Hi Folks,

This is a follow on from the Samui bar owner thread which I started a while ago....

Not so many moons ago, I was skint. Not skint as in "oh woe is me, I'm down to my last 200,000 bt in the bank" I mean S-K-I-N-T.
I'd just come out of a 3 year love hate relationship with the pub that I had leased and to be honest it had left me in pretty bad shape, physically and mentally.
Owning a watering hole in such an environment is a very demanding vocation, you simply MUST get pissed and get pissed I did.

Anyway, the pub was gone, but I remained, barely. The place was full of people like me, wethered souls with deep suntans, swigging from empty bottles of Chang which had been finished half an hour previously thus taking on the effect of a comfort blanket.

My dwellings at the time were pretty dire too. 2000 bt a month in a really shitty part of town. I remember thinking to myself " Why didn't I just stay for 2 weeks like normal people???" Going home was out of the question " How much is a plane ticket????" Anyway, plane ticket money would've been pissed away had I had it.

A friend and I were sitting at a bar one afternoon imbibing weak tea and cigarettes ( he was in a similar situation to mine, actually worse ,come to think of it) and we got chatting to a guy whose brother owned roughly 100 rai and was starting a housing development on the Island. Jokingly ( I think!) , I asked him if he could use a couple of labourers. He responded in the positive and we made plans to meet at his brother's office the next morning.

So, to our surprise, at 9.00 the following morning we were briefed with our job responsibilities. We were told we would be clearing land at 800 baht a rai - "Yep, why not". I think the reasoning behind us accepting was a rai a day should keep the wolf from the door. Basically, we thought we would be mowing the lawn.
We were given strimmers with huge metal blades and a machete each, unaware that we'd be using these tools for the next 10 months!

We started in December. Christmas was spent hacking down the first rai of a 10 rai plot, this took slightly longer than initially anticipated. Firstly, we had to overcome the fear of snakes, scorpions, wasp nests, red ants, monitor lizards, falling cocnuts, falling coconut branches, blazing hot sun, torrential rain and very awkward footing ( we were working on a mountain), then we could get on with the job at hand.
So the first 10 rai of virgin jungle took us a month to clear. Do the maths, thats crap money.

The next few months we spent working with a group of labourers from Issan. Most of them were being paid between 150-250 bt a day and boy could they save it. Breakfast, lunch and dinner normally came from the land. Papaya's, banana's, snakes, monitor lizards (if they were lucky) ants eggs ( they have an amazing way of separating the eggs from the nest) and of course good ol jungle rats.
During these months my friend and I moved into a small house within walking distance from the camp in which the Thai workers dwelled.
Day after day we'd go up the steep roads of the mountain in a jeep with our new friends. Once we got to our work destination, first on the agenda was usually breakfast, which involved one of the chaps searching around for a suitable coconut tree. Once located he'd shimmy up the tree (often 50 foot +) andthrow down our breakie. I became pretty skilled with the machete as far as preparing a coconut went, firstly for drinking then for eating.

The rest of the day would be spent sweating and I mean sweating.....