Hello dear steemit Community, today you will read more about my experiences on the elephant island Koh Chang. My money from Germany had arrived so that we could finally start to put our plan into practice.
We wanted to open a restaurant where there should be served the in Thailand very popular dishes from my partner's home region. How to cook she learned at a young age from her mother and she still enjoyed it. But before it could start, however, a lot of pioneering work had to be done.
A suitable property we had already found. This was a small piece of land, just across from the spot where we currently lived. It was right on the road, which of course was essential for our project. On the property, there was an old hut on stilts, where the landlady occasionally let forest workers sleep.
Behind the property, there was a cashew nut plantation, which then ended into the jungle. The landlady's house stood a little beside us and else there was only pure nature around us. One of the most beautiful beaches on the island, where the tourists stayed during the high season, was about 2 km down the road. Anyone who drove from one end of the island to the other, and everyone did, would inevitably pass our restaurant.
To come to an agreement with the landlady hadn't been difficult. She was the sister of the manager of the bungalow complex where we stayed. At that time, most of the islanders had no idea that tourism would be booming on the island in a few years, so rent prices were still quite low. We leased the property for 5 years, with the option to extend the contract for another 5 years, including a little increase in rent.
And so we moved our few things from the bungalow, on the other side of the street, into the hut on our rented property. Everything we needed for life, from a mattress and cooking utensils to a refrigerator, we had to shop in the city on the mainland. It was a whole day's work until we brought everything back to the island by boat and went over the mountains by pick-up taxi to the other side.
Luckily there were a power line and a functioning faucet, which was mounted on the outside of a post of the hut. But as there was neither a toilet nor a bathroom, we had to shower outside of the hut in the traditional way. Thereby we had to scoop with a container water out of a barrel and poured it then over the body. This usually does not happen in full nudity, but rather men have wrapped a cloth around the hips and women around the upper body. To use the toilet we had to go to our landlady's house.
I had got used to this simple way of living quickly. I haven't worn a watch for a long time and my T-shirts and shirts were also nearly unused. We got up when the sun was rising and when the sun was setting again, we knew it was time to go to bed. We didn't have a TV and there were no other conveniences. At that time, there also was no internet at all on this island.
After my partner had already had the idea to sell the chicken legs and was also very helpful dealing with the landlady, I thought it was up to me now to find someone who could build the restaurant for us. For this purpose, I turned to another German who told me that he had exactly the right man for such cases. He mediated the contact with an elderly long-haired Thai and we agreed on an appointment in his house.
When I arrived there the next day with my partner, I was a little surprised that his wooden house was built from all sorts of parts that didn't fit together. The whole thing looked a bit like the Asian version of Pipi Longstocking's Villa Villekulla. At this time we didn't know yet that the master builder had stolen the individual wooden components from his various construction sites.
Always keeping an eye on the costs, we planned a foundation and a walled kitchen with a large transfer hatch into the dining area. Otherwise, the dining area should be open on three sides and designed in the island style with a lot of wood and on top a thatched roof, which was also typical for the island. Next, to the kitchen, a bathroom/toilet combination was to be built, which could be used by us as well as by the guests.
We agreed on a fixed price, a payout interval according to construction progress and an approximate completion date that we had set before the start of the main season. The first payment I had to make in advance because the builder didn't have any money to order the material. When all this was done, he appeared with his construction team, which in the beginning still consisted enough people so that they could have finished before the start of the season.
But as so often in Thailand, everything turned out to be very different than it was planned. You will find out more about how we had trouble with the master builder and how we started our business with a semi-finished restaurant in the next part of "19 Years Southeast Asia".
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