Poem

Our Eden

We had our Eden

Beyond festooned lianas

And green ginger bushes

Where the sucking fig tree pushes

Up, up to the pristine blue

And  iridescent scorpions

Creep from secret lairs

As  invisible gibbons

Caterwaul across the canopy

Cacophonous cadences

From pre-history

And where retreating shadows

Define and deepen the verdure

Magical yet fearsome

There but not there

In the gathering gloom of dusk

A young bull levers his tusks

To ransack sweet bamboo

Still wild in his fleeing forest

Still blaming me and you.

Teaching

Arguably, I was born to be a teacher. Not in a stable but in the front bedroom of a Yorkshire schoolhouse - my father being the headmaster of the village school. Not long after I first learnt to walk, I would toddle next door and roam from classroom to classroom like the school mascot.

At Christmastime, when I was fifteen, I even filled in for the school caretaker - who was poorly - scrubbing every classroom floor and polishing all the windows. At eighteen, as I have blogged before, I was successful in my application to become a Voluntary Service Overseas teacher and was posted to Fiji. Upon my return, I completed a joint honours degree in English Studies and Education in Scotland before working for thirty two years in three South Yorkshire secondary schools.

Such an illustrious career! But towards the end of it, teaching could sometimes be like minding prisoners, spoilt brats or lunatics. You had to work so hard to keep your ship afloat and frequently potentially wonderful and well-planned lessons could be scuppered by reluctant, recalcitrant and downright lazy kids whose manners were sometimes quite appalling. I could tell you such stories of the sheer crap I had to endure just to get that monthly salary payslip.

Kids turning up ten minutes late for lessons without explanation or apology. Dozens of kids without pens or schoolbags. Kids answering mobile phones in lessons. Kids storming between classrooms to pick fights. Kids swearing like troopers. Kids stealing keys, DVDs, library books. Kids flicking to computer games when "working" on computers. Truants returning suddenly after three weeks off and saying a little angrily, "I don't know what we're doing!" Kids fighting. Kids plastering wads of chewing gum under their tables. Kids so lazy that sometimes you'd be lucky to get a five sentence paragraph out of them in forty minutes of "work". Kids whose homework performance was so poor that there was no way you could blend homework tasks with classroom activities - it just wouldn't work. I could go on and on but I won't...

Instead let's flick to Bangkok on a typical Tuesday in late January and let's focus on my Year 10 class - aged fourteen and fifteen. I have set them a research task which will transform into a "speaking and listening" presentation. They have to stand at the front and talk for two minutes about a particular country that I have told them to investigate for homework.

They have all done the homework. They all have memory sticks or "flash drives" containing their background Powerpoint slides. They all have bags and pens - and smiles of course. They all applaud their classmates both before and after their speeches. They all answer my supplementary questions. They all do their best and there is absolutely no fuss. No one is saying, "I'm not doing it!" or "I weren't here when it was set!" and no one is mocking or disrespectful. Okay they are a bit nervous about the task but nobody is backing out because this is what the teacher has told you to do so you do it. You just get on with the job like a proper student.

Proper student - yes, that's a term I often used in Sheffield when troubleshooting for other harassed teachers. Sit down. Listen to what you have to do and get on with it to the best of your ability - like a proper student. Good heavens, these friendly, focussed Thai children could teach many English kids a thing or two and if our children conducted themselves like my Thai pupils there'd be no need for highly paid teams of school inspectors to tour Britain  "kicking ass" in the name of higher standards. You can lead horses to water but you cannot make them drink.

Zoo

I have always had mixed feelings about zoos. They seem to be something of a hangover from the nineteenth century when wealthy societies brought exotic animals home for the amusement of  inquisitive citizens who were beginning to discover that there could be more to life than just work. But what do you do in Bangkok when your Saturday social diary is curiously empty? You can keep the city's massive shopping malls - not my cup of tea at all. Instead I decided to visit the zoo that King Rama V initiated over a hundred years ago following his royal tour of Europe.

I showed the taxi driver my city map pointing to the zoo and said "Suat Dusit! Suat Dusit!" which means Dusit Park. Instead this dumb sucker took me to a hotel to the east of the city centre called The Dusit something or other, in spite of me twice showing him the map again when we were stuck in Bangkok's predictable traffic jams clearly going in the wrong direction. Perhaps he was blind - not the best characteristic for a cab driver. Anyway we got there in the end for twice the expected fare but still only £4 ($7).

I had a lovely lunch in the restaurant by the lake that you can see to the left of the third photograph and I observed some interesting creatures even though I felt like setting a lot of them free - especially those larger caged birds that had no room to fly. Here's a sample of what I saw:-

Green tree python

Smooth skinned otter

Lake with view to King Rama V's Dusit Palace

Asian elephant with very dexterous trunk

Bengal tiger watching the world go by. Up The Tigers!

Malayan Sun Bear at feeding time. Until today I had no
idea that this creature even existed

Smiles

Have I passed the medical? Lord knows. Will I ever get to see the results? I doubt it. What I do know is that they took my blood pressure twice and in broken English I believe the doctor said I had slight hypertension - whatever that might mean. Like Shooting Parrots's father, I have always tried to stay clear of hospitals and doctors' surgeries even though Shirley is of course a nurse.

So there I was at the Vipavadi Hospital filling in forms with the help of Mr Somsak from the school's Human Resources Department. The Thais love forms and bureaucracy. I guess it keeps many people in work.  I was led from reception to the medical check-up section which must be a virtual piggy bank for the hospital authorities. There was a small army of nurses there all in pale lilac uniforms with nurses' paper hats decorated with different bands of purple which no doubt indicated their different ranks.

Blood sample, urine sample, blood pressure, weight, height, X-ray, cardiogram printout, reflexes, stomach pummelled, intimate inspection, second blood pressure test and the ancient Thai doctor with liver spots asking me if I took illegal drugs. I feel as fit as a fiddle but I will wait with bated breath to see if they have failed me. It's all about the big insurance company that owns the school and the limiting of their liabilities.

Koren woman from northern hilltribe

But that wasn't what I wanted to write about. What I wanted to reflect upon was Thailand's tourism strapline - "The Land of Smiles". Is it deserved? In the Vipavadi Hospital I observed a lot of smiling at reception, at the nurses' stations, in the X Ray room and from the ancient doctor himself. The senior nurse was a radiantly smiling supervisor and she attracted many smiles in return from her staff.

A lovely feature of teaching here is the smiles that can often fill your classroom with warmth. When I greet children they almost universally smile at me and on my walk to work I smile at the streetcleaner and the motorcycle taxi men in their orange jerkins and little Cheera my cleaner and Koy and Nem (I think that's her name) - the receptionists. The lowly paid school cleaners and the catering staff smile at me but what I mostly notice is how readily Thai people smile at each other. In general, there seems to be a lot of human warmth around - though of course I will admit that when you breeze in to an unfamiliar culture, you might not always read the signals correctly - missing subtle undercurrents.

Though there are smiles and the pervasive influence of the Buddhist faith is ever present, there's also great poverty here and for some people survival cannot be easy. There are also drug cartels, a rich overclass of tax dodgers, corrupt police officers, prostitution, occasional murders and political unrest but in spite of all of that I hope I'll remember the smiles. For me the strapline is entirely apposite. Mind you, for my part, I might not be smiling if they say I have failed this afternoon's medical because that would mean I'd soon be flying homewards.

Gallery

My £8 a night bungalow at Khao Yai

Jungle guide Beer holds a yellow whipsnake that I also held - feeling its
subtle smoothness as it wove its way expertly back to the greenery

Jungle shadows which I have posted especially for
The Blogger of the Year in New Zealand. 

The scorpion that Beer pulled from its sleepy lair. He thought it would be funny toput this
handsome fellow on my muscular upper arm - like a living tattoo

Beer tried to take a photo of a swinging gibbon by pressing my SLR against
his telescope. As you can see - it didn't really work.

Salty lake in the middle of the jungle where elephants come to drink and
defecate in the early morning. It is called Nong Phak Chi.

Trekking

How quiet the jungle. Following our light-footed guide, it seems we are circling though we are going straight. The leaf litter is dry beneath our feet and there are no leeches. Occasionally we hear birds high in the canopy. There are dark holes where creatures live – scorpions, snakes and small mammals. Vines hang like electric cables or wind their way up to the light. Some of the trees are three hundred years old but behind us a rotten branch crashes to the ground, landing with an almighty thud.

How cool the jungle and how old. The light is dappled. Occasionally shafts of sunlight descend like spotlights on the lower greenery. We are in Eden. In this very forest wild elephants live, honey badgers, timid jungle deer, macaques and gibbons and perhaps the very last of the region’s tigers. We hear cacophonous gibbons calling, defining their territory. Sometimes we step over great fists of elephant dung. It is good to be in the jungle.

We see ants and termites and leaves glued together by spiders. Perhaps it’s because it’s January but the jungle seems friendlier to homo sapiens than I expected. In the pick up truck, I was the idiot with the shorts, sandals and tiger T-shirt. The other five looked as though they were sponsored by outdoor clothing companies – boots, goretex tops, fleeces, mountain trousers, jungle hats and insect spray. Unnecessary as it turned out but they’re nice people.

There’s thirty something Zandra and Tomasz from Prague, a delightful lesbian couple from Magburg - Irina and Natalie, and Connie who is also German and a stone restorer who has pedalled her bicycle from Chiang Mai, through Laos – travelling over 2000 kilometres in forty five days. They all speak passable English and we chat happily through the day tour which lasts a full twelve hours.

Our guide, Beer, seems desperate that we should see wild elephants and after the jungle trek we are back in the Toyota pick up truck, travelling this way and that along the national park’s network of roads, looking for these elusive elephants. It’s when the sun is setting and the forest is being absorbed by the shadows of early evening that we finally see a young bull elephant five metres from the road. It’s as if he’s there but not there. You hear him more than you see him in the gathering gloom. He’s crashing into a small bamboo grove. His tusks are his main give away. Otherwise he might have just been shadows.

He’s munching the bamboo and then he leaves pushing deeper into the pristine forest. I kind of like it that we saw him in these circumstances – mysterious and unphotographable. And I feel sad that the human race is gradually destroying these natural forests or turning them into virtual theme parks. There are far, far too many of us for that young bull elephant and the gibbons calling to us from pre-history. All too soon they will be gone.

Jungle

Another week at school. This one has been going faster... In "Pavilion One" this afternoon, I went to a British universities fair - where representatives of different British universities literally set up their stalls to attract Thai students to their campuses. I was delighted to see my old alma mater in the corner - The University of Stirling. I chatted with the young Scottish rep and cadged a free pen from her while surveying an aerial photograph of my old stomping ground.... That's where I was assaulted by two Rangers fans...That's where I had to sprint like the wind while being pursued by two security guards and that's the Gannochy sports centre where the best lunches were served... and there's The Wallace Monument. Not a bad job to have - travellng the world to promote your old university. I could do that.

Anyway, I hope to get out of Bangkok this weekend - zoom off from school at 3pm and after picking up my gear get a taxi to the Mo Chit bus station. There I'll be looking for a bus to Pak Chong. It should take about three hours and then I'll need to get on a local pick up truck that will take me to this school's other campus on the edge of the Khao Yai National Park. It will be late when I arrive but I have reserved a hut in the country school's campus. On Saturday morning, another pick up truck should arrive to take me on an all day guided tour of the park - with walking, wild elephants, macaws, monkeys, pythons and green mysterious jungle with shadows, spiders, leeches and other creepy crawlies. It will be an adventure if of course I ever make it to Pak Chong.

And if I survive, I'l report back in the coming days...