Seymour Cumming:

This month, Seymour Cumming goes underground to truly experience what’s it’s like to be a ‘life-styler’ in Chiang Mai.

You know you’re a loser when the only thing you have to liquidate is the deposit on your guesthouse. When you get to the end of the month and the meagre salary you’ve been pulling as a part-time English teacher disappears in a weekend, and you get to a point where you decide to give up and go home, and you gotta ask your pensioned mom to send you an air ticket, and the small change you get back from your dodgy landlord almost covers the departure tax and airport meals, plus the hidden ten bucks behind your belt buckle to catch a cab from the airport back home. That’s when you know you’re desperate.

Actually there is a class below this level, quite a large one here in Chiang Mai, those who have resorted to surrendering their passport as security. This is a last resort when you can’t even raise deposit money because you’ve just arrived on an overland through Asia and you’re down to your last 1000 baht. Surrendering your passport is really the absolute pits man. It means you can’t use it to hire a motorbike, not even a bloody bicycle, and every time you want to do a visa run you have to turn in your watch (or, your bar girlfriend if you’ve already lost the watch), and then you get home and forget to bail her and she really loses it.

Strewth mate, I’ve been there. I’ve done the Chiang Mai experience. I came here with everything and left with nothing. I arrived with lots of dollars and left with a few baht. I managed to throw away my early retirement package on potential wives, and big motorbikes and good living.

Spent a lot of time in Phuket, had a bar down on Patong beach, and life was easy, making money while everyone else took care of business, except the girl I had in-charge of things was doing better than I was, and when I got heavies about it the extortionists arrived, so I just folded the whole stinking thing.

Then I moved to Chiang Mai and started this import-export venture with this girl I’d met in a Bangkok disco, excepting I soon realised she couldn’t even export bar girls to a colony of miners. And there was also the condo I bought in my Thai partner’s name but we kind of parted ways and, well, I don’t really wanna talk about it because the lawyer was in on the whole deal and I guess I just didn’t understand the ‘key money’ part of the whole deal, but I lost that too.

That’s when I swallowed my pride and got a teaching job, promising to clean up my act. Except the school fired me after one of the parents of a student complained about ‘touching’. Jeez man, I suppose I just don’t understand this ‘culture difference’ thing much.

I even tried learning Thai. I’ve been here two years now and even had a few girlfriends who don’t speak much English, but I just can’t master it. It’s the tones, too bloody difficult I reckon.

The other thing is, I guess I have this ‘Loh Kroh’ habit. Cost me a thousand a week. I know this younger guy who gets away with 500 but I guess I’m kind of older and ugly and girls just kind of somehow hook me by the wallet. Well, it’s better than a gambling habit ain’t it.

So, I’m down to the bare minimum. I’ve got all these ideas and money-making schemes, but there just ain’t money to be had here in Thailand. Now I’m all done. Finished. Worn out and disillusioned. Things just haven’t gone my way here. I guess I’ll pick up my passport and try some other place. Maybe Cambodia or Vietnam, I hear they don’t demand deposits there.

Investigative-journalist-at-large, Seymour Cumming sees things a little differently in life. He has previously been a used car salesman, fruit picker, ‘shock jock’ and newsroom war correspondent. He has written for Farmer’s Weekly, Nyet!, Porn Unlimited, Chessworld and  Cross-stitching Magazine.

He’s been to more than 50 countries, some for less than a day, and is currently working on a travel novel, but he’s written the author’s biog, and not progressed much beyond that.

Seymour Cumming archive is here...