by Alex Gunn
Our first new home was a hotel room in a mid range hotel in the centre of Chiang Mai. We’d spent three nights there when we first came to Thailand two years ago on a family holiday and thought it was okay and “value for money”, which, as we all know, is hotel code for “cheap, not very nice, but clean”. We had in fact only been to Chiang Mai twice before, although I’d got used to pretending it was a lot more in order not to sound completely mental to friends and family (“Yes, we’re moving to Thailand, to Chiang Mai, oh yes, we’ve been many times, it’s like a second home.”)
The first time we came was for the obligatory three night stay to “do” the elephants, an orchid farm, the Night Bazaar, hot springs and a trip down some jungle river on a bamboo raft steered with a big bamboo pole by a cheery drunk bloke in a dirty hat. As he punted our raft he drank a super size can of Chang beer all the way down the river. When the ride came to an end he drained his beer, crumpled the can and threw it in the water. He then carefully helped my wife and children off the raft and on to the river bank, interspersed by some very loud and unselfconscious spitting, burping, nose evacuating and using his hat like a face cloth. It was a master class in bodily functions and graciousness all rolled into one. The discarded beer can slowly floated down the river and out of sight. For a long time, I stared at the spot where it disappeared.
The following year, a second visit to Chiang Mai had been a much more sophisticated and relaxed affair consisting of boutique hotels, calming background music and scented candles. Unfortunately all this came with boutique scented prices which is fine when you’re raking in double incomes with steady jobs, but not so fine when you’re living on the bank’s overdraft facility with no income.
The cheap hotel was exactly the same as we had left it two years ago; the same tired but friendly staff on reception, same pictures on the wall and even the same odd selection of background music in the lobby. Rather bizarrely this consisted of Hummel’s Trumpet Concerto (not something that is often listened to unless you are taking your Grade 8 trumpet exam in which case every note is seared into your brain), easy listening Mozart string quartets, Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music and other miscellaneous hits from 1980’s bands like The Human League and Dire Straits. Sitting in the lobby was like being at a rather lively afternoon tea party at a university music faculty at the end of term in 1984. It probably wasn’t quite the mood they were trying to create, but suited me just fine.
The one significant thing that had changed at this hotel was its apparent deal with an ambitious Chinese travel agent whose aim was to accommodate thousands of jolly Chinese tourists who were all part of cheap package holidays.
Chiang Mai has a growing number of direct flights from China, from cities that you’ve never heard of, that are bigger than Belgium and have more economic clout than London and New York put together. When not fuelling the Chinese economic revolution the inhabitants of these super cities seem extremely keen on flying into Chiang Mai, getting a bit tipsy on the way and joining me in the lobby of a large, cheap but clean hotel and listen to the melodious sounds of the unlikely, but not unpleasant combination of Mark Knopfler, Johann Hummel Phil Oakey and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
It’s quite exciting when they all arrive at once, (the Chinese tourists that is, not Messrs Knopfler, Hummel, Oakey and Mozart, although that would also be very exciting but also a little spooky), especially if the lobby has been all quiet and empty. It’s a bit like being on an empty beach and suddenly and without warning being engulfed by a friendly tidal wave. Suddenly, huge coaches pull up outside and hundreds of excitable Chinese holiday makers all disembark and flood into the lobby chattering, shouting, smoking (like cancer hadn’t been invented), laughing, wheezing and coughing, and taking thousands of photos of everything. They seem to mainly take photos of each other in slightly different groupings.
I have at times, when I’ve been a bit slow off the mark to shoot quickly upstairs, been subsumed into one of these large friendly tidal waves and found myself surrounded by a big jolly party of excitable Chinese men and women all smelling of whisky and cigarettes. They have evidently been rehearsing a routine wh9ich goes something like this; one of the group will ask me to hold the camera or phone and take a photo of their group. Of course it would be rude to decline such an offer, but also it becomes inevitable that I should then take my turn and join the group and be photographed. This is all done with increasing hilarity and shouting.
The never ending combination of people holding the camera/ phone and in turn being photographed can go on for days, so it is therefore quite a tricky business unraveling from it all. It’s also a great pain in the arse when you are innocently loitering in the lobby with the sole intention of trying to steal the only copy of The Bangkok Post.
There must be photos circulating the massive factory canteens of China of me with various groups of smiley, drunken Chinese men with my stolen copy of The Bangkok Post sticking incriminatingly out of my yoga trousers.
Those first early days were a bit of a fog; a mixture of jet lag, excitement, hotel buffet breakfasts and complete terror. It all felt rather unreal and we gave ourselves a few days off before the enormous task of setting up our new business and finding somewhere to live.
It was during one of these early days that I realized that this very same hotel had played host to the famous and sadly deceased American TV chef and writer Antony Bourdain who had shot a TV episode in Chiang Mai about Thai food (and quite rightly so as it is the secret food capital of the world). I stared down at the same breakfast plate as Anthony Bourdain had done, with the very same emblem on one side and remembered him doing a direct shot to camera where he looked down at his badly cooked, greasy western style bacon and eggs and said something along the lines of “it’s a breakfast, but it’s not my breakfast”.
It was a statement that I could not get out of my head. It haunted me for the early part of our stay here because that’s just how it feels. It’s a decent enough breakfast, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it just isn’t my breakfast, it isn’t my life, it’s somebody else’s.
Throughout the awkward early days of getting everything wrong in banks, shops, hotel lobby’s, attorneys offices, with taxi drivers, motor bike hire shops, with accountants and their endless incomprehensible forms and situations too embarrassing to remember, I often came close to just saying “sorry, this isn’t my breakfast” and walking away. They were my secret magic words. I knew I could only use them once. I also knew that if I did use them it would change everything forever, and I would never know how my new script would end.
I didn’t though. I just kept on eating someone else’s breakfast in the desperate hope that someday soon it would actually begin to feel like my own.
Chapter 3
Finding
Somewhere to Live
Back in England I had bravely announced that I would find us somewhere to live when we got to Chiang Mai. After the initial few days of eating someone else’s breakfast and listening to Phil Oakey sing “don’t you want me baby” (no Phil I don’t) it was time to launch “Mission Home Of Our Own.”
It all sounded fine and dandy back in England around the kitchen table, but in reality little things like the four of us all living in one hotel room whilst trying to start a business, open bank accounts, transfer money, meet accountants and attorneys, organise a press trip for a small group of high profile journalists to cover the opening of our business and give the children an exciting start to their new life, made the reality just a tad tricky.
The night before we left England we stayed in London with my relentlessly kind and thoughtful brother-in-law Colin, and his kind and thoughtful family. I remember him saying over a glass of wine, that it would probably be “quite good fun” zooming about on a hired motorbike looking for a house to rent. With the deluded idea that it was going to be fun, still fresh in my mind I set off on a hired motor scooter. I had a hotel tourist map of Chiang Mai, a can
of coke, a packet of biscuits from the 7 Eleven, some half-baked notion not to rent a house near a river because of floods in the rainy season and a disproportionate amount of optimism.
I must have covered hundreds of miles on that little bike. What I didn’t bargain for was that most of the signs were of course in Thai, so I had no idea if I was copying down the telephone number of a potential home to rent, a local handyman, a laundry service or the number of a massage parlour, which I soon discovered crop up all the time and in the most unlikely places. After eight hours on a motor-scooter in the scorching heat you don’t really care what you are doing anyway.
After phoning several massage ladies (?) I eventually got through to somebody trying to rent a house. The trouble was of course, I didn’t speak Thai, so I ended up having to end the call. Occasionally though, I struck gold, and managed to make an arrangement where real houses and addresses and times were mentioned without reference to either a massage, laundry or handyman.
There are some very, very weird houses for rent in Chiang Mai and I visited most of them.
The first one that I was shown looked great from the outside. It was brand new and decorated beautifully with a manicured garden that looked like it belonged outside the Disneyland Castle. Unfortunately, once inside, it was clearly only half finished. There were no doors, the lights didn’t work and there was broken glass and rubble on the bare concrete floor. Still it was preferable to living in a massage parlour or laundry, which was looking increasingly likely. In desperation I felt I could make it work. A quick sweep round, a few cheap plastic chairs and we’re away.
My optimism began to fade when I was shown into the kitchen. It was just a bare, empty room, there was no kitchen. It reminded me of the children’s tale about the emperor with no clothes. We both looked around “the kitchen” which was a perfectly empty room at the back of the house. There weren’t even pipes or wires to plumb in but I was desperate enough to join in the illusion that it was a kitchen and found myself mumbling nice things about the room to the smiley lady showing me around.
Feeling rather weary I had to admit to myself that I couldn’t make a kitchen appear out of nowhere. I turned it down and got back on my bike.
The next place that I saw was great. It was in a nice quiet road on the outskirts of town and no river nearby. I asked this question religiously as though I knew what I was talking about. The various house owners must have thought that I had some bizarre interest in fishing or boats or sailors or all three. To their credit they never let on but answered seriously, “no water, no river.” To my relief the inside of the house was just as nice as the front. It actually had real house things in it like air conditioning, beds, a nice big modern flat screen TV and even a kitchen that had kitchen stuff in it. Great, it all looked fine.
I was just about to say “yes” when the landlord mentioned that if there were any problems I could always call him outside. What did he mean, “call outside.” I was shown outside into the back garden, where, incredibly there was a small, perfectly formed little house in the garden where he and his family lived. They all waved happily at me from the front door, about thre meters away, and I waved uncertainly back. It reminded me of the little wooden Wendy House that my Dad and Grandad built for my sister when we were kids (unfortunately me and my mad friend burnt it to the ground by accident one Guy Fawkes Night in an experiment so wild and ill conceived that I dare not even think about it). It would have been fine in a fairy tale about elves and goblins, but living with a real Hobbit sized house under our noses felt rather spooky so I mumbled something about coming back with my wife before we signed on the dotted line.
At last, after several days driving about in searing heat, walking around some truly weird houses (one wasn’t a house at all but a shop, the owner said we could put up a big curtain and sleep on the floor. Another place I looked at by Wat Umong was nothing but a large wooden shed in some hippy blokes garden. There’s load of them) and phoning hundreds of massage parlours and laundries I was shown a nice house in a private high end, gated community just off of Canal Road, with a big shared swimming pool and a club house. The house itself had 3 bedrooms, some furniture, TV, garden, kitchen (that was actually there) and nobody living in the garden in a Wendy House. It even had some kind of secondary kitchen, or maid area or something I didn’t quite understand, out the back. I signed on the dotted line agreeing to pay what sounded like a surprisingly large sum of money each month into a bank account held in Thapai Road in the centre of town. But anyway, it was a home.
We checked out of the hotel. It would have been good if Avalon by Bryan Ferry was playing in the lobby “…yes the pictures changing, every minute, and your destination, you don’t know it,” but of course being real life and not a film it wasn’t. Although, you have to admit that would have been good. We actually left the hotel to the twang of Dire Straits. I didn’t so much feel a Sultan of Swing as an ambassador of apprehension, I really hoped the house was as good as I remembered and my wife and children would like it.
For a small fortune we hired a mini van and driver from the hotel lobby to take us to our new home. We stopped off at the supermarket to pick up a few provisions, unnervingly accompanied all the way around by our driver who was clearly fascinated by what we were going to buy. He took it upon himself to guide us around the store as if it was a guided tourist outing and we had never seen the inside of Tesco. Accordingly we played our part and feigned surprise and wonderment at the range and variety of groceries.
He pointed out bargains and special 3 for 2 offers and vetoed various goods including, and surprisingly, cornflakes, which he said were rubbish “this… no good” he said, shaking it suspiciously as if what was inside was broken. He made us buy the biggest bag of rice I have ever seen in my life, I could just about lift it off the floor. He even replaced our bottle of expensive imported Australian wine with something that looked like it would strip paint off walls. It was a clear spirit with a red and blue picture of what looked like an eagle on the label and unnervingly called Red Cock, spelt out in big red letters. Our driver/ guide surreptitiously pointed to my wife and gave me the thumbs up. I dared not linger to work out the complex connotations and ploughed straight onto the check outs.
We also stopped at a kind of miniature garden centre that sold ornamental above ground ponds, because rather foolishly in a reckless moment to soothe an argument about pets I had promised that as soon as we got to our new house we could keep terrapins. We bought the ornamental pond, was given a derisory look by my wife for blurting out how incredibly cheap it was (“that was cheaper than orange juice at Heathrow Airport”) and set off for our new home, all keen to get blasted and bloated on Red Cock and rice.
Luckily my wife and children seemed to like the house, although it did seem a bit big. Actually, it was a lot bigger than I remembered, but at last we had a proper home. Having lived in various hotels, friends and families’ spare rooms and living room floors for the past couple of months we were more than ready to lie in our own, albeit, rented beds.
We moved in and unpacked the now legendary (well within our family anyway) “Pop up home”.
We had the idea back in England which started as a joke with my youngest son who adored a particular pop up book about a pirate. I made the mistake of likening our new life in Thailand with a page in the pop up book where you open a treasure chest, meaning that we would have an instant home, with all the important things (the treasure) that we needed in a suitcase. It kind of made sense at the time, I think, but looking back it does seem a bit jumbled. Anyway, the label stuck, and over the weeks and months there was a lot of discussion about what should and what shouldn’t be included in a big old suitcase which we referred to as our “pop up home.”
I unpacked the DVD player double quick and put Harry Potter on (it seems so old fashioned now). We all sat and watched it and ate biscuits from the Thunderbird 2 plate and had a nice cup of tea out of the Thunde
rbird mugs. It really did feel like home and half way normal, in a completely surreal sort of way.
For anybody interested in giving up their comfortable life and moving to Chiang Mai or any other part of South East Asia with two small children, here is what we packed in one suitcase in order to make an instant and comfortable, “pop up home.” Remember to pack clothes and wash bags separately:
2 blow up air beds and 2 cheap inflatable beach air beds (called “lilos” when we were kids)
4 space man single sheets
1 set of Thunderbird plates and cutlery including 4 plastic plates, bowls, knives, spoons, forks and mugs
Travel iron and travel kettle
Box of PG Tips Tea Bags and packet of biscuits
DVD player and 5 DVDs. Recommended: Pirates of the Caribbean, Pokemon The Movie, Harry Potter and The Philosophers Stone, Oceans Eleven (for my wife), Blades of Glory (for me). (Nowadays replaced with downloads on a tiny mobile screen).
1 six inch saucepan and wooden spoon
Deflated football , valve and pump
Several plug adaptors
Universal sink plug
Multi tool and Swiss Army penknife
Nylon washing line and a few pegs
Assortment of favourite tea towels (Devon Farmhouses, Wild Flowers, Historic Fishing Villages etc…)
Remember to throw in a few candles in case you decide to move into an unfinished house without electricity.