Why I will never be an expat

Thailand. The word instantly conjures images of long stretching white sandy beaches intimately meeting an eternity of blue ocean. Lush green stretching tree tops laden with coconuts perfect the idyllic setting. The ‘land of smiles’ is wholly applied to every imagined indigenous inhabitant. A holidaymakers dream, a honey-mooning couple’s glorification of their union, a young intrepid traveller’s guarantee of his peer’s envy and praise is what Thailand represents to many. What if this was rose-tinted vision? What if information could be shared right here to tear that image of perfection into a bundle of tattered parts? Would you read further? Perhaps so, in order to defy these words, or perhaps to nullify the envy you have held in your soul for so long having never visited the ideal.

I have seen this land in films and photographs. I have heard of this land in traveller’s narratives and honeymooners groans of ecstasy, but I have also ventured further than the tourist Mecca of Koh Tao and Koh Samui. I have been inside the trenches and fought for this ideal. The battle is over and the war is sadly lost. All around me I see emaciated and mange-ridden dogs. I see my own laziness and unconscious Eurocentric ideals when every verbal exchange is laden with incomprehensibility. I feel an anger burning inside as mopeds consume the roads like the Thai ants on a discarded mango, only with less organisation. I feel the rage multiply with every visit to the water closet that is ill equipped to deal with the flushing of toilet paper and results in the necessity of a toilet-side bucket to hold your used soiled papers.

Having lived in a Nakhon Sri Thammarat in the southern province with the same name, for a period of six months, the readers might forgive me my hyperbolic rant at what to most is paradise. I raise these issues largely because of the ego that exists in most travellers and in the minds of people who decide to live in foreign language speaking countries for an extended period. These people who, despite all their sunburns, their bodies riddled with mosquito bites, their inability to have solid bowel movements on account of their new diets, continue to proclaim the virtues of travel are not only reprehensible, but are superfluous to a society. To be in such denial to maintain a pretence of an open-minded adventurer is as exhausting as it is shamefully dishonest. I say balls to you. I imagine that to most this is not a wonderful and enlightening account of travel, but are dishonest ego-stroking tales of the self-development through tribulations really what you want to hear.

“I ride my moped like the Thais now. Yeah on the wrong side of the road. I don’t even notice it now. Oh I can’t stomach western food anymore, its so gluttonous in its ingredients and portions.” These are utterances, that when heard should cause the unfortunate listener to reach for a firm, hard and hopefully blunt object and proceed to beat the speaker into a state of a bloodied pulp.

I am over the top I agree. But what I am trying to communicate here is that these places we go to are interesting and a source of new and otherwise unfulfilled experiences, but they are not ever better than what we know. If you don’t believe me try ordering a burger of non-descript meat wedged inside a sweet bun. Sacrilege.