Elephants by Scooter in Thailand

These days in Phuket have been very lazy. The temperature is so incredibly hot – around 37 degrees – that it's impossible to do anything energetic. Luckily it is incredibly cheap to rent a scooter, so we headed off around the coast on my birthday.

Riding in Thailand is a lottery. There are lots of scooters on the roads and the traffic rules seem to be, well, “loose” (and no wonder – when I showed my driving license to the company I rented from, they said “we don't need that”). The rule I stuck to (as taught by my Dad many years ago, and used in my work and personal life many times since) - “if in doubt, go with conviction”. Watching two young lads separate scooters, exchanging food while flying down a main road at 70km/h is something I will not forget easily. Neither is the feeling of the back wheel skidding underneath me after the slightest touch on the back brake, a couple of seconds after the realisation that the front brake was not really working.

I started the day in non-typical Thai fashion, having a coffee in a well-airco'd Starbucks and reading “The Time Traveler's Wife” - here was the first of our “Ladyboy” meetings, as an incredibly effeminate and small breasted person with lipstick and a 10am shadow took my order. Meanwhile Nicki braved the sweltering shops populated with over-zealous salespeople – at one point she could feel the body warmth of one seller, who was following her so closely around the shop.

Then as we moved on, we realised we needed to buy petrol, and this is hilarious too. You can buy gasoline in unmarked litre jars on the side of the road. Or you can go to the more “sophisticated” stands where a petrol-filled glass canister has a piece of paper with ball-point pen markings down the side with numbers “10, 20, 30” and so on written by each mark. You pay your money – in this case 100 Baht (2GBP/2.25 Euros - they put the tube into your petrol tank, the level of the petrol reduces to the 100 mark and they stop pouring. Pricing? Yesterday I paid 100 Baht for a full tank – the day before 130 Baht for half a tank. In short, the price seems to be “whatever you can get away with”.

The same goes for shopping. Bartering is ludicrous and Nicki is getting really good at it - she has bought things as low as 80% less than the first offer made. But at times you just give up and think to yourself “what value do I put on this thing I am buying? Is it a fair price?” Maybe we could save a Euro or two here and there, but probably the few Euros we could save with a bit of extra bargaining mean more to the locals than they do to us.

The scooter ride took us to the Elephant places, something Nicki had been really keen to see. Along the side of the road, there were half a dozen places where you could feed elephants or even have a ride on them. They are amazing and quite scarey creatures, being so huge and powerful. Yet they very gently plucked the pineapple from Nicki's hand with the end of their snouts (though I was glad one ele stuck her snout to the side when having a good snort – that was a lot of elephant snot!).

In one place we found a 1-month old baby. Amazingly, the mother seemed quite OK for us to pet the little thing. It was a lovely thing to be able to interact with these unusual, ancient beasts.

It also reminded me of a proverb I once heard - “Beware of Elephant Thinking”. Apparently, when very young they are chained to pole in the ground to prevent them from getting away. While still very small, the elephant stops trying to pull the chain and pole out of the ground, knowing that it's not possible after numerous attempts. As they get older, of course they are strong enough to break the chain but they don't even try because the memory of failure is so strong.

The day moved on to a café with an amazing view across the bay. But customer service, surprisingly, has been very patchy here. I stood waiting to pay and counted 8 people hanging around not doing much – I was almost embarrassed to interrupt our waiter from playing with his Nintendo DS Lite. The same went for the waiters in our evening restaurant, where they seemed to have perfected the art of avoiding the customer's eyes in case they might order something...

But back to the positives! This part of the trip has been a welcome breather to review the holiday and we have been lucky to have sun, sea, good cheap food and a few little surprises along the way here in Phuket. Luckily, the BA strike won't have any effect on our Qantas flight and we land in Heathrow early on Friday morning.

So just one more World Trip blog posting to come...

Footnote
In case you have heard about the protests in Bangkok, we are far away from them. But the cause of the protests is baffling to me and shows how politics in poorer countries seems to work.

The protesters are claiming that the current government and prime minister came into power by foul means (it was a military coup - then again, it was supported by mass demos then too) and should dissolve the government. To me, it is virtually impossible to govern a country like Thailand, with little infrastructure for gaining taxes, salaries at an incredibly low level and with very limited resources. How to please the public within one term of government? Impossible. So it's not a surprise that protesters are on the streets.

But who is the person they support? Thaksin, a previous Prime Minister. He was recently adjudged by the High Courts to have embezzled huge sums of money ($2.3BN) for himself and his family while in power, plus there are rumours that he bribed voters to support him – a very shady character indeed. And yet, 1000's of people mad their voices heard on his behalf. The message seems to be – “we prefer a brutal embezzler to the current mess of government”. It's so hard to see what the future holds for such a country and its lovely people.