A beetle bit sidetracked...

Today’s post is meant to be a meme, but I just had to come and tell you about Son coming home from his trial run expedition to Khao Yai…

He arrived back home yesterday,

• smelling vile,
• limping,
• bitten to bits by mosquitos despite Deet,
• sunburned despite 50 spf,
• ‘more blisters than skin’
• covered in scratches,
• wearing his teacher’s trousers!

After four portions of shepherds’ pie, he felt strong enough to empty his rucksack out all over the kitchen floor.

Finally, he pulled out the sleeping bag from its bag to add to the washing pile, shook it open and THIS is what came out with it:

Gargantuan food; gargantuan feet.

Oh good grief; you wouldn’t believe the amount of work that goes into sending Son off for an International Award expedition…( the same thing as the Duke of Edinburgh Award in the UK.) This year it’s silver and he’s off on a rehearsal this weekend for three days. I tell you, the amount of work involved means I feel somewhat deserving of a silver award myself.

When I moved to Thailand I was warned that you couldn’t buy western sized shoes here, but I was okay Jack. I’ve got size five feet, I fitted Thai sized shoes. NEVER did I imagine I was going to need to worry about the children’s feet. But here we are: gigantic feet, both of them. I’ve been in email negotiations with someone in London to see if they could get hold of great big trekking shoes. (Thank you Simon: I know you were too busy, really) and he was going to have to get them to whichever colleague was the next visitor to Thailand. I finally found enormous trekking shoes yesterday morning. The man at Central Chit Lom had size 45 and 46 and said he’d keep them for me until Son and I returned around 4.30pm.

This whole thing is assessed. The students have got to plan their diet to suit the tasks they are undertaking. It needs to be varied and sufficient. This amounts to about 5,000 calories (*sits at the keyboard for a second, wondering if hiking up a mountain is worth doing so I can consume more calories. No, maybe not*) So then we had to go to the foodhall for two hours to consider what can be taken; carried; enjoyed; prepared; fulfil leaders' ideas of balanced diet…

Truly I began to lose the will.

Eventually, we finished. We went to the taxi rank: BIG long queues. Bangkok was under attack from a tropical downpour. We’ll have to take the sky train. “But,” I say to Son, “I’m not walking home in this. We’ll go to the next sky train stop [from home] and get a taxi just the local bit.”

So there we are, not at our local sky train station but one further away to justify a taxi journey. It's still pouring sheets of rain. The roads are car parks and so the first three taxis refuse to take us. We are soaking wet already. If we’d got off and walked from the correct stop, we’d be home by now. Eventually a taxi agrees to take us. He doesn’t know his way; we miss our left turn, we do a u-turn, he misses the next right. He reassesses; instead of a u-turn we turn right. From this direction cars are forbidden to turn right into our soi. He drives up the wrong side of the road, hits another car (no damage, just the wing mirror flipping in) and turns right to a symphony of honking horns, flashing lights and tropical rain.

But you know what? It could be worse: I could be going camping at the weekend!

Finally, just because it's fun, long time readers might remember this picture of Son from our trip to see grandparents in France.

A tent is a tent, right?

Husband, having been a boy, loves camping. When we were students, our first holidays together were camping trips. For the first one, based in Hull, we borrowed a tiny tent and drove off to the Lake District in search of Roman artefacts. (I will never forget trying to find Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England. We stopped Marigold, my bright orange car, by a dry stone wall: ‘Do you think this is it?’)

Husband - or Boyfriend as he was at the time – wanted to ‘rough it.’ He longed to camp in the mountains, hunting and foraging for food to provide for me. There must be something deep in his psyche as this wasn’t particularly a feature of our relationship. Luckily I camped as a child and I’ve always despised campsites that have lots of facilities: a TV room, swimming pool, showers, a shop and a restaurant. That’s not proper camping! However I wasn’t willing to skin rabbits either.

We usually compromised on a farmer’s field with loo and a spidery shower by way of facilities. One campsite in the Isle of Wight was just a field and we had to walk to a local pub for anything more serious than a pee. This type of site just about fulfilled Husband’s yearning to be caveman. Back in the Lake District, another place was perfect - the farmer appeared early in the morning with fresh eggs. Oh joy. And Husband’s desire to provide meant that he got up to make breakfast (every time). No wonder I married him.

Once, we got complacent about our ability to find suitable sites and left it too late in the day. We couldn’t find a site anywhere so we had to beg a publican to let us camp in their garden. He wasn’t keen but we promised to be up and out early in the morning. Another great place was a cheese farm in Cheddar which we stayed in for several days: years later we took the children back to the same site for their first camping trip. One place, though I can’t remember where it was, one of the other idiots in the field left a gate open and our field filled with sheep during the night. We had our dog Pepper with us on that trip and she woke us by bouncing around inside the walls of the tiny two man tent at the sound of the sheep.

Anyway, memories of my camping holidays weren’t what I was going to tell you about. Ever since we came to Thailand, Husband has been espousing Thai campsites, which, he assured me, were luxurious. I’ve all but lost interest in camping. It’s true, it’s great fun but when you’re young but it’s hard work when you’re older and I need my comforts.

But that was how I found myself this last weekend in a hotel/campsite in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, and now I’ve run out of space. Tomorrow I’ll have to tell you about our tent, the wild elephants, how I won the worst mother of the year award and the trip to casualty for skull and spine x-rays.

How are the French so chic?

I’ve just been down to school to pick up Son and his friend who’ve been on a camping trip. It was the expedition for the bronze International Award (this is the equivalent of the Duke of Edinburgh Award but goes under a different name here.)

I was waiting in the café with another Mum, a French woman who came to Bangkok at the same time as we did. They are a lovely family and our boys, despite being chalk and cheese (brie?) are friends. D rang his mother to say they were back. Five minutes later D appeared in the café. He looked fantastic – as though he’d been on a five star spa break and not camping in the Sam Roi Yot National Park. We chatted for a bit while my son didn’t turn up… (Son lives on a timescale unique to himself.) Then they left, with the parting words from D, that Son, wasn’t looking quite as clean…


Some twenty minutes later, Son appeared in the distance. ‘In the distance’ was the safest place to be but I had to confine myself to a taxi with him. He looked like Pigpen from the Charlie Brown cartoon, walking in a cloud of debris. I'm glad to report he had a great time, but had he changed his clothes all weekend? Who knows? He had tide marks of grime in his neck. Ewugh.