The Further Adventures of an Idiot Abroad (19 page)

It turns out this wasn’t the last bizarre exhibition I was going to see. The hotel we were staying at was quite good. It had good food, wifi, balconies, a swimming pool and a knob garden.
Everything you need. What? What’s a knob garden? It’s a garden full of knobs. They don’t call it the Knob Garden here though, they call it the Chao Mae Tuptim shrine. It’s a
fertility shrine. There must have been 200 or so wooden penises all over the place. All different sizes, from the size of a cream doughnut to the size of a canoe. I don’t mind the concept
– they’re not harming anyone – but why have so many? It was like a warehouse for knobs. It would look classier it they just had one big main one. It would give it more of a Ye
Olde Powerful Knob impression. Maybe it started off with just one knob then whoever is in charge got carried away. Me mam did the same with gnomes. People collect anything, don’t they? Never
understood why people collect thimbles, but I’d rather have them on a shelf than a two-foot knob. And the weird thing was, for a fertility shrine you’d think the bollocks would be the
bit that was important, but there wasn’t a pair of bollocks in sight.

We went out for some tea. Bangkok is busy at night. If I wasn’t looking at the women to work out if they were women or not, I looked at the billboards. They have so many of them on the
motorways, one after another. The biggest I’ve ever seen. Thirty metres across. Laptops, cars, cameras and TVs. It’s like driving through an Argos catalogue.

As I said earlier, I’m quite happy eating Thai food. It’s spicy and tasty, but the amount of dishes they bring out gets a bit silly. You just help yourself from each plate. I
didn’t know what I was eating most of the time. I think at one point I might have eaten a fag end out of an ashtray. The problem is, you lose track of how much you’ve eaten. We had a
change from the usual Thai food this evening though. We went to a place called The Flying Chicken. It’s a place not really known for the way the food tastes but how it’s delivered to
your table. I can get a bit annoyed at times when out having a sit-down dinner if there’s too much faff. I’ve been to fancy places in London where you put your order in then they bring
it and spend five minutes explaining where the carrots were grown and what the chicken liked to do in its spare time. I’m not joking. I went to a fancy place for a steak and they told me the
cow my steak came from liked listening to rock music. Going on the price of it, I think I was covering the cost of a front row seat of the last gig it went to.

At The Flying Chicken, the way it works is like this. You order chicken. A bell rings once the chicken is ready. The chicken is then placed onto a lever. The bell rings again. From nowhere comes
a man on a unicycle wearing a helmet with a spike on the front. The boy at the lever catapults the chicken through the air then the man on the unicycle catches it on the spike and brings it to your
table. Imagine
Britain’s Got Talent
delivering your KFC.

Once all the chickens had been delivered, during a quiet spell, the bloke on the unicycle showed his skills off by catching smaller objects like grapefruits, oranges, plums and finally something
the size of a grape. He let me have a go. Four dropped chickens later, grease streaming down my face, I managed to catch one on me head. The Flying Chicken – where the food is headable, not
just edible. I didn’t stay for pudding.

If visiting a place called Monkey Town had been one of the 100 things on the Bucket List, I would have picked it. I love a monkey, me. So, when I saw that there was a place called Monkey Town we
were passing by anyway, it would have been mad not to stop off and see.

I was expecting to just see the odd one sat in a tree. I couldn’t have been more wrong. There were hundreds of the bloody things. Everywhere you looked there was a monkey. Some big, some
small, some healthy, some not so healthy, some swinging on telephone lines, some sat on fences and high up on balconies. A gang of them were sat on a car. Who knows, it might have been their car.
It was like some odd cartoon town. I don’t know where they have all come from, but they’ve made this place their town. There were definitely more monkeys than people. We went into a
temple where at the gate a man (may have been a monkey in a human outfit) didn’t sell leaflets on the history of the temple, he sold bags of nuts and fruit. I bought a bag of nuts and was
about to enter the temple gates when a monkey climbed my shorts, grabbed the bag and ran off. I bought three more bags. Monkeys circled me, so I hid them in my pockets.

I sat down. I had about four or five monkeys all over me. They picked at my head like they were looking for tics. One worked out that no hair meant it was just easier to lick my head for any
passing tics. I slowly pulled out another bag of nuts. A monkey jumped from behind me, grabbed them and left. This was getting silly now. I wasn’t feeding the monkeys, I was just being
mugged.

I had a packet of Monster Munch in my other pocket, so I thought I would use them to teach the robbing sods a lesson. They were spicy flavour. Maybe this will stop them nicking food off other
people in the future. I was about to open the packet to hand a monkey one crisp when the whole packet was grabbed. They are so quick. I turned to see the monkey climbing the side of the temple like
when King Kong climbed the Empire State Building. So, is this why nature gave them the opposable thumb, is it? So they could open bags of crisps! You might be thinking, ‘Karl, stop moaning.
They’re probably just hungry and this is their way of surviving.’ Oh really? Well, what are the reasons for another monkey to nick me hat and another to have me glasses away?
They’re robbing bastards. Simple as that.

The guide told me that the oldest monkey there was over forty. So I asked to go and see it. It was resting while drinking one of those Yakult probiotic drinks! I don’t even have them. As
it sat there necking it, it looked so human: the way it sat, the way it looked around. It’s just their arse that is un-humanlike. These had a similar arse to chimps. Horrible big red bulbous
arses. What went on there? I’m glad we evolved to get a better arse. Goes to show even nature realised that that arse design was not good. Sore red arse. The one that nicked my Monster Munch
might have ended up with an even redder arse.

Someone will probably complain and say I shouldn’t even be trying to give a monkey a Monster Munch. I watched a programme on TV once when a bonobo was making itself a Pot Noodle, and some
people complained about it, as Pot Noodles are not very good for you. But that’s what it was eating the night they filmed it. The night before, it was probably knocking up roast chicken with
new potatoes and asparagus.

I called Ricky.