Thai Girl

Cat's English Club

2008-05-18T14:12:00.005+07:00

When last year Cat built a big wooden house down the garden while I was away in England, I asked her why she’d made its verandah so huge.

‘It’s because I want to run a school,’ she said, as irrepressible and zany as ever. I had little idea what she was talking about but I’ve since found out.

I wanted to write about the school as a last chapter to my new book, MY THAI GIRL AND I, but I realized that if I did, new events would keep making the book longer and longer. I just had to stop somewhere and publish the book. So I mentioned it briefly in the epilogue and now have the chance to tell the story in full.

Cat calls it her English Club and that’s exactly what it is. From time to time she’s had a number of children around to learn English before but now it’s become quite a big thing. Every weekday after the school day finishes twelve kiddies aged about nine to twelve arrive and sit down and chat excitedly on the verandah floor. Then teacher Cat appears and they all fall silent. This is serious stuff!

Then she teaches intensively for about three hours, both written and spoken English. It’s a very long day for them but they love every minute of it. She’s bought eight of those low school tables that Thai children use, a white board and various pictures and teaching aids, but the biggest teaching aid of all is a real live native-speaking farang.

Yes, I’ve been doing my half an hour or so and it’s been fun. Concentrating on oral English and pronunciation, I’ve usually arrived with a rucksack full of things like cups and spoons and toys and I pull them out and show them to the kids.

‘What’s this?’ ‘It’s a…’ I drill again and again. Eventually something sinks in and they’ve really learned quite a lot.

It looks professional too, a full thirty hour course with a proper invoice issued, a school outing to the lake where we all ate and swam and with certificates of completion nicely printed and handed out at the end of term dinner.

What quite impressed me was that the kids were not all from our village and the parents delivered them and collected them on their motorbikes. Cat is at last realizing her dream even in a small way of being a teacher and she’s much in demand.

When term had ended at the local school, she then began a second course for younger children in the school break. As it was getting much hotter, a cooler place to teach was our own concrete house. The main room downstairs is huge and again was perfect for the purpose.

This time I found them harder to teach. They were like puppies falling about the place and fighting, unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes. It was hard work to keep them engaged. Most of all they loved the two stuffed toys that sat on my knee and talked to each other. One was a dog, an ugly boy who loved the pretty penguin and did the children shriek with laughter at their silly courtship.

It really was fun and having the house full of noisy, happy kids a wonderful tonic for an elderly farang. For Cat too it was rather special, but already there’s something new in her life. She too has just become a full-time student!

What Is Matt?

2008-05-09T15:27:00.003+07:00

The crowd passes our gate during the Songkhran New Year water festival

Vanity of vanities! This is to tell you two things.

Firstly my new book, MY THAI GIRL AND I is on Asia Books' bestseller list. Amazing!

More importantly, for anyone interested in Thailand there's a great new on-line listing of the top hundred blogs about the Kingdom.

If you go to www.whatismatt.com/top100/ you'll find them listed on a combination of Page Rank, Technorati (WhatisTechnorati?!) and user votes. (Or click on the link to the right and at his home page click 'Top 100'.)

So if you've enjoyed my blog, please vote for THAI GIRL! Scroll down to find THAI GIRL and click on the fifth star! The traffic on this blog is not massive so, just like Hillary, I need your votes.

Vanities apart, the Top 100 is an excellent listing and I have found some fascinating and useful sites about Thailand that I didn't know existed.

Matt himself is a young Englishman who was working in Bangkok but has now escaped to Phuket where he is a freelance journalist. The byeline on his very popular blog is 'The Lost Boy'. Matt is a fan of the late singer songwriter, Nick Drake. Sometime ago there was a documentary about Nick which was called 'The Lost Boy', hence the name.

Matt was intrigued when I told him that Nick was my childhood friend and that on the new CD of his early recordings called 'Family Tree' one of the essays about Nick in the sleeve notes is by none other than me.

Cat's Building Yet Again!

2008-05-05T19:49:00.005+07:00

Life goes on as usual in the village and true to form Cat’s been building yet again. This time it’s a chicken house.

To be honest I’m not that keen on keeping chickens. I’m constantly cleaning up their mess from the verandah and shooing them off the table in the kitchen. And they scratch the leaves from under the bushes in the garden and I spend my life raking it all up again. Not to mention thoughts of avian flu!

On top of that I’m also ambivalent about having a personal relationship with the protein I eat, though I’d as easily stop Cat producing food as Canute held back the tide.

So now there are chickens everywhere.

When recently I came back to the village from Bangkok after doing the design work for my new book, “My Thai Girl and I”, I soon noticed something strange by the side of the fish pond. Thankfully Cat had never put pigs in the pig house that came free when we bought the pond, though I knew she had designs on it.

The strange thing was that on my return the pig house had gone. It wasn’t there by the pond any more.

‘Why did you knock down the pig house?’ I ask Cat accusingly.

‘I didn’t. It disappear!’ she tells me.

Apparently nobody saw it go. Nobody heard the clash of rusty corrugated iron or the thud of hammers tearing the woodwork apart. It had been spirited away by persons unknown.

Cat too was shocked to see it gone so she went to see the neighbours who’d sold us the pond. It was all smiles as usual and no, they knew nothing about it. They couldn’t explain it at all and had no idea who had taken it.

It was strange though, as Cat pointed out to them, that all the timber and iron from the pig sty was right there, dumped in a heap by their house.

They couldn’t explain this either they said, but since it wasn’t included in the sale and was theirs anyway, they weren’t going to give it back to her. It was a very Thai confrontation, like angry ducks paddling fast on the pond but making as few ripples as possible.

It took a visit from the police to persuade them that as a buyer of land takes anything affixed to it, they now had to tip it over the fence back onto our patch. Which is where I saw it in an untidy heap when I got back from Bangkok.

There could be something else behind all this of course, though I have to accept her story at face value as Cat is as the sole modem between me and the unfathomable web of smiles and intrigue that makes Thailand so constantly amazing.

The upshot is that we now have an ugly pile of old old building materials, which isn’t a problem as Cat wants to build a chicken house. The rainy season is coming and unless the chickens have shelter they’ll often sicken and die.

She now takes on the two of the frailest old men she can find and in a few days they create for her a new chicken house from the recycled pig sty and the bamboos they cut from nearby. It stands on the banks of the pond, has an upstairs for roosting and a steeply pitched roof. Unfortunately the roof is approximately eighty percent corrugated iron and twenty percent hole, so she’s going to have to put on some rustic grass roofing panels as well.

With the chicken house now almost complete, we drive in to Sangkha market to buy pork and vegetables as she’s going to do a Mongolian barbecue to celebrate. You may not pay your workers in gold but instead you entertain them to good food and an ample supply of lao khao, a white rice whisky which at forty percent is well worth a day’s work.

Cat has the little round barbecue glowing hot and the thin slices of pork are cooked on the aluminium dome which is placed over the top. We’re at the bottom of the ‘garden’ by the wooden house sitting under the grass roofed shelters that have recently become a regular living space. The great thing about cooking outside and eating on an earth floor is that you don’t have to clean up afterwards. All is organic as it should be and the dogs see to it that nothing’s ever wasted.

The two old men are sitting under the thatch with a big bottle in front of them. It’s half empty but also half full and while gentlemen prefer blondes and the devil wears Prada, I’m quite partial to a tot or three cheap rice whisky. So I help them to finish it off before we buy another bottle.

Still sober I’m humbled by the immensity of the heavens as we eat, the stars sharp pinpricks in the inky blackness. Then, as the alcohol sears its way down my throat, I find myself at its very centre, the hub round which the universe revolves. This is my rightful place in the world and it’s mine, all mine!

The alcohol mellows my senses but also intensifies them. The heat is thick, the sweat pricking at my brows, my clothes clinging to the interstices. The wet blanket of the night envelops us and the scream of the insects is raucous and intrusive.

I’m now definitely under the influence, the world has become benign and I no longer care about the dust and chaos around me. The two old farmers next to me are my best mates, though we have nothing in common and can hardly communicate.

But suddenly we can understand each other with a few choice words. The conversation isn’t profound but so what. Maybe it’s better that way.

‘Muang Thai sanuk mai?’ they ask me. Thailand’s fun, is it?

‘Sanuk’ I say sagely. ‘Chawp maak!’

Yes, living in Thailand is fun. I do like it. I’ve got a new hen house, it isn’t cold and my brain’s comfortably soggy with the glow of lao khao.

We can’t celebrate having a new chicken house like this every night but Cat won’t ever stop building so there’ll be more feasts and celebrations to come. Not that the Thais ever need an excuse for one anyway!

"My Thai Girl and I" At Last It's Out!

2008-04-07T12:31:00.005+07:00

I can hardly believe that in my hand I'm holding a book of 250 pages with 115 photographs that's all about the five years I've lived in Thailand with Cat. Writing about myself is the last thing I'd choose to do, but really it's about her, her village, her country. They are my inspiration.

I started writing it when we'd been together about two years. I went back to my diaries and I racked my brains but it wasn't difficult as I had a vivid recall of the many special experiences we'd shared together. I wanted to write about Isaan, the dry North East of Thailand where we live among the rice fields and that's exactly what I've done.

I hope it's funny and I hope it's fair. I hope that it portrays the agonies and the ecstacies of reinventing oneself and finding a new life in a context I could never before have imagined I'd find myself in. And it's about a very special relationship and of building bridges across our vast differences of culture and age.

So how hard is it to retire in Thailand in the bosom of a Thai family and to find happiness then? Well, you'll have to read the book to find out!

I loved every moment of the writing but the final editing and proof reading, creating the book itself has been hard work. I've twice travelled nine hours to Bangkok, the first time spending seventeen days there dealing with all the work of design and production.

My designer Khun Nont, a Thai fluent in both English and German was unbelievably patient and we sat at his computer for no less than fifty hours, doing the design and typesetting, piecing every photo into the page so that it directly related to the adjacent text. My eyes are still sore.

The book is distributed throughout Thailand by ASIA BOOKS who have given me an enormous amount of their time and been so very helpful. They now have 1,200 copies in shops round Thailand which means that if there's an average of four copies in each, it's for sale in 300 outlets which is amazing. Even so if it's not in your book shop, get them to order it from www.asiabooks.com or go direct to their customer services by email.

I'm now back home again in the village and am sending out a few press releases in the hope of some reviews. The most difficult thing is writing a blurb about one's own book but I've tried and I've pasted in the PRESS RELEASE below to see what you say about it.

Cat's not qute sure what she thinks about people reading about our life together. I'm not too sure either but I've gone and done it and we're now about to find out. This is the first publicity for the book but, like dropping a coin down a deep well, I don't really expect anything much to happen at all.

Only time will tell!

PRESS RELEASE

“My Thai Girl and I” by Andrew Hicks

This new book about the author’s life in Thailand has been distributed by Asia Books to bookshops and outlets throughout Thailand as from early April 2008.

Written by Andrew Hicks, author of the best selling novel, “Thai Girl”, it is expected to sell to readers looking for an accessible story about expat life that also informs about the local culture and living in rural Thailand.

Review Copies are available on request to… arhicks56@hotmail.com .

See also www.thaigirl2004.blogspot.com
www.thaigirl2004.com.

The author will be pleased to assist with any interview, media review or feature about the book.

ISBN 978-974-9898-90-1 250 pages including 8 colour pages with 20 photographs and 95 monochrome photographs in the text.

The Blurb on the Back Cover

“This is how I met Cat, a ‘Thai girl’ half my age and how we set up home together in her village out in the rice fields of North Eastern Thailand.
I’ll tell you of toads in the toilet, of ants’ eggs for breakfast, how we took up frog farming and how I got married without really meaning to.
It’s also a book about the countryside, of the old Thailand where the rhythm of the seasons and belief in the spirits and Buddhism remain strong.
Though how could I, a greying English lawyer, ever fit into the lives of a Thai rice farming family. Can Cat and I with our many differences really be compatible?
If you’re curious to know what it’s like to start a totally new life as I did, to slow down and ‘go with the flow’, I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading the story of ‘my Thai girl and I’.”

Five Brief Reviews of the Book for Free Publication

This new book tells the story of how the author, a former law professor set up home in an Isaan village with a rice farmer’s daughter half his age. With all their incompatibilities and the many problems of adapting to rural life, how could such a relationship ever succeed. A funny and engaging tale, it shows that anything is possible if Andrew throws off his cultural assumptions and learns to go with the flow.

Available at Asia Books and Bookazine and all good bookshops. Price 450 baht.

****

There are many ‘culture shock’ handbooks written for foreigners settling in Thailand but another way to get an authentic flavour of living in the Kingdom is to read a new book just released called, “My Thai Girl and I”. Written by Andrew Hicks, author of the successful novel, “Thai Girl”, it describes how he met his Thai wife Cat and how they set up home together in her village in the North East of Thailand.

The many lessons to be learned are amusingly told, that smiles can mean a thousand things, that yes can sometimes mean no and nothing is ever what it seems. Building a new house involves a thousand crises and compromises and running a thirty year old jeep can turn into a nightmare.

Lavishly illustrated, this is the story of five years in the lives of two people who are as different as can be but offer each other the same thing, namely a totally new start in life. For the author, an older man used to the comforts of city living, there are many lessons to be learned and moving to live in the real rural Thailand presents many challenges.

How Andrew coped with these challenges, struggled with his own cultural assumptions and learned ‘to go with the flow’ will amuse and enlighten those who long for a slower way of life and contemplate retirement in Thailand.
At Asia Books and all good bookshops throughout Thailand. Price 450 baht.

****

In many Isaan villages the ageing farang resident married to a local girl has become a familiar sight. It’s hard though to imagine the reality of these unusual relationships, but a new book now gives the inside story. In “My Thai Girl and I”, Andrew Hicks, author of the best selling novel, “Thai Girl” tells how he met his Thai wife, Cat and how they set up home together in her village in Isaan.

He describes the tortuous business of building a house, of maintaining a thirty year old jeep and all the difficulties of a new life in a very rural environment. How could a sixty year old former corporate lawyer possibly come to grips with the volcanic local food and culture and co-exist with an army of in-laws that he can’t even speak to.

Fully illustrated, “My Thai Girl and I” is a pleasant read that takes the armchair traveler on a quest that is both funny and informative about cross-cultural relationships, the rhythms of the seasons and life in a rice growing village in Surin.

Available from Asia Books, Bookazine and good bookshops throughout Thailand. Published by Konstrukt Books, 450 baht.

****

What’s the story behind the smart new concrete house that’s just been built in a remote village in Isaan? Who’s the tall farang often to be seen drawing wads of money at the ATM in the local town?

A new book, “My Thai Girl and I” now tells the inside story of how one Englishman retired from the rat race and came to accept a much slower way of life with a family of rice farmers in Surin.

Its author, Andrew Hicks tells how he met his Thai wife, Cat and of his culture shock when first she took him to her village. A former corporate lawyer and academic, how would he succeed in adapting to so different a life out in the remote rice fields of Surin?

He tells of the discomforts of living with no bed, no chair, no news of the outside world and with no way to get out of the village except by bicycle. An old Asia hand, he nonetheless finds the local diet of ants eggs and fermented fish spiced up with volcanic chili more than challenging.

The story takes you through five years of his life with Cat and describes the problems of building a house and of keeping a thirty year old jeep on the road and how their relationship confronted the strains and pitfalls of an unusual cross-cultural marriage.

The book thus offers the reader an upbeat and amusing read, with many insights into life for a newcomer to rural Thailand. For Andrew it wasn’t always easy, but ultimately life with his ‘Thai girl’ allowed him to look for a new balance in his life and to learn ‘to go with the flow’.

Fully illustrated, the book is now available at bookshops throughout Thailand. Distributed by Asia Books, price 450 baht.

****

Thailand offers an enticing haven for European men wanting to retire to a warm and welcoming climate and huge numbers seem to be flocking this way. The food is amazing, the cost of living is reasonable and the ladies do really know how to smile. Some of these men succeed in finding happiness but theirs isn’t always an easy path.

In “My Thai Girl and I”, author Andrew Hicks describes some of the pitfalls that can be encountered along the way. Ants eggs for breakfast and toads in the toilet are the least of his troubles and with his energetic wife, Cat, life is a roller coaster as they deal with the stresses of marriage and the cultural gulf that separates them.

After life as a lawyer in London, Hong Kong and Singapore, Andrew finds a small village in Isaan takes some getting used to. He discovers that he’s not only married his wife but her family too, her village even and that their collective way of life is in stark contrast to the individuality of the West.

Andrew describes the problems of building a home, of running a thirty year old jeep and most difficult of all, his isolation from his own world; from world news, family, food, language and culture. How can two people of such differing age and experience possibly make a life together?

The book tells of all the ups and downs of a cross-cultural relationship and, drawing on the humour of the author’s predicament, offers the reader an upbeat and amusing read whose conclusion is distinctly positive.
Available at Asia Books and Bookazine and all bookshops throughout Thailand.
Published by Konstrukt Books, price 450 baht.

Andrew! Leo Die!

2008-03-25T07:44:00.003+07:00

The Thai newspapers are often filled with images of utter horror, of accidents, murders and bombings... in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka and sometimes much closer to home.

How can people go on with their lives after something like that? I cannot begin to imagine the horror of it all.

Everything is changeable but so far my life has been peaceful and my tragedies have been small. Even so, the story that follows happened many months ago and I have not been able to tell it until now. As I write I feel a tightness in my throat and am reluctant to relive it.

One day I was sitting at my laptop upstairs in our house out in the rice fields when I heard my wife, Cat walking round the side of the house. With no warning she called up to me.

‘Andrew! Leo die!’

My favourite dog is Pepsi and some time earlier she’d presented us with five adorable puppies. Cat wanted to keep one and Leo, a little bundle of trouble then became part of our lives. He was white with comic blobs of black, mischievous and bouncy and a total charmer. When tired, he’d retreat to his basket on the verandah and watch all the goings on, his cute little head poking over the side.

I marvel at the pure magic of a very ordinary dog. He was utter joy. Few things on this earth have such innocence, such appeal as a puppy. I marveled at his intelligence, his zest, his sense of fun.

In so many ways he was just like us, sharing the same experiences of hunger and fear, the same need for warmth, contact, companionship and affection. He was not a lesser being, only different, unaware of being on a mortal conveyer belt that can abruptly reach its end at any time.

‘Andrew! Leo die!’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He couldn’t have died. He’s too young, too healthy, too much a part of us.

I rush out to the verandah and look down and there’s Cat cradling Leo in her arms. He's so still he must be sleeping.

I run downstairs and take him from her. He’s warm and soft, exactly as he always is… my puppy. But he’s limp and floppy, totally lifeless. He’s unmarked and beautiful and desperately I will him to wake up. But he never can be Leo again.

‘Big ice truck in the road,’ says Cat. ‘Go too fast.’

Why, why did he have to go so far from the house.

Only an hour ago I’d been out to shut the gate but they just don’t care. They always leave it open. If only he could have survived a few more months, he might have learned a little road sense and survived much longer.

We let Pepsi see him and she sniffs around him in alarm. It seems as if she understands. She seems sad.

Cat says we’ll bury him down the garden and goes to get the hoe. I help her dig the hole and then I take him in my arms and carry him to it. Nan and little Ping are with us and Ping is crying bitterly.

I have my dark glasses on so they can’t see my eyes but as I bend down to lower him into the hole, the tears fall into the lenses and I can hardly see a thing. Even months later I can’t get through writing this either.

Cat chants something in Thai over the little body. I know she’s distressed but she’s composed as Thais always are. And then finally we shovel in the soil and make a little mound over him. Cat has made a little cross… he must be a Christian dog, and she strews flowers over him.

For the next few days I cannot go anywhere near but Pepsi is always there, lying quietly beside the grave. I feared she’d dig him up, but no, she just seems to want to be close by. She really seems to be grieving.

Once while I was living in an African village, I heard the screams when early in the morning they woke to find their baby stone cold beside them. How intolerable that must have been. It’s always struck me that a little of my paracetamol could have saved the child, or simple oral rehydration perhaps. Death is sometimes avoidable and far too often we invite him in.

The lives of my parents were cruelly disrupted by two global wars but in comparison I have lived in peaceful times. The world has become a better place and is more stable than at any time for centuries, even while our powers of destruction increase. Paradoxically we think it’s getting worse because the media alerts us to all the horrors.

Today’s apparent conflict, a so-called ‘war’ is fought, not on the battle field, but is played out primarily in the media. Terror is a state of mind and not a state of war. It’s only becomes such if we call it a war and want to make it one.

After the twin towers atrocity the West was running scared. It was a big media event with great images and our leaders did everything they could to play on our fears, to promote the bogey men and to give them the oxygen of publicity. They told us that this small cell of deviants, a tiny cancer, was a malignant and fatal tumour that could end our very civilisation. How very foolish that was. How dangerous was their aggressive rhetoric, a desire for revenge that nourished and aggrandized the cancer.

And how foolish it was to unleash the dogs of war. Wars are rarely just and they provoke atrocities on all sides… in the heat of conflict men are not restrained by rules. Be it communism or terrorism, have we not had enough lessons in the last fifty years that you cannot drop bombs on an abstraction? You cannot assert your principles however valid they are, nor do you make friends by sowing death and destruction.

I find it hard now to grasp the sheer horror that has been unleashed in the name of freedom and democracy, but I do know that gratuitous violence solves nothing.

I’m angry too at the ineptitude of our leaders and the suffering they’ve caused, and I’m still upset about my puppy.

Amazing Thailand! Who F****d Who?

2008-03-11T09:29:00.002+07:00

It's a tough world out there.

In my forthcoming book, “MY THAI GIRL AND I”, (which you can read about if you scroll down a blog or two), I repeat the cliché that Thailand is often a land of stark contrasts and contradictions.

The book is the happy story of my Thai wife and I setting up home together in her village, but it’s also a vehicle for my own wide-ranging thoughts and observations about Thailand.

I make many wild generalizations in it on which I constantly contradict myself by then describing incidents that suggest the opposite is the truth. I say for example that I like living in Thailand because it’s a country of gentle manners in which people are honest and non-violent, yet commercial disputes are increasingly settled with a shot in the head from the pillion seat of a Honda Dream.

From time to time as I read the Bangkok newspapers I come across a news item which again suggests that despite my good experience here, people can sometimes be venal and dishonest in the extreme. A bizarre and grotesque instance concerns a recent scam for the theft and disposal of cars on an almost industrial scale. A particularly chilling element is that the police are alleged to be involved.

It seems that the scam works like this. The fraudsters set up sham car hire firms and induce private individuals to buy new cars for them. The firm then hires out the cars and the excess of the generous rental to be returned to the owner over their financing cost promises them a tidy profit. That of course is the theory!

The reality is that the rentals do flow in nicely for a few months but then stop abruptly. When the owners then try to recover their vehicles, all of them have vanished, probably fenced across the border into Laos.

The scandal blew up in the press when ‘a victim going to file a complaint was stunned to see his missing van parked at police headquarters in Bangkok last Tuesday.’ (Bangkok Post, 18 February 2008.)

It’s not clear from the reports what the alleged role of the police in the scam was but apparently there was no innocent explanation for the van being there.

The report talks of about 1,000 vehicles having been stolen and that upwards of 300 complainants have been camped outside one of the police stations demanding action.

Perhaps most bizarre is the profile of two victims who got themselves caught up in the scam. One man and his relatives bought sixteen new cars, borrowing from a loan shark at ten percent per month. That’s 120% per annum! A mother of two aged 34 bought six new cars, again borrowing at ten percent per month.

And the name of the car hire company to which she entrusted her cars? It was Yufuku Co.

Yes, indeed, and therein could lie an element of the truth!

Frauds like this one always involve extravagant promises of unsustainable profits that clearly are too good to be true and the victims, blinded by their own greed and stupidity are often the authors of their own misfortune. In this particular case they’ve been comprehensively screwed by everyone, including the men in tight uniforms.

Ironically Thai Buddhism holds that freedom from suffering can only be achieved by extinguishing all worldly desires. Furthermore, the related philosophy of ‘the sufficiency economy’ by which both individuals and the nation state should accept that enough is enough has recently been actively promoted at the highest levels. Yet in stark contrast it’s a tough world out there and the growing urge to militant materialism means that people here will recklessly ruin their own lives for the chance of a fast buck.

Amazing Thailand. It’s The Land of Scams!

Though let’s face it, it’s the same the whole world over and, if you don’t watch your back like a hawk, the shit often hits the fan big time.

Who Flung Dung? In this case it was everyone it seems!

Ja, ich bin ein Buffel!

2008-03-01T09:51:00.003+07:00

Tomorrow I’m off to Bangkok to start the design work on my new book, MY THAI GIRL AND I which is very exciting. (Scan down a blog or three to read the debate about the book.)

From our village in the north east of Thailand by bus it’ll be nine hours door to door before I reach The Atlanta, my favourite hotel in Sukhumvit. It’s a civilised though eccentric place that specifically claims to be a haven for writers with a big sign outside saying, ‘Sex Tourists Not Welcome’ and a smaller one on the desk saying, ‘Complaints Not Allowed – Not at the Prices We Charge!’. I love it!

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the discussion about the book on this blog, all in response to Jerry the Farang’s comment that it comes across as a constant grumble about the problems of living in Thailand. Feedback is the breath of life for me as an author though and it’s especially valuable when the book has not yet gone to press. This is my last chance to tweak and refine it.

I very much like your quote from Kipling, Niel, which appears in your Comment below. Strangely I too quote Kipling twice in the book as I feel he often has so much to say. He’s a major figure who, apart from Disney, is right out of fashion, and I’m sure he’s due for a reappraisal. In England last year I saw a set of his complete works for sale at an antiquarian bookshop and it was outside on the pavement in the bin for penny giveaways.

Going back to Jerry, I fully understood the point he was making and while he'd had the whole book to read, I could not of course post the whole book on my blog. I thus posted a particular chapter I was most bothered about. It was then reassuring that most of you said it should be included but even so, I think I should delete it.

Ultimately some readers of the book will accept my grumbles as an honest description of how things happened to me, some will see that I’m trying to make a joke of my own ineptitude while others will just think I’m what Americans call an ‘ass hole’! That’s the peril of being so forward as to write a book about myself!

I much like Jerry’s quote from the travel writer, Pico Iyer pointing out that the distinction between a tourist and a traveller lies between those who leave their assumptions at home and those who don’t. The tourist constantly grumbles that nothing here is the way it is at home. I really hope that after twenty years in tropical countries I don't do that!

Iyer went to Harvard as I remember, but he was also educated at Eton and Oxford so he should suffer no irony defecit. In fact he sometimes strains too hard to amuse with a heavy dose of paradox and the epigram ironical. Curiously my comment in my new book, that striving too hard to be funny can distort what one is trying to say was directly aimed at him.

Nonetheless the point about leaving one’s assumptions behind is an interesting one and I’ve been thinking about it, asking myself if I’m a mere tourist. When in the book I grumble that I have no food to eat, find sleeping on hard boards with no pillow a little difficult, regret being totally out of touch with my kids in England and have no idea if and when World War Three has begun, an I being ‘assumptionally retentive’?

My conclusion is that you cannot leave your cultural assumptions and conditioning entirely behind you. What is important is to be fully aware what your assumptions are, to recognise when local assumptions are different and not to judge other people by your own assumptions.

One cultural assumption I have and cannot rid myself of is how one defines ‘dirt’. I remember the farmhouse of some Breton friends in France. If you swept the kitchen floor you’d collect at least a bucket full of dirt, walked in from the muddy farm yard. I would not though call them dirty people though; rural standards are simply different. In an urban society we spend an excessive amount of time obsessively cleaning and even here in Thailand I still feel the need to keep my house clean. I do not though condemn my neighbours in the village as dirty because they live on earth floors.

I suggested to Jerry that he had not realised that some of my grumbles in the book where intended to be ironic, by which I mean funny. His response was that I should say just exactly what I mean rather than the opposite; perhaps like Pico Iyer I've been guilty of distorting my comments by trying too hard to be funny.

When I referred to some of my stuff as being ironic what I really meant was, to use an Americanism, that I was just ‘taking the piss’. While the book should not be a white wash, at least I could try to describe my bad moments in a way that was humorous.

I also wondered if, dare I say it, there are some Americans who tend to suffer an irony deficit.

Nonetheless, some of my best friends are American. There’s Jerry of course and Terry, and Bill and Bill, and Don and Don and Don. They’re a self-selecting group of course and most of them certainly DO irony.

One of them doesn’t though and his Thai wife has just dumped him because he talks too much. He never knows when I’m taking the piss and he sees everything through the prism of his American upbringing. He has brought all his assumptions with him to Asia and is supremely confident that they are the only way to see the ‘outside’ world.

Jerry on the other hand is a great and witty writer, an old hand with sensitive antennae for every nuance. At first I was worried that he said I came across in my book as a tourist but then I’m pretty sure he was only being ironic!

One last thing. Trawling around the site meter on my blog I came across a remarkable thing. My blog was there on the screen but it was in German. Can anyone tell me how this can be?

Who translated it? Was it a German? And what’s the reputation of Germans for humour and irony? Would it be a good translation?

Or could it have been done automatically by a machine?

How would a German translating machine cope with all my irony, I wonder. Then of course it’s as likely it’s all down to Microsoft, so it must be American.

Oh well, you can’t win them all!

Bangkok tomorrow and soon the book will be in the book shops. Then I’ll really find out what people thing of me.

Yes, I Am A Buffalo!

2008-02-25T12:05:00.004+07:00

Why do we farang so love swimming?

The Debate Rages On!

A few weeks back, Jerry the Farang read the draft of my new book, ‘MY THAI GIRL AND I’ and he told me I moaned too much. So I posted a chapter of it on this blog (scroll down a couple of posts) and asked for your comments. Most of you have responded that the chapter’s okay and so should be included in the book, but I’m still worried it may come across as an unmitigated rant. So I’ve decided to delete it.

Jerry has now posted a new Comment that appears as follows and my thoughts appear below it.

Jerry the Farang has left a new comment on your post "Is It I Who Am The Buffalo?":

Andrew...

I fear you missed my point. It wasn't just the chapter about the jeep. (In fact, buying a 30-year-old vehicle would've been a mistake in the UK.) It wasn't a matter of balance missing in the one chapter, there was no balance in the book; it's one long complaint. Even when you find something you like---people making financial contributions upon arriving at a party you are hosting, for example---you don't look good, in this instance coming off as a Cheap Charlie.

In his introduction to WANDERLUST, an anthology of stories from salon.com, Pico Iyer writes, "Though it's fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the 'tourist' and the 'traveler', perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don't. Among those who don't, a tourist is just someone who complains. 'Nothing here is the way it is at home,'while a traveler is one who grumbles 'Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo'---or Cuzco or Kathmandu. It's all very much the same."

Your book is well written, you just sound like a tourist. My advice is to leave the manuscript as it is, once you get rid of or fix those repetitious and/or unrealized chapters in the last half.

Nothing seems to please you about Thailand and that's what bothers me. The point of view is valid, it just rubs me the wrong way. This is, after all, what you are: a complainer, along with all the other farangs who write letters to the editor.

Good to see you in Surin. Best, Jerry

Posted by Jerry the Farang to Thai Girl at 24 February 2008 23:08. My reply follows...

Thanks for that Jerry!

I like Pico Iyer as a writer very much but ironically he seeks to amuse with his outsider’s quips and bon mots and he too often comes over as tourist as much as traveler. In ‘Video Night In Kathmandu’, one of my favourite travel books (partly because I visited all the same places as him at much the same time), in the chapters on Thailand and the Philippines for example he hardly gets beyond the girlie bars.

I have taken your points fully on board and have changed the ending radically and will remove ‘Things Fall Apart’ as it’s not being balanced by a positive element, as is suggested by Lloyd in his Comment posted below. I do not imagine this will resolve the issue in your eyes though.

In writing the book I tried not to repeat the Gaugainesque cliché of a middle aged man escaping to a paradise of swaying palm trees and dusky maidens. I have described things in a subjective way just as they happened for me.

While it’s pretty easy to get used to an air conditioned condo in Bangkok, living full time in a Thai village and sharing the lives of a local family while working out new relationships isn’t and sometimes it can get to you. I now have nearly twenty years experience living in Asia and have spent several years in similar conditions in West Africa so am not exactly suffering culture shock.

While I thus describe those difficulties and frustrations, I have constantly tried to balance this by saying that I’m here and trying to deal with the difficulties precisely because I like it and because I want to be here. In your view I’ve not tried hard enough though!

Essentially I am exposing my own cultural assumptions and suggesting how they are at odds with and an impediment to appreciating amd enjoying the local style of life and learning something from it. In a number of chapters I say how differently my Thai family does this or that and that being in such close company with them without any break can be hard, but I then conclude that perhaps they’ve have found a better balance in their lives than mine.

I hope the book then goes on to describe my journey in challenging all my assumptions and as I put it, trying to let go and ‘learn to go with the flow’.

At one point I say as follows… ‘There are so many lessons here for me on finding a better balance in life and it’s still not too late for me to stop struggling and to go with the flow.’ Indeed the final words of the last chapter read, ‘It could be at last that I’m learning to go with the flow.’

In the chapter, ‘An Expat Expatiates’, I say that grumbling can be a useful safety valve when you’re living in a foreign culture but that moaning expats are a complete pain. I’ve tried to extract the humour from my predicament and at one point I say that if in the book I express my irritation at things, I’m not saying the Thais are irritating. It’s probably me being irritable. The joke is thus on me.

On your one specific comment about me looking a cheap Charlie over hosting the party to inaugurate our new house, this is the passage in the book you refer to…

“Why’s everyone walking off with plastic bags when they go home? As the folk arrive, a boy at a table checks them in and they make a small payment which he carefully enters in a book. The tradition is that when next time we go to their party, we consult our book and give them their stake back plus a modest mark-up. It’s a sort of rustic value added tax on parties and it seems a great idea. Everyone who pays gets unlimited food and alcohol for the duration and is given a takeaway present of food and cola in plastic bags.”

And I conclude, “The ceremony, the reason for the event and a good excuse for a beano of a party, is now over and I really enjoyed it, not that I understood very much of it…. The Buddhist faith looks fun and is so much an integral part of a small community such as this.”

How negative is that?

Incidentally I only otherwise mention money once in this chapter when I say that for anyone building a house there's no lawyer’s fees or stuff like that but never to forget the mega-party they’ll have to throw before they can live there. And that was supposed to be a joke!

You say, ‘Nothing seems to please you about Thailand.’ Jing jing??!!

In a way your comment is a relief to me as I thought I’d stuffed the book full of gushy, rose-tinted compliments about Thailand and I’m glad at least if I haven’t erred in that direction. There are even two chapter headings that refer to this as a ‘paradise’ and I could quote you many other gushy bits.

In one early chapter I describe precisely why I like and chose to live in Thailand (which I have known well for over thirty years) in preference to all the other countries I have visited in SE Asia. I debate these countries and then at some length spell out what I like so much about Thailand and why I’m living here. This is part of what I say…

“It’s a bit of a cliché but the principal reason has to be the special qualities of the Thai people themselves.” …

“It’s hard to pin down but the Thais have a dignity and a serenity that I love and foreign visitors, if not loud or aggressive, are accorded great consideration. Unlike in many countries, this unique welcome has survived several generations of mass tourism and has not been corrupted by familiarity.

Thailand is not just a superficial ‘Land of Smiles’ though and is more than an oriental parody of McDonalds’ politeness. It goes much deeper and as a very different culture to my own, I want to be here and to understand more of it. Yes, I like Thailand primarily for the Thai people themselves and because they never fail to make me feel at home.”

In an attemp to justify myself, the last chapter of the book now begins as follows…

“There has recently been a number of reality shows on TV where they’ve dumped some privileged urban Thais in Isaan to live with a farming family for a few weeks and they’ve been hilarious. The joke is that the Bangkokians found the whole experience unbelievably difficult and grumbled incessantly about everything.

I too have grumbled a bit between these pages and while I’ve tried hard to bring out the humourous side to my own predicament, I hope my quips and comments have not been unduly cynical or negative towards those around me. If I am to portray how it’s felt to live here though, as well as the good times it’s essential that I describe my frustrations too.

Nowhere is life perfect and it would be a cop-out for me merely to depict a rose tinted paradise of swaying palm trees and smiley Thais. What I have written therefore is not a detached and objective critique of life in Isaan but my personal account of how it happened to me, sometimes told in the heat of the moment with as much emotion as reason.

I’m therefore keeping my fingers firmly crossed that you now think I’ve found a balance that doesn’t gloss over my difficulties but also is fair to the place and the people who have received me so generously.”

I hope that the book now has a better balance since I’ve revised it and I’m grateful to you Jerry especially and to everyone else for this debate about it. Time will tell!

Andrew

Is It I Who Am The Buffalo?

2008-02-19T08:19:00.003+07:00

In my previous post that appears below I told you about my forthcoming book, 'MY THAI GIRL AND I' and pasted in a chapter called 'Things Fall Apart' describing how nothing much ever seems to work properly out here living in the the backwoods of Thailand. I was worried that it came over as being a bit too negative and asked you for your opinion on it.

Many thanks to the ten readers who responded by comment and email direct to me at arhicks56@hotmail.com. Your views were very useful and interesting.

Now for the vote! One commentator, Lloyd said I should not include the chapter in the book. A couple of you were non-committal saying it depends on the context, and the rest pretty much said that it should go in as it reflected their own experience here and I should tell it like it is.

In writing the chapter, I was hoping the irony/humour one of you refers to might justify it and save it from being an unmitigated rant. I'm still not sure.

One of you asked whether what I was saying was intended as a reflection on local people or as providing insight into the western male and his lack of understanding of the predicament he is in. This for me hits the nail on the head as yes, it is mainly intended as the latter. Seen in the context of the rest of the book, it's all about the sometimes difficult though rewarding experience for a farang swimming in a very unfamiliar sea.

You also make the point that one should get recommendations first before buying goods or services. Well, in the case of the five mechanics who cocked up the brakes of the jeep, all were recommended by locals and by a farang friend. The latest mechanic proved to be reasonably okay but basically the standard is very low in a small market town, ranging from rip-off merchants to mere incompetence. (You can't go further afield if the jeep won't get there!)

The marital farce of the story is that I was clearly asking for trouble buying second hand in the face of my wife Cat's view that all car dealers here are crooks selling utter rubbish. My pig headedness with the jeep thus proved me horribly wrong and Cat is now vindicated! The only answer she says is to buy a brand new Toyota, which we have now done. Then you get impeccable service. I'd happily have my appendix taken out in the Toyota workshop in town!

So that's it. I now have to decide whether to leave the chapter in or to take it out.

Despite all the kind comments, I'm still inclined to take Lloyd's advice and not to risk publishing this chapter. The book is intended as a feel-good story and while it has to depict the inevitable farang frustrations learning to live in a new and different place, I'm worried that 'Things Fall Apart' is too much of a rant.

Interestingly one of you said that with time you adjust you expectations living here and learn to adopt a more laid back attitude and this softening process is a major theme of the book. You'll never make a go of it and be happy living here unless you too say 'mai pen rai' and learn to go with the flow!

Thanks again and keep the comments coming.

I must now stop writing this and finish the book. I'm almost there!

Is This Chapter Unduly Negative?

2008-02-09T15:41:00.000+07:00

Since long before I started doing this blog, I've been writing the story of 'my 'Thai girl' and I. It's a blow by blow account of how Cat and I first met and how we came to set up home together in her village in North East Thailand.

I hope it will be published in Thailand in the next few months and I am now working on finalising the text.

Because I feel positive about this country and about living here, I hope the book reflects that, though on the other hand it would be boring and misleading if I were to suggest that all was rosy with palm trees and eternal sunsets and sweet smiling Thais. Sometimes it can be difficult living here and there are thing that make life a struggle at times, so that has to go in the book. The difficulty then is getting the balance right.

A very good friend of mine whose opinion I respect highly has just read the draft manuscript for me and he tells me that I have failed to get the balance right. The tone of the book he says is negative and jaundiced towards Thailand and this worries me very much.

I've therefore been scanning the book to try to find instnces of me moaning and carping about things and I've just found a chapter that could be a culprit. In my defence I do say in the book that it is a feature of being an 'expat' that one tends to let off steam by expatiating at length about the frustrations of living here and this is a running 'joke' through the book. This does not excuse me though if my grumbling goes beyond a joke so I must be careful to cut out anything that is potentially offensive.

The first chapter I'm worried about appears below and I'd like your considered opinion on it. I'm almost decided upon deleting it on grounds that it is not that relevant to the theme of the book, but what do you think? Is it unduly negative and should I delete it?

I'd really appreciate you leaving a comment or if you prefer, email me at arhicks56@hotmail.com. Could this be the first example of a book being written by blogger consensus?

If you hve any thoughts on the cover design, that'd be much appreciated too.

Extract from my forthcoming book, 'My Thai Girl and I'

28. Things Fall Apart
I sometimes wonder if it’s a consequence of ‘Thainess’, of the readiness to say mai pen rai, meaning ‘never mind’ or ‘what the hell’, that the folks round here seem to be irredeemable botchers. Everything’s a mess in the countryside, though to be fair, it’s the same with small farmers everywhere. Tiny farms in rural France are a tangle of broken machinery, nettles and brambles because you haven’t time for anything fancy when you work a ten hour day and can hardly make ends meet. Likewise a Thai farmer isn’t too concerned about having the ideal home, but still it bothers me that nothing here ever seems to work properly and nobody is the slightest bit concerned about it.

My old jeep’s in dock yet again and when our second hand motorbike, bought from a dishonest motorbike mechanic, fails to start yet again, I do begin to wonder. With both out of action, we’ve just had to borrow a motorbike to get into Sangkha. On the way Cat begins to slow, shouting to me that something’s wrong. We grind to a halt and as I look down, there’s a ping and a greasy sprocket falls into the dust. I try to pick it up but it’s blazing hot and I burn my fingers.

Having paid for the repair of the motorbike, I tried the bicycle instead. It was securely locked with chain and padlock but then the key broke off in the lock. When I found the hacksaw to cut the chain, that was broken too and as for the bike, it’ll be exactly the same story.

All these experiences leave me feeling a little cynical. I’ll soon be telling you more about the jeep I’ve bought, but the succession of five mechanics I paid to stop its brakes seizing up were either incompetent or hadn’t even touched them before writing out a bill. When we came back from a trip to England the brakes were seizing up yet again, so I got Cat’s cousin to take them apart at the house, while I watched. They were utterly filthy and full of black dust, the slave cylinders were seized and the pads were coming off the shoes.

Sadly a few days later we never made it home from town, the front brakes binding tight and screaming so loudly that people in the street turned to stare. Thankfully, mechanic number five whose garage was nearby seemed competent and he had it fixed the next day. The jeep has modern servo-assisted brakes and the servo that was supposed to be new, was a dud.

For some months the jeep then stopped perfectly, or as well as drum brakes can stop a ton or two of metal, but then the ultimate nightmare occurred. One day, on the way into town I put my foot on the brake pedal and it went straight to the floor. With a rush of adrenaline, I grabbed for the hand brake, forgetting there isn’t one and then resorted to prayer. It was only because I was on a straight road with nothing in front of me that I didn’t have to die. If I’d made it into Sangkha and lost my brakes in the middle of town, the story could have been very different.

At little more than walking pace, I then drove the jeep back to my mechanic and paid him to have another go at getting the brakes right. A rubber seal in the ‘new’ servo had apparently failed. Not long after, exactly the same thing happened again, so the only thing I can now think of is buying an emergency anchor.

My conclusion is that maintenance doesn’t come naturally in this part of the world. To make it worse, most cheap things like door locks and taps are rubbish anyway and people are thoroughly careless fitting and using them, casually trashing everything they touch.

I won’t make any friends by saying this, but in my experience the bush mechanics I’ve encountered in Africa were far, far better than the Thais. In India and Burma they have amazing skills breathing life into old jalopies and I’m told the Vietnamese are fine mechanics. So why can the Thais not keep my jeep on the road as it’s not so very difficult. The engine, gearbox and brakes are modern Japanese transplants, while the rest is as simple as a tractor.

Small motorbikes regularly break down too, so maybe the problem’s a failure to do simple maintenance. Neglect can be expensive but Thais just don’t do maintenance, or so it seems to me. I often wonder why this is as the Thais are highly materialistic and sometimes strive hard to get the shiny baubles they’ve seen on the telly. I think of Prasert who, with his wife, spends his life stirring noodles to keep up the payments on his now ageing pick-up. I think of the girl in the bar who told me she’ll be hard at it until she’s bought the new car she can’t live without. So why is it that once they’ve got the object of their desire, they often seem to neglect it?

Is it a Buddhist thing? Could it be that material things are illusory and impermanent and if you can’t expect them to stay gorgeous and new, why bother to look after them at all. But no, I’m sure that’s not the explanation and I don’t know what it is.

Asians generally like everything to be brand spanking new and often can’t be bothered with the old. The Chinese for example like new houses because old ones are full of spirits from the past and as Bangkok is largely an immigrant Chinese city, many of the buildings there are un-maintained and falling into ruin. Apart from a few old areas that deserve restoration, half the city needs to be knocked down and rebuilt.

Attitudes are so very different in the West. We farang actually like old things for their hand-made feel and for the patina they’ve acquired from decades of human contact and use. For all these reasons we lavish enormous care on old buildings and I adore my thirty year old MGB which runs beautifully despite its age.

In Thailand it seems acceptable that nothing much ever works. The ATM at the bank often has no ink so withdrawal receipts come out blank, it’s run out of paper and even of money. Copy shops give you appalling photocopies and in the internet shop the letters on the keys have worn away to nothing and are illegible. My TOT IP Star satellite internet, a recent acquisition, rarely works, the maintenance men are quite shocked at being called out and I’m expected to pay for a sub-standard service.

It’s boring to trot out more examples and I’d better stop moaning because maybe they’re right… it doesn’t matter anyway! It’s my farang attitude that’s out of line, though sometimes it really does drive me mad.

Recently when taking Cat’s sister to the Bangkok bus, I spent two baht to have a pee at the Sangkha bus station. Twenty four hours a day somebody sits outside the toilet collecting the money, but do they ever clean the filthy urinals I’ve just paid to use? Not apparently. They’re yellow and stinking and broken and it’s hard to believe Thailand has just hosted the World Toilet Expo in Bangkok which promotes high standards of sanitation. The Thais are very particular about personal hygiene, so why do they tolerate these appalling public latrines?

Since then, the bus station toilet’s been closed and it says ‘sia’ on the door (‘spoiled’), so perhaps something positive’s about to happen. Trouble is, now there’s nowhere to go for a leak before you face an eight hour bus ride to the capital.

Live Your Dream!

2008-02-03T08:48:00.000+07:00

A month or two back there was a piece in the Bangkok Post reporting on the world’s longest journey by pedal power. Over thirteen years and 74,000 kilometres, Briton, Jason Lewis had just completed an extraordinary journey around the world from London and back by bicycle and in a tiny pedal powered boat. He had crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific and endured many hardships and dangers to return to Greenwich at exactly the same point, now aged forty and an older and wiser man.

I knew him and his boat before he left all those years ago and frankly I didn’t rate his chances of surviving a circumnavigation very highly. At the time I was chairman of the late lamented Exeter Maritime Museum, the finest collection of ethnic boats in the world and we’d given him warehouse space to build his boat.

My insight into his chances was based on the remarkable collection in the museum of early Atlantic and Pacific rowing boats. We had Ridgeway and Blyth’s… you name it, we had them all, including several whose wreckage had been found washed up, their crew long dead. These were a poignant memorial to the men who, uneasy with a conventional life, were driven to live their dream.

As I watched Jason’s wooden cockleshell slowly taking shape, I feared he might pay the same penalty for attempting this extraordinary feat. The boat looked far too fragile, less sturdy than the fibreglass boats in our collection and I was fearful for him. Designed by a marine architect, Alan Boswell, a member of the museum’s board of directors, nonetheless it survived a mid-Atlantic capsize and all that nature could throw at it.

I wasn’t too sure about Jason either. He wasn’t at all in the same heroic mould as say Robin Know-Johnson who was a great supporter of the museum or Atlantic rower, Chay Blyth. A powerful ex-marine who I’d met over the canapés at the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes, Blyth struck me as a man of huge resource who would survive the toughest of challenges. Jason on the other hand was of slight build, modest and quietly spoken and his steely determination was never apparent. How wrong I was and how glad I am that he lived his dream and survived to step ashore in London, his achievement a world story even in Bangkok.

If you tell a Thai that in life anything’s possible and that you’ve ‘gotta live your dream’, they’ll look at you as if you’re mad. What Jason has done would be comprehensible to few not brought up to understand the individualism and striving of western culture.

In part this reflects different aspirations; what sane person would spend so much money painfully pedaling in a circle for thirteen years? But it’s also because in less wealthy societies there’s a stark lack of opportunity. In the West everything comes to the resourceful planner and outrageous dreams can sometimes be realized. In a poorer place, it’s much more difficult, both practically and psychologically.

If making something of your life is more of a struggle here in Thailand, it’s less acceptable to expect people to support or sponsor your foolish quest. How can you justify it to yourself and others when there are more practical projects desperately needing time and money. Personal horizons therefore remain more narrow and people want to be safe and comfortable and not to take outrageous risks.

I’m not really sure where poverty begins and ends but there is in particular a poverty of opportunity here in Thailand. Many thousands of people leave the land and have to survive as best they can. With little formal employment, huge numbers have to get by, often cooking and selling food in the street. In absolute terms this is not poverty as their basic needs are met but that’s about all they can expect of life.

You see them everywhere such as the tired middle-aged woman I see squatting under the pedestrian bridge in Bangkok amidst the noise and fumes of the traffic. She’s working from two large baskets which she carries on a bamboo pole across her shoulder. In it are a ceramic mortar and a pestle, green mangoes and all the ingredients for making an Isaan dish that sells for a few baht. She walks bent over with a shambling gait as the baskets are extremely heavy.

This is her life as a street hawker and she can never ever step beyond it. She feels lucky enough to earn a hundred baht or two a day and her horizons have never been wider than this. The only dream she can live is to make enough to cover her rent and to send a little back to her children or grandchildren who are still at home in the village. Life for her will never improve; she has no opportunities.

We in the West can climb every mountain and ford every stream, but elsewhere realities are more stark. Jason Lewis ultimately found his dream in the most remarkable way and his story must fascinate Thais reading about it in the newspapers as ultimately it seems so senseless, so bizarre.

I hope that in his long quest, Jason found his own personal nirvana. Now it’s all over and he must do something equally difficult and that is to build a new life, to find a more modest dream that can sustain him over the years to come.

Back Down to Earth!

2008-01-28T09:46:00.000+07:00

Air travel whisks us from one world to the next with so little chance for reflection. Yesterday I was in Bangkok, swept up in its twenty four hour frenzy, and five days before I was in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Today, after a more prosaic bus journey, ten hours door to door, I’m home in the village and coming back down to earth.

Phnom Penh was a big surprise. During my absence of five years, much progress has been made in making it the lovely city it once was. Outside the Royal Palace, the roads are as smooth as the ubiquitous Cambodian pool tables, the parks along the elegant French avenues are colourful and well kept and the paintwork is fresh on the ornamental lamp posts and railings. There’s evidence of money around but smart new cars stand in stark contrast to the old style cyclos and the ordinary people who still look as though they've had hard lives.

The palace itself is of course an extravagant confection, a mere fairy tale with a dark history, but its glitter is spectacular especially when lit up at night.

Returning to Bangkok I had a meeting at Asia Books about the distribution of my next book to be called, ‘My Thai Girl and I’, which was very exciting. It’s the story of me and Cat setting up home together in the North East of Thailand, interspersed with various ramblings about Thailand.

I then rushed from pillar to post having photos scanned onto a memory stick but now having got home can find absolutely nothing recorded on said memory stick. Computronics are making a fool of me again! And I delivered to Asia Books another 500 copies of my novel ‘Thai Girl’ which is still selling well.

Every evening was full and I couldn’t manage a quiet night in. By chance I bumped into my old friend Greg in Sukhuvit, having a few weeks back bumped into him on Koh Chang when he should have been in England. He’s a big bloke to bump into, as is my dear friend and gastronome Roger Le Phoque with whom I shared a jar or two.

Then there were the literary luminaries. First was Canadian Bill, a university prof of Eng lit. I saw him together with Christopher Moore, author of about twenty Bangok novels (or is it thirty), whose latest is to be filmed with Keanu Reeves as Calvino, the hack detective of the story. Looks like he’s about to hit the jackpot.

Next up was Jerry Hopkins whose biography of Jim Morrison sold two million copies, not to mention one on Elvis and Yoko Ono and a more recent tome published in Singapore called ‘Asian Aphrodisiacs’. Jerry has seen it all and is a great raconteur. He has a Thai wife and a home in Surin not far from us but spends most of his time in Bangkok hitting the keys.

Finally I met up at an undisclosed location with two big internet stars, boasting regular readership in the hundreds of thousands, namely the mysterious Stickman and Dave the Rave no less. That was an evening and a half!

Google any of these writers, perhaps adding ‘Bangkok’ and you can find their websites and learn a little more about them.

The evening with Jerry was special as he took me to a bar in Sukhumvit Soi 8 where on Wednesdays and Thursdays a remarkable group plays rock and roll. Lead man Peter’s middle years didn’t stop him belting out the lyrics in a white silk suit thirties style with wide trousers and patent leather shoes, supported by two very accomplished Thai guitarists and a farang drummer.

It was a great performance. Where two or three are gathered together, obsessives like him are keen to entertain us and entertainer indeed he was. More than just a musician, he held our attention with his strong stage presence and a delightful patter in which he told us the day of the week Buddy Holly or PJ Proby had written the number he was about to sing and what they’d had for breakfast that morning.

He took us back more than a year or two, willing us to dream, dream, dream that it’s possible still to get one’s kicks on route sixty six. Which reminds me, I’d love him to read the blog I called, ‘You Can Score On Route 24’ as it contains a spoof of ‘Route Sixty Six’. I can almost hear him singing it.

‘If you ever plan to motor east,
Of Thai girls you’ll soon find a feast.
In Buriram and Sisaket,
There’s many waiting for you yet.
You can score on Route 24.’

Well maybe!

On getting back home to the village in Surin, I had that familiar feeling that everything round the house is in chaos. I’m not saying it’s all because Cat’s got stuck into her next new project though. You see she’s gone into retail catering and has been at the school for the last few days selling fruit and banana pudding and things to the kids and teachers.

She’s madly busy and I’m quite impressed as she really seems to be making a profit. As I’ve paid for all the stuff, should I ask if she’ll hand over some of the cash to me… or would I rather stay married?

Anyway it’s hot and dry and earthy here as it always is, a world apart from Bangkok and even Phnom Penh, but I’m really quite enjoying coming back down to Earth. I’m glad I came back the slow way too. And now I’m going to have plenty of time for reflection!

There´s Fish In Them Rice Fields!

2008-01-19T18:46:00.000+07:00

In the last few days, we’ve been having fish deep fried in vegetable oil and they’ve been delicious. They’re only small but they go crispy right through so you can eat them whole including the head, without having to pick around for bones. And they’re even tastier because we get them for free.

When I was new in these parts I once asked Cat why she was wanting to put green netting all the way round the family fish pond. To deter theft?

‘No, it’s to stop the fish escaping,’ she said without so much as a blink.

It’s sometimes difficult to know what stories to believe in Thailand but this one was true. Certain types of small fish can migrate across land and if they sense that the water’s greener on the other side, they’ll give your fish pond the push and move off elsewhere.

What’s also extraordinary is that while more than half the year here in the North East of Thailand is absolute drought with no rainfall, when the rains come the flooded fields are soon teeming with fish. And not only fish… there are crabs, shrimps and shellfish of several varieties, just like at the seaside.

There’s a super-abundance of protein in the water, all of which disappears with the dry season, though it’s still possible to find crab holes and to dig them up even when the fields are dusty and dry.

This cycle of feast and famine thus creates a need to preserve surplus fish for the dry season and the chosen means is fermentation. The plaa raa that results, sometimes called rotten fish is an important part of the local diet. Poor families eat their rice with plaa raa and little else and to a non-local it smells utterly disgusting.

Strangely though they all love it and pla raa and the purple land crabs are an essential part of that great Isaan dish, som tam. This is a salad made with shredded green papaya and if you can persuade them to serve it without plaa raa and chili in volcanic quantities, it’s a great dish indeed.

At the end of November the rains are over and the fish will soon be gone, though not quite yet. Cat has been out in the fields with her boots, a bucket, two little cousins and Pepsi, the dog and has come back with kilos of fish and crabs. She has precise local knowledge of where to find them and she’s never happier than when she’s burrowing in the mud to find this excellent free food.

She has absolutely no need to bother doing this dirty task and I like her all the more because she so loves doing it. But then if she were the sort of wife who sat at home preening and painting her lips pink, then I wouldn’t have chosen to be with her in the first place.

Cat is a rich and enthusiastic source of information on rural life here and for me she is the link between my urban, western lifestyle and the place in which I now live. It would all respects be pretty meaningless without her.

(Posted from Phnom Penh, Cambodia.)

Gates to Nowhere

2008-01-09T17:05:00.001+07:00

Some time ago I blogged about the social obligation to build a big wall with flashy gates if you manage to build a modern house that's a cut above the rest. It's a statement of status and wealth as much as Prado and Gucci.

The usual order for construction is first of all thousands of tons of soil, then the wall, follwed by the gates. In this case they've done the soil but seem to have forgotten the wall. If they do the wall, I'll bet they run out of money and never build the house. And if they do the house, they'll probably start by doing the roof first.

Where's the postman going to put the letters? They've forgotten to put up a box.

All This And Cheese Too!

2008-01-09T16:41:00.000+07:00

Back home in the village, I'm reviewing my photos of Koh Chang and couldn't resist posting a few more. They were taken on the trip I took on the wooden boat, the Thaifun.

It was a long day and we motored down to Koh Wai and Koh Mak, just as Ben did in one of the final chapters of "Thai Girl". It was a superb day as always and good to escape the commercialisation of Koh Chang for some truly remote spots, nonetheless quite busy between Xmas and New Year.

A day or two later the temperature dropped and it was blowing half a gale. I wondered what the Thaifun did as it was not at anchor. It was in the papers that tourists had to be 'rescued' from Koh Wai as they were stranded there by the high winds. What a place to be stranded.

It's all very beautiful as you can see and here on Koh Chang there's cheese too. I haven't been able to buy chesse for ages as the big Thai supermarkets in Surin don't stock it except by the ton. Here at Anna's supemarket there's quite a good selection. And at Oodie's Place pizzas as well!

Why did I come home? At least it's not for long. Tomorrow I take the overnight bus to Bangkok and on Saturday fly to Phnom Penh. I haven't been to Cambodia for ages and it should be good. There may be a temporary lull but then a torrent of blogs about that too.

Long Beach KC

2008-01-04T12:02:00.000+07:00

In my previous post, I deplored the poor standard of development on Koh Chang, my favourite island to the east of Bangkok, but perhaps I should now balance this a bit by saying that there are still some beautiful quiet spots to be found.

If when you land at the ferry, instead of turning right you turn left down the eastern side of the island, you will find it undeveloped and beautiful. Mainly coconut, rubber and fruit plantations, it is still much as it should be though there are some nice places you can stay.

If you keep driving and turn left down the long peninsula before Salak Phet you can enjoy many spectacular views before reaching Long Beach. Here you will find the 'Tree House' which is an example of exactly how a tropical beach resort should. Like the first 'Tree House' on Lonely Beach, it is built substantially of wood and bamboo with grass roofs. It blends perfectly with its surroundings and in a few days it could be removed and the environment returned to its original state, a huge contrast to the massive reinforced concrete structures that are being built elsewhere.

The road to Long Beach is a bit challenging, but so much the better as it deters all but the most determined seekers of solitude. I hope this place receives an adequate flow of business though, as unlike the others it deserves to succeed.

Koh Chang - All Change!

2007-12-30T13:09:00.000+07:00

It's always distressing to see how quickly Koh Chang is changing. As Thailand's second biggest islands it was late developing perhaps because of turmoil in neighbouring Cambodia but now they're building like there's no tomorrow.

When I first came here seven years ago the roads were rough tracks which wound through the palm trees. Now they're dusty highways with streams of traffic and the once sleepy villages have joined up in an ugly sprawl of scruffy buildings.

The beaches are still relatively well managed and the mountains are pristine but why oh why do the Thais foul their own nest with such abandon. Everything is illegal; this is a National Park after all; and in the pursuit of the tourist dollar anything goes.

After you land from the ferry, the road takes you through Klong Son and it's a shambles of builders' merchants, markets and car workshops, a terrible shock for the arriving tourist. And with everything happening unplanned with no sewagwe systems or regulations on outfalls and with increasing demand on supplies of water and power, it's a miracle if anything ever works.

While I have every sympathy for the poor underpaid workers who keep the place humming, what Koh Chang really needs is a massive recession in the tourism industry to slow things down a bit.

In February we stayed in the last bamboo huts on White Sand Beach where I could swing my hammock on the nearby coconut palms. Now these huts are all gone and a massive conference centre and rooms are being built. At least it's set back from the sea but it's out of scale and a total disaster.

At present there is demand and the beach is full but as a result the Thais are throwing money at Koh Chang thus ensuring that there is massive over-supply and that few businesses will make any money. I shall not be weeping for the fat cats who fail to make millions out of the rape of so beautiful an island.

Ultimately the tourists will stop coming as soon this island will not be worth visiting unless something radical is done to control the current rate of development. It would be naive though to think that anything will be done and the pace of change will thus be the only thing that stays the same.