Home Alone...

It was always going to happen at some point, I just didn’t think it would come around in what was only our third full week in Bangkok. One of us was going to have to go away leaving the other to fend for themselves and the dogs in the scary Bangkok house. I know I’m being a bit melodramatic, but you quickly get used to doing everything as a tag-team, particularly when it comes to the dogs; it’s never a good thing to be outnumbered.

Abandoned!

Chris was going to Phuket for 2 days, allegedly for some sort of work team-building thing. I thought it sounded dubious as the whole team is based in Bangkok so why they all needed to fly to an island with glorious white sandy beaches is beyond me, but I didn’t question it. It sounded like a total jolly though.

Chris’ absence meant that I was going to have to perform my first solo dog walk. Now, for those that have read the earlier post ‘Walking in Bangkok’, this was never going to be easy, dodging all the various obstacles that the Bangkok streets have to offer. In future, our maid Rena will be roped in to help with this sort of task however she’d only been with us for a week and I didn’t want to totally scare her off! The dogs also keep barking at her, but I think that’s mostly because they’re scared of the various cleaning paraphernalia. They seem to get over this when she gives them their tea though.

And before you, all start thinking ‘Ooooh Emma and Chris have got a maid, who do they think they are?’, it’s quite normal to have a full-time maid in Thailand and once I start work we will both be out of the house for at least 10 hours every day, so we’ve really got a personal maid for the dogs. Maybe that’s worse?

Wildlife

Not only would I have to contend with walking the dogs solo, but I was also going to have to manage the bedtime routine which in recent days had started to include fun and frolics with the frogs and toads in the garden. We’d had a bit of rain recently which seemed to have drawn out our amphibious friends. They’d probably been there the whole time and the dogs hadn’t noticed, but now they’d discovered them they had started to hunt them, which is not conducive to getting them to do their business before bed. The frogs are small and seem to appear out of nowhere and then hop across the grass. The toads (I think that’s what they are, but I am no expert in amphibious creatures) also appear from nowhere but just sit there motionless. They totally freak me out, like they will pounce on me at any moment.

Rather than leave them at the mercy of Charles and Siale, Chris had commenced the Frog Relocation Programme (FLP) where he captures them and relocates them to a section of foliage down the street. Whilst I’m not keen on letting the dogs torture and eat the frogs (I don’t think they’d be good for the digestion), the FLP is futile, as far as I can see they all just get run over later in the evening. My tactic is to usher them into the trees and put a plant pot to conceal and protect ‘Toady’ when he refuses to move.

To top it all off, Siale had decided he was no longer house trained at night, so we’d been waking up to a total mess for the past few mornings. We thought he was probably a bit poorly so hoped it would be short-lived. But don’t you worry Chris, you go build that team in Phuket, we’ll be fine here.

New Tactics

My chosen approach for the dog walk was to avoid the busier streets where there would be a lot of passing cars. Trying to persuade the dogs to walk in a single file formation was never going to happen so we’d probably just end up bringing the whole of Bangkok to a standstill if cars couldn’t get passed. I also didn’t want to get on the wrong side of “The Men with the Whistles” having cultivated such good favour with them up to now.

I was just going to stick to the little sois (streets) which were mostly dead ends but traffic free. Yes, it wouldn’t be a nice, neat circular walk but I felt we could achieve the same result. The challenge with the sois with no cars is that they are a favourable environment for all sorts of other menaces and we would be walking into the unknown, maybe never to return!

We set out, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (not literally as I don’t have a tail and the dog’s tails are quite smooth), ready to take on whatever Bangkok would throw at us that morning. Back in Crick my morning dog walk involved bumping into the same people at the same time most days, people you were only acquainted with because you walked your dogs on a similar route, and later referred to them by the descriptions or names of the dogs e.g. ‘Millie the Pug, “The Black Lurcher” and “The Two Evil Spaniels”. In Bangkok, it was fewer dog walkers, more loose dogs, men with whistles and elderly people doing light exercise. The first of these acquaintances was our neighbour going through his morning routine. This involves walking up and down our street, sometimes slowly, sometimes briskly and normally sporting a fluorescent short and vest combo. I’ve seen quite a few people take this approach to light exercise (but fortunately not exercise attire) walking back and forth over a short distance near their houses.

Out in the Open

We walked out of our street and meandered along a little soi. There as a surprising amount of greenery which the dogs loved. Having moved from Crick which is the epitome of ‘England’s green and pleasant land’, they miss real grass and vegetation and will be automatically drawn to a modicum of shrubbery. This street had plenty, so we did lots of sniffing and general foraging with me obviously on the lookout for frogs, discarded takeaways, and other perils. We reached the end of the line so turned back and did it all again.

We then crossed over a semi-busy road and into another set of streets that we’d never been to before. The streets looked like ours, however, there was one significant feature we didn’t have, a large detached house made entirely of corrugated iron! I’ve seen much smaller structures constructed in the same manner on the outskirts of cities like Paris and Sofia, but I’d never seen a full-on house. On closer inspection, the house was contained within a full corrugated iron compound comprising several separate buildings. They’d even fashioned a separate, gated area for their bins!

Noisy Neighbours

Moving on from this feat of engineering, we continued to pass other more traditionally constructed houses. The problem with these seemingly unassuming houses was that they all had dogs in their yards, and territorial dogs at that. Charles and Siale fit in well in Bangkok as like every other dog here, they bark when someone else comes close to their domain, the only difference being that Charles and Siale’s domain is wherever they happen to be. Unlike the UK where people can get judgemental when you have a reactive dog, nobody bats an eyelid here, so we’ve just let the dogs stand their ground which has made them remarkedly more chilled out.

We have several local dogs who Charles and Siale have become acquainted with (at a distance) and are not bothered by. This includes the two black Labradors (one missing a front leg), next door’s howling dog and these two yappy terriers who pop just the upper halves of their bodies out of the shutters, so they look like they have no back legs.

The issue comes when we enter new terrain and pass new dogs. I am afraid to say that the number of new dogs on this walk was probably overload, and we triggered what can only be described as a Mexican wave of dog barking and howling, that possibly continued to the other side of Bangkok and maybe even the World. This isn’t an unusual sound to hear where we live and would have been fine if it hadn’t been 6:30 in the morning. Fearing that we had undoubtedly woken up a lot of people, we made tracks and re-joined our luminous neighbour in the safety of our own street, with only a few feral cats to contend with.