Life Change Blog

28th June 2010.

Welcome to the Monday Morning Life Change Blog. We publish a Life Change Blog article every Monday morning about change, life and living in Thailand. We hope you find them interesting and helpful.

Change Therapy on the Road.

The drive down from Bangkok to Hua Hin on the Thailand peninsular really is amazing. The 3 hour journey passes through a country where change is absorbed with the grace and ease largely unfamiliar to us in the west. We’re working down in Chiva Som Health Resort, Hua Hin for the next couple of weeks offering Change Therapy; helping guests make changes as well as come to terms with change that has been thrust upon them.

Arriving at Bangkok airport is an event in itself. It’s big, cool, well designed, light and airy, and altogether modern. It’s the only airport that I’ve ever heard of where the only complaint is that it’s too big! The smiley officials keep things moving along at a jolly old trot and soon you’re out into the warm suburban Bangkok air. It’s a very bright, busy and shiny new Asia.

Driving south along the main highway, traffic is of course heavy, but unusually a wonderful odd mix of vehicles. There are top of the range Mercedes, BMWs, Jaguars and the like driven by well dressed young stock brokers on mobile phones rubbing bumpers with ancient Toyota pick up trucks, the colour long since faded and covered with years worth of dust and cheap stickers from the 7Eleven. Spluttering along the inside lane are a bizarre collection of hand made customized mopeds and side cars built in some small back yard from several bits of old motorbike and Aluminium sheeting. These are actually mobile shops and restaurants selling noodles, dried squid and fresh fruit.

The backdrop to all this is equally diverse; Tesco hypermarket, coffin shop , open air street market, top end housing estate, rice field, building site, chemical factory, small row of independent shops, until it all opens out into brilliant white salt flats. White sheets of salt tail off in every direction like a landscape from Star Wars. The road is now lined with endless salt stalls and the occasional little modest stall selling the very tasty but very bony estuary fish. The most exotic sight to my Essex eyes are the huge Storks and Cranes that wheel slowly about the skies preying on easy pickings from the fast evaporating salt water.

Eventually this gives way to open countryside of bright green rice fields, Palm trees, glittering golden temples and outcrops of rock and distant mountains that remind me of all the James Bond films ever made in the 1970s. The traffic has thinned right out and we can zoom along in the middle lane.

Perhaps the most unusual sight along this stretch of road that leads into the beach resort of Hua Hin is the Spirit House supermarkets (you certainly don’t get them in Essex). Large plots on the side of the road dedicated to the sale of the tiny raised ornamental “dolls house” type structures that adorn all houses, shops and plots of land in Thailand. This is where the spirits live, and if you want good luck you better buy them a big shiny house that glitters in the sun and make them offerings of sweets and Pepsi Cola every morning. These places also do a pretty good side line trade in huge lucky cement cast animals, cockerels 15 feet high, life sized elephants and half size giraffes always seem popular and make for an arresting image at the side of the road.

Hua Hin looms into sight and I’m reminded of work and of things about change and of what a diverse and changing place Thailand is. It suddenly seems the most sensible place to be working with people where change is at the very centre of the menu.

Until next week, hope you enjoy our life change blog articles, and do keep in touch.

Alex.