No Sacred Cows
Scepticism served medium rare
Category: Thailand
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Escape from Eight Hours of Techno Torture, to Sanctuary at the Macaca Beach Bar We came to Khao Takiab for a peaceful night by the sea. Softly lapping waves reflecting the full moon, a light breeze, a swim in warm water. Instead, we found ourselves with a front-row seat at a deafening eight-hour Full Moon…
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The early morning songtaew was peaceful. A lay ascetic sat opposite me, quiet, composed, radiating the sort of calm that makes everyone else behave for once. No drama. No noise. No need to pretend the world is listening (as in the earlier blog). Fast-forward to the return journey, where tranquillity died a swift death. In…
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A man climbed onto the baht bus today who could have walked straight out of the early chapters of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha – the years when Siddhartha leaves his comfortable life with his father, the Brahmin, to join the Samanas[1], the wandering ascetics who strip existence down to hunger, silence, and sheer will. This was…
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A beach that once held shells and seaweed now spits back our own rubbish. What would have shocked those of us who grew up before the plastic age barely registers today.
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I seem to have checked myself into what can only be described as a vintage survival capsule. One of Hua Hin’s old stilted piers, the sort the municipality has been dismantling for “encroaching on public land” since roughly the Late Bronze Age. Some have already gone. This one is still here through sheer bloody-mindedness and…
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When even solitude needs a tripod. One man’s dawn swim meets the selfie apocalypse. After an hour’s swim at dawn in glorious solitude, the sea smooth as glass, the horizon glowing like molten silver – I thought I had the beach to myself: two kilometres of unspoilt quiet. Then, inevitably, modern civilisation arrived. A lone…
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By night, this stretch of the Gulf of Thailand becomes a quiet constellation of green and blue lights. The bright beacons strung along the horizon are squid-fishing boats, their powerful lamps suspended high above the decks to draw the squid towards the surface. Each light may be visible from as far as fifteen or twenty…
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On the gardener’s sidecar at my daughter’s school in Thailand, 11 years ago. “Keep it up there’s still hope. You cannot climb the ladder of success with your hand in your pocket”. Whether success means career, purpose, a scrap of happiness, or simply hanging in there with sanity intact, the message still stands. You won’t…
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Once, this was a living coral – a complex city of polyps, feeding and breathing in warm tropical waters. Now it lies bleached and brittle on a Chumphon shoreline, carved by time and tide into a relic of itself. A single Asian weaver ant explores the labyrinth where an ocean colony once thrived. Life continues,…
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By some feat of navigational incompetence – possibly involving an upside-down online compass or Google Maps pointing every which way except the desired direction (and certainly not my own misplaced sense of direction) – I managed to take the E-line khlong boat from Thonglor Pier entirely the opposite way. Not slightly wrong, not “I’ll hop…
No Sacred Cows 