2001: A Thai Odyssey – Chapter 1

If you want to go straight to Chapter 2, feel free!

Arrival – Geckos, frogs, giant millipedes, rainstorms and the ubiquitous spirit houses (May 2001)

We arrived in Bangkok in the evening of 1 May 2001. We had flown in from Perth via Singapore and had had a great time in the two Club Lounges (the Qantas Club in Perth and the Raffles Silver Kris Club in Singapore). We were especially impressed by the Singapore Airlines plane we had for the short hop to Bangkok. If only we had that plane all the way! Oh, well. At least Qantas planes tend to stay in the air.

Prior to departing Perth, we had been staying with Roo and Janelle in their palatial home in Floreat. (All homes are palatial in comparison to our current digs!) We got to go and look at Tim's old haunts (from when he was 0-5 years old) and visited some wineries to pick up some emergency rations.

Before that, we had had a couple of weeks visiting people in NSW and ACT. Thanks to all who put us up and sorry to those we weren't able to catch up with!

So, we arrived in BKK. We were greeted on arrival by Tony Asome, the Defence Administration Officer, who got us in the right line to get through passport control and drove us to the Embassy Compound in the Sathorn Area. To get an idea of where we are look at this map.

The Embassy Compound was established about five or so years ago and consists of four "cores" in two separate buildings. Each of the cores is of a different standard. A-Block is for representationally posted officers and the apartments are very swish. B-Block apartments are smaller with three bedrooms, a separate "family room", a maid's room and large living areas.

C-Block is for the lowest levels of Embassy life, three bedrooms, a maid's room and rather cramped living areas. D-Block is for people in between the higher ranked, non-representational elite in the B-Block and the scum in C-Block. It is also for people with families as there are four bedrooms, a separate "family room", the maid's room and a more spacious living area.

We are in C-Block.

This is the result of politics and changing conditions in the Embassy. The Embassy positions are generally now higher than they were five or so years ago and hence there are now many apartments that are below the standard appropriate for their inhabitants' status. As we are not working at the Embassy, we are accorded low priority and the fact that we have two children who need more space than we have is overlooked. We have been told by a few people that we should complain but we are just making the best of it. Apart from anything, our "cramped" lounge room (by Australian standards) is about the size of a house in which a Thai family of eight would live, we don't pay that much for it and we are getting allowances to account for the difficulties involved in living here so it seems rather ungrateful to complaints hugely about it.

So, we moved in. We had cunningly planned to have all our things arrive the following day. Cunningly but in total ignorance of the fact that life doesn't work like that. Our stuff was to arrive the following week (but actually turned up that Friday). This was, in fact, a blessing. It gave us time to find our feet, get a bank account, have some briefings at the Embassy and get out and see the place. That said, when we did get our stuff and were able to put some things up on the walls, and have the apartment stuffed to the gills with our possessions, it made the place look considerably less like a hotel. Kalle and Taltarni (and Kajsa) were getting a bit sick of not having a home by this stage.

The compound is set in the block between South Sathorn Road and Rama Four, near the big unfinished building which is across the way from Lumphini Park. More precisely, it is on the corner of Soi (Lane) Attakarn Prasit and Soi Goethe. It is across the road from a block of apartments (a condo) called Panthip Court and the Danish Embassy. Around the corner is the Goethe Institute and we are less than a kilometre from the Embassy of Australia. We are also in the middle of a very gay district. There are a few Man v. man clubs around and many big fat farangs (that is, white skinned foreigners) walking around with their toy boys. It makes Tim a little self-conscious when he walks around alone, because he is aware that he may be regarded as one of these big fat farangs looking for a little man meat.

One evening we were at a restaurant about 100m up the road and Taltarni needed to go to the toilet. The restaurant had been recommended to us by many people (for location, price and quality) but no-one had seen fit to tell us that it was collocated with a night club. We found this out when we wandered around looking for the toilet for Taltarni and noticed that Gloria Gaynor was blaring from the second storey, then we noticed that it had "Boy Club" written on a sign pointing up the stairs. Hm.

We already knew about the gay club in the soi across the road called the Babylon Club. Apparently, as it moved recently, the Gomorra gate is no longer open and you have to use the Sodom gate!

Just to give you a little more flavour for the area – apparently one (or two or maybe more) of the hotels in the area have special hourly rates. Not only for business transactions but also for lovers who don't have a bedroom of their own that they can sneak into. Right next door to one of these is a brothel of a type that seems to be a specialty of Thailand – a butterfly hotel. You drive into this place (or be driven in by your driver) and some chaps will run out to draw a curtain around your car so you can't be seen getting out. Once you finish your business (sorry, not quite sure what goes on in these places, maybe we can inform you in later chapters!) the curtain is drawn back and off you drive (or are driven).

Inside the Embassy Compound there is a tennis court (which doubles as a basketball court), a pool, a barbecue pagoda and a lawn area. There is also a cubby-house for the kids. One thing that strikes you as soon as you walk in the compound is the spirit house. Almost every, if not every, building compound in Thailand has at least one spirit house. Even big foreign hotels have them (in fact one of the most famous is for the Erawan Grand Hyatt Hotel). The compound has a nice little one and Taltarni has even made an offering to it. Hopefully her resultant good luck will cover us all.

The idea of the spirit house is to appease the spirits associated with the land and buildings in the area. Additionally you can use the spirit house to request assistance from the resident spirits. To do so you make an offering and enter into a contract ("here's the deal, give me what I want (good luck, a win in the lottery or irresistible charms and I will come back and give you a wooden elephant"). If you get what you ask for, you have to be sure that you come back and fulfill your side of the contract or you apparently end up in all sorts of trouble.

There is wildlife of various types in the compound too. There are feral cats (which the authorities are trying to get rid of, with difficulty because of the Buddhist attitudes to life), frogs (noticeable at night and when rain is on the way), giant millipedes (about 15 cm long and good for scaring Erika) and lots of geckos.

Talking of rain, there have been lots of thunderstorms. They haven't been daily but we have had, on average, a thunderstorm every second day. Great lightening, very heavy rain and still warm! The kids like getting out and running around in it (some times with the umbrella but the purpose of the umbrella is unclear as they don't actually use it to keep them dry). We haven't had any solid days of rain but as we are only just moving into the rainy season at the time of writing, we have plenty of time for that. Perhaps we might even see some floods. An advantage of living where we are is that there is no chance of having out apartment flooded. Otherwise the idea of a flood would be very daunting.

The Joys of Compound Living – Don't tell anyone about the ghost! (May 2001)

The warning in this chapter is serious, Thais are rather more superstitious than Australians and it is better not to joke about having a ghost in the house. It will be taken seriously. For that reason, if you are coming to visit, please don't walk in and talk about one section of this – you'll scare the locals!

Enough of that. The layout of the compound has been described already but the actual living in a compound is a little more complicated. There are benefits to this sort of living; you have instant friends, neighbours you can understand, neighbours who know what you are going through and neighbours who know about everything that you do. You have access to clean, safe water (or rather you usually do, that is not the case when the water comes out of the tap is black). The area is safe, patrolled by guards and there is always a responsible adult in screaming distance so you can let the kids go down and play without worrying too much. The guards are incredibly respectful and Tim has received more salutes in the past month than in the whole previous four years. And very snappy salutes too!

Then there is the lack of privacy (already touched on), the standard air-conditioning which has two settings – Arctic and Off – and, well, there isn't anything else worth complaining about now they have fixed the front door which you couldn't lock properly! While it is not a complaint per se, we couldn't ignore the two types of water available, tepid and scalding. While it is a little dangerous, it is hard to justify complaining about the temperature of the bath water when you can regularly see people having a tubs in the rivers and khlongs. We guess that the same could be said for privacy (it would be in short supply in a two room house with an extended family of a dozen) and air-conditioning (which would normally have two settings – sweltering because the window is open and sweltering because it isn't).

For a while we were rather worried about our television. Those who read the Aftermath of the American Adventure would know that our old TV did not make it back to Australia unscathed. In fact it reached Australia in a rather scathed condition, one could even say it was buggered. It had been carefully lowered into a box that was exactly the width of the television itself and provided with no padding whatsoever. This might not have been a problem had the box not been dropped. Of all the boxes to drop, this was not a good one. (In fact there were only a couple or so boxes which were damaged in any way so they did well to drop the one which could cause the most heartache.) So, we made do without a television for a total of about, hm, one day and then went out and bought a really nice new one.

This was in February 2000.

Jump forward to mid May 2001. We are in bed around midnight and realise that the television is on. Aha, one of the kids must have sneaked out of bed to watch Cartoon Network. Kajsa got up to put whoever it was back in bed. Imagine her surprise when she found that the television had turned itself on. No child was to be seen. Now it could have been possible to assume that one of the kids had been up, watched tv for a while and then gone back to bed. That might have been what we would have thought if it wasn't for the fact that the television was also changing channels by itself!

For the next three days or so, the television would intermittently have a problem with staying on the one channel. It would stay where we wanted it to for about ten minutes or so and then start flipping channels and the remote wouldn't work and nor would the channel selector on the front of the television. You would have to turn it off and start again. Very annoying. More annoying was the fact that the television was new(ish) and getting it fixed in Thailand was going to be a nightmare, especially given its size. You wouldn't want to be lugging it around the streets and in and out of taxis. Tim started looking around for television maintenance people who came to your home.

Then the symptoms disappeared. No more channel flipping. We put it down to the ghost.

This is the same "ghost" that makes the weird noises in the middle of the night. The one who moves books around so they fall off desks. The one who hides everything (no, actually that is more likely to be Som!) Another night we were lying in bed and heard what certainly sounded like Taltarni playing in her room. Tim got up to investigate and found, to his surprise that Taltarni was in bed, fast asleep. He checked on Kalle and found the same. No books on the floor, nothing that seemed to have been able to have made the noise. The front door was locked, so it wasn't a burglar. Very strange. We slept with the light on just in case!

Another little weird thing occurred on the second or third day we were in the apartment. Tim wandered into the main bedroom and saw a gecko on the wall. Inside the flat. Not such a big deal except that all the windows were closed, all the doors had been closed and the gecko disappeared a short while later. There must be some small gaps in the wall, just big enough to allow access to the geckos (other people have reported having them in their apartments as well). Sadly, such a gap is big enough to let in mosquitoes but when we keep the air-conditioning on they don't seem to make their way through.

A little addition to the above. The channel surfing ghost had left us alone for about two weeks before we wrote the words above. On that very night though the symptoms came back for a few minutes but disappeared in time for us to watch an hour long video. The next day the symptoms came back again for a short while (the day that these words are being written) but so far it seems that we are just being reminded that life can be unpleasant if we don't take the ghost seriously! - So, just what is the Thai word for Caspar?

Night Tours and Buying a Watch (Early May 2001)

Soon after we arrived in Bangkok we were visited by Erika, Kajsa's niece who was on her way back to Sweden after being in Australia since August last year. Erika was a great help in a number of ways. Firstly, she helped get our apartment organised when we had our stuff delivered. Secondly, she looked after the kids a few times which allowed us the chance to get out and sample some of the delights of BKK. Then thirdly, she gave Tim an excuse to get out of the flat and use his Thai on a few extra nights when he would otherwise be sitting at home doing very little.

This period when Erika was with us was very hectic as well because we were aware that she had limited time in country and that gave us extra impetus to get out and see things that we might only have got around to seeing later (which in the American experience often meant that we never got around to it).

The night tours were particularly memorable. Tim took Erika out one night and then took Kajsa out the following night on an almost identical version of the same tour. Each of the tours entailed a visit to Patpong Road, Khao Sahn Road and then the bars of Sukhumwit. To make the explanation simple let us explain that when we went around (Kajsa and Tim), we did approximately the same things as Tim and Erika had done the night before, although we made no purchases and we had dinner at Somboon Seafood Restaurant after visiting Patpong which meant that we got to Khao Sahn Road after almost everything was shut. Apart from that, the tours were identical. Note that "somboon" means perfect and the food was certainly yummy!

Patpong is the most famous of the three areas visited. It is incredibly touristy with a hideously expensive night market (by Thai standards) and plenty of bars ranging from the sedate to the triple X-rated. Tim and Erika did little more than wander up and down the market aisles, although they did buy some incense and Tim got a laser pointer that he had lusted after he saw someone else play with their's.

On one of the side streets there was a huge crowd that attracted their attention, clustering around a restaurant. Apparently a famous football star (soccer, that is) was visiting and had booked the restaurant. A great big banner outside anounced that he would be there and Thais and farang alike were clamoring for a look at the bloke. Erika and Tim stayed just long enough to see the guy (which allowed Erika to add one more famous name to her list of visual conquests) before they headed off.

On the way out of the area, they wandered past one of the show bars and Erika got an idea of what went on inside (that is pole dancing, with many poles, many girls and not much in way of clothing). Then they stopped at a watch stall and listened in on a couple of American girls who were haggling for a watch. When they had given up and walked off a little way, Tim stopped them and asked how much the stall holder had been asking for the watch. They said that the opening price had been 2400 baht but that after a while of haggling, they had beaten him down to 1800 baht.

Tim went back to the stall, talked to the guy in Thai for a short while and got the price down to 900 baht. Wow, and only after a couple of minutes effort! Then he made some excuse about how he really wanted a (quick check of the watches) ... a blue one. Didn't seem to be one. Never mind, he would come back another day.

The next stop on the tour was Khao Sahn Road. Khao Sahn is certainly touristy, as touristy as Patpong but with a rather different clientele. Patpong is for the average tourist, the one who is interested in the slightly seamy side of BKK but will mix it up with a bit of shopping to make it seem legitimate. Khao Sahn is not a place for go-go bars. They may well be there but we have not seen them. It is more for the back-packers, particularly the hippy back-packers. Particularly the drug-taking hippy back-packers. In addition, there are internet cafés and little bars where you can sit for hours on end drinking lemonade and watching videos (with the day's videos and showing times advertised prominently). On the street itself (the interesting places in Thailand are often on the streets, not in the shops and bars!) are people who will put beads in your hair, sell you trinkets and give you henna tattoos for a couple of dollars.

Needless to say, Tim and Erika got tattoos. Tim got a snake (the kids were very impressed) and Erika got a four leafed clover, the symbol of her political affiliation in Sweden, though she got is more as a joke than as a true sign of political obsession. They also bought some roti, which was filled with banana and chocolate. Not very healthy but certainly delicious.

After Khao Sahn Road, it was off to Sukhumwit Road. In particular it was off to Na Na Plaza. Na Na Plaza is for the tourists who are interested in the (slightly?) seamy side of BKK and are not interested in mixing it up with any shopping to make it seem legitimate. There are three floors of go-go bars in Na Na Plaza and literally hundreds of girls who want to know you (if you are male) and a suprisingly large number of girls who are not girls. Kajsa had no trouble picking these out but Erika took some convincing (although not as much as Crocodile Dundee in that New York bar scene!)

On the first night, Tim and Erika had a drink or two in the tamer places and high-tailed it out of there. They then headed up towards another night spot called Clinton Plaza. This meant walking along Sukhumwit Road, past where a bunch of stalls are normally set up to fleece the tourists. Now Tim had convinced himself that Patpong was a much more expensive place to buy things but didn't really have any evidence to back it up. So, when he came across a woman who was in the process of packing up her watch stall, he started to haggle with her over a watch that was similar to the one he had haggled for in Patpong.

It is worth noting that a lot of business people in Thailand are of Chinese extraction and have a number of superstitions, one of which is that if they sell something to the first customer of the day (or night in this instance), they will receive good fortune. Also, the stall holder was packing up her stall. For one or both of these reasons, it quickly became apparent that she was extremely interested in making a sale. She started the bidding at 2400 baht but the price quickly fell to about 1300 baht even though Tim only spoke in English.

At that point, the price stalled and Tim, looking to make a getaway, said that he had already been offered 900 baht in Patpong. Sadly, while the price didn't really waver very much, the watch lady made various arguments about how the quality of her watch was far superior to any found in any of the less reputable road-side stalls (never believe that one, goods sold like this all tend to come from the same places). Then, when the woman realised that her customer was getting away, the price started to crumble, first it went down to 1100 baht and as Tim was trying harder and harder to walk away politely, the price came down to 900 baht and, with great show and ceremony, she got out a plastic bag, put the watch in it and tried to hand it over.

It should be noted that at this time, Tim had not been wearing a watch for more than six months. He had become quite comfortable with not wearing a watch and even liked the convenience of not having a watch flopping around on his wrist. Part of this change in lifestyle was because he had always been carrying his mobile phone with him and it has its own time display. At some point he recalled someone's statement about our fixation with time, the fact that so many people carry around a machine with them everywhere they go, a machine that has no other function than to tell them something that they could usually ascertain by looking around. At least if you are only after the time of day and who really needs to know that it is "four thirty seven and forty seconds beep beep beep". So when he started to this woman, he had no intention of buying a watch, he had just wanted to check relative prices between Patpong and Sukhumwit.

By this time though, he realised that he had got the woman's hopes up, he had beaten her down, she had made a sacrifice (many tourists would have been happy with a 30%-50% discount), this was going to be her last chance to make a sale that day, the price we were haggling over was a little over the value of one CD to Tim (at least when it is bought in Australia) but maybe more than a week worth of food to her and he was in a situation where he would be a real bastard if he didn't buy the stupid watch. It did not help that Erika was standing behind him with tears running down her face because she was laughing so much (possibly because she thought it was very funny that part of Tim's argument as to why he couldn't buy the watch was because his wife – ie Erika – didn't want him to buy it).

So Tim brought out his wallet, prepared to part with the cash ... only to find that he only had about 600 or so baht. Sorry, so sorry, he said, breaking into a little Thai.

The watch lady would not be deterred.

"You wife, how much he have?" - What? Ah, Erika, how much do you have?

The price fell again and the basis of the argument changed to a discussion about how much we needed to keep so that we could get a taxi home. The woman wanted to take all we had, with the logic that we could get money when we got back to the hotel. She seemed incapable of understanding that we didn't live at a hotel (all farangs live in hotels, don't they?) Eventually Tim and Erika walked away with the watch (genuine Rolex perpetual movement, no battery, no winding, only a little of moisture fogging it up from the inside) and a little over one hundred baht, having spent something under 750 baht, less than one third of the initial asking price.

Tim won't be doing that again!

A little mistake that can be made in Thai – tham phid kap pharya (Early May 2001)

One of the guilty (well, not that guilty) pleasures of being in Thailand is that we can indulge in our addiction to massage. At least we can afford the price, if not always the time. You can get a two hour massage (ancient Thai style) for 200 baht, which is less than $A10. Of course we tip the masseuses as well – usually 100 baht in addition which makes it a sum total of about $A13.

On one occasion Tim took Erika so she could experience a massage. This meant that Tim got another massage but he did have to act as an interpreter. For the most part this was an easy task – "She's telling you to turn over." "She's asking you if it hurts." Occasionally his role was to provide advance warning of some of the strange manoeuvres that go on in Thai massage – "She is going to sit on your leg." "She is going to put your hands about your head and bend you sideways until you crack", and so on. Tim also provided some warning about tipping.

Tipping is not that big in Australia but it is almost unheard of in Sweden and so Erika was a little nervous when it came to the time when we had to pay. Erika manifested this nervousness by striding out purposefully and handing her 100 baht tip to the cashier who Tim had just paid. The cashier was extremely surprised, but not enough to hand the tip back. The actual masseuses we waiting at the door so Erika ended up handing out another 100 baht tip, this time to the right person (who was probably a bit miffed that she only got 100 baht for two hours effort while the cashier got 100 for taking less than thirty seconds to put some money in the till). Still the overall price Erika paid was still a small fraction of the cost of a massage in Sweden.

A couple of days later Tim went with Kajsa. This was the second time that Tim had been to the place, which is just around the corner from the compound. When you walk in you are met with cheery "sawasdee, kha"s from the staff and then whisked into the booth area where you are given a pair of pajamas (with impossible trousers for the males) and left to get changed.

While you are being whisked, you may be asked what number you want. This is because each of the masseuses is adorned with their very own number. While it sounds horrible, we still tend to refer to the women by their numbers. This mostly because we have seen the number written and it is usually much easier to remember than their names, which are usually short but meaningless. In this instance the masseuses were called "Ooh" and "Aah", very appropriate under the circumstances. (Of course, for these two, we remember the names!)

Anyway, we said we didn't mind who we got (which seemed to upset #7, who had been Tim's masseuse a couple of days earlier) and prepared ourselves.

Now some background is necessary here. Thai humour is rather different to farang humour (as Australian humour differs considerably from American humour this statement is largely meaningless but just assume that westerners tend to find different things funny, and consider different things to be acceptable topics for humour). Thai humour, particularly that of people from the country areas, which means the vast number of people we come into contact with from day to day, is earthy to say the least. (A bit like Vevelsund humour!) For instance, Tim was asked if he was busy searching for a little wife (a mistress) when he was getting his first massage. This was before he explained that Erika was not his wife but his niece! He is still not sure if the masseuse was joking (or 100% joking) because she seemed disappointed when he refused to be serious about it and said that he was looking for about 72 proper wives (this is one for each province, which is apparently an achievable objective in Thailand due to the methods of registering marriages).

Anyway, the humour can get more earthy, rather rapidly, and it is hard to keep up (no rude connotations implied) when you have the humourist sitting on top of you and twisting your body into a shape which closely resembles a pretzel.

Thai massage includes a fair amount of body manipulation in fact. At one point, Tim's masseuse was hanging on to his foot and was pressing the underside of his thigh with her foot. Normally this has no great effect, but at this time this region was quite tender. The following is an approximation of the ensuing conversation, with Tim's translation following:

"jep, mai?" – does it hurt?

"jep, khrap, dae phom mai ru wa jep thammai. Bang thi phom tham pid yang gnai" – yes, it does hurt, but I don't know why it hurts. Perhaps I did something wrong.

"loe? tham pid kap pharya mai?" – oh, is that right, you did wrong with your wife? (At this point, Tim thinks he has inadvertently implied that he received an injury in a what could delicately be referred to as a "labour of love" or perhaps a "bedroom battle". Seeing that any attempt to change the conversation or explain what he really means may result in more embarrassment, he elects to make a frontal assault.)

"khrap" – yes

"tham pid kap paraya boi mai?" – do you do wrong with your wife often?

"boi khrap, dalort wela" – yes, often, all the time.

"dalort wela mai?" - all the time, huh? (then she turns to the woman who is massaging Kajsa right next to Tim and rattles off some Thai, then she talks to Tim again with awe in her voice .... )

"boi boi, dalort wela" – often, all the time

"khrap, wan le khrung ... mai chai, wan le may khrung!" – yep, once a day ... no, many times a day.

After that there was much laughing and carrying on between the two masseuses in Thai and they encouraged Tim to repeat his claims that he "tham pid kap pharya boi boi, dalort wela" (did wrong with his wife often, all the time). Then there a small interchange that made Tim think that he might be misunderstanding the conversation in some way. He was asked if Kajsa understood any Thai and the masseuses were amazed that she did in fact understand some Thai – it seemed that this amazement was not so much because understanding Thai is a huge achievement, but rather because she may have understood some of our earlier conversation.

A little later, Tim was talking with Surinya (a local angel who lives downstairs and has helped us in many ways) and asked if she could explain just exactly what the meaning of "tham phid kap pharya" was. Naturally it meant "to be unfaithful to your wife".

Very embarrassing, but Tim hoped fervently that it was understood that what he said was said in jest (admittedly it was originally a joke about a rather different subject, at least in his own mind). At least he now knows why he was treated like a legend – lying there calmly boasting about how often he is unfaithful with his wife is lying next to him, not showing any concern at all!