Day 5.
I'm sure we've all experienced something like this: rush to get plane - arrive at destination - get through immigration - beat queue for best taxi - get stuck in traffic - begin fuming.
In a way, it doesn't matter the destination, or the cause for the trip (holiday/convention/expropriating charity funds), we can't help taking our mind-sets with us and if our mind-sets live within a rushed, panicky 21st-century city then we see our destination through these ridiculous glasses.
So when the rattly overnight train from Bangkok took an hour and three-quarters longer to arrive than scheduled, or that the minibus driver from Trang was 27.39% more over-cautious than I would be on the country roads to Satun, or that the speedboat broke down as we left the harbour making us return to the quayside where we occupied the next hour with offerings of fruit juice not made from fruit, or that the remainder of the cramped hour -and-a-half journey, or that the resort is still under construction, or that the wi-fi is intolerably and excruciatingly slow, then... I have to remember, we're on Thai Time.
Thai Time, like Emirates Time, Mexican Time or Kenyan Time, is when the request/task takes twice or even three-times as long than it would in London, New York, Tokyo or Hong Kong. It's about frustrated, tutting consumers for whom time is money and for whom the wasting of it is nearly as criminal an act as beastiality or treason (these, of course, can be thoroughly justified given enough money).
Actually, the litany of woes above and any other complaint normally associated with an -insert country here- Time is nothing more a perceptual thing. Yes, it may take a little longer to get all these things done, but they will get done - eventually. So Thai Time is really an unhelpful imaginative comparison between expectations of time.
Here I am sat on a beautiful beach on a 'difficult-to-get-to' island in a 'difficult' country, but these difficulties are only mine. Everyone else seems perfectly contented with the way things are. That's not to say things couldn't be improved, but it's their business. I'm not here to 'save time', but to spend it.
And if it takes the magic fingers of the wi-fi that wrap around my i-Phone hours and hours to transport this simple bloggy nonsense to the world beyond these shores, then maybe that's a good thing.
