little of the bustle of other Thai cities, and many charming aspects – the endlessly-wandering alleys, the giant, crumbling stone walls around the edges of the city, the ancient trees in people’s front yards, the evident character of brick, stone, and metalwork on the houses themselves. The weather has been grotesquely hot, with promising thunderstorms in the distance that bring no rain, and my forays have been somewhat limited. I went on a nice long walk today, though, and took in the sights.
My first stop was an electronics repair shop I had spotted on the way to 7-11 yesterday. I have a headlamp of Swiss manufacture that has been a pillar of stout reliability for three years, and then it suddenly developed a case of the flickers. At home, you don’t really try to repair electronic things, you just replace them. The guy was repairing a clock-radio when I first saw him, so I thought he might give it a shot. It was a joy watching him work – he was obviously unfamiliar with this kind of headlamp, and took it slowly apart like a zoologist dissecting a small crab. His assistant brought me cold water and his mother came out of the back of the store to chat with me, and then he gave a grunt and thrust the headlight in front of me. There was a small severed wire. Then he whipped it back onto his bench, stripped and soldered the errant wire, and screwed the carapace back together. Although I offered him a handsome reward, he would only accept 20 baht.
Walking down the main street of the town, I noticed some unconventional shops. One was aimed at the Political Toady demographic, as it exclusively sold artificial flower wreaths surrounding portraits of deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The whole premise puzzled me, but I could not think of any delicate way to ask the owner about it.
Around the corner was a shop with cell phones on one wall and donuts on the other. Donuts are a charming addition to any shop, and I showed my approbation with a purchase. Donuts undergo a rather sad incarnation here in Thailand – wheat-processing technology has not really caught on in a good way, and wheat products tend to be on the order of quality of generic supermarket white bread – mealy, insipid, and yet somehow chemical in their flavor. I suppose there are a lot of Grade-D Thai restaurants you can patronize in America, so fair’s fair.
I followed wooden signs to the Vongburi House Museum, where I startled a trio of young people who were watching TV in the foyer. They sold me a ticket. One of the women kept telling me she would help me do everything, starting with taking off my shoes. I didn’t wait to see how she would assist me there, but then she helped me up the stairs by hovering at my elbow the whole way.
It was a nice old wooden house, with historic documents framed all over the walls. Some of them had to do with the purchase of slaves, as recently as the last century. This was something of a surprise to me. There were also documents relating to the buying and selling of elephants and teak. Evidently vast fortunes were made by cutting down all the forests in the area. The house originally belonged to a Lanna Prince, but ended up in the hands of a timber magnate and his family. There’s not much to mention about the house or the museum – even the family howdah was somewhat humdrum – but at least one member of the staff ghosted after me every single step of the way. It was disquieting. I remember this kind of attention in Hungarian museums, and I didn’t like it there either. What could I possibly steal? Were they afraid I would step over a velvet rope and sleep in a four-poster bed? Or avail myself of a silver chamberpot?
After the museum I was directed up a long, winding alley to Wat Luang, the eldest temple in the city. It had been built in 829, at the behest of a Lanna prince named Phor Khun Luang Phol to house a sacred Buddha image. The main chedi stood straight in the center of the temple complex, its elephants crumbling and decorations stripped by twelve hundred years of humidity, but still proud and glorious.
A sign explained: “Originally was a golden Buddha image but gold was unfortunately stolen by the Ngeuws.” This was the first citation I had seen of a group called the Ngeuws, but I imagine they were piratical heathens who foolishly did not recognize that gold belongs to the clergy.
After this I got lost in the alley-maze, and began to lose my temper. I had the unique experience of finding myself at the convergence of three disparate data-streams: the map in my Lonely Planet guidebook, the advice of the locals, and the reality flooding through my senses. None of these three agreed with either of the other two. It was unbelievable how badly the locals understood simple directions like “East,” “West,” and “toward the river.” It was also bizarre how far off the LP map was. It was shortly after noon and very hot, but I finally got to the road that runs along the city wall on the west side.
In some places, the road runs atop the old city wall, which makes for charming little recessed neighborhoods on either side. Somehow the local automobile drivers have agreed to defy Thai cultural mores and pilot their vehicles slowly and carefully, and there is little risk of a car hurtling off the road into someone’s living room.
Along the road I heard an unmistakeable noise coming from a woodcutter’s shop: a hill mynah. These are my favorite birds, and this one was happy to put on a vocal show for me and my voice recorder. It knew several phrases in Thai, a few tunes, and a lot of random squeals, trills, glides, and pops. Additionally I got the woodcutters chatting in the background, with comparatively little interference from traffic noise.
Further down I saw a man tending roosters inside inverted wicker baskets.
He introduced himself as “Bit,” and told me these were fighting roosters. I watched him curiously as he sponged a rooster off, then wet a dissociated feather and stuffed it down the rooster’s throat. He repeated this several times, and the rooster did not struggle. Then Bit took out a little bag of pills and fed one to the rooster. I pointed at the pills and pantomimed a rapidly-increasing heartbeat and wild-eyed, frenetic aggression, but he shook his head and pantomimed hale, full-bodied strength. Then we both laughed. I’d never been to a cockfight, and he invited me to go with him.
He left his rooster behind, for it was not scheduled today, and we rode his motorcycle across town and out the eastern gate, then out into the suburbs until we came to the metathetical Chicken Stadium. As a rare foreign visitor, my entry fee was waived and I was given a front-row seat.
The current fight had been going on a few minutes. The competitors were spiritedly clawing and pecking at each other. The bigger one was russet-colored and seemed to be in possession of most of his feathers. The smaller one was a dark metallic green, and was covered with scars and weals. The mostly-male crowd was screaming and jumping up and down. They bellowed numbers as the fight went one direction or another, jotting figures down in miniature notebooks that had pictures of girls on the covers. A referee sat on a tiny stool in the pit, which he moved around to keep out of the way.
Russet was clearly the more powerful chicken, but Green had a technique. He would push his head up under Russet’s left wing, and keep it there until Russet had forgotten what was going on, then Green pushed his head out from behind the other side of the wing and attacked. Russet was repeatedly shocked by this aggression that seemed to emanate from his own armpit, but managed to use his legs to lever Green out in front where they would peck and claw at each other face-to-face. That was obviously a losing strategy for Green, because Russet had superior strength and reach, so he continued with the underwing-method. For a beast with a two-volt brain, Green was pretty clever. Eventually Russet began to tire and Green scored some hard pecks on his opponent’s head and crest. Then a bell rang and the round was over. The owners rushed in and hustled the birds away for a twenty-minute breather. Russet’s owner had a pal who was a poultry-surgeon, and used a needle and thread to sew up a gash over Russet’s shoulder.
Two other competitors were introduced to the cockpit shortly afterward. These were both haggard, tough-looking customers who were missing feathers. They reminded me of the rooster we ate in the Hmong village in Laos. They faced off and puffed out their ragged neck-ruffs at each other, holding eye-contact until the interchicken electricity got too high, and then they would swat and swipe. Both of these were obviously old campaigners, and had won all their previous fights, so defeat would be a big surprise to whomever lost. The crowd noise increased in pitch and intensity as the brutality escalated. Finally one of the fighters got hold of the other’s left eye with his beak, and there was a huge surge of energy from the spectators. The feet clawed, the wings beat, but the one chicken held on until the eye came out. Then it pressed its attack against the blind side, striking the raw, swollen socket over and over again with beak and talon. The wounded rooster tried to back away, but the other was relentlessly aggressive, pushing it around and around. Finally they ended up right in front of me, and I smelled blood and feces. The losing chicken turned his good eye up at me, regarding me with a dull, glazed, crestfallen look, and the bell rang, saving him from the final indignity of blindness. His owner swept him up, and though the man was obviously disgusted at the loss, dabbed at the rooster’s wounds with obvious tenderness.
The two original fighters were brought back in. Russet had had his chirurgical repairs, but Green apparently had a cock-teaser among his trainers who had taunted him for the full twenty minutes, for he entered the arena full of fury. Russet, who now bore wounds, scars, and patches bare of feathers, quickly decided he’d had enough of this business, and tried to run away. The crowd jeered and booed, and the referee stopped the fight.
I had had enough of this action, and Bit very kindly gave me a ride back to town. By now it was approaching dinner time, so I went to the market and sought out a dish of chicken curry.
SELF-PORTRAIT
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