north thailand

north thailand

Massage North-Thailand Style

Published by Owen Jones on 28 December 2015
Massage North Thailand Style

Massage North Thailand Style

Massage North-Thailand Style

I treated myself to a massage today. The woman who does it teaches massage at Sukhothai University and is not your average twenty-five-year-old masseuse. She is twice that age, and practices massage north-Thailand style.

For those of you who don’t know, massage north-Thailand style is pretty rough. This woman, who is fairly tall for a Thai and weighs about fifty kilos (110 lbs), is extremely strong. Not only that but she has a very firm grip with both her hands and her feet.

When she walks up the back of your legs, you really feel her toes digging in. I think that it is fair to say that massage north Thailand style hurts. However, four years ago, I had back trouble and could only walk doubled over with my hands on my knees. That was when I first met this lady, whose name I still do not know.

She came to the house and examined me. “Five two-hour sessions ought to do it”, she told my wife.

I was sceptical, but asked for the sessions to be carried out on consecutive days.

She looked at me and laughed. “Impossible,” she said. “You are not strong enough. Two hours every week”.

Now, I am six feet tall and weigh 120 kgs and no-one had ever told me that I was not strong enough in my whole life. However, after one session, which could be described as wrestling, with her and I knew that she was right.

Five weeks later, I was cured, and stupidly stopped the sessions. Now, four years on, the problem is starting to return, but I am going to re-establish a routine of massage north-Thailand style to keep myself ‘fit’.

As I write this message to you, I ache all over and have slept for two hours this afternoon, which is not usual for me.

This woman is a tiger, and an all-in wrestler, but she has healing hands and I knew from the moment she laid them on me that she could fulfil her promise of curing me.

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And the best,

Owen

Podcast: Massage North-Thailand Style

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Snakes in Thailand

Published by Owen Jones on 8 July 2015
Snakes in Thailand

Megan Goes Hiking

Snakes in Thailand

I look out for snakes… but then I suppose most people do except the British and the Irish, because we don’t have many at home. After all, no-one wants to step on one in the grass or get bitten by one in the woodpile, but I don’t mean it like that, I mean that I like snakes, although that doesn’t mean that I’m not wary of them.

It’s just that they fascinate me. As you might know, I live in northern Thailand and there are about a hundred species of snakes here around thirty percent of which are poisonous (and most of them are deadly), although I don’t know the absolute numbers.

I imagine that the vast majority of snakes here are not poisonous, although those in banana trees often are. Most of the deadly ones seem to be shortish, green pit vipers with a broad head. There are also two huge pythons, six and ten metres, which are best avoided when they get to that size.

People think that there are snakes everywhere in rural Thailand, where I am, and they may be right, but I doubt if I see one a month, and I’ve only seen one cobra in ten years, and it wasn’t a King Cobra either (also about six metres).

Well, I saw two snakes today, which is a personal best. The first one was a 600mm Lion Snake (a Chequered Keelback), which people here say is poisonous, and the book says might be. It was travelling along the top of our wall and then jumped of into our neighbour’s garden and the second was a 1500mm Wall’s Bronzeback.

I became aware of it because our dog was going crazy. The snake was sitting on the patio leisurely eating a frog and when it was finished, it quietly left.

I don’t know why we had two visitors today, but I suspect that they had been disturbed by the roadworks outside our house. The snakes were lucky that my wife was out shopping or she would have had her son kill them.

All the best,

Owen

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Podcast: Snakes in Thailand

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North Thailand Near Chiang Khong

Published by Owen Jones on 31 January 2014 6
Map of North Thailand

Map of Thailand

 Holiday in North Thailand

Last week I finished writing my latest book, ‘The Disallowed‘. I had originally planned to locate it in Laos, but a few Thai friends persuaded me to place it in north Thailand, so I made a compromise and put the family in the top eastern corner of north Thailand on the Laos border. I knew nothing about the place except what I could glean from the map and Wikipedia.

Then on Saturday, a friend invited us to go on a short holiday to north Thailand and it was to include exactly the same region I had chosen to put the family in. The book is about the Lee family, who are goatherds in the area north-east of Chiang Rai, in the mountains around Chiang Khong

We drove to Chiang Rai and looked around a beautiful all snow-white temple by the name of Wat Rong Khun. I had never seen anything like it. It is amazingly intricate and looks as if it was carved out of ice rather than built. From there we even further north to the ‘Golden Triangle’ where the confluence of the Mekong (Mae Naam Kong) and the Ruak rivers separates Burma (Myanmar), Laos and Thailand. China is less than a hundred miles north across Laos too.

From here, we journeyed west, staying close to the river to Mae Sai, where we spent the llnight. The next morning we looked around the huge market area in the city and then headed back west hugging the river until we got to exactly where the action of my book takes place. It was amazing for me to actually be where the characters in my novel live, in the east of the province of Chiang Rai in north Thailand somewhere before you get to Chiang Khong, where they have just built a new bridge over the Mekong into Laos.

The area is somewhere between hilly and mountainous and very sparcely populated. I saw several farms as we travelled through the mountains on narrow roads that could have been where the Lees had their farm and so the book came alive for me. I would like to have stayed there at least one night to feel the atmosphere, but my friends had to work, so we continued south to Phrae, which is still very much considered to be in north Thailand.

We stayed there a night too, and took our time driving back home the followeing day.

I thoroughly enjoyed our holiday break in north Thailand, but seeing the exact spot where the action of my book takes place really made it for me.

Amazon Image ‘The Disallowed’ – a light-hearted look at a vampire family.

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