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The restaurant where our shaman works as a cook |
However, to get them, Thais would have to part with money for a doctor's consultation and of course the meds. Shaman's cures in the provinces, however, are cheaper. A Thai friend in his 50s told me recently that when he was a boy, shaman's cures, often dispensed by a monk, could be obtained for as little as one or two baht.
"It is in the early stages. Catch it now, you can cure it. Leave it, you could die," he said, vouching for the effectiveness of Mor Sawaeng. "I have sent hundreds of customers to him for a cure," he added.
Nice work if you can get it. Shaman such as Mor Sawaeng typically ask for a "teacher's fee", a payment supposedly for the monks who taught him the magic words he chants. But more of that later.
Mor Joe's shaman friend is a portly, cuddly looking chap who works as a cook at the restaurant and offers cures as a sideline. We met after a tense 15 minute drive from the massage place and many, many phone calls between Maiyuu and Mor Sawaeng, who guided us to the spot.
Initially, muddle-headed Mor Joe mistakenly gave us the name of a restaurant in Pattaya, not the one in Phaya Thai we needed, which confused our taxi driver, who looked it up on Google Maps and asked why were going so far afield.
When we arrived, Mor Sawaeng came out to meet us in the carpark wearing his cook's apron and ushered us to a table under a tree. The carpark faced the rear of the restaurant, where from an open door I could see cooks working on Chinese dumplings in little bamboo boxes.
Before we left, Mor Joe asked Maiyuu to buy two small bottles of lao khao, a severe Thai spirit which tastes like rocket fuel. Maiyuu said later that he assumed that the mystic would blow the alcohol on my red spots.