Letter from Thailand

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.