Night after night I wander the streets of this city, looking for the Phin Man. He emerges only at night; this I know, but little else, and so I wander, searching.

When the sun burns down into the Chao Phraya, backlighting Wat Arun and making all the magical legends of Bangkok seem tangible, I step off a canal pier. As sleek and serpentine as a naga, lurching, roaring and trailing black curling diesel fumes, the monstrous canal boat rushes through the city, past the infamous traffic locked streets. The canal it travels on, one of the city’s few remaining, was built under terrible conditions by prisoners captured in expansionist wars in the south a century and more ago. Their ancestors still live in the canal-side slums, beneath the shadows of their mosques. Saan Sab canal was built to marshal Thai armies quickly from one side of the capital to the other, when Bangkok was still surrounded by enemies. Now, the canal only ferries tired workers on their way into or out of the business core of the city.

Under a pastel pink and purple evening sky, I step into the crush of Siam square. Here beneath the missile shaped sky-train and the garish lights of the giant cinema marquees, in this resonating concrete amphitheater, pace the crowds. Businessmen at the end of their day, carrying their coats and releasing the top button of their shirts, squeeze past pitiful beggars carrying dying babies. University girls with short black skirts tiptoe on high heels past mounds of garbage, chattering on phones worth a couple month’s average wage. Vendors cook skewers of fish balls, pork balls and stinking dried squid over small charcoal grills, and the odd Ferrari guns it’s motor helplessly in the gridlock a few feet away.

Yet, there is no Phin Man here. Not tonight.

I grab a coffee and ascend the skywalk to survey the crowds below; squinting, looking for the Phin Man, this musical phantasm. I have seen him before, so I know he exists. When I lived here, I would encounter him fleetingly; from the street, through the open window of an ancient city bus, I would sometimes hear him. Walking through the densest crowds, bent with age and a head shorter than those around him, the Phin Man sometimes would suddenly appear.

In those days I never thought much of him. The Phin, the three stringed instrument he plays, can be compared to nothing else I have ever heard. The music seems so incongruous beneath the air conditioned skyscrapers of Bangkok, this sinking city, but if you have a look at the Phin Man, it all makes sense.

Chewing blood red betel nut, he wears threadbare provincial clothes and has dark, leathery skin, a stooped posture, testament to a life spent in the rice fields. That he now brings this antiquated instrument to the city to scrape a living from the generosity of modern Thais who turn toward the future more than the agricultural past, likely means he has lost his old rice farm.

Now that I am here again in Bangkok, equipped with the latest technology to shoot a documentary film about an old Thai and Burmese feud, I know that no music can so properly bring to life the story I want to tell as can that of the Phin Man.

When the night is mature, I walk up Sukhumvit road to Nana. Nana is the Bangkok of popular culture; a hedonistic, exotic capital of base desires. Indian touts pull at my sleeves, offering curries or tailored suits as I wander through the small sois, dark but for the gaudy neon overhead, reflected in shiny pink puddles on the otherwise pitch black ground. Sidewalk shop stalls offer lubricants, souvenir t-shirts and cheap chromed over brass knuckles and throwing stars. Apple scented hookah smoke lingers around Lebanese restaurant verandahs. Arab women, swathed in yards of black linen stride by Thai and African and Ukrainian girls in the shortest of minis, their cleavage pushed up over low cut tops. A group of quiet Africans watch, half concealed in a darkened stairwell, as fat white tourists trundle carelessly by, beers in hand, intoxicated by the open door glimpses of writhing naked women.

I also watch. I watch the crowd just like everyone else, because everyone is looking for something here. I find an old man much like the Phin Man, only this old man plays the Saw, an instrument something like a violin made by a crafty fisherman of bamboo and hemp. The Saw produces haunting music, but it won’t do. It doesn’t have the same strength as the Phin.

I ask the motorcycle taxi drivers if they know the Phin Man. They know everything there is to know here; they will happily take you to an air conditioned brothel to pick girls from behind one way glass like in a police show. They will also find Yabaa, the cheap amphetamine of Bangkok, a cheap suit, or a rundown hotel, they are often rumored to execute certain problem people, for people with problems, but the Phin Man eludes even these steely urban creatures.

I continue to search. Up and down Sukhumvit Road I find country relics like elephants and poor farmer’s daughters misplaced in the city. Never do I find the Phin man again. On Sunday I will go to Chatuchak market, the weekend market, as one bemused driver suggested. I will ask around until, hopefully, I find the Phin Man, and I will ask him to play his old songs for my cutting edge microphones.

Shade dappled and quiet, surrounded by Buddhist temples and forest, the old boxing ring seemed a rustic, almost theatrical place to shoot a Muay Thai technique book. What author Glen Cordoza and I found, unfortunately, was the rustic environs were too busy to shoot the clean, crisp photos necessary to make a precise instructional book.

We needed a studio, but in Thailand a professional photo studio is hard to find. We thought we would underexpose the background, lighting the fighters performing the techniques with strobes to separate them from the busy background. Plugging in the heavy strobe units, which Glen had carried all the way from the U.S., we heard a popping, a sizzling, a flash of fire, then smoke rising from the strobe heads.

We changed gyms. We thought that perhaps a wide open pasture with Brahma cows and the candy colored Thai sky might be simplistic enough a background. It was not.

Sloshing through a thin lake of water, fish guts, rotten vegetables and rats, we found a market fabric shop who agreed to sew us a sail big enough to cover one entire side of a boxing ring. The following day we picked up the cloth. The technical problems however, did not stop there; we had a background, but still needed to light it. Lacking our daylight balanced strobe system, we went to a hardware store and bought 1,000 watt outdoor lights to bolt to our strobe stands.

Turning out studio quality photos, I thought the job was as good as done. Then the shutter broke down on our tired old 40D. A quick trip to Bangkok and many thousands of Baht later, we had a new 60D, cutting edge technology.

It is a lesson any visitor to Thailand should learn; there is always a way to get things done here, and Glen’s book, shot outdoors in a wind whipped studio with suboptimal lighting conditions will, when released, stand as the paramount catalogue of Thai boxing technique and style.

“There’s a ghost that comes at night” F told Glen and I. Camped out on the twins’ floor, we were awoken almost every night by wolfish howling. The house pack was rallying, howling at the moon, at a nighttime intruder, or at a ghost.

Outside Hua Hin city limits begins a low, hot scrubland studded here and there with temple topped limestone hills. Long ago, before man changed the face of this simmering junglescape, the lush foliage hid elephants, water buffalo, cobra, leopard and tiger. From India through Southeast Asia, the rich diversity of the African Savannah met the particular morphology of Asia.

Those days, alas, are gone. A few wild elephants do still roam Thailand, but conflicts with farmers and highways have seriously imperiled them. Even fewer wild tigers survive, though there are captive tigers “farmed” for superstitious Chinese “medicine”. As housing developments go up and jungle is cut away, Cobras do find their way into human habitation, with predictable results. The water buffalo are all chained up.

Now the scrubland is roamed by huge, humped Brahma cows and each and every scrap of land is jealously guarded by packs of feral dogs. Down the dirt road leading to where O and F live there are two such ravening packs. Territories, though invisible, are well known and though the neighbor pack will nip your legs as you ride in on a motorbike or as you run, they stop some ten yards before the Gym pack’s turf begins.

Always hungry, the pack maintained a rigid structure of dominance. For luck and to satisfy the Buddhas, the twins would feed the dogs, the challenge being keeping the alpha busy long enough to feed the others and avoid fights. Over time, the dogs came to know Glen and I, and to defend us from the neighbor pack, but the reason for the howling was a mystery unresolved. Until I asked F.

“It’s a ghost I think” said he, “But I don’t know because when they howl I pull my blanket over my head…whatever they see, I don’t want to.”