Lady Boys Large it Up

Up until now I have only seen a handful of lady boys, however here in Phuket where brash is a kind of competitive sport, they are actively promoted.

There is a specific bar on Soi Bangla where lady boys dance for your pleasure and it is actively promoted as an attraction. There is consequent overflow onto the street and for the first time since arriving in Thailand I'm almost literally surrounded by shemales in various stages of transformation.

Being of a shy and nervous disposition I decided to sit in the balcony of a first floor bar to gawp at the he-shes in the company of what I hope were dancing GIRLS.

It's hard to believe that some of these beauties started out as men. Austin if you're reading this is still not too late to start your dancing career. Just chuck on one of your mums old frocks and get down to Phuket.

It really is like a Sergio Leone classic down here, however it seems like harmless fun. The performers certainly seem to enjoy it. Apologies for the sideways video, I haven't figured out how to rotate it for playback!

I asked my hostess (at least I'm pretty sure "she" was a hostess) why there are so many trans-sexuals in Thailand. She was quick to point out that being a Buddhist country the core philosophy is "live and let live". People simply are not persecuted for being who they are. What kind of world would we live in if that was the guiding principle behind Christianity and Islam? So tolerance and accessibility to surgery make it possible for this who wish to to do so. Makes sense to me.

I was warned by my server that some TVs fund their surgery through prostitution but specifically by essentially robbing their clients. As you can imagine I was in no rush to repeat my 8 bottles of Chang incident and surprisingly drank very little in Phuket..

And finally on this subject:

That one second in from the right looks pretty hot.....

Right that's it, I need to scarper before I make a messy mistake. Yikes.

Next: 2 Wheels out of Phuket

Cheers boys and girls, and all those in-between.

MrC.

Phuket or Bust

This is the collection of sights that greeted my eye on arrival in Phuket:

It's like Blackpool on a bad acid trip. This is the short street called Soi Bangla just a hundred yards from actually rather nice hotel I'm staying in. As you can see it's wall to wall bars, go go bars, and the usual tawdry collection of sex shows. I'm stunned to note that food and drink is twice the price here as it was in Chiang Mai or Bangkok, in many places it's 3 times the price.

On the plus side I found these, which I'm buying as gifts for everybody this Xmas:

Mankini - is nice, you buy.

Fortunately the morning revealed a somewhat less seamy side of Phuket in the form of the beaches which were indeed wonderful.

This is my first ay on the beach since arriving in Thailand and in typical British fashion I over did it. I look like lobster thermidor in a hat strutting around the streets.

Don't expect much Thai food in Phuket it took all day to find what I can only assume are the only two family run Thai restauranmts in the Pattong beach area.

Right I'm off for an aloe vera massage in the vain hope that this will all stop stinging.

Next: Lady Boys Large it Up

Later, dudes.

MrC

Off Road & Dangerous

Just a short entry today as my time in Chiang Mai is coming rapidly to a close. Just two more things I want to do here. One is to go to a real Thai boxing match. The other I spotted just the other day - half a day of off road ATV (quad biking) trekking; 45 Kms of rough trails on the back of a vehical that's less stable even than a motorbike, doesn't steer well and has very little in the way of effective brakes - how could I resist?

These machines are hilarious, it's all about body position and throttle, basically stand up and try to steer the beast with your body weight while yanking the throttle so far open its sounds like the engine will expode under the strain.

This could so easily have been a boring day, there were 5 Slovaks on the team, 2 of them girls; now I don't want to be accused of being sexist, there are some girls who are damn good on bikes and in cars, these two were not. The lads were also clearly scared witless, especially after one of them lost control and shot over the edge like a rocket propelled lemming, saved from certain death only by the two trees he hit on the way down.

Fortunately there was also a great Danish guy, my age, travelling for the same reasons. Together we were like a couple of long lost 14 year old brothers. We made sure we stayed well back from the tortoises so that we could charge at every tough section full throttle. We raced each other all the way back to base. A bloody brilliant day for 30 quid. I'd do it again if I didn't hurt so damn much.

So, kick boxing then. I wasn't impressed. Maybe I over hyped it in my own head, I was expecting violence, brutal kicks, blood, insane knockouts from round-house kicks etc etc. By comparison it was all rather tame. Take a look at the clip below, it's really more of a big hugathon really. There's only so much of this kind of fast paced brutality you can watch before you just fall asleep. I'd rather watch proper boxing any day of the week.

OK that's it from Chiang Mai, I'm off to the islands starting with Phuket. Take care.

MrC

Cook Cook, Bang Bang

The treking etc was excellent however it would be a shame to come out to Thailand and not attend a cookery school. There are several here and its easy to enrol in a 1 , 2 or 3 days course. I opted for the 1 day, 900 Baht all inclusive and that turned out to be a wise choice.

The course starts with a tour of the local market to sample and understand all the ingredients used in cooking Thai food:

3 types of basil, 4 types of chilli, 12 varieties of rice, 2 types of garlic - thank goodness they give you a cookbook.

Then its onto the school itself. There are a number of prep tables where you work in small groups with the chef and half a dozen assistants who runn around doing all the grunt work, washing up , assembling ingredients etc. Finally there are a number of "wok stations" where we poor punters try hard not to massacre the food.

What I had naively overlooked was the fact that you eat everything that you cook! Therre were something like 6 courses, I thought I was going to burst. I could not have survived for 3 days at that pace! It was however a completely delicious experience. I made all of these from scratch:
vegetable spring rolls, classic Pad Thai, Green Curry, Jungle Curry, Banana Fritters etc etc

How do you top a day of gustatory overload? Well, how about shooting? I don't mean wimpy little .22 guns either, I mean the real thing. Chiang Mai has a public shooting range run by the Army on a local military base. I've always loved shooting, and never agreed with banning full bore guns in the UK - another knee jerk political decision that hurt a lot of businesess and sportsmen, so I can't resist a chance to shoot proper guns.

From an extensive cabinet of guns I chose the trusty Glock 19, hammerless 9mm, and favourite of police forces worldwide.

I'm delighted to report that I scored in the high 90 percentile, I'm just happy that I'm moving on soon as I could happily spend all day here and it would cost a fortune in ammunition! Ok 1 more day left in Chiang Mai then it's south to Phuket Island.

Next: Off Road & Dangerous

Elephant Rafting

The third days trekking was much more gentle going, more down hill sections following the course of a small meandering river.

- ahh.. I love the smell of napalm in the morning, smells like...breakfast

- jungle bungalows, compact and bijou, with a pleasing southerly aspect which gets the sun in the late afternoon......

Finally we came to a small clearing with a handful of quaint sleeping huts and best of all an inviting swimming pool with a cascading waterfall. Hopefully the gorgeous semi naked girl in the foreground gives you some sense of scale......

It's hard to explain just how good it feels when you are very hot, grubby and tired to leap into a pool of cool clear water, or to stand under a thundering waterfall.

This then marked the end of our short trek into tribal territory and after a night round the camp fire we headed off in the back of an open pickup truck for some elephant trekking and bamboo rafting.

I love this country, there is no pervasive nanny state. If 8 consenting adults want to travel in the back of an open pickup truck, the government here reasons that they are smart enough to figure out the risks and accept them or reject them. There are no safety harnesess, no helmets, no airbags - and you know what? We all made it safe and alive, and we didn't pay 5x the cost to cover a load of unneccessary safety regulations. While I'm ranting, you can also drive here while (wait for it) talking on your phone! And just like the UK almost no one dies as a result. In fact it so statistically insignificant it is not even recorded!

Down the lazy river in Thailand on a bamboo raft. I can garauntee that you will get wet on these rafts. They ride through the water rather than on it so with ever set of mild rapids you get a good soaking. However it is a tranquil passage through the counry that I could easily have spent the whole day enjoying. Drifting languidly past grazing elephants and wondering at the high water marks some 10 feet above our heads.

Elephant by the river.

After a couple of hours on the river we reboarded "death trap 1" and hurtled off to the nearest Elephant trekking emporium for a couple of hours of altogether different trekking.

Deathtrap 1, reckless transport which um..err..hurts no one....

The Elephant Mafia control this region and their well trained banana pushers are strategically placed throughout the jungle with large bunches available for immediate and insistent purchse, 20 baht, thank you very much. It's a good scam, Elephants love bananas - unfortunately I was on the biggest elephant in the herd and they operate very much like vehicles in terms of Miles per Gallon, although with them its BPM (bananas per metre). My behemouth of an elephant, surely decended directly from a woolly mammoth was working on the basis of 1 banana per metre. Frankly it would be cheaper to drive a Ferrari through the jungle.

charge of the heavy brigade why do cute girls always want pictures of me? I feel invaded.

Ok, that's it for me for another day. Next: Cook Cook, Bang Bang.

More Jungle Japes in Thailand

Happy to report that I made it through the night with out any insect bites. However a spider the size of a Ford Ka was perched in the rafters all night. I was too terrified to even take a photo, some jungle spiders are known to like photographers even less than Russell Crowe does.

- no it's not my school photo, it's lunch (well someones anyway)

Breakfast is hard boiled eggs and a loaf of toast each with jam from the local market; jungle tea (tastes like lapsang shoe box to me) or Nescafe, ah the great taste of freeze dried coffee all the way out here in the jungle.....

local boy, in local costume: making small boys wear smocks is how the whole lady-boy thing starts I'm sure.
local tribal girl, grinding maize before rushing off to get more Nescafe.....
wilderness at first light

Still life is good, it's another baking hot day and we balance over tree trunks thrown accross streams and traverse fallow rice and maize fields in scenes disturbingly reminiscient of about every Vietnam war movie I've ever seen.

- carefull, that's easily a two foot drop into two foot of water...
Look girls a really cute village puppy.....

Amidist this beautiful, if sometimes arid landscape, are small tribal villages and isolated farmsteads that retain their own unique magic, snapshots of a kind of simple,natural beauty too long eviscerated from our modern urban imaginations.

Ok that's it from me for today. Next: Elephant Rafting!

Me Tarzan - You.......Ladyboy?

So I'm in Chiang Mai, the second city of Thailand - and I like it. Something about the old ramparts and the defensive canal system that remains at the heart of thei ancient city gives it a familiar, colonnial feel.

It's not trying to be anything, as a result it comes off as an altogether more authentic flavour of Thailand. The pace here is less frenetic and you can walk the streets without the constant badgering, which completely changes your own reaction to the town.

I've booked a jungle trek as its less than an hour away in a 4x4 and this is a chance to inflict my ribald British humour on a team of 8 unsuspecting fellow trekkers for the next few days.

Jungle village house Karon tribe

The trekking is damn hot, it's over 30 degrees here and the shade of the canopy is very welcome. One thing I couldn't capture is the oftne deafening roar of the insect life as we trudge through the trees - genuinely on the verge of deafening.

Jungle hotel - the interior

The jungle trip is my first experience of the "mighty woosh" and I'm very grateful for having brought a large dose of Loperamide with me. Nothing however can prepare you for the thrill of a third world, jungle hut toilet, thank god they sell strong beer....

Jungle hotel - the exterior

Fortunately the natives are friendly although I was disappointed to note that as the 5 indigenous tribes are confined within the borders of teh national parks they have been progressively weaned away from their gypsy lifestyle and as a result from their native animist beliefs, many becoming Christians. Hey can you guess what the only building in this village that was made of real bricks, proper machined wooden beams and with a real and expensive slate tile roof was? The blidning contradiciton never ceases to amaze me.

Ok, tomorrow will bring more hills to climb so I'm goign to crawl under a mosquito net.

G'nite.

MrC