There Must Be Something In The Water

Sad to report, but my Irish-based, better, and better-looking, half wasn’t particularly impressed with last issue’s Temporarily Thairish. “Why do you always have to go on about sex and drugs?” she fumed down the phone. “Your column was all about knickers and prostitutes and ecstasy. It’s just childish and attention-seeking. You’re 34, for God’s sake!”

“What’s that got to do with it?” I protested. “Lots of 34-year-olds use knickers, prostitutes and ecstasy!”
“Well, do you not think it’s about time you grew up?”
When I didn’t respond, choosing to silently sulk instead (at great expense to her bill), she changed to a more diplomatic tack. “Look, you’re too good a writer to have to stoop to that level. You’d have a much bigger audience if you didn’t offend so many people.”
“But that’s just the style of the column,” I protested. “Nobody’s meant to take it seriously. You know – it’s funny!”
“Well I didn’t think it was very funny!” she snapped. “Most of it was just puerile!”
“So what do you think I should write about then?” I asked, more than a little peeved.
“Well, the other day you were telling me about how beautiful the long-tailed boats are,” she said. “Why don’t you write something about the... the nobility of the fishermen or something?”
Noble fishermen? Unlikely, but I figured it was worth a shot. If hotpress didn’t want it, I could always try selling it to one of those wussy Saturday supplements. Besides, after what she’d just said, my planned piece about the ping-pong tournament in the local girlie bar definitely wouldn’t go down too well (they don’t fire the ball with bats).
I went to a Haad Salat bar called My Way to speak to the only two long-tail fishermen I know, whom I’ll call Tee and Jacques. Tee is Thai, heavily tattooed and muscle-bound, and Jacques is French, long-haired and permanently twisted. Both of them are in their early thirties and seem to make a reasonable living either fishing for calamari or taking tourists out on snorkelling trips. They’re always in the bar at night, at any rate. When I arrived, Jacques was in particularly bad form, knocking back neat Mekons at a furious pace.
(Mekon – named after the river delta rather than the green, big-headed SF character - is one of the stronger and cheaper Thai whiskeys. By all accounts, it contains an unhealthy dose of amphetamines, along with two “secret ingredients” - rumoured to be even more amphetamines and some kind of hallucinogenic. The local mental hospital is home to numerous unfortunates – both native and farang – who went on a Mekon bender and never straightened out again. (Needless to say, it’s banned in the EU).
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Sheet!” he replied, throwing another Mekon back, and violently slamming the glass down. “Buy me anuzzer dreenk!”
I motioned to the barman, and sat down at his table. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I ave some zilly Canadian beech on ze boat today,” Jacques sighed. “She need to take a peez, but she wouldn’t admeet it. Eez always ze zame! You go out on ze boat and zen some beech haz to take a peez. Ze men, no problem, ze peez over ze side but ze women... merde! I tell to ‘er, ‘Juzz peez, for fuck’s sake - we weel all look away. Peez into a bucket or get in ze water and do it!’ But no, she get embarrassed and say she don’t need a peez – she haz juzz forgotten some-sing. So we aff to come back in after only ninety minutes. Eet’s bullsheet!”
He was seriously peezed-off. “I charge 200 baht per person per hour,” he explained. “Seex people on ze boat and we all ‘ave to come back in for ‘er modesty! Zen the tide was all wrong to go out again. Merde!”
At this point we were joined by Tee, who, judging from the way he tripped over the table and slopped all the drinks, had obviously been Mekoning as well. “You wan’ go on bow trip?” he asked. “You go wi’ me – 150 baht an hour!”
“Fuck you!” Jacques snarled. “If ‘e go on feeshing trip, ‘e go wiz me!”
“No – fuck you!” Tee shot back. He turned back to me, struck his chest proudly and announced, “My bow bigga an’ fasta! My bow cost sixty tousan’ baht!”
“Ha! Zat peez of sheet!” Jacques laughed, contemptuously. “Eet eez a fucking death boat!”
“Wha’ you say ‘bou my bow?” Tee demanded.
“I say eet eez a peez of sheet! I would zooner go out to zee on a fucking lie-low!”
In an instant, Tee threw himself over the table and caught hold of Jacques’ throat. The Frenchman responded with difficulty, but in kind. For the next ten minutes or so, myself and the other customers were treated to a homoerotic wrestling match reminiscent of a Ken Russell movie. There were a couple of action-packed moments but, for the most part, they just held each other tight and grunted. Some people took pics on their mobiles.
Midway through this sweaty spectacle, an attractive English girl arrived on the scene. She just stood there for a moment, taking in the view. Then she picked up a Heineken bottle, flung it at them (it just missed) and screamed, “WHY DON’T YOU TWO JUST FUCK EACH OTHER AND GET IT OVER WITH?” Then she stormed off. Neither man took a blind bit of notice.
“Sorry about this,” I said to Kes, the unlikely-named English barman. I was feeling stupidly responsible for the aggro.
“Nah, it’s all right – they do this quite a lot actually,” he explained. “It’s a thing they have. I don’t mind once they don’t break anything.”
“Would you say that they’re representative of the long-tailed boatmen of Ko Pha-Ngan generally?”
Kes watched the entwined pair rolling around the floor of his bar, and thought about it for a moment. “S’pose so,” he said. “But most of the fishermen are really fucking crazy!”
Well, at least I tried.
A Hot Press job, methinks.

Everybody, even the most unseasoned of travellers, knows that the tap-water abroad is always suspect and usually best avoided altogether. It’s something to do with the mineral content, which oscillates wildly from place to place, and in most cases will not be what your body system is used to. If you’ve any sense at all, when visiting foreign climes, you drink only bottled water.
What catches a lot of people out, however, is ice-cubes. The water you’re drinking may be purified but some unscrupulous bars and restaurants make their ice-cubes from tapwater. It’s a little short-sighted of them, given that the customers wind up blaming the food for their stomach upsets. Still, that’s what they do.
I thought I had found a way around this problem though. What you do is you tap the glass gently on the table a couple of times or swirl the ice around vigorously with your straw or little finger. You’ve got to get the timing right. The idea is to let the ice completely cool the liquid it’s immersed in, and then to slam your drink down before any of the cubes have melted. It’s not an exact science, but I’m pretty good at it.
Or so I thought anyway. The other night I drank at least ten Mekons in this fashion and, when I woke up, I was as sick as a dog. Worse, I was as sick as a sick dog.
I figure one of the cubes must’ve melted.

I was sitting in the My Way, chatting to a Belfast girl and her Tel Aviv boyfriend (“So I guess you two have an explosive relationship”), at about 1.30 in the morning, when news of the Sumatra earthquake came in. Kes received what was obviously an urgent call on his mobile, and then came out from behind the counter and announced, “Folks – there’s just been another big earthquake in the Indian Ocean. There’s a major tsunami warning!”
There were about fifteen people left in the bar, and all heads immediately turned in nervous unison towards the sea, which was flat and calm and beautiful in the moonlight. December’s disaster is still fresh in the memory, so it didn’t take any great leap of imagination to visualise a massive wall of water suddenly rolling in and smashing the bamboo decking of the bar – and all of us with it - to smithereens.
“Where exactly was the earthquake?” I asked.
“Near Sumatra, I think,” he replied. “It only just happened but apparently it was a big one – over 8 on the Richter Scale.”
At that moment, a slightly bigger wave than normal (about a foot high) broke harmlessly on the shore. That was all it took. The bar cleared in less than a minute. Nobody panicked or ran, but most people quickly made their excuses and, murmuring anxiously amongst themselves, began heading for the hills – including those who lived in the beach-huts just twenty feet away.
“But we’re in the Gulf of Thailand,” the Israeli guy said. “Even if there is a tsunami, it’s not going to hit here.”
“Shut-up!” Kes hissed. “I might get an early night for once!”
As it turned out, he didn’t; though with the absence of all his geographically-challenged customers (I think Jacques and Tee were in jail that night), he did have a quiet one. We stayed talking for another hour or so, mostly speculating about the quake, and generally lamenting mankind’s lack of respect for the planet, and our rape of its natural resources. We can be deep when we want to be.
“Oil isn’t there for us to suck out of the ground,” Kes announced, sipping coke through a straw to illustrate his point. “Oil is part of the planet’s natural suspension system, and the more of it we remove from beneath the ground, the more earthquakes and so-called ‘natural disasters’ we’re going to have. They’re drilling for oil in the Indian Ocean. But will we ever learn?”
We all agreed wholeheartedly that it was wrong (man). Having said that, we all got to this beautiful place via fuel-guzzling trains, planes, boats and automobiles.
The following day, the beach was still there and the news reports were more detailed. There had been a serious earthquake alright, but it hadn’t triggered any waves higher than three metres. Only three hundred dead (of course, the figure rose later), so not that big a deal.
“Not that big a deal?” I hear you cry. “The deaths of three hundred people is not something that should be made light of!”
You’re probably right. But the Tsunami killed 250,000. Everything is relative and around here, after the first surge of panic, the Sumatra earthquake hardly registered.

Speaking of tsunamis, I won 500 baht (about €10, or bottles of beer) in a related bet last week. I was telling my landlord Mr. Pong about a ‘Scientists are warning’-type article I’d read recently, concerning mountain tsunamis, when an Australian guy who’d been half-listening decided to rudely interrupt, “A toidal wave in the mountains? Are you facking stupid, mate?”
I assured him that I wasn’t. He assured me that I must be. Mr. Pong stayed out of it.
To the Australian guy, it was simple. There’s no sea or ocean in the mountains, only sheltered lakes, therefore there couldn’t possibly be any ‘toidal’ waves. End of story. I asked him if he’d like to put his bahts where his beerhole was. He thought it over, ran it through his mental hard drive, and a minute later agreed. Then I explained, in just three or four sentences, exactly how there could – and probably will eventually – be tsunamis well above sea-level.
I read it in the Bangkok Post but maybe it was reported in Ireland as well. Apparently the massive glaciers and icebergs that constitute large parts of the Alps, Himalayas and other mountain ranges worldwide are in serious danger of melting. Some of them contain voluminous glacial lakes. If the ice cracks, it’ll be like a burst dam. The billions of gallons of water they contain will burst out, flash-flooding down the mountains in tidal waves and wiping out everything in their path. A cold water avalanche down to Atlantis.
“Fack me!” he said. And paid up.

As I’ve been writing this column, a swift and steady procession of tiny red ants have been crawling underneath the keyboard of my laptop. I’ve tried blowing, flicking and wiping them off, but all to no avail. I’ve even tried typing ‘HEY ANTS – NO FOOD IN THERE!!” but they keep on getting in. I do k ow I they’r oing an damag o it bu I can’ b g d fo t e la t p. Sh t!