Life in Phana

Too busy to blog

This blog has not been updated for some time now. (It has, in fact, just yesterday, which shows how long it has taken me to get this one posted.) I’m not sure whether this is because I have been too busy (I HAVE been busy) or because I have lost some of my former enthusiasm for blogging. I suspect that it is a combination of the two and that the things I have been busy with have supplanted blogging at the forefront of my attention. That, and the fact that this blog is about ‘Life in Phana’ and inevitably my life here has become more routine and less of a novelty to me.

So what have I been busy doing? Well, back in April I had to leave the country to renew my visa. Usually I just go across the border to Laos at Chong Mek, and I’m back home a few hours after I left. But this time I couldn’t do that because there was not enough space in my passport for a Lao visa – it fills a whole page, and then there is the departure stamps from Thailand and Laos, and the new arrival stamp into Thailand. So I decided to go down to Singapore, which I had never visited before. The Air Asia flights to and from Ubon made good connections at Suvannaphumi Airport, so the travelling was all quite straightforward. Except that when we arrived at Singapore there was a fierce storm out of sight below the clouds so we circled round for more than an hour and then ran out of fuel and were diverted to Johor Bahru in Malaysia. There we had to wait while a Singapore Airlines plane on the same errand was refueled ahead of us.

We stayed four nights in Singapore, at the Rider’s Lodge, a friendly and pleasantly calm place to stay away from the city centre. It is set in a nice garden and is part of something called Turf City, which was probably once a race course and is now home to lots of activities like horse-riding, gymnastics and dog-training, all housed in the old stable blocks.

 

One of the oddities of the Rider’s Lodge is that it is Indian-owned and largely Indian staffed, but one of the selling-points in its brochure is that you can “re-live the colonial experience” while staying there. That seems very generous, but hopefully it does not give mem sahibs the right to be beastly to the staff!

We ate in a nearby Indian restaurant on two nights, a French restaurant one night, and once next to the Singapore River at Siem Reap II, which is part of the Indo-Chine restaurant outside the Asian Cultural Centre. One lunch-time we had some excellent tapas. What we didn’t have is Singapore noodles, my standby when eating Chinese food in England.

Singapore has the reputation of being extremely well-ordered, but this photo I took suggests that not all is as it perhaps should be:

 

I take it this is not one of them trying to get away.

For a big, modern city, Singapore has plenty of open spaces and we spent some time at Bukit Timah where there are walking trails through the forested hillside

 

and on another day we visited the McRitchie Reservoir Park:

At both places there are long-tailed macaques, which of course was why we went there. Both places were recommended by Dr Michael Gumert, an associate professor at Nanyang University and an expert on long-tailed macaques. We were lucky enough to spend a very pleasant evening with him over a meal at Picotin, the French bistro in Turf City. The situation regarding these monkeys is very different from here in Phana. The monkeys, though, are much the same:

Back in Phana, time may stand still, but people are always on the move. So my next post, I think, will be about some of the recent comings and goings.

Long-tailed Macaque Twins in Don Chao Poo Forest

Ten days ago I saw a monkey carrying two young infants. The infants looked to be the same age but I had never seen twins in the forest here before. I know that sometimes a female will foster an orphaned infant, so that is a possibility too. At the time I did not have my camera with me, and my sighting of the mother + two was quite brief.

 

I have been on the lookout for them ever since, and today I finally succeeded. And I had my camera with me.

 

They look like twins to me. What do you think? And have you come across long-tailed macaque twins in the wild before?

Click on an image to enlarge it.

This post also appears on Thai Monkey Forest. Please visit that site if long-tailed macaques interest you.

Technorati Tags: Thai monkeys,Thai monkey forest,Isan monkeys,Phana,Long-tailed macaques

Study Centre is Busy, Busy

After opening on 8th March, the Rin-Homhual Mahanil Study Centre in Phana was busy two days later when the Phana Bicycle Rally came by. Then there were a few quiet days when we wondered where everyone was who had said they would visit. Slowly ‘business’ picked up. The Director of Phana Suksa called in with a good luck gift to the Centre, for example, and several people stopped by to do a little weaving.

But this last week has been very busy and has been everything we had hoped the Study Centre would be: a place for people to study, to hold discussions and meetings, and to drop in to browse through the books and magazines and study the exhibits and ask questions about them.

Three groups of children on school holiday are now attending the Study Centre twice a week for English lessons and practice. The largest group (16 of them at the last count) are of Primary One age or a bit younger. One group of them comes in from a village about 7 kms away in/on this vehicle driven by the mother of one of them. I guess you would call this a little-people carrier.

The oldest group (M1) is currently the smallest, but these three girls are very keen. They are joined by ‘Judy’ in the background, a Phanasuksa student who has just returned from a year as an AFS student in Brazil. She is helping out at the Study Centre and especially helping me with the teaching.

The other group, about to double in numbers next week, is Primary 4 and 5. After their class finished on Thursday they stayed on to play some English-language games on the computer.

On Wednesday we hosted a group of teachers and students from Benjamah Mahavat School in Ubon. They were following up an earlier exploratory visit to assess Phana as a possible focus for their off-site study programme. We started the day early after they had had breakfast across the road at the house of Acharn Kalyani, who is involved in the running of the centre.

After introducing them to the centre and looking at the history and monkey exhibitions in some detail, we took them on a tour of other possible educational sites in the village.

The Traditional Medicine Centre had not been expecting us, but when we arrived they had just done a presentation to a group from Si Sa Ket, so they kindly repeated it for us.

 

At Fai Rong Hin the group was most interested in the cooking, using methane gas produced on site with the help of a lot of pigs… (APPLIANCE OF SCIENCE)

… and in posing for a group photo:

After lunch we visited the weaving co-operative in Moo 9. Again, they had not been expecting us and it turned out that a training session was in progress. But again, we were welcomed, given lots of attention and lots of answers to our questions, and a couple of the teachers were sold some cloth produced by the co-operative.

And finally, to Don Chao Poo, where we took them on the Path of the Buddha:

Then it was back to the Study Centre for a plenary discussion. It looks very likely that a group or groups of students from the school will be making a visit of several days to carry out a varied study programme using all the facilities we visited early in the new school year which starts in mid-May.

And finally, on Friday evening the first of a planned series of meetings took place at the Study Centre, organised this time by Khun Chorkdee Pornsri. The idea was to discuss the ways in which the traditional 12-month festivals were celebrated ‘in the old days’.

Thirty-two people turned up, but they didn’t get past the first month! The next meeting in two weeks time will be to listen to the Chao Kana Amphur (the chief abbot of the District) talking about his recent pilgrimage to the places in India associated with the life of the Buddha.

So, a very busy week at the Study Centre, and a very productive one which promises well for the continued use and interest in the Centre.