The musings of a prairie girl who followed her heart to Phuket, Thailand a decade ago and still wonders how she got here. Number of kids: 2. Number of times/day I teeter on the brink of insanity: countless.
I'm planning to stop blogging for a while. I prefer to keep this blog light and fun, which is unfortunately not reflective of my current state of mind.
I notice that most of my posts over the past two months have been about death or near-death. Death is on my mind a lot I guess, especially over the past two weeks having had a friend lose her son and another friend leave her young son behind after succumbing to a long battle with an illness.
Don't really see the point in continuing this on a half-assed basis while I focus on other things for a while to reevaluate, renew, rejuvenate, etc, etc.
Got some good stuff in the queue, but lack the motivation to do a proper writing job of it. Maybe more will come when the knots in my stomach release and the tangle of my mind unfurls.
I am ok, for anyone concerned. More than ok -- very, very blessed and thankful for everything and everyone I know, both offline and online.
My second car was a Pontiac Pheonix. A hand-me-down from my older sister, who wangled it from my dad, who had bought it from his friend.
She had power steering, power windows and aircon!
She was my rediscovered freedom after being car-free for two years.
Her seats were luxurious brown velour. She had a wicked Pioneer stereo with an amp, that dad's friend had kindly left in when he handed over the keys.
With her, I cruised the mean streets of Victoria, BC, carefully avoiding running over elderly people crossing the road with walkers.
I once packed her full of everything I couldn't sell or give away from my apartment and drove to Calgary with my sister, our last little journey before I embarked on a year's student exchange to Thailand.
We detoured down to Seattle then through Idaho and Montana, feeling like criminals when we crossed back into Alberta and the US border guard pointed to the haphazard boxes and the brown vacuum cleaner poking up from the back seat, asking if we had anything to declare.
I may or may not have used her back seat for sordid purposes; I will not reveal.
She earned me a $100 speeding ticket on my way from somewhere on Vancouver Island down to Victoria with my friend.
The cop asked "Why were you speeding?"
I said "Well, you know how it is, sometimes, when you just get going along..."
He said "No." and wrote out the ticket.
The muffler had a problem for a few months so she was loud like a motorbike but I was too lazy/poor to get it fixed. Until the guy upstairs in my apartment building who was sort of stalking me mentioned that he could always hear when I was coming or going.
That day I took it to the repair shop in Esquimalt near the Navy base where I knew the guys there would 'overlook' the fact that her gas tank modifications weren't quite exactly legal at the time and would just fix the muffler, no questions asked.
She was ugly. She was brown. Yet she was glorious and she was mine, all mine, for a year or so during university.
She was the last car I ever had in Canada. And probably the last American one that I'll ever have (my affair with Toyota is looking set for life).
Bye bye Pontiac. You served me well!
Don't have an actual photo of my Pheonix handy but she looked something like this:
If you're going to kick the bucket in Bangkok, you might as well do it in a mysterious, salacious and spectacular way, I reckon: Carradine death 'erotic asphyxiation'
If things had happened slightly differently, we'd have killed a man.
We took the kids out for lunch yesterday and on the way home in the car both of them fell asleep in the back seat so we decided to drive around for a bit.
O mentioned there was a place on government land on the edge of town he used to go to as a child that had huge dinosaur models and a swimming pool. He wasn't sure if it was still there so we went looking for it.
We were driving along a road with little traffic. A guy on a motorcycle was driving in front of us slightly to our left at the edge of the road. I was looking left and right, in search of the entrance or a sign to the dinosaur place. O was driving fairly slowly.
Whap!
The man on the motorbike flew suddenly to the right, while his motorbike fell to its side and spun into the middle of the road.
O hit the brakes and we managed to stop, a few feet before reaching the sprawled man on the road in front of us.
I looked to the left and saw another smashed motorbike off the road, just inside the entrance to a yard, with a man and a woman beside it, dusty and dirty and scrambling to get up on their feet.
They'd clearly been coming out of that yard entrance fast and somehow slammed into the other motorbike. I didn't see the actual smash, only the flying man and spinning motorbike.
The motorbike man looked only slightly injured and as he stood up his full attention was on his motorbike and the other fallen riders.
He didn't even see us. If he'd only peeked over his shoulder he would have seen us right there in the Toyota Corolla, our faces agape.
He had no idea how close he was to death.
We stayed in that spot for a few moments, but when it looked as though everyone was ok we looped around the man and his motorbike and drove on.
We chattered nervously, in shock.
"Woah, imagine if we weren't looking for that place and were driving at normal speed!"
"Would've run over him for sure."
Several possibilities spun through my mind, all of them grim.
We were very, very lucky.
The man, even luckier.
We drove on, forgetting about the dinosaur place, thinking about what to do next.
The office of a volunteer rescue foundation just happened to be nearby. The main task of the foundation is to scrape car and motorbike crash victims off the roads and get them to hospital, or to the morgue. It is next to a Chinese temple.
We stopped there and I waited in the car with the sleeping kids and O went inside and made a donation, also making a visit to the shrine to plant three sticks of incense and bang a gong.
Many people come to Thailand on spiritual quests, perhaps taking refuge in a temple where they ponder the questions of life and death with benevolent and wise teachers guiding them.
For me, the biggest realizations, the biggest lessons here have always come on the roads, out in the thick of it.
Being conscious, being present, living in the moment, accepting what is. If you can't make progress with these Buddhism basics while driving here, you won't achieve them anywhere.
Smashed glass, the screech of rubber and a couple of inches of road provide a kind of instant enlightenment and a renewed appreciation for life; a reminder that we're all on the edge.
Thankfully, flying motorbike man wasn't sacrificed in this particular, weird spiritual trip.
A dull ache in the pit of my stomach grows as I read about the shocking sudden deaths of two young women travellers, one Norwegian, one American, on Phi Phi island.
The cause of their deaths is still a mystery and there's a lot of conflicting information coming out. One of my colleagues at Phuketwan.com is on Phi Phi now trying to get to the bottom of it.
My first visit to Phi Phi was when I was 22 and our group had the time of our lives.
Can't imagine what their families and friends are going through right now.
This week: Michael Jackson I display my favourite, completely randomly selected video of the week from YouTube at the bottom of this blog. Scroll Baby Scroll!
It's pronounced "pooh-ket", not "fuckit". Its population is roughly 30% Chinese-Thai, 30% Malay Muslim Thai, 30% Buddhist Thai and an assortment of nutjobs and wackos such as myself. It's a great place to come for holiday, but I'd rather you not because there's enough traffic here already, thank you very much. It's a long way from Canada.
I'm planning to stop blogging for a while. I prefer to keep this blog light and fun, which is unfortunately not reflective of my current state of mind.
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