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Death by shock
It has to be acknowledged that there was a certain irony in being in the “secret” room of a DVD seller’s shop in Phuket checking to see whether the copy of Sacha Baron Cohen’s movie, Bruno, we were buying was of satisfactory quality. Even more ironic when a portion of the video was a trailer about the perils of buying pirated DVDs and the potential problems with reproduction quality, not to mention theft of royalties. We blamed the movie theatres in London for our need to buy a copy, caused by their not showing Bruno at suitable times when we were there. Midnight screenings were just not for us. We felt OK though because we were assured that, at around $2.80 a copy, these DVDs were the genuine article and not fakes.
The reason we needed to check the quality of DVDs from this store was that, on a previous visit, someone who cannot be named for legal reasons purchased about six movies only to find that The Pink Panther 2 appeared to be filmed on a handycam during an actual theatre showing. Not only was the film’s quality as stale as second-hand cigarette smoke, the only properly audible sound was the theatre audience laughing at what we presumed were the funny parts.
Still, this is Phuket where anything goes including, it appears, our camera and Marty’s flash sunglasses which were in our luggage when we left Bangkok but absent on arrival. It is the second camera to go west here, the first, Kaelene’s Pentax, simply died one day on the beach.
Little has changed in Patong, our Kiwi bar is still there post-recession although it has made a major concession and now displays a couple of large Australian flags (we’ve made our displeasure known), the refurbished Hard Rock Café, due to open last February, is yet to unfasten its doors (though progress has been made and it looks not too far away), markets, street vendors and tuk-tuks still clog the streets, as do time-share salespeople the latter of which (all white tourists, generally working illegally), are pests not to put too fine a point on it. We quickly adopted our previous stance of telling them in English that we don’t speak English and for some curious reason this seems to do the trick, they don’t persist.
Still circling the streets are the utility wagons with Thai kick boxers on the back urging people to come to their next show (at around $NZ60 to get it we won’t be there), also there is the man you can pay to have your photo taken with his iguana, the bar girls (with their sing-song calls of hello, welcome), the massage shops and those tourists. This would be a great place without them, and then there are the beggars. They were about on our first day back but, unusually, gone the next having been "unmasked" by Patong’s "top cop". The local superintendant told The Gazette that among the regular beggars was a one-legged florist, a man who is usually accompanied by his fat daughter and dog, a drunken man with white hair, an elderly but healthy aunt and a man with short hair and a tiny body. The tiny body beggar, posing as blind, can make as much as 30,000 Baht of $NZ1,200 a night. It must be unlawful here to make so much money.
The Andatel Hotel ($NZ40 a night including breakfast and unlimited internet access) is home for the next week or two, it is down the other end of town than our previous accommodation so there are new experiences. The call to prayer rings out, we hadn’t expected that but there are a number of mosques in the vicinity and a quite large Muslim-Thai population. This is their patch, and they are campaigning to have one of the streets near here declared alcohol-free as a symbolic gesture of some sort, we are not quite sure what.
We lunched at the appropriately named Paradise Beach with an ex-pat journalist Alan Morison and his partner Khun Oi who together run Phuketwan, a news internet site with a focus on Phuket. Alan is an old-fashioned newshound who pushes the boundaries almost too far in terms of stories and has campaigned against the abuse of Boat People by the Thai Navy and exposed scams perpetrated against tourists. His is bold, gutsy and refreshing journalism and he told us he probably gets away with it because the authorities don’t quite understand the criticisms he makes, although he qualified that by saying that he is pretty careful not to go too far. Phuketwan is worth a read, even from afar, and Paradise Beach worth a visit but be warned. The road in and out is so steep that, in April, when Marty and Kaelene tried to get there on a hired motorcycle, it didn’t have the necessary fortitude to make it up the hill.
What also hasn’t changed are the Australians who still swagger about as though they own the show even if the Europeans and now Chinese try to monopolise at certain times of the year. Phuketwan revealed that three Australians have died during the last week, but the story that caught our attention was of the man who took his last breath while involved in what was described as a tryst with two Thai women while his unsuspecting wife was in a hotel elsewhere on the island. A senior Phuket policeman provided what we thought a very medico-legal explanation: “People come here and drink too much; they perhaps take Viagra or other drugs, then get very excited. Thai women are beautiful. They are much more beautiful than most western women. In this kind of situation, some men simply suffer shock.'”