A Thailand Post

Isn’t it funny how you can sit down to write, knowing what you’re going to write about, and yet once you start your fingers and brain go off on a completely different tangent? That happened to me yesterday. So today I am attempting again to write the posting that I planned to write yesterday. Does that make any sense?

So here we all are at the beach. We’re somewhere called Bansaphan, Prachuapkhirikhan, which probably isn’t much use to you; it’s on the Gulf of Thailand, an area not affected by the Tsunami of 2004. The sea has waves, which makes a change from the other places we’ve been beachside in Thailand. Sometimes the sea is so still that I long for the drama of the English Sea (I used to live in Dorset). I feel guilty saying that though, because the Thais have experienced the drama of the power of the sea and it was devastating.

Thailand has suffered both with the Tsunami and with the resultant knock to its tourism industry. As a mainly Buddhist country, many Thais believe in ghosts and they will not go to the areas that they believe are inhabited by spirits. Thai tourism needs visitors to go back to those areas: this, and a good price is why we went to Khao Lak the first time.

We’ve been to Khao Lak, north of Phuket, twice. It was ravaged by the Tsunami. I was afraid: it was so peaceful there, hardly a wave on the surface of the bluest sea I’d ever seen, and yet always I would have in my head the violence that had taken place just 18 months earlier. Sometimes I would sit and scan the horizon, looking for approaching waves. Silly I know, but I was scared.

My children had a go at scuba diving in the hotel pool with a gorgeous Swedish girl. She had a tattoo on her shoulders in Thai, and one of the children asked what it meant: she said “it says: ‘live every day as if it’s your last.’” It’s hard to be judgmental about a pedestrian statement when you think about what people have experienced.

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My fingers have written something else of their own accord again. I didn’t plan to write this… I wonder why it happened.

Will I ever be able to write the other one?

Mountains and sea

After a very long journey from Bangkok (4 hours) and a worrying 30 minutes where the taxi driver kept rotating the map to see if it made any more sense another way up, I’ve arrived.

I’m staying in a rather Thai ‘spa and resort’, which is no bad thing (lunch cost £1.30 for example not £4.50 as it would if it was aimed at foreigners). On the internet everything was in English, which made me assume that it would have some English spoken… There isn’t, and since my Thai pretty much consists of ‘go straight, turn right, turn left, stop here, where is the loo?, stir fried chicken and rice’’, etc it makes asking ‘what time does the restaurant open?’ And ‘can I use the internet?’ rather difficult. But we have established that the internet isn't working though the Engineer is working on it now. I'd like to suggest that my Thai is better than I led you to believe, it's not - we got that from the receptionist's school girl English. Still, very clever Engineer has fixed the internet, and they tell me there's 'no charge.' Oh I love Thailand,

To my joy there are mountains, though rather off in the distance, but since there’s sea on the other side and we’re totally surrounded by palm trees I’m absolutely not grumbling.

And my word count has gone up. A bit. Little bit at a time: I’m just glad that I’m writing it down. It’s really nothing special, but I am getting words out without that demon fellow shrieking in my ear that I should stop, go back to Bangkok and get my nails done instead. This is progress indeed.