After my recent and somewhat gloomy posts about the floods in Thailand, I thought it would make a welcome change to post a positive and far more cheerful article. These extracts are 2 chapters taken from a book that I am writing that chronicles my early years in Bahrain through to my service in the Royal Navy and then finally my retirement to Thailand. It will be titled, ‘Fleet Engineer’ and I am pleased and incredibly grateful to note that Tom, our Editor of FSB, is very kindly helping me by reviewing it and providing
constructive feedback, before I approach a publisher in the UK next year.
Of the 68 countries that I have visited this is the place that I feel most secure, truly happy and blessed to be given the opportunity to live here as a guest of the Kingdom of Thailand and its people. It takes about 10 minutes to read so I’d suggest making a nice cup of tea first, as Andrea would say. I hope that you enjoy my true story about Amazing Thailand, the “Land of the Free”.
Thailand is in some ways like Italy and India. Hot, and lovely food with kingdoms of five former rulers.
Chiang Rai is in Lanna and the statue of its former king, Meng Rai, is its central feature. There are remnants of the original centuries old city wall. When Lanna aligned or amalgamated with Siam and other kingdoms it became Thailand the “Land of the Free”. I still prefer to call it the Land of Rain. Slavery existed before it became Thailand, hence the name. A lot that is comically portrayed in ‘The King and I’ is undoubtedly and luckily true. Much of that culture thankfully exists and is why it remains one of the most popular holiday
destinations and the most marvellous place to live.
Unless they know you well Thais rarely wave their hand to say thank you or hello; they may give you a subtle but respectful nod of the head. Most westerners will not notice this gesture. I didn’t for quite a while until my wife explained it to me. I could go on but that would call for another book or at least another chapter. I would recommend, “The First Englishman in Japan”. An informative story about the intrepid William Adams. Men could have their heads chopped off for not nodding to a Samurai on the other side of the street. ‘Geisha’ is another favourite book about Japan and perhaps my favourite film of all. What
lives they went through.
My wife is also brave, like the Geisha girl, intelligent, compassionate, proud, ultra sensitive, hard working, inquisitive, resilient, patriotic, resourceful, strong while being feminine, and incredibly beautiful. I could describe most Thais that I know thus. They are the most beautiful people in the world.
I chose Chiang Rai because it is not a major tourist attraction and I don’t do beach holidays. It
was a nice change for my young daughter who used to fly to see me in Oman. I enjoyed the holiday so much that I returned 5 months later but alone. The manager, reception staff and waitresses were all lined outside to meet my daughter but there was just me. They were disappointed because they called my daughter, “Water Angel”.
Many of the girls chatted with me at dinner and I agreed to teach them how to swim. I took them to a sports shop and bought their swimming costumes and we went to a nearby hotel as it would have been bad form to do it at the River House. That’s when I got to know Sa a bit more and we went for a meal. I suggested that she should visit me in Oman. She replied, “Impossible”. There’s nothing impossible if you set your mind to it and that’s how a year later we married in Southampton. We had a Thai Buddhist ceremony several months before where you can see we literally tied the knot.
All Thais have a nickname. That is because no one can pronounce their official names that tend to twenty letters long. I exaggerate a million fold but you get the gist. So they tend to use short Western type names like Sam, Mint, Mink, Bank, Beer and so on. My wife may be an exception that proves the rule.
Her name is Saisunee but she has only been known as the abridged monicker of ‘Sa’ by all of her friends and family for most of her life. It was only when I called her Saisunee a few years ago that her closest friends came to know her proper name. Try looking up ‘Saisunee’ on Google. If you do find it, it will be an obscure Thai female singer from many decades ago. Personally, I think it is most delightful and encapsulates her perfectly. Just pronounce out loud both the short and long versions to get the idea.
Sa is fluent enough in English and speaks with a Thai English accent which makes life easy. She struggled to pay for her English classes but did so knowing that it would help distinguish her from others. Before you think she was privileged, her parents were village farmers with no money. 
It is estimated that only five percent of Thais speak English fluently. From what I have seen I think they are the ones most well off as a result and the most beautiful. Sa is also a fantastic cook and loves Italian and English cuisines as well as Thai food, obviously. Thai is a truly difficult language; best avoided if possible. There are over 40 characters and 5 tones to master. Blimey. It will do your head in.
I have a hypothesis that Thais actually like speaking English. It’s just that they are very very very very shy and do not get many opportunities to practise. Every Thai that I have met speaks lovely English if you politely and carefully tease it out of them. Waitresses, nurses, bar maids, neighbours, restaurant owners, teachers, cooks, shop assistants, waiters, police men and women, cleaners, bankers, doctors, solicitors, delivery drivers and monks. Say Sawadhee Krup and then Good morning or Good afternoon so they know that you are English. Speak quietly but clearly. They like that especially. Do not intimidate them; they are exceptionally sensitive. Joke with them in the most gentle fashion. They like that even more. In summary, treat them like the most beautiful woman in the world. None will mind that you cannot speak Thai. That you love and respect their culture is enough. They know that their language is tough for a foreigner.
I have discussed this point with Sa a few times. She confirms that Thais understand their language is difficult and that she does not mind if I cannot learn it. I’ve tried for more than 5 years. On one holiday to Italy my Italian vocabulary went from 30 words to 300. I’d hazard a guess that my vocabulary of Thai is fewer than 30 after 6 years of living here. It is not something about which I am proud but when I see my doctor, waitress or bank manager I don’t need to worry about it. There are so few immigrants in Thailand that they have no worries. I’m not even formally classified as an immigrant, despite being married to a Thai national. My visa is a ‘non-immigrant support Thai wife’ visa. If I don’t maintain a substantial sum of money, (10,000 pounds) in a bank account I will be kicked out of the country, despite having been married to a Thai girl for 17 years and having cared for her parents at considerable cost. A bachelor needs 20,000 pounds in the bank.
The next picture was taken at Doi Tung. Doi means mountain and Tung means holy banner. It’s at the border with Burma and is my favourite place to visit in Thailand. The previous king’s mother lived there in a beautiful villa made of wood. You can just see it in the top right-hand corner. 
Another Thai woman is stupendously clever and effectively my personal bank manager. As an example, I was recently using a cash machine to update my bank book for the immigration police. I didn’t know, until I turned around, but she was stood right behind me to help if there was a problem. She sorts out every possible banking transaction within seconds. I don’t even get the chance to print out a queue number ticket. Instead it’s, “Good morning Mister Mark”, with a Wai and a smile. If you don’t know what a Wai is please see the picture below. 
I’ve been admitted to hospital four times in Thailand in the past six years. The first was a respiratory infection. The Air Quality Index for PM 2.5 particles had reached 299. The normal index limit is 30. The second was when I had a seizure. Luckily the nearest hospital was just 5 minutes away from where I collapsed and is the best in Chiang Rai. It has a MRI scanner which showed some damage to blood vessels in my brain. Then I fell off my bicycle when I rode over some algae towards the end of the rainy season. Although X-rays showed my ribs and hip were not broken my ribs must have been cracked as they
hurt for the next 3 months and prevented me from cycling. I think having high bone density from exercise and a good diet prevented my ribs breaking.
Then in March 2023 I went to the Emergency department of a nearby private hospital with breathing difficulties even though I had not been outdoors for several weeks for more than just a few minutes at a time and was using air purifiers in my house that I had bought after my previous respiratory problem. The unhealthy level of pollution is caused by farmers in Burma who burn their land in February and March and we are only 65 km south of the border.
After 3 doses with a nebulizer they transferred me to the Intensive Care Unit for a ‘serious respiratory infection’. They threw everything at it by intravenous drips: antibiotics, multi-vitamins, Vitamin C, more antibiotics. At one point I had 3 medicines being drip fed into my body. They took 3 sets of X-rays from different directions for thorough analysis. I declined an oxygen ventilator in my mouth but was given a high dose of oxygen via my nose for 2 days and nights. Luckily my lungs recovered after 3 days without permanent damage and I could once again breathe normally. It would have helped that I stopped
smoking 5 years before.
Each time showed me that Thai hospitals not only employ only Thai nationals as doctors and nurses but that they are world class professionals. If there was a world cup for hospitals, Thailand would win the Gold medal. Thai women would also win an Olympic gold medal for talking, but that’s another story.
Then look at the system of immigration. Thailand could teach us all how to control immigration. Few people are allowed in. If they are they need shed loads of money. For Farang mortals a non-immigration visa is the affordable norm. It is not a secret kingdom but 96 percent are Thais; similar to Japan. Coming from several genetic backgrounds Thais are not necessarily one identifiable indigenous group. Just like the English. But you can call a Thai a Thai. They are as different to Chinese, Koreans and Japanese as people from Cornwall are different to those from Lancashire or Perthshire. One can identify regional differences. Young Thai men in Koh Samui wolf-whistled my then girlfriend from Chiang Rai and called her a “Japan girl’ and ‘China girl’ because she has almost white skin, when not working in her gardens. By contrast, in the south most are much browner with different, more angular, faces.
I was helping a few young Thai children to learn English a couple of years ago in my wife’s village. One cannot use the word, ‘teaching’ because that may imply working for money. I noted that there are several similarities with the United Kingdom. Our flags are red, white and blue. The following photograph was taken in a cruise boat in Istanbul and makes my point.
We both have monarchs, now kings. We drive on the left-hand side or, as I like to say to our American cousins, the right, correct, side. There is a military and historic reason for that. When crossing paths we carried our sword in our right hand.
Our populations are broadly similar at 70 million or so. We are both known as rainy countries; different kinds of rain I admit. In Britain there is the drizzle from the Southwest and the Atlantic Conveyor that allows palm trees to grow on the West coast of Scotland. In Thailand we have monsoons caused by the Himalayan mountains that pushes the flow of air upwards gathering moisture as it does. I have read of discussion about Mount Everest. Most people think, and know, correctly that it is the highest mountain. It is not the tallest though despite getting higher every year. The tallest is Mauna Kea. Everest gets higher as the Indian subcontinent moves north.
It’s a bit like the Moon which recedes from Earth by 2 to 3 centimetres every year to maintain conservation of angular momentum as the Earth’s rotation slows down all the while spinning around the Sun at 70,000 kilometres an hour. It boggles the mind that our galaxy is also rotating so we are never in the same place more than once. I said engineering is fascinating. The overlap with science is that scientists dream crazy ideas; engineers implement them and make them work.
Polite, kind, courteous, intelligent, passionately fearless but deferential. Neither invaded for over a thousand years. There must be some common denominators. Or there were until quite recently. Britain had the biggest empire in the World. It will never be bettered. Britain also had the temerity, because of The Enlightenment, to create an Industrial Revolution. The result of which has seen an explosion in the human population from fewer than two billion a hundred years ago to eight billion today.
I was chatting with a lovely Thai woman recently. She owns her own cafe, that is truly delightful, and she is only 25; the same age as my daughter. She has family in Germany and she studied at a university in the USA. She brought up the subject of the British Empire. I said the Empire now lives in Britain. She laughed.
When Sa goes out with her friends I remind her every time of my two rules for her.
One. Call me before you drive so I know when to expect you to either get home or to her mother’s home. Call me when you get there. Sa’s father died about a month after we married. Her mother died about 3 years ago. I pay for the maintenance of her parents’ house in her village, Doi Hang, so that she can stay with her friends and family as she does about two or three times a week.
Two. Don’t drive in the dark. Thailand has one of the worst rates of road deaths in the world. I suspect many countries don’t report their true figures because driving in Thailand is nowhere near as bad as it is in the Middle East or Europe or Africa. I’d describe it as a cognitive system where you read the other vehicles behaviour rather than strictly obey the rules. Thailand does not have police systems designed simply to make money, unlike the UK.
Being English I do follow all of the rules in Thailand: I don’t want to be deported, for a start. Something which Sa occasionally gets grumpy about: the fact that I insist she follows the legal road driving rules as well. It is often said that a husband cannot be a driving instructor for his wife. I taught Sa how to drive and we are still married. As I gently remind her, we have no rush to get anywhere - we are retired. I think I have the sensitivity to help her develop in confidence without her getting grumpy. Too much. If she does get grumpy then I need to promise to buy her a new handbag or pair of shoes at Charles and Keith in
the Central Mall. She has gained the confidence to drive properly and carefully although needs a rare reminder about keeping her hands 10 to 2 so that she can later drive my manual transmission pick up truck without getting flustered.
In the early days Sa got angry when I called another driver, “W**nker” because she thought I was bad mouthing one of her fellow people. Now it is funny to hear her do the same. She told me once that I should not tell off another driver, “You don’t know what these people can do”. Years later I learned that one in ten drivers has a gun in the car. She was right, yet again.
A British man was beaten and killed by some local Thais several years ago. They were drinking white whisky and making a lot of noise. He stormed in and shouted down to them to be quiet. The court decided that the Thai men were right to defend their freedom to get drunk and to make a lot of noise. This was not a simple case of Thai v Farang. I suspect that he approached them as a righteous westerner rather than understanding their culture.
These men work really physically hard in hot, tropical conditions and they are hard men: watch Muay Thai. They don’t get paid a lot of money. They just wanted to wind down. Thai men and women do not shake hands with anyone or hug them. Except they do: with me. I get to kiss Thai women on their cheek and to hug them. One kiss only by the way: I’m not French.
I get to kiss and to hug all of Sa’s girl friends and to shake hands and pat the backs with her male friends and relatives. Thai men don’t do hand shakes, except they do if they respect you even as a Farang, and even if you don’t speak Thai. Secretly, most understand at least some English, if spoken clearly and quietly. They even come out of their shells to speak English, albeit exceptionally shyly.
There is a story of a Thai princess who was in a boat. The boat over-turned in a river. She could not swim because, at that time, Thai women were not allowed to do physical sports. They were expected to be beautiful only. She was drowning but none of the male crew could touch her because she was a princess. She died. I would judge that is probably a true account. It’s why I taught Sa and her friends how to swim.
when you do they love it because they really do trust you to be gentle and to be kind. It’s a leap into the dark for them. Today I met a beautiful waitress that I have not seen for over 2 years in my favourite restaurant, Chivit Thamma Da. “Mister Mark I know that you are English, we talked 2 and a half years ago”.
Three. Enjoy and have great fun with your friends. As I said, I think in threes. Sa has thus developed her own mnemonic: CDE.
Call when you leave and arrive.
Don’t drive at night time.
Enjoy.
Fourthly, a loving husband sets the rules even if his loving wife sometimes breaks them. The magic trick in Thailand with women, and around the world, is never to get too serious. Be funny and relaxed. I describe my debit card as my wife’s Smile Machine. At the end of the day if you can provide for her she’s going to love you if you are funny as well. And physically to look after her. Being handsome also helps a little bit. In Thailand people judge you as being handsome if you are well groomed and well dressed. They are proud
people and always present themselves smartly whether it is at the village or in an office, no matter whether rich or poor.
The White Temple follows. It is my favourite place to go for a bicycle ride and to stop for a
The White Temple is my favourite place to go for a bicycle ride and to stop for a coffee.
