Ban Yang Lon – 2

Back at Saipa’s, the dogs fortunately remember me again and the house looks clean to me, despite Sasipa saying it’s not finished. The concrete driveway she put in looks good. A few things have been rearranged, but it’s otherwise about the same. The new motorbike I bought is now 9 months old and has 10k on the clock! Praew rides it to school in Satuek everyday as the other motorbike has a problem and surges dangerously when accelerating, so that’s job number one on my list. Before that though I pump up the tyres on both motorbikes as they are almost flat! I also take it for an oil change and service.

A process of trail and error with the other motorbike led me to a faulty fuel injector, so I have replaced that and it now works fine. On my hunt for the required injector, I went to one motorbike shop where they wanted 580 baht for the part, it seemed a little expensive for what it was and as I felt that the prices seemed high last time I bought a part there, I decided to try somewhere else. It was a good call as the motorbike shop up the road only asked 400 baht for the same item. I shall give them my business in future and let the other shop surcharge some other foreigner.

The pace of life here is much slower, the only sound being the wind whispering through the trees. That’s when a dog isn’t barking or a cock crowing. I visit my favourite noodle shop here for lunch a few times a week, but the other place I like, that sells an excellent pad thai, is closed at the moment as the owner has gone off to see relatives in Laos. The friendship bridge linking Thailand and Vientiane in Laos is only a few hours drive and we may go there at some point.

John turned up on my second day back with a few beers and we caught up while sitting outside enjoying the warmth. More beers were purchased until we called it a day due to the mosquito’s arriving for dinner. On that note, his wife has some large steel contraption that catches bugs by the hundreds, including crickets.

She prepares them then bags them up, freezes them and sells them. It’s not a bad business as the bugs are endless and the price per kilo is high. Sasipa bought a couple of bags and it made an interesting and crunchy dinner. ”Anyone for cricket(s)”

We attended a funeral on the other side of Surin, which is famous for it’s elephants. It was one of Sasipa’s aunts who passed away. There were 10 children (including Sasipa’s mother, but now there are only two left. One just around the corner, who I have met numerous times and the other who lives in Lampang, just south of Chiang Mai. I went to Lampang a couple of years ago. I remember we ate sashimi there and that it had a brilliant night market.

There were very many cousins there and I also met Sasipa’s brother for the first time. He lives in Bangkok and so she rarely sees him. I sat down with various family members for lunch, which was a constant stream of different dishes arriving. Then I sat with her brother and some other male cousins for a few beers, while Sasipa went and caught up with more relatives. One of the cousins was a policeman (in Thai it sounds like – dam roat). He is an interesting man and spoke some English, which was helpful. Then it was off to the temple for a couple of hours of chanting and the giving away of fans, throwing of little money parcels and speeches praising the departed and her life.

During one of the family photo’s at the end, one of the cousins insisted I was in it. It felt a bit awkward, as I am the only foreigner here among some 200 Thai people.

One of the main jobs I want to do is to put a suspended ceiling in the kitchen for Sasipa, as it is currently just some joists supporting a corrugated roof.

A trip to Do Home in Buriram followed to buy all the ceiling bits. All told it was only about £100 to do approximately 38m2 of ceiling. The metal framework bits are all 4m long, but two shop staff came out and put them all on to the car, tied them neatly down and added a red flag at the end, what service! The prices here are amazing, but it was a real pig of a job though. Once the structure was up it got easier, but the walls are not square or even straight, nor are the beams, so trying to get it level in 3 dimensions was hard. At the same time the roof space is incredibly hot from the sun beating down and all the biting insects live there too, so I got bitten a lot. Ten days later I still have quite a few red bite marks on my arm from some insect that took a fancy to me. The ceiling looks great though and Sasipa is delighted, so it was worth it. In fact I’ve decided to do the bedroom as well as the tiles in there are old, stained and uneven.

So the jobs done so far:

Fixed leaking water pipe, repaired 3 motorbikes, built a suspended ceiling in the kitchen, put up netting on the front gate so that the dog can’t escape to the street for a punch up with neigbouring dogs. Replaced missing steel struts from the fence for the same reason. Repaired a laptop computer, fixed my GT2 watch, once the part from Lazada arrived. It’s been broken for over a year and so I am having to learn how to use it again. Repaired 3 fans, dismantled and unblocked a sink. (piece of banana in the pipe). Installed an outside water tap, replaced a broken screen on an iPhone 12 (much easier now the home button has been dispensed with). I’ve still got some doors to do, but will have to cut away part of the wall to do it. Just need to borrow an angle grinder!

I had to buy a new charger for the drill as the original one has disappeared, although I left it all neatly in a box. Who knows what these Thai’s get up to when left alone. Lazada came to the rescue and delivered a new one, but then I eventually found the old one in the garden while weeding!! The plug has disappeared off my fairy lights too, I mean how does that happen? I guess someone needed a plug and just cut it off rather than buying a new one! A nice chef’s knife I bought has also disappeared. I found it in the end after about a month. It was under a broken photo frame with the tip broken off. It was blunt too and had been used in the garden I think. Still I can’t make too much of a fuss as I have ‘form’ on this subject as my parents will tell you!

The chicken numbers were back up to 12, but now there are 17 (actually now 21), but I did see a relative stalking them around the garden, so perhaps there are less again. I haven’t counted. We are looking after a little puppy for a few weeks called cafe (pronounced in a Thai way of course – Caffaay) very cute and a bit naughty. He can only stay inside as the black dog will bite him if he goes in the garden. He will be off to live in Bangkok in the new year, but we have grown very fond of him.

Some water filter sales people came round the village offering a free trial of this huge 6 foot tall filter as the village water is quite bad. It looks rather like a torpedo, but they wanted 30,000 baht for it, which is an absolute rip off. Maybe some one told them a foreigner is staying here, although I think the neighbours were equally unimpressed with their prices. John in the next village has a filter on his supply that cost 15,000. A much better investment is to drill your own well. For about a third of the cost of the filter, you can have better water, year round. You need to go down to about 45m for a good supply. Even so you still can’t drink it, but you can brush your teeth. The village water is so poor that you shouldn’t really even brush your teeth in it, nor use it for cooking etc. Plus you never know when they are going to turn it off for the afternoon or even the day. In fact as I proof read this right now, we have no water. Particularly annoying as we went to a Thai wedding this morning.

Another relative turned up yesterday pushing her old motorbike and it was old, it had a manual choke and it must have been a good 30 years since it last saw the showroom. She couldn’t get it started and had heard that I can fix most things. Anyway I got it going with a new spark plug and some carburettor adjustments and she roared off with a big smile. From the sound of it it needs a new exhaust pipe too! For the first couple of days she would stop by the gate and give it a rev to show it was still going. Fortunately she has stopped doing that now, but I know it’s still going by the racket I can hear in the distance when she starts it up.

I’ve had a few fans delivered to me to repair as well. So far they’ve been fairly easy to fix, but I’m sure at some point I’ll be presented with something I can’t repair and my magic repair aura will be tarnished.

The pad thai shop duly reopened and so has been added to the lunch circuit again. They also serve a very good Lad na, which is a thick soup with vegetables and pork and is very tasty once you get past the rather slimy consistency. It’s origins are Lao/Chinese and I ate this once before in Bangkok, when I took a wrong turning and ended up eating in an area and restaurant where foreigners rarely go. It was a bit of a surprise the first time, but it was tasty. A few other restaurants have opened up locally, but have not yet made it on to the regular list.

The road continues to be widened to two lanes in each direction, allowing for fast traffic to get from Surin to the Buriram airport, about 10 minutes from us. They intend to expand it and include some international flights which will be great. At the moment there are two flights a day to Bangkok and that’s it. They have even put traffic lights in at a junction near us, which is much less welcome. Up until now the nearest traffic lights were about 10 km away.

We are off to celebrate Christmas in Pattaya again this year. With all the tourists and western influence, you get a lot of the festive atmosphere that you would in Europe and North America.

I drove down on the 20th on my own to my usual haunt, the Quba hotel. Sasipa will get the bus down in a couple of days time. The drive is about 6 hours, but went well and I was soon checked in and after a freshen up, out to eat my favourite Thin Lek Nam Tok Moo noodles. It’s nice to be in town where the bugs, mosquito’s etc are minimal, if present at all. I get a bit fed up with being bitten by all manner of things in the deep countryside. I went for a massage, but it was very hard and left me with a bruise or two. Sometimes you take pot luck. I decided to go and have a facial instead. In one of the Malls there is a place that is packed out all day long, There is a great choice of facials to be had and the prices are great. the most expensive one is only about £20 for 75 minutes.

There are just as many men as women there, both foreigners and Thai’s, although the men are almost all westerners. With the face mask I look like one of the baddies from Scooby Doo!

After a couple of days of soaking up the atmosphere, Sasipa arrived at the crack of dawn, having taken the big yellow night bus from Satuek.

We headed over to the four seasons, where I booked a junior suite a month or so ago. The suite they gave us on check in was not the one the manager showed me last time and though he assured me it was the same size, I didn’t like it at all. It felt cramped and not what I expected. He had a much larger Grand suite that he then showed us around, which was much better and at 96 m2 had two bathrooms, a study, a separate bedroom etc. It was only 350 baht more per night, so I immediately said yes. Now we have a lovely place for Christmas, which is good as I am struggling to find somewhere I really like for Christmas dinner and so I have decided to cook it myself in our suite/apartment.

The only concessions I have had to make are, chicken instead of turkey and I can’t find chestnut puree. Otherwise I was able to buy everything I needed, although I had to make my own cocktail sausages to be able to do the pigs in blankets.

One of the new bars I discovered is called the Rock Factory. The music is pretty hard core, with quite a lot of very heavy rock, if not metal, but there are still quite a few numbers in the set by Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, Queen etc.

However the main band are only on from Wednesday to Sunday and after enjoying a couple of nights watching them I thought I would take Sasipa along (as well as some earplugs as it is so loud!). Unfortunately it was a Monday and the band were, in my opinion, utter crap. It sounded like death metal meets screaming. We left after one drink with our ears ringing.

We decided to do something cultural on our last day and headed southwards from Pattaya for 20 minutes to Khao Chi Chan, which is the largest laser etched buddha in the world and covers a limestone cliff face.

Then nearby is the famous Nong Nooch botanical gardens. It is one of the top ten botanical gardens in the world and covers over 500 acres. There is a sight seeing bus that you can take which is worth it, plus quite a few elephants, which you can feed and get close to. One that we fed some bananas to was 70 years old. Among all the different plants there are hundreds of statues of dinosaurs dotted around, encompassing many many different types. So many in fact that I had not heard of quite a few of them. There is a raised walkway on stilts, that goes around the grounds, with a roof to protect from the sun and if you are wondering where all the red telephone boxes went, one of the culprits is here, where you will find a long walkway to a temple, edged with a row of them along one side.

After Christmas we headed to Rayong, a town about 60km south. We booked a ocean suite at a nice little place, situated on the beach road and a bit out of town. The view is lovely and it is clearly an area popular with Thai’s, who sit under the trees along the beach or even on the pavement and have barbecues and drink beer or Thai whisky while the kids play in the sea. It’s nice to not see any foreigners after wall to wall ‘farangs’ in Pattaya.

Stencilled on our wall is ‘have a ni e day’. It’s true that Thai people struggle with a soft s sound and Sasipa and others I know say nie (pronounced nigh) instead of nice.

We ate on the beach at small restaurants every meal and mostly ate seafood, but we both feel slightly under the weather and so couldn’t do it as much justice as it deserved. There is a big market in Rayong with many hundreds of stalls, but as it was a Sunday only a limited number were open. We came across one stall loaded down with hundreds of Pomelos of various sizes and another with mounds of pineapples. We bought quite a few of both and the car in the morning smelt like a giant pineapple.

We had a fabulous seafood soup at one restaurant, although I think if I had eaten it a couple of months ago I would have found it too salty. The food is often quite salty here, but with the heat it doesn’t appear to be a big problem.

The traffic has apparently been really heavy, with reports of 12 hours or more to get to the north. Many Thai’s drive home for new year to see their families, as they have all left their villages to go to live and work in Bangkok and other major cities in the south. We were both hoping to avoid any extra hours on top of the 6.5 hours it will already take to get home, even with a clear run. With that in mind, I have plotted a route that takes us as far as possible to the east and away from Bangkok, while still heading north as we must. In fact we will almost skim the edge of Cambodia, which at the nearest point will only be 20km away. Fortunately I can report that it paid off, as we did the journey in about 6 hours 20 minutes. 🙂

Today we are off to save a cow. Sasipa wants to rescue this cow from the butchers block, so with a little help from a couple of relatives and me, she bought the cow, which will now live a lovely, free and hopefully happy existence at her aunt’s, in a nice grassy field with a pond. Early every evening Sasipa also fills a bag with rice and fish, off cuts of meat etc and rides off to feed various hungry dogs that she has discovered living in the area. They are very lucky to have have such a kind person looking out for them.

New year’s eve was spent at a friends house at the edge of the village. There were, of course, relatives there too. They wanted me to join in their card game, which is apparently very popular in Thailand. The game is call Baccarat, which I have heard of, but never played. So I looked up the rules quickly and got out my 10 baht stake. You are dealt 2 cards and have to get as close as possible to 9. PIcture cards and 10 are worth 0. If you want a third card, in your attempt to get 9 or as close under as possible, you can have one. If cards are in a run or flush or 3 of a kind etc, it increases the money you can win. As we were only playing for 10 baht, the maximum win or loss per hand was 50 baht, but in reality it was 10 baht almost every time. Anyway, after an hour playing, all said and done I won, drum roll…….. 30 baht! It was good fun though. Other people sang Karaoke, often just to themselves, drank beer or whisky or came over to try out their English expressions on me. Sasipa told me, the next day, that one teacher was really keen to talk to me in English, but got tongue tied and couldn’t think of anything to say.

Two months have flown by and I need to renew my visa for the next two months, so I am off to the Chong Chom/O Smach Thai/Khymer border crossing. I did want to go to Siem Reap & Angkor Wat, about 165km away, but it’s a very quiet border crossing and apparently there is little transport from the border and the paperwork to take the car is quite extensive. So it looks like a quick bite to eat in Cambodia and then hop back over the border again. The crossing itself is indeed quiet compared to other border posts, but as there is a casino on the Cambodian side, which was packed full of Thai’s as gambling is technically illegal in Thailand, there was quite a brisk trade. Unlike me they don’t need a visa for Cambodia, so it’s a easier process. We had a quick look inside. There was one huge room filled with fruit machines of various types and another filled with card tables. Both rooms were packed with locals/Thai’s and there was not a single foreigner in there except for me.

Sasipa came through the border with me, but as she was chatting away to every one, knows nothing about international borders and they were busy with my paperwork and collecting their fee, she waltzed straight through Thai passport control and then Cambodian immigration without even showing her passport and then did the same again on the way back! Only finally being asked at Thai immigration for a passport. Luckily the border police thought it was hilarious that she’d left Thailand, gone into Cambodia and come back again without a single stamp in her passport.

My mum will be over in a couple of weeks for a holiday, it will be great to see her, so more updates to follow.

สวัสดีปีใหม่ (Sawaat dii bee mai – happy new year!)

Here is a link to some more photo’s from my current trip:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/photos/share/vstk2ZGm5QGO10xAvISVLmxy8V83UQZANFSWSddwLp0