Category Archives: Work “Eating, sleeping and shopping.” If you ask a Thai to name the country’s three favourite pastimes, this is what they will tell you. “Chatting” (คุยกันเล่น) comes a close fourth. As a general rule, Thai people value relaxing and having a good time. I was reminded of this on our recent visit to Koh Samui. When […]  File this one under: “Not-so-pretty” pictures, and “Jobs I’m glad I don’t have to do.” Just outside Battambang, Cambodia, there is a huge, warehouse-like building where fish-paste is made. You can imagine it, can’t you? Hot, dark, damp, and – yes – smelly. Surprisingly, this place is a fairly routine stop on the day-trip circuits. […]  “By the way, you DO have your passports with you, don’t you?” our guide asked (in Thai) after the van we were in had pulled away from our hotel. At least, that is what I finally figured out she had said – by which time we were already five or ten minutes down the highway. Negotiating […]  What we think we need is so dependendent on what we already have. Earlier this week, my husband and I drove the six-plus hours south from Sydney to Eden, a coastal town in New South Wales, Australia. We are having some work done on a small house we bought there in preparation for our relocation at the end […]  Take isolated communities growing rice and raising cows and chickens in rural Cambodia where few roads reach, and you have a need. Take some rail track in disrepair, a bamboo raft and a small motor and you have a solution. Meet “The Bamboo Railway”: the ear-splitting, bone-rattling, wind-in-your-hair, bushes-in-your-face solution to transporting goods and people […] |
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