Thailand - January

The King

I had thoroughly enjoyed every country we had visited so far.  In their own way each had been wonderful, exciting, different, exotic, and/or interesting.  From a cruising point of view, the Pacific and the Polynesian islands were my favourite place and I’d go back there tomorrow, though we never seriously contemplated living in any of the islands.  But as far as individual countries are concerned I can honestly say that I loved Thailand. We both did, but me particularly. We spent a wonderful, varied year here.  Though the people have a reputation with some foreigners as grasping and only interested in taking your money, I didn’t find that so and met many extremely nice Thais.  And I find Buddhism appealing – it seems to be a laissez-faire sort of religion and their temples are beautiful.

Wat Chalong

I met a young man once who had spent nine years as a monk so I asked him to tell me it’s main principles. He was very unforthcoming but finally told me that the Buddha would never kill any animal. Knowing the Thais to be uninhibited meat eaters, I expressed surprise and asked if the Buddha had forbidden meat. No, he said, the Buddha would eat meat, but wouldn’t kill an animal. So, I asked, he’d let someone else kill the animal and then he’d eat it? Yup. I gave up at that point and have since explored the subject on the internet. On the surface the people are gentle and laid back, but I believe that when offended they are quick to violence and have little compunction killing one another. Theft, however, was very rare.

Everything was scruffy and rather lawless. Having grown up in Africa where the ‘nanny’ system and ‘blame’ culture have yet to get a hold we felt very comfortable with that side of it. The lack of hygiene was sometimes comical, but we never got sick, nor did I hear of anyone else who did. And of course we loved the food which was so good and so cheap I hardly ever cooked the entire year we were in Thailand.

Kitchen on wheels

The Thai sense of safety was almost non-existent. I once saw a man driving a motorcycle, with one hand on the handlebar and the other arm crooked around a new-born baby which he was proudly showing off to his neighbours. Admittedly, he was driving slowly and it was within the confines of our village, but even so!

At one point the police set up a traffic check point at the roundabout in Ao Chalong and it was laughable to see motorcyclists donning their helmets as they came into the area and then removing them again as soon as they’d passed through. The manoeuvre of removing and replacing was in itself dangerous whilst driving, but they hated having to wear a helmet. The main idea of the checkpoint was actually to catch and fine the foreigners, and we were caught once, not for no helmet as we always wore ours, but for not having my driving licence on me! 300 bhat.

Household pets were common, cats in particular. Dogs, which were never kept tied or locked up and therefore not vicious, were a menace on the roads and only the very canny or very lucky survived.  On my route to work there was one ancient mangy old cur who would stretch out and sleep on the side of the road, forcing the traffic to swerve round him - amazingly everyone did. 

I was fascinated by the language and started learning it. I memorized the entire alphabet and found the grammar not too difficult, though the tones render it embarrassingly difficult for foreigners to speak properly.

Had it not been so difficult to buy land, I think we would have stayed. However, the authorities have, quite understandably, clamped down and forbidden foreigners from buying land. That was unfortunate for us as property is really reasonable and we would have been able to afford something quite decent. It was actually possible to buy at the time, but only through a complicated process with lawyers and a Thai partner who had to hold over 50% of the equity. The endless visa thing made it difficult to stay for any length of time and impossible to stay forever. A foreigner can never get permanent residency – not even those who marry Thai nationals.

There were lots of foreign men in Thailand with Thai women. The men are looking for a woman, usually considerably younger than themselves and, through marriage, the possibility of buying property. The women are looking for financial support and a child, hopefully with a foreign passport and access to another country. Thai men are remarkably unfazed by this influx of foreign men taking their women, and we heard that it is not only tolerated, but even encouraged. We met some of these foreign men and the pattern was often that they were married for about 5 years, the child was born, shortly after which the woman would lose interest and leave, taking the child as well as the property he had paid for. He, still in love with both her and the child, would continue to pay maintenance whilst she went home to her new Thai husband. Despite the fact that this scenario was well documented, foreign men continued to flock in and take Thai wives, and it was hard to feel sorry for them. You’d find gaggles of them drowning their sorrows in pubs, denigrating the Thai people. Mike found it difficult to relate to these men and made no friends amongst them.

2 January 2006

On the recommendation of Boris and Lisbeth on Li, we made the anchorage at Nai Harn in the south of Phuket our first stop, and shared dinner with them that night in the restaurant on the beach.

Boris and Lisbeth had been cruising in this area for some time and they told us how they had been anchored in this same spot the previous year when the tsunami hit the island. At anchor they felt nothing and their only indication that something was amiss was when their yacht suddenly reversed direction though the wind had not changed. A few seconds later they watched in horror as the tsunami hit the beach. They pointed to a high spot on the road circling the bay and said that a small boat had been deposited up there by the wave. They entertained us further by recounting how they had been anchored in New York Harbour on 11 September 2001 and witnessed the bombing of the Twin Towers. We joked that perhaps we should anchor a long way away from them!

Lovely though Nai Harn was, it was a long tuk tuk ride over to the nearest town, so a few days later we moved over to the anchorage at Chalong Bay. At Immigration we were given the standard one month visa and, as our intention then was to leave at the end of January, we only asked for one month for the boat. But then we met Keith and Marian on Tenacity II. Marian was working as an English Teacher at the university. She encouraged me to try teaching, told me there was a shortage and the pay was quite good (relatively) but I would need a certificate to Teach English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). We didn’t have the money to pay for this course but then, quite fortuitously, we had another unexpected little windfall so we made the decision to stay in Thailand for a year and I went ahead with the course.

Mike rowed me into shore every morning and collected me in the evening. Despite the fact that the anchorage at Ao Chalong was full of yachts, many of them living aboard, there were no adequate facilities for dinghies. There was a long jetty which protruded right out into the bay and one could tie up somewhere along this jetty. The spot needed careful selection and a very long rope to cater for the tidal range. Badly positioned and the dinghy would get crushed at high tide, too short a rope and the dinghy would be left dangling at low tide. The whole thing was very unsatisfactory; the water could get very rough under the jetty and leaping from the dinghy to the scaffolding under the jetty was fraught with undignified dangers, after which one had to clamber up the scaffolding to get onto the jetty. It was difficult enough in trousers, and each week morning I watched with admiration as Marian negotiated this hazard on her way to work, smartly dressed in a skirt. The equally ungraceful alternative was to weave the dinghy slowly though rocks and weed to the beach, either long and very shallow at low tide or rough and abrupt at high tide, both requiring that one leap out before landing and drag the dinghy up the beach.

The view from Mama Dim's restaurant

Mama Dim ran this ramshackle little restaurant at the water front where quite a few sailors congregated, though most preferred the more up market Jimmy Lighthouse a few doors away. She lived in a room behind the restaurant with her two pretty teenage daughters. Most of the restaurant had been washed away by the tsunami the previous year, and it was the yachties who had helped her to re-build.  Mama Dim was notoriously unreliable but, when she could be pinned down, was a marvellous cook and it was she who introduced us to the positively divine Tom Ka soup.