Bamboozling sex life of kung fu pandas

A version of this appeared recently in the South China Morning Post. Respun and revved up for the bloggy-wog.

EATS, ROOTS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES

Hong Kong’s superstar pandas are randy. Ying Ying and Le Le have been seen batting big black goo-goo eyes at each other and generally getting jiggy in their Ocean Park love shack.

This is news because pandas are not nature’s porn stars. They are shy, coy and rarely mate in captivity, eschewing the libidinous lewdness of, say, bonobo chimps and humans. There is no Panda Craigslist, awash with importunate urgings and sad pleas of perversion. Pandas don’t whack off in their cages, hump the nearest object or toss scat at each other. They are gentle souls, the animal kingdom’s slackers and sofa surfers, laid back in every sense. The three-toed sloth, should he creep by, would raise a gnarled paw in slow-motion salute to a kindred spirit. For the panda, life doesn’t get any better than lolling about, munching bamboo shoots.

The fact that pandas exist, however, is evidence that from time to time they do answer nature’s call to mate. So the kind folks at Ocean Park recently closed the panda exhibit for three days after Ying Ying, the female, reached what zoo experts termed “the peak of her estrus’’. Alas, this was to be no Last Tango for Pandas. Le Le failed to deliver the yang for Ying Ying’s yin, even when she brought out the kinky stuff, including “increased water play’’ and “bleating’’.

DOES MY BUM LOOK BIG ON THIS?

“They responded well to each other and unclose (sic) interactions have been observed from the pair. Unfortunately no successful mating behaviours have been observed,’’ said a zoo panda handler.

As a married man, I know a thing or two about unsuccessful mating behaviours. Le Le has my sympathies. While Ying Ying was shaking her substantial money-maker and oozing estrus, Le Le was most likely fretting over the male panda’s famously small equipment, pondering his bad press and pining for springy length of bamboo.

News of the thwarted coupling prompted sad, knowing smiles in Thailand, where the Chiang Mai Zoo's most famous guests, Lin Hui and Chuang Chuang, became overnight soap opera stars following the launch of a 24-hour Panda Channel.

CUTENESS: IN THE EYE
OF THE BEHOLDER

Absenteeism soared and productivity plummeted as a nation was transfixed by each new plot twist. Chuang Chuang, the male, was pronounced 'too heavy' and put on a low carb diet. Zoo staff screened 'Panda porn’ clips of successful matings. But nothing worked ... and no wonder. They could have tossed him tabs of panda Viagra, lined his cage with satin sheets, bought him a studded collar and stuck a mirror on the ceiling: the poor fellow would still have been pinching his love handles and pouting.

Artificial insemination succeeded where nature failed. The birth of Linping in 2009 saw panda-monium, panda-mania and other bad panda puns reach a peak. If Linping’s birth almost ruined Thailand, the cub's early years sparked a spectacular revival. Zoo visits doubled, along with toy makers' profits. Panda fans queued in all weather and often for hours to get a glimpse of the famous family.


Should Le Le get lucky, Hong Kong might one day have its own bouncing panda cub. Enjoy the bonanza. Take the ride. But not too far: in Bangkok, hawkers recently began flogging ceramic pandas with Hitler moustaches in “Sig Heil’’ poses. The international opprobrium was instant, and a bearish backlash began.

Surely this faux paw will be a wake up call for Hong Kong’s panjandrums. Learn from Thailand's mistakes. Drop the pressure. Ditch the love shack. Don't rush down the slippery slope of 'panda porn' and cable channels. Do the right thing: it's black and white.

A letter to Grandma

Dear Grandma …

I was your oldest grandson, so you always had a soft spot for me and sometimes in secret you told me I was your favourite. Then again, perhaps you said that to all your grandchildren. I’m sure we were all your favourites, in our own ways, on our days. Your mixed bag of licorice all sorts, spearmint leaves, freckles and bananas.

I preferred Snakes Alive … and you always made sure the glass jar of sweets in the top cupboard was full.

Now the cupboard is bare. I’m writing this at the last minute, the way I write most things, but I procrastinated longer and more diligently this time, because I knew what was coming: the hurt, the loss, the streams of tears, the creeping years, the burst dam of memories.

And here they come now, cascading through time, bearing me back to 32 Grovely Terrace, a home made from fibro and lino, held together with magic and love. A place where car lights became stars in tinted louvers, carved wooden elephants marched around picture rails, giving me itchy feet, and canaries sung as old dogs went to the front porch to sit in the sun.

That’s where you often were too, peering through Grandpop’s frosted glazing, on the lookout for new arrivals to shower with lollies and love.

You were Ann Tree, our family tree, and beneath your boughs we sought shade.

I don’t remember ever seeing you angry. You were kind, funny, forgiver of foibles, shepherd of black sheep, an inveterate worrier and back seat driver, a hypochondriac who almost made a hundred, and a homebody who later became quite the world traveller.

You didn’t understand my restless soul, yet you never begrudged my life abroad.

You were a flaming red-haired beauty in your day; someone I didn’t know at all. You looked impossibly exotic in the hand-tinted black and white photo that hung above the grandfather clock, as foreign to me as your brother John who never came back from the war.

I can hear the clock’s chimes now, marking the hours, resonating in time. I see Grandpop with his Steamrollers and you with your Snakes. Goodbye my sweetheart.

Yes, we have no bananas. We have no bananas today.

Country piles, bitches of cities, and other irritations

All's well that ends well ... got a run in the end at Roads and Kingdoms, so posting the link here for posterity   http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2012/three-cities/




This was a piece commissioned by the Asian Literary Review, written during a high period of stress as a Bangkok flood refugee. It was to be an impassioned screed arguing that city life is not all it's cracked up to be. A companion piece by another writer extolling the virtues of cities was supposed to accompany it. The magazine then folded, and its new online incarnation's editor basically said 'don't call us, we'll call you'. Here, then, are 3,000 words that I wrote for nothing and laboured over for days while camped out at a friend's house. Enjoy. 



I WAS COWERING in a corner of my upstairs bedroom as the floodwaters stole into my yard, crept inch by inch up the driveway and then began to lap at my doorstep. I maintained a sad vigil at the window, knowing my new home was doomed. And when the first filthy fingers of the flood slid under my front door, I knew I had to go.

In the time it took to sling my hastily packed bags over my shoulders and unlock the front gate, the waters had already risen two inches and covered my floor. My wife and I had only just bought our house in Nontaburi province, a backwater to the capital’s north-west where villages nestle amid verdant rice fields and the klongs, or canals, flow with something approaching actual water, not the poisonous black ectoplasm that runs in the capital’s veins. We had moved in just three months ago. For weeks we had watched as a vast water table oozed inexorably towards us from the massive lake that had once been the ancient capital of Ayutthya. And now, all of a sudden, I was moving out. For how long, I knew not. Days? Weeks? Months? We were at the mercy of the waters.
   
In what used to be the front yard, I saw a baby snake cut sinuous arcs through the oily brown soup. A pink teddy bear floated past, with a red centipede coiled on its belly. I was feeling venomous myself. My home was one of the thousands sacrificed to keep Bangkok dry, part of a vast makeshift moat now ringing the capital, although this moat wasn’t protector – it was the invader. A home that had been my exit strategy, my first wary move to escape the big city’s clutches, a base from which to dart in and out of town and present a moving target to the city’s slings and arrows; an attempt to slow down and smell the roses, or at least some cleaner air.

Now, threatened and besieged, Bangkok was angry, her famous angels turned into shrieking furies. As she slammed down the sluices and piled on the sandbags, the flood runoff pouring down from the north couldn’t find its way out to sea and so swelled like some slow-motion tsunami. After days of watching the water rise gradually, the speed with which it marked its final arrival was scary. As I slogged more than 3km to dry land, it rose from my knee to my thigh to almost my waist in places. I saw cars ruined, pets stranded, and homes submerged to their eaves. Most of all, I saw the spectre of creeping misery and crushing hardship descending even as my Thai neighbours affixed their customary smiles in the face of adversity. So forgive me if I’m not feeling too charitably disposed towards cities just now.


EXISTENCE in any modern metropolis is a tale of two cities. We love them and we hate them. They are the best and the worst of times. Any sort of civilized existence is all but impossible without these teeming piles of people, this much we know. Cities engender inspiration, fuel ambition and fire creativity. They stoke the engines of commerce, potentiate politics and drive nations. They bring our dreams sharply into focus, dangling that big swinging dick of success just beyond our reach, making us crave for better and more, especially more. Cities provide the yardstick against which we measure our abilities, and a road map to chart our course through the material world.

But cities are selfish. They are mean and pitiless and they amplify the worst in us. They trample trust and kill kindness. They take and they take and it’s never enough. They divide us and subtract from us, drain us and maim us. They are anonymous, autonomous, automated. Mostly, they are unforgiving. Cities are the rat race that leaves us rat fucked, the hive mind that makes us faceless drones. Cities are swollen with an inflated sense of their own importance; ends that didn’t justify the means. Cities arrogate attention. They hog the limelight and crave the spotlight. Cities chip away at the spirit, corrode values, erode the sense of self… beguiling, bewitching and bewildering with their bright lights and late nights, their gleaming icons and dark secrets, their sound and fury.

Which in the end signify nothing. You are never more alone, perversely, than when you are in the city. “The abyss of the human species,’’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau called them. A thousand souls might be packed in above, below and around you, but you are all by yourself.  “Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing,’’ wrote Martin Amis in The Information, as plangent a cry against the crushing void at the dark heart of cities as you are likely to find. “Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them.’’ Amis knows that cities can be shit, all right. “Now in the dawn, through the window and through the rain, the streets of London looked like the insides of an old plug.’’ The Manic Street Preachers put it another way: “Under neon loneliness, motorcycle emptiness.’’ A fitting soundtrack to many a dark night of the soul in any number of soulless metropolises. Andy Warhol, that pale cipher and city slacker, said of LA: “I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.”

And then there are the tattered sheaves of cliché and warmed over panegyrics to the Big Apple, that wonderful town and its grasping multitudes who could make it anywhere, clawing their way to the top of the heap or at least ceaselessly scrabbling at the greasy pole. “Let’s hear if for New York,’’ warbles Alicia Keys. But buggered if I’m applauding that rotten Gotham with its teeming hordes of rodents and untimely showers of pigeon poo, queens of mean and hard bodies corporate, horns and sirens, whores and suits, marks and muggers, its urine-soaked alleys and graffiti-strewn subways and cabbies who manage to be at once offensive and incomprehensible.

Many are the sob probes that would have marked me as I raged in tiny rooms against the indignities and inanities of urban existence. We’ve been sold a pup. Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow but the only urban cowboys are lurking in leather bars. Deep down, we want something else. A bit more room to manouevre. Some grass between our toes. Air we can actually breathe. People who talk with you, not at you. Or simply some peace and quiet so we can hear ourselves think.

Cities, those bitches, give me the seven-year itch. Oh yes, at first it’s all rose-tinted sweet nothings and soaring choruses, sunrises and sunsets, vistas and visions. We get drunk on their glittering lights and can’t wait to drink in their sights. We make grand plans and utter foolish promises. We see past their shortcomings, tenderly overlook their faults, swept along in the giddy waltz of first love. But somehow it always turns bad.

My three great love affairs and bitter bust-ups have been with Brisbane, Hong Kong and Bangkok. The former, home to my first two and a half decades of existence, the latter pair my primary places of residence for roughly ten years apiece. Each in its own way once had me smitten. All still exert a powerful pull, tugging me in different directions, summoning vivid memories of highs and lows. But in the end it mostly feels thin and sour, a bittersweet toast charged with the dregs, the lees of life. Christ, but the highs ...


WHEN I FINALLY DEPARTED Australia in 1992 for the helter skelter of Hong Kong, it felt like the last plane out of Brisbane was almost gone. The urge to broaden my horizons had swelled to a kind of reverse vanishing point. I didn’t just have itchy feet … more like athlete’s foot of the soul. A dull ache in some hidden hollow place that suburban bliss in Brisbane was failing to fill, and a nagging fear that if I didn’t get out and see the world soon, perhaps I never would.

It wasn’t that life was boring. By my mid-twenties I’d been a ballet dancer, a university student, a journalist, a surfer and a husband. I tried telling myself I was living the dream. My career at the daily newspaper was simmering along nicely. I had a beautiful wife. We had bought our first home, a quaint old worker’s cottage and renovator’s delight, upon which I unleashed my limited handyman skills. But something was missing.

Life went by in a blur of backyard barbeques, home improvements and sun-and-surf-soaked weekends at the beach. “Queensland, beautiful one day, perfect the next,’’ was the advertising slogan du jour, a boast based on the state’s unusually high average of sunny days per year. But as those dazzling crystalline days accrued into years they became brittle and fractured, as the first cracks in our marriage began to appear. I was beset by a dull and unfocused angst; a sense that I was rusting away. Gradually the rolling hills and pretty homes of Brisbane began to assume an oppressive menace. The manicured lawns became flypaper, pinning me down.

I threw myself into work and pretended all was well. We moved to a bigger house, as the dream dictated; an ‘Old Queenslander’ that was all rambling verandahs and crumbling charm. Its steady march towards entropy was a constant and accusing mirror help up to my life. The termites and borers that dined on its foundations might as well have been eating me alive.

By night, I tossed and turned. Shafts of moonlight through our bedroom’s stained glass windows bathed my wife’s peaceful perfect features in a lambent glow while my mind roiled and raged. Was this all there was? Had I become just another suburban clone with a Stepford life? At least once in a lifetime, I wanted excitement and chaos, passion and danger. But underneath the seething unease, all this water flowing underground, a small voice was also whispering: Be careful what you wish for.


HONG KONG HIT ME like it was raining bricks. I was convinced she was the one. I was head-over-heels and boy, we had us some times. But Hong Kong had me on a trajectory I couldn’t sustain. I crashed and burned hard; blowtorching the candle at both ends until the melted mess met in the middle. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome, then I’m pretty sure I left an important part of my brain in some dark corner of Wan Chai.

Wan Chai is Hong Kong’s black hole; a place that exerts its own gravitational pull. Just as fraying galaxies at the edge of the universe cannot resist the absence of matter, so the average Hong Kong party animal, absent of sense, is drawn to the dense centre of Lockhart Road. And it was on one or one hundred foolish endless nights and cruel bitter mornings in The Wanch that Hong Kong dumped me.

Wan Chai was where the wicked things were, the predatory habitat of big-livered shellbacks and other rough beasts slouching towards bedlam as temptation importuned at every turn. It wasn’t the world of Suzy Wong. It was a neon-bathed netherworld of gang-bangers, glad-handers and chrome pole clutchers, brokers, bankers and other wankers, drunken sailors, broken poets, dai pai dongs and all night discos, wizened Vietnam War whores and pneumatic Brazilian hookers, chattering packs of maids on the make, rave parties and monster raving loonies, drug-fucked nutters, triple-trio triads and bus uncles who hawked smack in the shadows of basketball courts.  At first, it was awesome.

But eventually the shine would wear off. You’d swear never again, and yet there you were in some fetid den sneaking furtive glances at your watch and counting off the diminishing hours still available for sleep as you got another round in. You’d wince as your credit card took another body blow, then you’d dust it off to go and do more blow. You’d cruise. You’d wander. You’d want to stop the madness and get off. But you couldn’t. You’d tell yourself you might get lucky, but you weren’t going to. Ever. You’d order another beer and a shot. You’d slope off to the Worst Toilet in Hong Kong, paddling through puddles of piss to clog your sinuses and fry your brain with another rail of crap coke. Then you’d look at your watch again and wonder how it could be five or six in the morning already.

Time behaves strangely the closer you get to a black hole. It compresses, distorts, folds in upon itself. You might as well be wearing one of those melted Dali timepieces. You would pat your pocket to see if you had remembered your sunglasses. You would know it was almost light outside, and you would also know that your shades were like a superhero's cloak of invisibility, shielding you from the withering stares and disgusted snickers of the early birds.

Welcome to the wormhole; the non-event horizon. A smoke machine would hiss and through fits of strobe you’d discern sinister leering faces of people who were not your friends. There would be no quantum of solace. You were simply in Wan Chai, adrift and alone. Again.


BANGKOK WAS A DIFFERENT AFFAIR. More of a slow-burning simmer than love at first sight. After Hong Kong, from which I’d fled for my life, tail wedged between legs, Bangkok felt rough and primitive, clogged with traffic, beset by beggars, overwhelming you with its juxtapositions of lurid luxury and grinding poverty. But bit by bit I fell for its unexpected pockets of beauty, its hidden leafy lanes and polished teakwood homes, its unhurried attitude and its wide, ready smile.

Nor was the end of the affair brutal and short. As the City of Angels had slowly encircled my heart, so she gradually began to let it go again. There was no sudden flame-out here, just a light that slowly faded; a candle guttering down some dark receding klong, borne beyond my understanding on currents I couldn’t read.

If there was one night where I fell out of love with Bangkok, it was probably my midnight visit to the vicious slums of Klong Toey in pursuit of a story about drugs. Bangkok was in the grip of a methamphetamine epidemic, a city on a bender, cranked up on candy-coloured pills called ‘yaba’, or ‘crazy medicine’. Klong Toey was Bangkok’s black hole, the drug trade’s Ground Zero, a garden of earthly horrors where even the angels feared to tread.

Ramshackle huts perched over sludge and garbage strewn ponds, rats ran riot, and at times it was hard to discern whether the glittering eyes peering from the gloom were human, rodent or something in between. I remember the police officer I had persuaded with a handful of baht to be my guide turning to me and asking: ‘Can you smell it?’’

The acrid urine? The stench of rotting garbage? The cloying waft of poisoned klongs simmering in the relentless humidity? The dead dog beginning to decompose under a precarious catwalk of warped planks? Or the sickly turpentine tang of yaba, the faint but unmistakeable top note of Klong Toey’s persistent perfume? “The smell,’’ he said with a cruel crocodile grin, “of fear.’’

Klong Toey counted its addicts in tens of thousands, from doddery senior citizens to emaciated, gimlet-eyed whores, from gangs of young thugs on tweaked motorcycles patrolling late night mean streets like werewolves to child junkies with wired smiles and old eyes. We came across a group of the latter in a dark and reeking alcove, cowering behind a pile of packing crates. Treacly strips of foil lay crumpled on the ground. Their eyes were wide and glazed. The cop aimed a vicious kick at one of the kids and connected just above his kidney. He barely flinched. I looked into his eyes, but there was no one home. No spark. No hope. No future. Something fundamental had checked out for good.

I’ve seen bad stuff as a journalist. Dead and mangled bodies. Assorted horrors. But something about the look in that kid’s eyes shook me, stayed with me, and stole a bit of my own humanity. I didn’t chide the cop for his kick. I just turned and walked, and then ran, as hot tears welled, overjoyed that I still new how to cry.


I REALLY DON'T want to live in cities anymore. People are nicer outside their dizzy limits. The big smoke is just fumes and hot air. A cancer. The human condition doesn't seem quite so fatal in more laid-back, thinly-spread locales. Folks just seem more interested. Engaged. But because of the flood, because of that selfish bitch Bangkok, it looks like I’m headed back there. At least until we can hose out the mud, scrub and scour, rebuild and repaint. For now, home will be another constrictive urban bolt-hole. Just when you think you are out, cities pull you back in.

It's said that moments of crisis bring out the best and worst in people. As I trudged out of my village through the floods, I clocked the odd shifty scumbag or two with looting in their eyes. But mostly I saw resigned smiles and acts of kindness. Two chaps with a boat took our bags and ferried my wife and I over a kilometre. Wouldn’t hear of payment. In a minimart, a crinkly auntie gave me a free beer and a snaggle-toothed, we're-in-this-together grin. We struck up easy conversations with people toting their som tam works or their dogs or their entire earthly possessions in little floating contraptions.

Amidst the mounting tragedy, there have been moments of high farce. Such as Bangkok Governor MR Sukhumbhand Paribatra, scion of a Prussian-educated dynasty of rationalist bankers, presiding over an ill-advised ceremony to appease the Water Goddess Ka Kang. The excellent satirical website Not the Nation purported to have obtained a memo from the goddess, who was highly offended.

“Her Holiness The Water Goddess Ka Kang completely and without qualification rejects the appeal from the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority,” the story read, citing pollution, mismanagement, overfishing and years of abuse as the principle violations of the sacred pact she had with the Thai people. “Your appeal for salvation is that of the ant to the child whose flesh it has bitten,” the memo concluded. “And so shall you be trampled beneath the feet of vengeance that have displaced forever-lost innocence. Fuck you, Bangkok. The Water Goddess has spoken.''
http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2012/three-cities/

CP and the Wonton Factory

This recently ran in the South China Morning Post. I recently stopped eating wontons. 


If your idea of how to eat shrimp wonton is daintily supping on ‘har gow’ in between genteel sips of jasmine tea at Yung Kee, look away now. For the humble shrimp wonton in its fastest, most mass-produced form has become the latest craze to sweep the distended, dyspeptic and some might say disgusting world of competitive eating.

THAT OLD CHESTNUT:
WASTE NOT, WONTON

Thailand food giant CP Group, which churns out microwave wontons by the millions, is behind The Biggest Eater, which might sound like a prequel to reality fatty fest The Biggest Loser but is in fact a regional speed eating contest that will see hungry hopefuls from Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia pit their bottomless pits against the best Thailand has to offer at the grand finale in Bangkok’s swanky Siam Paragon shopping mall on February 11.

 “Five times bigger and five times more exciting than its debut in 2010,’’ CP proudly proclaims, and this year it has certainly attracted a who’s who of the world’s best competitive eaters, along with over 1,000 amateur nibblers and dabblers hoping to gorge their way to the US$3,000 grand prize.

WONTON DESTRUCTION: THE SUM OF DIM 

The Hong Kong leg of the competition took place in November, where waif-like Natalie Chin scoffed 74 wontons in the allotted eight minutes, setting a new Hong Kong record in the process. Men’s division winner Lam Yat Ming beat out local hero Johnny “Hong Kong’s biggest eater’’ Wu by getting 131 wontons down before the buzzer.

Their feats paled beside a casual display of speed eating by last year’s grand champion Joey Chestnut, as the US native tossed back 225 slippery shrimp bits for fun, nowhere near the 380 he downed to become the 2010 Biggest Eater men’s champion, beating Takeru Kobayashi. The pair’s rivalry has spanned more than six years and the globe, battling for speed-scoffer status over hot dogs, waffles, burgers, chicken wings, pizza and gyoza.

Past feats of gluttonous glory count for nothing if you don’t have the stomach for battle, however, and Chestnut was dealt an early shock when he was bested by the “ocker oesophagus’’ Tim Janus in Australia.

As all eyes now turn to Bangkok (including those whose clearly aren’t bigger than their stomachs - the finalists), one wonders where it all ends. CP is basking in the massive publicity its stunt marketing has garnered.

FRANKENFURTER SEES WHAT'S
ON THE SLAB

But surely, if the ultimate aim is to sell more wontons, there’s a risk of reverse psychology taking hold, with people so grossed out by the spectacle that they never want another wonton again. Could it be coincidence that CP Group rhymes with Augustus Gloop, the glutton from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory who meets a sticky end in a river of chocolate? What if one of the contestants explodes, spraying the crowd with half-digested shrimp and rice noodle? And with 65,000 crustaceans crammed down by contestants this year alone, aren’t they also eating into CP’s profits?

CP Group spokesman Kosit Lohawatanakul says the Biggest Eater was developed “with people in mind’’ and had received “tremendous support’’. Some people might compare the US$30,000 in total prize money handed out to wanton wonton gobblers to a roughly equivalent sum the group spends on education scholarships for underprivileged kids each year and wonder if greed really is good.

STOP PRESS: It's official. The Biggest Eaters for 2012 are Joe Chestnut, who eclipses the field and sets a new world records, wolfing down 390 wontons. Sonya 'the Black Widow' Thomas scoffs 231, a new women's record.

Pukka up .... it's the chicks with sticks

Here's one from the vaults, although I've given it a bit of a respin. Some things never really get old anyway. Because you can never have too many ladyboys whacking at balls atop massive beasts. This ran in the SCMP's Postmagazine around 2003 if memory serves, and a couple of other magazines regarding which memory obviously does not serve. Enjoy:


Phruts pulls her hot pink top down tight over buoyant breasts, tosses her glossy mane and flips open a mirror to check her make-up. Somehow through mascara darkness she discerns a lack of sparkle on her earlobe. “MY EARRRRRINNGG!’’ she cries, summoning a scream from the upper registers of pain and loss. It’s a sound of pure agony, many decibels beyond the demands of missing costume jewellery; the sort of high-pitched trumpeting shriek you might more reasonably expect to hear issuing from the swaying huddle of elephants tethered nearby.

But that’s how the third sex rolls. A chipped nail is a nailed-on crisis. A hair out of place elicits hissy fits. With ladyboys, everything’s larger than life, especially if – like scream queen Phruts – you’re the star of the world’s first transsexual elephant polo team.

SHE-MALLETS: THE PINK OR THE BROWN?

As Phruts searches for her missing stud, prancing between piles of pachyderm poop, three transgendered teammates sashay onto the field of play to join the hunt. Each sports the same hot pink top emblazoned with a cartoon corkscrew. They flap and flounce and poke clods of turf with their toes, but no earring is found. And besides, the second chukka beckons, and Phruts will have to live with a naked earlobe. All business now, she grabs an outsized mallet and marches over to a wooden tower, ready to be strapped on to her mount.

It’s a strange introduction to an odd pursuit: elephant polo – one of the few sports, along with tiddlywinks and synchronised swimming, where the hunt for an errant earring can be considered a highlight. To the uninitiated, elephant polo may appear a lumbering affair that proceeds almost in slow motion. Mallets flail, jodphurs bulge, spit polished leather squeaks and two-ton behemoths bounce off each other like big wrinkly dodgems.

It looks like the kind of lark cooked up by a bunch of public school types after too much gin and Pimm’s. Which it is. “We were pissed, of course we were,’’ avers one of the sport’s founding fathers, Jim Edwards, the pukka proprietor of Nepal’s Tiger Tops jungle lodge. “It’s hardly the sort of thing you’d dream up sober.’’ Aficionados claim to appreciate the sport’s finer points, and can spend hours engaged in well-lubricated debate about how best to execute the off-side backhand and the line drive, in between speculating about which society matron might be getting mounted by her mahout.

Tournaments are held at former outposts of empire, or anywhere civilised enough to be within hollering distance of a cucumber sandwich. Nepal, India and Sri Lanka all fit the bill nicely. For today, Thailand’s sleepy seaside hamlet of Hua Hin will have to do. The rules are simple. Two seven-minute chukkas, three players and therefore three elephants per side, teams switch elephants at half time, and the aim is to whack the small white ball with a comically long mallet between the goalposts. Teams comprise the idle rich, the titled rich and the filthy rich, with a smattering of military-looking chaps with moustaches and the odd Colonel Blimp figure. Double-barrelled surnames abound. Players assume noms-de-polo like “Bombay Sapphire’’, “Silver Fox’’ and “The Dark Horse of Delhi’’.

CHUKKA WOW: RIDE ON TIME

At least, that’s how it was until this year’s King’s Cup, when elephant polo took a walk on the wild side.    “Ladies and gentlemen, the second chukka is about to begin,’’ crackles the master of ceremonies. “Please put your hands together for the Screwless Tuskers and Wepa Nepal.’’ The latter is Edwards’ team, more pukka than a punka-wallah’s wallah, comprising the old campaigner and his sons (“Kristjan Edwards,’’ the program informs us, “is a keen sportsman known for his prowess on the Cresta Run in St Moritz. Kristjan also sails, plays tennis and horse polo and has been riding elephants since he was a child … Tim has just left Harrow School and is on his gap year, and spends most of his holidays in the jungles of Nepal searching out tigers, rhinos and other game.’’

Up against them are our four glamorous creatures of indeterminate gender, missing jewellery and cartoon corkscrews. The name of the team, emblazoned beneath this motif, seems wrong and deeply troubling on at least several levels. It was all cooked up by their manager, patron and sugar daddy; a wisecracking, wealthy Floridian ex-attorney named Alf Leif Erickson, who inherited the family’s baking fortune and seems to have stepped out of the pages of a Carl Hiassen novel.

 “Do your best, my darlings,’’ drawls Erickson, as his charges climb aboard their beasts. The elephants’  sloping backs descend from ridged and knobbly spines, which means a certain degree of adjustment and repackaging is required before the girls are comfortable  - or at least as comfortable as any bloke can be shoved atop an elephant with his wedding tackle wedged between his legs.

Some of the Pimm’s-sipping Blimps and grand society dames are less than amused about the presence of the Screwless Tuskers and furious debate ensues as to whether they should be allowed to use two hands on the mallet, like the ladies, or one as per the chaps. Alf Leif Erickson is highly amused by the to-do, and it’s clear this was his evil scheme from the outset. “Elephant polo is not something to be taken too seriously, it seems to me,’’ he says. “On the matter of one or two hands, I think the acid test should be whether you sit down to take a leak, which my darlings assure me they do.''

Erickson moved to Bangkok four years ago and took up residence at The Oriental. He’s loaded and loving it.“My family were in bread back stateside. That’s how I got my dough, ahaha.’’ He splashes cash on his passions, which are hot air ballooning, collecting rare corkscrews and assembling men who want to be women to whack away at balls. None of these pursuits are for paupers, least of all elephant polo, where the King’s Cup entry fee alone will cost you US$10,000. That’s before you’ve even considered accommodation, dining, leather boots, jodphurs and – at least in Erickson’s case – a pre-tournament Hong Kong shopping trip for the team.

"For many years I had a team called the Screwy Tuskers, which was basically me and my daughters,'' he explains. "We didn't win many games, but we had a lot of fun. But those spoilsports went off and got married, had kids, and that was that for the team. Two years ago, I decided a team of ladyboys could be fun.’’ His first team disintegrated in tears, tiffs and methamphetamine tantrums when he recruited a bevy of high maintenance Patpong shemales. The first team meeting included an impromptu nude modelling session, which can be seen on Erickson’s website, www.corkscrew-balloon.com, but might best be avoided by those of delicate disposition.

Undaunted, he continued the search for his dream team with a difference, and was delighted to find fashion designer Phruts through a friend of a friend, who also roped in three “lovely students’’ named Beige, Tok Tak and – oddly – Army. Each says they are saving up for the big snip, with the exception of the statuesque Army, real name Chaichana Sutyos. “Look at my shoulders,’’ she says, rolling her eyes. “What’s the point? I’m never going to pass. And some guys like it. Have you tried?’’

On the field, it’s going badly for the Tuskers. In fact, they are getting a hiding from the Edwards clan. “Met my son Tim?’’ hoorays Edwards the Elder from his pachyderm at some braying Blimps and Double-Barrels. “Bagged his first stag last week!’’ His elephant crouches, opens its bowels and deposits a steaming green pile of excrement, perfectly timed as the most cutting riposte.

TRUNK CALL: BIG SWINGING STICK

By the next morning, word has spread about the team of trannies, and a media swarm is forming. Television cameras and microphones are shoved in the girls’faces. They lap up the attention, vogueing their best poses, to much tutting and tsk-ing from the VIP tents.

On the field, an extremely hungover umpire wanders, befuddled. His mount came into musth and attempted some mounting of its own, earning instant banishment. “Too much jungle juice last night,’’ nods a chap in a solar topee. Today the Screwless Tuskers line up against the American Express team, which comprises a professional polo player fresh from the pampas, a hotel manager who claims to have played the Sport of Kings in Ethiopia with Haile Selassie, and Geoffrey Dobbs, owner of Taprobane, the ultra-private Doctor Evil island off the coast of Sri Lanka.
 
This match only looks like having one winner, and it’s not the Tuskers. Before long, they’re six goals down. In the third chukka they briefly rally as Phruts bangs in a brace. “It’s the Screwless Tuskers coming from behind,’’ cackles the MC between gin-tinged snickers. By the fourth chukka, the jungle juice is flowing and no one seems to care much about the score. Everyone is having a grand old time, with the exception of Tusker Beige, who is sporting a trout pout and a face like thunder. She looks around to see who’s watching, then breaks into an ululating wail. “I BROKE MY NAAIILLLLL!!’’

Dai hard ... with a hangover

While I'm dredging up some old Timers, here's one from the 'My Wife's Wacky Family' department. This was a shot in the dark, could easily have been a bust story-wise, but with a bit of dumb luck we stumbled into the right people and I wound up with a touching tale. I'll add the pix when i can dig them out of boxes in our flood-ravaged house. The story originally appeared here: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,268237,00.html#ixzz1jWHp3znU


It was after the seventh or eighth tumbler of rice whiskey that the tears began to flow. Nai Tong, the weather-beaten, gold-grinning village chief, blinked hard, splashed the whiskey jug around and raised his glass. "Welcome to Sipsongpanna, daughter of the Dai. Welcome home." It was a magic moment and the culmination of an emotion-charged journey for my wife, Sawitree. She is the first of her large northern Thai family to travel back to the land of her ancestors, the Dai people, who inhabit the southern tip of China's Yunnan province. The region is now known as Xishuangbanna, a Sinicization of the Dai name, which means "12,000 fields."

Exactly 130 years ago, my wife's great-grandmother, then a seven-year-old named Bua, left her village to walk with her parents to a new life in old Siam. Why they left is lost in the mists of time; most likely it was amid turmoil as colonial powers bickered over the region, sandwiched between Burma's Shan states and modern-day Laos. They were following a well-worn path. For centuries, the Buddhist, rice-farming Dai have been tempted by the wide open spaces of Thailand's north, and have ventured across the Mekong to start anew. This migration was actively encouraged by northern Thailand's kingdom of Lanna, which means "one million fields''. To Bua and her family, the math was clear and so they packed up what possessions they could carry and set off. They would settle in Chiang Rai first, Bua would marry an enterprising Chiu Chow trader and their family would grow to sprawl out all over the fields of modern day Chiang Mai, Lamphun and Lampang provinces. Sawitree grew up speaking Dai Lue, the main Dai language, which remains the lingua franca of many northern Thais.

MAKE MINE A DOUBLE PEPPERONI PLEASE 

Our first glimpse of her roots had come two days earlier, as our plane dropped through a thick layer of cloud to reveal steep, wrinkled peaks flanking a jade patchwork of paddies. As we skimmed the treetops to land outside the main town of Jinghong - or in Dai Lue, Chiang Rung, "the city of the dawn" - what looked like dozens of Pizza Huts peeped from the verdure. This was the unique architecture of the Dai, their signature, high-canted roofs perched atop thick teak pillars.

With no clue other than the name of Bua's childhood village - a place handed down in family legend named Baan Yandee - we decide to start at the palace of the Dai King, Jau Phaendin, a shadowy figure kept on a very tight leash by the Chinese authorities. After hours of wandering Jinghong's wide boulevards, we spot two elderly Dai women in traditional dress; long, silk sheaths and blouses, cinched by wide, silver belts. "Jau Phaendin?" asks my wife. "Don't you know?" whispers one of the women. The last Dai King, she tells us, was exiled to Kunming during the tumultuous early years of the People's Republic of China, and his teak palace was torn down by rabid Red Guards. The Dai were a feisty people, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and it was felt they did not need a monarch around to stir up ethnic pride or notions of independence. (These days, the septuagenarian King works at the Yunnan Research Institute for Nationalities, and the Chinese government prizes the bright costumes and quaint villages of the Dai as a lucrative tourism draw.)

PUTTING OUT THE FIRE 
WITH GASOLINE

Does the old woman know of Baan Yandee? "Of course," she replies. "It's the village where Jau Phaendin was born." My wife explains her quest and the woman leads us through a maze of backstreets to a house with a handsome Dai roof, crouched in the shadows of tiled apartment blocks. We knock, and a man named Saengau answers the door with a scowl that fades as Sawitree explains her story. "Come in, come in," he smiles, calling his wife. They were once dancers at the King's palace, Saengau explains, and he is related to Jau Phaendin. "Very sad, very sad," he says. "We had to run for our lives when the red guards came to destroy the palace."

Saengau rummages in a drawer and puts on a video of Baan Yandee's New Year festival. It shows a noisy, musical procession, where an elderly chap is carried though cobbled streets on a moth-eaten throne. "That's Jau Phaendin," he says reverently. "He is allowed to come back to his village once every year."

Next morning we're bumping over dirt roads through rice fields, on our way to meet the past. Word of our arrival at Baan Yandee gets around quickly. Within 10 minutes, dozens of smiling villagers have materialized, each trying to drag us to his house. Nai Tong, the headman, introduces himself and listens with rapt attention to my wife's story.

"Bua? Bua?" he ruminates. One of the oldest women mutters and squawks, professing vague memories of a cousin of that name who left as a little girl. "Come," says the chief, "we must eat and drink." His house, a rambling, postcard-perfect example of the Dai style, was built 10 years after Bua would have begun her long trek. I soon lose count of the glasses of firewater raised and quaffed, as the women bustle about, assembling a feast. My wife is the center of attention, showered with questions and hugs. Overwhelmed, she chokes back sobs. The chief raises his glass and asks for silence. Then he clasps her hands and says once more "Welcome home."

Amber warning for the land that time forgot

I just got back from a business trip to Luang Prabang. As I rolled into town I fully expected to see sweeping changes to Asia's most charming sleepy hollow since I penned this piece for Time almost a decade ago. I was shocked and delighted to see that in fact, almost nothing seems to have changed, with the exception of wi-fi, some ATM machines and the miserable silty trickle that now passes for the Mekong. Here's the link to the original: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,230444,00.html
Here's the story: 

LUANG PRABANG: THE BIG LAZY

Luang Prabang marches to the beat of an indifferent drummer. Nothing is rushed in this sleepy Lao hamlet where the somnolence is contagious and you can spot the new arrivals by the briskness of their gaits. On the streets, teenagers conduct confabulations on motorbikes, two or three abreast, scarcely going fast enough to stay vertical.

Rheumy-eyed old timers lean on fences in the grip of some nameless torpor. Silent saffron parades of monks glide by, footsteps raising little puffs of dust, stooping now and then to solicit alms. Time creeps by. You imagine some indolent imp has fallen asleep inside your watch and gummed up its works. Indeed, Luang Prabang might just be the best value holiday destination in Asia, if only because a day here seems to last as long as two anywhere else.

Its mellifluous name hints at hidden wonders, and Luang Prabang has certainly achieved cult status among travelers since UNESCO pronounced it the best-preserved city in Southeast Asia six years ago and put it on the World Heritage list. "What a delightful paradise of idleness this country protects, by the fierce barrier of the stream, against progress and ambition for which it has no need," wrote Marthe Bassene, a resident French doctor's wife, in 1909. Her words have since been immortalized in the august pages of the Lonely Planet. "Will Luang Prabang be ... the refuge of the last dreamers, the last lovers, the last troubadours?"

Once the capital of Lan Xang, the Kingdom of a Million Elephants, this town of about 16,000 inhabitants perches on a peninsula where the Nam Khan and Mekong rivers meet about 200 km north of Vientiane. It's a place of unsurpassed charm, which seems all the more fragile when you consider it's a mere 100 km or so from the infamous Other Theater where between 1964 and 1973 the U.S. was busy dropping a planeload of bombs every eight minutes in the so-called Secret War.

The town's old quarter, which on the map looks like a boot giving the fat brown snake of the Mekong a kick in the belly, is a conservationist's paradise: a kind of colonial Disneyland with lane after unspoiled, shade-dappled lane filled with French brick and stucco buildings and teakwood homes that sag with age. On almost every corner and rise sits a temple: there are more than 30, some half a millennium old. The golden sweep of their winglike roofs seems to suspend them in the hazy skies. The place is so photogenic the local Kodak concession must be a license to print money.

ALMS AND A LEG 

Luang Prabang has no McDonald's, no 7-Eleven, no ATMS. It doesn't have a single place to get a cash advance on MasterCard, as I discovered to my embarrassment, which resulted in a last day spent in penury hiding in my hotel. The town is refreshingly free of things to do, apart from wander around, drink coffee and beer in cafes, and soak up the ambiance. A dust-choked side trip to the gorgeous Kuangsi waterfalls or a jaunt down the river to the Pak Ou caves, which are crammed with ancient Buddha images, make up the extent of nearby attractions.

How long can Luang Prabang's slumber last? There are ominous signs of a rude awakening. In the old quarter's main street, Sisavangvong Road, tourists now outnumber locals. Satellite dishes bristle from roofs and backyards, sucking from the ether a steady stream of inane Thai game shows. Internet shops spring up daily, each filled with earnest backpackers clicking away. Highway 13 from Vientiane is now paved, putting the capital just a day's drive away.

Luckily, aside from a few dissenters who would rather get rich quick, most locals seem to welcome the World Heritage status and the protection from rapacious development it confers. "I think it's a good thing," says Mae Ouay Kum Lek, 86, owner of Ban Xieng Mouane, a 150-year-old teakwood home that's now a unesco-sponsored "Heritage House." She smiles. "And a nice young man from unesco gives me $50 every month."

Luang Prabang's charms seem safe enough if the abject failure of its first full moon-style party, modeled on Thailand's island raves, is anything to go by. "Us backpackers have got to make our own fun," said a shaggy type who bounded up to me in Sisavangvong Road and thrust a flyer proclaiming the birth of the Full Mekong Party into my hand. "I'm the Great Disco Dane," he explained, assuring me the party would be "wicked." Around 9 p.m., I ventured down to the sandy strip where the ferries land to find about 20 people sipping Beer Lao around a fire, a decided lack of music and a disconsolate Disco Dane. "I can't believe it, man," he moaned. "We got shut down."

Who needs a thumping techno beat anyway? It's clear that in Luang Prabang, the indifferent drummer continues to call the tune.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,230444,00.html#ixzz1jBIoRXp5