A couple of weeks ago, when The Parents were still here, we decided to play a round of crazy golf at Adventure Golf, a course roughly a twenty minute drive from our apartment. We had been shopping at a factory outlet complex and so needed to charter a baht bus down the busy Sukhumvit Road. Cue total confusion and miscommunication. We were approached by a driver and I told him that we wanted to go to Adventure Golf, upon which we received an puzzled look. "enter golf?" he asked. "No, Ad-ven-ture Golf" I replied. Another confused expression. I tried another tactic, miming swinging a golf club. "Ah, you want go to golf club!" he exclaimed, somewhat triumphantly, before eyeing us more closely, obviously taking in our very un-golf club attire. "No, no, not proper golf, crazy golf," I said, my hopes of ever reaching Adventure Golf sinking fast. At this point he took out a walkie-talkie from a clip on his belt loop and spoke very quickly in Thai. Another man walked up as he did so, and asked us where wanted to go. We repeated what we had told the other driver and he gave us the same quizzical look. "You want watch golf?" he asked, hesitantly. Oh dear, this was not going well. In a desperate last-ditch attempt I mimed a gorilla. This may seem like a strange thing to do in the circumstances, but there was both a picture of a gorilla on the road-side sign at the front of Adventure Golf, and a large replica on the course itself. I thought that one of them might have seen it at some point as they drove past. Apparently not. Cue embarrassed laughter and even stranger looks directed largely at me.
Another man then turned up to try and work out where these crazy farangs wanted to go, until eventually I said the magic words - mini golf. Immediately, the banter between the three men and the man on the other end of the walkie-talkie stopped. "Ah, mini golf," they said in unison. Why I hadn't thought to use that term before, I don't know, but after uttering those magical words we were soon our our way. We were slightly concerned when the driver pulled up outside the entrance and went in, leaving us locked in the back, unable to get out, but he did eventually come back and let us out!
After a highly entertaining round of crazy, sorry, mini golf, we needed to catch a bus back, a somewhat difficult task on the busiest road in Pattaya, where most of the traffic is merely passing through on their way to somewhere else. We eventually managed to stop a bus and he even seemed to understand where I wanted to go. Result! He was a little bit shifty looking so when he invited me to sit beside him in the cab at the front of the bus I politely declined and swiftly jumped in the back with The Parents. That's when I saw that there was a woman on the bus. If she wasn't going in the direction of our apartment before, she certainly was now. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't long before she rang the bell and hopped off, giving the driver a scowl as she headed off. I guess our 150 baht charter fare trumped her 1o baht fare.
We had gone about five minutes down the road, when the bus slowed to a halt at the side of the road. I should have known it was too good to be true to believe he might have actually understood where I wanted to go. I leaned out, expecting him to ask me to repeat my desired destination but he said something in Thai which I didn't understand. It soon became crystal clear what it, however, as he walked up to the bushes, a mere few feet from us, parted his legs and unzipped his fly. I either looked straight ahead of me and had a perfect view of him relieving himself, or I looked behind me and copped a lungful of fumes from the lorries speeding past us on the road. So I looked down. Unfortunately, it was the longest wee in the history of mankind and an uncomfortable couple of minutes elapsed before he jumped back into the cab, grinning inanely to himself. Well, I suppose if you've got to go...
Miraculously, we got back to the apartment without further incident. Until, that is, I paid him, when he thrust his hand out towards me. Not wanting to be disrespectful, I shook it. It wasn't until I was walking into the apartment that I realised just what that hand had been doing a mere ten minutes earlier. I have never been so glad of antibacterial hand wash in all my life.
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