It's Friday and I'm nueang maak, very very tired. A mix of indecision and poor planning means that I'm facing this weekend unplanned. It's the first time I am in the house alone. Dusk is falling and the road hums with home-bound traffic; scooters zipping along with laughing families and trucks filled with people or durian or shopping bought in for the weekend.
Often travelling at the weekends gives you little time to stop. Everything is new and exciting and a distraction. I wander round the house that I have called home for the last month and for the first time I see the lives that it has nurtured. The faded photographs of P'Saupom's and P'Jim's three children; smiling wildly at the camera from a viewpoint with the iconic white sand beaches below. Old clocks, books and boxes are hidden away. And the cats perch here there and everywhere, patrolling the boundaries of this, their sanctuary. Surrounded by towering, fat palm trees, all planted in neat lines, the back garden to the house is more a tumble of jungle off-cuts. A gateway to the natural world, left peacefully to grow as it pleases.
This is not a house, but a home. Nurtured, lived-in and open to all who come to it. The front room with no front or back wall invites the nosey onlookers from the road to peer in, tempting friends to stop and chat and strangers to make acquaintance.
I sit on the front porch watching the sun melt into the greying skies. Rural Thailand is a hidden treasure; tucked away from the highways and from the eyes of the tourists who speed through the south from coast to coast on VIP sleeper buses. The tourist Thailand is wealthy and far too expensive for local life; an average teacher's wage starts at 18,000 baht (£360) a month and the local exclusive resort, Novotel Chumphon Beach Resort costs approximately 2250 baht (£45) a night.
I wonder what my Thai friends think when I rush off on Friday evenings to escape to the must-see/must-do attractions infamous to white-sand-turquoise-sea reputation of Thailand. I ask P'Jim later over supper where she would most like to live if she could go anywhere in the world. She smiles at me wisely, in a way that accentuates her rich fifty so years of life compared with my fresh twenty so years. Here, she says, there is no place I'd rather be than in my home. I blush and realise for all my urgency to see the most of Thailand, the one place that will actually mean the most to me when I look back is this house and this family. I am glad for my failed plans and more than grateful for these priceless two months.
Often travelling at the weekends gives you little time to stop. Everything is new and exciting and a distraction. I wander round the house that I have called home for the last month and for the first time I see the lives that it has nurtured. The faded photographs of P'Saupom's and P'Jim's three children; smiling wildly at the camera from a viewpoint with the iconic white sand beaches below. Old clocks, books and boxes are hidden away. And the cats perch here there and everywhere, patrolling the boundaries of this, their sanctuary. Surrounded by towering, fat palm trees, all planted in neat lines, the back garden to the house is more a tumble of jungle off-cuts. A gateway to the natural world, left peacefully to grow as it pleases.
This is not a house, but a home. Nurtured, lived-in and open to all who come to it. The front room with no front or back wall invites the nosey onlookers from the road to peer in, tempting friends to stop and chat and strangers to make acquaintance.
I sit on the front porch watching the sun melt into the greying skies. Rural Thailand is a hidden treasure; tucked away from the highways and from the eyes of the tourists who speed through the south from coast to coast on VIP sleeper buses. The tourist Thailand is wealthy and far too expensive for local life; an average teacher's wage starts at 18,000 baht (£360) a month and the local exclusive resort, Novotel Chumphon Beach Resort costs approximately 2250 baht (£45) a night.
I wonder what my Thai friends think when I rush off on Friday evenings to escape to the must-see/must-do attractions infamous to white-sand-turquoise-sea reputation of Thailand. I ask P'Jim later over supper where she would most like to live if she could go anywhere in the world. She smiles at me wisely, in a way that accentuates her rich fifty so years of life compared with my fresh twenty so years. Here, she says, there is no place I'd rather be than in my home. I blush and realise for all my urgency to see the most of Thailand, the one place that will actually mean the most to me when I look back is this house and this family. I am glad for my failed plans and more than grateful for these priceless two months.