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February, 1998
Thailand
Peter says that I have to put in the following:
The longer we’re here, the more we like Thailand. The people are just so pleasant and happy. Peter says that any religion that has as its main prophet a really fat guy lying around just laughing a lot must be okay. The Wats (or temples) are pretty fantastic, so colorful and light and airy, not somber, or monumental.
We are trying to get motivated. That’s pretty hard in the incredible heat here - I think it’s the hottest we’ve ever been, though part of it could be that we haven’t found a whole lot of places where we can swim, and two of the places that had clear enough water had stingers (like sea nettles) in the water, which puts a bit of a crimp in swimming. It would be better if the water were just a bit cooler.
We just got a quote to redo the cushions in the saloon: the twelve cushion backs completely rebuilt (new wood backing, new foam, and fabric), and new foam and covers for the seat cushions, with a muslin lining cover for the foam which makes for a better quality cushion. All the work is going to cost 21,000
Baht. A lot of money, right? Just about $400. We’re probably paying too much by Thai standards, but I’m delighted. The new curtains are a pretty batik print that blocks out the terribly strong tropical sun but keeps the interior bright. I hope they stand up a bit longer than the horribly expensive ones I had made in Australia which are only four years old and looked terribly shabby (the lining on one of them just dissolved when I washed them last month. The sun had just rotted the fabric).
We also had two of our head sails worked on: our light air genoa was recut to fit the roller furler, and the number two genoa had to be completely restitched. We blew it out on the only windy day (15 knots max - not very windy) we’ve had. The stitching is just old, but the fabric seems to be holding up really well for 16-year old sails. Good quality and good care pays off. I wonder how we’re going to cope when we finally have to replace some of our sails, it’s going to be a bitter pill (at $3,000 and more for a sail, it’s a major investment we’ve successfully avoided
for these many years. That’s what comes of buying a boat with an inventory of 12 sails, including 3 mainsails). Peter decided he wanted the headsails color coded, and when he got back from the sail maker,
Rolly Tasker, he told me that he instructed them to make the sacrificial shade cloth on one sail green and orange on the other. I gagged:
orange on our lovely Watermelon, with green, and red, and black? Orange would be painful. I insisted that we go back to the sail maker the next day to change the order. Whoops! They had already sewn the cloth on. Fortunately Peter’s color knowledge is as bad as his color sense -- the cloth is yellow, not orange. Still not great, but better than orange (and as our friends keep telling us, there are yellow watermelons).
I found a way to salvage the situation. Our sail cover was rotting away from the sun and after 11 years it didn’t owe us a thing. At first Peter was just going to have it repaired, but I convinced him that we were just postponing the time when we’d need a new one made, so better now than later, while we have the money and are in a place where things are a
 bargain. When we went into Rolly Tasker’s with our old cover to order a new one, they didn’t have enough green Sunbrella to do the entire cover. They had a bolt end with enough fabric to cover only a bit more than just the boom. I took the lady supervisor aside and said, “that’s okay. Our boat’s name is Watermelon, can you make the sail cover with a watermelon?” We drew it out; she looked excited by the challenge of making it really nice, and off we went, Peter skeptical and worried about what I’d conspired to do.
The sail cover is great! The price was the same for a plain, boring one or this neat one (materials are expensive, labor is incredibly cheap). We are receiving very favorable comments, though Peter is still not sure that this garish thing on our boat is what he wants.
NED KELLY left for the Med last Thursday. Peter’s depressed. They were wonderful company for both of us. Phil is exceptionally upbeat and energetic and positive and he made Peter smile. A fun guy to have around, it’s going to be terribly quiet and lonely for a while without them. We sent them on their way with an emergency package (Vegemite and dried bananas, Australian survival food), a load of line we hadn’t any use for anymore and might come in handy for Phil, and other such useless/useful stuff. Told him that anything he couldn’t use he could trade when he got to the Red Sea. You know that Peter liked him when he parts with any of his precious “stuff’.
We did some mini-cruising around Phuket Island. The water between Phuket Island and the mainland is muddy/murky, the tidal currents are terribly strong, and the islands are spectacularly beautiful. There are lots of “hongs,” small rocky islets riddled with caves. One waits for the proper tidal level (sometimes near low, sometimes near high) and goes into the mouth of the cave, through a lightless patch (spooky, with little bats flying around disturbed by our noise and flashlight) and out into a tiny lagoon completely enclosed by the rock, the small tunnel through which we arrived its only access to the outside world. It’s impossible to photograph unless one were a rock climber and could scale the sheer cliffs. The rocks are multi-colored, gray, with red, yellow, and brown streaks. The cave/tunnels have stalactites hanging and cascading down (no stalagmites because there’s no floor, just water). They’re not particularly colorful, but the overall effect is awesome (in the old definition of inspiring awe). We became cave junkies, flitting from islet to islet looking for tunnels to explore just for the thrill of coming out the other side into a temple-like amphitheater. Such fun. We went to the island where the James Bond movie, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN was filmed. It’s now “James Bond Island” for the tourists. It is spectacular, even with the wall-to-wall ticky-tacky souvenir stalls there, but I’m glad we came on our own hull. It really wasn’t worth paying a local canoe to take us, though they seem to give value for the money, taking the tourists to several places over a period of three or four hours.
More thoughts on traveling in third world countries.
The 12 most widely spoken languages, with approximate numbers of native speakers, are as follows:
Mandarin Chinese, 836 million; Hindi, 333 million; Spanish, 332 million; English, 322 million; Bengali, 189 million; Arabic, 186 million; Russian, 170 million; Portuguese, 170 million; Japanese, 125 million; German, 98 million; French, 72 million; Malay, 50 million. If second-language speakers are included in these figures, English is the second most widely spoken language, with 418 million speakers. (I think that the easy reference of the encyclopedia and atlas CD-ROMs is going to fill my head with so many facts that I’ll be even more insufferable that I already am. But it’s so much fun to look this stuff up.)
Can you imagine Martha’s Vineyard, or Atlantic City, with street signs in English and another language? Yet just about everywhere in the cities and tourist spots, that’s what we see here in Asia. In addition to the local language, English is on most of the labels on packaged food in the grocery stores with the exception of some of the strictly local foodstuffs, like sea jelly (as an aside, this sea jelly varies from tasteless to disgusting – it must be an acquired taste). It makes sense. These countries have two, maybe three totally dissimilar languages (Arabic, Bahasa Malay, and Chinese with no common written form among them), and so it behooves them to have a language that enables them to fit into the developed world; and English is the language of commerce nowadays.
In Thailand everybody is taught English in school. If they want a second language, they are almost always offered French. There was a discussion in the newspaper the other day about the uselessness of French, and the need to offer Asian languages. Going to my trusty encyclopedia, they discuss the problem of the loss of languages - and indeed there are many languages spoken by a very few people that are going to be lost. But U don’t think that major cultures, like Indonesia/Malaysia, Thailand, and China are going to lose their language or their culture. They’ll just add English to their repertoire and compete more successfully than the Westerner who won’t learn the local language, figuring he can get by with just his knowledge of English. Great Britain tried that and lost its empire, becoming a shadow of its former self. How do I know that the Chinese won’t lose their language? Because there are third- and fourth-generation Malay Chinese, and Singapore Chinese, and Indonesian Chinese who still speak Chinese and write using Chinese characters. They cling more tenuously to their culture than just about anyone else I can think of. Fascinating. And still, they wear Levis and Lee jeans, they listen to American rock music, and they eat at McDonald’s.
[Another aside. Aussie friends of ours are just slightly anti-American. They won’t eat in McDonald’s or Burger King, and were dismayed to learn that Heinz and Kraft were American companies -- they thought they were Australian. Peter, of course, heads straight for McDonald’s wherever we land, and Sue is adamant about not eating in “that place” because it’s destroying the local culture. Peter finally snapped and pointed out that nobody was holding a gun to the heads of all the locals who were eating there. McDonald’s must be doing something right to be so busy. There was no place else where people were lined up six deep to buy food. It’s true that in some ways I feel a bit appalled by all this American fast-food ticky-tacky exported, but it’s only ticky-tacky to us. The advantage out here is that the places are probably the cleanest you’re going to find outside of the upscale hotel restaurants, the food is always the same, and the service is fast.
(Damned with faint praise!)
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