My stepson drove us up to the old mountain kingdom of Nan this year for the first time. Neither he, his wife nor their sixteen-month-old baby had been there before, so the five of us went and we treated them to a night in the capital of the province, which is also called Nan.
He turned out to be a better driver than I had expected, and slower than most Thai men, but that could have been because his mother and wife were on the back seat. It was a very pleasant 287km journey, all uphill until we crested the mountains and cruised the last fifty kilometres gently down into the city in the mountain basin.
The trip from Uttaradit to Nan is so beautiful, if you like vistas of forest-clad slopes, which I do. There is a tribe still living in there that the West didn’t ‘discover’ until about 1976. Look it up on Wikipedia under Nan Province. That means that my house is less than 200 miles from a Stone Age civilization!
That is difficult to fathom when you were a boy from South Wales.
Anyway, the visa has been applied for and the night is ours, not that there is anything to do in Nan. It is like its neighbour Laos, and to which its people felt/feel closer (Nan sided with Laos and North Vietnam), everything that I know of closes at nine p.m.
I am sitting in the only shop that I know that sells beer to write this too and I am in the city centre five yards from the city’s biggest market. That probably gives as good an impression of the place as any. I have been coming to this shop, run by two old sisters, on every visa run for about seven years, but they never show any sign of recognizing me.
The government forces foreigners who live in certain provinces to come here for their visas, probably to open the place up a bit, but there is absolutely nothing for us to do. The city is crying out for a few bars where we visa-hunters can while away the evening.
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Owen Jones, Amazon Best-Selling Author from Barry, Wales, has lived in several countries and travelled in many more. While studying Russian in the USSR in the '70's, he hobnobbed with spies on a regular basis; in Suriname, he got caught up in the 1982 coup; and while a company director, he joined the crew of four as the galley slave to sail from Barry to Gibraltar a home-made concrete yacht, which was almost rammed by a Russian oil tanker and an American aircraft carrier.
“I am a Celt, and we are romantic”, he said when asked about his writing style, “and I firmly believe in reincarnation, Karma and Fate, so, sayings like 'Do unto another...', and 'What goes round comes around' are central to my life and reflected in my work. I write about what I see, or think I see, or dream... and, in the end it is all the same really”. He speaks seven languages and is learning Thai, since he lives in Thailand with his Thai wife of fifteen years.
His first novel, Daddy's Hobby is from the seven-part series 'Behind The Smile: The Story of Lek, a Bar Girl in Pattaya', but his largest collection is 'The Megan Series', twenty-three novelettes on the psychic development of a teenage girl, the subtitle of which, 'A Spirit Guide, A Ghost Tiger and One Scary Mother!' sums them up nicely. He has written fifty novels and novelettes, including: Dead Centre; Andropov's Cuckoo; Fate Twister; The Disallowed (a philosophical comedy); Tiger Lily of Bangkok; and A Night in Annwn (Annwn being the ancient Welsh word for Heaven). Many have been translated into foreign languages and narrated into audio books.
Owen Jones writes stories set in Wales, Spain and Thailand, where he now lives. He is a life-long Spiritualist, and this belief is interwoven, in a very realistic way, into many of his books and storylines. If you like a touch of the 'supernatural', try his books
He sums his life up thus: “Born in the Land of Song, Living in the Land of Smiles”.