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A YEAR IN SOUTH KOREA - CARRUTHERS
MAY
At the start of December Carruther's flew out to South Korea to start a one year contract teaching English, these are a selection of emails conveying his experiences.
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Friday 9th May
Thailand
DAY 1
I am plied with alcohol to a hitherto unknown extent by a gorgeous Thai Air stewardess. I arrive in Phuket and end up out on the piss with two Tahi blokes and a Malaysian tailor called Bob.
DAY 2
After a deliciously cheap breakfast I leave Phuket town for the coast. I rent a bungalow next to the beach, nestled amongst lush tropical vegetation. After a swim in the delightfully warm Andaman Sea I spend the afternoon drinking with a delightful bunch of Thai bar girls. In the evening I do much the same. I am smiled at by a lady-boy.
DAY 3
See the latter part of day 2.
DAY 4
I take a bus (or was it a sardine can) for four hours to the depths of the Thai jungle. I check into a treehouse. I sit in the riverside bar, watching Long Tailed Macaques playing at the base of a jungle covered limestone cliff 15 feet away. I drink beer form a bucket (no...really) while fireflies flit all around me. I watch a billion stars light up the sky whilst the nocrurnal chorus and a Banco De Gaia CD (!) serenade me. My sink is full of ants.
DAY 5
I ride in the back of a pick-up (or was it a sardine can) at what seems like 200 miles an hour to Chiaw Lan Lake, from which rises an astonishing array of 960m high sheer, limestone, jungle covered, mist swathed mountains. I
arrive at a rafthouse. I swim in the waters of the clear, warm, tropical lake. I watch Dusky Langurs leaping through the trees above me. I eat lunch while the calls of Gibbons echo from the surrounding forest. I go on a two hour jungle trek. I wade waisst high through rivers, I walk across fallen trees, I scramble through thick vegetation. I try not to think about
Bilharzia. I swing on a six inch thick Liana. I spend 45 mins in a violent, thunderous jungle storm. I am very, very wet indeed. I stand knee deep in river mud attempting to free the boat from the bank. I see a hornbill flying across the canopy. Later, I check my possessions for rain damage...my plane tickets are sodden - oops.I drink beer from a bucket. I
swim in a jungle river with two random Thai blokes. We have fun on a rope swing. Something unidentifiable crawls acroos my roof, noisily.
DAY 5
I ride an elephant through the jungle to a waterfall. I swim beneath it. I ride the elephant back again. I spend much of this journey attemptin to prevent large offensive fies from biting my feet. I have limited success. I swim in the river again. At the bar, a leech crawls acrss my table, shortly followed by a Ghecko. Later, the staff go to bed leaving myself, an
Australian called Bruce, and an english girl called Ally in charge of the bar stereo and a bottle of whiskey. We go swimming in the river at 1am. My self and Ally get...cosy. I use a line I will almost certainly never be able to use again - "Would you like to come back to my treehouse?". She does.
DAY 6
As i wait for the bus to Surat Thani, gibbons call from the misty forest. At Surat Thai I have a thrilling (or was it terrifying) 'motorbike taxi' ride to the airport. 20km on a moped driven by a psychopath...nice. Surat Thani airport is like the Marie Celeste. I arrive in Bangkok and it is 37 degrees C/ 99 degrees farenheit. I check into Khao San Road. I am surrounded by beautiful hippy chicks wearing skimpy clothes.
So, is Andy having a good time? You decide.
DAY 7
I make friends with Sarin, the barmaid in the place next to my hostel. She succeeds in telling me I have no style, am not charming, and that she doesn't like my hair (all unintentially, and she's very apologetic afterwards). Hmm..customer care. I go out on the piss around Khao San with an Irish bloke called Peter. The evening runs it's course without much of
note, except the relentless approaches of prostitutes -"Hello handsome man! You go with me?". I use the response I was taught in Phuket, "Mai auw, mee mee aleyo" ("no thank you, I have a wife").
DAY 8
I eat breakfast from a street stall, it's delicious and it costs me about 20p. I send that last email to everybody. I ride a Tuk-Tuk (or was it a three wheeled motorised deathtrap?) to the station and catch an aircon bus to Kanchanaburi. Then it's another motorbike-taxi, and I check in to a rafthouse, floating on the River Kwae (Kwai). Tropical birds sing to the
sunset as I gaze across at mountains and temples. The idyll is shattered by a floating Karaoke disco barge - it's bad, very bad. I eat yet another delicious meal and head to a bar. I manage to hold my own at Connect 4 with the barmaid, and I drink something called a 'Kanchanaburi Sexy'. It is. At another bar I play Connect 4 with one of the girls (they're obsessed, every bar in Thailand has Connect 4). The woman who runs the bar asks me if I want to take the girl home, apparently it will cost me 200 Baht (about 3 quid). She is gorgeous, and I am tempted, but I am a gentleman so must
decline. This country is depraved.
DAY 9
I walk to the 'Bridge on the River Kwae'. I go to the oddest museum in the world, the Kanchanaburi 'Jewellery and war museum'. Mostly it's WW2 relics in cabinets, with a few papier mache models of POWs. Of note, are a cabinet
containing the skeletons of 106 POW's, and a huge, ghastly mural depicting every Miss Thailand since 1937 (interesting juxtaposition). I find a collection of life size models of WW2 mainplayers (Hitler, Stalin etc etc) The winston Churchill looks as unlike Winston Churchill as I do. The captions are quite interesting though - "When the atomic bomb was drop on
Hiroshima the whole city was destroyed in a jiffy."(!) I walk across the Bridge. There are Japanese tourists...I wonder how they feel being there. Later in the bar, I am roundly thrashed at pool by a very cute girl called Aiya. She asks me if I want to have a smoke with her. We go to her place (on the back of her very nice motorbike). We have one, and I am absolutely
blasted. I get a lift home at the end of the night, and we arrange to meet again tomorrow.
DAY 10
I go on a tour to Erewan National Park. The minibus is full of chunky, irritating Canadian girls. At Erewan, I trek with a Fijian, an Irishman and an English couple up to the highest of seven tiers of waterfalls. We swim in No.7. Idyll is not a big enough word. We slide down a natural slide into the pool at No.4. We are nibbled by big fish at No.2. We get lunch and
then ride a train back to Kanchanaburi along the Burma-Thai Death Railway and across the Bridge on the River Kwae. Later, I meet Aiya again,and we end up getting..cosy.
DAY 11
Aiya and I go for breakfast at VN Guesthouse, owned by a delighfully friendly woman called Lassii. Lassii asks me to write a letter for her, to some American bloke who keeps trying to get her to come to the USA at his expense. She makes me write the phrase "Do you just want my body?". I purchase a bottle of Thai Rum for about a pound, and Aiya and I chill out by the river for a few hours. We then hire a boat. We visit a cave where an English girl was murdered by a drug addicted monk. Outside is the most undignified statue of Buddha I have ever seen. In the evening the heavens open for a few hours. Lightening fills the sky, and the rain bounces about three feet off the road. A six inch long, jet black scorpion wanders through the guesthouse. I cannot act swiftly enough to prevent Lassii beating it to death with an empty beer bottle, to the sounds of her screaming, "I want him die!! I want him die!!" So much for Buddhism.
DAY 12
After a relaxed morning, Aiya and I get the bus to Bangkok (she's decided to come with me). Once there we eat from a tiny, pokey stall in a back alley. The food is fantastic. We get a Tuk Tuk to Patpong, Bangkok's red light district. The driver thinks he's Michael Schumacher. His conveyance has two speeds..stationary and 60MPH. The time spent in transition from one to the other is kept to a minimum by the application of homicidal acceleration and a braking technique which dictates that braking cannot commence any further than about six feet from the obstruction ahead. Somehow, we survive. In Patpong we are invited into a host of bars promising sex shows and any number of disturbing anatomical feats involving a variety of inanimate objects. A bottle and a banana were involved at some stage. We go to a bar and I watch with amusement as a large number of Farang (foreigners) make liasons with the host of Thai prostitutes that fill the place. I feel
smug. I'm not paying, and the girl I'm with is cuter than most of the others. We leave after the band plays YMCA and FAME in quick succession.
DAY 13
We hire a boat for a tour of the Bangkok canals. Poverty is rife. We visit a snake farm where men get very close to very dangerous things with no legs. We visit the Grand Palace and Wat Phra Kaew (The Temple of the Emerald Buddha) The whole place is extraordinary. We visit Wat Pho, the oldest and largest Wat (temple) in Bangkok, which contains the largest reclining Buddha in Thailand. It's 46 metres long and 15 metres high. It's big. Afterwards we head back to Khao San Road, where I do some last minute shopping, we get a nice feed, and we go for a farewell drink. I get emotional. I've fallen head over heels in love with this country, and I don't want to go. I'm also very fond of Aiya, and I'll miss her. She gets emotional too. Lassii calls from Kanchanaburi to wish me good luck and to tell me to come back soon. I think I just might. Aiya comes to the airport with me, and the goodbye is a sad one.
Conclusion
If there is a paradise on Earth..it's name is Thailand. Incredible, wonderful, fantastic, beautiful, amazing, stunning, mind-blowing, awe-inspiring. These words don't go far enough to describe the place. To call it the 'Land of Smiles' is not a cliche..it's the literal truth. I have never been anywhere where the people are so spontaneously happy and friendly. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE that passes in the street will either smile at you, or smile back if you get there first. I have been amazed, enthralled, enchanted, stunned and blown away in the last two weeks. GO TO THAILAND. I've tried... but I can't adequately describe what you're missing if you don't.
Saturday 24 May
I'm a very happy bunny. In about an hour I will be on my way to Seoul, to an Indian restaurant. After 5 months without a decent Indian food experience, we have come across an offer in the paper - all you can eat in a four star Curry house, for 11,000 Won(about 6 quid)!! Aahh, how I've missed Mango chutney!
I've also recently discovered a fantastic new bar, called....ANDY. It's now my second home, staffed by four delightfully happy and friendly Korean girls, all of whom speak decent English. When I went in last night, one of them ran out from behind the bar shrieking excitedly about how much she'd missed me (I wasn't in the night before!) and gave me a huge
hug.........which was nice.
I was also honoured last night, in a nearby town called Nowon, to witness the most contemptibly feeble cocktail show in the history of bartending. It wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't built it up for ten minutes beforehand, with strobe lights, music and some Korean geezer babbling away on the mic. There were three guys involved, and all of them dropped bottles on AT LEAST four occasions during the five minute performance. My Korean mate Tony in the bar downtown could've put every one of them to shame. He's constantly practising behind the bar (largely to impress women I think)
waving flaming sticks/bottles around, blowing mouthfuls of Bacardi 151 into huge palls of flame and so on. We met the man he describes as 'My Master' the other night. We have decided affectionately to call him Yoda...."Hmmm, drop bottles you will not." He kicks ass at waving a bottle around though.
I've pretty much cheered up from my post holiday blues now. A few decent nights out can do wonders. What's more, it's payday on Monday....WOOHOO!!
Right, on that cheery note, I'll be off - Vegetable Bhuna and Bombay Aloo await! I just hope the Koreans realise what 'all you can eat' means to westerners - we tend to have larger appetites than them!
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