Life in Phana

I just met a girl ...

I just met a girl …

A beautiful friendship? Just the pictures (taken this morning) and the captions will tell this romantic tale.

I hope you will click on this link to read my new post:

www.thaimonkeyforest.com

Most of my life in Phana just now is spent in the forest or being busy about some monkey business or other. So if you haven't done so already, please take a look over there.

 

Too busy to blog

This blog has not been updated for some time now. (It has, in fact, just yesterday, which shows how long it has taken me to get this one posted.) I’m not sure whether this is because I have been too busy (I HAVE been busy) or because I have lost some of my former enthusiasm for blogging. I suspect that it is a combination of the two and that the things I have been busy with have supplanted blogging at the forefront of my attention. That, and the fact that this blog is about ‘Life in Phana’ and inevitably my life here has become more routine and less of a novelty to me.

So what have I been busy doing? Well, back in April I had to leave the country to renew my visa. Usually I just go across the border to Laos at Chong Mek, and I’m back home a few hours after I left. But this time I couldn’t do that because there was not enough space in my passport for a Lao visa – it fills a whole page, and then there is the departure stamps from Thailand and Laos, and the new arrival stamp into Thailand. So I decided to go down to Singapore, which I had never visited before. The Air Asia flights to and from Ubon made good connections at Suvannaphumi Airport, so the travelling was all quite straightforward. Except that when we arrived at Singapore there was a fierce storm out of sight below the clouds so we circled round for more than an hour and then ran out of fuel and were diverted to Johor Bahru in Malaysia. There we had to wait while a Singapore Airlines plane on the same errand was refueled ahead of us.

We stayed four nights in Singapore, at the Rider’s Lodge, a friendly and pleasantly calm place to stay away from the city centre. It is set in a nice garden and is part of something called Turf City, which was probably once a race course and is now home to lots of activities like horse-riding, gymnastics and dog-training, all housed in the old stable blocks.

 

One of the oddities of the Rider’s Lodge is that it is Indian-owned and largely Indian staffed, but one of the selling-points in its brochure is that you can “re-live the colonial experience” while staying there. That seems very generous, but hopefully it does not give mem sahibs the right to be beastly to the staff!

We ate in a nearby Indian restaurant on two nights, a French restaurant one night, and once next to the Singapore River at Siem Reap II, which is part of the Indo-Chine restaurant outside the Asian Cultural Centre. One lunch-time we had some excellent tapas. What we didn’t have is Singapore noodles, my standby when eating Chinese food in England.

Singapore has the reputation of being extremely well-ordered, but this photo I took suggests that not all is as it perhaps should be:

 

I take it this is not one of them trying to get away.

For a big, modern city, Singapore has plenty of open spaces and we spent some time at Bukit Timah where there are walking trails through the forested hillside

 

and on another day we visited the McRitchie Reservoir Park:

At both places there are long-tailed macaques, which of course was why we went there. Both places were recommended by Dr Michael Gumert, an associate professor at Nanyang University and an expert on long-tailed macaques. We were lucky enough to spend a very pleasant evening with him over a meal at Picotin, the French bistro in Turf City. The situation regarding these monkeys is very different from here in Phana. The monkeys, though, are much the same:

Back in Phana, time may stand still, but people are always on the move. So my next post, I think, will be about some of the recent comings and goings.

Keeping the ancestors informed

It was important to keep the ancestors informed before we ‘interfered’ with their house, and we duly did that in a small ceremony in the enclosed ground-floor area of the old house built by Ta Rin and Yai Hom. We told them that work was going to be done in the house, that this would improve its condition and that we were doing this out of respect for them and in their memory.

When the major work had been done, we held another ceremony. This was attended by a few more people and this time I had my camera with me. I remember well going through the same ceremony when our house was nearing completion back in the mid-nineties. One of the most memorable features was that an old man prevented us from entering until lots of questions had been asked and entered, and he had decided that we meant well, had sufficient respect for the ancestors who were the true owners of the property, and that we intended to use it wisely and maintain it properly. The old man guarding the property on this occasion was Khun Ta Peng, the husband of Pensri’s father’s half-sister; answering on my behalf (although it was me who was wearing the traditional ‘regalia’ of a hat and carrying a bag containing a hammer and a nail – with which I was going to ‘maintain’ the house) was Khun Ta Gert, father of the mayor of tetsaban Phana.

This was the condition of the house at the time:

Here we are, gathered outside the house:

It was a good opportunity for old friends and relations to get together:

Khun Ta Peng didn’t want to let us in!

But eventually he was persuaded and he helped Khun Ta Gert and me to attach flowers, incense and candles to the foot of the stairs.

Khun Ta Gert prepares to demonstrate MY willingness to maintain the house by hammering in a nail above the photo of Ta Rin and Yai Homhual, Pensri’s parents.

Then Pensri’s adopted brother, Tuan, did the honours at this little temporary shrine in what used to be Ta Rin and Yai Homhual’s bedroom.

And I did, too.

Afterwards, we sat around for a while in the big, sitting area outside the bedrooms. We chatted, but also there was an important presentation. Pensri is going to use the ground floor as a community library or study centre, and a neighbour, Khun Yai Somwang had offered to donate an old ‘accordion’ book which had belonged to her grandfather, the village herbal doctor born about 100 years ago. Here she is in the blue jacket, presenting the book to Pensri.

And here is a close-up of two pages of the book.

Some of the book was written in gold on black, some of it black on white.

Everybody had a good look at the book, which was in quite a fragile state in parts.

But the interest was obvious:

Now we have to decide on the best way to display the book, keeping it safe and intact, but allowing people to indulge their interest in what is certainly an item of historic importance. Pensri has already decided that Khun Yai Somwang’s donation will feature in the logo of the study centre.

Year of the Rabbit, that was

I was born in the year of the rabbit and that year comes round every twelve years. For me, it has come round six times so far. Traditionally, the sixth cycle (and the seventh) are celebrated more than an annual birthday here in Thailand. It is considered quite an achievement, I suppose, to see your sixth cycle. I certainly feel a sense of achievement, partly perhaps because I can still remember thinking that 30 years old was OLD AGE, and I could not imagine living that long.

My actual birthday was back in October, but we decided that the best time to celebrate it would be close to Christmas. We ended up with Christmas Eve for several reasons, the main one being that the family was asembling in Bangkok the previous weekend for the wedding of Liew and Ashley. By family 'assembling', I mean that our children Dominic and Darunee, with Jay and Adam and our five grandchildren would all be in Thailand for the wedding and then staying on for some holiday time. Liew and Ashley would be here from England too of course. Our Thai family (Pensri's sisters and their children and grandchildren and her cousins and their children and grandchildren) were also able to come up to Phana, as most of them do each year for a tam boun for the ancestors.

Most people arrived in Phana on the 23rd, Dom and Darunee's lot with us in the house, everyone else booked into Phana Garden Resort. Food was organised, monks invited, a stage put up in the garden, and a marquee, plastic tables and chairs stacked up ready for use. In the morning we were going to feed nine monks (one forgot to come!) and then have a baci su kwan ceremony with one of Pensri's second (?) cousins the spirit-caller. The neice of Mom, the woman who spent several months with us in England in 2011, had offered to dance the benediction dance, and three other young women were going to perform another dance for the baci.

Hundreds of photos were taken, none of them by me on this occasion. It is difficult to make a selection,but here goes.

Presents, this one from my senior brother and sister-in-law:

And more presents:

Beautiful dancers -- worth waiting 72 years for this picture, I think.

Our two 'children', Darunee and Dominic, and three of their children, Polly, Esme and Kim:

The monks beginning their chanting; the senior monk here kindly told me I could sit cross-legged. He could see that I was likely to topple over otherwise!

Most of the guests sit outside on these occasions:

The woman on the right is well past her seventh cycle. She must have attended hundreds of ceremonies like this one. She used to give me massages when I first came to Phana, and I thought she was really old then. Really old, but her thumbs were amazingly strong, and she gave me some of the most effective massage I've had. It was good to see her again because she doesn't get out and about much any more.

And then when the monks were eating, the su kwan ceremony began:

And then the sacred threads were tied around wrists while blessings were muttered. It is usual to wish the receiver good health and a long life but people seemed to enjoy trying to outdo each other by wishing me 100, 300, 600, 1200 years of life! I'm not sure I wish any of those for myself, but who knows.

Then we all had lunch and everyone except the families from Bangkok, Abu Dhabi and England disappeared rapidly, as is the custom. But in the evening we had an entertainment arranged and I'll post some pictures of that very soon.

Tripbase and My 7 Links

I have recently found myself nominated to take part in the 7 Links project hosted by travel company Tripbase. The project aims to link the world of bloggers via a chain of posts in which blog authors list their chosen links from seven different category questions.

Here’s how Tripbase explain the goal for their project:

To unite bloggers (from all sectors) in a joint endeavor to share lessons learned and create a bank of long but not forgotten blog posts that deserve to see the light of day again.

Here are the My 7 Links Rules

Life in Phana was nominated by Martyn of  Beyond the Mango Juice. I'd like to thank him for that, and for all the pleasure I have had from reading his very personal and always humorous take on his life in wonderful Wi's village in Isan, some way north of Phana. The only problem with this is that it means I can't nominate him, even though BtMJ is one of my favourite blogs (as were several of the others he nominated).

The difficult part is providing 7 links to posts of my own. But here goes.

The most beautiful, I think, is this one about the LOTUS. I like it because I like the lotus so much, and food for the spirit and for the stomach sums up most of what Thailand has come to mean to me over the more than 40 years I have been associated with the country.

The most popular I am not so sure about, because I don't have much real information to go by, but without counting, I can see that VISITOR WEEK is itself visited pretty often. It does show that life in a small village can be surprisingly full, something that I hope my blog manages to get across.

The most controversial post was easy to select. Although I am aware that there is no earthy paradise,  I generally try to accentuate the positive aspects of my life in Phana. There are several reasons for this . One is that I know there are several Thai friends in Phana who read my blog regularly, and perhaps a few more that I am not aware of. Another is that if any negativity  does creep into my thinking I don't wish to inflict it on other people. I certainly despise and recoil from much of what I used to read on forums in Thailand. But the post I have selected turned out not to be so very controversial after all, and it led to some very positive action to put the matter right. Readers in Thailand will have no problem in recognizing that this is a problem that it not unique to Phana. You can find the post HERE.

The most helpful post may not be helpful to my readers but I believe it is already proving helpful for Phana. It was the last (for now) of a series that focuses on the village's large population of long-tailed macaque monkeys.

I was surprised by the success of a post about the KATHIN ceremony , which told of one that took place in Devon, England, and the other in Phana, Thailand. I think this post draws on the double life I lead in the two places, and also points to one of the things that bridge the two.

Tripbase also ask for a link to a post that didn't get the attention it deserved. I am completely in two minds about this one. One part of me is still very pleasantly surprised that my posts get any attention at all. I definitely began blogging for my own sake; that thing about writing in order to clarify your own ideas and to make sense of your life. On the other hand, I have come to think some of my posts are really not bad, so when I am in that mood I think none of them get the attention they deserve. I think I was a bit disappointed by THIS ONE because its subject is a book that I like very much and want others to enjoy it too. The post also includes a few pictures that I thought were 'very Thai' and I intended to run a little series of very Thai photos, but didn't do so because the post generated so little interest. So come on! Give me some encouragement, won't you.

And finally, the post that I am most proud of. This one is about another book. The book is about the 300 year history of Phana which was written by my wife Pensri. So it is not so much the post I am proud of, but the author, the book, and Phana.

Now for my 5 blog recommendations. Several of the blogs that I visit the most have already been nominated but there are still plenty of good ones out there that have not.

First up is BOONIE's THAILAND PHOTOS which like me you will love if you like someone playing with words as well as posting some mostly unusual photos -- even if Mrs S did take most of them for him.

 

Then there is VILLAGE FARANG who lives in a house, in a field, in a valley, with a view, in the north of Thailand. He is the best blog writer I have come across, a great style, he writes lyrically of biking through the northern fields and hills, and although I don't generally much like reading opinionated stuff, when he does express an opinion it is clearly thought-out and expressed in a calm, rational, non-personal way. The photos are to be drooled over, too, especially, I imagine, if you are stuck in a city somewhere.

 

Family life in rural Isan, albeit with frequent side trips to the city, to Laos, and also the land of Oz, is documented with some excellent photos by Memock of LIFE IN RURAL THAILAND. Check it out.

 

A young blogger you should definitely check out for the variety of his subject matter and opinions (again, with some great photos) is THE THAI PIRATE. A post I have particularly liked recently was 5 things I didn't like about Thailand but now can't live without. Nice to see that people can change their minds and don't just get stuck in a (sometimes) negative groove.

 

My last choice may be a bit cheeky, but I think that isan traveller should be visited more often. To be fair, I think he should post more often, too.

Songkran in Samui

Songkran is a festival that I don't often see. Most years we return to the UK round about the beginning of April. But this year we are still here and I went down to Koh Samui to spend a few days with our son and his family who were back in Thailand for the first time in several years. Dominic's wife is from Samui but although I had met many of her family I had never been to their home. So it was a good opportunity to put that right and I must say that everyone was very welcoming and made me wonder why I had not been before. Part of the reason was that I had thought Samui was another Pattaya but I now know better. I loved the place, and I loved the close family feeling we got as we moved around from house to house visiting Jay's mother, her brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles. Unfortunately I also had a slight accident so some of her cousins we met when I was at the Samui Hospital where they are nurses.

Because of my accident, I didn't go out on the streets to celebrate Songkran but stayed in the resort recuperating a bit while they went out with their water guns. But first we celebrated in the traditional way. This Buddha image had been set up in the reception area, along with a bowl of scented water. I felt that as well as for the new year, I was in need of a bit more blessing than usual to balance out my accident, so finding this seemed quite auspicious.

 

 To start with, we each blessed the Buddha image by pouring water over it very gently.

Ben ...

Kim ...

Jay ...

... and Dom:

And then it was my turn to receive blessings. From Jay ...

 ... Ben ...

... and Kim:

And finally Ben and Kim blessed their parents:

It was a very nice preliminary to the wilder celebrations out on the streets.

Community Action Avoided

I am all in favour of positive, practical community action and get involved in a lot of things here in Phana. In return I get recognition that makes me feel less of an outsider. But the annual communal effort right behind our house is something that I always avoid. 

There is a klong (คลอง) or canal running there from the roadside back towards the fields. It's called a klong but it is really a long, narrow, curving pond since it doesn't go anywhere or connect with any other stretch of water. Although it is right behind our house there is a strip of land belonging to our neighbour that comes betweeen the back of our house and the bank of the klong, so we don't have any waterfront. 

There is a notice which tells people not to dump rubbish in there and another which says they should not take fish from it. People out the back do take water from it in the dry season to water vegetables they grow in their nearby fields.

 

It looks nice right now but that is not the way it always looks. In the rainy season the water is dark and murky, home to lots of frogs which are in turn preyed on by all sorts of snakes. The snakes come from the coconut orchard swamp across the road you can just make out in the top of the picture. The frogs let the snakes know where they are by setting up a kind of come-and-get-me serenade each evening. In the dry season the surface is quickly covered in a thick growth of weeds and it is this which has to be dealt with by the good people of Moo 1 before the next rainy season comes around. They start early in the morning, accompanied by loud music, shouting, teasing, laughter, and a good deal of flirting if you ask me. They stop quite early, too, for lunch and alcoholic refreshment of the strong, illicit variety. But in fairness, this is now not just the dry season but the HOT dry season.

Last year I went out the back and took some photos of them at work. That was a bit cheeky, perhaps, and unsurprisingly they invited me to join them in the task. Later they invited me to join them for lunch and refreshments. They seemed to take my refusal in good spirits and I hope that I was able to convey to them my admiration for the work they were doing. But I really didn't want to get as down and dirty as this man was; I don't trust murky waters and what might lurk in them.

 

This year I was conveniently litter-picking in Don Chao Poo, but I took this next picture (and the one at the top of this post) a few days later when it became clear that they were not going to complete the job. I hope they are not waiting for me to go out and do my share.

 

 

Bali ... and Kalasin

I have taken two trips away from Phana recently. The first was to Bali, going by Air Asia from Bangkok. We stayed at a place called Sekuta Condo Suites, which was about a 15 minute walk from the beach.

 

I have just posted Holiday in Bali HERE . You will find some good food there.

The second trip was to Kalsin. We drove there and back in a circle, staying two nights in the provincial city and exploring the province from there. I have posted about Kalasin HERE .

 

Visiting the neighbours

This seems like a good time to be blogging about somewhere other than Thailand. So now for something completely different.

My trip to Hong Kong started with a delayed Air Asia flight from Ubon. We were only given three pieces of information by the Air Asia staff at Ubon airport: firstly, that the flight was delayed, secondly, that they did not know when the plane would arrive in Ubon to take us to Bangkok, and thirdly, that the delay was caused in Malaysia. I had heard these last two excuses at least twice before when I had been there to meet relatives off a flight from Bangkok. Always, the fault lay in Malaysia. This was possibly true, because the plane which flies from Bangkok to Ubon has previously come from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok although these are two separate flights and if you booked through from KL to Ubon you would have to collect your baggage before checking it in again so it can be loaded onto the same plane. Strangely, the plane I was due to take turned up while counter staff were still telling us they didn't know when it would arrive.

In other respects, these Air Asia counter staff were very helpful to me because it soon became apparent that I would miss my connecting flight on Emirates to Hong Kong. So they got their staff in Bangkok to alert Emirates that I would miss my flight and Emirates sent back a message saying they would put me on stand-by for the following day. When I got to Bangkok  I thought Air Asia would pay for my overnight stay, but I was told that they would have if the flight had been just another four minutes late. Naturally, I concluded that their timing was better than at first it seemed.

This was a couple of years ago now, but who said this was a topical news blog. Air Asia seem to have become more reliable in the meantime.

Blaming Malaysia for the lateness of a flight to Ubon reminded me of a train journey I once took from Exeter, in south-west England, to Glasgow. Glasgow, by the way, is in a part of the United Kingdom called Scotland. For most of the journey announcements on the train were made in a voice that was clearly marked Made in England. But somewhere along the line, another voice took over, so when the announcement that the train "is now crossing the border into Scotland" was made, it was in a strong Scots accent. Announcements such as "The next station stop will be Birmingham New Street" were greeted with bored indifference by the passengers, but when we were told that we were entering Scotland the announcement was greeted by universal cheers, only a few of them ironic.

More was to come. Just before the train pulled into Glasgow Central the same Scots voice apologised for the lateness of the service but pointed out that "this was due to a delay caused in England." This time, not everyone cheered, but those that did made a lot of noise. A few of us jeered, but in a rather self-conscious, sheepish, very English way. Or maybe we were just afraid of reprisals.

And so back to Hong Kong. These were my Pic of the Day for the week 17 May - 23 May.

The first shot was taken at Wong Tai Sin, a Taoist temple that is very popular with Thai tourists visiting Hong Kong. There were several groups of Thais there when I visited.

The second was taken in a Mahayana Buddhist temple. From a Thai perspective, the two nuns (if that is what they are) mark a significant difference from a Thai Theravadan temple. I notice that they are wearing shoes, and it doesn't look as if they shave their heads once a month.

The flower shop was somewhere in Kowloon, and the floating fish market was at Sai Kung, where there are also loads of restaurants all serving really fresh sea-food. It was a grey, misty and rainy day when I visited as you can see from the sixth picture.

The last shot tells you what I was really there for: the HK 7s. And though it has appeared in one of my previous blogs, there is a bonus shot of my two grandsons, Kim and Ben, who had played for Discovery Bay Pirates in the mini rugby on the Friday morning of a great weekend of rugby.

Click on the photos to enlarge them. And please preview my Pic of the Day for this coming week by going to thetab at the top of this page.

         

       

 
 
 
  
   
 

Isan returns to Bangkok

Years ago when men living in the furthest eastern parts of Isan planned to travel west, they would say they were "going Thai". This was when the country was still known as Siam, so what they meanjt was that they were going to where the Thai lived. Not many people did make that journey iin the days of Siam, and the few only made the trip infrequently. Pensri's grandfather used the expression when he was going to drive his buffalo down to the market in Korat.

The completion of the railway, which reached Ubon in 1926, made the journey a lot easier, but you wouldn't have thought so if you wanted to travel this weekend. We tried several weeks ago to book to travel from Ubon to Bangkok on Saturday night, 2 January, but everything bookable was already booked. The same was true ofr all the flights from Ubon.

Luckily, there are four buses which come through Phana from Khong Chiam on the Mekong River, headed for Bangkok via Yasothon, Suwannaphum, Surin and Korat. These were heavily booked in advance too but extra buses were being put on so we were able to get one leaving Phana at 5.50 p.m. and aiming to arrive at Morchit at 4.30 a.m.

Phana bus station, usually almost deserted, was swarming with people, most of them young, many of them clearly students. Some young women were kissing goodbye to their small children before heading back to whatever it is they do. Luckily for us and the bus company, the majority of people, and almost all the rowdy ones, were only there to see others off.

All went well and on schedule until I saw a road sign saying Nakorn Ratchasima (Korat) 97 kms. I reckoned that should take about 75 minutes. It took two and a half hours, crawling along in traffic often 4 vehicles wide on a two-lane road. But everyone was driving sensibly, nobody that I saw getting frustrated and doing anything reckless. And I didn't see any sign of a single accident. There were some somewhere I am sure, but my observations over the New Year period suggested that most of those would be motorbike riders with no rear lights, no road sense, no helmets, and no awareness of the danger bigger vehicles pose. And presumably with an inflated idea of their own invulnerablity.

So, it looked for a few hours as if everyone in Isan was on the road, many of them huddled up beneath blankets in the back of pick-up trucks. It also looked as if we might have difficulty getting a taxi from morchit to Bangkapi because so many taxis, driven by their Isan owners I guess, were also heading back to Bangkok.

Well, we got there soon after 5.30 a.m. which is still a good time for clear roads on a Sunday morning, and there were still some taxis around. Now, after a day spent mostly asleep, we're to meet our daughter and son-in-law from England and their three little girls, and go with them for a few days at Hua Hin and then an bit further south. So it's good-bye to Phana for a while although I have some PIC OF THE DAY minblogs scheduled, and although the site has not been working well, you should find something there as well as a couple of posts on this site. We'll see what the beach brings. What the tide washes up, you could say.