Brazil welcomed me with cold water, a gun-shooting outside my hotel, and fairly mediocre women who seemed to want a serious relationship as soon as they jumped into bed with me on the first date. Thailand and wider Southeast Asia, with its quiet, sophisticated culture stood worlds apart from loud, expressive and aggressive Latin America. The culture shock I had experienced on my first visit to Asia was nothing in comparison to what I went through on my move from Thailand to Brazil.
Lost and hopeless in this strange new world, I e-mailed a friend (those paying attention will recall a girl near the beginning of the book, who was supposed to join me on my Southeast Asian experience, but instead opted for Brazil), and three days after arriving in Sao Paolo, I was at her and her husband’s house in Guaibim, a small village on the other side of the bay from the famous city of Salvador de Bahia. I spent about a month with them as I tried to detox and clear my mind after my Thailand experience. I spent another month as a tour guide, leading two groups of travelers around the state of Bahia.
I spent a lot of the time thinking about what I had left behind in Thailand, in particular the relationship with Piam. Any lingering remorse of conscience soon disappeared after hearing that she had called my mother back in Ireland, claiming that I had taken a number of bank loans in her name and left the country. She wanted my family to pay off the alleged loans. It hardly needs saying, but a farang in Thailand is such an inferior creature, that he or she would not be able to take out any bank loans, and certainly not in someone else’s - a local’s - name. Her desperation allowed her to track me down eventually, which of course was the opportunity to ask for money. It was during these exchanges that I finally accepted that I had made the correct decision in leaving.
I was not finding life in Brazil easy and was relieved when my next series of assignments took me to Ecuador, on the other side of the continent. I flew there well in advance to take a one-month long Spanish course, which was supposed to help me pick up local chicks, as well as make my life and survival easier on this continent. I liked Ecuador much more than Brazil, but had a significant problem in that the local girls didn’t live up to my standards. There was one exception and her name was Claudia. Unfortunately, she had been married before and had a child. I was not ready for an “This is Ecuador” after everything I’d experienced in Thailand. Hearing the legends of the alleged beauty of Colombian women, I had no choice. With Peter, my new business partner, we came up with 15 ways of making money on the Colombian coast and travelled overland to the land of cheap cocaine. This is when “This is Thailand” began to be written.
Everything I’d heard about Colombian women was true. As soon as we crossed the border, the number of beauties per capita increased dramatically. Even the smallest godforsaken town like Pasto had more stunning ladies than Quito – Ecuador’s capital. One of them, Karen, a resident of the coastal town of Barranquilla, stole my heart.
Unfortunately, none of our money-making ideas worked, partly due to Peter’s sudden and unexpected depression. Money was running out, employment opportunities in Colombia were not optimistic and I started to see panic in my eyes whenever I looked in the mirror. When not spending my evenings with Karen, I got drunk with my young, Colombian flat-mate in a local park. Every time it happened, I bored him with stories about how much better Asia was than Latin America. Once, I pissed him off so much that he bit back at me: “If you hate South America so much, shut up, pack and go!”
So I did. This time to Malaysia, promising Karen that one day we would be together again. I taught English for a month at a private school in Kuala Lumpur and worked as a Business Development Manager for an outdoor adventure company for another month.
Then another great opportunity fell my way. After casually sending out some e-mails, one travel agency in Burma responded and a month later, I was flying to Rangoon to become their Product Manager.
It’s been almost a year since I moved to Rangoon. Karen joined me more than six months ago (as promised) and it seems that she’s going to stay at least for the foreseeable future. While in Myanmar, I began writing a new book.
Thank you for reading,