Rules

Some rules for living are proscribed by law and others are instinctive. Together these rules provide foundation stones for social life. It might well be said that in small, subtle ways these "rules" constitute the very character of a particular culture. Here are some surprising "rules" that are endemic in Thailand:-

• If driving a car never stop at a pedestrian zebra crossing, even if there are people actually walking across it.
• If you own a motorbike, feel free to ride it as fast as you wish along pavements where pedestrians are walking.
• If you own a motorbike, please don't wear a helmet.
• If you own a two-seater motorbike feel free to transport your entire family on it - babies, animals and all.
• If you own a motorbike make sure you use a mobile phone when in transit.
• If you are active in a political party, feel free to erect giant posters on pavements so that pedestrians cannot get past them without stepping in the road.
• If you are a waiter or waitress, as soon as you have delivered the menu you must stand next to the diner impatiently waiting for his order.
• If you are a waiter or waitress make sure that you habitually get diners' orders wrong. Bringing starters to tables after main courses is advisable.
• When riding on buses, never talk loudly - keep quiet apart from when your obnoxious ringtone goes off - then you can talk over your mobile phone as loudly as you wish.
• When standing on a crowded metro or "skytrain" you must face forward - not backwards or to the side.
• If you are an attractive young woman you must wear tight skimpy shorts or very short dresses to inflame the passions of passing middle-aged "farangs".
• If you are a woman you must not touch a Buddhist monk.
• Do not touch other people's heads.
• Do not talk about the King of Thailand who is as venerated as the Lord Buddha himself.
• If selling wine in a supermarket, make sure the bottle price is at least double the average European price.
• If you own a dog there is no need to have it on a lead or anything like that - just let it roam the streets so that it can make a pack with other street dogs.
• If you are a car driver, you must only use your horn in dire emergencies - never to express annoyance or frustration.
• Drop litter where ever you want to.
• If you operate a business, employ large numbers of people, specially selected because of their low levels of competence.
• If you own a business, pay your workers as little as you possibly can so that they only have enough for basic survival.
• If you own a construction business, ignore normal health and safety rules and irritating building regulations that get in the way of progress.
• If you are a market trader, do not harangue or hassle potential customers as such behaviour is considered most impolite.
• At supermarket checkouts, never help the shopper behind you by putting the plastic divider on the conveyor belt for them.
• Take off your shoes before you enter somebody's home or any Buddhist temple.

The country seems to have many other "rules" like this. The longer I have stayed here in "The Land of Smiles", the more I have noticed these odd codes of conduct. They remind me that I am far from home.

Sukhothai

She was collecting snails

"Hello! Sawasdee kap! Hello!"

It was midnight on Friday and there I was at the spiked steel gates of the Orchid Hibiscus Guesthouse just outside the ancient city. Next to me was my slightly inebriated "taxi" driver. Can you call a beaten up old Toyota pick up truck a taxi? This man, Non, told me he loved me but I think this was just because I had bought him a can of "Chang" beer when we stopped at the 7/11 store.

"No, you don't love me! You love her!" I said, pointing at his slightly inebriated missus leaning from the passenger seat in her straw coolie hat.

Non was yelling with me. It was a midnight serenade. So much for Booking.com's promise that this little hotel had "24 hr reception" and so much for the customer note I had added to my booking - "...arriving around midnight."

I was beginning to have awful visions of sleeping in toothless Non's pick up truck down some Buddha-forsaken dirt track in the middle of Thailand when glory be, the awakened receptionist sauntered to the gate with a key. Saved.

Lord Pudding's chamber

In the morning, after a breakfast that included wild honey, delicious fat little bananas and coconut rice cakes, I rented a red bicycle and began pedalling around the ancient mini-kingdom I had come to see.

How glorious it must have been - a veritable Garden of Eden in the heart of South East Asia, long before there were named countries like Thailand, Cambodia or Burma. It seems that King Ramkamhaeng was a benevolent monarch, ahead of his time. He encouraged trade and allegedly created the first written form of Thai but I doubt that he laboured in the sun with rocks or bricks to build the temples and meeting halls that grew up in great preponderance in and around the moated city with its huge earthen walls.

Sukhothai bloomed for two hundred years - from 1238 to 1438 before rule and influence shifted south to the city of Ayutthaya which was the Siamese capital for a further three hundred years.

Ramkamhaeng's representatives visited China, India and Sri Lanka. Trading links were established but perhaps the most significant import of all was the Buddhist faith, coloured with flecks and traces of Hinduism that came from the Indian subcontinent, transforming itself as it travelled into a Siamese version of the faith which to this day continuously reinvents itself.

In the early evening, a security guard allowed me back into the central area of the "historical park" to take photos of Wat Mahathat, eerily illuminated in the black darkness but I couldn't get close because of a pack of gnashing curs who appeared to be ganging up on me like wolves of yore.

Wat Mahathat at night

And then as I pedalled homewards to the Orchid Hibiscu,s down a long dark tarmac road, another slavering hound ran out of the darkness at me barking as if it had emerged from The Baskervilles. "Yaa!!" I yelled, pedalling faster than Sir Chris Hoy on amphetamines. The vicious mutt began to tire at the very moment that the pressure of my muscular energy caused my bike chain to come off. I free-wheeled another hundred metres. The Lord Buddha himself knows what might have transpired if the chain had come off further back down the road. I would have been dog meat.

At 6.30 on Sunday morning I was up swimming in the little hotel's twenty five metre pool before another forray into Sukhothai's open-air archaeological treasure house, a fascinating visit to the Ramkamhaeng National Museum and a seven hour bus journey back to Bangkok. Glad I went, in spite of those damnable dogs!

Wat Si Chum

Prequel

Sorry I haven't posted in a few days. This weekend I bussed it up to Sukhothai, seven hours north of Bangkok. It was here in the very heart of Thailand that King Ramkamhaeng developed an amazing Buddhist city in the thirteenth century, complete with a water system, huge ramparts and moats as well as scores of temples and statues. It must have been such a wonder to behold, far from the imaginings of Europeans. I will say more, but before I hit the hay ready for work on Monday morning, here are just two photos I snapped:-

Posters

Election fever is growing in Thailand. The polls open on July 3rd. The front-runners are the incumbent Democrat Party led by the erudite Oxford-educated prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and The Pheu Thai Party led by the photogenic political novice Yingluck Shinawatara - sister of disgraced former leader Thaksin Shinawatra - still in exile over greedily extracting millions of baht from the public purse. They reckon that from afar this megalomaniac is pulling many of the election strings just as he was most influential in last year's "red shirts" demonstrations that resulted in many deaths and injuries.

Anyway, the intention of this post is not to lecture you about Thai politics but to share with you some of the posters that are now decking the streets of Bangkok. Every party has its own number on the ballot paper. What an odd "co-incidence" that Miss Yingluck's party get Box 1! But here's Mr Spock, representing party number 21:-

And here's Miss Yingluck just outside my bijou residence, looking rather battered:-

Here's the prime minister with his old fag from Eton as Yingluck lurks menacingly behind:-

The mad scientist party have fallen to the ground:-

But my favourite poster has to be this one for Party No. 2. What is the baby saying to the electorate? Probably what all politicians think about the hoi polloi in their constituencies. But the baby is making no bones about it. No pretence. The two-fingered salute says simply, "Give us your vote and then f... off!" I think that party Number 2 - and what is a "number two" (?) - must have been schooled by The Right Honourable Nicholas Clegg MP for Sheffield Hallam:-

Doesn't that just about sum up all politicians?

Scarecrow

There's an intruder in my garden back in Sheffield. She has been planting vegetables and ensuring that my little patch of prepared earth doesn't lie fallow this summer. I have been giving her long distance advice. The English spring has apparently been most wonderful weatherwise and there has been much watering to do. In comparison, jobs like ironing, changing bed linen, washing clothes, drying them, vacuuming, dusting and bleaching the toilet bowls are of course dead easy - woman's work. Now my little scarecrow is discovering what man's work is all about. Hard! Bloody hard!

Through the wonders of modern technology, yesterday our Frances snapped this picture on her phone, uploaded it and then emailed it to me in Thailand and now I am displaying it - sideways on* - to the entire world! Well to Jenny in Wrexham, John in Trelawnyd, Ian in south Manchester and a handful of other readers who drop in to this rambling blog from time to time. The wife:-

* The wonders of modern technology! I cannot re-orientate it no matter how I try! So bend your head!

Interesting

When I am at my computer keyboard, I do go elsewhere. It's not all about blogging. For the past few years I have been contributing photos to the Panoramio website. From there over 350 of my pictures have been selected for Google Earth and may also be seen in Google Maps etc..

In 2006, I visited Berlin for the first time. Afterwards, I added a few of my Berlin and Sachsenhausen (concentration camp) photos to the Panoramio website. Incredibly, Panoramio provide running totals of visitors who have looked at one's pictures whilst on the internet. I posted the following photos on the same day. Here's my picture of the Jewish Holocaust Monument in Berlin. Established many years after World War II, it recognises Germany's role in the unnecessary deaths of approximately six million Jews:-

And here's my picture of the site of Hitler's "Fuhrerbunker" in Berlin. The place where that evil, racist, ego-maniacal monster died:-

These two sites are spitting distance from each other. What interests me and the reason for this post is that I note that just twenty six visitors have looked at the Holocaust Memorial picture but currently 4,802 have checked out my photo of the site of Hitler's bunker. What does this say about people if a memorial to six million gets so few visits while the eerie but unremarkable plaza where just one "man" - the "Fuhrer" - made his last throws of the dice has attracted the attention of almost five thousand people? I find it spooky and not a little sad. How far have we travelled I wonder?

Grumbling

Blogging is great for grumbling - letting off steam and having a good old moan. As I can't think of much else to post about today, I shall return to one of my pet themes - namely taxi drivers.

Here in Bangkok there seem to be thousands of taxis - often brightly coloured. You rarely have to wait long for a cab. You hail one, open the front passenger door and enquire if the driver is prepared to take you where you want to go. This can be more challenging than it might seem as hardly any taxi drivers in Bangkok speak more than three English words. Also they have clearly all been trained in negative and disinterested body language. Sometimes the signal that the fellow is prepared to transport you is shown by the very slightest inclination of the mandibles.

Bangkok's metered taxis are incredibly cheap. The meter begins at thirty five baht (70 UKpence or $1.15 US) but then the meter ascends very slowly. A long trip to the state-of-the-art international airport - Suvarnabhumi (Soo-wanna-poom) nearly eighteen miles from here will cost a mere £6 UK ($9.80US or $12NZ).

In Thailand, tipping is not customary - which suits me just fine. Around the world, taxi drivers seem to expect to be tipped after every trip. However, I have always had an aversion to this habit as in my many years as a teacher I never received one single gratuity from a parent - even if I was the last to leave a parents' evening at nine o'clock on an icy winter's night or I'd given up several lunchtimes to coach a struggling child. Not one groat, one centime or one dong! Zilch! Yet somebody sitting on his (or her) fat backside turning a steering wheel and getting lost not only expects an inflated fare but also a tip!

In tourist hot spots in Thailand there is always a danger of being ripped off by taxi drivers even though most taxi drivers in the country seem scrupulously honest. Last Sunday, in the southern town of Krabi, I agreed to pay a pick-up truck or song thaew "taxi" driver a certain sum of money to get to the airport. I had just travelled from Ao Nang to Krabi for forty baht - a distance of seventeen kilometres. In Krabi town, I climbed into the back of the jallopy, squeezing in next to some local people.

Thai Song Thaew "taxi-bus"

I noted that when the woman who had been sitting next to me paid the driver at his window she gave him fifteen baht. A mile later, at the airport, I got out the twenty baht we had agreed and the driver started shaking his head. "Two hundred! Two hundred!"

"No way!" I insisted. "We agreed twenty baht"

"Song thaew two hundred from town."

"We agreed twenty mate and besides there were half a dozen people in the back with me! It might be two hundred for somebody on their own."

The bloke was becoming aereated. He tried to phone someone on his mobile phone.

"Look. I am an honest man!" I said. "As a compromise I will give you one hundred baht and no more! I don't like being cheated so you will take the hundred and bugger off!"

I tossed the banknote into his cab and waltzed into the airport as he sped away - no doubt seething about the farangs whose business puts food on his table.

This was just another incident to add to my lifelong catalogue of "events" with taxi drivers. Having rid Sheffield of several parking enforcement officers last year, I am considering a similar campaign against taxi drivers when I return to England or possibly I will limit myself to a protest march on parliament, urging our noble MPs to make the tipping of taxi drivers illegal.