Big bills, bad food and mean women

       Things continued on at the usual Thai pace, slow. We built a tree nursery and ordered tree grafts for next years planting. Money was going fast, with more bills everyday. Workers, scrub cutters [weed whackers]  fuel, poison and I knew this was to be on going for many years to come. Having learned from my first tree planting, it would be different next time. I would higher bulldozers to clear the land, again not cheap. Add to that we were living in a up market hut, sleeping on a board on the bare concrete floor, no running water. Thailand may very well be a hot country and a cool shower is a pleasant relief from the heat, but getting up in the morning and throwing a bucket of what felt like ice water over your head is not what soft white men are used to. Some up grade to living standers was needed, more money. It would only be last year 2010 when we started tapping rubber for money that I would have the luxury of a hot shower.
       Food was another unforeseen expense. You may venture down to your local Thai take away and think that Thai food is very good, not so in a village. One of the first things I noticed was the lack of bird life in the village.  Any unwary bird who landed in long rife range was shot dead and in the pot. If it walked, crawled, swam or flew it was food. Frogs, snails, bugs. snakes, pretty well anything that was not poisonous would be dinner. This required a daily trip to Buntharik and the one restaurant that served eatable food. Even my wife found much of the food uneatable and hot. Over the years I have grown accustomed to much of the local food,but have to say I am still unable to sit down to a plate of fat ground dwelling bugs fried up and eaten with sticky rice.
      The time had come to end our stay in the village and head back to the old world. One week of R and R on Koh Samui was to be our last holiday for many many years.
      Back in good old Australia and the number one priority was employment. I didn't want to return to the Prison Service full time. I knew if I left again there would be no getting back in. Even though I had set my sights on life in Thailand, things can go wrong and an exit plan needed to be available. Here again fate played her hand. A friend who had become the Governor of the female prison asked if I was interested in working there. I explained that I was hoping to return to Thailand as soon as the bank looked healthy. He had the solution, seems that the women's prison had a very high staff turn over and that I could go on call as a casual Prison Officer. As a casual you can make yourself unavailable for up to a year and still remain on the books. It was perfect, the place was so short staffed that I often worked 6/12 hour days in a row. To be fair it wasn't a bad place to work, if it was not going to be your life, just a means to an end. I didn't care about the politics etc, just got my money and left. 4 months later we were back on the plane to Thailand. This is how we continued over the coming years, fly in, work and fly out. All was good, then the first baby was born, things would change.