Same Same But Different

This is a picture of me and the kids on the back of an elephant on the Pai River in northern Thailand. We've been here a fortnight now and are leaving tomorrow. I just don't want to go. Sometimes I get home to my bungalow late at night, well not that late, and think; I'd forgotten how beautiful it was, the sound of the river, the moonlight reflecting off the water, the lights of the huts down the valley, even the lighted lanterns that float off into the sky at night. I've loved it here. Yesterday I was thinking we've done everything, it's time to leave, and today I'm thinking, why, why, when everything is here.

I have to be back at work on Sunday. I was so depressed when I left. Ceasing transmission wasn't the half of it. I don't know what it was, some depressive jag after Ian died. He was the sentinal, somehow, in the internal cosmology, the one to report back to, the chronicler of all our lives; and his passing seemed to reflect on everything. Sydney was boring late at night; no real late night cafes, playing pool with the tragic trannies at 3am had limited appeal; and there was just nothing, there in the darkness and the silence before the dawn. I could never sleep. Here, with the sound of the river, I sleep for hours. Or sit and talk to people from all over the world, literally all over. Back there, I had lost faith in the story; the writer, the observer, the camera eye, the role that God and fate had cast were all meaningless in the depths of growing older and more silent; day by day. Here there are blokes from all over; all ages; and for some reason; maybe I've got that sort of face; they tell me their whole life story in the first five minutes of meeting them. I was a postman, I worked in an icecream factory; I was divorced, there was nothing there, I had money in the bank and I set off two years ago and just never came back.

Never came back. Same same but different. It's a common phrase the Thais use in the midst of negotiations to justify why, after half an hour of assuring the customer that this one was the same as that one and the price would be the same, that in fact it cost extra, because it's same same but different. Like all the other sayings. The land of smiles is also the land of money, with the economy expanding at 13 per cent a year. Suddenly they're all running around in brand new Toyotas, money changes hands rapidly, schemes and dreams. Everything is possible, nothing is sure. One of the last nights at work; I got there, churned out 400 words on our noble fireman for a self promotional activity by the paper; then updated a weather story that hadn't run to take in hail storms in Armidale while reinforcing the prediction for the first white christmas in more than 20 years; then had to find an academic anti-euthenasia after the publication of a how to kill yourself book; then realised there had been a shutdown on the eastern suburbs rail network after passengers reported strange smells; a false alarm, then the radio room rang down and said there had been an explosion at the entertainment centre, turned out to be fireworks in a car park, then bashir was exonerated by the Indonesian courts and I had to ring Bali bomb victims; lifting the scabs off the wounds for the thousandth time, all this just before midnight; then doing the radio spot on the ABC, the national broadcaster; and there could be no mistake. And I haven't had an upgrading in 12 years and thought: what the fuck am I doing?