Every day around 5pm I jump on the old Honda Click scooter with the hello kitty decoration on the rubber floor boards and ride 5 mins to the only sizable watering hole in the area. This is both mental therapy, a refreshing respite from the heat and simultaneous physical therapy.
Life revolves around this water, in a part of the country where during the dry season its hard to find much here. The pool is a small dam, a place where you would expect to find numerous paw prints in the concrete was poured, but surprisingly there are none. Which leads to my next topic – the dogs. Some are friendly around here, some are afraid and run from you and then others have one mode – called attack. Fortunately a few of the larger and most nasty looking ones are muzzled, but its the others you have to be careful of. They want to bite you, and not just a friendly nip, but a full on teeth sinking into flesh bite.
And there are the fisherman; some evenings they are here, fishing from the banks. Or the more hard core fisherman are into their necks in the water laying nets. And that is something to be aware of when swimming here. You may or may not see evidence of the nets in the water – sometimes several sticks poke out of the water indicating they are here, other times there are no markers. As a result, if you are swimming along all of the sudden you may find yourself tangled in the nets located just below the surface of the water.
And there is the family that crosses the dam every day around the same time. The father is on the motorbike with two small sons hanging on behind him. One of the kids always shouts out hello, perhaps the only word he knows in English.
In December and January there are plenty of underwater colder currents mixing with the warmer water on the surface. By the time March rolls around, these colder pockets are much harder to find and the surface resembles bath tub temperatures. And by this time of year the large green plants began to dominate the surface, drifting where the wind blows them and all congregating together.
This is a place to lose yourself in the stillness—where the water runs dark, but the soul and the mind finds clarity.
Is this your village house in Thailand? It looks like such a little oasis to escape to …. the fishermen, the kids and the watering hole all of it except you have to watch out for the aggressive street dogs! Exactly what you need for some inner peace therapy
Hi Teh – this is the village I hermit up in every winter. Yes, and I ride either the scooter or bicycle to the watering hole. There is a back way through the eucalyptus groves where I avoid almost all the dogs :))
What a beautiful and vivid post. It’s so easy to visualize that quiet evening ritual—the scooter ride, the pool, and that perfect line about the water running dark but the mind finding clarity. It makes me miss the simple routines of traveling somewhere slower.
The back way through the eucalyptus groves to avoid the dogs sounds like a perfect secret! For a regular visitor like yourself, has the swimming hole or the routine of going there changed your feeling about the village itself over the seasons?