'Bizarre Thailand: Tales of Crime, Sex and Black Magic'
For the first-time visitor to Thailand almost everything looks weird: the candy-colored taxis with Buddhist amulets hanging from the rear-view mirrors; the ladyboy sashaying down the street while balancing a tray of jasmine garlands on her head; the office workers bowing to a spirit house abutting a monolithic office tower.
But the magical soon becomes the trivial, and the wanderer in search of true weirdness has to head deeper into the hinterlands while delving into some of the country’s more eccentric characters and warped legends.
Here are a a few, which can be found in my new book "Bizarre Thailand: Tales of Crime, Sex and Black Magic."
Heartland soul
Many of the “patients” at the world’s first and only Monkey Hospital in the provincial Thai capital Lopburi are victims of turf wars that rival Los Angeles street gangs for murderous, territorial behavior.
As emissaries of Hanuman, the Monkey God of Hindu lore, the macaques are tolerated in the town and some are given Buddhist cremation ceremonies at the Monkey Hospital because they will become human in their next reincarnations, or so the Thai belief goes.
Also seen as sacred are the hard-shelled reptiles that inhabit Khon Kaen province’s “Tortoise Town." In fact, the creatures outnumber the townsfolk by about four to one.
Peak tortoise-spotting times are early in the morning and late in the afternoon when they trudge along dirt roads and through yards and houses where the locals treat them like pets.
These cold-blooded reptiles warm up during the rainy season when they mate in the streets and the males square off in shell-butting duels over the females.
The creatures are the living proof that animism (both the world’s oldest religion and form of environmentalism) is the real spirit of the Thai heartland.
It’s also the soul of Wat Hua Krabeu (“Buffalo Head Temple”), on the outskirts of Bangkok, where the abbot has collected some 6,000 water buffalo skulls in order to build a pagoda out of them.
The structure may also wind up as a towering tombstone for these increasingly obsolescent beasts of burden that are lumbering towards extinction.
Country ‘n Eastern
How many three-star resorts in the world offer accommodation behind the horseshoe-studded façade of a blacksmith shop with a mock-up of an antelope’s head on the wall and an old Winchester rifle mounted above an electric fireplace?
Raised on a U.S. military base in Thailand’s Northeast during the Vietnam War, Yuttana’s fixation with the Western films the bomber crews watched became a life-long obsession.
On Saturday nights, he is the sheriff of High Hill, walking around in complete cowboy duds with a fake six-shooter strapped to his thigh. As a live country band plays, grub is served from chuck-wagons, the crowd participates in line dancing, and there’s a Wild West theme show that smacks of Thai slapstick.
The original ‘Siamese twins’
Billed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World” by the legendary showman PT Barnum when they arrived in New York at the age of 18, the original Siamese twins were causing commotions not long after they were born on a floating hovel in Samut Songkhram province in 1811.
As kids, Chang and Eng were blamed by superstitious villagers for causing a cholera epidemic that clogged the waterways with 30,000 corpses. Only the patronage of King Rama II, another native of Thailand’s smallest province, saved them from mob justice.
Later, the twins became his favorite performers at the Grand Palace in Bangkok.
Siam’s most infamous citizens have been written out of almost all the guidebooks and promotional materials on the province. Yet their legacy as fishermen and duck farmers is still evident in the waterborne ways of life that remain buoyant in Amphawa District, which won a UNESCO prize for Cultural Conservation.
The twosome’s legend, made monstrous by Herman Melville in "Moby Dick" and humanized by the longest-running musical in Singaporean history -- "Chang and Eng: The Musical" -- is best appreciated at the open-and-shut museum devoted to them in Samut Songkram.
Forget the shabby exhibits and posters. The real attractions are a life-size replica of the twins’ floating home and a statue of them; its pedestal is etched with bas-reliefs depicting highlights from their career and an engraving of the autopsy that proves the original Siamese twins were not, as was often claimed, frauds.
They shared a brotherly bond made of flesh in the form of a connecting ligament and a fused liver.
Anatomy of a killer
During the 1950s a poor Chinese immigrant and serial slayer terrorized Bangkok and its surrounding provinces. The cannibal’s death toll bequeathed a bogeyman and urban legend that still haunts the nation: children should not stay out late at night or the ghost of See Ouey Sae Ung will come and eat them.
His preserved corpse is the most popular -- and most reviled -- exhibit in the Siriraj Medical Museum in Bangkok.
This dark cluster of a half-dozen museums specializing in anatomy, tapeworms, natural history and autopsy photos, is brightened by locals who leave candies for the infants floating in jars of formaldehyde, and the students of forensics who bow to the skeletons in the glass cases and refer to them as “teachers."
All these tales are part of a lesson every traveler has to confront: there’s just as much to be learned from investigating a country’s dark side as there is to be gleaned from the sunny-side-up slices of utopia (this paradise, that Shangri-la) served up by every tourist board.
Jim Algie is the author of a just-released book titled "Bizarre Thailand: Tales of Crime, Sex and Black Magic," available for purchase in Bangkok book stores and online at Amazon.com.
