Archives for November 2004
Controversy!
The internet + Google + my big mouth (fat fingers) can get me into trouble.
Writing about Thai girls and fat western men, I’d illustrated it with a picture of Andrew Hick’s book ‘Thai Girl’ and made a trite description of it as ‘dire but informative’. To my great surprise, a few days later I received an email from the author himself rightly criticising my comments. Read his comments and my response here.
Lessons learnt: be careful what you write on the internet; don’t make crap comments; be prepared for feedback. I was a bit right, though.
(Thanks to Paul for working out the search phrase probably used – ranked fourth on Google, above the official site, not bad eh?)
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Back!
I’ve been remiss in updating in the past couple of weeks, as I’ve been adusting to the freezing shock of being back in the UK. A combination of having skipped the Indian stage of my trip, spending my mental budget and wanting to come back and see Ben Folds in concert meant that I changed my return flight to late November. (Hurrah for the travel agent who worked out I could catch BA back from Bangkok for no extra charge, a real money saver.)
My last few days in Thailand were spent bumbling around. Back to Bangkok to see some more sights, do some shopping, go to the cinema and also catch up with Nicole, Bec’s sister. She was a fine host who took me to both a delicious Thai restaurant and up to the rooftop bar of the Banyan Tree, surely one of the world’s greatest views from a bar, right up there with pissing on Hong Kong at The Peninsula. Thanks Nic! It was the perfect complement to my earlier encounters with Bed Supperclub and the Freedom Dance Arena in the city’s gay sois.
Minor bodyshock to leave Bangkok at 34 degrees on Thursday evening, and landing to in 3 degrees in London. Even more of a shock to pick up a hire car and have to drive to Kent around the M25 in rush hour.
So, back in the UK for Christmas a little earlier than planned (and now I wish I’d stayed a bit longer in Thailand and gone to some more beaches, as the Ben Folds concert was cancelled. Grrr.). But this is only the end of chapter one, and I have plenty more plans for 2005. Watch this space.
Meanwhile, I’m delighted to say that I’m getting into the swing of not having a nine-to-five job and being more ‘in control’. Highly recommended. I’m hoping to pick up some work in the next couple of months to fund the next steps, but I’m coming round to the idea that things will be more fluid next year and that it shan’t be straight back on the career train when I get back to the UK.
For now – market researcher for hire, excellent daily rates.
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Who ate my cheese?
After two months without cheese, I had a craving. Climate and culture make cheese and bread much harder to find in a Thai supermarket than Pringles or Nescafe, so I had to stick to processed cheddar slices.
Here’s the complete ingredient list:
Cheddar Cheese 81.60%
Salt [NaCL] 0.50%
What’s the missing 17.9%? Tasted like it was plastic.
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Thai girls
I was keen to move down to the beach having finished fasting. Tall palm trees, golden sand and warm shallow water make this a tropical idyll. Cruising down the beach road I chose Lamai Coconut Resort, a series of appealing but modestly priced bungalows on the water’s edge.
Once I’d checked in and unpacked, however, I became uncomfortable. Around two-thirds of the guests were not happy young couples or backpacking friends, but western men and Thai girls. My first reaction was to think ’sex tourists’; my second, to feel uneasy in their company. (Yes, I know they’re women, but they look so young as to be girls.)
It’s low season on the Gulf of Thailand as the monsoon clouds the sky and drops a torrential shower most days. Hotels are half empty but this ugly breed remains. Typically older (and often overweight), but sometimes the same age as me, they tear up and down the roads on motorbikes with a much younger Thai girl in revealing dress on the back.
It’s the blatant commercialism of the relationship, the lack of attraction and focus on money for love, that I dislike. To me, it’s the expoitation of Thai women by western men and I don’t like what that says about me and my culture as well as those who take part in it.
A few years ago Lamai was a quiet village with attractive, simple bungalows lining the beach. (The Lonely Planet delights in telling us that the first two tourists arrived from Bangkok on a banana boat in 1971.) Now, several hundred metres of the town centre are wall-to-wall bars with loud western music, English football and girls touting for trade. It’s the Costa del Sol with sex, a complete contrast to the island calm I’d expected. Other towns on Samui are no different, although by many accounts this is nothing compared with Pattaya or Phuket.
Being a well-off middle class Englishman I cannot understand why these men need to travel 6,000 miles to spend a few weeks with a Thai – or rather, I understand why but cannot see how it gives long term satisfaction. Moreover, I feel sad to see these pretty young women selling their bodies for money, away from their families and traditional Thai lives. Andrew Hicks, in his novel Thai Girl, tries to place this in the context of needing to raise money and hopefully improve the lives of themselves and their families.
Few are natives of Samui, many coming from the Isan region near the border with Cambodia and Laos, their darker skin and slim faces contrasting with the Polynesian look of the native chao samui. Yet their presence is changing the island.
But who’s exploiting whom? During one lengthy thunderstorm I had a long conversation with Joy, the owner of an internet cafe. “Lamai has changed much in past few years”, she said, “it’s sad. These girls come from far away and change our town”. “And I suppose they are sad, too?”, I asked. “No! They are happy because they have money and can spend on things like clothes and drinks. Why do sex and drink always go together? Many men send money from abroad, lots have Thai boyfriend too. Money from Western boyfriend go to Thai boyfriend”. Even if this were just half true, this raises myriad questions about the position of these women in Thai society and the financial purpose of the sex trade. There’s a thesis in it, for sure.
In my snobbish way I refuse to talk to the men and find out more about them and why they do it, but my mind goes back to my first days in Nepal, meeting two Burnley lads on a rafting trip. They talked without bravado about who they worked a few months a year in the construction industry, then spend the rest of the time living like kings in Pattaya with cheap apartments and Thai girlfriends. Not monsters, they seemed like two blokes who’d get out of the cold of northern England and were trying to make a better life for themselves in Thailand, at least for a couple of years.
And then I’m challenged again when I meet Danes and Brits more like me, with families or partners living in Europe, where the wife happens to be Thai. Look at the company director and his wife I met on a Thai cookery course, or the hypnotherapist and his girlfriend working at Spa Samui.
So what is going on? It reminds me there is no black and white. I’m not looking to find an answer, a holisitic explanation, just trying to explain what’s running through my untaxed mind. Still don’t like the old westerners – young Thai – girlie bar thing, though. And I checked into a different hotel.
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Cleaned out
“If several family or friends cleanse at the same time, it’s fun to keep track of the number of feet removed and compare notes. No kidding! It’s at least ten times more entertaining than the average TV sitcom and enormously more valuable. Looking into the toilet and scrutinizing the dis-ease potential, you will be filled with great joy…” – Dr Richard Anderson
“Eurggghhh” – Joel Down, MA Hons, FRGS
It’s over. After seven days without food or non clay-based drink, I have completed my fasting and cleansing and I’m allowed to live again. And to be honest, I’m disappointed. It seems that I might have been healthier than I thought.
I’m not going to go into detail about the ins and outs of it, nor provide a day-by-day account of mucoid plaque and lymph. Let me just give you a picture of what it involves.
The Spa attracts a diverse group of people. When I first arrived those already fasting were rather cliquey and I didn’t have much contact with them; predominantly overweight English northerners and Australians, judging by their physique most were fasting for the potential weight loss. Later in the week, more people arrived and I met a younger mix who were, like me, curious about the potential for detoxification rather than (just) losing a few kilos. They ranged from a young osteopath interested in setting up a similar venture in England, through recruitment consultants atoning for regular overindulgences, to a Staffordshire yob living in Pattaya (the sex capital of Thailand) who’d heard about the principles behind the programme and had become an instant convert.
The principles behind the fasting programme were the work of ‘Dr’ Richard Anderson (I think he is a real doctor, to be fair) and introduced in his book ‘Cleanse and Purify Thyself’, although the ideas have been around for aeons. In essence, it is argued that until the industrial revolution we tended to eat unprocessed foods in simple form, e.g. a bit of rabbit, an apple or some bread, at different times. Nowadays, we combine lots of food groups and predominantly eat processed foods that inhibit digestion and poison the system. These toxins are present throughout the body, from the liver and kidney through to the intestines, where they build up as something called ‘mucoid plaque’. (Google that and see what comes up; if you find some pictures and notice how it’s unlike anything you’ve seen before, you’ll know there’s some truth in this.) His solution to help regain balance is fasting mixed with a ‘cleansing’ herbal mixture. Reducing the demands of the digestive system, it is argued, allows the body to devote energy to clearing out those toxins and shedding that plaque.
Of course, it has some other effects including relatively fast weightloss (why Simon Pegg did it, if you know who he is) and, as Channel 5’s notorious Celebrity Detox demonstrated, can generate emotional as well as physical change (Kim Wilde’s experience), be a source of cheap jokes (Richard Blackwood’s experience), and continue your status as a C-List celebrity (Tamara Beckwith’s experience).
Before starting the seven day fast one is expected to complete a ‘pre-cleanse’ of several days, eating just fruit and salads, avoiding fried food, carbohydrates, caffeine and alcohol etc. However, my ‘pre-cleanse’ consisted of regular beer and thai curry, a rich food blast in Bangkok, double hamburger and chips on Sunday night and just a fruit salad on the last day. I was expecting trouble.
Having been shown a ‘motivational’ DVD about the founder of Spa Samui, at 7am on day one we took our first detox drink. A combination of two spoons of bentonite clay, two spoons of physillum husk and diluted fruit juice, I was dreading this part. Clay! We’re not meant to drink clay! When you’re a kid you get told off for eating dirt, and now I’m paying $260 a week for the privelege of drinking muddy water. Thankfully, it did not taste too bad at all and slipped down okay, although we were reminded to drink it as quickly as possible ‘before it sets in the glass’ and follow it with a large glass of water to force it down.
From this point onwards we were to follow a strict programme of drinks, pills and colemas. Five drinks a day, 31 pills and two flushes. The herbal pills were a mixture of things to help scrape the insides clean, and things to give a hint of nutrition. Although they tasted a bit wholesome, they made it down every time, although after 237 in a week I will gladly never take medicine again.
It was not quite like being in prison, or more rightly a mental asylum, although the routine could become restrictive if wanting to leave and have a look around the island.
For me, the original attraction of the programme was the clear detoxifying impacts described in various articles I’d read, and reinforced by what the fat old fasters I first met were telling me. The talk was of flu-like symptoms and terrible headaches, followed by much greater energy levels and a feeling of good health. Plus, of course, interesting outputs from the other end, too. I was ready and waiting for the illnesses, and wanted to feel like I was being made better. No pain, no gain. Better out than in.
Now, a few words about those colemas. I’m told the rationale of these is to ‘flush out the toxins before they are reabsorbed into the blood stream’, rather than any fetisihistic or time-wasting reasons. They were certainly no fun, although I did have a good chuckle as rather than ‘practicing deep breathing, meditative techniques and listening to relaxing music’, I listened to the entire two series of On The Hour. To answer your questions: surprisingly, no; yes, every time; 16 litres; yes, but I’m not going to show you here.
Despite the encouragement shown in the quote at the top of this entry, I have nothing noteworthy to report here, nor any measurements. One look was enough, thanks, and I was not getting my hands dirty. Although those two years at Thames Water did finally turn out to have a use.
By the end of day one, I was still feeling fine, and not even hungry. Disappointed, I fell asleep and expected to wake with terrible sensations the next day. Instead, I felt fine, even better in fact, and spent the rest of the second day with nothing more than a very slight headache. Day three, surely, must be the bad one. I’m paying big money here folks, I WANT to feel ill! I want to see those toxins expelled from my system through every orifice, every pore. But no, I felt a litle tired of tablets and pineapple juice but otherwise good. Yes, good. Damn it, what was going on?
It was only later that day, when I met a couple of a similar age who’d just completed their seven day fast, that I learnt with disappointment that I may have no ill effects whatsoever. I might get through this without one itch, without a single sneeze.
So soon the boredom set in. ‘Get through tomorrow’, I told myself, ‘and you’ll be more than half way there’. On the morning of day four I reminded myself ‘only three more days after today’, which in my mind became twisted to two more days. It was encouraging to see each day marked on the whiteboard in the ‘detox centre’, but as the week progressed I became increasingly obsessed. Not with food – I hadn’t been hungry at all, and wouldn’t be even after the fast was completed. No, I was focusing on eating. And choosing food from menus. Supermarket shopping. Digesting. Ordering a beer. Drinking a beer. And another. Sitting in pubs, sitting in restaurants, sitting on the sofa drinking a cup of coffee and watching the TV.
Stop for a moment and think about how much of your day has been, or will be, spent planning eating, eating, and tidying up after eating. Breakfast… making a cup of coffee… preparing lunch, perhaps going to the sandwich shop or visiting the supermarket… afternoon snack… a pint on the way home… making dinner… eating dinner… washing up. And then think what you would do if you were on holiday by the beach. Nothing much to do except read your book, a bit of sightseeing, hanging out and eating and drinking. The highlight of the day.
Yet I could do none of this! Reading a book, sure, sightseeing, yes (but not when you’ve got a schedule that keeps you tied to your hotel), watching TV, okay (but there is only one channel). But no eating or drinking. As the week progressed, the days dragged on and I thought more and more about what I’d do, where I’d go, what I’d eat when I finished.
Meanwhile, there were no exciting symptoms or outputs to demonstrate that big things were happening. A session of remarkably intense Ampuku massage – how can one woman put so much force on my shoulders? how can she generate so much PAIN in my colon? – shook things up a bit but there was nothing that would make the text books or get me a medal in a mucoid plaque competition. But surely I could last the seven days?
On day six I made my Big Mistake. It was Jason’s fault. A jovial American management consultant living in Bangkok, he’d started the fast on the same day as me. A shared snigger when the colema mix was described as a ‘cappucino’ (it’s coffee based) in the instructional video showed he wasn’t taking it too seriously. He kept to his room most of the time, but when I met him on that afternoon he confessed that he’d got on his moped the previous evening and took off for Burger King in Chaweng, the next town up the coast. “‘I had it all worked out. I was just going to get onion rings – they’re vegetables, right? I was halfway there before I thought, ‘what am I doing?!’, and turned around. But I stopped outside McDonalds in Lamai for a couple of minutes and just looked inside. Didn’t go in though. But it did look good“.
Why was he putting these thoughts in my mind? It was no good. I’d hired a jeep that day and had spotted a Tesco Lotus supermarket about 10kms away. I knew it was the wrong thing to do, but I went there and went shopping. Oh, the beauty of those endless aisles. I didn’t buy much: a small packet of Pringles, some Tim Tams, some sweets but also fruit and fruit juice. Yep, those were something to look forward to when I finished the fasting. I could resist the temptation. Sure.
And that night I did. I sealed the carrier bag, hid it in my rucksack and had another detox drink. Come the morning of day seven, however, I found that Jason had finished a day early. The cheat! And then I did the sums… I could finish that afternoon… and I could eat that evening… and that would only be half a day different, right? And I didn’t feel bad, or different, or brilliant, so the main detox effects where finished. And it would only be half a day difference… 12 hours… okay, that’s it, I’m breaking the fast today.
I did. I’m sorry to say I gave in to temptation and didn’t make the full seven days. I could have waited just a little longer – I wasn’t hungry, after all – and done things properly. But instead, my trip to Tesco Lotus had put temptation in my way.
We are told that ‘breaking the fast [breakfast, geddit?] is as important as the fast itself’. That I should eat only raw fruit and simple salads for the first two or three days, followed by lightly steamed vegetables later in the week. I could introduce eggs and other proteins ‘as an evening treat or morning energy boost’. Well, there’s the right way and there’s my way.
My breakfast was three Tim Tams followed by a light salad of Pringles. Lovely. Although, Tim Tam fans, the Thai ones are not as good as the Australian ones.
And my bowels have not muttered a word of complaint since.
Would I recommend it? Well, whilst I take some of the emotive rhetoric surrounding the principles with a pinch of salt, I think there are health benefits of fasting and I’m pleased I (nearly) did it. The fact that I wasn’t hungry at any point suggests that fasting for a relatively short period does no harm. I don’t feel incredibly energised or destressed, nor have I ‘become closer to God’ or been through an emotional rollercoaster. But then I had already been relaxing for several weeks and was a relatively sane person beforehand.
What I have learnt is that, um, there are lots of things trapped in us that should be released and our modern way of living can have its drawbacks. I’ll probably think a little more about what I eat, and how much, although there’s no way I’ll fall into veganism or begin a 70% raw foods diet. And not eating, whilst not difficult, is very very dull.
On the plus side, I take the lack of vigorous physical reaction as a vindication of my previous lifestyle, and look forward to going back to coffee, beer and pizza – in moderation. And I’ll eat more fruit (but separately from main meals, people, as combining causes digestive problems. Hold on, perhaps I have been brainwashed!). Plus I’ll still be eating meat. Listen, you veggies, what do you get your Vitamin B12? Having met an osteopath, an occupation whose entire focus is on the body and nutrition, I was convinced by his arguments that we’ve evolved into carnivores and that healthy, well prepared meat is an essential part of the diet. By coincidence The Ship was his London local for three years and he also craves El Vergel steak sandwiches, so he must be right.
But would I recommend it? Read the literature, manage your expectations, assess your health and lifestyle. It really is a personal choice. And I’m glad that I’ve done it. At least it will make interesting pub ammo.
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“Clean Me Out”
Ever since reading this article I’ve been curious about whether there were any health benefits from attending the seven day “clean me out” programme at Spa Samui. It’s time to find out as I checked in today and will begin tomorrow.
I’ll leave you to work out for yourself what the course involves, although whatever you guess is probably right and included in there somewhere. Heck, I even have to stop eating for seven days!
From what I’ve read it’s going to be pretty tough, not only as the toxins leach out but also, judging by some comments in the guest book, the staff may not be as supportive as they could be. Still, will be interesting to see what other nutters have signed up too.
I’ll avoid posting photos but will try and let you know how it goes once I’m over the worst of it. Wish me luck. Yuck!
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