Jim Algie Read online

  At Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok, one of the first sights to greet visitors is a colossal statue of the Hindu creation myth, detailing the seminal ‘Churning of the Milky Ocean’ from which all life arose. Standing atop a sacred tortoise is the deity Vishnu. At Angkor Wat, bas-reliefs depict similar tableaux.

  An hour’s drive from the Cobra Village in Khon Kaen province is Mu Bahn Tao, or Turtle Village, a town crawling with tortoises which have also been blessed with a divine lineage. Locals believe these yellow-headed tortoises are protected by the village’s guardian spirit, Chao Khun Pa, the late abbot of a local temple who befriended the creatures. (Consider him a Siamese equivalent of Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals.) At the entrance to the village are two models of its totemic figure, burnished with gold, draped with garlands and housed in a wooden pavilion. Down the main road is Tortoise Park. Bridges span the park, affording an overview of the creatures trudging around.

  The adults of this species (Indotestuda elongata) weigh around three kilos. Their shells, a patchwork of black and yellow, span 30 centimetres. The reptiles’ staple diet is grass and fruit. Some visitors feed them slices of watermelon by hand.

  In this hamlet, the 400 residents living in weatherworn houses propped up on stilts with cows underneath them, and fenced in by pickets of bamboo, are outnumbered approximately three to one by tortoises. The prime times for tortoise-spotting are early in the morning and late in the afternoon. They are everywhere then: chewing up the greenery in the fields, crawling down the dirt roads and trudging into houses where they are treated like pets. In a hamlet almost 250 years old, even the dogs do not pester them.

  Picking up a tortoise in his front yard, Prasong Sutwiset, a local who runs a home-stay for overnight visitors, said, “The males have flatter stomachs and rounder shells. The females have concave stomachs and a capsule-shaped shell.”

  The 48-year-old, who was born in the village, is one of many locals with weird tales to relate about the creatures. “A Taiwanese film crew came here and one of them put his foot on a tortoise. Only a few minutes later all their equipment started malfunctioning. Some Thais and foreigners who stole baby tortoises later brought them back after experiencing ill health. But I guess the strangest case was a Thai tourist who accidentally ran over a tortoise in the village. Later that same day, he got into a serious car accident that almost took his life,” said Prasong.

  Are these coincidences? This is the question I put to the former editor of Hyper magazine, Veeraporn Nitiprapha, who said, “You Westerners destroy so much with that word. Everything that cannot be rationally explained you call a ‘coincidence’. Thais don’t believe in coincidences.”

  These cold-blooded reptiles warm up during the mating season from June to December, when they are quite literally doing it in the streets, the backyards and the park. Like stags in rut, the males square off in head-to-head duels, butting shells to subdue their rivals. The battle-hardened winner then mounts the female from behind. When copulating, the males make strange croaking sounds. Stoically bearing the brunt of these intrusions, the females are silent.

  Until watching this orgy erupting all over town, I had not realised the true significance of the Motorhead song, ‘Love Me Like a Reptile’.

  ON THE ROUTE TO EXTINCTION

  Bulleting down the highway in a fossil-fueled car, en route to the Phu Wiang Dinosaur Museum and national park, we encountered one of the most deadly reptiles in all of Thailand: a police officer, who ran out into the middle of road to flag us down. If it wasn’t for the driver putting a lead foot down on the brake pedal, the cop could’ve ended up like many snakes—road kill—though not the kind that is reincarnated in a pungent curry.

  Still wearing his sunglasses and grinning at the Thai lady in the front seat, the policeman (who reeked of alcohol) said the radar trap had red-flagged our vehicle breaking the speed limit. Discretely, she handed over her driver’s license along with 200 baht—the going rate for traffic violations—tucked inside it. He pocketed the money and cheerfully gave us directions to the dinosaur museum. Then he told her, “There aren’t any more radar traps on the way, so drive as fast as you like.” The policeman laughed and wished us good luck.

  Along the way we spotted many life-size models of dinosaurs, in front of hospitals, beside banks, hovering above traffic islands. These statues are primers for the museum and the park, advertisements for the province’s main draws.

  The centrepiece of the Phu Wiang Dinosaur Museum is the metal skeleton of a Siamotyrannus isanensis. Unearthed in 1976, this 15-metre-long monster was the first of its genus and species to be discovered. It’s a forebear of the much bigger Tyrannosaurus Rex. Off to one side of the museum is a kind of Jurassic Park, filled with built-to-scale dinosaurs baring sabre-sized teeth, amid jungles of foliage.

  As the museum illustrates, this area was Thailand’s stomping ground for dinosaurs. Other species, like the Phuwiangosuarus sirinhornae (named after Princess Chakri Sirindhorn) and the Siamosaurus suteehorni, were also first discovered in the region. Over in the nearby national park, visitors can get down to the bones of these discoveries and see the pits where paleontologists unearthed them, as well as dinosaur footprints, a 9th-century Buddha image carved into the cliff buttressing Phu Wiang Mountain, and caves with Stone Age artworks.

  Many children come to the museum on field trips. Their enthusiasm brightens the gloomiest of days. Running around screaming or sitting on the wooden walkways of the jungle to sketch pictures, the kids are loud testaments to the creatures’ primeval pull.

  While the boys gravitate towards the monsters, the girls orbit around the cuter creatures, like a massive tortoise in a glass case. Many sea turtles and land tortoises—of which some 28 different species are found in Thailand—date from 200 million years before the first season of Survivor was shot in southern Thailand. A display in the museum calls this the ‘Age of Mammals’. From that epoch also came the distant ancestors of elephants, dolphins, rabbits and snakes.

  In the midst of global warming, rising seas, and the second greatest mass extinction of species the world has ever seen, the museum invites comparisons to the natural calamities that killed off the dinosaurs. It would be ironic if, from the fallout of an environmental apocalypse, what crawled out of the wasteland in 2500 AD were not human survivors, but tortoises, serpents and lizards with the DNA of dinosaurs—prehistory coming full circle and the reptilian brain outsmarting Darwin’s descendants.

  For the museum bears little evidence of humankind except for one drawing on the wall showing a portrait of evolution: from the naked homo erectus to the Neanderthal carrying a club and swaddled in animal hides to a pale-skinned woman in a mini-skirt at the end of the line. Compared to the dinosaurs that survived for tens of millions of years and the reptiles which still thrive, the homo sapien looks frail by comparison—the human race but a flash in a primeval reptile’s eye.

  THE SUPERNATURAL

  Modern Primitives and Ancient Shamans

  A young male traveller with a radioactive-looking suntan, colourful tattoos and enough earrings to set off an airport metal detector stepped out from behind a new Toyota, snapping a shot of a Thai man who had a metre-long sword pierced through both of his cheeks. Behind him was a Kodak photo shop, an ATM machine and the off-white façade of one of Phuket’s oldest examples of Sino-Portuguese architecture, the On On Hotel.

  This bizarre juxtaposition of the modern and the primitive is the most photogenic feature of Phuket’s annual Vegetarian Festival. These Taoist Lent celebrations are held in some of the southern provinces of Thailand for nine days during the 9th lunar month of the Chinese calendar. Of all these movable feasts, Phuket’s is the grandest.

  Throngs of tourists crowd the sun-glazed streets for the processions on the last three days of the festival. In particular, a healthy contingent of rich Chinese fly in for the festival, as this is the only part of the world where Taoist Lent is celebrated with such colourful and grisly a
bandon. While the snap-happy tourists gawk in disbelief and take photos, the mah song—‘entranced horses’—willingly stop and pose for them. The faces of these Thai men, women and even a few transvestites, are skewered with everything from swordfish to cymbal stands to tennis rackets and small bicycles. In a trance, they walk in the middle of small entourages, shaking their heads from side to side, while their eyes roll back into their heads.

  Both shirtless and shoeless, and wearing bright silk smocks emblazoned with fanciful dragons baring fangs and claws, the devotees claim to be possessed by a pantheon of spiritual entities—from Hindu gods like Shiva and the elephant-headed Ganesha to Chinese and Taoist divinities. It is these deities and a strict vegetarian diet, they say, which gives them the power to undergo the painful rites of penance, passage and purification through self-mutilation.

  Many of the local onlookers, dressed in white as a symbol of purity, put their hands together to wai the participants—also known as ‘spirit warriors’—as they pass by, while other locals cluster behind makeshift shrines on the streets. Draped with red cloth, these wooden tables are set with bowls of burning joss sticks, plates of oranges, pineapples and candies, and nine tiny cups of tea—one for each of the Emperor Gods or Immortals of Taoism, who also represent the seven stars of the Big Dipper constellation and two others (from earth the formation resembles a yin-yang symbol). The deities are believed to attend the festival each year.

  An elderly Thai woman standing among these streetside supplicants explained that their offerings and shows of respect for those possessed by the gods would bring them good luck.

  But some of the tourists stared at the people in the procession like they were freaks. Raymond Jones, the aforementioned photographer with the tattoos and earrings, noted some similarities between the ‘modern primitive’ body-piercing trend and these ancient rites.

  “They used to pierce their navels in ancient Egypt as a sign of nobility. And Roman centurions used to do it to show how virile they were. Some people may do it strictly for fashion’s sake today,” noted the young American computer programmer. “But my piercings and tattoos mark important turning points in my life. I got one when I graduated from high school, another when I got my first apartment, and then my tattoo of Isis [the Egyptian Goddess of Love] when I finished university.”

  The coming-of-age rites that he spoke of also play a part in the Vegetarian Festival. Some of the devotees, both male and female, are still in their teens. Prasong, a 15-year-old fisherman, said, “It’s important for a man to show how strong he is, how much pain he can take.” By participating in the festivities, Prasong also believed that he could bring good fortune to himself and his community.

  Some of the participants, however, are professional spirit mediums, or like Prasong’s father Veerawat, a mor phi (literally, ‘ghost doctor’). The 63-year-old—who had his face pierced by a steel bar draped with a garland of jasmine flowers for one of the processions—pointed to the Khmer script emblazoned on his back, and described in painful detail how a Buddhist monk at a temple in northern Thailand had stenciled it into his flesh while reciting magical incantations. As a latter-day shaman in Phuket, Veerawat consults various spirits for his clients, reads palms and dispenses herbal remedies. According to Veerawat, his magical tattoos have protected him against illnesses and accidents. “Look at me,” he said. “I’m still alive and I’ve never been seriously ill or in a car accident.”

  In contrast, inked into his son’s skin was a tattoo of rock band Guns N’ Roses’ skull logo. In his left ear was a silver stud. “I am the new generation,” Prasong said with a grin.

  The term ‘modern primitives’ was first coined by Roland Loomis in 1978 to define the neo-tribal movement of the tattooed, the pierced and the branded. Better known by his adopted name of Fakir Musafar, Loomis is a former advertising executive with a degree in electrical engineering and an MA in Creative Writing. He also founded the first school for body-piercing in the United States. A lecturer, shaman and legend in the fetish community, Loomis’ most famous and well-documented feat was performing the excruciating ‘Sun Dance’, a Native American spiritual rite that involves being hung from two big hooks piercing the chest and nipples. (The Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum in Pattaya has a life-size tableau of a tribesman undergoing that rite of passage.) Much of the inspiration for his experiments with body modifications came from the indigenous peoples of the United States, and various Southeast Asian tribes and sects. For instance, the Hindu festival of Thaipusam, held outside Kuala Lumpur around February each year, attracts upwards of 100,000 people. The really devout have hooks put in their backs so they can drag chariots bedecked with flowers and Hindu idols up to the caves in a nearby mountain.

  Many locals in Phuket are upset that the more extreme elements of the festival—walking on hot coals, scaling razor-runged ladders and spirit mediums licking hacksaw blades until their white smocks turn scarlet—have upstaged all the ascetic aspects, and that many travellers only come for the last three days of bloodletting and pyrotechnics. When I first attended the festival in 1997, people were already complaining that it had gotten out of control. A woman working at the Tourism Authority of Thailand’s office in Phuket said that the antics of the devotees had become increasingly outrageous over the years to impress the tourists and the gods. “Many foreigners who come to the festival only want to see the piercings and fireworks. They forget about the purity side of the festival—abstinence from alcohol, sex and eating meat. They don’t bother watching all the Chinese operas and dragon dances. I don’t like the piercings. They’re very, very boring,” said the woman, who asked not to be named.

  To a certain extent, however, the shamans’ showmanship is in keeping with the festival’s first act. In 1825, a visiting Chinese opera troupe agreed to eat a strictly vegetarian diet and perform acts of self-mortification in the hope that the gods would stop the malaria epidemic that was decimating the local populace. After they performed these rites of atonement, the number of deaths mysteriously declined.

  In Marlane Guelden’s informative and lavishly photographed book, Thailand Into The Spirit World, she linked the history of the performing arts in Southeast Asia with shamanism—many of the first performers were also traditional healers and practitioners of magic. The same is true in the West, where Greek tragedies evolved from magical ceremonies and the mythology of the country where the first Olympic Games were held to honour the gods.

  Some of the expat community on the country’s largest island and second richest province find the festival’s lunatic fringe revolting. “Watching some of the men whipping themselves, or dancing with rows of safety pins stuck into each arm, that’s offputting to me,” said Alan Morison, the owner of local news website Phuketwan.com. After relocating to the island in 2002, the Australian has even seen “one or two people wrapped in barbed wire. It’s hard to dance when you’re wrapped up like that.” He laughed. “Authorities try to discourage the excesses but every year you still see a few people who have been pierced with the barrel of an AK-47 or have a BMX bicycle stuck through their cheeks with their friends carrying it as they walk.”

  Wrenches, swordfish, cymbal stands and the odd AK-47 are all used during the world’s grisliest celebration of Taoist Lent, when ‘spirit warriors’ go into trances and become possessed by different deities.

  Those ‘extreme elements’ also include more than a few members of the fetish scene, both Western and Asian. Mistress Jade, a Thai-Chinese dominatrix living and working on Phuket, said, “I think it’s the sexiest festival on earth. I always get some good ideas from it about what to do with subs in my play space,” before she burst out laughing. More seriously, she elaborated on the most piercing part of all the great faiths and status-quo systems of social control—guilt. “The rituals of penance that the warriors are doing are similar to some of my customers who feel guilty about having certain fantasies and fetishes. So they want me to make them suffer to absolve their guilt.”

 
; In its penitential aspects—according to the ‘ghost doctor’, the warriors take on the pain and suffering of all their fellow humans—the Vegetarian Festival draws blood from the same vein as Easter in the Philippines. During Holy Week, surrogate ‘Christs’ are nailed to crosses on a volcanic Golgotha outside the town of San Fernando de Pampanga, where the streets are filled with hundreds of men, some dragging crosses, some wearing crowns of thorns and many flagellating themselves with cat-o’-nine-tails made from bamboo. In 1997, when I went for Holy Week for the first time, all foreigners were banned from being crucified because during the previous year, a Japanese man had been nailed to a cross. Only later did they find out he was an actor shooting the first scene in an S&M movie.

  Taoist Lent in Phuket is nowhere near as gory or sorrowful as Easter in the Philippines. Many of the piercings are mundane. They demarcate certain professions. The man who installs satellite dishes has a TV antennae stuck through both cheeks. The gardener has a tree branch. The factory worker is skewered with a pineapple-laden shish kabob that has an ad for the local cement company where he works.

  But some of the shamans are synonymous with shysters, who walk around with bars through their faces draped with Thai baht and pestering people to take photos of them to make a donation. By way of thanks they hand out a few ‘blessed candies’ (read: Hall’s lozenges).

  In 2009, the authorities launched their biggest effort yet to crackdown on the frauds and extreme elements. Each of the 350 ‘spirit warriors’ was issued a special ID card with their full name and details, the name of the deity that possesses them, the temple to which they’re attached and a list of friends assisting them during the processions. That year also saw two more of the island’s Taoist temples join in the free-for-all (one on Rawai Beach, another in the Tungka district of Phuket city), bringing the total to 18 as occupancy rates soared to 70 per cent of the island’s 40,000 rooms—incredible for the soggy season. All the hotel rooms in Phuket city, where many of the rites are held at the elaborate Jui Tui Temple, were booked solid for months before the festival commenced with ceremonies on a deserted beach to welcome the gods ashore. For the traders in tourism, the windfall—according to TAT estimates—was 200 million baht.