There’s been a new face hanging around the restaurant for a few days. She is a tiny young girl of about twelve, who looks like a puff of wind would sweep her away. She has a beautiful face and smiles huge crinkly-eyed smiles whenever I pass her. Being used to the ebb and flow of people around here I don’t think to question who she is for several days. Until it becomes clear she’s sleeping here, at which point Crab explains she is Ooh and Bo’s daughter and she swam here from Burma.

“She what?” I ask, complete incredulity written across my face. Crab re-iterates, “yes she swam here”. Ooh and Bo couldn’t afford to pay the people traffickers who smuggle people over the border from Burma, so she went illegally in a boat with 14 other people. Crossing the foul straits between Ranong and Thailand, they were chased by the Burmese police, the boat overturned and she had to swim for it. Five people died. This little slip of a girl swam to Thailand, and then presumably with no money, certainly with no Thai language, managed to make her way across the country to the island.

A few weeks later, I am actually in Ranong, Burma, doing the annoying three-monthly visa crossing required on most long term visas. I arrive at the port having mini bussed across the country, spent hours on the ferry and finally arrived at the hell hole of a port. The place stinks. The smells of rotten fish, rancid sewage and gasoline hang in the air and choke everyone, along with the sweltering heat. On the dock, hundreds of boats are crammed along the edges of the water, packed in like starving kittens, bobbing at their mother’s teat.

When we clamber into the boat, the clean highway from Thailand cushions us on one side of the river, and on the other side the smoggy jungle hills of Burma, with all their secrets and their deathly struggles rise into the distance. I look down at the water, which is black, putrid, oily foulness. The stench is almost unbearable, and I have literally never seen water that looks like straight oil. It’s disconcerting.

In our wooden longtail boat we chug our way out into the wide water stream that divides the two countries. Belching gasoline, as we pick up speed the air clears a little bit. I cannot believe that this little girl was in this water. Cannot imagine her cheerful eyes and sweet smile racing under cover of darkness across this waterway with the Burmese police on her tail. I cannot begin to contemplate the fear as she lands in the filthy water, or the strength she must have had to swim across the miles of water, and haul herself oil coverd and exhausted from the obnoxious river.

I dread to imagine the life she has come from. Something in her demeanour, something in her eyes speaks to me that she is a victim. Unfortunately in a place like Burma, with no protection, no women’s rights, a war torn, bloody land, just a beautiful little slip of a girl making her way is unlikely not to have encountered hardships. I wonder what she has seen, what those intelligent gentle eyes have borne witness to. What she thinks behind that luminous smile. Of course she just gets on with it: is happy, smiles, enjoys being with her family, is glad to be alive, is glad of the moment she is living and the opportunity to enjoy it.

A few weeks later the girl gathers her things in a plastic bag and swinging it against her leg waves goodbye. She is off to another beach to work in a resort. I hope she is well treated, I hope they are good to her, that someone there will be protecting her, that she wont be abused, violated, exploited or hurt in anyway. She is perfectly happy as she gets on the bike to go, this is her chance, a shot at Thailand, a shot at a good life, work, food, some comfort. She is glad to take it and I pray with all my heart it works out for her as the bike speeds out of the village and up the dusty dirt road.

Related posts:

1. Joe and Egger get a photo from Burma
2. Joe and Egger’s Little Boy….

A few days ago I started running up the mountain. With it being so hot it’s difficult to find time that’s cool enough to run, so when it started pouring rain I threw on my shoes and headed off, confirming for the whole village that, yes, I am totally barking. My comeuppance was quick to appear, as predicted by all the Thai people who had shaken their heads at my folly, this morning I couldn’t get out of bed.

This is not an uncommon occurrence for me, being definitively NOT a morning person. But even my addled morning brain could detect this was something different, and a slightly extreme reaction to having inflicted one little mountain run on my poor  unfit body.

My back feels like it has collapsed, any strength or power I had there is gone completely and my legs and hips felt like they belong to the dingly dangly scarecrow, disconnected from my body’s centre and barely under its control. I drag myself through the morning washing of body parts, wrestling with t-shirts and scrubbing of faces before moving like a zombie to the car and going slowly through the motions necessary to get Clear Sky to school.

Only when I am at home again, and despite the mountain of stuff I’ve got to do today, know that I am only fit to fall back into bed, does it dawn on me that my bones are aching unaccountably all over. I remain prostrate in the bed for the rest of the day, adamant this can’t be Dengue Fever because I’m not hot, until Shrimp comes in, feels my head, and says actually I am on fire, burning up. At which point I begin to consider that this might well be Dengue.

Aedes Aegypti Mosquito

And so it begins, the days of lying inert, pained, unable to move, unable to look at anything due to stabbing pain behind the eyes, so just staring at the wall. The doctor confirms I have dengue and runs blood checks to see how low my white blood cells are, if they drop below a certain level I could be in danger of developing Dengue Haemorrhagic Fever, which can be fatal.

I ride out the wave of the illness in bed, sweating it out, alternately hot and cold, cold and hot, bathed in sweat and shaking with chills. As the virus runs through my body I develop agonising head pain and swellings all over my skull, an insistent nagging pain like toothache, but consuming my entire head.

When I start to feel better I crawl out of bed and eat some dry crackers, everything tastes like metal and makes my stomach turn but I force down the food and water as best I can. After a couple more days the nausea leaves, although the head pain remains, debilitating and frustrating me from being able to concentrate or write.

What is more disturbing when the illness finally leaves, is that I find I have sunk into a lethargic depression, from which rousing myself is proving virtually impossible. I can get up and fake that I’m okay enough to get Clear Sky off to school, but that saps all of my energy and as soon as she’s gone I’m a teary heap, unable to tackle even the smallest of tasks. Apparently this is quite common with dengue, but it is so demoralising and frustrating to feel almost well, but puffed out and exhausted from just climbing up the stairs.

Apparently there has been an outbreak of Dengue, with 26,000 cases throughout the country and six deaths in the last week alone. Dengue is transmitted by a small daytime mosquito, one of the really pesky ones that it’s hard to swat. There are around 40 million cases of Dengue each year globally, and several hundred thousand Dengue hemorrhagic fever each year.  By the late 1990s, dengue was the most important mosquito-borne disease affecting humans after malaria, in Africa and Asia.

There is currently no vaccine or treatment for Dengue. It’s hard to imagine a disease being this common, and this devastating, in a western country without serious effort and funding being put into finding a cure, treatment, or some kind of adequate prevention.

Just saying.

Related posts:

1. The One Small Change Challenge
2. Night Fishing, deserves a quiet night

Today is a day of wonderful people beginning their journeys.

My cousin is flying from London to take over as head chef, and help me open our new cafe venture. In what couldn’t be a starker contrast, Joe and Egger’s oldest son sets off today to join us from Burma.

Joe just got the call to say everything is confirmed, the people traffickers are paid, and he should be crossing the border, crammed in the back of an illegal van, to make his way across Thailand to us.

Wishing them both God’s speed.

Related posts:

1. Swimming From Burma
2. Joe and Egger get a photo from Burma

Today is kids day.  All the kids in Thailand are puffed-up-proud of themselves on this; their own shiny day.

Mail, Pha Ngan and Mai come around, a raggle taggle procession of differently sized stompy feet. Proud in their proper baseball shoes, rather than customary dirty barefoot. Raucous on this the day no grown up can tell them no.

They each clutch a prize from the festivities in the main town, Pha ngan a cheap wind up car, Mai a ruler and pencil and Mail an already grubby doll.  That they feel special, important and feted is written loud on their faces and warms my heart to see.

Pha Ngan, this troubled boy, on the brink of almost certainly delinquent teenage years, who runs and steals, is chased and beaten and neglected in equal measure. Who has the most infinite tenderness and sweetness with Clear Sky that is truly beautiful to behold.  I know his path is set for trouble, his lack of love and care has written it so, and the trouble path is oh-so-dangerous for boys in this oh-so-wild of places.

I pray that somewhere in himself he has courage and drags up his strength in the face of adversity and clings onto his sweetness through it all, to find the love of a kind woman, and the comfort of a loving family.

Mai my little intrepid boy-man, the cutie pie who will melt a million hearts, whom tourists want to grab and hug at every opportunity, who loves baked beans. Who is a sensitive soul and cries easily in the face of other boys’ cruelty as he learns in his five-year-old world what it takes to be a man.

And E mail, my beautiful bouncing butterball baby girl.  A little sunbeam, who makes us roar with laughter and brings brightness to even the shabbiness of happenings.  Whose valiant heart is always happy, despite the persistent sickness that plagues her, the chronic asthma and the ongoing hospitalizations.  With her grubby little legs, permanently dripping nose, and wild unkempt hair she powers through life with enthusiasm that knows no bounds.

Nong mail, kids day

Undaunted she throws herself at everyone she meets with the same open heart, asking only love in return.  When I first met her she was a tiny, fat little thing, rolls of chubbiness, perfect cherub mouth and wide wondering eyes.  Unfortunately she was also scared of farang and would scream her head off if I even looked at her.

The first time she let me take her out to the beach I fell in love, and knew that we would have a special relationship this little ball of merriment and I.  When she took her first steps it was into my hands, and I thought I would burst with excitement and pride as she tottered towards me, arms aloft, trusting entirely.  What big responsibility to witness her evolution from that squidgy powdered baby ball to this fabulous gorgeous girl who stands before me, or rather runs, jumps, kicks, and dances, before me.

Related posts:

1. The Scent of Beauty….
2. The One Small Change Challenge
3. Wedding Wednesday

This is one of the most beautiful places in the entire world. This island, with its powerful jungle landscapes, cascading waterfalls and stunning beaches can take your breath away with its startling beauty.

I’m honoured to live here, I try to appreciate the beauty of nature that surrounds me here, and I try to respect it. It is terrifying to see the impact that living has on the environment here. In the west it is easier to ‘not see’ as your trash gets carted away, debris put in skips, waste removed.

Photo credit: Anja (thanks!)

Here everything gets dumped: in the river, the ocean, on the street, everywhere. Some rubbish is removed but you have to pay, so most of the time it’s easier to chuck it in the river. You literally see the impact of peoples’ trash around you at all times.

I’ve been wanting to make a few changes to reduce our impact on the environment, and then I found the brilliant one small change challenge over at hip mountain mama. Basically you make one small change at the start of each month leading up to earth day on April 22.

The changes I’m committing to this month are:

• Switching to canvas shopping bags
• Moving the washing machine pipe to water the garden
• Switching to all natural laundry detergent.

I’m working on implementing a guttering system and a couple other things, but will do my best to do these this month.

Will let you know how it goes……

Related posts:

1. Kids’ Day
2. Doing the Dengue Merengue

All is quiet in Jungle Town, after the raucous New Year celebrations. We have settled into some kind of rhythm of life again after the busy busy days surrounding the holidays.

An exciting new project has come up for me, and this week I will be off to experience the joys of night fishing. I’ll be taking a longtail out to fish with the locals, authentically – lao kao and all. Really looking forward to it, although I’m hoping the waves will be coming down and the moon sheds enough light.

Will update with my tales from a Thai fishing boat as soon as I can.

No related posts.

Some days I feel like my relationship with this place is crazy-making. I lose perspective when embroiled in all the crazy drama of this little jungle town.

And then there’s this…..

Incandescent dawn on this crazy little beach I love, by Russell Gordon – Check out his beautiful Flickr stream here.

Related posts:

1. Kids’ Day

Today we went to a wedding. All of Shrimp’s family arrived last night in pick-up trucks for the festivities, a home town boy made good, one of the massive extended Songkhla family is marrying a local island girl.

Shrimp’s family can’t believe their luck with one of their family members marrying so well. The night before, the boy came to say hi, he is such a sweet kid, the face of a child, and a beautiful generous nature. I wished him good luck and he thanked me, I think he himself cannot believe his good fortune, as he drove away in a brand new SUV.

Early Birds Catch Wedding Worms…..

There are three things you can say unequivocally about Thai weddings: they are early, long and loud. This one kicks off at nine am, the lucky number in Thailand – we make our way over to the next beach and begin the procession which is a raggle-taggle affair of appalling drummers shipped in for the occasion, all the family in their varying degrees of finery and drunkenness despite the early hour.

We made our way through the village, a collection of about fifty people, proudly stomping and banging, and singing accompanying the groom to his destination. As we passed each house everyone came out to wish him well and smile at the wedding party.
I as the only farang attracted some attention from the out-of-towners, some of whom have probably never seen one of my species before, I was photographed and feted, smiling as radiantly as I could muster without copious amounts of tea and porridge inside me.

Drunken Revelry at 9am….

As we made our way past one group of shacks a woman I recognized as the village drunk came out, bleary-eyed and disheveled, and realizing she was in the presence of a procession jumped on board and began to dance beautifully at the head of our gang.
Thai culture being what it is, no one blinked twice at this, everyone delighted in this woman’s good feeling and joy at the occasion. When I compare this to England it makes me laugh at the thought of a random drunk in their pajamas dancing ahead of the bride into the church.

Bang, Bang, Bang

We made our way onto the main street, drawn by our siren call of bongos and shouty electric Thai piano- as we did so, people opened fire. Quite literally: started firing guns into the air around us in celebration. A royal gun salute this was not, as I watched in horror more and more people reached into their waistbands and began to discharge rounds into the air.
I looked at Shrimp in horror, he looked back at me shrugging apologetically – his look spoke volumes – “I’m sorry, what can I say, my family, country people, don’t know any better, far be it for me to say anything, I am Thai, respect my elders, know my place.”

As one family member, who’d been hitting the lao khao rather hard waved his gun at the ground, pulling the trigger in a puzzled fashion as to why it wouldn’t fire, two metres from my daughter, I decided enough was enough and snatching her jumped out of line and ran for the safety of a nearby building, where I stayed until Shrimp came and got me an hour later, promising that all the shooting was over – it was time for the Buddhist ceremony.

This was conducted in the privacy of the house while everyone else sat outside under the obligatory marquee roasting alive on the ubiquitous plastic garden chairs. Clear Sky was hot and bothered and nearly choked to death on a large piece of duck someone had shoved in her mouth.

We decided to rejoin the festivities later, but before saying our goodbyes we made our way into the house to pay respect to the bride and groom. Shrimp’s nephew was pale, both from powder and trepidation, he mopped his brow with a hanky and looked shell shocked. The bride is pretty, in a Bangkok-nose-job sort of way.

Her heavily made up face and liberal gold drippings fail to register any expression at all – it’s the brides I pity, they’re up from five am doing makeup and preparing, and then spend the whole day sweltering in their war paint, meeting and greeting people in order of a strict social hierarchy, until they collapse after nearly twenty four hours awake, to be molested by the young fella who is now their hubby and probably doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. All this without a drink or a fag, good god!

I hope she is good to him, I hope she sits on the bed before him, the Thai traditional way of showing who will be the boss in the marriage, he’s such a sweet boy.

Related posts:

1. Kids’ Day

The fridge’s brokeness has got me more than slightly miffed. Apart from the car, and the baby, that fridge is the most expensive thing we own, and in all its shining stainless steel glory is testament to how far we’ve come. In fridge terms it is a victory monument, and the fact that it has given up the ghost after one short season, and now sits brooding in all its gleaming expensiveness in the bar is highly depressing.

On our opening day eighteen months ago, we had no refrigeration of any kind at all. We had blagged a cheap industrial sized fridge off a friend for a knockdown price and when on opening day we hefted it off the truck we discovered two things. One, it didn’t fit in the kitchen door, and two it didn’t work.

Cue frantic calls to fridge man who had to be enticed with some particularly fine expletives to make the treacherous journey to the back of beyond to fix it. Cue large scale conversations about knocking down of walls, ripping out of doors etc (which are all cheaper options than buying a new fridge in this topsy turvy country we call home).

To cut a long story short, we opened the restaurant by the skin of our teeth with large plastic ice boxes borrowed from friends stashed everywhere desperately chilling beer. When push came to shove we even converted cardboard boxes into coolers by filling them first with bin bags and then with ice – a handy American portable cooler trick, gleaned from knowledge of the great american sport of tailgaiting (getting pissed sitting on the tailgate of your truck). To be honest it was not the highly polished and professional look that we had been aiming for, but as I have had thrashed into me over the last two years: what the hell is?

Once the behemouth of a fridge was fixed we were able to use it for the highly creative tasks of storing food and beer. Unfortunately due to the general occurrence of Thai time, and lack of good ideas about how to achieve it, it remained outside the kitchen for another six months.

This was most difficult on Shrimp’s poor younger sister Sao, who, when an order was placed had to slip slide across the treacherous ice rink of a wet kitchen floor, charge outside the kitchen, stand on a rubber pad, grab the handles with cloths (again to avoid electrocution, this fridge had issues too) and remove the food.

Unfortunately due to the complete lack of a bar fridge she also had to repeat this process anytime anyone placed a beer order, and at parties, poor valiant Sao would remain at the ordering hatch until dawn, just waiting to begin her beer charge should anyone of the remaining dribbling drunkards fancy a refreshment.

After about six months, with the aid of six men, a sledge hammer, some corrugated metal, a pulley, and after removing all the doors and screws, and with a hefty dollop of Thai ingenuity we did manage to get the beast into the kitchen. Where it has sat ever since, having become the bane of my life in its finickityness: constantly freezing stuff you’d never want to freeze, like salad, and refusing to freeze stuff you’d always want frozen like meat. I probably shouldn’t slag it off or it will die on me too, and even in all its drippy/icey, energy inefficientness, like many things in my life, I don’t know what I’d do without it.

When our generous benefactors visited us to survey the riskiness of their investment they spotted the bar fridge issue as the crux of the matter and kindly relieved me of my misery by lending us the cash to buy one. This was one of the greatest reliefs of my life, releasing me as it did from endless time spent daydreaming and fantasizing about refrigeration.

But as always the story did not end there, we went over to Samui to buy our second baby, and spent agonizing hours choosing the over priced new addition to our family, in the end we settled on a model that was ever so slightly too large, and a bit more expensive but had vastly more space and a hardcore freezer (yippee).

Once the long arduous process of hefting the monster onto boats and trucks and finessing it in the back of a pick up over the diabolical mountainous jungle track we discovered two things, one it was two long, and two it was too tall and you couldn’t remove the legs as the salesperson had promised.

Cue long discussions involving most of the village about smashing down countertops, removing structural pillars and demolishing reinforced concrete to get the bugger into place. Which we finally did, putting an end to our refrigeration nightmare and making us feel like shiny, stainless steel professionals. Until it decided to pack it in that is.

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1. Plugging the Dam Again