Alex Gunn [Gunn - Two Years in Chiang Mai

Two Years in
Chiang
Mai

By Alex Gunn

Two Years in Chiang Mai
Copyright 2018 Alex Gunn

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informational storage or retrieval system without the expressed written, dated and signed permission from the author.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to give up everything and move to a totally unfamiliar place the other side of the world and never go home

Table of Contents

Introduction

Alex and his wife Chrissy decided that if they were going to change their lives and move overseas they had better do it before their two small children got too old and too settled.

They gave up good jobs, put their house on the market, gave away lots of stuff, said goodbye to friends and relatives, found new homes for their goats and moved from England to the other side of the world. They chose Chiang Mai in northern Thailand where they had no friends, no contacts and no income (and no goats).

Chapter 1
Saying Goodbye

Its a very odd thing leaving your country behind, especially when the country you are moving to is the other side of the world, completely different from your own, where you have no contacts, no connections, no job and two young children constantly saying, why are we going to Thailand?

Life seemed to be trundling along fine, I was working at the local university and Chrissy, my wife, was running a small charity and a busy counselling practice and our two boys were enjoying school in the local village.

After work and school and at weekends, we all happily toiled away on our small holding in Devon, England, tending to a large orchard, a small herd of goats, some ducks, chickens, some excitable Guinea Fowl, a load of very boring quail and some very lovable geese. But, at the back of my mind Id always wanted to be one of those people you hear about that suddenly up sticks and make an exciting sounding life for themselves somewhere else. The trouble is that Im more like one of those people you never hear about that has a quiet but comfortable life, works hard in a good job and retires early to see out his days bumbling about in the garden muttering about aphids in the green house.

For many years though, Id secretly been observing expats at foreign airports smugly waving off friends and relatives back to cold, grey northern climates. They looked comfortable and relaxed, like people who were not about to go back to the horror of credit card bills, Monday morning and real life. They were going to stay on holiday. They would smile and wave through the departure gates before turning and walking back to their car and driving back to their perfect villa to have one last swim before walking down to a little harbour side restaurant, where they would enjoy a bowl of steamed mussels, freshly baked bread, a chilled bottle of white wine and a few jokes with the waiter, with whom, of course, they were on first name terms. I wanted all of that as well.

Over the years this scenario had been enacted in my mind many times; the drive back from the airport, the villa with the pool and the harbour side restaurant. All it needed was a few actors to act it all out. It seemed easy enough. I could learn the lines, follow the stage directions and acquire the confident moves. Everyones done a bit of acting at school, how difficult could it be? Loads of people had done it and if we didnt like it, we could always come home and spray the aphids in the green house.

We often sat up late after the children had gone to bed, talking through plans over the kitchen table. I was thinking Spain and my wife was thinking Chiang Mai, Thailand. So, Thailand it was!

We tried to sell our house for a year before we gave up. The original plan was to sell the house and use the money to fund our new life. Instead we would have to rent it out, use the rental income to cover the mortgage and use our overdraft facility to fund our new life. Not exactly a perfect start.

Undeterred by this minor set back we found ourselves a perky little chap in a local letting agency who rather alarmingly found us a tenant within a week.

After a year of talking, planning and false starts, suddenly the pressure was on to actually do something. Dates were firmed up and we had to pack up, sell and give away furniture, organize shipping, decorate for the new tenants, put up new fencing for the new tenants horse, notify all manner of banks and organisations, install a new oil tank, re-lacquer the wooden floor, say goodbye to bewildered friends and relations, hold separate goodbye parties for our children, hand in our resignations at work, make emotional leaving speeches, hug lots of people, apply for weird sounding visas at the Thai Consulate in Hull (of all places!), register separate companies in England and Thailand, hire a company to make a web site and find homes for forty eight chickens, twelve geese, four goats , two hysterical Guinea Fowls, eight ducks and loads of boring quails.

I began to feel like a bough of a tree being pulled out of position and forced into a new unknown direction. The familiar underpinning network of my quiet comfortable life was being uprooted. I was so far out of what might be described these days as my comfort zone that I would need a very small scale map to find my way back.

It wasnt particularly unpleasant, just strange. It felt that overnight everything familiar was replaced with things from someone elses life; attending design meetings for web sites where we all talked utter nonsense but everyone pretended it was meaningful, emailing Thai lawyers who had unpronounceable names, discussing something called Search Engine Optimization with an Internet Consultant who looked about twelve years old and writing him cheques for huge sums of money. It all seemed nuts.

You would think that our children might have found all the upheaval difficult and the reassuring parents would have to steer a true course through a sea of uncertainty. But, if anything, it was the other way around. Our kids couldnt wait to get going. They said a quick goodbye to the animals, swapped email addresses with their friends, made sure they were all up to speed on Facebook and Twitter and all the other social media things, packed a case with computer games and Pokemon cards and were ready.

Meanwhile I was moping about in the field saying goodbye to my chickens and goats, pruning the orchard for the last time, watching the sun set over the rolling Devon countryside and wondering what an earth we were letting ourselves in for. I could hear the distinct sound of wood splintering as branches and boughs were being forced out of position and extensive root systems that had taken a lifetime to establish were ripped from the ground. This bit hadnt been in the stage directions.

Finding homes for all the animals was more difficult than you might imagine. We gave a lot of the hens and other assorted poultry back to Dave, annual winner of the local sheep throwing contest and proprietor of the animal centre where we had bought most of them (except the highly strung Guinea Fowl that we won in a local fair...farming people can be very cunning). The goats eventually went off to Keith The Builder our good friend and indeed, a builder (what you want to go off to Taiwan for anyway) but the geese where a lot more problematic.