Covid 19 caution had most popular beaches closed. Those in high risk provinces were under close scrutiny while in less risky places like this province, Nakon Si Tamarat, have remained open though all services were suspended and the countrywide lockdown reduced beach going numbers to almost zero.
Since the “ban” on beach going did not affect me i was in the water twice a day as i am also today and will be until i am able to get back home to Japan.
The beaches mentioned in the article are target weekend spots for people from a large city, Bangkok, so no surprise the numbers exploded. But beaches in distant areas, here and Phuket, are not really for the big city weekend crowds, they are for more scarce local province people and longer stay tourists and they are either fewer in numbers, non weekday visitors or, in the case of foreign tourists, travelers not allowed into Thailand yet in any significant numbers.
If you plan a beach visit try the Thai preferred places. They will be quite an interesting mix of people. Definitely avoid beaches favored by Chinese tourists. China tour groups have no problem booking people to beaches in numbers that don’t allow even enough space to sit. This was true of the beach near Phi Phi island where the movie “The Beach” was filmed staring Leonardo De Caprio. So, remember, “Life is a Beach!”
By now you might be getting a glimpse of my tactics. I try to draw you into the subject and then once I have you captured I go through the story, whatever it is. Today I’m going to explain what I mean by “batteries in paradise“.
When you travel abroad you need to take a variety of electronic devices to do this that and the other even if it’s just some odd piece of equipment. For me, having been in the computer business for more than 45 years I just can’t get away from computing devices. Currently with me I have my iPhone, my iPad Mini 4 and my MacBook Air. All of them run on batteries.
Previously I never had a habit of just sitting down and consuming a lot of information someplace where I didn’t have my large screen and computer attached to it. Now that happens to be a MacBook Air. My luxurious suite room ($18/day -eat your heart out) has a TV with an HDMI port so I just plug my computer into that but it isn’t the kind of sitting situation where I can comfortably use a keyboard and a mouse so I prefer to sit outside in my private patio, drink some coffee and for the first time in years use my 3 year old iPad Mini 4 to consume information and to use on various applications to do this that and the other, especially email.
I use my MacBook Air for heavier computing such as the development of our family digital museum, extensive emails with attachments, complicated document creation, watching videos and online material in the evening, and doing some fairly extensive financial work.
I thought my iPhone XS would be useful mostly during the commute, which it was, but now it seems to be the most convenient device to do financial transactions and a few other various jobs such as international Skype calls.
So now I wind up charging my phone only once every two days since I don’t use it as much. My iPad fulfills most of my morning news consumption and simple data transactions. It works fine with dictation which helps a lot since typing on these smaller digital devices is time-consuming and not really good for the tendons and muscles. So this iPad needs to be charged up at least once a day. I even have an extra fairly high powered external battery to pump it up while I’m working if I need extra power. In the morning sitting outside without the air conditioner is very comfortable and a lot better on my sinuses. It’s warm outside but when you get used to the heat and the humidity it’s often more comfortable sitting outside and bearing the heat rather than going in and out of air-conditioning.
My MIT colleagues and students bought me an extra smaller battery which I use to power the iPhone when I need to inside or outside.
During thunderstorms, which happen now about every third day, it is wise to unplug my laptop. Trust me! Bad things can happen especially in Thailand where there is no ground ( Earth) used in most small buildings. One thing to note about the HDMI external monitor is some thing I found after I got the MacBook air and had it constantly plugged into the external monitor. Even with your monitor off it drains the battery if it’s connected to the MacBook Air. I couldn’t figure out why it was very very difficult and time-consuming to get the MacBook Air to start up. I found each time the battery was zero. So don’t leave your external monitor, especially HDMI connection, plugged into a laptop if the laptop is not also plugged in for charging. Oh, I didn’t mention just before the battery drained in the laptop because I didn’t have it plugged into a power outlet while I had the HDMI cable attached.
So if you’re traveling extensively I highly recommend making sure you have your devices charged up by the morning and also have some kind of portable battery to carry with you during the day. There are probably many times you will run out of battery power especially the way some of the devices react to touch even if they’re in a backpack, turning on and off, executing applications even when you haven’t touched it. And when that one photo or sound you want to record comes into view or into hearing distance you don’t want to have a dead mobile device. So that’s about “batteries in paradise“. HAVE A NICE DAY!
in Paradise. By now you might be getting a glimpse of my tactics. I try to draw you into the subject and then once I have you captured I go through the story, whatever it is. Today I’m going to explain what I mean by “batteries in paradise“.
When you travel abroad you need to take a variety of electronic devices to do this that and the other even if it’s just some odd piece of equipment. For me, having been in the computer business for more than 45 years I just can’t get away from computing devices. Currently with me I have my iPhone, my iPad Mini 4 and my MacBook Air. All of them run on batteries.
Previously I never had a habit of just sitting down and consuming a lot of information someplace where I didn’t have my large screen and computer attached to it. Now that happens to be a MacBook Air. My luxurious suite room ($18/day -eat your heart out) has a TV with an HDMI port so I just plug my computer into that but it isn’t the kind of sitting situation where I can comfortably use a keyboard and a mouse so I prefer to sit outside in my private patio, drink some coffee and for the first time in years use my 3 year old iPad Mini 4 to consume information and to use on various applications to do this that and the other, especially email.
I use my MacBook Air for heavier computing such as the development of our family digital museum, extensive emails with attachments, complicated document creation, watching videos and online material in the evening, and doing some fairly extensive financial work.
I thought my iPhone XS would be useful mostly during the commute, which it was, but now it seems to be the most convenient device to do financial transactions and a few other various jobs such as international Skype calls.
So now I wind up charging my phone only once every two days since I don’t use it as much. My iPad fulfills most of my morning news consumption and simple data transactions. It works fine with dictation which helps a lot since typing on these smaller digital devices is time-consuming and not really good for the tendons and muscles. So this iPad needs to be charged up at least once a day. I even have an extra fairly high powered external battery to pump it up while I’m working if I need extra power. In the morning sitting outside without the air conditioner is very comfortable and a lot better on my sinuses. It’s warm outside but when you get used to the heat and the humidity it’s often more comfortable sitting outside and bearing the heat rather than going in and out of air-conditioning.
My MIT colleagues and students bought me an extra smaller battery which I use to power the iPhone when I need to inside or outside.
During thunderstorms, which happen now about every third day, it is wise to unplug my laptop. Trust me! Bad things can happen especially in Thailand where there is no ground ( Earth) used in most small buildings. One thing to note about the HDMI external monitor is some thing I found after I got the MacBook air and had it constantly plugged into the external monitor. Even with your monitor off it drains the battery if it’s connected to the MacBook Air. I couldn’t figure out why it was very very difficult and time-consuming to get the MacBook Air to start up. I found each time the battery was zero. So don’t leave your external monitor, especially HDMI connection, plugged into a laptop if the laptop is not also plugged in for charging. Oh, I didn’t mention just before the battery drained in the laptop because I didn’t have it plugged into a power outlet while I had the HDMI cable attached.
So if you’re traveling extensively I highly recommend making sure you have your devices charged up by the morning and also have some kind of portable battery to carry with you during the day. There are probably many times you will run out of battery power especially the way some of the devices react to touch even if they’re in a backpack, turning on and off, executing applications even when you haven’t touched it. And when that one photo or sound you want to record comes into view or into hearing distance you don’t want to have a dead mobile device. So that’s about “batteries in paradise“. HAVE A NICE DAY!
Khanom Area, in Nakon Sitamarat Province, Thailand
The word hyperbole is from two Greek words. HUPÉR (above) + BÁLLŌ (I throw). So let me do a little throwing above.
When you learn to scuba dive a very important principle is from Archimedes, supposedly, the law of buoyancy. The key is weight. If the weight of the water which is displaced by some object is heavier than the weight of the object then the object will float and we say it is positively buoyant. My additional rule is a very simple one. Humans are basically fish. How do I know that? We are basically neutrally buoyant, which means if we breathe out we will sink and if we breathe in we will float. But as we get older that can change.
When I was 62 kg all the way through high school until I was about 48 I was neutrally buoyant, actually skinny. But then I started eating Philippine food four times a day, lots of adobo which is half pork fat. So I wound up at between 78 and 84 kg. So what happens to all of that pork fat and a certain kind of way we tend to gain weight as we get older? It turns into filler throughout the muscle which we call fat. That is lighter than, less dense then, our general muscle tissue so that tends to change our buoyancy.
How do you survive on the ocean and on the beach? when I was a kid going to the beach our father taught us kids a very simple principle. If you hold your breath and let your body float on the top of the water with almost none of your body under the surface you will float and the waves will bring you into shore That is almost always true with a few exceptions. That rule saved me from drowning at Sandy Beach in Hawaii number of years ago. It took two hours to get back to the beach after I was completely worn out from fighting the current. But I remembered what my father taught me when I was a kid, I floated on the top of the waves and eventually made it to shore. The art of the save was in spending most of my time with air in my lungs so I would float. At that time I was 62 kg and if I had let the air out of my lungs I would have sunk.
Before I came back to Thailand a few months ago I was 84 kg. Through exercise and diet I’ve gotten down to 77 kg. But even with that diet it would be very difficult for me to die in the ocean. If I let all the air out of my lungs I still float due to the fat in my body being more buoyant than the water it displaces. The problem is when I go diving I have to put on more weights to get me back to neutral buoyancy than I did when I was 62 kg back in the 1990s.
So the moral of the story is if you diet too much and get back to your neutral buoyancy state you could risk death in the ocean. Hyperbole? Maybe, maybe not.
By now you know I’m stuck in southern Thailand. In this case “stuck“ seems like a very enjoyable interpretation. One friend in Hawaii yesterday told me Japan might allow me back in soon. I responded, “I hope not“.
I set my daily schedule basically by jellyfish. The second determination is weather. The only thing I have scheduled every day is going to the beach and getting some exercise in the ocean. The jellyfish start to come in at about 5:45 in the evening so I try to get to the beach at about 5:15 to get a half hour swim. The second constraint is whether or not it’s cloudy. If it’s cloudy I can go down to the beach anytime and not get sunburned. And after about 5:15 the sun starts below the palm trees and I don’t wind up getting too much sun.
Two days ago there was absolutely no wind and the ocean was so calm and glass like, some thing I have very rarely seen in my five years on the ocean. you could get your eye right down just above the water line and see all the way along the water to the beach 5 km away. That is a real zero situation to do body surfing in but there are many different kinds of swimming.
Four days ago it rained very hard at the beach and produced a very interesting and beautiful effect on the water. The drops falling on the water bounce off and project silver pillars, millions of them, a short distance into the air producing over a long distance a very deep fog like Haze. And there is some thing especially fun about having rain pouring down on you which is cooler than the ocean water. The ocean water here near the shore is about 82°F (28°C). The inclines are only a degree or two lower.
Here I think it’s a good idea to tell you I hate swimming pools. The chlorine and the other things that come from humans, deposited it in the water, are very bad for humans. On top of that so many people expect swimmers to go in a straight line. I never learned to do swimming in a straight line. Well, I guess I did at the community swimming pool when I was just a kid. But almost all my swimming has been in the ocean, copying the swimming techniques of the otters and seals. That is not exactly straight line, competition swimming. Oh, i just remembered getting suspended from the pool for short periods of time for swimming like a seal.
Sometimes we’re lucky enough to get enough wind so we can get some kind of waves. The beach here in Khanom is a very shallow and gradual slope so it doesn’t really produce the large, close to the beach waves you see in Hawaii, La Jolla or other beaches where the shore slope is greater. So for body surfing this is not really a great beach. However, given the right circumstances it can produce large enough waves to just enjoy and have fun with and get washed up on the beach.
Some people talk about techniques to body surfing. I am not sure i know the formal “techniques”. I just DO IT. What I enjoy is finding the right technique to place the body given a certain wave. It’s not all successes.
I look at body surfing as an analogy to life and how to live. Most of it is about where you are, position and what the circumstances are, the wave. You are in a certain position that is not easily and rapidly changeable. The water is the most massive thing on earth that controls you. If you think you control the water you will die. It is important to find the right position for your kind of body surfing. On top of that you have the choice of wave to avoid. You can either duck under and avoid it totally, you can smash headfirst into the middle of it, or you can let it smash you and roll you into the beach. Those are decisions you need to make fairly quickly. But also given a certain wave there are different body stances. You can put your arm out and try to position yourself to the top of the wave and sort of surf it in. You can try to catch it in the middle and ride it until it breaks, giving you a little bit more pressure towards the shore. You can start at the bottom, go sideways and decide to go under it and skip it or to let it propel you to the top by itself. But even if you go to the top of the wave if it curls too soon it can curl you and smash you down on the beach. It’s about position, decision making and timing. That’s how I see life. So for me, going into the ocean is life. When I was a little kid we would go to La Jolla to visit our grandparents and uncles and aunts. They lived just one street up from the beach and we accessed the beach through a public walkway going down to what we called “whispering Sands“. The sand squeaked under our feet as we walked and that’s why we called it “ whispering Sands“. It’s way south of the Cove.
Every time I got to the beach I had this crazy feeling, very physical. There was a rope connecting me and the ocean and the ocean was pulling me in. There was no way when I went to the beach I couldn’t resist going in. The pull was way too strong. Even if I had to strip down to my underpants I would still go in. But I learned at an early age respect for the ocean is the most important thing. It is similar to the respect we need to have for life. If you don’t respect the ocean and understand it you will die. I have come close to death in the ocean several times. Once was not my doing but the other time was due to a lack of respect, and the mistake was almost fatal.
I have to admit I’ve used a little bit of hyperbole here. What you see in this video is not really gigantic ants, something you might envision from the title, The title I imagined from my childhood similar to “the revenge of the cyclops“ (I don’t think that was a real movie though I do remember the cyclops movie). But they can be very dangerous nonetheless.
Back in the 1990s I bought a Samsung laptop, one of their first, which was really very subpar. No, wait, that’s not the right computer. Delete that from your memory. I put together a desktop in about 1994 with an inexpensive keyboard. One day Some of the keys on the keyboard were not working. I looked around and I saw a constant trail of ants going, where I thought was under the keyboard but was actually a constant stream going inside the keyboard. I took the keyboard apart and I found these itsy-bitsy, teeny weenie pieces of silicon all stacked up close to where the ants were coming inside the keyboard. Those keyboards had a silicone pad underneath the keys that would create the travel distance and “pop back“ function for the key so it would go back into the up position after pushing down. The ants had broken off little tiny pieces of silicon and decided they were important to take back to the nest and I guess before they could get them all out of the keyboard they decided to do a stocking up next to the entrance/exit for another group of ants to take back to the nest. I was guessing they had divided up the jobs between the ants. One would break off little silicone pieces and take them back to stack up near the keyboard exit and the other group would carry the little pieces back to the nest. When I looked closely I saw the stream of ants leaving the keyboard actually had very small tiny pieces of silicone meant for the nest.
So this is where the nomen “monster“ comes from. Last week I had taken my MacBook air outside to work on the patio table and then returned it back inside the room. Later in the evening I noticed ants going in and out the USB-C port and imagined the worst, a repeat of 1994 and the attempted total destruction of my computer. That’s when I went to get this little green poison thing to put by the computer. It worked.
Some of you may think this is a very cruel way to deal with ants but I can assure you, according to the computer world, it was life or death, it was them for me.
I was able to escape California for Singapore on March 12 which was pretty lucky for me. On the 17th I flew from Singapore to Thailand just one day before Singapore shut down flights and Thailand and Malaysia shut down new entries into the country.
As many of you know I am now stuck in Thailand with the only other country available being the US. But I have spent way too much time there and have absolutely no interest in going back right now. Maybe sometime I’ll go visit the national parks.
I had a bank account in Thailand and thought I should probably change all that old, diverse foreign currency into Thai Baht in Singapore, where the exchange rates are good, and take that cash with me to deposit in the Thai bank so I could use my ATM card in Thailand instead of using the debit cards from foreign accounts which incur rather high withdrawal fees in Thailand.
So, going up to the foreign-exchange counter, pulling out my international currency wallet and going through the currencies the exchange company would change for me, which happened to be a much more excepting number of older bills then what a Thai bank would exchange, I was surprised to find that about 3/4 of all the foreign cash I had extra from visits to different countries had exceeded US$1,700. They gave me an envelope with about 55,000 Thai baht and I vowed to make it last as long as possible.
When I got to Thailand I found that the bank account has been closed since the balance had decreased below a certain amount for a certain period of time and they did not allow tourist to open bank accounts anymore in Thailand so I was stuck with the envelope of cash. My hope was to make it last about two months if possible which was the longest amount of time I would be able to stay in Thailand with just a tourist stamp and without a visa.
To my amazement it turned two months a few days ago and I had almost made the cash stretch out to the limit except for about US$60. All of my expenses included hotels, food and anything else I needed. Of course the current health crisis has helped slightly with a decrease in hotel prices, the free use of the motorcycle where I am now and the free dogs and cats at the resort. Since I am the only customer, most of the time, the free dogs and cats for company is very helpful. Let’s hear it for free dogs and cats. Hip, Hip, Horranimals!
We are having some very unusual amount of rain here in the southern part of Thailand, Nakhon Si Thammarat, but that’s not really what this is about. It’s about cats and dogs. Or maybe I should say dogs and cats because the dogs are much more friendly and dogs have become much greater friends than the cats, so the cats come second.
The Place I am staying, I am the only customer now except for an occasional day stopper, has two dogs and three or four cats. I’m not gonna spend too much time on the cats, not only because they’re fewer numbe but also because of what they did to tease my dog, DC, when I was living in Phuket, Thailand. Late at night the cats used to stand on top of the truck and make DC bark for hours on end, teasing him, showing him how they can jump up on the top of the car and he can’t. Total neighborhood mafia.
But I am friendly to cats and with cats if they abide by my rules. I certainly am not going to bend to their will and to allow them to use their evil nature to control and subdue me. But since I already said they ranked number two in my book let me get to the dogs.
Most houses have dogs they keep outside mostly in the front as guard dogs. And most of the people really don’t take great physical care of their dogs so they tend to get all sorts of problems that don’t get fixed especially abrasions and skin problems like mange. In the countryside there are not too many of the small yuppie dogs that actually resemble large rats more than they do dogs. That shows some of my prejudice but then I’ve had some experiences that make me feel that way. The last yuppie dog I had a run-in with i nicknamed football for an obvious reason which I’m sure you can guess. When a dog bites you, that’s the last straw.
Dog with mange The purple is probably some treatment for mange or another skin problem.
So most of the dogs in the countryside tend to be medium size dogs, bigger than a beagle and smaller than a Labrador. That’s what they call the typical Thai dog which has blood lines from several different dog breeds including Ridgeback. But almost all the dogs here tend to be very mild tempered, kind of like the people, with A few exceptions.
Since I have been in Thailand for a number of years (not recently) I have some kind of sense of how to manage the typical dogs kept outside. They tend to be very friendly on the whole and there is a way to manage certain problems such as the motorcycle chasers.
One way to manage motorcycle chasers is to do what I don’t do and not what I saw a European fellow do a couple weeks ago and which I don’t recommend, is to kick at the dog and then stop the motorcycle and harass the dog. Knowing the dogs here tend to be very mild-mannered is the key to knowing how to manage dogs. Mild manner is also the general emotion of the motorcycle chasers. When I get one or two dogs chasing me and trying to bite at me I slow down and stop. The dogs stop pursuing me and sometimes slink away or in some cases just shy away slightly. If I see them slink away then I know they are not going to be easy to get to know. If they just shy away, I turn off my motorcycle, get off and crouch down, talking to the dog and holding out my hand palm upward. Most of the time the dog will come to me so I will pet it and find a place it’s itching and scratch it, and then we become friends. Sometimes we get down to Exchanging cat jokes and that is always hilarious. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard of a dog laugh it’s belly off at the joke about the three cats walking into the bar.
Just a few days ago I slowly passed by a house with a larger Labrador sized dog I made friends with, one that was chasing my motorcycle several times before. The dog came over and greeted me I started scratching her behind ear and places where I knew she was itchy. She proceeded to climb onto my scooter, standard 100 cc motorcycle in Thailand which in other countries is 50 cc (More about that later), and so, well, of course you know this wasn’t going in my planed direction.
By this time the little boy who’s dog it was came out of the house and was trying to talk with me but my kid Thai is not that good so I just said to him, a mistake, “go together“. Since I haven’t been in Thailand for a While, my Thai is a little rusty and I sometimes don’t say everything I mean to say. I was meaning to say “I can’t take her with me“. But all the words didn’t come out. So I think the little boy thought I wanted to steal his dog. Ever since I haven’t seen the dog outside. Well I got the dog off the motorcycle, scooter, and proceeded to the beach for my daily swim.
My buddy on the beach road
That’s kind of the long story of how to manage motorcycle chasing dogs in Thailand.
A smaller buddy
I have two good dog friends here, one small dog and one larger dog. The larger dog is very very friendly, a short hair, so when I help her get that shedding hair out, which is very itchy, she just keeps asking for more. But there are limits to every good thing. Remember what happened to Oliver when he asked for “some more“?
The smaller dog is noisier than the big dog, which is very often the case with smaller dogs, from my experience at least. She’s a very good guard dog but sometimes even the slightest sound, A bird on the other side of the wall, will have her imagining thieves coming to steal her food and massacre all her friends.
This Resort’s Big Dog and Little Dog
I think I made a mistake and took a walk to the end of the dirt road with the two dogs. A couple days later they seem to get into their head that this was going to be a routine thing. But I found out later they normally just walk as far as next door which is a relative’s resort and then come back again. The problem is, even without me, they start going down the opposite direction to the end of the dirt road and encroaching on other dogs territories which means only one thing, mayhem. And now the small dog will walk ahead of the big dog, strutting her stuff and showing how powerful she is. But when another dog comes to clean the territory she runs way behind the big dog. So then the big dog gets into a conflagration. It turns into something like a typical Bar brawl where nobody gets really badly damaged, just damaged enough to feel they protected their precious reputation and territory.
So now I see the owner of the dogs walking the big one on a leash and not allowing her to go in the opposite direction. That’s what tipped me off, I had created an issue. So I just keep my mouth shut and stay friends with the dogs here inside the bungalow resort.
As for the cats, the black-and-white one doesn’t like to be touched but she will come into the room, sleep on my lap, and be content as anything. I like it best when cats are sleeping. We all know the end of the world could happen when all the cats decide to wake up and cause trouble.
The white catThe tabby
The tabby, evidently, has been replaced. She is still here but the owner went to the temple and for some reason wound up with a new kitten that nobody wanted and the tabby became jealous and doesn’t want to be around the owner so the tabby wants to spend time with me. She loves to be petted and held and comforted but so far she hasn’t tried to sleep on my lap. The behavior of the two cats is tolerable and that’s the only reason I write about them. I am not hoping for a franchise hamburger shop to be set up in the small town. Not yet anyway.
To end on a Happy note, “As long as the roots are not severed, all will be well in the garden“. If you know that phrase you are truly an eclectic comedy lover. Hint – nope, not today.
A very simple thing washed up in large numbers on the beach, something called a cuttlefish bone. it isn’t really a bone it’s cartilage on one side plus some other softer substance on the other. But it IS the internal skeleton of the cuttlefish. When the cuttlefish dies this is all that’s left and it is light so it floats to the surface and washes up on the beach.
A Cornell college friend, Francis Wu, told me when he was a kid his mother used these to scrub the dishes. One side of the “bone“ is smooth, hard cartilage. The other side is a softer and abrasive substance. When he told me what his mother used them for I tried peeling off the outer edges of the cartilage and using the softer side to scrub some dishes. It’s not only does an excellent job of scrubbing the dishes it also is a biodegradable substance that can be washed off, taken back to the beach and let to wait for thousands of years to become a new substance.
Don’t you dare kill a cuttlefish to get this bone or I will come after you. Joking aside, if you happen to be walking on the beach and see these in quantity, pick one up and try it out. It’s better than buying plastic and having it wind up in the ocean to kill animals and to degrade into microparticles we subsequently eat.
In the previous blog I described the adventure trying to find a hotel, just someplace where I can sleep at least. During that adventure a few things happened that are kind of interesting and shed some light on Thai culture and business.
The driver of theThe taxi I took from the hotel I was staying at to the hotel at the airport where I had the booking kept talking with the hotel people about hotels open in the next province. I was not quite sure why
he spent so much time talking about it but I soon found out.
When we got to the airport hotel I saw the driver slope about 700 baht to the hotel owner and just after that the hotel owner keep huge prices on the taxi driver, how reliable he was and how much good information he had regarding hotels. I was assuming the payment was for the hotel owner to promote the taxi driver. I wasn’t sure if they knew each other and the payment might’ve been for something else. In fact, a lady who tried to check into the clothes airport hotel the day before could not check in since the hotel is closed and through the discussions with the hotel owner they told me the taxi driver had taken her on an hour and 15 minute taxi ride to the next province to a hotel that was open. So I think the 700 baht was Commission for either taking that lady the long distance to the open hotel where it was for my ride. 700 baht is about half of the taxi fare and a good daily income for anyone in this difficult economy.
Both the hotel owner and the taxi driver kept talking about the 1000 baht daily room charge I might face when I get to the hotel.
During the trip the taxi driver talked about how I could probably negotiate the daily charge down to maybe 650 bud.
When we got to the hotel the hotel owner said the room charge is 650 bud but I asked how long I would stay. When I explained that it depended upon the charge and that I might stay a week or even a month she reduce the daily charge to 600 but. Two days ago I pulled up to hotel booking websites and both of them indicated that the room I had rented was normally 500 but. So for the second week staying here I negotiated the price for the next week. It turns out that taxi driver is the one they use here at this hotel all the time to drive customers to and from the airport which, again, is an hour and 15 minutes away, a 1500 baht fee. Having lived in Thailand seven years I can tell you that the difference between 500 baht and 600 baht which in total was 700 but since the difference was paid for seven days, was a commission to the taxi driver. So you can see how the commissions were flowing.
When I explain what happened to a friend of mine who was a diving customer with me many years ago he kept saying, “oh that’s the old hotel scam”. What he was talking about is when you wind up someplace, not knowing any hotels and having to take a taxi and the taxi takes you to a hotel that usually increases the daily fee in order to pay commission to the taxi driver. That, of course, is one way to look at it, as a scam.
In my situation all of the hotels in the province were closed and the Airbnb were rejecting people as well so there was no place to stay . I did have to pay 1500 baht and another 700 baht for the convenience of being able to go to a hotel that was open in another province. I look at those differently from my friend, based on my experience. I didn’t see it as a scam, I saw it as a convenience, a fee for a very friendly emergency advice in guidance. Some kinds of these commissions I look at as very much like a tour guide for you. And in a difficult economy I was not angry that the airport hotel owner benefited, the taxi driver benefited, the new hotel owner benefited and I benefited. It cost a little money but everybody was happy.
And what about Groves? Well, you might pay some cash to policeman when he catches you in a traffic violation. If you didn’t pay the money you would have to go to the police station and fill out forms and go through a bureaucratic fit process while paying a smaller fine. Paying the policeman is clearly a bribe. But the policeman will try to explain to you that he’s trying to save you time and hassle going to the police station and going through the bureaucratic process and a very friendly way.
When you’re moving to Thailand and your personal effects come to the airport and you have to go to the airport to clean them in customs, you have probably done enough research to understand there is no import duty on those personal items. But you go with a tight friend who knows how to do this process and when the customs officer leaves the office you are currently in your friend will direct you to putting a certain amount of cash in a desk drawer. With the customs officer comes back in the office, he will open the drawer to “get the appropriate forms to fill out”. He will see the cash in the drawer, you will fill out the forms and there will be no duty imposed on your personal effects. This is also clearly a bribe. But in the case with the policeman and the customs officer the amount is not very high and the benefit of getting things done quickly and smoothly it seem to benefit everybody. Everybody complains about the system but it is not really changing. Everyone knows the appropriate amount to pay as if it were a menu in a restaurant.
So you can look at the extra fees being paid as a tip, a scam, a commission, or a bribe. As we say in Thailand, “up to you”.
