Life in Phana

Christmas in Lao PDR

However much I enjoy life in Phana, it is good to get away sometimes and for me Lao PDR is the best place to get away  to. This year I had to leave Thailand at the end of my allotted 90 days by 22 December so we decided to stay away over the Christmas period. There is only so much of piped jingle bells that anyone can take.

I prefer round trips if at all possible and so this time we decided to drive up to Thakek and then do the 'Khammouane loop' that so many tourists on motorbikes are encouraged by the guidebooks to experience. We did see a couple on the route but there were also several people we came across who were doing it by public transport -- more gruelling, possibly, but almost certainly safer.

Referring to guidebooks again, I read this loop described as possibly the highlight of a trip to Laos. Without doubt the trip is full of highlights. The scenery is pretty much one continuous highlight, and we also were lucky enough to stay at two resort / guest houses that were particularly welcoming.

The first was on our first day out of Thakek. We headed for a small town called Mahaxai which my guiddebook described as a 'delightful little town' with several guesthouses. I think they were thinking of somewhere else, or perhaps some tourists had written in recommending it as a joke! Mahaxai can never have been delightful and right now it is being 'redeveloped', meaning that it is nothing more or less than a red-dust dust bowl. So we pushed on ... and fortunately saw this sign just a couple of kms further along the road (route 12):

  

The restaurant and our bungalow:

  

Other bungalows and the view of the resort from outside:

  

We stayed two nights here. The resort is owned by a friendly English-speaking, Russian-trained engineer at the Nam Theun 2 power station who said he had built much of the resort himself and put in the water and electricity supply.

We drove north along route 1e, a laterite road that until very recently was full of potholes but has now been upgraded and is very easy and pleasant to drive along. It is metalled as far as the Nam Theun 2 Power Station seen here:

  

Some people find the huge flooded area caused by the Nam Theun dam depressing and the dead trees spooky. Of course, villages were destroyed by the flooding and the villagers re-located but their new villages offer them better facilities in terms of schools, electricity, easier access to medical treatment and so on. At a police checkpoint just across the dam, the policeman asked us if we could take an old man home who had been up to the dam for some free medical treatment, and we learnt a lot from him in the 30 minutes or so he rode with us.

  

There is a small stretch of about 5 kms where road works are continuing and we had to wait a short while before we could get past:

  

The road was so much better than we had expected that we pushed on past windy and dusty Lak Sao the last town on route 8 towards the Vietnam border. We turned west and drove on to Kham Khoun where we found a wonderful resort / guest house with the help of our guide book, which proved completely reliable in this instance. We stayed here, at the Sainamhai Resort, this one owned and designed by an English-speaking Cuban-trained architect who is currently running the Nam Heun Power Station and preparing for his retirement in a few years time.

  

  

 

After 3 nights at Sainamhai Resort we returned to Thakek. We had taken several sightseeing detours on our way round the loop and I will write about them and show more photos in my next post – coming soon.

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.

Visit Phana

VISIT PHANA was the theme of the community-based tourism that was on the agenda of the Amnat Charoen Provincial authorities earlier this year. Nothing much seems to have come of it so far, at least as far as the Provincial initiative goes. That may in part be due to the change in government. Not because a change in government necessarily results in the abandonment of all previous policies, but because budget allocations inevitably have to be looked at again in order to reassess priorities.

But in Phana itself some progress was made towards planning for community-based tourism. Perhaps it has taken a new direction, or at least a somehwat unexpected one, in that Don Chao Poo and the resident monkeys have become the focus; and the focus has been narrowed down further to the educational possibilities that they offer.

Another step towards community-based tourism in Phana has been the production of several leaflets, in English initially, but to be translated into Thai and possibly into Japanese.

Here is the content of the first leaflet.

VISIT PHANA 

THE TOWN OF FIELDS IN THE FOREST

Visit Phana and uncover the secrets of this little-known but historic and surprising town in the heart of Isan.

Phana just may be the best place you have never heard of!

Phana is famous for Phra Lao Thepnimit, the beautiful image in a 300-year-old temple: come and pay your respects.

 

Phana is famous, too, for the large tribe of long-tailed macaque monkeys in Don Chao Poo forest – come and feed them, or just sit and watch them.

 

But visit Phana and you can discover much more

Visit during one of the festivals – there is one every month, but the most lively is the Wat Phra Lao festival in February. Join the festivities at the temple. Take part in the bicycle rally around the town …

Come for the rocket festival in May. You can see the young women of Phana competing in traditional dancing as well as watch the firing of huge rockets.

Or Boun Pravet in March when the story of Buddha’s penultimate life is paraded on a banner and read in 13 chapters in a temple.

Or celebrate Loy Kratong at the big pond in Don Kwan village in November.

Visit on market days – Wednesday and Saturday mornings – but you must be up early as most of the action is between 6.30 and 8.00 a.m. The market meets again on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from about 4 – 6 p.m.

Come to Phana and eat gai yaang with som tam and sticky rice, or duck noodle soup, Korean BBQ perhaps.

Or a local speciality: Jao Hawn.

 

Visit the Traditional Medicine Centre for a massage or a sauna – or spoil yourself and have both!

Ask to see how traditional herbal  medicines are produced — and then buy some to ensure your health and comfort.

 

Hire a bicycle to visit the nearby villages. Watch weavers at work at their looms or dying thread; take a tuk-tuk to Ban Soi in Tambon  Chan Lan and see the complete process of silk production from mulberry leaf and silkworm raising to the finished cloth.

Take a picnic to Fai Rong Hin (the Model Agricultural Centre) in Tambon Phra Lao. Enjoy the quiet serenity and take a look at the livestock and find out how farmers are advised to adopt a more self-sufficient and sustainable style of farming.

 

Don’t forget to take a look at those fields in the forest.

 

 

Phana Garden Resort is waiting to welcome you.

Get to Phana by bus from Amnat Charoen or Ubon Ratchathani. Or take the a/c coach service from Bangkok to Khong Jiam.

But don't forget your destination:

Phana

Come on!

Surprise yourself

with an unforgettable visit.

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.

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 .

 

Community-Based Tourism

I am not sure I fully understand what the Thai Tourism Authority understands by Community-Based Tourism. But Amnat Charoen is one of two provinces (the other is in the south of Thailand) that is going to run a CBT pilot project. I need to understand what is meant because I have been co-opted onto the Provincial committee that is to draw up plans for the different amphur in the province. My job is to 'collect data'. I wasn't at the original committee meeting (though Pensri is one of the Phana representatives and she was there) so I can interpret data collection pretty much as I please, I think.

Tourists already come to Phana, almost all of them Thais coming from other parts of the country. They  visit Wat Phra Lao and sometimes Don Chao Poo Forest Park. On average, they spend no more than 30 minutes in Phana before getting back into their big tour bus or private car and heading off to the next stop on their itinerary.

These tourists are in no way based in our community. They donate to the wat, no doubt, and those going to Don Chao Poo purchase some food (not necessarily appropriate food) for the monkeys there. But Phana gains little or nothing from their visit

What I have done so far is produced  a document outlining what Amphur Phana has to offer to tourists so that they might spend more time here and provide some income-generating opportunities for Phana people.

SITES TOURISTS COULD VISIT IN AMPHUR PHANA

• Wat Phra Lao -- 300-year-old temple and famous Buddha image
• Wat Ban I-Keng -- attractive wat in a nearby village 
• Wat Ban Sao-Ree --village wat with school for novices 12 - 18 years old
• Wat Don Kwan --new(ish) wat in Tambon Phana; largest black Buddha image in Isan; 2nd tallest Phra That under construction
• Don Chao Poo Forest Park -- Buddha images, Chao Poo shrine, monkeys
• Weaving groups: Ban Phana, Ban Pathum Kaew; Ban Soi (silk production from mulberry leaves to cloth)
• Traditional Medicine Centre: Traditional Massage (treatment and training); herbal medicine production and sales
•  Model Agricultural Centre, at Fai Rong Hin, Phra Lao Municipality
•  School visit(s)
•  Noodle-shops and restaurants

ACCOMMODATION: at Phana Garden Resort

INCOME-GENERATING OPPORTUNITIES: Phana Garden Resort, Noodle-shops and Restaurants, Taxi and bus services, Hire of bicycles, Purchase of woven products, Purchase of herbal medicines, Purchase of traditional massage services, Invitations to donate for site visits:

REQUIREMENTS BEFORE IMPLEMENTATION:

• “Come to Phana” brochure produced, in Thai and in English

• “Come to Phana” brochure to be made available at TAT offices in Amnat Charoen, Ubon Ratchathani, Yassothon, Si Sa Ket, Bangkok, etc. And on TAT web-site.

• Production of bi-lingual informational guide leaflets to individual sites; to be made available at the sites, and at Phana Garden Resort, Amphur Offices, Tetsaban offices and OPT offices

• Production of map of Phana district showing facilities, routes and distances; to be made available as guide leaflets above

• English-language menus compiled and made available in noodle-shops and restaurants

• Purchase of bicycles for hire; to be made available at a central location where they are easily available and can be checked for repair, etc. (eg Tetsaban Phana IT Centre at the Old Market)

I suspect that 'Home-Stay' might be part of the TAT definition of CBT, but to me there seems little point in  making all the arrangements that would entail until it becomes clear that there is demand for it from tourists. It would be different if there were not already somewhere to stay. But a visit I recently made to a 'Cultural Village' in Kalasin Province suggests that what might be envisaged is putting on some sort of  cultural performance for large groups of tourists who would be put up in village homes. But this means inspecting and certifying the homes, and preparing to entertain groups which might never materialise. That seems to me a recipe for disillusionment and cynicism. To be fair, at the village in Kalasin it did seem to be working to a certain extent, but that is down to the village being entirely populated by an ethnic group that is sufficiently 'different' to create interest, and whose culture is sufficiently well-maintained that there is likely to be little about it that is specially put on for tourists. I am not sure that Amphur Phana is sufficiently different in that respect, but it does have enough to interest someone for a stay of, say, two days. We shall see what, if anything, comes of this initiative.

 

(No photos with this post, but I expect to be posting about the various sites as I go about 'collecting data'.)

Take a look at my new blog

 
I have recently launched a new blog called isantraveller which over time will, I hope, build up a useful and comprehensive guide to the north-east region of Thailand known as Isan.

isantraveller

Travels in North-East Thailand and further afield

  

Please take a look at the first two posts which are live now. I plan to post twice a week, mid-week and on Sundays, so the site should grow fairly rapidly. As always, comments and ideas for posts will be much appreciated. So too would guest bloggers and/or additional or even contradictory information.

www.isantraveller.com

It's all new in Phana

When you go home you expect to find things as they were when you left. I remember that as a small (and presumably insecure) boy I would sometimes dream of coming home from school to find the house and my family had all disappeared. So when we leave England each winter we hope that everything in Phana will be as idyllic as it was when we left six months earlier. But always we also find ourselves expecting some changes and hoping that they will not diminish our love of living here. The changes that have taken place in the last few years have all turned out to be positive ones, though thinking about them in advance did not always suggest they would be. What that says is probably that the decision-makers in Phana have a much clearer and more positive vision of development than I have.

A good example of this is the new market, which is situated less than half a km from our house. Between us and the market there is one house, two side roads, a bridge over a small steam, and you are there. I had thought it unnecessary, a nuisnace to me personally, and of no great benefit to anyone. A white elephant in English terms, if not in Thai. I was wrong on all counts. So you can expect a post dedicated to the new market before long.

A change I had known about was the arrival of the two new volunteers from Project Trust and we were looking forward to meeting them but when we got here they were on holiday (the schools they teach in were closed) and we only met them when the Desk Officer for Thailand arrived with his asistant for the annual monitoring visit. This involved us accompanying them and the tetsaban representatives to all three schools for meetings with directors and teachers. The volunteers, Billie andRosie, arrived in Phana at the end of August and when I reported that here (I was in UK then) a commenter suggested that they be inteviewed for this blog. I hope they will agree to that. They certainly seem to be first-class volunteers, keeping up the tradition which is now firmly established in Phana.

On our first day back our friend and neighbour Add (deputy mayor of Tetsaban Phana) came round to co-opt Pensri onto a small delegation going to Amnat Charoen the next day to discuss a pilot project on Community-Based Tourism being set up by TAT in two provinces, Amnat Charoen (in the north-east, inland, rural, little visted by tourists, on the Lao border) and Surat Thani, (in the south, on the coast, including Koh Samui, already a major tourist destination). Pensri duly attended the meeting, and now I too have been co-opted onto the provincial committee, adding a 'foreign' perspective and a little expertise in the English language and experience in producing brochures, etc. The next meeting is sometime next week (I think, this is Thailand, so it may not be), and here in Phana we are very excited by the idea and have already formulated some plans. I will be keeping readers up to date on this in this blog -- and even inviting some of you to visit as guinea-pigs!

Less exciting was finding that our water-storage tank which collects roof run-off and provides us with drinking water was empty. Our 'helper' had not made the necessary adjustments to the pipe after allowing a few weeks of rain to clear the gutters. So off we went to the small village of Ban Nong Ka, where water is pumped from a deep well in the wat, treated, bottled and delivered to customers all over Amphur Phana. The facility was very impressive and I will feature it in a later post.

The wat where the well is located is one which I had never visited before and it turned out to be rather unusual. It is a typical small-village wat, no grand buildings, no ubosot (ordination hall), very simple kutis for the few monks who stay there, an old wooden preaching hall with very little decoration, and lots of trees.

But outside the wat was this sign:

 

It seems that the senior monk here is a computer wizard! Possibly more of this another time.

Across the road is a small forest, and here is the Phu Ta, the guardian 'grandfather' of the place (a little hand-shake or out of focus, sorry):

 

And inside the forest, something was going on! More of that, too, another time.

Perhaps the strangest thing we find when we return each year to this quiet, unknown little back-water that is Phana, is how much is going on and how much there is for us to do and to get involved in. I always think there will be nothing of the sort, that I have seen and done everything there is to do here, but that is far from the reality. It's in England, really, where we live an uneventful life. I am not complaining: we still need both kinds of life and still enjoy living in both places. But it is definitely in Phana that we are much more involved in social and community activities. That doesn't seem to change, and we are glad of it.
 

 

 

 

 

Thai Festivals in England

Since I was last here in England, a new oriental food store has opened in Exeter. It is run by a friendly and delightful Malaysian-Chinese woman. Exeter University (like every other UK university, I guess) has a high number of Chinese students and they seem to provide most of her customers. But Thais and English people also patronise the shop, and Thai foodstuff is well represented on the shelves and in the refrigerators. Some of the part-time shop assistants are Thai, too.

One of the things I picked up last time I was in there was a free newspaper called Amthaipaper which claims to be the first Thai newspaper in the UK. It comes out monthly and July's issue was the 31st. so it has been around for quite a time without me coming across it. A full-page ad for Chang beer included this:

The distinguished tasting panel of "The Beverage Tasting Institute" described Chang as ...

"Bright golden colour. Honeyed raisin toast aromas with a hint of lychee follow through on a crisp, smooth entry to a dryish medium body with a hint of apple, nut, and a solid roasted grain character. Finishes with a crisp, balanced earthy hop and pizza dough fade. A very nice food beer."

Nice to see that pretentiousness is alive and well. Even nicer to know that if you are accused of drinking too much Chang Beer you can point out that it is mostly a food, with lots of good stuff like honey, fruit, nuts and just a bit of carbohydrate in the pizza dough.

Possibly more useful are two ads that claim to save you money. Flightzone.UKclaims to have the "CHEAPEST AIRFARES GUARANTEED", quoting a special offer of Bangkok for £335.

Calls to Thailand can be made for 1p per minute after you buy £5 credit from auracall. Other countries costing 1p a minute include China, Singapore, USA and Canada.  

A Thai Summer Fair in Bournemouth was advertised but it took place on 1st August so I missed that but Amthai itself is running a 'THAI FAMILY FUN DAY' at Wimbledon Park (near the Thai Temple) on Sunday 29th August from 11 am to 7pm. Amongst the attractions are

• Thai Blue Music (sic)
• Thai Massage
• Thai Boxing
• Thai Cultural Performances
• Thai Products
• And of course ... Thai Food

Oh, and one more thing. There is "Free Tasting" of Chang Beer and Mekhong, too.

See you there?

Thai people abroad (1)

Many Thais go abroad, to work, to study, and increasingly as tourists. I have known people going abroad for each of these reasons, and what they all seem to have in common is an urge to see, and preferably to touch, snow. I suppose that as the world becomes increasingly the same in many (superficial, perhaps) respects, snow is the one thing that is most clearly NOT Thai.

My family, all of them more or less Thai except for me and our son-in-law, are no exceptions to this. This year we all spent a few weeks in Spain and France, and shared a week in the Pyrenees mountains. So we all saw snow, albeit only in patches and high up on the peaks. But one day they drove up to a lake, itself pretty high at about 3,000 metres, and then walked and climbed higher to a patch or block of snow that was still clinging to the rocks some distance below the mountain-top. Pensri and I pleaded old age and didn't accompany them on this particular outing, but here are some pictures of more or less Thai people enjoying themselves on and under SNOW!

Here is our son, Dominic, making hard work of it ...

... while his wife, Jay, looks the part of a real mountaineer:

For Darunee and two of her girls it looks just like a leisurely stroll ...

...and here comes Esme, showing her mother and younger sisters the way ...

 

... followed by Ben, with the lake way down below in the background:

 

Esme and Anna get to grips with the snow:

and so do Kim and Ben:

He's behind you!

 

So for these Thai-ish people that's one ambition achieved.