http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/Do I wanna work in Thailand for a year? You havin a laugh?en-EUMokoFeed10http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/http://data5.blog.de/design/preview/49/ae97ccd77505b9e6e0ae19980f9ae1_160x200.jpghttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/11/20/column-by-robert-carry-no-picture-20-11-09-i-jumped-out-7418753/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-11-20:/2009/11/20/column-by-robert-carry-no-picture-20-11-09-i-jumped-out-7418753/Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:21:04 +0100 <p>Column<br> By Robert Carry<br> No picture<br> 20-11-09</p> <p>I jumped out of bed at 5am last Sunday morning, climbed into some clothes and shuffled out into a still Sydney morning. I was looking for a pub – any pub. As long as it had a TV. </p> <p>I caught a train to Sydney’s party central – the horribly seedy yet inexplicably popular Kings Cross – where I felt sure there would be proprietors cute enough to open his doors for the first leg of the France vs. Ireland World Cup play off.</p> <p>Sadly, although the main street was still dotted with waxen-faced, stumbling revellers they were clearly close to running on empty and the Cross’ ample contingent of drinkeries were all locked up. I was fruitlessly rattling the doors of an Irish bar in the forlorn hope of entry when an idea came to me – I didn’t need a telly – I could catch the match on the internet.</p> <p>I skipped past the grumbling morning road sweepers and haggard crystal meth prostitutes back onto the train. Within minutes I was in front of my computer with a live stream of the match – which was just three minutes in.</p> <p>I’m known to get emotional when Ireland have a big game and I’m not ashamed to admit shedding a tear when we were knocked out of the World Cup by Spain on penalties in 2002. However, Ireland’s 1-0 first-leg loss to France didn’t upset me – I felt all along we would probably need a goal in Paris and this didn’t seem like an impossible ask given the performances of the two teams of late.</p> <p>6am Thursday morning rolled around and I was perched, bleary-eyed with cereal spoon in hand, in front of my computer for the second leg kick-off. The Irish were immense and the French made to look like scared kids for much of the game. It was obvious a goal was coming and when it did, my flatmates and other building residents were wakened by the sound of an Irish bloke screaming intelligibly and knocking over his cornflakes bowl.</p> <p>Then it went to extra-time, Henry handled and we were cheated out of a place at the World Cup. Like all Irish football fans, I was suddenly reacquainted with that deadening reminder of how a match result can break your heart as thoroughly as the souring of any teenage romance. Lost and hopeless, I pulled on my shirt and tie and went to work. </p> <p>There was a bloke on the train with tears running down his cheeks. I knew he was Irish before hearing his accent when his phone rang. </p> <p>Women are usually considered more sensitive than their male counterparts but football has a way of flipping the pattern. While my office’s male half expressed moral outrage and offered heartfelt sympathy, the girls were dismissive and oblivious to suffering such a turn of events might precipitate.</p> <p>I really tried to get some work done, but I just couldn’t. Like a spurned lover who can’t help torturing himself with photographs and letters from his sweetheart, I spent the entire day reading every news report and piece of analysis of the game I could find. When I read an article with a suitably outraged headline or furious quotes from tearful players I at least felt some small level of vindication, but mostly they made me feel worse. Hearing Robbie Keane talk about how cheated he felt and realising he, like many of his fellow players, would most likely be too old to play in the next World Cup was truly galling. </p> <p>Ireland deserved to win on the strength of their performance but only the score line matters and luck always has a role to play. Fans and players accept this, but what happened to Ireland in their World Cup play-off was something different. The outcome was not decided by the performance or luck of the players – it was decided by the referee and the game’s ruling body. </p> <p>Although some might call it a conspiracy theory there is no getting away from the fact that the rules of the qualifying competition were changed mid-way through. If teams placed second in the group stages had of went into a straight draw to find who they would meet in a play-off, France and Portugal might be drawn against each other – and the World Cup would be missing one of its marque, revenue-generating teams. So the rules were broken and a seeded draw which would avoid this occurrence was adopted. This put Ireland at a distinct disadvantage – and revealed to the world the preferences of the sport’s king makers.</p> <p>It’s not a conspiracy theory to say that Fifa forced Irish players to walk onto the pitch knowing their sport’s governing body didn’t want them to win – they chose to seed the draw and in doing so demonstrated a desire for a seeded team win. And then a blatantly offside player runs into the box and clearly handles the ball twice – a goal is given and the powers that be get the result they wanted. </p> <p>It leaves the impression that it didn’t matter what Ireland did during the game – it was just a case of going through the motions. We were a side show that was never going to the World Cup.</p> <p>There is something inherently unwise about investing so much of your happiness in something you have literally no control over and football is a temperamental mistress that will crush you at a whim. But the game, the planet’s biggest obsession, has always worth it. This time though, when the sport’s governing body rather than our opponents took a place in the World Cup from Richard Dunne and Damien Duff and Liam Lawrence, it just seems like a waste of time.</p> <p>The thing is, Fifa can rescue the situation. The are a number of precedents of games being replayed in everything from FA Cup matches to previous World Cup qualifiers. The chances of them doing so however, are slim. The only way I can see it coming about is if the French step forward and say to the world that this is not how they want to be seen - that cheating their way to a World Cup is the wrong thing to do and that they're prepared to rectify it. In such a scenario, it would be difficult for Fifa to deny them. </p> <p>The villian of the piece, Thierry Henry, should lead the charge. If he offers a replay the rest could follow. If he doesn't, I get the feeling this thing will hang around his neck for the rest of his days.</p> <p>In all likelihood there will be no replay of the game. As a gesture at least, I think the FFF should offer to play Ireland again before the World Cup in a friendly - and we can at least find out who should have went. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/11/20/column-by-robert-carry-no-picture-20-11-09-i-jumped-out-7418753/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>ireland-vs-france-replayfifa-replay-ireland-vs-franceireland-vs-france-world-cuphttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/11/20/column-by-robert-carry-no-picture-20-11-09-i-jumped-out-7418753/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/11/14/the-tough-decisions-7370065/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-11-14:/2009/11/14/the-tough-decisions-7370065/Sat, 14 Nov 2009 01:56:11 +0100 <p>I was on a bus a few days ago when three Indigenous Australians, also periodically known as Aboriginals, got on. The two guys and one woman looked about middle-age, were shabbily dressed and clearly drunk. They mumbled loudly between themselves and glared aggressively at fellow passengers. They staggered off after a couple of stops and I could see them stumble into a park as the bus pulled off. </p> <p class="center"><img src="http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200708/r165776_614966.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p>“Smell very bad!” said our East-Asian driver who stopped the bus shortly afterwards. He produced a can of air freshener and marched theatrically up and down the aisle spraying liberally. It was an awkward, uncomfortable affair but unfortunately, pretty much typical of my experience with both Indigenous Australians and the reaction they seem to get.</p> <p>There is no doubt that things are difficult for Australia’s native communities right now. There is little point in denying the fact that alcoholism and drug abuse are a disproportionately significant problems for them in comparison to the broader Australian people. Successive reports examining semi-autonomous, isolated Aboriginal communities in various parts of Australia have highlighted shocking levels of child abuse and family violence – way beyond what is seen in other parts of the country. These people also suffer disproportionately from a range of health problems and on average will die considerably younger than their non-indigenous fellow Australians.</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://www.sfbayview.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/australian-aboriginal-town-of-yarrabah-homes-hold-25-people-each.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p>The liberal, somewhat cosy option of saying Indigenous Australians and their communities are just like everyone else suddenly becomes a difficult one to defend. Centuries of chronic abuse and disadvantage means they are not the same – and pretending they are only prevents specific measures designed to tackle the problems they face from being introduced. </p> <p>It’s difficult to grasp the magnitude of changes endured by these communities, in place for up to an astounding 70,000 years, since the arrival of Europeans. Unlike most other peoples around the world they were largely semi-nomadic hunter gathers with no tradition of agriculture or animal husbandry. With no command of metals they remained largely in the Stone Age. I’ve heard people describe this way of life as primitive, but I’m not sure that gives an accurate picture.</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://www.cairns.com.au/images/2007/12/06/aboriginal-culture.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p>It’s entirely unreasonable to suggest that the indigenous Australian nations went 70,000 years without ever noticing that a crop grows when you drop seeds on the ground. Their avoidance of agriculture was quite clearly a lifestyle choice. A life of work on farms or in tool-making or other related industries was set aside in favour of a nomadic existence in which they could feed themselves just as easily. Their time was used instead to create elaborate languages, music, art, stories and religious rituals. They were for all the world, travelling artisans. Indigenous Australians were one of the only peoples on earth to not have a tradition of alcohol consumption and war and inter-national conflict were practically unknown. </p> <p>Literally half their number were wiped out by smallpox and other diseases brought by European settlers and once the arrivals gained a foothold, the new colonial masters proved exceptionally brutal. Stories of farmers and rangers shooting Aboriginal men, women and children on sight were common, as were reports of slavery. Government sterilisation programmes and enforced Christianity were initiated and thousands of indigenous families had their children taken from them. Nearly a whole generation was handed over to white settlers or crammed into institutions. 70,000 years were almost wiped out in a single century – it’s hardly surprising that so many Indigenous Australians turned to drink and struggle with its by-products at present.</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/images/discover/a128454h.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p>The Australian Government responded to these problems and of reports of endemic child abuse in particular by taking control of a 73 of the most troubled communities. Its plans involved a range of race-specific regulations so they declared a state of national emergency and suspended the country’s Racial Discrimination Act. They then implemented measures that can either be considered pragmatic, practical and brave, or as discriminatory throwbacks to the heavy-handed, counter-productive sterilisation and forced adoption programs seen in previous decades.</p> <p>Among the actions taken were compulsory income management, through which unemployment and other benefits given to families are tied to certain necessities, and blanket bans on alcohol and pornography in problem towns.</p> <p>There is little doubt that the measures taken by the Australian Government were racist – they only apply to certain Indigenous-dominated communities. However, it is also evident that these steps have improved the lives of many Indigenous Australians, particularly women and children. So where does that leave Australia’s race laws? They were designed to improve the lives of minorities but what if, as in this case, they threatened to prevent a government from taking direly needed steps to provide protection and boost the standard of living for one such group? It’s a perilously thorny issue and the stakes are high – intervene to protect children and women from appalling levels of abuse or stand back, respect the autonomy of the regions controlled by indigenous people and abide by the race laws that were introduced for very good reason. I don’t envy the Australian Government or people for having to provide the answers these questions pose. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/11/14/the-tough-decisions-7370065/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>indigenous-australians-grogindigenous-australians-alcoholindigenous-australians-racismaboriginals-abusehttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/11/14/the-tough-decisions-7370065/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/11/07/adventures-in-belmore-park-7323610/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-11-07:/2009/11/07/adventures-in-belmore-park-7323610/Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:35:44 +0100 <p>Some strange things go down in my local park. You get your normal lunch-breaking office workers, truant teenagers and drunken homeless people swatting imaginary demons, but Belmore’s location directly across the road from Sydney’s Central Station and the pathways which dissect it mean it’s also a busy pedestrian thoroughfare.</p> <p>My manual labouring career has been replaced by a desk job which means some form of recreational exercise is in order. Being a long-standing Muay Thai fan I decided to check around to see if there are any gyms in my area and a web search turned up an add for Saturday and Sunday morning classes in trusty Belmore Park. Saturday rolled around and I wandered over to the appointed place at the appointed time but there was nothing resembling a Muay Thai class on the go. There were however, over 1,000 Thai people all dressed in white assembled in the middle of the park.</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://www.nationalwalkforvalues.org/sydney/hyde.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> I say they were all dressed in white but that’s a bit of an exaggeration. A group of children and teenagers were actually dressed in outlandish elfin-like costumes. These cheerful sons and daughters of Siam skipped around the perimeter of the assembled crowd carrying a giant plastic flower each. One guy in particular was wearing what could only be described as a gold cat suit and a matching bonnet. Was I witnessing the biggest Muay Thai class ever assembled outside its ancestral home? Surely not, I decided. You couldn’t train wearing that thing.</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://www.fotosearch.com/bthumb/PDS/PDS134/200386842-001.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p>A stage lined with a row of seats had been erected and the purpose of this entertaining yet slightly alarming spectacle began dawn when a dozen monks sat down. The white-robbed Thais kneeled in neat lines facing the stage and some chanting got underway.</p> <p> The Thais all carried plastic bags with various foodstuffs inside and the monks had brought large brown bowls with them. These facts, coupled with the bits and pieces of Thai I could understand, led me to conclude that I had stumbled upon an alms giving ceremony – when Buddhists earn karma points by giving food to the monks and doing various other associated good deeds.</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_brIyg5OdFyg/Snvv2ac9QhI/AAAAAAAARJk/nxqQzRBhKR4/s400/11.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> Although most of the people passing through the park largely ignored the goings on, a group of interested parties gathered to try and work out what was happening. I was standing among them, wondering if the Muay Thai class I got out of bed for would kick off after the event, when I felt a tap on my arm. I turned around to see that one of the white-robed Thais – a cheerful, mid-thirties woman – had broken ranks in favour of a chat with a random spectator.</p> <p> “Hi! I see you standing here long time,” she said with a mega-watt Thai smile. “Would you like to help me give alms to the monks?” </p> <p> I’m not sure why she picked me from the gathered crowd of confused onlookers but she was delighted when I told her in Thai that I would love to; that it sounded fun. So I was escorted to a spot right in the middle and there I sat, delighted to have again found myself the only white lad in a sea of smiling brown faces. In a park in the middle of Sydney city centre. </p> <p>The monks began to file up and down the rows and I couldn’t help but get slightly nervous as they approached. It reminded me of queuing up to get the bread from the Priest at mass when I was a kid. I strained around trying to see exactly what the drill was for handing over the food while my new buddy piled packets of instant noodles and Morro bars up in front of me. Everyone was doing the same thing: pick up food item as monks approach. Hold in both hands as if praying. Raise to your forehead when first monk gets to you. Carefully place in bowl with both hands. Bow to monk with hands in prayer position. Repeat for each monk. My alms giving passed without incident although I wasn’t convinced that you still get karma points for handing over food that wasn’t yours. </p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://www.lincoln2.smmusd.org/staff/Vieira_Web/images/Buddha%27sface.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p>My self and my new-found karmic colleague got chatting and she mentioned that the temple, which had organised the event, held free Thai language lesions every Saturday afternoon to which I was welcome to come along.<br> “Sound!” I said, forgetting that she probably didn’t speak Dublinese.<br> “Excuse me?” she answered, wondering whether her English wasn’t as good as she previously thought.</p> <p>“Sorry, I mean I would love to go,” I said.</p> <p>I got the details of where the class would take place (in a centre right beside the park), and what I would have to bring (nothing because everything would be provided), before saying my goodbyes. I headed home tingling with positive karmic energy and what have you, while marveling at how friendly, generous and just basically bang on Thai people are. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/11/07/adventures-in-belmore-park-7323610/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>backpacking-australiamuay-thai-australiathai-people-australiairish-in-australiathai-community-sydneymuay-thai-surrey-hillsdublinesethai-boxingbuddhism-sydneythai-people-sydneybelmore-park-sydneybuddhism-australiamuay-thai-sydneythai-community-australiahttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/11/07/adventures-in-belmore-park-7323610/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/11/01/look-i-do-real-news-too-7283924/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-11-01:/2009/11/01/look-i-do-real-news-too-7283924/Sun, 01 Nov 2009 07:48:39 +0100 <p>This is an article I was commissioned to write for a Sydney-based newspaper called The <em>Irish Echo</em>. It's a pretty well thought of publication with a very healthy following among Australia's hefty Irish community.</p> <p><strong>Irish seasonal farm workers fall victim to exploitation</strong></p> <p><em>Seasonal farm work has long been a staple source of income for Irish backpackers and with second year working holiday visas available to those who complete 88 days in the agriculture industry, demand for 'fruit-picking' jobs is higher than ever. Robert Carry, who worked for four WA vineyard companies during the course of his investigation, reveals how this increase in demand has led to some employers implementing exploitative work practices.</em> </p> <p>“They had us living like animals,” recalls Sean Morgan, a qualified plumber from Dublin. The 22-year-old came to Australia in search of work when the Irish construction industry went into free fall. Unable to secure employment in plumbing and with funds beginning to dwindle, he turned his attention to seasonal farm work. He was among hundreds of backpackers who responded to an online classified add offering vineyard pruning work in Dandaragon, three hours north of Perth. The add promised free accommodation and piece rate payment in excess of $1,000 per week.</p> <p class="center"><a href="http://www.blog.co.uk/media/photo/dandaragon_vineyard/4062630" title="Dandaragon vineyard"><img src="http://data6.blog.de/media/630/4062630_3ae7571194_m.jpeg" alt="Dandaragon vineyard"></a></p> <p> He and nine other successful applicants arrived to find that the free accommodation consisted of a filthy, semi-derelict farm house (pictured) and when work began it quickly became apparent that none of the staff would be earning the wages promised. In a number of cases, renumeration would equate to less than the minimum wage. The company gave guarantees of three months pruning work in the Margaret River area; enough to qualify for a second year working holiday visa. However, when Sean and the rest of the group made the seven-hour journey to the south-west town just 10 days in, the company's supervisors suddenly became impossible to contact. “They turned off their phones so we couldn't get in touch with them,” recalls Sean. “We left dozens of messages and sent a ton of emails but they basically ignored us.”</p> <p> According to Australia's Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC), record numbers of working holiday makers are searching for harvest work in order to gain a second year visa. Yearly figures to June 2009 show the number of successful applicants has hit a record 21,727 – an increase of 84 per cent on the same period last year. The largest uptake was among South Koreans while the Irish, at 4,426, came in second. As a result, accounts like Sean's are becoming increasingly common.</p> <p class="center"><a href="http://www.blog.co.uk/media/photo/the_kitchen_in_dandaragon/4062631" title="The kitchen in Dandaragon"><img src="http://data6.blog.de/media/631/4062631_527be3f841_m.jpeg" alt="The kitchen in Dandaragon"></a> </p> <p> The surge in numbers is good news for Australian farmers. Stories of fruit and vegetables rotting on vines due to shortages of pickers have been replaced by reports of farmers being inundated with requests for work. The National Harvest Labour Information Service, which assists job seekers searching for farm-related employment, normally gets between 2000 to 3000 calls per week at seasonal heights. The organisation is now reporting weekly calls in excess of 4,500. Migrant labourers have quickly gone from a scarce resource to being easily replaceable. The comparative scarcity of positions mean workers are now forced to tolerate employment practices which would previously prompted them to look elsewhere.</p> <p> The Irish Echo uncovered a host of exploitative work practices in a number of wineries during the course of its investigation into working conditions on WA vineyards. Staff reported late payment of wages, incorrect payslips and mass dismissals with little or no prior notice. One Irish vineyard worker told how he was dismissed with one day's notice when the owner of the vineyard he was employed by decided to give his job to his teenage son.</p> <p> However, the most commonly cited issue was that of pay rates falling below the national minimum wage. The low rates of pay meant staff were reluctant to take breaks and frequently worked through eight-hour shifts without stopping in order to make above minimum wage. Unfortunately, employers paying piece rate are exempt from minimum payment regulations under current employment legislation, so staff have little legal protection.</p> <p class="center"> <a href="http://www.blog.co.uk/media/photo/the_bedroom_in_dandaragon/4062632" title="The bedroom in Dandaragon"><img src="http://data6.blog.de/media/632/4062632_6cf0595ebb_m.jpeg" alt="The bedroom in Dandaragon"></a></p> <p> Australia's Fair Work Ombudsman's (FWO) office received a rash of complaints from vineyard workers in WA since the start of the year and eventually launched an investigation. Inspectors checked the books of 27 wineries and vineyards in the south-west region and according to its report released last month, a third were in breach of pay laws. A spokesperson for the FWO told The Irish Echo, “A recent WA wine industry campaign was conducted in response to worker complaints and information from industry associations... Employers in the Great Southern and South West wine regions did not properly understand their obligations.”</p> <p> However, the organisation revealed that the The Great Southern Wine Producing Association and The Margaret River Wine Association – industry bodies of which a number of the investigated vineyards are members – were informed by the FWO of their plans to examine the issue before the investigation was launched. As a result, problems may be far more extensive than FWO figures suggest.</p> <p> The FWO told The Irish Echo that it is opposed to employers using the piece rate exemption as a means of paying staff below minimum wage. A spokesperson said, “Employees must receive at least the correct minimum entitlements regardless of whether they are paid piece rates, by the hour or a salary.”<br> ENDS </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/11/01/look-i-do-real-news-too-7283924/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>irelandwa-vineyardswork-for-backpackers-australiasecond-year-visa-australiaworking-holidaytravelpruning-australiafarmwork-australiairishirish-backpackers-australiawestern-australia-workbackpacking-western-australiajournalismaustralian-winebackpacking-australiavineyard-work-australiafarming-australiahttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/11/01/look-i-do-real-news-too-7283924/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/10/24/raaaaacism-7237784/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-10-24:/2009/10/24/raaaaacism-7237784/Sat, 24 Oct 2009 23:55:36 +0200 <p>A popular Australian TV comedy show called 'Hey Hey, it's Saturday' made headlines recently when it aired a segment featuring a group of people from various ethnic backgrounds tarted up in Minstrel-esque black face paint impersonating the Jackson Five. It prompted columnists, TV and radio show hosts to posture up and begin a finger-wagging national self-analysis: 'Is Australia a racist country?'. It was as ridiculous as it was embarrassing. A individual, a legal stipulation or on occasion an organisation can be racist but a county – a sovereign territory with a nation and government – obviously can't collectively be racist any more than a field or a car park can be an open-minded liberal. Nonetheless, the national conversation went back and forth for a few days generating plenty of heat but very little by way of light.</p> <p class="center"><img src="http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/images/hey_hey_blackface_400.jpg" alt="" title=""></p> <p> On one side were the poor damaged souls who out of that nasty, post-colonial inferiority complex we so often see in Ireland, felt the need to write their country and nation off as collection of pillowcase-wearing, cross-burning Nazis. For this crowd, the worst of it wasn't even that the whole country was racist – the really crucial point was that the rest of the world supposedly thought Australia was racist. Copies of English newspapers which mentioned the row in a tiny article on page eight were brandished around studios as if they were proof of the country's failure in the eyes of the world – and in the eyes of the English, in particular.</p> <p> Standing against the moral outrage were those who thought the segment was sort of funny. They reckoned it should be written off as something done in an attempt to make people laugh rather than to cause offence. It was comedy and cultural sensitivities be damned. Both went into the argument with their views deeply entrenched and, as tends to be the case in debates, came away without having budged an inch; bar maybe radicalising slightly.</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://skyblu.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/argue-with-jackass.jpg" alt="" title=""></p> <p> It seemed very much like a storm in a tea cup to me. The segment wasn't funny, but then the programme itself is dire so I wouldn't have expected anything else. Of course, the act of dressing up and doing a ham-fisted impersonation of a Jackson Five member isn't racist in-and-of-itself – UK show 'Bo Selecta' regularly featured comedian Leigh Francis ripping off Michael Jackson but to my knowledge he remained free of accusations of racism. This reveals the crux of the issue; the act of putting dark paint on your face to appear black. </p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://www.basehead.org/files/wallpapers/shots/9150/9150.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> So is this racist? When the Minstrels did it it was of course racist because they set out to ridicule black people in general. But was this the intention of our rubbish Australian comedians? I don't think it was. Demonstrating cultural insensitivity out of a lack of knowledge and understanding of how the things you do will come across to others isn't racism – that's just being a bit of an idiot. It's ignorance – a different kettle of fish to the deliberate malice which denotes real racism.</p> <p class="center"><img src="http://imspeakingtruth.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/minstrel.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> I've heard the argument that someone can inadvertently do something bigoted or racist without there being any intent behind it, but I'm not sure I agree with this. For example, every now and again a word that was common, acceptable parlance is suddenly stricken from the record when somebody somewhere decides that from now on it's going to carry negative connotations. 'Person living with a disability' is the the acceptable, politically correct term at the moment and 'disabled person' is for cavemen. If you're not aware of this change and you use the later, then there are people out there who will take this to mean that you are a bigot. And give it 10 years – it will change again and those who use 'person living with a disability' on the Tuesday after the Monday it gets proscribed will too be branded. </p> <p> To me, a word is a collection of inanimate sounds we use to portray to our audience a particular meaning. It's the intent – the message the bigot is seeking to project that is the issue, not the words themselves. Without the meaning the speaker chooses to attach they are just noises – the sound of a car going past or light switch being flicked.</p> <p> I think the same goes for peoples' actions. We all do stupid things from time-to-time and occasionally put our foot in it but if there was no intention to hurt or offend, we shouldn't be condemned for it.</p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/10/24/raaaaacism-7237784/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>racism-in-australiaracismdancing-minstrelsracism-hey-hey-its-saturdayminstrelshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/10/24/raaaaacism-7237784/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/10/10/pruning-australia-farm-work-australia-margaret-river-vineyard-margaret-river-sydney-australia-working-holiday-farm-work-working-holiday-visa-aust-7135184/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-10-10:/2009/10/10/pruning-australia-farm-work-australia-margaret-river-vineyard-margaret-river-sydney-australia-working-holiday-farm-work-working-holiday-visa-aust-7135184/Sat, 10 Oct 2009 03:11:44 +0200 <p>Australia's labour-intensive agricultural sector periodically requires massive numbers of workers to arrive in various parts of the country, to coincide with a harvest or some other annual work-a-thon, and the world duly obliges. Margaret River, a town to the south of Western Australia which has been home for some time now, is nestled in the heart of wine producing country. Every year from March to September it gets flooded with would-be farm workers all set to individually prune every shoot on every vine in every vineyard in the region.</p> <p> The Irish are up in the top five most well-represented nationalities with many of the other leading contributers hailing from Asia. The rag-tag group, a very large proportion of which will have never set foot on a farm before, join Australia's experienced farmhands who themselves are virtually all internal migrants who follow the harvest trail from one end of the country to the other every year.</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://img.thesun.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00474/rainman_280x390_474897a.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> Pruning is tough, monotonous work and the knowledge that you're slaving away helping to create something that only priests and wasteful toffs could have use for in these difficult times is all the job satisfaction you're going to get. The fact that Margaret River is hundreds of kilometers south of where I first started pruning means that it is far, far colder and pruning season kicks off in the dead of the Australian winter. Now, I'm trying to add some drama here, to make you all understand how cold, wet and miserable a vineyard is in pruning season but I understand that it is impossible to strike any fear into a person living in Ireland with a term like 'the dead of the Australian winter'. I'm sure most people think Australia gets year-round sunshine – I know I certainly did. That's why I didn't pack any warm clothes. Sadly, Australian winter in Margaret River is genuinely cold. As in, Ireland cold.</p> <p class="center"><img src="http://corrawines.com/photo/vineyard.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> Temperatures drop to single digits at night and barely get into double digits during the day. Margaret River is on the coast at a point where the Southern Ocean meets the Indian Ocean which means it is unbelievably windy. Add to that the fact that during winter it will be raining at least every second day and that thunderstorms and hailstones come regularly and you'll get the picture. The rain is so frequent and consistent that it is just not feasible to allow people to run for cover when a down-pour starts so everyone is under orders to keep working – pruning away with the rain gushing through every gap in your rain jacket and filling up your wellingtons.</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://images.webpilot.com.au/cowagencies/pruning.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> It gets to some people. I've looked up on a number of occasions, often when the rain is coming down in sheets, to see some poor unfortunate standing motionless over a vine with their head bowed and their hands by their sides. Because everyone works at a different pace it isn't long before workers are spread across the vineyard out of ear-shot of one another. So you're pretty much on your own for the day. My supervisor told me that the isolation, the monotony of the work and the shocking weather conditions are often enough to send people over the edge. He said he has come across guys standing in a vine row crying their eyes out over a years-old family death or a failed marriage. Vineyards are a petri dish for depression.</p> <p> Happily, the Australian winter has ended and we're now in Spring. Myself and the rest of the foreign hoard that invaded this picturesque, isolated part of Western Australia have worked up the requisite 88 days of agricultural work required for a second year working holiday visa and a return migration is underway. You would want to be an agoraphobic, anti-social outcast to stay in a hostel for months on end and not make a few buddies and it was sad to see various likable characters heading of in various directions never to be seen again.</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://data6.blog.de/media/315/3986315_a3153ddb16_s.jpeg" alt="P1040058"></p> <p> I worked as a cleaner during my years in college and I think the nastiness of the experience made me determined not to end up in a situation where I had to something like that for a living. That fear-driven hunger was a great motivator career wise but as the sharpness disappeared from the memories of what it is like to scrub a public jacks so too did some of that determination not to go backwards. Then all of a sudden I was doing a ridiculous, poorly-paid menial job in a muddy field in the middle of absolutely nowhere. The plus side was that my hatred for doing crap jobs returned, I started frantically looking around for an alternative and got an interview for a job with a magazine in Sydney.</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://cache1.asset-cache.net/xc/stk33227bin.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=8A33AE939F2E01FF0AB5A95C86277579C59CA42EA27CAC8393B9D0EFB37323482C9A667C629D7FEC" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/10/10/pruning-australia-farm-work-australia-margaret-river-vineyard-margaret-river-sydney-australia-working-holiday-farm-work-working-holiday-visa-aust-7135184/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>vineyard-margaret-riverirish-workers-australiaaustralia-working-holidaygap-year-australiapruning-australiairelandjournalism-sydneymargaret-riverdepression-farming-worksydneyfarm-work-australiahttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/10/10/pruning-australia-farm-work-australia-margaret-river-vineyard-margaret-river-sydney-australia-working-holiday-farm-work-working-holiday-visa-aust-7135184/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/09/27/banged-up-in-dubai-7048686/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-09-27:/2009/09/27/banged-up-in-dubai-7048686/Sun, 27 Sep 2009 13:17:21 +0200 <p>Mentioning you're a journalist often prompts people to suggest a topic they reckon you should write about. They will generally play a starring role in the tale which in most cases, will be a complete non-event. Occasionally though, you meet someone who really has a story to tell. This was the case with<br> Scottish Iain.</p> <p>I met the 25-year-old not long after his arrival in Australia. The Dundee native flew from Scotland to Australia via Dubai where his flight was delayed. He missed his onward connection and his bags were searched by customs. Officers found 0.09 grams of cannabis resin inside the pocket of a pair of his jeans which he had no idea was in his possession.</p> <p class="center"><img src="http://www.ameinfo.com/images/news/6/79636-Dubai_Customs_stand_at_Airport_Show.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p>It was an amount roughly equivalent in size to about one-eight of a pea, smaller than the head of a match, and he expected to make his re-booked onward flight. The seriousness of the situation became apparent however, when he was detained over night and then moved to a prison close to the airport. The poor lad was then forced to undergo a full body search before being put through rounds of questioning. Many of the other inmates he came across were westerners detained on similar charges – casual cannabis smokers found in possession of tiny amounts they didn't know they had.</p> <p>Iain was swept through Dubai's legal system and ended up spending over a month in prison on possession and smuggling charges. The guy had the presence of mind to keep a diary during his imprisonment and he gave me a copy. It was a cracking account of a genuinely grueling, terrifying experience. It detailed his bemusement as the legal process went on around him entirely in Arabic and his embassy's complete failure to assist him.</p> <p>One passage in the diary read: “They haven't even given me a bed so I have to sleep in the corridor with a bunch of other guys. There is a room which has mostly western prisoners staying in it so I'm hoping to get in there soon.” Iain spent four days sleeping in the corridor before eventually being given a bed by the prison authorities. He continued, “The toilets are a hole in the ground and absolutely stink. There is no toilet paper and all the prisoners are expected to use their hand.”</p> <p class="center"><img src="http://images.mirror.co.uk/upl/m4/mar2009/7/8/prison-escapes-image-6-368516258.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p>Inmates organised soccer matches when permitted to use the prison yard and Iain regularly joined in. On one occasion he found himself playing with a member of the Taliban caught attempting to smuggle 14 kilos of heroin through Dubai by strapping it to his body and concealing it under his clothes. Things went well for that particular smuggler until his contact failed to collect him at the airport and authorities became wary of his suspicious, aimless wanderings. Once he caught their attention the bulkiness of his clothing lead them to conclude that he was a suicide bomber of some sort and a massive security alert was sparked. He narrowly escaped being shot before the nature of his payload became apparent.</p> <p>Although Iain was not physically harmed by the prison guards, other inmates did suffer abuse. He recalled, “They sent one Arab guy to solitary where they handcuffed him with his hands above his head for hours because he sat down during the counting in the yard.” He continued, “There were one or two nice guards but the rest looked on us as dirt and didn't want to be close to us.” </p> <p>The diary also gave an account of Iain and his family's frantic attempts to secure help from the British authorities. He told me, “They couldn't do anything. The embassy came to visit me on the second day and told me I had to just sit and wait it out for whatever the Dubai authorities wanted to do. They told me I would probably either be deported or else given a four-year mandatory penalty.” </p> <p>Iain was finally released after serving 36 days in prison. He somehow managed to avoid deportation back to the UK and was permitted to continue on his trip to Australia. This lad had a real story to tell but because he and his family were reluctant to have his full name or photo published in a newspaper it's one that won't be read about by anyone. With the exception of you lucky people of course. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/09/27/banged-up-in-dubai-7048686/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>travelhash-dubaiaustraliaheroinjournalismcanabis-dubaiworking-holiday-australiadubai-prisondubai-customs-policesmugglingtalibanhttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/09/27/banged-up-in-dubai-7048686/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/09/20/travel-media-journalism-irish-ireland-australia-w-a-vineyard-work-farm-jobs-working-holiday-australia-dandaragon-margaret-river-6999613/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-09-20:/2009/09/20/travel-media-journalism-irish-ireland-australia-w-a-vineyard-work-farm-jobs-working-holiday-australia-dandaragon-margaret-river-6999613/Sun, 20 Sep 2009 04:23:38 +0200 <p>Just over a week into my new career as a vineyard pruner, things were looking grim. We had been promised several months of continuous work on a number of vineyards but we were close to finishing our first plot and details beyond that were sketchy. We were told we would have to head south to a place called Margaret River and wait a few days before work was again available. To make matters worse, accommodation facilities were medieval and wages were looking like they would be far short of what was promised. With no real alternative available, I headed to Margaret River and waited for the call to say work was beginning again. It didn't come. </p> <p> I worked on quite a few articles about the exploitation of foreign labour during my time with Metro Eireann but never thought I would experience it myself. I wasn't a happy camper and just couldn't take it on the chin. I decided to fill a few people in on the way the company I was working for had treated me and my colleagues, all of whom were foreigners. In the interest of fairness, I emailed XXXX, the co-owner of the company and the person who had given me the job, to let her know about why I was angry and what I intended to do about it. The following is an excerpt from my correspondence with her:</p> <p>“Dear XXXX,</p> <p>It's been a number of weeks since anyone from XXXXXXX XXXXXX has been in contact and I can only assume that my employment has been terminated. However, I do not feel I can let things rest until I outline some grievances I have and more importantly from your point of view, detail what I intend to do about them.</p> <p>Your company placed an add on Gumtree promising $1,000-plus per week for experienced pruners and up to $1,000 for inexperienced workers. Emails I have received from you said that I would be working for two weeks in Dandaragon before transferring immediately to Margaret River. Despite the best efforts of the team it became immediately clear that nobody would be making the sort of money promised. In fact, practically everyone made less than the minimum wage.</p> <p>Although we were promised two week's work in Dandaragon, this was reduced at short notice to just nine days. We were given guarantees of steady employment with free accommodation but instead were cut adrift with no wages just over a week in. Sadly, this apparently unforeseen break in our work schedule stretched on and the lines of communication broke down – mainly because your company completely ignored my numerous phone calls and emails. Eventually, I called your phone on one occasion only to be told by an operator that my number had been blocked. </p> <p>It was around this time that our pay day arrived. Unfortunately, it went without any sign of payment. When my wages finally did arrive over a week late it was a paltry $580. </p> <p>Another relevant point is the accommodation you provided; it was semi-derelict. I have travelled to some of the poorest countries in the world and I can safely say that I have never had to contend with such squalor. Like some of your other staff I opted to stay in a tent rather than the 'house' but I was forced to use the filthy, antiquated toilets and shower facilities. The place actually defies description but luckily, I had the presence of mind to take some photos.</p> <p>I didn't expect to make my fortune when I signed up to work as a pruner. What I did expect was to be treated fairly and to receive a decent day's pay for a decent day's work. Instead, I was paid below the national minimum wage, endured a litany of broken promises and was treated like I was disposable, ignorable and not worth the time it takes to reply to an email or return a phone call. </p> <p>Anyway, as you know, I am a Masters in Journalism graduate and spent much of the past three years working in the media industry for a variety of publications. At present, I am working on an article about the exploitation of foreign workers on Australia's farms and in particular, on vineyards. I will be pitching this article to a number of local, regional and national papers. My pitch will include the details of my time with your company and quotes from other persons who have had the misfortune to have dealings with XXXXXXXX XXXXXX. To add some colour, I'll also include some photos of the house you put us up in.</p> <p>I have also taken it upon myself to inform as many vineyards as I can of the treatment your company metes out to its immigrant labourers. I will be drawing up a detailed account and circulating it by email and by post directly to vineyards with a suggestion that they think carefully before rewarding any contracts to companies with dubious track-records with regard to the treatment of workers. I will also send copies to other contractors – your competitors – of which I already have an exhaustive list.</p> <p>Best Regards,</p> <p>Robert Carry.”</p> <p>I contacted newspapers and vineyards as promised and afterwards felt much better about the situation. One local paper even put a story on the subject on its front page. I also quickly found work with another vineyard contractor once in Margaret River and they proved to have fair employment practices. Exploitation is rampant in the sector but at least I wasn't a victim for too long. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/09/20/travel-media-journalism-irish-ireland-australia-w-a-vineyard-work-farm-jobs-working-holiday-australia-dandaragon-margaret-river-6999613/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>working-holiday-australiamargaret-rivervineyard-workjournalismirishwairelandmediadandaragontravelaustraliafarm-jobshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/09/20/travel-media-journalism-irish-ireland-australia-w-a-vineyard-work-farm-jobs-working-holiday-australia-dandaragon-margaret-river-6999613/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/09/13/nature-is-wonderful-6951529/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-09-13:/2009/09/13/nature-is-wonderful-6951529/Sun, 13 Sep 2009 03:24:34 +0200 <p>Pitching a tent in the dark wasn't quite the gargantuan challenge I expected it to be so I was soon nodding off ahead of my first day's work on an Australian vineyard. I had been bouncing from one city to another for months and the somewhat alien, deadeningly quiet countryside made for a peaceful night's sleep. It was brought to a shuddering end at 6am when the sun breached the horizon by – no messing – a blood-curdling scream. </p> <p class="center"><img src="http://clouddragon.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/tribbles-woman-screaming.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p>I had just about scrambled out of my sleeping bag in the semi-darkness when a second almost monkey-like screech split the silence. Suddenly, a full blown cacophony of simian, yelping cries broke out all around me. Now, I am fully aware of the fact that there are no monkeys in Australia but it sounded exactly like the trees around my tent were filled with dozens of highly agitated, bawling chimps.</p> <p class="center"><img src="http://img2.allposters.com/images/NGSPOD/112608-FB.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> I clambered out of my tent around the same time as my equally bemused soon-to-be colleagues with the screeching still in full swing. “What the f**k is that?” said a female English voice from still inside one of the tents. </p> <p> “Sounds like blumin' monkeys!” answered a Welsh guy in his early 20s.</p> <p> As it turned out, it was Kookaburras – large, nasty snake-eating birds that would wake us up in the same manner every morning for the duration of our time in Dandaragon. They break into their touching song at day-break, sunset and whenever one of them catches a snake.</p> <p> After some brief introductions we headed off to the vineyard itself where we were taught how to prune a grape vine. At the conclusion of her demonstration for our 12-strong group Katy, the boss, gave us a word of warning about the electrical cutters we would be sharing between us. You pull a trigger and a pair of blades snap shut. A German girl in Australia on a working holiday visa worked on the same plot last year. She went home early minus a thumb.</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://rougeforthewin.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/hmrthumb1.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p>Pruning isn't particularly difficult, but you get paid by how many vines you prune so you have to push yourself and limit breaks if you want to make decent money. Dandaragon, being towards the North of W.A., is also considerably hot, which doesn't help matters. The worst thing about it is the toll it takes on your hands. I was unwilling to loose a finger for the sake of a few quid so I avoided the electrical cutters in favour of a loppers until I was fully used to the process.</p> <p>This meant that I had to work harder to keep pace and that my hands would finish the day in a sorry state. Repeatedly slamming a loppers closed over a nine-hour day with just the one 15-minute break I allowed myself means some sort of repetitive strain injury is pretty much unavoidable. I woke up during the night after my third day to find that my hands had seized and I literally couldn't open them. I slowly peeled my fingers back and slept the rest of the night with my palms flat under my pillow. Unfortunately, I had no choice but to coil them around the handles of the loppers and get going again the following morning. All rather unpleasant, but still far better than a dole queue.</p> <p>There were also some enjoyable moments on the vineyard. The countryside around the area was beautiful and when the sun wasn't too hot it was nice to be working outdoors with parrots flying over head and kangaroos bouncing around fields in the distance. It was however a smaller variety of wildlife which provided the best entertainment. The rows of vines were infested with red, biting ants. I was nipped on occasion by one or two, but generally got away with it lightly. </p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://opensourcereleasefeed.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/ant.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p>That wasn't the case for a Cork guy named Dave who seemed to have a nack for putting his foot directly into an ant mound and leaving it there while he pruned the vine it sat at the base of. It didn't help that the guy had a healthy, borderline phobic dislike for insects. We would hear a scream and look up to see the lad frantically tearing off all his clothes and staggering around like someone had poured petrol all over him and flicked a match in his direction. The guy could strip to his boxers faster than a Chipendale by the end of the first week. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/09/13/nature-is-wonderful-6951529/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>travelmargaret-riverwinevineyard-workwildlifedandaragonirishaustraliaworking-holidayirelandpruninginsectsjournalismwahttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/09/13/nature-is-wonderful-6951529/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/09/06/my-job-search-led-me-to-discover-that-i-was-6904148/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-09-06:/2009/09/06/my-job-search-led-me-to-discover-that-i-was-6904148/Sun, 06 Sep 2009 14:24:39 +0200 <p>My job search led me to discover that I was living in a parallel universe in which casual farm labourers earned more than journalists. A career change was in order. I secured a position working on a vineyard without too much hassle and once I had bought a car, some camping equipment and enough food to last me two weeks I set off towards a place called Dandaragon.</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://www.reverseshot.com/files/images/pre-issue22/texas-chainsaw-massacre_28.preview.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> Dandaragon doesn't appear on most maps because for the most part it isn't accessible by sealed roads. It isn't a town – it more of a small, ill-defined region. New fangled inventions such as mobile phone signal and Internet are decades away. If you're travelling there you better have good directions.</p> <p> I had good directions. They came from Google Earth and were emailed to me by Katy, the woman I would work for. The four-hour journey from Perth to Dandaragon was a complicated one so the print-off of the directions was four pages long. </p> <p class="center"><img src="http://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/the-hills-have-eyes-2-unrated-edit-large.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> I'm not too proud to admit that there were a number of wrong turns made on the way but with the help of random strangers and petrol station staff I managed to keep going in the correct general direction. I was quite pleased right up until I made my scheduled turn off a main road onto a dirt track called 'Scenic Drive' sometime approaching mid-night. I consulted my directions to see where I should go next and found that there weren't any more directions. They were cut short either by Katy's email or by the printer I used. Whatever the reason, I was stranded. I had Katy's number but I had lost signal hours ago. To top things off, I was running low on petrol and had passed the last station around the same time as my phone died. I knew I had to be close to the farmhouse I was due at a few hours previously so I continued up the five kilometre length of Scenic Drive looking for a signpost or a vineyard or anything that might get me out my predicament. The only thing that indicated that there might be life on Scenic Drive was a light in what looked like a barn or large shed.</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://msnbcmedia2.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/051222/051222_wolfcreek_hmed.hmedium.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> I may not be from the country but I've seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Wolf Creek and God help me, Deliverance so I know that wandering into a random farmyard in the dead of night invariably means torture, rape and murder. Besides nurturing a racking fear stemming from horror film-induced trauma I was reluctant to saunter onto someone's property in the middle of the night out of a sense of common decency. Unfortunately, I was out of options.</p> <p> I pulled up at the edge of the property and, like someone having a near-death out-of-body experience, walked towards the light. It was a garage for tractors and other farm-related paraphernalia but was empty of people, be they hill billy serial killers or otherwise. I walked back outside and spotted a fairly swanky-looking farm house further into the property and a light was just barely visible through the curtained front window. I felt like an idiot, but just bit the bullet and knocked on the front door.</p> <p> A farmer answered and he instantly struck me as a kindly sort. I apologised for disturbing him at such a late hour and explained my predicament. He was unconcerned by my arrival on his doorstep; probably because the lad was quite clearly hammered. Nonetheless, he had a plan to resolve my crisis and the wheels were immediately set in motion. Only two vineyards in the area employed contractors to prune them and he knew both. He threw on his wellies and with trusty dog bounding along behind him he headed towards his ute (that's Ozzy talk for a open-back 4x4). He tore off down the dirt track in the direction I had come from while my 1985 semi-vintage motor struggled to keep pace. </p> <p class="center"><img src="http://butlersheetmetal.com/tinbasherblog/images/deliverance_dueling_banjos.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p>After 10 minutes of desperately trying not to let the bloke get away he pulled up to a gate that opened towards a small, borderline derelict house that looked to be in total darkness. We both jumped out and peered over. There were tents pitched outside the house – it was definitely the place I was after. I thanked the bloke profusely as he jumped smiling back into his ute. He waved away my appreciation and seemed happy to have done a good deed, if in a slight rush to get back to the crate of beer he had been working his way through.</p> <p> I didn't feel like ruining anyone else's peace and tranquility so I quietly pitched my tent among the others and climbed in. The introductions would wait until morning. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/09/06/my-job-search-led-me-to-discover-that-i-was-6904148/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>irish-backpackersbackpacking-western-australiaseasonal-work-australiafarm-work-australiavineyards-western-australiavineyard-work-western-australiabackpacking-australiasecond-year-holiday-visahttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/09/06/my-job-search-led-me-to-discover-that-i-was-6904148/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/09/03/perth-s-backpacker-land-is-flooded-with-irish-people-and-6882741/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-09-03:/2009/09/03/perth-s-backpacker-land-is-flooded-with-irish-people-and-6882741/Thu, 03 Sep 2009 12:39:14 +0200 <p>Perth's backpacker land is flooded with Irish people and although personal experience is not always a representative sample that reflects exactly the larger picture, I was forming the belief that the Irish/non-Irish ratio was greener in Perth's Northbridge than on Dublin's O'Connell Street. Matters however, were to get still more surreal. </p> <p> Myself and a motley crew of various hostel hounds decided to go along to a Latin night being hosted by a bar up the road. Bog-standard chart music played, cheap Australian beer drained and the clientèle was at least 80 per cent Irish – so all-in-all it was about as Latin as a mashed potato sandwich. However, the night suddenly became notable when I recognised someone – a guy who grew up in the same Ballybrack housing estate as me but whom I had no idea was even in Australia, never mind Perth.</p> <p> For a good 20 years we lived so close that I could have stood on my back wall and spat into his front garden, were I so inclined. Now here we were on the other side of the planet still somehow living in the same neighbourhood. He wasn't quite as shocked to meet me as I was him, and I realised why when I saw who he was drinking with. He had randomly bumped into and was now travelling with two other Ballybrack natives we both knew since childhood. It's a small world – but the list of places to which people tend to travel is very, very much smaller.</p> <p> I was getting nervous at the start of my second week of job-hunting. What I thought was an interview with the editor of a mining magazine turned into something of an anti-climax when he informed me as soon as we sat down in a coffee shop that there wasn't actually any job available. He mouthed off about how great his magazine was and all the great places he gets to visit before bidding me the best of luck and heading off. He even stung me to pay for his coffee. I would have to cast my net wider if I was to land anything so I started applying for every position I came across in the hope of getting something to tide me over while I found my feet. </p> <p> These ideas seem like a great way of increasing your chances of getting a job on paper except for the fact that you're only going to get a response from the ones you're either qualified for or which don't require any qualifications or experience. My applications yielded two job offers – one as admin support for an oil and gas industry magazine and another as a pruner in some god-forsaken vineyard a few hundred miles north of Perth. Both arrived on the same day and oddly, so too did a third unsolicited job offer from Thailand – a property magazine I worked for about a year ago wanted me to re-enlist.</p> <p> “Global economic crisis my arse,” I informed my mother, who is doing a spot of travelling herself of late and was in New Zealand at the time. “Three job offers in one day!”</p> <p> “Good stuff!”, she exclaimed. “So which one are you going to take?”</p> <p> “The one with the best pay.”</p> <p> “Which one is that?”</p> <p> “Strangely enough, the one on the vineyard.”</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://www.audleytravel.com/~/media/Images/Destinations/Australasia/Countries/Australia/Features/Green%20Travel%20Australia/barossa_vineyard_490.ashx?w=490&h350" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> There was a perk involved with working in agriculture – farm labouring positions were rough going by all accounts so Ozzies with options avoided them. Foreigners are needed to fill the gap so the Australian government offers entitlement to a second year working visa as an extra incentive. Working in the middle of nowhere means there is little to spend your money on so saving is easy.</p> <p> My boss-to-be told me I would need a car, camping equipment and food for about two weeks which along with a few other bits and pieces meant a substantial outlay, but the work was due to last for four months if I needed it. So that was that. I had a week to get everything together and make my way to a place called Dandaragon where I would join up with an international contingent of fellow farm labourers. We would toil long hours in the fields, live in a house with no TV in a region with no Internet or phone signal in order to provide wine to the people left in the world with the money to drink the stuff.</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://img.webmd.com/dtmcms/live/webmd/consumer_assets/site_images/articles/health_tools/tooth_enamel_erosion_slideshow/photolibrary_rf_photo_of_woman_drinking_red_wine.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/09/03/perth-s-backpacker-land-is-flooded-with-irish-people-and-6882741/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/09/03/perth-s-backpacker-land-is-flooded-with-irish-people-and-6882741/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/08/23/strange-people-6799933/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-08-23:/2009/08/23/strange-people-6799933/Sun, 23 Aug 2009 13:35:25 +0200 <p>You come across some characters when staying in backpacker hostels and I found myself sharing a dorm with some right headers. One, an early thirties Galwegian called Paddy who had been living in Perth for over a year, was on the bunk above me. He studied robotics in university and was working for an Australian company that manufactured car assembly machinery. In his spare time he told me, he was working on a computer program that he would allow him to cheat at online poker. Although his short stature, dorky profession and thick glasses gave the impression of a studious, quiet type, he was actually a funny, eccentric sort of a lad.</p> <p>He was full of off-the-wall stories that generally only came to light when the drink was flowing. One such tale was of the time when he went to Belfast as a 17-year-old to try to enlist in the IRA. He didn't know anyone so he just wandered into a bar in West Belfast and started asking random punters if they could put him in touch with the local OC. Happily, he wasn't taken as some sort of security forces plant and he returned home unharmed after being informed that the war was all but over and his services would not be required. His decision to travel to Belfast came about, he told me, as a result of a short-lived romantic notion of the IRA's campaign that had long since past. But he enjoyed telling the story all the same.</p> <p>Another one started off a bit more mundane but ended in far greater personal tragedy. He got his own place in Galway shortly after leaving college and immediately set about redecorating. Walls were painted, tiles were laid and a laminate floor was glued into place with some dodgey tin of industrial adhesive he got from a mate. He slept on the floor after his day's work but he would wake up, he told me, feeling increasingly groggy and short of breath. His brother dropped by to check on his progress and was impressed by the results. He was less impressed however, by the discoloured, disheveled mess Paddy had suddenly become. He was a shade of green, by all accounts, and a trip to the hospital was deemed necessary. He was sent home after extensive tests and a short stay with the sad news that he had permanently lost 30 per cent of his lung capacity. “Don't laugh at me! I've the lung capacity of a eight-year-old girl!” he lamented, throwing his hands in the air when he saw my unsympathetic reaction to his sorry tale..</p> <p>Also sharing my room were the hostel's only two French representatives – Sylvan and Thebault. The pair were of such different personalities that it was amazing that they came from the same planet let alone the same city. While handsome, brooding Thibault was quiet and darkly intelligent, larger-than-life Sylvan was probably the most out-going person I've ever met.</p> <p>A particular bug-bear of Sylvan's were the big, screeching crows that seem to infest much of Western Australia. They look quite like the Irish fellas but oddly, they sound nothing like each other. To all intents and purposes the Australian version has a different accent. It's difficult to wake up in the morning to anything other than their howling cries that sound like a mixture between someone dry retching and a bag of cats being stamped on. Unless of course, you shared a room with Sylvan. He hit the roof as soon as the first bird began to vomit its morning chorus off in the distance. He would be out of bet and barreling towards the window shouting, “Zee berds! They cannot shet ap!”</p> <p>Sylvan's main hobby was smoking cannabis. Not unusual in itself, but he had an oddly artistic way of approaching the practice. Anytime we went to the super market he would pick up a piece of fruit and announce that he would smoke it. I didn't really know what he meant by this on the first occasion he started manically declaring his nefarious intentions towards an unsuspecting water melon but I soon found out. He bought it, took it back to the hostel and went to work with a big grin on his face. He cut a lattice of internal chambers into the fruit and then started rolling a half dozen joints. Next, he fitted them into strategically placed holes in the outer skin of the melon, sparked up and smoked them by sucking on one end of the fruit. Over the weeks that followed he would burst into the dorm with some other unfortunate victim from the fruit and veg isle quite regularly. I personally watched him smoke grape fruit, banana, mango, a large apple and, on one of his less inspired days, a bewildered carrot.</p> <p>I was quickly finding out that sharing a room with a bunch of strangers is at times uncomfortable, sometimes unhygienic and occasionally dangerous, but rarely boring. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/08/23/strange-people-6799933/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/08/23/strange-people-6799933/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/08/16/australia-perth-northbridge-backpacker-hostels-bed-bugs-media-irish-travellers-6733682/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-08-16:/2009/08/16/australia-perth-northbridge-backpacker-hostels-bed-bugs-media-irish-travellers-6733682/Sun, 16 Aug 2009 05:28:19 +0200 <p>My latest plane touched down and finally, after stopping off in England, Thailand, Cambodia and Singapore I was at last in Australia. Despite the fact that the first Irish to set foot on this part of the world had to be shackled and dragged kicking and screaming down the gangplanks onto the shores of Botany Bay by our then colonial master, Oz has been a voluntary target of our emigrating masses ever since. The Irish played the same role here as they did in the other 'new' countries, namely, battled their way onto the building sites, docks and farms, worked their arses off and played a major role in hacking a nation out of the wilderness. Our late affluence however, triggered a massive shift in the type of individuals being dispatched Down Under. </p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c9/EarlyIrishImmigrants.gif" alt="" title="null"></p> <p> With a trip to the other side of the world less the life sentence it once was and Australia's immigration laws tightened significantly, the profile of the average Irish arrival changed. A young Corkonian or Galwegian travelling to Oz did so for an extended holiday on a one-year visa funded primarily by cash generated in Ireland and subsidised by as little casual employment as possible. With our little economic miracle now over things are slowly creaking into reverse. </p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://www.townsvillebulletin.com.au/images/uploadedfiles/editorial/pictures/2009/03/16/irish17.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> I travelled to Australia for a three-week holiday about four years ago. I flew into Sydney and went straight for the infamous Bondi Road where a mate of mine was living at the time. Bondi had been home to the city's Orthodox Jewish community for decades but they were in the process of being ousted by a partying hoard of gap-year Irish aiming to transform the area into Ireland's 33rd county. I was stunned by the number of GAA jerseys floating about and struck dumb when I saw a game of beach hurling in full swing on my first trip to the seaside. The Irish I came across were there primarily for a good time and they new exactly how to go about getting it. This time round though, the Irish I've been coming across have been pushed out of Ireland by lack of work rather than pulled to Australia by the promise of a year-long session. Many are riding out the storm – more still are going to stay if they can.</p> <p> Unfortunately, Australia has been hit by the international economic crisis and work is nowhere near as plentiful as it was in years past. Although not brutalised to the degree to which Ireland has been, there is still massive competition from travellers for any and all positions that crop up. A lot of guys who used up savings, redundancy or bank loans to come here in the hope of getting work and putting aside a few quid have been forced home to dole queues and debts after being unlucky in the jobs market here. There are of course wealthy exceptions, but the all-encompassing party that had been ongoing amongst the Irish youngsters knocking around Australia for a decade is over.</p> <p> I had a pre-booked bed in a backpacker hostel in Perth's traveller Mecca of Northbridge and made it there some time around midnight. I smiled hello at a small gathering of backpackers stoically drinking their way through a bottle of vodka and went to reception. I was beat after my trip and ached for a bed. I paid for the night and was shown to the dorm where I would be staying. </p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://cache.virtualtourist.com/1592955-Perth_City-Perth.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> I've put my head down in some dodgy spots over the years but this one took the biscuit. The room, which looked like someone had pilled a dozen backpacks onto a hand grenade and then pulled the pin, stank of a mixture of sweat, cigarette buts floating in stale beer and feet belonging to someone with late stage trench foot. I dropped my bag onto the ground and glared at the guy who had escorted me to this midden. “Are you serious mate?” I said, hoping he had another room reserved for people who weren't filthy.</p> <p> “What do you mean?” he asked, fully aware of exactly what I meant.</p> <p> “I mean I wouldn't put a dog in here.”</p> <p> The argument went back and forth for a while with me hamstrung by the fact that it was too late to go wandering a city I didn't know looking for somewhere to stay that had a late night reception. I knew it wasn't one I was going to win so I bit the bullet, called the guy a dirtbag and climbed into one of the free beds. </p> <p class="center"><img src="http://www.alternativehealthjournal.com/img/upload/bed-bug-bites0.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> I pulled a t-shirt over my face in a forlorn attempt to block out the stench but without any joy. I tossed and turned and through my disgust, fatigue and discomfort began to convince myself that there was something crawling on me. I shook it off eventually and passed out but when I woke the next morning I was head to toe in swollen, red bites. The place was infested with bedbugs. The only thing that saved the bloke at reception that morning was the fact that he had been replaced by some other clown. It wasn't the start I had been hoping for. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/08/16/australia-perth-northbridge-backpacker-hostels-bed-bugs-media-irish-travellers-6733682/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>bed-bugsnorthbridge-backpacker-hostelsaustraliamediaperthirish-travellershttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/08/16/australia-perth-northbridge-backpacker-hostels-bed-bugs-media-irish-travellers-6733682/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/08/09/singapore-geyland-road-hookers-journalism-media-ireland-irish-6682494/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-08-09:/2009/08/09/singapore-geyland-road-hookers-journalism-media-ireland-irish-6682494/Sun, 09 Aug 2009 05:27:20 +0200 <p>I suffered a disorienting start to my time in Singapore – the spoiled little rich kid and multicultural poster boy of Southeast Asia. I booked a room in Hotel 81 on the city's Geylang Road only to find that there were in fact eight Hotel 81s on Geylang Road. Squeaky clean Singapore has a reputation as being super spotless to a fault, but nobody told Hotel 81's cleaning lady. My room, when I eventually found it, was manky and for some reason had a disconcerting amount of other people's hair clinging to various surfaces. I knew something was amiss but at that point, couldn't figure out what.</p> <p> I reported the lackadaisical approach the elusive cleaner had taken to her duties to the looker at reception and she responded with a frosty smile bordering on a grimace and a new room key. Sadly, my new room was equally gross and hair coated. Eight Hotel 81s – at least 20 stories each and with a minimum of 30 rooms per floor. I didn't fancy measuring the hair content of all 4800 rooms so I cleaned the place as best I could, took a shower and headed out determined to spend as little time in my room as I could during my two-day stay.</p> <p class="center"><img src="http://www.local3000.com/uploads/tx_localclassifieds/1217629317cleaning_lady1.JPG" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> Southeast Asians are renowned the world over for their friendliness and optimism-against-the-odds attitude so I was expecting Singaporeans, the only nation on the sub-continent with the cash to make this positive outlook seem justified, to be an extremely cheerful lot. Instead, I found stoney-faced glares and pedestrians who appear to be under the impression that its physically possible to actually walk straight through white people when they get in your way. </p> <p> After being jostled off the footpath and into the road by the twentieth be-suited, dour little creep in the space of a half an hour I decided a pit-stop was the only thing that would save the next clown from a daylight beat down and me from being sentenced to lashes or hanging or some other delight from Singapore's big book of medieval punishments. </p> <p> I pulled up a chair at a roadside eatery and was immediately shouted at by some old bint working there. They don't take orders – you queue, point out what you want and then pay. Anyone not born with this knowledge should apparently be abused at full volume in a variety of languages. I selected some slop or other, paid and took my seat while the woman snapped something I'm sure was equivalent to “Not that f**king hard now is it?” in what I think was Malay. I had only been there a few hours but I couldn't help it – I already hated Singapore. </p> <p> Another roadside job on the opposite side of the street had a couple of people patiently sipping beers so I hoped across to see if I couldn't cheer myself up. I ordered a Tiger – the country's national beer – and nearly choked when I heard the price. 22 Singapore dollars is in the region of 12 Euro. No wonder the other patrons were drinking so slowly.</p> <p> I decided there was definitely something odd about Geylang Road as the night closed in and I nursed the most expensive beer I'd ever had. There were a lot of good looking women about, but they seemed to be just standing around. The blokes on the other hand, were all on the move. A middle aged guy who looked to be Indian stopped and began chatting with a pale, shy-looking girl of Chinese origin about half his age. She nodded furtively, they headed off together and everything fell into place. The ludicrous number of grotty hotel rooms, the girls standing still, the guys pushing past – Geylang Road was a giant, open-air knocking shop. The streets around Geylang were heaving with what must have been tens of thousands of people as I headed back towards my hotel and the female half were on the game.</p> <p class="center"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_YlvEjlIelzk/R7jvnILNXoI/AAAAAAAAI4I/CzFmJrU_5Io/s400/4.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> I knew before I got to my Hotel 81 that it would have suddenly received a rash of bookings and so it proved – there was actually a queue of couples who clearly had never met before waiting to get checked in. </p> <p> A guy I used to work for in Bangkok has since relocated to Singapore and I met up with him the following night. He showed me around the city's magnificent harbour area and brought me out for beers in a swanky rooftop bar in old China Town which afforded views of the whole city. He mentioned that prostitution was actually legal in Singapore – status not enjoyed even in raunchy Bangkok. The tourist heart was a far cry from Geylang, but still not a place I could take to. The people were just as pushy and stuck up. If you ever get the chance to go to Singapore I suggest you skip it. Unfortunately, my return flight is already booked. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/08/09/singapore-geyland-road-hookers-journalism-media-ireland-irish-6682494/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>singaporeirelandjournalismhookersirishmediageyland-roadhttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/08/09/singapore-geyland-road-hookers-journalism-media-ireland-irish-6682494/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/08/05/something-strange-going-down-in-singapore-6654468/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-08-05:/2009/08/05/something-strange-going-down-in-singapore-6654468/Wed, 05 Aug 2009 06:52:05 +0200 <p>A visit to Phnom Penh's city dump the day before I was due to fly out didn't turn me off Cambodia and as my flight to Singapore trundled down the runway I was determined to return for something longer than a holiday. In the meantime, I had a couple of days in the Lion City to contend with before I would finally arrive in Perth to begin what would no doubt be a tough, demoralising search for some gainful employment – a resource all but dried up back home.</p> <p> Phnom Penh's airport is a basic, quaint type of place with light traffic and practically no amenities. Singapore's Changi Airport is a slightly different kettle of cod. Changi, Southeast Asia's busiest, has a swimming pool, gym, saunas, steam rooms, an embarrassing range of shops and restaurants, hundreds of free Internet stations and recliner chairs complete with blankets dotted around the terminals. I didn't want to leave.</p> <p> The city state of Singapore is the end product of a century of economy-driven multiculturalism in action and there are few if any countries in the world quite as diverse. Native Singaporeans live among massive communities of Malay, Indian, Pakistani and ethnic Chinese. Westerners and Asians of every other hue are also represented in number.</p> <p> Singapore is Southeast Asia's wealthiest country – a fact evident on the drive from the airport to my hotel. The place is immaculate the point of annoyance. It was amazing to think that it shared a planet with ramshackle Cambodia, let alone a sub-continent. The trees that dot the roadside and motorway meridian are spaced exactly the same distance apart for kilometres on end and the grass they sprout from is as manicured as a K-Club putting green. </p> <p><img src="http://www.cs.nyu.edu/overton/genearoundtheworld/singapore.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> Draconian laws mean crime, litter and other nastiness found elsewhere in neighbouring countries are for all intents and purposes non-existent. Squeaky clean Singapore is so displeased by those unsightly brown blobs found on the streets of every other city in the world that it even has a law on its statute banning chewing gum. Arriving with half a pack of Wrigglies Spearmint wont get you banged up but selling the stuff can actually get you sentenced to lashes of a cane across the arse cheeks.</p> <p><img src="http://patdollard.com/wp-content/uploads/cane.jpg" alt="" title="null"> </p> <p> There is however, a dodgy side to Singapore which I ran into through lack of proper forethought and planning. My round trip from Ireland to Australia via Cambodia, Thailand and Singapore meant booking eight different flights as well as least a dozen hotels and guesthouses. Because I only planned to stay Singapore for two days I didn't work too hard to find cheap, cheerful, well-located accommodation – I just consulted Google and picked the cheapest option that wasn't too much of a trek from the city centre. The place I ended up didn't look much like the postcards.</p> <p><img src="http://www.singapore-visit.com/folder52/800px-Geylang_Road_Shophouses.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> Hotel 81 on Geylang Road proved odd, first of all, because there are eight of them. Eight of the same hotel, built to the same cheapo design, on the one road in the one city. I told my elderly taxi driver how ridiculous this was after I jogged out of the fourth Hotel 81 on Geylang Road which didn't have a room reserved for me, but he wasn't convinced. He felt I should have come equipped with more information than the hotel's name and road. Luckily, the fifth was the one I was after so I paid the guy and cast him out of my life forever. </p> <p> The girl who checked me in was good looking but with a fake, plastic McSmile that made her look like a breathing manikin. “So”, I said. “Would you believe me if I told you that this is actually the fourth Geylang Road Hotel 81 I've visited today?”</p> <p> “Yes Sir, there are actually eight Hotel 81s on Geylang Road,” she answered without acknowledging the weirdness of such a marketing strategy.</p> <p> “How many are there in the rest of the city?”</p> <p> “Oh, there are none Sir. All of Singapore's Hotel 81s are on this road.”</p> <p> “That's weird. Don't you think that's weird?” I asked. </p> <p> “Here is your key Sir – room 718.”</p> <p> “Well I think it's really weird,” I said as I took the key and picked up my bag. “Something should be done about it actually,” I continued. “Like maybe bulldozing seven of them!”</p> <p> The lift, halls and corridors of the hotel were all empty – a fact which I felt confirmed that there was indeed a flaw inherent in building eight hotels on the one nondescript street. Things were not to stay this way for long however, and the thinking behind the move would soon become apparent. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/08/05/something-strange-going-down-in-singapore-6654468/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/08/05/something-strange-going-down-in-singapore-6654468/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/07/27/the-shittiest-of-shitty-lives-6597157/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-07-27:/2009/07/27/the-shittiest-of-shitty-lives-6597157/Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:47:18 +0200 <p>Stueng Munchey, Phnom Penh's city dump, won't top anyone's list of must-see attractions in Cambodia but with 4,000 people living there I felt sure it would make for an interesting story. I talked my reluctant, slightly alarmed driver Narun into bringing me there and with a vomit-inducing stench, smouldering underground fires spewing toxic smoke and filthy, ragged people of all ages digging around for salable recyclables Steung Munchey was every bit the hell hole I expected it to be.</p> <p> I wandered around, snapped a few photos and basically tried to act like I wasn't completely horrified by what I saw while the people who had to live there were looking. Before leaving, I decided to have a chat with some of Stueng Munchey's residents. I didn't really know where to start so I just walked up to one of the ramshackle huts, made out of garbage and sitting on top of garbage, and said hello in Khmer to the wary people sitting inside. The hut I chose was on the periphery of a concentration of larger, equally thrown together shacks which I suppose would constitute the centre of the community. I smiled my way up to the open front of the hut which was basically a raised platform made out of wooden pallets and posts topped by tattered sheets of blue plastic. A young woman who looked to be about 18 stood as I approached and immediately began conversing with Narun. I guessed the drill. If I wanted to gawk and snap pictures of her and the squalor she lived in I would have to pay for the privilege. </p> <p> Once money had changed hands the girl went back inside. I walked closer to the entrance from where I could see that the shack, around the size of a box room in a Dublin council unit, housed four people. A phenomenally scruffy young guy of about 15 popped his head up from the filthy mat he he had been napping his day away on and gave me a sporadically toothed smile before plopping back down. The other occupants were two small children – one was a small girl who sat staring in clothes which were little more than dirty rags and the other was an infant of less than a year old. The youngest was lying naked on the platform dead to the world. Hundreds of flies crawled undisturbed all over the poor kid. It was probably the most disgusting thing I've seen in person.</p> <p> I struggled through some basic questions and got basic answers in return. Sandar, the eldest girl, was sister to the teenage guy and mother to the two children. They had been living on Stueng Munchey for four years. Yes – it was a dangerous place to live and rats sniffed, scratched and nibbled at them while they slept. Of course disease was rampant because sanitation was non-existent. NGOs occasionally passed through and made tokenistic efforts at improving their lives but other than that the world left them to rot.</p> <p> Sandar could have been quite pretty but Stueng Munchey had left its mark on her. Her face bore a raw looking scar she got when a fellow scavenger accidentally tossed a molten piece of plastic her way. These people didn't need me peering at their horrible lives so I thanked them for their time and, rather pointlessly, wished them well in the future knowing full well that their future would be as horrible, debased, and nightmarish as their present. </p> <p> It was a relief to leave and I dived into the shower as soon as I got back to my hotel, which had magically transformed from basic to opulent during the hours I was away. The stench I carried with me fell away down the plug hole but the images – of forgotten haggard people digging around in pig shit and a filthy, malnourished child being feasted on by angrily buzzing flies – wouldn't be leaving any time soon. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/07/27/the-shittiest-of-shitty-lives-6597157/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/07/27/the-shittiest-of-shitty-lives-6597157/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/07/21/cambodia-steung-meanchey-phnom-penh-city-dump-journalism-media-irish-ireland-travel-southeast-asia-6559234/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-07-21:/2009/07/21/cambodia-steung-meanchey-phnom-penh-city-dump-journalism-media-irish-ireland-travel-southeast-asia-6559234/Tue, 21 Jul 2009 11:20:31 +0200 <p>I had one day left in Cambodia before I flew to Australia via Singapore to try my hand at being an immigrant and Stueng Munchey was the last place on my list of places to visit. My moto-driving friend Narun was confused and alarmed by this turn of events because Stueng Munchey is Phnom Penh's city dump. The reason why I wanted to visit and what separates it from other landfill sites around the world is that 4,000-odd people are currently living out there lives on top of its stinking, smoldering rubbish. </p> <p><img src="http://www.globalenvision.org/files/trashpickers.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> The dump site has, of late, been swamped on all sides by the sprawl of the growing city it serves – largely because of Cambodia's rapidly urbanising population. Competition for space coupled with a government policy of expelling residents and then selling off any piece of land foreign companies or individuals express interest in means there is an ever-increasing number of families forced to live in despicable, horrific conditions on Stueng Munchey. Most of its inhabitants scrape together a living of sorts by sifting through newly arrived truck loads of rubbish for salable recyclables meaning the dump is both home and workplace.</p> <p> “Bad smell,” said Narun in his typically understated manner. It made me want to vomit. It made me want to tear my nose off and gouge out my sinuses. It was the sort of smell that makes your eyes water and your breath come in short repulsive gasps and we hadn't even got to the dump yet. </p> <p> The narrow, litter strewn street running from the main road to the dump itself seemed to be the economic centre of Steung Munchey. Miserable, filthy people aged from four to 70 called a brief halt to their stacking and debating over freshly scavenged piles of old cans, bales of plastic and bags of crumpled paper to glare at the white boy speeding towards the landfill. Normally, despite the poverty and hardship seen within its borders, the Cambodian spirit will be writ large across the faces of its people in the form of ever-present, infectious smiles. That optimism-against-the-odds attitude looked to have been beaten out of the people of Stueng Munchey a long time ago. The majority of people living in Southeast Asia are close to the poverty line, but Cambodia is at the bottom of the pile by some distance. Stueng Munchey's haunted residents are the poorest of the poor – living in a squalor lost to the western world a century ago – and they know it. </p> <p><img src="http://www.theshayrebellion.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/dump6_tron.jpg" alt="null" title="null"></p> <p> The road gives out directly onto a track which runs along the surface of the rubbish heap. Narun slowed to walking speed and I jumped off. The spectacle in front of me, and I'm only exaggerating a little bit here, was like a vision of hell on earth. Through the sickly, toxic smoke leaking from rumbling underground fires I established that the hills of smoldering rubbish, like the one I was standing on, stretched out in every direction as far as the eye could see. Ragged, beaten figures pawed hopelessly through the rubbish in the dizzying heat while, bizarrely, herds of long-haired, foul-smelling goats from God knows where scrambled bleating in the filth. </p> <p> Trucks worked their way towards some vaguely designated dumping point around which most of the scavengers congregated. We hauled the bike and ourselves off the track into the garbage as they rumbled passed. One came along that was more of a container truck than a dumper, and a thick, pale-brown liquid was sloshing around in its open-topped back. Clumps of it occasionally sploshed over the side. It stank in a very different way to the rest of the dump and from the other trucks. At a guess, I would say it was pig shit from a battery farm somewhere on the city's outskirts. The driver could have dumped it anywhere, but he trundled right up behind the other trucks and emptied what must have been a good three ton of pig shit right in the middle of where all the new refuse had been left – the spot where the scavengers were searching.</p> <p> I felt like dragging the lad out of the cab and drowning him in his little gift; and I didn't have to work in the putrid load's immediate vicinity in 30-odd degree heat for the coming days and weeks. The people picking through the rubbish however, didn't react. One thin, middle-aged guy put his hands on his hips and shook his head. Narun wanted to leave and so did I. Journalistic endeavour can only fuel you for so long. Before I went though, I wanted to find someone to talk to – someone who lived their entire life in this place where I had to fight hard to endure every moment. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/07/21/cambodia-steung-meanchey-phnom-penh-city-dump-journalism-media-irish-ireland-travel-southeast-asia-6559234/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>phnom-penh-city-dumptravelsteung-meancheycambodiairishirelandmediajournalismsoutheast-asiahttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/07/21/cambodia-steung-meanchey-phnom-penh-city-dump-journalism-media-irish-ireland-travel-southeast-asia-6559234/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/07/12/easy-karma-points-6495848/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-07-12:/2009/07/12/easy-karma-points-6495848/Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:15:19 +0200 <p>A lengthy journey on motorbike and cobbled together river ferry brought me to Mekong Island and the home of my Cambodian buddy Narun – an orphaned Khmer Rouge survivor and former soldier turned moto driver and family man. Most Cambodians survive on less than a dollar a day and although Narun had a solid roof over their heads, they had little else. There was no running water or electricity and, I would discover, the form of sanitation being utilised was of a sort not seen in the west for centuries.<br> I didn't want to arrive empty handed so myself and Narun stopped off in a market in Phnom Penh at the beginning of our journey. A tropical climate meant we were spoiled for choice in the fruit and vegetable stakes, but this was no Tescos and meat was butchered and displayed on plastic sheets laid out on the grimy, watery walkways without any refrigeration. Flies crawled over bristly pig hinds, stunned plucked chickens and the roaring, red fingered women who sold them. Nothing really appealed so I gestured for Narun to take the lead. He pawed his way through several piles of assorted body parts before selecting and bagging up a few cuts that cost practically nothing. Despite this, his kids skipped on the spot and his wife beamed shyly when I handed over the bag of food.<br> Narun showed me inside his one-roomed house which acted, more-or-less exclusively, as a communal bedroom. I dumped my bag beside the blanket laid out under a mosquito net I would sleep on and headed back under the house to the sandy patch of earth between the teak stilts which was the centre of the home. As Narun's wife busied herself frying meat and steaming rice in the semi-outdoor kitchen, one of his daughters returned from a mission to round up the neighbourhood kids so they too could come and stare at the oddly pale young man who appeared to be getting ready to sleep in their home. Narun's youngest daughter remained where she was – staring gauntly from a hammock strung between two of the uprights. “She sick,” said Narun, nodding towards the shrunken child who had charged out to greet him only to return to her hammock, coughing pitifully as she went.<br> “No doctors on the island?” I asked, guessing the answer.<br> “Have clinic near to where we took ferry – on the mainland,” Narun answered. He dropped his head and stroked his daughter's hair and I didn't need to ask why the kid hadn't been taken there. It was because her father couldn't afford it.<br> Neighbours started arriving on masse as darkness fell in on us, bringing various dishes and treats with them for the celebration the arrival of a stranger apparently warranted. I asked Narun if there were any shops nearby where we might get a few beers to help oil the conversational wheels which had ground largely to a halt due to the fact that Narun was the only in our number with any English. A kid was dispatched and returned with a grin and a slab of beer cans. We had a good time by the light of a fire – we mimed conversations, stuffed our faces with nameless foodstuffs and got hammered.<br> When it came time to hit the hay, I stumbled up the steps of Narun's house and crawled under the mosquito net. Drunk as I was though, I got very little sleep. There's no more heartbreaking a thing to listen to than the sound of a mother trying helplessly to calm a sick, coughing, whimpering child in the darkness. At first glance the simplistic life lived by Cambodia's rural poor could almost be paradise. A tropical, verdant country which generously provides all the fresh fruit, vegetables and meat one could eat. Scratch the surface though, and you see exactly how valuable the technological and economical advancements made elsewhere in the world really are.<br> The cost of paying for Narun's daughter's medical treatment came to $40 US – a pittance for someone from one of the lucky countries. Unfortunately, it's over a month's wage for the average Cambodian and in all likelyhood her illness would have went untreated had a random foreigner not wandered into the picture at such a fabulous time to earn some easy Karma points. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/07/12/easy-karma-points-6495848/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/07/12/easy-karma-points-6495848/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/07/05/getting-my-mooch-on-6452766/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-07-05:/2009/07/05/getting-my-mooch-on-6452766/Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:03:05 +0200 <p>My Cambodian moto driver made the mistake of casually mentioning that he could probably put me up in his rural home for a night or two, and I grabbed the opportunity to see a part of the country not on the tourist trail with what to Narun was probably disconcerting enthusiasm. Narun, an orphaned Khmer Rouge survivor who fought in the Cambodian Army before becoming a moto driver, has his home two hours from Phnom Penh in a place called Mekong Island – a massive, tropical sand spit in the middle of Asia's largest river which is only accessible by ferry.<br> The travel time and petrol costs involved in a trip from Mekong Island to the city centre where Narun makes his living means it isn't practical for him to return home after work. So, like hundreds of other drivers in the Cambodian capital, Narun works all day and then sleeps rough on the back of his bike most nights of the week. When money and time permits, usually once or twice a week, he heads home to spend time with his family.<br> It was a dusty, uncomfortable drive across the city centre and through the slums on Phnom Penh's outskirts on our way to the Mekong Island ferry, but the sight of the ferry itself made me want to jump onto Narun's bike and head straight back. The Mekong River – a massive, brown bubbling body of water – was stretched out before us with the shore of Mekong Island barely visible a couple of kilometres away. The vessel myself and the other passengers would attempt to traverse this Asian giant was, basically, a wooden shed nailed onto a some floating barrels with a beat up old motor strapped onto the back of it.<br> My fellow travellers; farmers returning from markets, school kids on their way home and moto drivers like Narun, were highly amused by both the presence of a 'barang', which had been nowhere to be seen for the last hour of our drive, and the look of dread I imagine I was sporting.<br> We skidded down the steep, muddy embankment and onto the hodge-podge of a craft we would trust our lives just as it spluttered into life and began to move away.<br> I attempted to keep as calm as I could in the cramped, oily bows of the ferry by sponging up the nonchalance of the other passengers crammed in around me. It wasn't difficult – they were all staring at me with expectant, beaming smiles plastered across their faces. “Hullloooo!” said a small Khmer girl in a tattered red dress from behind her mother's skirt. “Hello!” I answered with a smile. The rest of the group erupted into giggles and words of congratulations for the brave kid who dared to converse with the oddity in their midst. “Hullloooo!” yelled a scruffy, animated teenage guy from atop the clucking, chicken-filled bamboo basket he was sitting on. “Hello!” I answered over the roar of the struggling engine.<br> An awkward silence descended when the whole boat had greeted me with what appeared to be the only English word in circulation. Luckily, the girl in the red dress peered out from behind her mother's leg to save the day. “Hullloooo!” she said, smiling through the two fingers she had jammed into her mouth – and around we went again.<br> I scrambled off the 'ferry' when it beached itself on shore and helped Narun push his moto up the steep, gravelly bank. The passengers fanned out and headed off down dirt tracks that cut through the thick, lush vegetation that topped the island as we started the old bike up and made out towards Narun's home. “Remember Rob, we are very poor!” he warned me for the thousandth time.<br> The island itself was stunning. Traffic on the pathway was dominated by carts pulled by bony white cows and people either on foot or on battered bicycles. Trees heavy with mangoes, bananas, coconuts and a range of other unrecognisable fruits partially concealed beautifully constructed if basic stilted teak houses. The land occasionally opened up to reveal verdant fields dotted with lazily grazing livestock and bent figures in conical hats. Tourists are a rarity on Mekong Island and necks craned as we sped towards Narun's home. Narun visibly brightened as we neared our destination and when we finally arrived it wasn't difficult to see why. His two daughters ran, giggling and screaming from under his stilted house while his wife walked smiling from its main room. The poverty in the area made its presence felt in the absence of electricity, sanitation or running water, but Narun and his family had found a way of living which made their happiness not depend on such trivialities. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/07/05/getting-my-mooch-on-6452766/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>mediajournalismirishasiasoutheast-asiairelandtravelcambodiakhmerhttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/07/05/getting-my-mooch-on-6452766/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/06/30/buying-mates-in-cambodia-6423570/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-06-30:/2009/06/30/buying-mates-in-cambodia-6423570/Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:41:12 +0200 <p>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.</p> <p> 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. </p> <p>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.</p> <p> 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.</p> <p> 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.</p> <p> 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. </p> <p>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.</p> <p> 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. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/06/30/buying-mates-in-cambodia-6423570/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>cambodiakhmerjournalismirelandthailandsoutheast-asiamediaasiatravelirishhttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/06/30/buying-mates-in-cambodia-6423570/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/06/21/a-spot-of-bother-6355195/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-06-21:/2009/06/21/a-spot-of-bother-6355195/Sun, 21 Jun 2009 14:20:33 +0200 <p>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.</p> <p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/06/21/a-spot-of-bother-6355195/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>southeast-asiairelandtravelriots-thailandkoh-lipebangkok-riotsthai-weddingsthaiirishjournalismasiathailandmediahttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/06/21/a-spot-of-bother-6355195/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/06/14/multi-culties-6300128/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-06-14:/2009/06/14/multi-culties-6300128/Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:35:51 +0200 <p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>"It can't be helped!" I roared, to the delight of the male half of the traveling contingent. "They're Sweeeedish for Jaysus sake!"</p> <p>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. </p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/06/14/multi-culties-6300128/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>irishthailandsweedishkoh-lipethai-weddingssweedenirelandhttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/06/14/multi-culties-6300128/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/06/06/denis-you-re-a-mong-6249287/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-06-06:/2009/06/06/denis-you-re-a-mong-6249287/Sat, 06 Jun 2009 14:02:16 +0200 <p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>"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.</p> <p>“Of course,” he said in perfect English with a look of extreme concern. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/06/06/denis-you-re-a-mong-6249287/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>thailandthaijournalismirishmediatravelhttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/06/06/denis-you-re-a-mong-6249287/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/05/17/a-slight-snag-6129583/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-05-17:/2009/05/17/a-slight-snag-6129583/Sun, 17 May 2009 15:15:51 +0200 <p>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.</p> <p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/05/17/a-slight-snag-6129583/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/05/17/a-slight-snag-6129583/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/05/06/back-from-the-dead-6066334/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-05-06:/2009/05/06/back-from-the-dead-6066334/Wed, 06 May 2009 03:30:03 +0200 <p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/05/06/back-from-the-dead-6066334/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/05/06/back-from-the-dead-6066334/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/02/25/temporary-halt-5648722/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-02-25:/2009/02/25/temporary-halt-5648722/Wed, 25 Feb 2009 18:14:19 +0100 <p>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. </p> <p>Cheers,</p> <p>Rob. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/02/25/temporary-halt-5648722/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/02/25/temporary-halt-5648722/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/01/26/good-to-be-home-5451538/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-01-26:/2009/01/26/good-to-be-home-5451538/Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:55:19 +0100 <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/55/150637535_809818cb67.jpg?v=0" alt="" title=""></p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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. </p> <p>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.</p> <p class="center"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3135/2844706905_dd86711680.jpg?v=0" alt="" title=""> </p> <p>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. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/01/26/good-to-be-home-5451538/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>irishirelandtravelthaijournalismthailandmediadublinhttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/01/26/good-to-be-home-5451538/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/01/19/the-last-hurrah-5407896/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-01-19:/2009/01/19/the-last-hurrah-5407896/Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:22:37 +0100 <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p class="center"><img src="http://data5.blog.de/media/763/3157763_cb246df54f_m.jpeg" alt="Ek" vspace="5" hspace="5"></p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p class="center"><img src="http://data5.blog.de/media/766/3157766_cb11ad2312_m.jpeg" alt="Me and Chris" vspace="5" hspace="5"></p> <p>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.</p> <p>“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.</p> <p>“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.</p> <p class="center"><a href="http://www.blog.co.uk/media/photo/me_hippo/3157765" title="Me hippo"><img src="http://data5.blog.de/media/765/3157765_17614d38ef_m.jpeg" alt="Me hippo" vspace="5" hspace="5"></a></p> <p>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.</p> <p>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. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/01/19/the-last-hurrah-5407896/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/01/19/the-last-hurrah-5407896/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/01/15/getting-the-hang-of-the-place-in-time-to-leave-5382125/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2009-01-15:/2009/01/15/getting-the-hang-of-the-place-in-time-to-leave-5382125/Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:01:53 +0100 <p>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.</p> <p> 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!’.</p> <p class="center"><img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Bangkok_skytrain_sunset.jpg" alt="" title=""> </p> <p> 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. </p> <p>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. </p> <p>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.</p> <p class="center"> <img src="http://www.thetravelrag.com/photo_gallery/images/730LRG.jpg" alt="" title=""></p> <p> 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.</p> <p> 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.</p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/01/15/getting-the-hang-of-the-place-in-time-to-leave-5382125/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>thaiirelandjournalismmediatravellingtuk-tuksbangkokirishasiathailandhttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2009/01/15/getting-the-hang-of-the-place-in-time-to-leave-5382125/#commentshttp://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2008/12/27/i-arrived-back-to-thailand-after-a-trip-to-cambodia-5284942/tag:letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk,2008-12-27:/2008/12/27/i-arrived-back-to-thailand-after-a-trip-to-cambodia-5284942/Sat, 27 Dec 2008 15:34:32 +0100 <p>I arrived back to Thailand after a trip to Cambodia to find the country’s capital in turmoil. Before I left I had come across government buildings occupied by thousands of PAD protesters attempting to oust then prime minister Somchai Wongsawat, who they considered a stooge of his disgraced predecessor and former Manchester City owner Thaksin Shiniwatra, but things had since stepped up a gear. </p> <p>The majority of the population of Thailand lives in vast, poverty-stricken, rural province called Issarn in the country’s northeast. High population density in the rice growing region has meant the educated, often middle and upper class Bangkokonians have regularly found themselves on the loosing side of the Bangkok-Issarn divide come election day. PAD has argued that vote buying is rampant in rural areas and poor farmers regularly sell their vote to the ruling party for a kilo bag of rice or a bottle of fish sauce. With successive governments collapsing or being forced from power amid claims of corruption and incompetence, they now feel that western-style democracy simply does not fit in Thailand. Divisions have been exacerbated by disputed PAD claims that Thaksin and his supporters plan to de-throne the revered King of Thailand HRH Bhumibol Adulyadej – a figure who is literally worshiped by the Thai people. </p> <p class="center"><img src="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/00797/bangkok-riots-4_797937i.jpg" alt="" title=""></p> <p>PAD wants to scrap the current one-man-one-vote system and replace it with weighted democracy and an appointed parliament dominated by bureaucrats and the military. While I was off barbequing myself on Ocheatueal beach in Cambodia the PAD had announced that after months of protests, it was time for a ‘final battle’ with Wongsawat. Demonstrations were intensified, more government buildings were taken over and swathes of the city were shut down. </p> <p>With the stakes rising the government responded by announcing a state of emergency which permitted police and soldiers to put civil liberties on hold and resort to military force in policing when deemed necessary. Road blocks were thrown up and scores of protesters were detained for mandatory 30-day stints without sentence. Riot police were called onto the streets as events turned violent, and a number of protesters were killed either by cops or by a sort of pro-Thaksin/Wongsawat militia that appeared to have bused in for the purpose. Several more were killed when militia members lobbed hand grenades into the middle of groups of protesting PAD members. A Thai friend of mine emailed me a link to a graphic YouTube clip of the aftermath of one such attack – it showed a Thai protester sitting on the ground looking at the two bloodied stumps where his legs used to be while a ring of people stood around staring at him. </p> <p>By the time PAD protesters took over Bangkok’s two airports last month, the situation was becoming desperate. Massive damage was being done to the country’s reputation as a holiday destination and many of the millions of Thais reliant on the tourism industry already hit by the global financial slowdown were feeling the pinch. There was a general consensus that matters could not be permitted to continue as they were and when the army failed to respond with force when the PAD effectively cut the country off from the rest of the world it was clear that they had won the day. The Thai court banned Wongsawat from politics and dissolved his party. The government was forced from power and the opposition Democrat Party’s English-born and Oxford educated leader took over. </p> <p><img src="http://www.thaiphotoblogs.com/media/apisit.jpg" alt="" title=""></p> <p>44-year-old Abhisit Vejjajiva is seen very much as coming from the upper echelons of what is a deeply stratified Thai society and is not particularly popular among either the rural poor or the city’s working class, although his plans to introduce free healthcare, a higher minimum wage and free education, textbooks and milk for nursery-school children should win many over. From the PAD point of view, his appointment will largely be welcomed in that he has built a reputation as being thoroughly against corruption and a figure unlikely to involve himself in anything untoward. However, his greatest asset to PAD supporters is that he has been in opposition to the various incarnations of Thaksin’s political parties from the outset. It is unlikely that he will implement PAD’s more radical reforms regarding the rolling back of democratic entitlements although with one drawn from their own now in power, many in PAD will be reassessing whether this is really still necessary. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2008/12/27/i-arrived-back-to-thailand-after-a-trip-to-cambodia-5284942/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://letterfromthailand.blog.co.uk/2008/12/27/i-arrived-back-to-thailand-after-a-trip-to-cambodia-5284942/#comments