Mai is a wannabe rock star who runs the smallest bar in Prachuap Khiri Khan, “possibly in the whole of Thailand” he tells me proudly. The Small World Bar, opposite the night market in this sleepy coastal town has only been open five nights but it’s already a favourite with the town’s few ferangs.
The original idea was to paint the bar yellow and make it stand out, Mai tells me. But he scrapped that plan because of the political connotations. Once the colour yellow was beloved by all Thais as it was the colour of the king, who is almost worshipped here. Unfortunately the leaders of the military coup d’état in 2006 that ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra (so he could go and play fantasy football in the UK) have now appropriated the colour to legitimise their efforts so now for most normal people yellow is off the table for interior decor.
In a shifting of traditional colour symbolism, the king now is represented by pink – on his birthday in December millions donned pink t-shirts to dance in the streets – and the anti-coup rebels, who support Taksin wear red. Sarah, Ed and I met a taxi driver who was a card-carrying red one day in Bangkok. Both he – and Mai – mentioned their worries that if the reds and the yellows can’t reconcile their differences the country may end up in civil war. I managed not to suggest that they all wear orange.
Joking aside, it seems that the corruption here is getting frightening and the mafia has its hand in everything. Watch this space…
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Maybe its because Prachuap Khiri Khan (‘Pra-juaap’ to those in the know) is a little off the beaten track – located bang centre in the tourist wilderness between Bangkok and Surat Thani (the jumping off point for Ko Pha Ngan) – and that I wasn’t expecting a rocking time but it’s not just Mai (above) who makes for good company. The westerners I meet are an unusually varied and interesting lot, and all lone wolves like myself.
Two of them are cyclists, an English bloke riding from Chang Mai to Phuket and an Aussie who’s on his way to China (davecyclesasia.blogspot.com). There are also a couple of German girls, both here nursing broken hearts, and an old American dude who has been to Prachuap Khiri Khan 25 times and this time is here for a full two months of drinking a bottle of Samsong a night and talking a fair amount of well-intended gibberish.
I end up in a fight with a drunk Irish carpenter about the book (and film) Into the Wild. For the uninitiated it’s the true story of a boy who finished Uni and then threw away all his worldly possessions and severed all links with his past to follow a dream of living wild in Alaska. This guy “Willie” thinks the boy was a god (‘Down with western imperialism’); I think he was selfish to leave his parents without a way to know he was ok. Willie thinks that he was building a brave new life for himself out in the bush; I’m more inclined to believe foolhardy and underprepared.
We eventually make up and compromise on Chris McCandless’ (the guy in the book) last thought in his diary: that “Happiness is not real unless it is shared.” In one of those moment of tipsy traveler togetherness we agree that that applies to us too: although we are all enjoying our own journey, travelling for our own reasons, it’s nights like this one in Thailand and the meeting of so many others also on their own quests – same, same but different, that makes it so exciting and give our own journeys meaning. Or at least that’s what we came up with after a few Singhas anyway.
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And that, ladies and gentleman, was my last night in Thailand, probably for a long, long time.
[photos to follow]
