Year: 2009

With 2008 being so dominated for us by holidays–four months of it were consumed by our trip of a lifetime around South America, not to mention a two week suprise trip over to Oz in February–it was inevitable that we would have to pay for it eventually. And so 2009 has been as defined by the lack of time off as 2008 was by living it up on steak and Malbec.

Much as I might once have considered Aus to be a holiday destination, the daily grind of delayed trains and desk-based work is much the same as anywhere else in the world. Somehow we had reached September with just weekend breaks in Sydney and Adelaide under our belts (and I’m not particularly proud of the second one). It’s fair to say that we were hanging out for our two and a bit weeks in Thai paradise.

Unbelievably it has somehow been nine years since I was last here. Much has changed, of course, but then so have I. Gone are the days when it’s possible to get by on a couple of hundred baht a day, staying in guesthouses for 50 baht a night. But then I’m not sure I’d want to now even if I could.

It’s fair to say that we haven’t skimped on our accommodation options this time.

The first of our hotels, the lovely Twin Palms resort in Surin beach, turned out to be our favourite. And one of the benefits of travelling in the low season is that when we arrived there at 9am exhausted from our overnight flight from Melbourne and sweating profusely from the humid 30 degree day that was waiting for us, there was a room ready for us to check straight into. We were in the pool by 10.

And what a pool: the resort’s best feature is the massive central swimming pool area. Our room was one of the “lagoon” rooms that open directly onto a smaller section of it that loops around the edge of some of the rooms. This means that you can step down from your balcony and straight into the pool, then swim around to the main pool. Aside from the occasional other guest swimming past your window it’s like having your own private pool outside your door. All hotels should be like this.

Another aspect of travelling here in the low season that brought unexpected benefits is that although the weather gave us its fair share of the rain you would expect this time of year, it was still humid and hot enough to swim, just without all the people. And it doesn’t really matter if it’s raining when you’re in the pool-the bottom part of you is already wet, so a bit more from above–even a torrential downpour–doesn’t make much difference.

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At breakfast on the second morning of our stay we were briefly entertained by listening to the middle aged man with the strangely ugly face and terrible dress sense loudly lecturing his prettier, younger, and more pregnant wife about how this wasn’t “the real Thailand”. She listened intently as if this was some kind of profound insight, as if he was the first to notice that your average Thai doesn’t spend his days lounging around in 5 star luxury with twice daily maid service, a minibar and room service on call. Perhaps we’d have been more convinced of his commitment to finding the real Thailand if he was actually out looking for it instead of sitting at the buffet breakfast in his garish tourist T-shirt and brown deck shoes lecturing the room about it…

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Another place where you won’t find the real Thailand is Patong, the garish beach and bar district a few kms away from Surin that is filled with neon, gogo girls and drunken western tourists. It’s the kind of place that males you think that Al Queida might have a point.

We went down there for a few drinks to see for ourselves. Who knew there were so many fat sweaty old men in the world on the hunt for young Thai girls… It really is quite unpleasant, and by the time we’d overheard the two middle aged Germans behind us negotiating a sex transaction with the woman in the bar and seen our fifteenth guy who could barely walk being led down the street on the arm of a Thai girl young enough to be his granddaughter, we decided it was time to finish our drinks and catch the next tuk tuk out of there…

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After three days in Surin, we moved on, first to Phuket Town where we stocked up on dodgy DVDs and T-shirts at the night market, and then across the Andaman Sea to Koh Phi Phi, where our bungalow on the beachfront was waiting for us. On the way over, we passed Koh Phi Phi Leh, the smaller of the two islands and the location 10 years ago for the filming of The Beach, a story on one level about the traveller’s ideal of trying to find that isolated untouched idyll.

Ao Maya, the beach where most of the filming took place was swarming with speedboats, longtails and packed with more people than we have so far seen on a single beach on the trip so far. And this is the low season…

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But we loved our quiet little resort over on a private beach on the eastern side of the island. Especially as a modicum of internet research beforehand had warned us that as you are so isolated the resort will overcharge you for everything, and that the average food at their restaurants isn’t worth it. However, you can sneak out of the back of the resort through the staff exit where a small village with some excellent cheap Thai restaurants awaits. We found this on the second attempt, after eating lunch on our first day in the staff canteen by mistake (although at 35 THB each for lunch it was some of the cheapest and best food we’ve had so far, and it meant we found the staff supermarket, which was the cheapest place to buy beers on our bit of the island). Thank you Tripadvisor…

We took said beers back to our bungalow, where we would sit each evening as the sun went down enjoying the view with a glass of Singha. On our penultimate night we even had a wedding to watch as it was taking place on the small grassy area between us and the sea. I’m not sure if the brochure advertising the wedding package would have specified that you might end up with two drunken holidaymakers sitting on their deck watching your special day with beer and snacks, but we enjoyed it anyway…

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The final part of the first half of our holiday–before we head East tomorrow to Koh Samui to join the rest of the gang for the real wedding we have come all this way to see–has brought us back to Phuket to Kata beach, where our suite is up on the hillside looking down onto the bay, and where the pool I’m sitting beside tapping this away on my iphone is calling me to go for a dip…

It’s been an interesting experience so far following the fortunes of the England cricket team from deep in enemy territory.

On the one hand, I will get to see far more of this Ashes series than I would have done had I been in the UK, as the time difference turns something that would otherwise have happened while I was at work into prime evening viewing–the 11AM start for the first test translates to 8PM over here. Much to Sal’s chagrin I can watch the first two sessions right up to the tea break and I only need to stay up until half past midnight, which isn’t difficult at all given that I’ve done far worse since we’ve been here in my attempts to keep up with the Everton.

Even better, the TV coverage is the same as I’d be watching back home, as neither SBS nor Fox Sports, the Free to Air and Pay TV broadcasters with the rights to show the games, have bothered to send over any commentators. Thanks presumably to the Global Financial Crisis (TM) we only have to put up with about 5 minutes of pre-match Stuart MacGill awkwardly stumbling over his words while chatting to a couple of ex-Aussie players in a studio that I assume is in Sydney before the action cuts across to David Lloyd, Ian Botham, Mike Atherton, Nasser Hussain and the rest over in their commentary box. I’m surprised that the Australian Cricket loving public are happy to put up with this state of affairs, but it certainly works for me.

On the other hand, I do have to put up with lashings of (generally good natured) abuse from the locals…

At least this time, when my boss brought up the subject on Monday morning, I was able to turn around and say: “hey, I thought we were supposed to be the whingers?” as the post-match newspaper reports over here have predictably concentrated not on the game itself but on the allegations of time wasting. Funny how there’s always some kind of excuse whenever the aussies fail in some way: no matter that they had plenty of time–40 minutes–to get that vital final wicket, or that they had the whole day to bowl us out and failed to do so, the real reason for Australia’s failure to win the test match was because the physio and the 12th man were out on the pitch holding things up for maybe all of 5 minutes. The way Ricky Ponting calls it, you’d think it had been a five hour pitch invasion.

So roll on Lords. And hopefully this won’t be the only opportunity I’ll have this year to laugh at Australian cricketers desperately making excuses for the result…

Flicking through the TV guide that came with the Herald Sun (that would be Rupert Mudroch’s Melbourne tabloid) this weekend, I was amused to see that the final episode of Australia’s Next Top Model on cable channel Fox 8 (that would be one of Rupert Murdoch’s TV channels, on Rupert Murdoch’s pay TV network) listed as this week’s “Must See TV”.

Apparently:

The shining light of the show this season has been [host Sarah] Murdoch. A model of composure in the hosting role. There’s no chance she’ll suffer the same fate as her predecessor, Jodhi Meares, who lost the gig after succumbing to stage fright.

Hmm. Sarah Murdoch. Yeah, I reckon her job is probably fairly secure…

So I’m about half way through Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News at the moment. It’s engrossing and depressing in equal measure to read Davies’ detailed insider account of everything that’s wrong with the 21st century mass media–an industry so dominated by commercial pressures to fill space as quickly and cheaply as possible that its journalists are reduced to what Davies calls “churnalism”: the regurgitating of press releases and stuff copied from the internet and the wires, with neither the time nor resources to fact check.

Of course I knew that this sort of thing went on, but I never really noticed just how widespread a practice it is. Now I see it everywhere. I can’t read anything on the news websites without looking between the lines for the source and the vested interest that planted it there.

And yes, I expect that if I pick up a copy of the shabby freesheet Mx, our local evening version of Metro, that it will be mostly recycled PR, stuff they’ve copied off Twitter and very little in the way of actual journalism, but I didn’t expect to start to notice so much of this stuff in the pages of supposedly reputable news sources like the Beeb and the Grauniad. Davies quotes research into the UK quality papers over a 2 week period that showed at least 60% of all stories in the “quality press” “consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and or/PR material”. Adding on articles where the researchers weren’t sure of the source (another 8%), and those where some original content had been added to the PR/wire copy (another 20%), they were left with just 12% of stories where all the material had been generated by the reporters themselves.

Those are some depressing statistics.

In the middle of all this, just after reading the bit of the book where Davies describes how time-poor journos sometimes just mass email out to PRs asking for content, I arrived into work to find an email asking me to prepare a couple of hundred words on one of our new products for a New Zealand technology magazine, and one asking for the same for an Australian industry publication. I fully expect both my replies to run largely unaltered in the respective forthcoming issues.

On a lighter note, on the subject of not checking your facts, I was highly amused to see some quality Australian journalism escaping onto the airwaves of Channel 9 last week, via Stephen Colbert. (The ABC’s ever excellent Media Watch had this to say on the matter.)