An American in Asia: His Quest for Cosmic Truth (or at least a Decent Espresso)

 

It was announced this week that the next James Bond movie would be a new adaptation of Ian Fleming's first 007 novel, Casino Royale.

I don't know whether it was a mistake,a coincidence, or the Thai sense of humour but two days later, a local Phuket TV station that regularly plays Video CD movies of questionable origin, featured the wacky 1967 spy spoof, Casino Royale, with David Niven and Peter Sellers both starring as James Bond, fighting the bad guys, Orson Welles and Woody Allen, all to a groovy soundtrack by Burt Bacharach. If it wasn't a deliberate joke, I really would love to have seen the quizzical looks on the faces at the TV station as it slowly dawned on them that Sean Connery wouldn't be making an appearance but that trained seals, cowboys, Indians, go-go dancers and bagpipers would.

The (Wild) Life in Phuket

I am stumbling around my adopted home of Phuket Island, gradually developing a daily routine. Mornings are spent writing, generally, but afternoons are still a bit of a random schedule, when I handle things such as traveling 30 minutes to the store to pick up supplies, fixing the truck's stereo, not fixing its water-guzzling cooling system, jumping in the ocean, and keeping my home free of the wildlife that is daily attempting to devour it.

By 'wildlife', in this particular instance, I am referring to the creatures that make up 40 per cent of the earth's living creatures by weight: ants. There are zillions of the critters pouring down out of the hillsides, including little red bitey ones that spit formic acid. So I keep my kitchen spotlessly clean, seal food garbage in plastic bags, and occasionally circle the house like a witch doctor waving a can of insecticide. Not very environmentally sensitive but hey, they're spitting formic acid!

I share this plot of hillside with a lot of other creepy creatures and I've made a habit of circling the house daily with a camera like a crocodile-wrestling Discovery Channel host. My little safari is considerably less dangerous, though yesterday morning when I stepped out the door, I was ambushed by the largest spider I have ever seen outside a zoo. Brown and hairy, with long spindly legs and glassy black eyes, it was large enough that if it jumped on your face, it could tickle both your ears at the same time. I had goose bumps for hours after that encounter.

Among a plethora of other insect life, I was whacked in the head one evening by what scientists refer to as a big, fat brown moth. While perhaps not as scary as the spider for me and most of my fellow countrymen, different cultures have different ideas of scary animals. For the Japanese, for instance, moths are scary enough to have created several movies featuring the giant moth aptly named, Mothra. The moth on my screen door would have started a salaryman stampede in downtown Tokyo.

A few days later I found one of the moth's relatives crawling along the shrubbery, sporting those kind of colours that warn other animals not to touch it or eat it. Kind of like the average spandex aerobics gear.

I checked this guy out and, after viewing the prominent black, white and yellow stripes and long, red and black feelers, I figured I'd better go out to the restaurant for my daily meal of grubs and larvae.

 

Heading a bit up the evolutionary chain and food ladder, I see amphibians every time it rains. It being the rainy season, the frogs are having a heyday and this one seems to have discovered a whole refrigerator full of worms and beer.

He was actually kind of fast and it was a bit of a challenge, chasing him around the side of the house to get the picture. I guess I'd better lay off the beer. And worms.

I see a lot of lizards but, unlike the usually sluggish reptiles who live in the temperate climes of North America, the snakes and lizards in the tropics are full of vitality. Difficult to photograph because they're always shooting across the pavement or up the wall before I can click the shutter.

This one actually tore across the driveway on its two rear feet, leaving a little trail of smoke and flames. So, this picture is a little on the grainy side because I finally had to resort to using the telephoto function on my camera, which doesn't actually have a telephoto function, but a wimpy little zoom.

Down at the beach we're back to the actually scary and dangerous animals. Only the big, dark, creepy ocean could spawn a monster blob of protoplasm that hovers and undulates invisibly through the deep, dragging strings of deadly poisonous tentacles in its wake. But when they wash up on the shore they're totally helpless and bystanders can safely point and laugh at their misfortune.

OK, all these animals are pretty small. They're not tigers or bears. These days the only large animals you'll see on the developed island of Phuket is the occasional elephant stomping down the road and blocking traffic, toting a wobbling bench filled with camera-toting tourists. Not technically wild. They are dangerous, however, and every year somebody gets trampled or poked with tusks.

Phuket has a few other dangerous species and I have heard stories of four-metre pythons. I'm still waiting for my first cobra sighting. I may have seen a big one once, but I didn't see the head so I can't be sure.