In some of the earliest photos of my brother and I in the family album, we’re dressed up in cowboy outfits and sitting on a rocking horse; in another shot we’re posing in the backyard with our friends, wearing cowboy hats and brandishing cap guns that look like Colt .45s. As children growing up on the Canadian prairies, we wanted to be outlaws like Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy. After school, we played ‘Cowboys and Indians’ and calibrated our fantasies by watching re-runs of old TV shows like Gunsmoke and Bonanza; we learned to swagger and talk tough like Clint Eastwood and John Wayne in the old Westerns (“Vamoose, ya doggone varmints!”), and gave ourselves nicknames like ‘Tex’ and ‘Hoss’. To practise our roping skills, we tried to throw a lasso made out of a belt around the neck of our mom’s Pekingese. But the miniscule yap-dog wasn’t much of a surrogate for a Texas longhorn steer.
During the summer holidays, our most memorable times were spent riding horses in the mountains of Jasper, and watching cowboys wrestle steers and race chuck-wagons at the world’s most famous rodeo, the Calgary Stampede. But we never got to rob any stagecoaches or fight off a horde of whooping, circling and scalping Apaches. And the only real Indians we ever saw were panhandling winos fleeing lives of deprivation on squalid reservations.
Little did I realise that my childhood aspirations would not come halfway true for another few decades until I visited the Pensuk Great Western Resort in northeast Thailand.
A LIVING GHOST TOWN
The main streets in the resort’s town of High Hill could be the set for an old ‘horse opera’. There’s a sheriff’s office and a jail, a gunsmith and the Deadrock Bull Saloon, a blacksmith and a barber. Between the bank and Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound is a fading sign: ‘Deputy Wanted: Looking For A Few Good Men To Help Out The Law. Must Be Good With A Gun And A Good Horseman’.
All of the tumbledown buildings, made of wood and bricks, looked authentically weather-beaten. Hidden speakers played a hit parade of 1970s’ country chestnuts like Waylon Jennings’ ‘Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys’ and Charlie Daniels’ ‘The Devil Went Down To Texas’. As photographer Jason Lang and his girlfriend, coupled with Anchana and I, sauntered down the street towards the enormous corral for the first time, Jason said, “It all looks so real you expect some cowboy to run out on the balcony, get shot, and fall down into the street.” Then the Californian yelled, “Yee haw! Yip, yip, yip, yip!”
Many of the resort’s rooms are actually inside High Hill’s buildings. Behind the horseshoe-studded façade of the blacksmith shop, our room had a plaster mock-up of an antelope’s head on the wall, beside cut-outs of pine trees that framed the TV set. An old rifle was mounted on the bricks above the electric fireplace. Glaring down at us from over the mirror was the bust of an Indian warrior with a feather headdress. Instead of leaving sweets on the pillows, the maid had left us a pair of cowboy-style neckerchiefs.
The owner of the resort, Yuttana Pensuk, modelled the buildings and signs on a real 19th-century ghost town in Nevada named Calico. When construction began in the mid-1990s, he said, with a cowboy-hat grin, “All the local people thought I was crazy.”
At first it was only intended as a weekend dude ranch for him and his friends, but little by little, they added air-conditioned teepees, shooting ranges for rifles and archery, a karaoke room, a swimming pool, a tram that resembles an old steam train and a ‘Cowboys and Indians’ theme show on Saturday nights. Now it’s a 25-horse town with 70 full-time employees and 30 part-timers, and the resort can accommodate up to 300 guests.
The owner’s obsession with the Wild West began around the same time as mine did, but under much scarier circumstances. His father was a Thai soldier during the Vietnam War, and his kinfolk all lived together on a big military base in the northeastern province of Udon Thani, where he was stationed. Yuttana recalled how, every ten minutes, an American fighter plane would shriek down the runway on its way to drop a payload of bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. In their down time, the American bomber crews watched lots of Westerns.
And so did Yuttana—who can be seen every weekend at the resort, walking around in a black hat and complete cowboy duds, a holster with a fake six-shooter strapped to his thigh.
Much of the resort’s appeal to middle-class and well-heeled Thais (who make up about 90 per cent of the visitors) and other Asians (mostly from Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan) comes from Hollywood films and old TV shows. In Thailand, the allure of cowboy folklore and the dozens of Western-themed bars with water buffalo skulls and wagon wheels, also stems from the fact that the kingdom is, like the Wild West, an agrarian society rife with outlaws (read: gangsters and hit men). As the owner’s wife—nicknamed Ping Pong—said, “Thai people don’t have heroes like Americans do, but you see the old films, and wow, cowboys are cool.”
When she said ‘heroes’ what she was really referring to were ‘heroes’ from rural farming areas, like the cowboys in the American Westerns that were shown in Thai cinemas and on TV after the GIs arrived.
Whatever heroic tendencies my trusty sidekick—now known as Jason ‘Shooter’ Lang—and I possessed were blown on the first night. Stumbling down the street of High Hill to our rooms, three sheets to the wind, we spotted an enormous insect smashing its carapace into a fluorescent light above the blacksmith shop that was the façade of our room.
“Dude, that is the biggest bug I’ve ever seen, Tex.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s like the vampire bat of the insect world. Shooter! Duck! It’s coming for our necks.”
As the insect dive-bombed us, Jason ducked and shrieked while I threw up my arms to ward off an imminent attack: a slapstick scene of Keystone cowboys, causing our girlfriends to have a fit of the giggles. Fearlessly, Anchana walked over to the light, reached up and caught the monster in her hands. “Come on, you guys. They don’t bite. We used to play with them on the sugarcane farm.” Grinning, she threw the insect into the air, where it disappeared into a black velvet night encrusted with stars.
In this spleen of the tropical woods, the womenfolk were making Shooter and Tex look like a couple of greenhorns and yellow-bellied cowards.
DARK HORSES
The last time I went trail riding was up in the mountains of Jasper, Alberta. While cutting through the forest, a branch whipped me across the face. I lost my balance and fell off the horse, but my foot was caught in the stirrup. The horse dragged me along for about 50 metres before it stopped. It was a miracle I didn’t break any bones.
Trail riding is dangerous, warned Yuttana.
“If the horse knows you don’t have any experience and cannot control him, then he will try to buck you off,” the owner said. “Another thing to be wary of is that horses spook easily.”
The owner related a cautionary tale of a Thai member of parliament, who was an expert rider, but up in the nearby mountains, he was galloping down a trail when a wild pig appeared in front of them. The horse stopped dead in its tracks, catapulting him into a tree and fatally fracturing his skull.
For the nervous novice, Pensuk Great Western offers riding lessons. All the basics are covered, from saddling up and reining the beast in, to trotting, cantering and how to fall. “When you’re falling, you have to pull the horse in that direction to break your fall,” said Yuttana.
But you can’t really experience the cowboy life until you’re galloping down a trail to the percussion of hooves and the tune of the wind sawing through the trees like a fiddle, the forests and streams and sugarcane plantations all dappled with sunlight, cows grazing in pastures and water buffaloes pulling plows in rice paddies—a country mile from the desk-jockey lives most of us live in the city.
Much of the Western’s appeal is the scenery: mountains, forests, rivers, deserts and wide-open plains. The grounds of the resort, complete with a small stream and an orgy of tropical botany, rope in city slickers, even though most of the Thais prefer riding around on mountain bikes rather than horses. “They call me and ask if I have horses, but they don’t want to ride, only look and take photos,” Yuttana laughed.
We were supposed to go trail riding the next morning with Yuttana, but Shooter and I were hungover to the point where we already had horses galloping through our heads. Considering what Ping Pong had told us about how she’d stopped riding horses after getting bucked off four or five times, the three of us settled for the easier and more popular option of having a ranch hand walk us around on horseback while Jason took photos.
At Pensuk Great Western, most visitors prefer shooting photos to blowing off guns; the main afternoon action in High Hill consists of photo sessions among families and friends. The buildings are used as backdrops. One Asian visitor I overheard compared it to Universal Studios in Hollywood. Nobody at the resort seemed to mind if we borrowed some cowboy hats and toy guns from the souvenir shop to stage our own photo shoot. Going down in a blaze of glory after a showdown at high noon was the usual finale to our childhood games, but as with everything at the resort, there was a weird twist—now it wasn’t some lawman or desperado pretending to plug me full of hot lead, it was my girlfriend, foreshadowing darker chapters yet to be written.
COWBOYS VERSUS INDIANS
It didn’t dawn on me until around dusk, as Shooter and I were moseying along the main drag of the resort’s Dodge City section, toy Winchester rifles in one hand and beers in the other, that the anniversary of 9/11 was looming. On a restaurant TV, a news programme showed a retrospective collage of clips from ground zero, as well as sound-bytes from George W. Bush. In reference to Osama Bin Laden and the other members of Al-Qaeda holed up in Afghanistan, he drawled, “We’re gonna smoke ‘em outta their holes.” Talking about John Howard, the then-prime minister of Australia, Bush added, “He’s my deputy sheriff in Asia.”
Thankfully, nobody at Pensuk Great Western takes the old cowboy rhetoric that seriously. In fact, the big theme show held every Saturday night is full of the ludicrous slapstick seen on Thai TV programmes, so it’s easily understood by non-Thai speakers.
The show takes place outside the restaurant. Tables are set up in front of the stage, where a live band in cowboy costumes plays everything from the Beatles and Elvis to Hank Williams and Creedence Clearwater Revival during the dinner buffet. Off to the left is a row of miniature chuck-wagons used for their original purpose: serving up grub. Mostly it’s Thai food, although they also roast a pig on a spit every Saturday night.
As you’d expect, the show boasts some gunplay (with blanks, of course), some fisticuffs and horsing around. But as you may not expect, the Indians are central characters with actual speaking parts. The show begins with some drunken Thai cowboys staggering around with beer bottles. They kidnap a lovely Indian princess and threaten to sell her into slavery. It’s a far battle cry from the old Westerns, where the natives were usually portrayed as whooping savages, forever scalping decent Christian folks with tomahawks, and setting their wagons on fire with flaming arrows. (Many of the derogatory names for Native Canadians and Americans like ‘wagon burners’ that we heard as kids came from those movies.)
But the resort does a much more adroit balancing act in its portrayal of frontier America’s two great enemies. Inside the old wooden building near the paddock, for instance, are photos of celebrated Indian warriors like Kicking Bird and Two Hatchet from the Kiowa tribe, along with brief descriptions of the famous battles they fought against the US cavalry. Yet another sign in the big barn of a restaurant lists a few Native American beliefs such as ‘Remain close to the great spirit’, and ‘Show great respect for your fellow beings’.
In truth, the Indian iconography at the resort are as plentiful as all the cowboy motifs. And the most colourful and popular accommodations are the elaborately decorated teepees, with TVs and en-suite bathrooms, which sit in a concrete circle surrounded by gaudy totem poles.
During the show’s centrepiece, an Indian chief rides in on the front of a train engine to save one of his warriors from being hanged by the cowboys. Accompanied by the owner’s young daughter, Shania (who is named after the Canadian country starlet, Shania Twain), the chief walks through the crowd so people can take his photo, jumps on-stage, grabs the microphone and berates the trench coat-wearing cowboys, as if he were a professional wrestler. This was then followed by some corny jokes in English about the ‘three hows’, like “How are you?”
Then it hit me: the show is a cleverly constructed satire about how the Wild West was tamed, how the cowboys in trench coats are stand-ins for criminal elements, and how the Indians lost their traditions. When you can come up with egghead interpretations like this, you ain’t never gonna be no real cowpoke.
The Asians in the audience all warm to the communal rituals, like at the end of the show when everybody gets to carry a lit torch around in a circle, while the band plays the Hank Williams tune about a wooden, cigar-store Indian named ‘Kawliga’. Later on, there’s line dancing. And you thought square-dancing was goofy? For such tough guys and gals, country ‘n’ western fans sure listen to some sappy songs and do some flatfooted dances.
The rowdiest folks at the resort this weekend turned out to be our Thai neighbours across the street in the ‘bank’. Employees of an insurance firm in Bangkok on a team-building trip, they were only too willing to share their big bottle of whiskey with a couple of pseudo cowboys from the West. At this point in the evening’s guzzling, no one was too coherent except their boss, who kept insisting in between guffaws, that “Johnnie Walker is our most important world leader. He makes everybody friendly. Stop war and drink whiskey!” Because he was the boss, nobody dared to interrupt him.
One of the other men in their group said it wasn’t a real cowboy town because there was no brothel or all-night saloon. Which is true: the bar closes by midnight and a lot of the guests are families who stay in log cabins named after Jesse James and Billy the Kid.
The weekend hadn’t quite worked out the way we’d fantasised—the trail riding had turned into cantering; Shooter and I had been spooked by an insect; we’d both been shot down by our girlfriends (in more ways than one); and neither of us could have hit a barn with a blunderbuss on the shooting range. But in spite of the drawbacks and misfires, we’d still gotten to relive our childhoods by playing costume-party cowboys, staying in a real live ghost town and tying on the feedbag from some chuck-wagons while watching a surreal cowboys and Indians show.
By 1am, I was the last man staggering around High Hill and Dodge City. Even my sidekick and our partners were getting some shuteye. But that’s the way it was in the darker Westerns and the rustlers and ranchers novels of Cormac McCarthy like All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. The anti-heroes never got the girl, never got rich, never even found a place to call home. Nope. They kept drifting like tumbleweeds, always ending up very much alone. And that’s what keeps the old cowboy tales from being put out to pasture for good, because sometimes every wanderer on every continent can relate to that.