Man vs Creature

Two species rule here – insects by day, and dogs by night. At least that’s the way it seems.

The insects here make the ones at home looks like pathetic underachievers. Flies are wily, fast and persistent. They irritate the hell out of you, landing on your food, your face, and particularly any cuts or scratches, and take the swatting motion of a hand as little more than a temporary inconvenience, always returning to the same spot they were checking out. They may as well sit there saying “yeah, whatever buddy, I’m not done irritating you yet”. The ants are small and unbelievably fast – go anywhere near them and they scatter in seconds flat before you’ve even reached for a can of Raid, even when you interrupt a team of thousands of them moving your TV across the room. The mosquitos don’t even have the decency to make that high-pitched zuzzing noise when they fly around - the little bastards are on you, sucking your blood and leaving you with a swelling bite mark before you even know it, like Dengue-fever-ridden miniature stealth fighters. Crickets randomly land on you, spiders don’t give a monkeys about your personal space (one large one cornered me in my own bathroom the other week) and cockroaches strut along the ground waving their antennae like some insect gangster who just dares you to look at them the wrong way. You actually end up letting them do what they want, adopting the calm but exasperated expression of a water buffalo, just because it takes so much energy to twitch them off that you end up looking like you have a case of Tourette’s.

Then there are the dogs. By day, they sleep or occasionally bark at each other. By night, anyone is fair game and the buggers even chase me on the motorbike. I’m actually developing a good move which involves accelerating while simultaneously kicking out sideways, a move that Evil Knievel would have admired were it made twenty feet in the air above a row of double decker buses. The other night I sped towards a pair of them mid-coitus, and both of the little swines were so put out at my rudely interrupting them shagging in the middle of the road that they abandoned their love-in to try biting my ankles instead. I’m an animal lover, I really am, but the animals here change your mind about unconditional love. I learnt early on that if a dog around here runs towards you, you bend down ready to pluck a stone from the ground, and nine times out of ten they turn and run away, but you should be ready to actually throw the stone at them if they don’t. I always walk through Wat Bo armed with a decent sized rock, and my aim is getting better all the time. The other night I chased a dog down the street growling at it, and a friend told me once he even bit a dog back when attacked. The growling and chasing is one thing, but what I could never figure out is the Mexican Howl that goes round the neighbourhood about three times a night. I swear, a dog howls somewhere in Thailand and three hours later they’re joining in here. They don’t even know what they’re howling at. It’s like a football chant.

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