Introduction
I have a confession to make.
I’d allowed myself to buy into many of the common stereotypes surrounding Phuket (pronouncedpoo-ket) in Thailand. This was before I had even visited the place to see it for myself. I’d concluded that this city was all about the endless party vibe, the scantily clad bar girls and the overcrowded beaches; anisland mecca for sex, particularly for the lost, lonely and desperate from all corners of the world.
Having been to Thailand many times I’d always avoided staying in Phuket, assuming that thiswasn’t the ‘real’ Thailand that I’d grown to know and love.This destination is a tourist magnet and I thought I’d progressed long ago from being just a tourist in this country.
I’m now delighted to say my misguided perceptions and unfounded presumptions about Phuket have been well and truly squashed. Sure, Phuket is a great place to party, and there are areas where you can go completely crazy and meet random strangers in various stages of undress dancing on top of bars if that’syour desire. But you need to deliberately place yourself amongst it. In fact, the rich cultural experiences on offer far outweigh any of that. This amazing place and its people are friendly, welcoming and unique.
Before long you may even find that it has reached deep inside your heart and established a permanent spot there.
Phuket Island is separated from the mainland by a narrow sea channel and the 660-metre SarasinBridge connects it to Phang Nga province. If you ever feel like a drive to Bangkok, it’s 840- oddkilometres away. Phuket is in the far south of Thailand, closer to Malaysia. It’s a tourist hotspot with 14 million domestic and international visitors in 2023.
I grew up in Albury, New South Wales, Australia. It’s located on the northern side of the Murray Riverwith its twin city Wodonga being on the southern side in the state of Victoria. In my last year of high school,I decided I wanted to be an exchange student and live overseas for a year, hoping it would provide me with some sort of direction once I left school as I didn’t really have any.
I applied to be an American Field Studies (AFS) exchange student.This program involved studyingoverseas for twelve months and having an intercultural adventure: living with a local family; attending alocal school; absorbing another culture; often learning a new language and gaining life skills while making friends; and having a great time. When the letter arrived to say I had been chosen to participate in theprogram, I was full of excitement and anticipation. A whole year away, stepping into the unknown, seemedappealing. I originally selected Japan as my destination, only to be told that Japan wasn’t available butThailand was. This country girl knew nothing about Thailand apart from the fact that the food was spicy.Albury had recently acquired a Thai restaurant, which in itself was pretty unbelievable given the foodchoices in the 1980s in my town were limited to Chinese and Italian.
On 13 March 1989, aged seventeen, I said goodbye to my family and boarded a plane toMelbourne to connect with a flight to Bangkok. I don’t need to reread the diary I kept back then to remember that I left home in a flood of tears.My dislike of goodbyes has stayed with me throughout my life.
I had exchanged several letters with my Thai host family and knew I was going to live inKamphaeng Phet, a town some 350 kilometres north of Bangkok. For months I stumbled over the name ofmy town, until finally I got the pronunciation right:‘Gum-paeng- pet’, not ‘Cam-fang-fet’.
While deciding what to include in this book I found an old box of bits and pieces that I had kept from my exchange-student days. I came across the yearbook that the AFS Thailand exchange studentsfrom all over the world had made. We all contributed one page and wrote about how our year had played out. I was very curious to read what eighteen-year-old me had to say: Thailand is truly a beautiful country,deep in history and tradition from ancient temples to hill tribe people.Thailand and its people have been good to me in my time spent here and I know I’ll return one day to re-experience a bit of my year hereagain.
Once my exchange year was over and I’d returned home to Albury, it wasn’t long before I was ready for my next adventure. I moved to Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, a lively, artsy city with trams running down the middle of many of the inner-city streets, umpteen late-night cafés,Vic Market for freshfood and an eclectic mix of people and food choices from so many different countries. I felt very grown-up and capable as I carved out this new life for myself. I lived in the inner-city suburb of Richmond,worked at an upmarket food hall and coffee bar in South Yarra, and fell in love with all this city had to offer.
I eventually tired of the frantic pace of the coffee bar and making toasted focaccias. I started abusiness degree at Swinburne
University, while cleaning the homes of the rich to provide me with a minimal income. I met a man, not a wealthy one, whom I lived with for the next six years. I continued to study the Thai language on aSaturday morning in a class full of middle-aged men, most of whom had Thai wives or girlfriends.What afun class it was, and our teacher was a posh Englishman who’d married a Thai lady, so we had access to a native speaker.
I travelled backwards and forwards to Thailand on holidays, to study at university and once for a short work stint as a Thai- speaking graduate at a major insurance company. Just as my career was taking off, my long-term relationship ended. All I wanted was to be close to my family and that meant moving toSydney in New South Wales. For the next six years, drifting from job to job chasing the money, I wasdesperately trying to find something I enjoyed. I found myself working as a personal assistant to those in middle management in all sorts of industries. My weekends mostly revolved around where my AustralianRules football team, the Sydney Swans, were playing. The games were thrilling and we went as a family for many years.
Sometime in 2001, reading the paper during one of those football games, I saw an article about online dating. It was a new concept and seen at the time as an odd and somewhat embarrassing way to meetsomeone. I’d tried pubs, clubs, blind dates and desperate and dateless balls and knew I had nothing to lose. Iwent home that night and joined the online dating website, RSVP. I was flattered by the attention I received from complete strangers, but there was one man who impressed me with the written word. We exchanged multiple emails and then my internet provider went out of business. I came home from work one day to find a letter in my letterbox from this man. He’d managed to track me down.
For our first real-life date, I met Joe at Hoxton Park Airport. He was working as a commercial pilotand had flown himself from country New South Wales in a four-seat, single-engine Cessna 172 Skyhawk.(I let him add this bit because how would I know that!) Soon I was enjoying a joy flight over Sydney. Myparents had always told me to be wary of getting into cars with strangers, but aeroplanes? Six years later he would become my husband.
I eventually went to live with him: first in country New South Wales, then in Darwin in the Northern Territory – the Outback, endless expanses of red earth, vast, starry night skies, crocodiles and swimming under waterfalls. Then Joe’s job took him to Canberra, the Australian capital, nestled between Sydney and Melbourne. By this time my family had all moved to Hobart, the Tasmanian capital, 850 kilometres away. Iwanted to be close to them, so Joe commuted between the two cities and we made it work. In Hobart, Ibecame a Commonwealth public servant at the Australian Antarctic Division.
In 2008, things began to get difficult. I was in my late thirties when Joe deployed to Iraq andAfghanistan with the Australian Army. He was on the cusp of turning forty, slim and fit, an intelligent, articulate man who chose his words carefully and didn’t suffer fools. He could turn his mind to most things and succeed. He was kind- hearted, considerate, quiet, loving, loyal and believed in making a difference.He valued his family and friends and wanted to make us all proud.
I will never truly know what Joe experienced in those wars. Yet by September 2009, when he had been home for less than a year, I was living with a man whom I barely recognised. He had become distant,hypervigilant, fragile, angry, incredibly emotional and depressed. He was having nightmares and night sweats, drinking excessively, totally shutdown and unable to get off the couch for weeks on end. This troubled man had broken into a million pieces. I was totally shut out.
Two years later, I celebrated my fortieth birthday in New York with Joe and my parents.The city I’dlonged to visit delivered so much more than I’d believed was possible: Broadway shows; Magnolia Bakery cupcakes; and wandering for blocks and blocks amid this buzzy, iconic city. It was also aconflicting and sad time.
On our return, Joe went straight into intensive psychiatric treatment. We both knew something had to change. We had no idea what the road ahead would look like and maybe that was a blessing.Thediagnosis was confirmed that he had PTSD and major depression. Meanwhile, the angry irrational outbursts continued in private and public over simple things or nothing at all. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t work out what would trigger him. My mate had become a ticking time bomb. I struggled to comprehend how our lives could’ve changed so dramatically. He was forgetful, frightened of the dark,easily startled, constantly fatigued, impatient, wary of strangers, antisocial, unable to function on a dailybasis and often suicidal. A long list of medications was now his friend. He was a mere shadow of himself,often engulfed by shame and guilt.
As his capacity decreased, my responsibilities increased tenfold. My role changed from wife to carer.
Although this book isn’t about my husband, I don’t feel like I can ignore the impact those years had on me. They have undoubtedly shaped me into who I am today. The struggles we all face throughout our lives can be unspeakably cruel. Even now I wonder how we both survived those grim times. I learnt tolive with a level of pressure I never knew existed. I became hypervigilant for situations that I knew he couldn’t handle. There were arguments and tension between us. It was nothing short of life-changing. My health declined at times due to the immense and sustained stress.The relationship that should’ve been joyful and easy became complicated and hard.
We’ve often talked about how on earth we stayed together. To be honest, we don’t know. We think it was due to our strong friendship and genuine love for one another, but even that has been beyondtested.The simple fun stuff can be a big deal and spontaneity is totally out of the question. Things I used to take for granted, like being able to calmly drive in traffic, go to new places to eat or asking Joe to drop into the supermarket for a few things, can all be a big deal and change the mood in an instant. And we still continue to muddle our way through life.
After more than a decade, white-knuckled on this emotional rollercoaster, I knew I needed to dosomething just for myself. I had no idea what that would be.
In 2022, just as the world began to open up again after the coronavirus pandemic, we were desperate for some time in the warm tropical waters of Thailand.This country had become a place Joe and I both enjoyed and we felt relaxed and happy whenever we visited. We seemed to find a level of peace therethat eluded us at home. Despite the risks of international travel at that time, on a whim we booked a couple of weeks in Phuket, having previously dismissed it as somewhere we wouldn’t want to stay. We couldn’t wait to go.
When Joe and I arrived in Phuket, we found the people desperate for tourists to return to their island. The pandemic had been devastating as they relied so heavily on the tourist dollar to survive. The hit they’d taken confronted us everywhere we went. The sight of empty shops and deserted streets and the stories of survival from the locals were heartbreaking.
One afternoon, I was having a swim in the pool at our favourite hotel, The Sarojin in Khao Lak, an hour north from Phuket airport. The staff there have become like family to us. We were joking around together about me coming to live at the hotel and help them improve their English. I’d often chat with themusing my limited and rusty Thai and we thought we could all benefit from some language lessons. Thatflippant conversation sparked an idea that I couldn’t ignore. I knew I was ready to live in Thailand again for an extended period.
I was keen to soak up all that I love about the place and dive headfirst into the language. I’d saved a chunk of my long-service leave and started planning what a couple of months away might look like. Joe wastotally onboard with my idea and made sure I followed through. I returned from that holiday and put myleave application in at work.
Joe and I have a theory that, once you’ve booked your flights, there’s no turning back. I’d like to tellyou I researched and plotted my time away, but the truth is I didn’t. Location-wise I thought it would bebest for me to be close to the language school I’d chosen, but I also wanted some time near the beach. That was about it for planning. Something I was sure about was that I wanted to escape any hint of my daily routine and erase the daily grind.
When I arrived I started capturing my days through photos and words which kind of morphed into a journal of sorts via my Instagram squares. The painfully practical side of me and my foggy brain (thanks to being fifty-two and in the haze of menopause) knew that if I didn’t capture what I was doing each day in some form, I’d forget. It was as simple as that.
I wrote only for myself. I knew that afterwards I’d want to be able to recapture the sense of calmI felt as I sat on the beach alone, feet buried in the warm sand and staring at a golden sunset, or the taste of a ripe mango paired with sticky rice and smothered in coconut cream, or the feeling of the weightlessness of my body and the worries of the world around me evaporating as I floated in the warm, jade-coloured waters of the Andaman Sea. I wanted to be able to smile as I scrolled back through my photos, words and comments onInstagram. I tagged my posts #livinglikeathai. It never ever crossed my mind that my words would find their way into a book!
There was no polish to my writing. It was real and raw as I recorded the ebb and flow of my dailylife, shared my thoughts, my sheer delight, my utter despair and sadness, as well as my interactions, hopes and,inadvertently, the lives of those I met.
Living vicariously through other people’s travel adventures, whether through books, blogs or social media, has long been a favourite pastime of mine. Feeling part of someone’s adventure through experiences generously shared would have me dreaming and scheming of doing the same. I’d imagine the excitement of stepping off the daily treadmill, packing away my everyday routine, travelling solo andletting life rise up to meet me. I never imagined that one day my travels might do that for others.
I’m writing this after having lived in Phuket for a whole 153 days. I still can’t believe how fortunate I was to form genuine and lasting friendships with many wonderful people. Not only Thais but foreignersfrom all parts of the globe with whom I crossed paths and often found myself laughing.
The experiences that seemed to find me during my stay have given me immense joy. This book really came about by accident. After much encouragement by those who followed my Instagram posts, I decided to dip my toe into the unknown world of self-publishing.
You will meet some truly remarkable people in these pages, learn about them and their lives and hopefully gain a sense of the fascinating Thai culture, learn a bit of their language, have a laugh and cometo understand why I have long referred to Thailand as ‘my happy place’.
I’ve not necessarily set out to teach you anything here, only to share with you that doing life differently is possible. There’s so much to be gained from travelling solo and just getting out there and giving it a go. For those who might have the desire to do something similar, trust yourself, dare to dreamand the rewards will be yours for the taking. Don’t live with regret – book that airline ticket or buy that caravan. Just make it happen.
I’ve found the relationships that have come my way have formed on a basis of mutual respect,understanding and laughter. My love and admiration for the Thai people and my happy place has deepenedafter this stay. I’ve had a print on my wall for more than twenty years which says: Enjoy the little things inlife. For one day you may look back and realise they were the big things.
I hope you enjoy some of life’s little things and the doing of life differently in the following pages.
22 February 2023
Hobart–Melbourne–Singapore| Kata Beach, Phuket
Five a.m. kisses from my fur girls, Jasmine, the super-smart black Labrador, and Rosie, the biggest cuddle-muffin chocolate Labrador. Oh and Joe, too.There’s no looking back for me. I dread leaving my girls behindeven if it’s only for a short while. I’d tried to put this out of my mind in the days leading up to my departure.I’d repeatedly told them both how much I loved them and that it was okay for them to sleep on my side ofthe bed. I also knew they’d forgive me for being away, they always do. Thankfully there are now multiple ways of keeping in touch with husbands, but I’d given him the same messages as our girls. I love the anticipation of an international flight. I probably haven’t done enough of them for them to become tedious.Even just getting yourself to the airport after all the prep and packing required for a lengthy time away is reason enough to high-five yourself. I’m now actually on my way.
These next four months all before me to do as I please is liberating and totally foreign. I’ve neverhad an extended break from my working life. I’d like to say that my departure from home has me on some sort of deliberate self-discovery path but that’s not true. I just know I want to do life differently for a while, only be responsible for myself and improve my languishingThai language skills. Nor do I want to think about what’s for dinner each night (hello mental load – theinvisible burden that women often carry when managing not only their own life but also those in their household).
It was 8 a.m. and, as I walked through duty-free, I was offered a G&T by a chatty man selling of allthings Tasmanian gin. I gladly obliged.This simple act was, I believe, the start of doing things differently,although I was oblivious at the time. It was only when I reread my Instagram descriptions that this became obvious.
The flight to Singapore was seamless. I found myself thinking about what these next couple of months might hold while flicking through various movie options and watching the flight tracker.The flight timefrom Melbourne is around eight hours which I find goes quickly.
At Changi Airport, I went straight up the escalators to the Hainanese chicken hawker stall, notbecause I was necessarily hungry but rather because I wanted to check that it wasn’t another Covid casualty.My favourite airport not only had its pretend hawker stalls back but also the umpteen luxury-end shops fully stocked and the browsing and buying public were back in numbers.
When flying from Singapore to Phuket, you no sooner sit down and you’re on descent. Phuket hasbeen the gateway through which we have most often entered southern Thailand during our past visits. The musty smell of the air conditioning that hits me as I leave the air bridge always signals that I’ve arrived inThailand, as do the big smiles on the faces of the staff that are there to provide a warm welcome. I’dpurchased a fast pass through immigration and customs that promised I’d be in a taxi and on my way in thirty minutes.
With my meet-and-greet lady waiting for me as I stepped off the plane, I was off and running with my Thai language. My aim is to use it as much as I possibly can, so there was no holding back. I find you can learn so much about people when you’ve got even a small amount of language here and probablyanywhere you travel throughout the world. I found out where her hometown was, where she studied, how much she paid for rent a month and lots of other bits and pieces. Small talk is useful for me when I start speaking the language again. Such a great boost to my confidence if I can understand the conversation and be understood. She ushered me through immigration and straight through customs.
When my driver arrived curb side, I had my next opportunity to chat. Initially he thought I’d come to teach Thai kids English and couldn’t quite believe I was here to learn their language. We talked about our favourite Thai food, how to tell the time in Thai, how much he loved his country and how good-heartedThai people are. He also told me his Thai nickname. Thai names are impossibly long, but thankfully mostpeople have a nickname or cheu len, which literally translates as ‘play name’. When I came here as anexchange student, my Thai family gave me the name Sumalee: ‘beautiful flower’. Thais love to know Ihave this name and will often call me by it.
The trip from the airport in the north of the island to Kata in the south took about an hour. After the quiet, orderly burbs of Hobart, the bustling, tourist-filled streets of Kata Beach can be quite a sharpshock.The bright lights were back on with restaurants packed, night markets open, locals smiling and street-food carts out and about selling everything from fresh tropical fruit to pad Thai. It was so heartening to see that the place had come alive again.
My brain was fried by the time I opened my hotel room door. By the time my head hit the pillow, I could barely speak. I love seeing how far travel can take you in aday. I also like to know there’s a shower and comfy bed waiting for me at the end of a twenty-hour day.
