Letter from Thailand

With Songkran quickly fading to a blurry memory I had two weeks in Southeast Asia to kill before I was due to arrive in Australia as an immigrant. Naturally, money was tight which made my next destination – probably the only livable country in the world where you can buy a beer for 25 cents US – the ideal spot to spent the interval. I visited Cambodia last year and had a torrid time on the notorious 'scam bus', which ferries eager, wide-eyed backpackers from Bangkok to Phnom Penh and squeezes them for cash via an elaborate series of rip-offs every few kilometers, so I opted to make life easy for myself by flying to the capital this time round.

Like practically everything else in Cambodia, transport is extremely cheap. There are virtually no taxis in Phnom Penh, but a lift to practically anywhere in the city in a tuk tuk can be had for about three dollars. Cheaper still, at least until you factor in the cost of an airlift to Bangkok for medical treatment, are the motorbike taxis or 'motodups' which ferry helmetless Cambodians and visitors around town for a dollar or two per trip. I walked away from Cambodia last year satisfied that it was my new favourate country, and my second stay had been planned to within an inch of its life. I had a ton of places I wanted to visit so I opted to go for a transport option ludicrously expensive in practically every other country on the planet but practically free in Cambodia – an eight dollar per-day personal driver.

I approached the first motodup driver I spotted outside my hotel and happily, he turned out to be a gent of a guy who I spent a week knocking around Phnom Penh with. Narun knew where every site I mentioned along with a rake of others I didn't. We went to the Royal Palace, the Silver Pagoda, the Killing Fields and a ton of other enjoyable tourist traps during the day and spun around the nightspots when the sun dipped below the skyline on his battered old motor. Narun was a somewhat shy, unassuming guy and he tended to decline when I asked him in for a beer in the boozers we pulled up outside. Every time I offered he would look at the ground and shake his head with a smile and say, “Nooo. I wait you here!” Phnom Penh is a fun town but I found it difficult to enjoy myself fully when I knew there was a bloke, who was quickly becoming a good mate, sitting outside on his motorbike waiting for me.

As a way of making his evening a little more enjoyable and my conscience less put upon, I would buy an extra beer every now and again, before nipping outside to have a drink with Narun. Pumping your motorbike driver full of beer probably isn't the wisest thing to do, particularly in a country with roads as lethal as Cambodia's, but Narun seemed to really appreciate the gesture. It got to the point where I would spend most of my night sitting outside the bars we had driven half way across the city to check out.

During one of our slightly drunken late night chats Narun told me about what happened to his family during the years of the Khmer Rouge – the genocidal ultra communists who controlled the country in the late 1970s. For no reason he has been able to ascertain, his parents and elder siblings were taken from his home by Khmer Rouge cadres and have never been heard from since. With his family assumed murdered, Narun was alone in the world by the time he was 10 – although in the absence of either documents or older relatives he doesn't know exactly how old he is.

When the Khmer Rouge came to power after ousting the US-backed Lon Nol government in a bloody civil war which culminated in the invasion and evacuation of Phnom Penh, they declared it 'year zero'. The outside world was to be shut out and the past, which was tainted with foreign influence, was to be forgotten. Children therefore, who had no knowledge of the past or the world beyond, made the ideal recruits.

Orphans and other children were rounded up and put into ramshackle countryside camps; Narun among them. Days were spent working on a rice farm or in a rudimentary factory making sandals out of old car tyres and nights were filled with indoctrination classes involved long lectures about the greatness of Angkar and the terrors waiting to overrun their sacred Cambodia from within and without. Food was scarce and disease rampant, and many of the children in Narun's camp joined the estimated two million fatalities of the period.

When the Khmer Rouge was eventually forced into the hills by an invading Vietnamese army, the cadres deserted Narun's camp and the children who had survived were taken to a refugee camp near the Thai border. Happily, Narun is no longer alone in the world – he now has a wife and two young daughters who he gets to see two or three times a week when he has time and money to make it back to his rural home some two hours away. “Would you like to meet them?” he asked as he was dropping me off at my hotel shortly before I was due to leave the city. “You can come and stay with us!” It may have been a suggestion made more out of politeness than anything else, but I intended to take him up on it regardless.

Hangovers and boats are uneasy bedfellows but the wedding I had travelled to the isolated island of Koh Lipe in Thailand's southern-most province for had come to a close and I had to get myself to Bangkok immediately or risk missing the start of the legendary Songkran festival that throws the capital into a frenzy of drunken waterfights for three days every April. Thailand's population mobilises ahead of the celebrations with some returning to their provincial homes to mark the event with families while others hit the capital to mark Songkran where it is at its manic best. This year however, there was a significant increase in the number of people barrelling down the motorways from the impoverished Issarn Province in the northeast to Bangkok – and this year they had a very different agenda to the rest of the revelers.

A string of 'yellow shirt' protests ousted a series of prime ministers allied to former Manchester City FC owner Thaksin Shinawatra last year amid claims of corruption. Abhisit Vejjajiva was eventually installed but Thaksin remained popular in the the heavily populated rice bowl province of Issarn and his supporters, clad in red, chose Songkran 2009 as their time to bring one of theirs back to the PM's chair.

I started to come across pieces of information that hinted that a storm might be brewing – groups of red-clad protesters pilling out of a 7-11 with bags of beer and whiskey before jumping onto schools of flatback trucks and heading towards the city centre and brief mentions of clashes with police on BBC World Service. I however, was in holiday mode and was primarily concerned with what type of watergun would leave us best equipped to defend ourselves from water balloon attack by the Thais who would choose to party through the turmoil. On the second night of the festival however, matters worsened as reports came in that the army were on the streets and had opened fire on protesters who had taken to hijacking and burning out vehicles.

A friend of mine from back home who has lived in Bangkok for the past four years emailed me to say that the protesters had taken over the main intersection in the city which his apartment was right next too. Rather than huddle indoors however, Chris decided to go and check out what the fuss was about. He excitably informed me over the phone that he ended up having to hit the deck as a burning bus came hurtling towards a group of soldiers who responded by spraying it with bullets. The vehicle, which was being driven by a brick on the accelerator, eventually came to a stop when it crashed into an electricity post which called a small fire and a localised blackout.

That night we headed to the backpacker Mecca of Koh San Road, a couple of miles from the centre of the city. After a few hours of drinking, partying, dousing random strangers with water and general merriment, we grabbed a taxi towards home. Less than five minutes into the journey the car was locked up in traffic caused by a large group of masked protesters who had torched several more buses. They were in the middle of a tense stand off with nervy looking teenage soldiers and the thought that they might turn their frustrations onto the passing farangs crossed my mind. Happily, we were eventually waved on our way.

The Thais are having a tough year and the smiles were not as quick to flash across their faces as I remembered. That said, the problems there at the moment are very much a domestic and foreigners who keep their heads down are not likely to be dragged into it. The Thais are fully aware of how rapidly the number of people with the cash to go on holidays is shrinking right now and how a tourist getting the slaps for stumbling into a protest would reduce their share of the cake. I half wanted to stick on my journalist hat and get stuck into the middle of things, but I decided against it. Partly because I didn't want to be playing a part in sending negative images and reports around the world about a country that has given me so much. Mainly though, because I was on holiday and my beers were not about to drink themselves.

So there we were – a rag-tag assortment of Carrys and other hangers-on, waiting around on a beach on the southern most tip of the Thai peninsula, close to the Malaysian border. We were gathered there ahead of the marriage of Irish girl, Emma, and Columbian guy, Marlon, who would afterwards return to their home in New Zealand. This stunning example of intercontinental multiculturalism in practice was not without its difficulties – the wedding would have to be registered in four different countries and the location chosen meant many couldn't make it. However, the island was a living postcard and was sure to make for a beautiful ceremony.

The day before we were due to kick off my wandering friend Denis had made it to Koh Lipe after experiencing the horrors of being a foreigner in Thailand with no money. However, while on the ferry he had met two individuals who might well turn what was looking like a quiet couple of days in paradise into something more interesting. Denis had come across two predictably stunning, early 20s Swedish girls who were apparently fixated by the Irish accent, and being without male companionship were hoping we could take them out that night. When our good fortune was revealed to the group some skeptical looks were thrown towards me by various female members of the Carry clan. There was a palpable dread that we would be out all night and end up half dead at the wedding ceremony we had travelled half way round the world for.

"It can't be helped!" I roared, to the delight of the male half of the traveling contingent. "They're Sweeeedish for Jaysus sake!"

Although I quickly forgot their names, the two girls were every bit the tanned, blonde, simpering crackers I was hoping they would be. One of them, who looked like a young Anna Kornikova, appeared to take a particular shine to me and kept getting me to repeat various phrases which emphasised what she felt was my most charming quality – the thick Dublin accent that made me Mr Unpopular in snobbish UCD and which still brings unbelieving looks when I tell a middle or upper class Irish person that I'm a journalist.

We eventually forced ourselves to bid the somewhat confused Swedes an early goodnight – terror struck as we were by the thoughts of facing stressed out Carry women caught in an organisational frenzy with nothing but a hangover and a feeble excuse based on the nationality of our drinking partners to defend ourselves with. They promised to come to the wedding the following day, but I got the feeling that their meeting with what must have been a totally alien experience of temporary rejection meant we had lost our chance.

I got up the next morning, changed into my crumpled wedding outfit and headed off to establish where we were in terms of getting the show on the road. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the beach in front of our resort had been decked out with floral arches, rose petal pathways and various other wedding-esque paraphernalia by the Thai staff. Amazingly, the resort manager had somehow secured the services of a pair of Irish-American musicians who were hanging around with guitar, bodhran, fiddle and whistle at the ready. A crew of Buddhist monks were scheduled to arrive and bless the ceremony any minute so I skipped breakfast and went to have a chat with my sister during her last few moments as a Carry. Given the fact that she had to get ready in a beach bungalow and the hair and make up girls she hired were dismissed before having their work restarted by Emma and her bridesmaid, she looked amazing – if somewhat stressed by her determination to get everything right.

Eventually, the three monks arrived on the back of a single moped and it was time to get going. In the absence of my father who died last year it fell to me to give my sister away to her fiancé Marlon who I had met for the first time the previous day. I didn't know the bloke I was giving her too so my role was primarily aesthetic, but I was happy to trust Emma's instincts on the matter and skipped the clichéd, brotherly hurt-my-sister-and-you're-a-dead-man chat some feel are a necessary part of any wedding celebration. The fact that Marlon is a 15-stone martial arts expert who doesn't really speak English made this decision the obvious one, but he also seems like a nice lad.

The Swedish girls, predictably, made their excuses early on and left the wedding party to eat what was by far the best wedding meal I've had. We sat on the beach and listened to the two musicians, one guy and one gal, gently bicker with each other between songs in what threatened to spill over into a full blown domestic as the drink flowed. An Irish wedding used to be a very different affair, but with travel becoming ever cheaper and peoples' horizons broadening with every generation, I get the feeling that celebrations along these lines will soon become more the norm than the exception.

My travel companion on my trip to my sister's wedding had inexplicably failed to meet me on a connection flight from Bangkok too the southern Thai city of Hat Yai but with my sister having asked me to give her away I had little choice but to go without him rather than delay and risk missing the ceremony. I arrived in Hat Yai after a fretful flight and checked into the twin room we booked. I sat on my bed and looked at the empty one opposite. I had been traveling for 20 hours at this stage, but had to find out what was happening.

I headed outside just in time for a heroic downpour that had Thai's scattering from the darkened streets in search of shelter. I approached a motorbike taxi driver, a somewhat elderly gentleman with a kindly face, and asked him to take me to the nearest Internet cafe. "I know it!" he said with a smile. "But the rain! I have no rain coat," he continued as his expression sagged tragically.

"OK, I'll give you a tip so you can buy a raincoat," I said, getting the hint. With that we were off into the torrent which at times almost whipped the bike out from under us. We weren't helped by the late hour and it took us some time to find a working connection. When we did find one it was in a games shop – an Asian phenomenon involving rows of teenagers who cannot afford a games console of their own transfixed by online games they play on computers they rent by the hour. I'm sure I cut a bizarre figure in that rarely-visited southern city, walking into a games shop looking like I'd been dredged up from the bottom of the Mekong and begging the boss to let me check my emails in broken Thai.

“Of course,” he said in perfect English with a look of extreme concern.

I logged into my email and there it was – the Mr Beanesque reason behind my friend's inexplicable disappearance. You see, Denis had made a series of blunders that in isolation might have been problematic but which collectively were bound to prove nothing short of catastrophic. First off, after I booked my flight to Hat Yai from Bangkok I emailed him the flight confirmation so he could book himself onto the same flight. Somehow, he got the origin, destination, time and even the date right – but he screwed up the month and booked onto a flight in April rather than March. He discovered this when he arrived in Bangkok and tried to check in. No big deal – internal flights are cheap, the flight wasn't fully booked and he had his credit card. He could just buy another ticket. Except he didn't have his credit card. He lost it somewhere between Dublin and Bangkok. Worse still, he had practically no cash. I would love to see the security video taken in Bangkok Airport that day because I can just picture his disorientated, panicked wanderings from one end of the departure hall to the other. His condition was such that he didn't think to wait for me where we had arranged so that I could get him another ticket and instead opted to approach the tourist police who rather unhelpfully suggested he go to the international departure lounge, find other Irish travellers and attempt to beg money from them. He took this advice and after several hours found three Irish girls. Sadly, they refused to give him enough money to buy a bottle of water. When asked, he told me, they turned their backs and walked away. Eventually a Scottish guy overheard a subsequent discussion with the tourist police and gave him 1,000 Baht - or the equivalent of just over E20.

Reading his tragic tale, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. So I laughed. I sat there soaking wet surrounded by spotty Thai teenagers and laughed my arse off. Then, I booked him onto the first flight the next day and called a friend of mine in Bangkok who went to the airport and collected him. The next day he was in Hat Yai looking like someone had picked him up by the hair in Bangkok, swung him around a few times and then thrown him to the southern city. Happily, we were both in time for the wedding which was due to take place the next day and what's more, the young man had accomplished something that looked like it might nullify his previous calamities.

Two weeks before I was due to book my flights to Australia I got a call from my globe-trotting sister currently residing in New Zealand. She told me that she would be marrying her beloved Columbian boyfriend – in my beloved Thailand. “Can you come to the wedding? You can stop off on your way to Australia!” This was surely as good an excuse as I was ever likely to get to make a return to sweet Siam some ten months after I had bade it a tearful goodbye.

I had my tickets, my convoluted travel itinerary and the promise of some work in Australia so I was pretty much all set. Until my sister's wedding plans offered me an excuse to divert to Southeast Asia on the way. Assorted family and friends, it was arranged, would be gathering on a southern Thai island called Koh Lipe for about a week but I decided that this would be nowhere near enough time for me to reaquaint myself with a part of the world where I had spent eight cracking months of the previous year. So, I extended my stay to one month. In order to reduce the catastrophic impact this deviation would have on my meager funds, I opted to spend most of it in neighbouring Cambodia – where a beer could be had for $0.75 U.S., a meal for a dollar and accommodation for a fiver.

When news of my intentions broke to my only two friends still in gainful employment they resolved to accompany me on the Southeast Asian leg of my trip. Denis, a long-time buddy and frequent traveling companion, would come along to the wedding and for the jaunt around Cambodia while Luffo, a pal who has been working in Beijing for the past two years, would skip the ceremony but meet us in Phnom Penh for a week.

Although my months back in home were pretty miserable I did leave on a high. My flight took off the day after Ireland beat Wales to take the Grand Slam and Bernard Dunne showed the heart of a lion to win a world title after one of the greatest fights the boxing world has ever seen. The dire state of the economy had the Irish people hurting, but it was no longer in our character to stay down for long.

In the run-up to the Carry clan's departure to Thailand for my sister's wedding to her Columbian boyfriend, I began to feel slightly alarmed at her choice of location. Getting to the venue – the tropical island of Koh Lipe - was a serious trek. After arriving in Bangkok I would have to take a connecting flight to the southern city of Hat Yai. The arrival times meant I would have to overnight there before getting up at the crack of dawn and taking a tuk tuk from my hotel to the bus station. Then it would be a three-hour drive to a place called Pak Bara pier from where I could take a three-hour ferry to Koh Lipe. I felt OK about making it, but various travel parties had booked different flights at different times and I wasn't sure if my mother, aunts and other family friends not necessarily used to such endeavours would make it without being stranded somewhere along the way. I didn't however, have any doubts about my buddy Denis who was to meet me in Bangkok for a connecting flight to Hat Yai. Sadly, I massively underestimated his capacity to make an absolute dogs dinner out of carefully laid travel plans – with catastrophic results.

The arrangements were simple - I was to meet Denis in Bangkok Airport at the check in desk for a flight to Hat Yai, the details of which I had emailed to him weeks in advance. "If I don't see you in the airport," I remember saying, "I'll see you on the plane." Sadly, when I stepped off my long haul from London Heathrow and wandered up the the appointed place at the appointed time, he was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he's checked in already, I thought. So, I dropped off my bag and collected my boarding pass before heading towards the gate. When it came time to board I was starting to feel somewhat uneasy. I walked slowly to the plane with pretty but cross Air Asia flight attendants trying to hurry my inexplicably slow progress. Where in the name of Jaysus was he? Did he miss his flight in Dublin? Did he make it as far as his transfer in Abu Dhabi? There was nothing I could do – I had a wedding to catch and could not afford to miss that flight. So the door slammed shut, the seatbelt light went on and we flew away leaving Denis to his unknown fate.

So there I was – back in a grey, drizzle-splattered Dublin housing estate after having just returned from eight months working for a magazine in bubbling, hectic Thailand. The months back home ticked by slowly and my new environment began to feel like a sensory deprivation tank. The appropriate course of action was obvious - leave. The question was just a matter of deciding where to go. I had fallen quite thoroughly in love with Southeast Asia and a return was the dream. However, securing any sort of well-paid work in that part of the world is difficult. The only jobs I came across offered miserly pay and as such carried the inherent risk of landing me back in Ireland broke within months. I needed something well-paid.

I had hard-won Masters degree in journalism burning a hole in my pocket but it wasn't quite the meal ticket I thought it might be when it was handed to me as a wide-eyed newly graduated 23-year-old. With the atmosphere among journos in the Irish jobs market becoming increasingly desperate it was practically worthless. I would have to be more creative in my money-making endeavours.

When I returned to Ireland a friend of mine stabbed me with an interesting piece of information – one of our old school friends was working in the Australian mining industry. He turned up with no experience and was started as a truck driver on AUS$100,000 a year. “He's winding you up you Muppet,” was my response I believe. However, after looking into it, I found out that these sort of wages were par for the course in the outback mining settlements. Employers operate fly-in, fly-out shift cycles which see workers stay on site, generally in the middle of absolutely nowhere, for up to three weeks at a time before being flown, free of charge, to their chosen city of residence for a two-week break. The chosen city doesn't even have to be in Australia. It could be in, say, Thailand, for example.

Before the plan was fully hatched the friend who had come up with it was forced to back out through lack of travel funds, so I would be making my way to Australia on my tod. It wasn't a particularly appealing idea, but I had spent plenty of time traveling alone in the past and felt confident I could make it work. I didn't have much choice to be honest; it was either that or face the ignominy of being the Masters graduate in the dole queue. Plus, I had visited Australia some years previously for a three-week holiday and quite enjoyed it. Cracking rocks in an Outback iron ore mine wouldn't, of course, be quite the same as the lazing around on Bondi Beach but I had got a feel for the place and the people and was happy enough about a return.

So all that remained was one comparatively minor problem: I knew absolutely nothing about mining and my CV contained precisely zero references to applicable experience or training. Bombarding dozens of mining companies with tarted up resumes proved fruitless and when I fired off the one hundredth responseless email I opted to try something different. The Australian mining industry is massive – it is responsible for some 40 per cent of the nation's not inconsiderable GDP. I felt sure therefore, that there would be associated trade publications and if they existed, then that would be my way into the lucrative industry. And so it proved. I found five mining magazines and dutifully contacted them. I announced my intentions to travel Down Under, proclaimed my interest in their line of work and touted my training and experience as a journalist. I went to bed that night feeling confident I had found my angle and when I woke up and checked my email I had three responses. The first editor said thanks but no thanks, the second suggested I get in touch to arrange a meeting once I arrived in Australia while the third reported that she would be willing to hear some article pitches.

Great, I thought. Now I had to pretend I knew something about mining in Australia and come up with article suggestions experts and people working in the industry would be interested in reading about. This however, wasn't the daunting task it might sound and reveals a pertinent point about the nature of journalism. Being a journalist isn't about being an expert on the subject you write about. Your topic could in any case vary hugely from one day to the next. Rather, producing good copy is about having a set of skills that allows you to first of all find the information you need and secondly, to present it in an appealing way on a page. You don't know anything about swine flu? Dissident republicanism? The sub-prime mortgage crisis? No problem. Just alk to the people who do, pick out the interesting bits from what they say and write up your report in a reader-friendly format. So that's what I did. And I got commissioned to write six months worth of articles for The Australian Journal of Mining.

In case anyone is wondering my recent lack of posting is due to the fact that this is pretty much a travel-blog and I'm not travelling at the moment. Happily, I'm off again in four weeks so I'll be back to telling bullshit tales again then.

Cheers,

Rob.

My homebound flight cut into Dublin at an angle which gave me a great view of the city below. It looked as grey, damp and low-key as ever but I couldn’t help but get excited. So much so that when the plane rolled to a stop and the seatbelt signs pinged off I jumped to my feet, retrieved my bag from the overhead and stood in the queue to disembark knowing full well that the doors wouldn’t open for at least 10 minutes.

Hot, humid, muggy Bangkok has a smell that slams visitors in the face when they arrive and sticks to them for the duration of their stay. Although best described as a mixture of car fumes, poorly maintained sewers and cheap cooking oils, you eventually become immune. The clean, cool, crisp air that sweeps across Ireland and into the aircraft cabins on Dublin airport’s runways however, made me instantly realise how deprived I had been. It was like gulping a first breath after being held under water.

I declined to have anyone meet me at arrivals; mainly due to the fact that it would have meant an airport run at rush hour, but also because my Mother, the prime candidate for such an imposition, had herself been bitten by the travel bug and was mid-way through a solo trip around Australia. And so it was that I hoped off the airport bus on O’Connell Street, wheeled my suitcase past the spire, over the bridge and down the keys to Tara Street Dart station while a misty drizzle settling on my Summery clothes.

A flick through a newspaper some thoughtful commuter had left on my Dart seat quickly acquainted me with the state of terror the country has found itself in the grip of since the onset of the recession. I had kept reasonably up-to-date with the major happenings in Ireland while away, but I somehow didn’t take on board the full extent of the damage being done to the Irish economy. The paper screamed headlines about massive budget deficits, bank shares collapsing and tens of thousands of immigrants turning on their heels and heading straight back to the airport. I mean, I leave you people alone to look after the country for five minutes and come back to find it in this state.

Anyway, by the time I knocked on my old front door the weather had conspired with the economic gloom to knock all the wide-eyed nostalgia I had briefly felt for my soggy homeland out of my system. My Ma I decided, who has signaled her intention to stay abroad indefinitely, had the right idea.

Reunions with various friends and family members were every bit as enjoyable as I expected them to be and one in particular, with a lad I had been good mates with since primary school, proved extremely interesting. Robbie had been contacted by a friend of his who worked in Australia’s booming mining industry. Apparently, mineral companies were struggling to get skilled and non-skilled labourers and were offering implausibly generous packages for those willing to work shifts in middle-of-nowhere Outback mine sites. Robbie’s mate was cleaning up and reckoned he could sort us out with a job that would allow us to do likewise.

With Ireland’s full-blown 1980s-style butter voucher, KVI crispy pancake, soda stream recession making my chances of securing full-time employment within a reasonable time-frame unlikely, a legger back to the airport sounded like just the job.

I had older siblings and other family relatives who joined the hoards heading for Ireland’s points of departure when our economy was last in shreds. It had gone arse-up again, and now I would get to experience it for myself. The last time I went away I was a shiny new product turned out by the Celtic Tiger’s education system which plucked youngsters from council estates and put them through third level for free. Going abroad in order to take a job as a reporter with a publishing house in Bangkok had a very different feel to it than the trip I was eying this time round.

And so it was that we began to lay our plans to take that well-worn route from recession-hit Ireland to Australia’s sunny shores with March penciled in as our departure date.

My farewell to Thailand was somewhat rushed in that I arrived in Bangkok from Cambodia a day-and-a-half before I had to fly home. I was shattered from my trip and dry retching at the thought of the long haul ahead, but was easily talked into a farewell piss-up by my fellow Irish ex-pat Chris; a gargantuan David James lookalike who grew up in my housing estate in Dublin and had been living in Thailand since his early 20s.

A little crew of farang guys I’d met through Chris and my Muay Thai corner man and good friend Ek got together and headed off into the steamy Bangkok evening. We bummed around from bar to bar, sipping happy hour beers and buzzing off the ever-cheerful bargirls who hit us up for free drinks.

The thoughts of leaving the next day horrified me. I wanted to see my family and friends, but my year in Thailand was the best I’d had and life back in Ireland was unlikely to match the carnival my stay in Asia had become. Around the time alcohol chased off my concerns about making a 20-hour journey with a hangover I decided that going home was in fact a ridiculous idea. It would make far more sense if all my family and friends simply relocated here. If only the thought had occurred to me sooner.

We ended up in the one remaining Bangkok nightclub that opens beyond 2am. ‘Spice’ avoids being shut by the police because it is owned and staffed by the police. Thailand’s boys in brown frequently stand accused of failing to properly enforce the law. They may be incompetent on that score, but they know how to run a club. Taking out the competition was a masterstroke and the place was packed with the full complement of dodgy individuals you would expect in the last remaining after-hours spot in a city that lives off its reputation for having a wild nightlife.

The majority of the clientele being hosted by Bangkok’s crooked cops seemed to be female and implausibly attractive. My thoughts were apparently written across my face because Chris quickly read them. “These are all dancers from the go-go bars,” he said with a blank expression. “This is where they come when they’ve clocked off.” I sighed, swilled the beer around in the bottom of my bottle and knocked it back. “Don’t worry,” Chris continued. “You’ll grow to love rain and unattractive women after a couple of years back home.” I cried a little inside and headed for the bathroom.

Overly conscientious toilet attendants are no rarity in Irish nightclubs but the Thais, I discovered, take it to disturbing and potentially hazardous new levels. No sooner had I arranged myself in front of the urinal than two hands landed on my shoulders. I yelped and spun around as far as the job at hand would permit me to and discovered a sprightly young man in a shimmering waistcoat and dickey bow.

“Jai yen yen!” he chirped before erupting into laughter along with a number of his similarly dressed and hitherto unnoticed colleagues. Apparently it isn’t at all uncommon for toilet attendants to attempt to win tips by giving impromptu kneck and shoulder massages to whoever wanders up to the urinal.

“Don’t you ‘jai yen yen’ me!” I wailed, jolted by the thought of the heroic beating such a move would precipitate if attempted in Paparazzis in Dun Laoghaire. “I’ll tell you what,” I continued, starting to see the funny side. “How about I pay you not to touch me while I’m going for a slash? Will that work?” They had probably seen the same reaction from bemused farangs a million times, but the way they had to hold each other up to stop themselves from falling over laughing suggested that it just never got old.

As I pushed my way through the throng of girls who delighted in pinching, poking and giggling at every unescorted male who came within reach of their overly-manicured fingers, it occurred to me that most of them would kill for the unwanted plane ticket I had back in my room. Many would happily walk down the isle with any sweating, middle-aged derelict westerner for a visa. It said a lot about the human condition that all I wanted to do was stay while all they wanted to do was to leave.

The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur but I have a vague memory of walking down the Bangkok soi which was home for much of my stay. I recall slurring teary farewells to inanimate objects ("goodbye lamppost! Good bye tuk tuk stand! I'll miss you!" etc.). The sun was creeping up between still-blacked out skyscrapers and within an hour the whole city would explode into life for the day. Sadly, it was one I wouldn’t get to see – because I had a poxy plane to catch.

Looking around at Bangkok in the days before I flew home I was struck by how different it appeared in comparison to how it seemed when I arrived for the first time. Living in the Land of Smiles for the best part of a year had made me see it in an entirely different light.

During my first visit I never really managed to make the separation in my head between the beaches on Thailand’s south islands and the capital. As such, I tended to wander around the city and even into bars and nightclubs wearing the beach-bum uniform of board-shorts, flip-flops and a counterfeit t-shirt bought off some stall or other. I was totally oblivious to the fact that the Thais all dressed in an entirely different manner. By the time I was due to leave I was giggling along with my Thai co-workers at the beach-ready foreigners whose dress sense doubled as sign reading, ‘I’m an oblivious tourist!’.

Another big difference came about when I learned to speak a few snippets of Thai. The Thais are an extremely proud people and while most working in the hospitality industry fully expect people to address them in English, the average Thai on the street is rarely over the moon when a foreigner assumes they are proficient when asking for directions or whatever, and in so doing highlights for anyone else who might be within earshot that they actually aren’t. Thais, being an extremely conflict-averse group who see confrontation as something which brings about loss of face to all parties involved, will generally remain all smiles in such situations and not let on that they might be irritated or offended. So, most foreigners can blunder on blissfully unaware that they have just ruined someone’s good mood.

Visitors who didn’t take the time to pick up a phrase book and learn 20 or so words before flying out will occasionally encounter a Thai willing to use the fact that the farang in front of them is advertising their newly-arrived status to their advantage – and more often than not they will be in the form of a taxi or tuk tuk driver. Tales abound of wide-eyed tourists being taken for mugs in all manner of inventive ways. Rip-offs range from the old negotiate-an-inflated-price-before-the-start-of-the-journey-instead-of-turning on-the-taxi-metre trick to bringing the farang to a commission-paying out-of-the-way jewelry shop and refusing to take them anywhere else until they’ve both something. Which will usually be fake.

However, even if visitors get away with it, and they generally will, I’m of the opinion that there is something fundamentally wrong with going to someone else’s country for anything more than a couple of days and expecting your hosts to be able to cater to your needs by speaking a language that is foreign to them. You don’t have to master the language – but you can at least make an effort.

Naturally, the first thing I did was learn how to chat with the taxi drivers who ferried me from apartment to Muay Thai gym and sky train station to night market. Starting with asking them to turn on the metre and instructing them to go left, right, straight or to a stop, I slowly built up a repertoire that allowed me to converse in a way that created an illusion of language proficiency that simply didn’t exist. I learned how to politely guide the conversation and keep to the narrow topics I could actually speak about. It was like a deviation-free pre-prepared speech that I rattled off with a few predicted interjections from the driver. I had originally decided to embark on the endeavour as a way of avoiding the hassle of taxi scams but I was immediately struck by how happy a little effort with the language seemed to make to people. Not only did scam attempts freefall, but Bangkok’s taxi drivers actually went from potentially my worst enemies to being my best friends.

A lot of people who go to Thailand see the smiles they are met with by the locals as a being transparent means of hiding mercenary intentions. It is true that the Thais keep their smiles on hair-trigger. The mercenary aspect could be somewhat accurate for those who never get beyond the tourist areas where the Thais they meet make their living by parting foreigners from their money. If you dig that bit deeper however, and especially if you arm yourself with some of their language, the country and the people open up and those ever-present smiles become far more genuine.