Holidays in Thailand

 So, I've been invited on a holiday to Thailand with a lady I met on Tinder and with a further offer that she'll pay for half of my flight ticket; how could I say no..

My first holiday overseas was also an offer from the parents of a girlfriend; we could go anywhere, and we decided on a package called 'Razzle in Rio' at the time, a week in Brazil.

This time around, it was the first time that a 'girlfriend' invited my on a holiday. The timing could not have been better as I've been freezing in this Cape Town winter. I also still had a month of holiday time left for the year, and we left about 3 weeks later, on 4 September, for 3 weeks.  

I could understand about 30% of my new friend's English, so the Translator application was going to come in handy. It was the first holiday that I did zero planning, and left it all over to my lady.

From the day we arrived, she took control. She could speak the language of the locals, knew the customs, she had a local SIM card, and after we meet with her sons and grandson the very next day, our journey started. 

We had a rented car, her son was the driver - we were 5 altogether - and our first 'appointment' was with a famous monk at a temple ceremony on day 3. The intention was to get blessings of good luck, not only for winnings from the lotto tickets we bought, but she has a house that she decided to sell, and the Buddha's blessings would make the sale a reality.

After the temple experience, we headed further north, to her sister, to the house she was wanting to sell, and then to a city where she worked for many years. Here we met with old friends of hers, we visited waterfalls in a national park further north of this city of Kachanaburi, we each had a 2 hours massage from her friends while waiting for a train, we ate delicious food every day. 

There were 2 things I wanted to do on this unexpected break; the one was visiting a beautiful beach, and the other was to visit a rain forest. Importantly, I had no desire to visit popular tourist destinations.

We ended up in Koh Samui, arriving by plane from Bangkok. With no accommodation booked, we found a room on a beach at an establishment called NoName Bungalows. Here we'll sleep for 1 night and then look out for a place to stay around the best beach on this island at least. It was about 1 km away, and we booked the next day into a super 'hotel', also at a surprisingly reasonable cost. Here we stayed for a week until we headed to supposedly the most beautiful beach in Thailand, in a province called Krabi. 

Up to this part of the holiday, we had rain once, at the waterfalls we visited a few days earlier, but heading west, the rain started falling as we travelled by bus. It hardly stopped falling for the next week; big tropical raindrops that sometimes came down in torrents. 

Railay beach was outstanding; it took a long-boat to get there, but it was a tourist trap kind of place, and not a destination to spent time in while the rain came down like it did. My Thai friend knew better places around, and we headed to Ao Nang were we spend the last week of our stay together. We would eat at the local market every night, explored the beaches and night life with our rented scooter, and found other eating places for breakfast and lunch. I love eating and my friend had a similarly healthy appetite - we had duck, crab, prawns, fish, more fish, fried bananas in batter, an Australian steak which was way too expensive, mangos, mangos with sweet rice, omelet with rice for breakfast, everything Thai and hardly anything Western.

The saying goodbye was not going to be pleasant, and even now as I'm writing this 3 weeks since I'm back, tears are starting to well up in my eyes. 

My lady is living a working class life back in Thailand. She's a go-getter, she used to be a truck driver, and has been giving massages for more than 10 years now, having achieved certificates for special skills she's learned in this trade.

What is difficult for me to understand is the influence of the Buddha on the locals. It feels to me that the lottery business in Thailand won't exist without the Buddha's presence. The belief that the Buddha will make the sale of your house happen, rather than an estate agent. Just yesterday my lady travelled for a whole day to visit another Buddhist temple and to receive a blessing as the house is still not sold. 

My lady also collected gold in the form of a necklace and arm band from her savings over the years. Sadly, she had a burglary at her house while we were on holidays, and the gold got stolen. She would only wear the gold when visiting the temple. With all this superstition, I thought that I was possibly responsible for the bad luck..

We are still in contact, almost on a daily basis. She wants to come back to SA to start her own massage shop; she wants me to join her in Thailand and built a business using a food truck. And the goal of it all, to be comfortable when she retires one day.

Thailand is hot, humid, tropical, cheap compared to South Africa, the people are friendly, almost always smiling, but also nasty - it turns out - when you don't do business with them, the women all seem to be wanting 'foreigners' for a partner/husband, there seems to be little inhibitions when it comes to sex, and the women and girls, from a young age, seems to be just wanting to please, for love or for money.

I also got my own name as the W in Werner is just too difficult to pronounce by the Thai. So, greeting to you from Cape Town, feeling revitalized and motivate to take on the world as we head through the last 3 months of the year.

"Pong Ding"