Thailand - Guns, snakes and gold teeth

Isn't it funny how time can stretch and pull away from your comprehension depending on where you are and what you're doing. 9.5 hours on a plane seems like agony when you've read half a book, listened to a few albums, eaten two meals etc etc. In the same way ten days in a new place can stretch away from you like an odyssey of adventure, when every day holds a bright promise of fresh experiences. And then in retrospect it seems like you took a mere gasp of air in that place, and in your memory it becomes like a shiny bauble or trinket to ponder over and treasure, filled with wonder and kept close to the heart.

Sam, with said palm fronds..

Thailand seems to have passed by in the blink of an eye, but really it was ten days of packed in activities and travels, and best of all many good conversations. Arriving in Chiang Mai was a very pleasant change from the overbearing concrete smog of Bangkok. I spent half a day wandering around town in the company of my new french friend, discussing prostitutes, politics and prices. Unfortunately i left it a little late making my way out to the suburban residence of my old friend Samuel Quinlan, and when i finally began making my way there after dark i realised that a). the address that i had for him made no sense to me, and b). it didn't seem to make any sense to the tuk-tuk driver either. With the help of Sam's girlfriend Phim on the phone, the tuk-tuk wound its way through a labyrinth of tiny concrete paths into the densely packed jungle suburb of Suthep. Sam wasn't kidding when he said 'my shack under the palm fronds'. I enjoyed the company of Phim, her brother Tun, and beautiful baby girl Leila until Sam returned from work. We had a fine night getting stuck into the whiskey and delving deep into subjects of little apparent relevance to our reunion - global politics, the neccesity of change, negotiating privilege when designing hypothetical Australian revolutions, and naturally discussing the whiskey itself.

Mmmm, gunnnnzzz

While Sam worked during the days i had the run of Chiang Mai on my newly hired Honda Phantom. See my other post for a review of this neato Harley Davidson knockoff. For years i have thought of South East Asia as the place where you might walk into a bar and be offered a handgun/grenade launcher/bow and arrow, and taken to the semi-private firing range out the back for a quick session, largely thanks to a semi-fictional story regaled upon me by my friend Paddy before he departed for SE Asia some years ago. Sam partly corroborated this idea by mentioning that in Cambodia he had once been offered the chance to blow up a cow with a rocket launcher. So i was set that Thailand would be the place where i finally laid hands on fire-arms, no doubt a scary thought to many of my friends and foes. I headed out to the semi-army run firing range on a sunny afternoon with a bit of cash and an overly eager smile. I chose as my weapon a 9mm Glock hand-gun, as the receptionist informed me that it was light weight and good for beginners. The very feeling of it in my hand was sinister - guns have a sort of presence about them beyond their actual weight (their pretty fucking heavy unsurprisingly, which makes any TV or film involving the careless discharge of firearms seem fairly naff).

Expect to see this one in the Herald scum one day..

The ex-army trainer gave me a crash course in how to load, hold, aim and fire it, and then it was mine, all mine! I hate to say it, but for a beginner, i reckon i did pretty bloody well - firing at a 80cm x 80cm target from a distance of 25 metres, I hit the black centre circle 10 out of 12 times, scoring 8s, 9s and even an outer 10! Yeeehaaa! Then a few days later in a street market games stall i managed to tear the centre out of the target by hitting it repeatedly with a bright pink plastic pistol. Hot AND Gangsta! So now knowing how to fire a gun i'm pleased to be one step more prepared for the apocalypse. TICK!

Next up was a visit to the Maesa snake farm, a sort of weird and slightly depressing zoo with snakes, a few crocodiles in tiny enclosures and a large range of exotic and interesting birds, including a pair of mountain eagles, criminally enclosed in a 3m high by 2m wide cage. Pretty fucked up. The main draw card for me was the promise of a live snake show. The flyer even had Rambo on the front with some strange looking Thai guy who looked like he'd been working all his life on trying to look like the bad Asian guy in, well, a Rambo movie.. The show itself was actually incredible. There was all of 5 people in the stands designed to hold at least 300 people. In the centre on a green felt covered ring, the snake handler produced two cobras, extremely poisonous, and taunted us and them by crouching close and ducking and weaving with his knees as they quite rightly tried to attack him.

BFS - big fucking snake

Using a hypnotic series of pinches and strokes, he seemed to immobilise parts of their bodies and was even able to pick them up in sweeping gestures, pretend to fling them at the audience, and then bend over backwards avoiding their bite, and even kiss the damn thing! Incredible! Next up came the most enormous bloody python, with its beautifully patterned green, yellow and brown scales, and the bastards walked straight up to me and said "you first". Offering me the python and taking my camera, they draped it around my neck (just like Britney! haha) and then made me kiss it! Holy crap balls i've never laughed so hard in my life, this thing was fucking terrifying! Good kisser though...

So all up i felt very drawn to the idea of Thailand as an adventurous destination where most things that would seem unreasonable of unsafe in Australia were available. However all that extreme adventure activity was offset by a trip to visit Chiang Dao, where the Makhampom Institute is making some incredible humanitarian theatre work with refugee communities who have crossed the border from Burma. These tribes of people live in a beaureacratic no-mans-land - not being recognised by Thai law, finding it difficult to farm or even live any where permanently as a result. I was allowed to tag along and visit them when Makhampom took an Australian school up there to share theatre games and cultural exchange with the village kids. Richard who is the International Director of Makhampom explained that last year the same village kids had created a performance which Makhampom had toured to Bangkok, raising enough money to lease the land that the tribe was now living on. A beautiful story. But by far my favourite moment of that day was finding this girl (http://www.flickr.com/photos/52739150@N06/5473767864/ amidst the games, wearing a loud "The Exploited" t-shirt exclaiming "FUCK OFF WANKERS", and frolicing wildly amidst the hand carved spinning-tops churning up the dirt. Punks not dead - it lives on in a refugee camp in far north thailand. Fuck yeah.

Anyway, thats quite enough from me for the time being. Thank you so much for having me Sam, Phim, Leila and Tun - your hospitality and cheer made the whole thing seem absolutely magical.
I'm also going to chuck up a review of the Honda Phantom in the next few days, and also put up some photos of my gold tooth as soon as i can figure out how! Delhi is a hard place to navigate without getting distracted. But thats a different story... ;D

Mad love from the dust and the dirt
RUIN