A Thailand Scam, Plain and Simple
The first time I went to my girlfriend at the time’s village was 6 months after I met her. I’d just moved to Thailand as a new retiree, 51 years old and living off investment income. I had loose cash available to enjoy. And after I’d been in the country for a few months, I already got a retirement visa and bought a motorcycle. That was one of the things I was looking forward to the most: jumping on my Africa Twin and touring the country.
I was still living in Bangkok, so I didn’t really have much of an opportunity to ride the bike after I bought it because that would entail having to push through nearly an hour’s worth of bad traffic to get out of the city just to enjoy it. I’d been on a few trips, but nothing substantial yet, but it was on that bike that I went with her up to her village.
She was 28 years old when we met, very mature for her age, and I met her on a dating site. I found out quickly that while she worked a proper job, she said she was also looking for someone to help supplement her income and become a couple. You can look at that in two ways, I think. You can look at it in one way like she’s deliberately trying to find someone to get money from, or she’s looking for someone who she can love and respect and give herself to, and in return, she will be afforded a better quality of life by being with this person.
I saw it as a mutual understanding that was mutually beneficial on both sides. I didn’t see it as one sided. I didn’t see it like she hates me, she doesn’t like me, she only wants my money and she will act. I didn’t see it that way. I didn’t expect it to be that way.
Getting to Know Her
But after I met her, I liked her obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t have done anything. First thing that I wanted to make sure was that she didn’t have any kids. I found out she didn’t, and that was perfect. And I started seeing her more regularly. When she’s with me, she’s kind, considerate, sweet, and very undemanding.
I found out in terms of her intellect, she was quite slow. I mean because this happened a while ago when I’ve had other experiences since, perhaps not in Thailand, but in other similar countries I would learn that even the most basic of things, many of these girls are so far removed from the ability to do it. But I liked her naivety. I liked her simple demeanor and how she didn’t seem to have any interest in the outside world or even how her own country operated. No interest in politics or the government or anything really. Very, very basic.
But I had no issue with that because while I’d been married in the past and been divorced and my ex wife was quite similar to me in terms of mental capacity, we still had conversations together such as about politics or important topics. I never felt having a conversation with my ex wife about something like that was very fun. I preferred to speak with friends about things like that. Maybe that’s just how I was brought up by my parents. My mom was stay at home. She seemed to not have any interest in things. She did, but it was my dad who was the one who concentrated on the bigger picture, supporting the family. And my mom’s job was just to be the glue to keep everything together. And that’s how I feel relationships work best.
So when I’m with my new girlfriend after a few months of seeing her and I asked her if she would like to take things to the next level and come and live with me in my place when she said yes and she’d been there for a while I just asked her what she thought about a particular thing happening in the country at the time. This was all over the news, all over the English news and as far as I was aware all over the Thai language news, and she just said she didn’t know what I was talking about. She had no idea about things.
And I was attracted to that because it appeared to be very traditional. It appeared to be that it wasn’t her job to know about things like that. It was her job to be the glue in my family unit, which would be me and her if we took things further. Sorry to drag on, but this also has its negatives. For example, when we did something this was further on into the future she had no idea about it. I had to do things that she should have done, but she couldn’t because she was just not mentally capable. And I would learn though that this was very common, especially from people from similar areas as her. 90% great. 10% was like, “What am I doing with someone who can’t compute basic ideas?” But that’s beside the point.
The First Trip to the Village
The first time we went up there, I was quite serious with her now. We were talking about marriage, but that hadn’t actually been decided on yet. She was on the back of the bike. I was driving up and it was really fun to actually get out of the city for an extended trip. She was from a town called Loei. Quite a remote part of the country. It borders Laos and it’s kind of on the border of Isan and northern Thailand. It still is in the Isan region, but it was a really scenic part of the region.
We were taking things slow, stopping off along the way. And being a guy who likes to speak to other people, I always like to look for the expat focused bars in a particular town. And even in some of these places in northeastern Thailand, there were a few very concentrated parts of the city where there were bars and places where expats hung out. Maybe the bars were expat owned. And I was speaking to people and loads of guys were there. They’d built houses in the village. They came there and it was their entertainment place.
That was my first introduction to just how common building a house in Thailand was. The thing was though, the guys there were the ones who were there saying they did this and they were still there. Therefore, for them it was still working okay. But I was only hearing one side of it. I was only hearing how great it was, how amazing it was for them because they were still there and living there. Therefore, they were either going to continue that or something would go wrong for them and then they wouldn’t be able to live there anymore. Perhaps something I should have considered, but I didn’t.
The Road North
We would drive through small villages on the bike as we’re heading further north, and you’d be going through a normal village with normal Thai style houses, and then you noticed this big place, and my girlfriend would tap me on the shoulder and say, “I think farang build this one.” And I’d look at it like this majestic house surrounded by a lot more humble abodes, and it was very interesting.
You’re probably going to absolutely hate me for this, but I kind of pictured a very close friend of mine who grew up in Zimbabwe. He was growing up there when everything was going to hell there basically, and he talked about their estate and surrounding it on the land were more humble places. Until his father got decapitated, life there was good. So, I’m not saying one way or the other, but for whatever reason, I will never know that’s what I was thinking about when I saw these houses, amazing houses, and it was like they were the bringer of civilization. Don’t hate me for that. I’m just telling you how I felt.
I found that part of the country to be incredibly beautiful, flat for most of it, and then occasionally there’s the outcroppings. I wouldn’t call them mountains, but of rocks. The first thing I thought about was when you see these big hills or mountains and again they’re not really mountains because they’re small but if that was in my country, that would be prime real estate. Houses dotted around, there’d be lots of things there. Yet there were never houses in places like that. There were always temples stuck on the top of them, and it intrigued me. I wondered why it was like that as opposed to how I would have loved it to be. Imagine living somewhere like that the amazing views. But it was just a Thailand thing that you learn about.
This was still in the center of the region. When we arrived in her province, then the mountains start to appear. The really famous one, Phu Kradueng, was one that stood out. And we actually drove up to the top and stayed at the place the night before we went to her village. That got me thinking even more. I suppose I shouldn’t drag on about it, but you saw people living up on that mountain, and I’m thinking this would be an incredible place to live. Yet these were a particular group of people maybe hill tribe you would call them. They had the right to live there, but they didn’t own the land because it was un ownable being on a mountain. And I’m learning lots of Thailand as I go along. And I found it intriguing, yet I can’t quite understand it.
The Village
After that night, which was incredible very cold as well because we were quite high up we made it to her village, which was in a more traditional Thai style area, quite a way from the mountain, reasonably close to the border with Laos. We set off from Bangkok, boyfriend and girlfriend. I was happy with her, really liked her. She seemed to have the same kind of feelings for me. And by the time we arrived in her village, after such an incredible trip, we became engaged.
I found her family to be friendly, just your typical rural Thai kind of people, steeped in tradition, clinging on to the ways that things had been done for generations, and happy just to exist. I found the contrast between the people who lived in the cities the Thai people that lived in the cities, or that were from the cities was huge. They were like a completely different kind of people. Yet, my fiance at this point, who was from there, was a mix of the two. She was from there, but she’d been exposed to big city life.
I think after I’ve done a lot of soul searching ever since what happened happened, I think it was that bringing together of two worlds for her and for other people in similar situations that caused these types of things to happen. If I was in a relationship with someone who came from a city or close by to a city, they would be a lot more aligned to my worldview and opinions. Not the same, not identical, but similar. Yet, if I met someone from a village who had never left the village or never left their province, I would have understood what they were and who they were and what mattered to them because that’s how they acted.
The problem was though, when I met my girlfriend and I didn’t know this yet but I met her in the city. She behaved and looked like someone from somewhere like that, yet inside she still was a village girl who didn’t hold the same kind of worldview as the people who came from the city. I’m not talking about opinions in terms of nationality or other things. I’m just talking about the worldview of how things happen. It was confusing because on the surface you had a modern, forward thinking individual. They appeared that way. They dressed that way. They looked that way. Yet inside they were still the person connected to where they were from and still held those beliefs. Perhaps where survival was much more of a basic instinct as opposed to anything else. I might be overthinking this, but I always like to think about things, and that’s how I thought.
We spent a week in her village. I love to be able to rough it. For me, it was roughing it. Now, I’m not saying that in a way to show any kind of disrespect. It was a very peaceful location. Although they weren’t connected to any of the hill tribes, they lived around the mountains. You could see the mountains in the distance, and it wasn’t very built up. It was scenic. It was idyllic. If you look at the map where this province is located, you could kind of go west and head up to northern Thailand and that region, east and explore the rest of Isan, and south down into Phetchabun and further towards Bangkok. It seemed to be a perfect location to explore Thailand from many different directions you could go and see such different things.
Meeting Her Family
We spoke with her family at length. She was acting as translator, and we arranged when we would go and get married, what it would entail, and I did everything that way, but that was going to be in about 3 months. We left and headed up to Chiang Mai before taking the long way back to Bangkok through Mae Hong Son and then down across the road that stretches down by the Burmese border and made our way eventually back to Bangkok after an incredible time.
We actually registered our marriage as soon as we were able to. I got all the paperwork for that, and we went for the ceremony 3 months later. And at this point, although I don’t like to use the word love, I felt like she was my soulmate. When we went out together, if we stayed in, we stayed together. If she got a call, she always spoke in front of me. And I did the same. And I trusted that what we had was a real relationship.
I was 51 years old might have turned 52 at this time, but that’s how old I was. I always hit the gym. I might have been bald, but I wasn’t one of these guys that walks around with a vest and a beer belly hanging out. I wore presentable clothing, clean shaven, so I wasn’t a slob thinking this beautiful Thai girl was attracted to me. But even still, I didn’t think she was necessarily attracted to me in the deepest sense, but she was just like you would want any girl to be.
I should mention when she said she worked a normal job and was also looking for someone never actually found out what that job was. I asked her and she just said she sold clothes with friends, and I left it at that. I didn’t really care because I was no prude. I always cared more about what happened when we were together in the future, not what she did before. Because what she did before was not in any way targeted to hurt me. So it didn’t matter.
Life in Bangkok
I was living or I suppose I should say we were living in a unit on the Thonburi side of the Chao Phraya River. I loved that part of the city of Bangkok. But the more time I was in Bangkok this is after we returned from our trip the more stressful it seems just being there. If you wanted to go anywhere, it’s not just a question of going there. It’s planning what time of the day to go to avoid the worst traffic if you need to go in a taxi. It’s planning again knowing what time you should go on the skytrain when you get there are you going to have to battle your way onto the skytrain, fighting for the minimal amount of space because they’re always so full? Then you get off the skytrain and you can’t walk at your own speed because there’s such an amount of people all around. By the time you make it to the mall, if that’s where you’re going maybe to watch a movie or have something to eat the very act of getting there has tired you out. Not necessarily tired because you’re not fit, just tired mentally at the struggle of going from A to B.
It might be like that in every city. And although I’ve spent time in many cities, I didn’t feel it was the same. I kind of felt that 20 or 30 years ago I would have loved that chaos, but at that moment in time, I’m getting bored of not being able to go from one place to the other at my own pace. Little things like you’re going on an escalator. You’re meant to stand on one side. I mean, common courtesy says you stand on one side so somebody that wants to walk can walk past you. But you get people pushing in front of you as quickly as they can to get into the queue, only to stand still next to each other on the escalator so you can’t get past.
You could go into 7 Eleven and there are 100 people in there, three counters, and instead of having one queue that filters into each individual counter whoever queues first goes first; people queue individually. Then you find yourself behind someone who’s paying a million bills. I just couldn’t, as time goes on, exist in a situation like that because it was more difficult than working used to be. I found just existing in Bangkok this is after only a short amount of time was more difficult than it was when I went to work. It was so much more stressful. I’d spent time there in the past, but as a holiday it’s different. Very different.
I’m saying this because eventually it’s time to go and get married.
The Wedding
We go back up on the bike, and when you leave Bangkok, all of a sudden you feel you can take a deep breath, relax, and it’s so much more at ease with things. For me, it’s when the tollway ends going up north. And although you can’t use a tollway on the bike, but when the tollway ends and you keep going north and head up on the road in that direction, you leave behind the madness and you enter tranquility.
The wedding ceremony was something different. Being someone who was open minded, I went along with it. I had water splashed on me by a monk, had string tied around my wrist, had to kneel on the floor, bow down to the monk, bow down to her parents, and I was just embracing it and actually enjoying it. I was told by my wife because she was my wife at the time on paper that if somebody offers me something, it’s rude to decline. I took that to heart.
And after we did this I don’t even know what you would call it the family had this wooden house with an upstairs area, and that’s where we went upstairs. And the five monks sat, golden pots with water in, and they dipped bamboo in and started flicking you with it. As we left there and walked downstairs, the whole village was there probably 300 people, maybe more. It was a huge congregation. And a guy hands me a shot glass with a clear liquid in it. I remembered you’re not allowed to decline anything because it’s impolite. I took it and took the shot. Foul tasting stuff. Lao khao the rice whiskey.
The people though appreciated it when you took this shot, and they all seemed to have no care in the world. These were the older people in the village. And then after you have that one, you’re going to go and sit down somewhere and take a break, and they hand you another one and another one and just handing them to my wife as well. And she’s taking these shots. And I definitely found that the people who seem to appreciate this style of ceremony were the older people in the village. Her younger friends there who were also from the village, but they weren’t going as crazy about things. They weren’t drunk at 1:00 p.m. They were drinking, but more kind of sedated, sticking to beer and around a number of tables that were set up. It was like two generations just doing things differently.
A Ceremony for the Village
And it was striking because it appeared that what we were doing in terms of the ceremony was for the benefit of the people who did it like that themselves. Yet, if it was up to the younger people, they wouldn’t bother and they would do it their own way. But I guess that’s how traditions stay alive. I’m just being handed more and more of this rice whiskey, as is my wife. And then I go and sit down after I’m feeling drunk. And then her younger friends come over who still live around there and they start pouring beers for me, and I’m not declining it because it’s my wedding day, and I suppose I got absolutely sloshed.
I never used to drink heavily, but apparently it was impolite to decline, so if I was offered I took it, and I can’t really remember much past 5:00 p.m. I can remember though waking up in the middle of the night and I was lying on the floor outside the house, pounding headache. And I get up and I didn’t even make it into the house it seemed. I look around and there’s this Thai guy asleep in a hammock, another guy on the floor not too far away from me. And they were all completely annihilated with drink. I made my way inside the house into the room I was sharing with my wife. But my wife wasn’t there. Had a look around, couldn’t see her, so I just lay down, and she woke me up in the morning saying that we had to go and do something at the temple. Had a really, really bad headache, but I had no choice.
I didn’t know where she was in the middle of the night. Didn’t think about it. Could have been anywhere, and it didn’t really matter.
After the Wedding
By the time my headache had gone halfway through the next day, we’d been to the temple. We’d got the ceremony out of the way. I’d met loads of people that were friendly. Everyone was really friendly and kind. And we went to stay in a resort probably only 10 minutes away from the village. It was basic, basically better than the house that we were staying in. And I think it was when I was there together with her that I just felt so at home, surrounded by such natural beauty. I started thinking about moving somewhere like this even if it’s not here, to her village, somewhere similar somewhere where we can be close to nature, where we can just get on the bike and drive without the constant hassle of Bangkok. I didn’t want to talk about this with my now wife yet because it seemed to be too soon. And I also wanted to go back to Bangkok to see if I still had those painful feelings like I had before, which were that I just can’t live in Bangkok. I know I would be getting in other people’s way as well. I’m not saying that people are getting in my way and everyone’s in my way. It was everyone is in everyone else’s way. That’s what I’m trying to say.
We spent a few days in that resort. Most of the time together, but occasionally she went to see her family and I went with her once, but the other two days she went herself. It was the happiest I’d been in that resort for a very long time. Don’t picture luxury. This is an 800 baht a night small little place. Nothing fancy, but it was nice.
We made it back to Bangkok. That’s where we were living. And as the days passed, I’m really in love with her. And she’s just behaving exactly the same as she was before. She always says how happy she is. And I was assured by that fact because she seemed to be. Everyone in her family seemed to respect me and we seemed to be good together. That’s what they said. But you never know how people actually feel about things. But I thought I did.
You would always though see Thai guys with younger Thai girls all the time. Especially in villages like that. You have to understand it’s not just foreigners meeting younger girls and getting married. All the time. If that guy’s got money, he’s got a younger girl. Not every time, but half the time. Thai guy with money, younger girl. It’s a Thailand thing.
Also, one thing that many people aren’t aware of in Thailand you think it’s only foreigners who go to the bars. And while bars like that are targeted at foreigners, the industry targeted at Thai people something similar to this is so much more bigger than the ones targeted at foreigners. And I think people have Thailand all wrong. There are massage places all over the country. The ones where it’s more than a massage bathtub in the room and everything that goes along with it targeted at Thais, karaoke places targeted at Thais. It’s endemic in Thailand. So, you shouldn’t look at foreigners going to Thailand to do this as being the cause. They’re not the cause. It’s just available because it’s a Thailand thing. Yet, the ones available to foreigners are more out in the open.
Considering a Move
I’d say we’d been back in Bangkok for 3 months and thinking all the time about moving somewhere else. And we decided to go on another ride together. My income at this time was about $3,500 a month, so I was able to not do as I pleased, but I could go somewhere if I wanted to. I wanted to spend a little bit of time in Hua Hin. A friend of mine had just moved to Thailand and moved there. Said it was great, saying, “You can still get things like you can in Bangkok, but it’s more peaceful and also you’ve got the ocean.”
When we went down there, I just didn’t feel it. I think what I liked about Thailand was when I went somewhere where I was the only foreigner there, or one of the only foreigners there. Not because I didn’t like other foreigners not at all. But because when you were somewhere where other foreigners weren’t, the people as in the local people treated you very differently. They didn’t look at you as a source of money. They didn’t look at you as someone there who has money that needs to be taken from. They just looked at you and were more friendly, more welcoming, more interested to learn about you, and they didn’t have one cruel bone in their body. At least I thought. Again, this is usually the older population I’m talking about here. And that’s why I liked where my wife was from. I liked the fact that it was devoid of many other foreigners, and therefore I wasn’t treated like I was when I went to a restaurant in Hua Hin. In that restaurant, I was just another foreigner. I could have been a tourist who had just landed for the first time a day ago, and I was treated like that regardless. I didn’t want to be treated as a tourist in a country I lived in. And I suppose you have to accept that when you’re living or spending time in an area frequented by tourists. I wasn’t treated like a tourist when I was somewhere where there weren’t many foreigners.
And that made me say to my wife when we were in Hua Hin, “How would you feel about moving out of Bangkok and finding somewhere else to live north of Bangkok in a very peaceful location?” At that moment in time, we were spending most of our time together. She’s not going out often and seeing people often. Therefore, there’s nothing connecting her to Bangkok. She said she’d be open to the idea. She asked where I had in mind. I said, “Somewhere like where you’re from.” I wasn’t thinking at the time directly where she was from. I was thinking somewhere similar. Maybe go to Chiang Mai not live in the city, live somewhere like Chiang Dao, close to the mountains. Maybe Mae Hong Son, very remote. But she said immediately, “Why don’t we just go to my village because we already have connections there, have things there, and it might be easier for us if we just went to my village.” I thought it made complete sense like, yeah, why do we need to go somewhere and start from scratch? If things are already established where she’s from, let’s go and have a look there look at the possibility of living there.
We did a repeat of that first bike trip that we went on together straight from Hua Hin. Didn’t even stop at our place in Bangkok. And we did stop off at the towns along the way. Again, I’m singling out expat areas. And even in places like that even in somewhere like Udon Thani or Khon Kaen while there might be a congregation of expats in a particular location, the local people, even the girls that worked in the bars there, they didn’t treat you the same as the girls that worked in the bars in other parts of the more touristy parts of the country because for some reason, they assume that you’re there and you’re not new to the country and you must have a bigger knowledge of Thailand. I liked that difference. They thought you must have been there longer, otherwise there’s no way you would be there in the first place. It kind of felt more authentic in a way.
I spoke to more people on the way up talking about how great their lives are in the houses that they built. I was in one place and the guy owned the bar also had a house about 10 minutes out of the city in his wife’s village, and he said it was the best decision he ever made 15 years before that moment in time. He seemed to be loving life. Said he didn’t have a lot of money, but he has everything he needed. Again, if you’re in a place where somebody’s there, they haven’t got to the point where something has potentially gone wrong yet. So, if it’s going to happen, then it’s going to happen after this moment. So, you never get the actual truth.
Building the House
When we get there, we were welcomed by her family. Her mother and father were really great people, I thought. Although I couldn’t communicate with them, I have no doubt that they perhaps were not involved in anything that was due to come. I mean, I started to think otherwise, but I’ll get to that. We decided to spend time in that resort as we looked around the area. I think I’ve been calling it a resort for a long time, although I think perhaps I should just call it a rented room, but that doesn’t sound as good.
I got to know a lot about the area over the course of probably a month staying there. Her family owned quite a lot of land. They had lots of crops. I think in total, they had about 50 rai. That was a lot. Yet the crops they grew weren’t crops that gave them a lot of money some rice and a few other things. She had family members who probably had equal amounts of land. And I even found out about some of her friends who still lived there. They had land because their parents were no longer around. Most of the land that belonged to her parents was quite a long way out of the village and it wasn’t suitable for building on. It would have needed work doing to it.
But we began looking around the village itself, looking for places where we could have a house. If there was land for sale, we’d ask how much it was. If there wasn’t any land, we would perhaps cheekily say, “Would you sell this piece?” Usually, they’d say no. And if they did say yes, they would want way too much money for it. Eventually, we found a plot of land which had the great views I was looking for. It wasn’t too big, but it also wasn’t too small. But the only negative was it was down about 100 meters of an unpaved road. The electric didn’t reach that far, but we could pay to extend it, and it had a proper title, so that was important. The price was quite good as well. I’ll talk about everything in dollars for ease here, but it was about $12,000 for this one rai of land. We bought that. I mean, I bought that for my wife, and it was amazing to see just how seamless the process was to actually get it transferred to her name. “Can we buy this land from you?” “Yes.” “Can we see the paper?” “Here it is.” “Are we okay to go and do this tomorrow?” “Yes.” So the following day we’re at the land office, and 2 hours after that the land already belongs to her. Why was that so easy? One of the things in Thailand I remarked on as being very efficient.
I had about $150,000 of loose cash. I would always want to keep at least $50,000 just in case of a medical emergency and I needed to pay first before my insurance did. After paying for the land that gave us roughly 90,000 I had a budget of 70,000 for the actual build, including all the construction and the wall to go around it, and it’d be 20,000 left to furnish it and get it to the level we would want it to be.
My wife was very happy when we were there. As we were living in the resort, she was always so much happier. I noticed that straight away. She was always regularly going off to see her family, always coming back happy, and that made me feel happy and content. Happy wife, happy life. That was my life. And I started to picture what it was going to be like when the house was ready, when we were living there, when we were sat on the sofa watching TV. And also, which I was more excited about when we were sat on the verandah looking at the view. A gin and tonic on the verandah was the thing I was looking forward to most a good book, gin and tonic, sunset. And I was even contemplating digging a pool, but I decided against it. I think the idea of having a pool is much better than actually having one. You end up having it, not using it, and it would take maintenance and it would be a regret. So, I didn’t bother.
Building a New Home
We made sure to find a competent builder to build the house. Went to look at ones they’d built before, agreed on the budget, and everything was set. And it slowly started to come together. I found that I’m spending a lot of time on site. While they were professional builders, I always felt that there were little things here and there that perhaps didn’t go according to plan. Maybe they put something the wrong way round. Maybe something wasn’t exactly level. Maybe something wasn’t perpendicular to an adjoining wall. Perhaps one of the guys that the main man had pouring the driveway with concrete perhaps he did it the wrong way. Instead of angling it so when the water came from rain, it drained away from the house, he did it so it would drain towards the main door. So that had to be changed. But I was there to pick up on it. I was never angry with things like that. It just happened, and I was there to spot it before it would become difficult to change.
So, I actually really enjoyed the months on site. At the end of the day, I’d always go to the local shop and bring back beer for everyone. They weren’t paid a lot of money, these guys who were doing the build. The boss probably made okay money, but these guys at the time, I guess, were getting 300 baht a day. Considering a bottle of Chang from the local shop was 60 baht, they were working for five bottles of beer a day, 12 hours a day. So, I was okay to give them a few, and felt that made them do a better job because they appreciated it. Also, it just seemed to be what people did in an area like that. Take care of the people that were working because you knew they weren’t being paid a lot. I’m happy to take on board the local customs.
Because I was on site daily for maybe 4 months, I’m not spending that much time with my wife during the day. She’s just off seeing family, spending time with them. And I think that’s fine because why can’t she spend time with her family?
When the house was finally completed and we could move into it, that felt like a huge success. We had a house blessing ceremony. Seven monks came this time, sat in the living room. This was before it was furnished. And I’m there, my wife’s there, and her parents are there. I’m bowing to the monks, and they’re splashing water around and chanting. I was really enjoying it until the chants just continued and continued and continued. And I’m getting really uncomfortable in this crouched position on the floor because as a Westerner, I’m not built to sit a few hours in the same position on a hard floor. And by the time it did actually end, I could hardly stand up. But it wasn’t a major problem.
Because that had happened, the house had been blessed. We were going to be lucky. And in front of the main door these were two doors that opened out together the monk took some white chalk that was wet and put dots on the wall and a little thing underneath it. And now the house was definitely lucky. Then we furnished it, moved in, and commenced this next chapter of our lives.
The First Signs of Trouble
I still had my income. And when we’re living somewhere like that, you understand just how far money will go. If you didn’t leave the area, you physically wouldn’t be able to spend that much money, which meant after living there for 3 months, and I think everything’s going great. For me, everything is going great. My wife seems to say that everything’s going great. I probably spent 25% of my income. I’m giving my wife money so she can buy what she wants. But even still, only 25% of my income I spent, and I just had the urge to leave Thailand for a few weeks and go on holiday out of the country.
I hadn’t thought about where to go, and I wanted to surprise my wife because she’d never left Thailand before. I decided on Singapore. I’d never been there, and I was always intrigued to go and look at the city and also the historic buildings. There were some bridges and things that I thought were great engineering marvels and I wanted to look at it. I bought the tickets for both of us if it was for 3 weeks’ time because my wife would need to get her passport. She hadn’t got hers yet. And I told her I’d booked tickets to Singapore. “I can’t wait to show you.” Her reaction was different to what I thought it would be. She said, “Thank you. That’s great, but I can’t go because I’m helping my family with things at the moment.”
She was spending so much time out of the house. I’m spending a lot of time myself, but I’m good with it. I’m enjoying it. And she just said, “I’m really sorry, but I can’t go because of whatever reason.” She said she was helping family with things. She said she was visiting family. And I said, “Well, I’m going to go and I’ll be upset if you don’t go. I’ve already paid for the tickets. Let’s just go get you a passport. Forget about it.” We talked before. The plan was to go to places regularly. And we hadn’t been anywhere for 3 months. But she’d said next time she’ll go. This time she’s so sorry, but she’s already committed to things. I didn’t want to push it further, and I decided to go myself.
When it was time to go, I left and I didn’t mind. It was 2 weeks. I wanted to go and see something else, and I’d be spending time by myself, and my wife can do whatever she wants to do. It doesn’t matter. We can go together next time. It was really interesting in Singapore. Nothing like Thailand for obvious reasons and expensive. That’s when I thought doing what I did and living where I was living was the best decision I made. Because I spent the equivalent of my monthly income in only two weeks in Singapore including the hotel but it was so expensive. But because I hadn’t spent that much money since moving in to the place that we lived, it didn’t matter. I could have a great time there, and I did.
I went back home. Great to see my wife again. She seemed to be happy that I was back. And she was saying she was helping her family with things to do with a new crop, new seeds that they were doing, and she wanted to be helpful. This was the day I was back. And when I arrived back, I just had a small bag with me. I left that at the doorway. Hadn’t been into the bedroom yet. And when I went in a few hours later, just to get changed so I could have a shower in our bathroom, I noticed something that seemed very out of place. Just at the side of my side of the bed, kind of halfway under it, there was a lighter cigarette lighter. Now, I don’t smoke and my wife doesn’t smoke. And when I left, we didn’t have any lighters in the house. The floor tiles were white, but we had black grout in them because I liked the design. And the lighter was kind of in a way where if you didn’t look directly at it, you could easily miss it. I thought it was strange because it was on my side of the bed. The bed was made. The bed was clean. Yet, there was that lighter there. And I just thought, “How did that get there?” I didn’t think I’m going to go and ask my wife about this because this is so strange. I just wondered.
After that, though, I took a shower, went back in the living room, my wife’s there, and we just spent a bit of time together because I’d just come back. I told her I wish she’d gone, and she said she’d wish she’d gone, too, but she was busy. Then she said she’s going to be very busy over the next number of weeks because there’s a lot to do. I asked if there was anything I could do to help because I was free and didn’t have anything to do myself. I was happy not to have anything to do. It was the perfect retirement, and she just told me not to worry. It’s fine. She’ll do it.
Questions at Home
A few days go by and she’s off with her family again. And I went to go and see what was going on. I just felt like I wanted to stretch my legs a bit, and it was only a 10 minute walk to her family’s house. I take a walk there expecting to see a hive of activity. Yet her father’s just outside on the hammock, and her mother’s doing some sewing. They greet me respectfully. I do the same. And I could speak enough Thai to say, “Where’s my wife?” And they looked a bit puzzled like, “We don’t know.” I didn’t think again what this could mean. She said she was off with family. She had a lot of family, so perhaps it wasn’t anything to do with her parents. So, I just continued to walk around seeing if I would run into anyone. I saw her sister, who lived quite close by, who never left the area, and asked her. She said she didn’t know. So, I just thought, “Oh, I have to ask her exactly which family she’s doing things with because this seems to be strange.” I just have to say, though, if your wife says she’s going to see her family because she’s busy helping them with things, would you think anything other than that was actually the case? I wouldn’t, but then again, maybe I should.
After I couldn’t find her, I just went back home and waited for her to come back. I said, “How was your day been when she arrived? What have you been doing?” “Just helping family with things. Been really good today. Been really busy.” “Which family have you been helping?” Never asked before because I didn’t see the need to. “Just my father. He’s been very busy on the farm.” That was alarming when she said that because I’d seen her father looking like he was relaxing on a hammock. I said to her, “That’s strange because I did go to your parents’ house and your father was lying down on a hammock.” She had a completely straight face. She didn’t look alarmed. She just said, “He goes back often to rest, usually at lunchtime.” “What time did he go? What time does he usually have lunch?” “About noon,” she said. “What time did he have lunch today?” “Noon.” “Well, I went there at 10:00 and he was lying in his hammock. So, what’s going on?” He was so straight faced. He wasn’t alarmed. She didn’t appear to be shocked that I was asking questions, and she just said, “No idea what you’re talking about. Maybe he had lunch early. I don’t know. Because we were very busy.” “What are you busy with? I don’t actually get it because there didn’t appear to be anything going on at the house. I asked your sister and she didn’t know where you were.” So, it just continued on this conversation, and she’s not giving anything away to make me think she’s lying. But obviously, she is because she can’t explain properly without me being able to say that that didn’t happen because I didn’t see it.
“Are you going to help your family tomorrow?” I asked her. And she just said, “No, everything’s finished now. Everything’s done. We don’t need to do any more things.” That was weird. Just like that. I think she knew I was going to say, “I’ll go with you.” So, she just said everything was finished. Everything’s been planted in the ground. Everything’s good. I knew that they were planting things. I knew they were doing the crops. I knew they spent money on these new crops because they’d had government people coming explaining about a particular new crop that might be able to give them more money seeds and fertilizer that they had to buy. But now it was all over apparently. So I thought, okay.
I felt like something was definitely wrong, but I just didn’t know what was wrong. It was obvious to me that she was doing something that she didn’t want me to know about, but again, that could be anything. So, I just had to play cool and try to get to the bottom of things. I’m not even thinking that she’s cheating on me. I’m not thinking that. I’m thinking she’s doing something else. Maybe she’s embarrassed about whatever it is she’s doing, but I’m not thinking she’s actually cheating.
The following day when we got up, I took my bicycle for a ride for half an hour and came back and she was there. And I asked her, “Are you doing anything today?” She said, “No, I’m free all day. Do you want to do anything?” I didn’t have anything in mind. I had no plans. So I’d said, “Is there anything you want to do?” And she said, “No, I’m okay.” I’d actually just received mail the previous day of a book I’d bought, and I wanted to read that. So I planned to spend the day on the verandah reading the book and occasionally glancing at the view because I was happy to do things like that. I told her that’s what I planned to do, and she said, “Oh, okay. I’ll just be downstairs.” She’d been busy for weeks, and the day I said, “What are you doing tomorrow?” because she knew I was going to say, “I’ll go with you” now everything was over and she wasn’t busy anymore. It was weird, but I was just okay to continue and wait for the opportunity because I wanted to find out what was happening.
The House in the Fields
I didn’t leave the house for the next 3 days and neither did she. We’re perfectly normal together. There’s no animosity. There’s no discomfort. It’s just normal like it had always been. Felt very strange though because ever since we moved, she was always spending time out of the house. It was always seeing family and doing things and busy, and now she’s not. I didn’t know if I should try and force anything or just wait for her to make any kind of move because I felt something was wrong. I was just hoping it was something innocent enough, like perhaps she was opening a business with friends. Perhaps she was trying to do something that she wanted to keep for herself. I was thinking all kinds of things, but I never thought she’s cheating on me because it wouldn’t make sense to me why she was.
After 3 days of not doing anything, I was feeling like going out. Maybe go away for a night somewhere. Maybe actually Phu Kradueng go and stay up the mountain because we’d not been there since the first time. I asked her if she would like to go. I said, “I’m going even if you don’t want to, and I really want you to go. Shall we go?” She said, “I’d love to go, but I don’t really feel very well. I don’t really feel like I want to sit on the bike for a long way.” She said, “How about we go next week and I’ll go with you? Can you wait?” That kind of made me prick my ears up a bit and think is that just a play here? As if to say, no, I don’t want to wait. I want to go now so that I’m not thinking anything, because if I’d wait, she’d have gone with me. That made me think because it was too convenient.
I just said, “No, I’ve already decided that I want to go.” And she said, “Oh, I wish you would wait, but if you want to go, okay.” So, I went and packed a bag, got on the bike, and drove about 1 kilometer. Parked up because it was now apparent that she wasn’t going to just be staying in the house. I parked up at a place that was very inconspicuous, so nobody could see the bike, and I made sure to drive there as quickly as I could. I got off the bike, left the bag in the container on the back of the bike, left my helmet and my jacket. I had full attire on like I was going for a ride, put everything there, and hightailed it back in the direction of the house. I was hoping that I would catch my wife leaving the house and going wherever it was she was going. We didn’t have a car, but we had another small motorcycle, and it took me maybe 10 minutes from leaving to actually get back.
Finding the Truth
And I probably looked very foolish. I mean, nobody was watching because where the house was wasn’t close to anything else, but I was peering in through the windows trying to see if I could see my wife. I saw her and she appeared to be getting ready to leave. So, I’m now thinking here’s the time. I walked round to the back of the house and just sat down out of view. I knew the way the door sounded at the front when it would be opened, and I’d be able to hear it. And sure enough, about 10 minutes later, it opened. So, I stood up and made my way around the side of the house very quietly, and she jumped on the bike and set off. I was hoping she would have walked, but she had the bike. So, I knew the bike had gone, and I just had to find the bike. There were only two directions to go. One leaving the village and the other way which was going into the village and it was kind of a dead end after that probably 2 km away. This was after the dirt track we were on. At the end of the dirt track it was left or right. It wasn’t like it was going to be easy, but I just started walking in direction. This was the direction where her family’s house was as well. So I would see that and wonder if she’d gone there. I couldn’t see the bike there though or at her sister’s place. And I kept walking further into the village. I can’t see the bike anywhere. Everyone’s saying hi to me like nothing’s going on. Everyone’s pleasant. I ask people if they’ve seen my wife, and nobody has until one person said he had. He was just this old guy. He was one of the guys that gave me a shot of rice whiskey when we got married. And he just gestured in a particular direction as if he could have said something. I assumed it would have been, “Oh, yeah. I saw her driving a motorcycle in that direction.” Everybody knows everybody in the village. Well, nearly. So, I walk in that direction. And then there are a few houses on either side of the road and don’t see the bike there. And at the end of the road, it’s more of a dirt track. I don’t know where it goes. So, I walk up that for about 5 minutes and there’s a small house there. It’s more of a shack. The electric still stretched there. And as I said, our house was on a dirt track. And from that track, that’s when you get to the road and go to either the village one direction or out of the village in the other. Kind of similar dirt track to the one our house was on. Then I saw her bike parked up there.
I had no idea what to expect, but I go up to this structure. It’s quite isolated. You can’t really see the rest of the village from there. I just knocked on the door, maybe expecting to see my wife having a drink with a few of her friends, but no one answered. I looked about a bit for about 5 minutes. Very Thai style place, very basic, and there weren’t any windows, so you couldn’t see inside. A few holes in it, but not big enough to see through. Then I heard a noise. You know that noise. That’s when I thought something was very wrong. So I knocked really loudly. The noise stops, and this guy opens the door, no shirt on. Really startled look. And I barged my way in because my wife’s bike was there. Then he tried to stop me, but he was a very small build. And I saw my wife, and that’s when I found out the truth. She said, “What are you doing? I thought you’d gone.” More like, “What are you doing? I thought you were my wife.”
Instinctively, I pulled out my phone and got a picture of her and him together in that state of undress. And the first thing she said was, “Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell my family. Don’t tell anyone because nobody knows.” And I could tell that might have been true because she seemed to care more about what her family and the people in the village thought more than me, who was her husband. But I don’t actually know. “Please don’t tell. I’m sorry. But please don’t tell my family.” I didn’t think it was a good idea to attack this guy. And to be honest, I wasn’t really angry with him. I was angry with my wife because she was my wife and he wasn’t. Then I’m thinking the lighter. Don’t tell me he was in my house.
I just asked my wife why. “If you tell me why, I won’t tell your family.” She just said that this was her boyfriend from when they were young, and her family don’t like him. So she said, and people don’t really like him in the village, but she cares about him, and he was living in Bangkok with her when we met. He moved back up when we moved up. “Didn’t you think I’d find out?” She just said no. I was so angry and upset, and I’m thinking, I’ve got over $100,000 invested here. What am I going to do now? I just left that place. I was dazed, as you’d expect. I expected her to come chasing after me, but she didn’t. She just said, “I’ll talk to you later.”
When I was leaving, that’s when I started to boil with rage. The very fact that she was doing that for all that time I was with her made me feel sick because of everything that went behind it. It wasn’t as much as the deceit, but it was the disgust of it, and I will be very crude here sharing my wife with someone as primitive as that. It disgusted me, and all I could think about doing was actually harming her. Anyway, I couldn’t do that. So, I decided just to go on the bike and go back home, wait for her to come back, and see what she had to say for herself. It wasn’t long before she came back just saying she was sorry but nothing changes between as she said, “Please just don’t give me a problem for me and my family because the village will look badly at me.” Again, that really angered me, and I shouted so loud, like, “You care more about what everybody thinks than me than I feel.” I said quite early in my story that she didn’t have that much mental capacity to think more than one thought at once. She even said she would break it off with him, but all I wanted to do was cause damage to her. I just went upstairs to read and think about things, but I couldn’t concentrate on the book. I wanted to destroy her life. I wanted to ruin everything for her.
The Revenge
So, I started thinking about what to do, and what I did, I guess, was quite cruel. I pretended to be okay for a number of weeks. I’m not touching my wife because it made me feel physically sick. I’m noticing that the family’s land crops are coming up. I’m thinking I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to destroy all this land. I’m going to poison the crops. Then I’m going to print out that picture of her with this guy and I’m going to leave it at the family’s house, and then I’m going to leave. I wanted my revenge, and I wanted not just to hurt her, but I wanted to hurt the people that she cared about. I wanted them to know what she’d done, and I wanted them to know why their livelihood had been destroyed. That’s what I started to think about, and it was just a question of how.
I did some research on how to do what I wanted to do. Don’t want to give it away for obvious reasons, but I just went to a local shop that sold farm supplies and bought something that you could spray. The problem was it was 50 rai of land, and I needed to do it in the middle of the night. That was going to be difficult. Then I’d have to be able to leave before anyone got up, and I’d get the hell out of there. You think about that size probably 20 acres. I could pay someone to do it in the middle of the night, give them some money, then print out the picture. But I couldn’t do that. I didn’t want to involve anybody else. I suppose I wasn’t thinking straight. I just wanted to destroy everything not so much the house that was meant to be left there as a reminder of don’t mess with the wrong person.
I decided the only thing to do would be to rent a tractor with a boom sprayer. It was a big piece of land, and although it was out of the way and not in the village as such, it was not where people lived. There was still a remote possibility that somebody else would be out in the same area at the same time of night, but it was highly improbable. I told my wife that I needed to go away for a few days to spend time by myself. “I’ll be here for two more nights and then I’ll come back and hopefully we can start being okay.” She said, “Okay.” And again, she was sorry.
I went into town, drove the bike, and I had these pictures printed out. The people in the picture shop looked at them, and I just said, “I need them as proof.” I printed out 50 pictures. I kept them in the bike, then went to a place I knew where he could rent farm machinery. I just hoped they would rent to me as a foreigner. Told them I wanted it for 3 days. No problem. Big deposit. Never mind. But then it was going to be hard to get it to the land because it would involve driving through the village. I asked if they could get a driver to take it where I wanted it. People drive tractors through there all the time, so I thought it would be okay, and they said they could do that. It was delivered the day I planned to leave in the evening time. I saw it driving through and no one’s even batting an eyelid. I’m thinking this is ridiculous. I should probably stop, but I didn’t want to.
I told my wife I was going and I’ll be back soon, and I drove my bike into town. I’d already found a place where I was going to sell it. And I sold it for a very cheap price, pocketed the cash, and got transport at about midnight back to the village. I was feeling like I was doing something stupid and I should stop. I was taking things too far, but it was that thing inside me that kept telling me to continue. There were going to be a few things that could get in the way dogs and misfortune. Luckily, I had researched how to use this thing, and I was shown how to use it, and it took me 4 hours. It sprayed the whole fields. Everything would be ruined.
Carrying Out the Plan
And then I drove the tractor this was about 4:00 a.m. back through the village, parked it up, took out the pictures, went to her parents’ house, and threw them all over the place so it was unmissable. Then I took the tractor back to the place I’d rented it from. They weren’t open yet, so I parked it outside. Didn’t care about the deposit. Then I had about a 20 minute walk back to town. From there, I got a taxi down to Bangkok more like a guy with a car who wanted some money. One of those people who you see sitting outside the bus station waiting to take people places who have come from a different place. I paid him 10,000 baht straight to Bangkok. It took a while to get there, and I bet there was all hell going on in the village, but they probably wouldn’t have even been to the land yet because they’d seen these pictures and they’d be confronting each other about it.
When I did leave, I felt really guilty because I took it out on her family when it was her who did it to me. But then I thought her story about her family not approving and not knowing perhaps that was only half truth. Perhaps they turned an eye, and I bet they did know. But that was how I got my revenge. I didn’t want to ever go to Thailand again. The most stupid thing was though I’m on the plane. It hasn’t taken off yet. And I think, damn, I’ve just forgotten about my visa money. 400,000 baht in the bank, no ATM card. But never mind, it was worth it.
And I left Thailand for good and moved to another country to start again. I was lucky that my income remained the same. Still had my loose cash, but that was in my own country $50,000 and I was able to start again. She scammed me because of what she did. It was a scam. It was deliberate. And she paid the price. Don’t know what happened to her and I don’t care.
But since then, I’ve been in lots of relationships with girls not in Thailand, in similar places. But I’ve never taken anything too far because you can’t trust anyone.
