My love affair with Thailand started in the beginning of the new Millennium and came to an end in August 2011. An affair, which like many physical love affairs, started innocently enough, but grew into something that eventually became destructive.
Along the way I have experienced highs and lows, an emotional roller-coaster on occasions, that’s how the Land of Smiles tends to treat you once you are hooked by her seductive charms. So how did a very ordinary, somewhat conservative, long time public servant fall for Thailand?
The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?
Well it all started innocently enough, a Far East holiday with the new love of my life. We had got together the year before, both going through messy and sometimes bitter divorces. I was certainly bitter before I met Ruth, I had lost everything to my ex apart from my pension! Ruth on the other hand had fared better in a monetary sense than me but on an emotional plane was probably in worse condition than I was.
So we headed East to Bangkok and Hong Kong before returning to Thailand and the charming beach resort of Cha-am where we spent some quality time together. We both enjoyed our first real holiday together. We didn’t travel much, I had a day at the River Kwai while my partner did a bit of shopping but that was it, we simply chilled out for the rest of our time there. We both commented on the charm and friendliness of our Thai hosts, eating out, walking the night markets and enjoying the balmy evenings all went towards making the holiday very memorable. We vowed to return someday although with hindsight perhaps I was more committed to this promise than my travelling companion.
In fact, we as a couple never did return to Thailand. Perhaps our return journey to the UK and the meal we had on the evening before that had something to do with this.
Let me explain.
The night before we travelled home we headed for our favourite beach bar/restaurant near Cha-am. I don’t remember what I ate but Ruth went for Tiger prawns, you know the huge ones. Well by the time we boarded the Thai 747 to fly home it was fairly obvious that she had food poisoning. I don’t think I have ever been pleased to be seated near a toilet on a flight before but our allocated seats in a block of three occupying the two inner places were almost opposite the forward toilets and the stairs to the upper deck. Our travelling companion realising that he was not going to get much rest kindly swapped seats so I ended up wedged between a rather sick lady on the aisle side and as it transpired a very talkative shoe salesman from Northampton near the window.
So why mention this? Well maybe indirectly what my new found friend shared with me on our eleven hour flight to Heathrow fired me up even more to return to Thailand. I am more certain that what he said also affected Ruth and her view on the shoe salesman, Thailand and many years down the line her view on me and my motives for choosing to live in Thailand, but more on that in a later chapter.
My friends story was slowly revealed as we headed Northwest through the night, he was, he told me a regular visitor to Thailand, were he sourced boots and shoes for his business back in the UK. Later struggling for a moment he retrieved a wallet and took out some rather dog-eared photographs. “Take a look at these,” he said in a voice that somehow reminded me of someone dressed in a dish-dash I had once encountered when exploring some ancient ruins in Egypt 
I looked, unable to refuse even though I fully expected some explicit photos that were not to my taste and certainly not something to be viewed while sitting next to the person I wanted to spend my life with.
I needn’t have worried since the photos were not in the least explicit, in fact they showed a pretty Asian lady and a couple of kids. “She’s my Thai wife and they are our kids,” he explained. “Well we are not really married,” he went on, “I only visit her when I am in Bangkok, since I am married to a woman in the UK.”
For the remainder of the flight he told me about his double life in Thailand, not really personal stuff, more about the people, the culture and life there. I admit despite the disapproving looks of my partner, when she wasn’t in the toilet, I was engaged. Whether the seed was planted during that flight or was already there from the holiday I don’t know but I silently renewed my earlier vow to return someday and spend some time in the fascinating country I had so recently discovered.
Little did I know at the time of this chance encounter, that the story I was told and its effect on both Ruth and I would come back to haunt me in August 2011. But more of that later. In the next chapter of My Love Affair with Thailand-Epilogue you can follow my story as I head back to Thailand in 2005 to keep my vow to return.
A journey I made alone.
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