For years I’d been spending huge amounts of my increasingly jet-lagged and sleep-deprived time hurtling around the Asia-Pacific region from high-stress client meetings to commercial shoots to regional board meetings. I was exhausted, regularly took sleeping pills, had intractable sinusitis from Bangkok’s acrid air pollution and I was desperate to slow down and see if I could regain my happiness once again.
I’d been reading Peter Mayle’s hugely successful book ‘A Year in Provence’ and identified strongly with the biographical story he told of an advertising executive, much like myself, who’d quit the madness of the corporate rat-race to move to a beautiful part of the globe and concentrate on writing and creativity. Indeed, Mayle had even worked for Ogilvy and Mather and the legendary David Ogilvy, as I had done as a young adman in Toronto in the 1970s
Peter Mayle, an Englishman like myself, was born in 1939, 10 years before me, so he was somewhat ahead of me when in 1989, in his early fifties, he moved to Provence to continue his writing career. I realised that in my own 2006 move to Phuket, I was searching and hoping for some of the romantic idealism which Mayle discovered and then wrote about so vividly when he moved to Provence.
Bicycles feature large and centre stage in Mayle’s Provencal dreamscapes as crusty locals in berets are seen cycling to the morning bakery and the aromas of freshly-baked croissants enliven their sleepy pedalling through the early mists. Late evening tipplers are hilariously depicted, weaving their unsteady way home from extended sessions of banter and pastis with their cronies in the town square.
Dusting off my own trusty mountain bike to start to get to know Phuket, I wondered if I would find similar scenes of amusing local life, as Peter Mayle had portrayed. As the year from May 2006 when I arrived in Phuket unfolded, I did indeed seem to find a wide number of distinct parallels between our experiences of disconnecting from the mainstream world of congested cities and stressful corporate life.
The wondrous natural and topographical beauty of the Andaman was of course very different from the rural agrarian charms of Peter Mayle’s Luberon, but both seemed to have a mystical ability to unleash happiness in our souls. Much like Mayle, I started to find myself smiling again for no apparent reason, other than the unbridled pleasure of being alive in the lovely new outdoor world in which I found myself.
Like Mayle, I certainly fell afoul of the trickery, mendacity and money gouging of the locals, but again even this was mostly done, as Mayle had observed, with an almost comedic obviousness. It was certainly a case in Phuket of ‘Foreigner Beware’ and if you failed to wise up pretty quickly to the scams and cheating, then that was your problem Mister Stupid!
As I gradually settled into my island idyll, other parallels between Provence and Phuket announced themselves. There were the wonderful fresh food markets bursting with colourful local produce, not to say colourful locals! Cheeses, cured meats, olives, artichokes, fungi, truffles and rabbits in Provence and pla kapong, shellfish, lobsters, durian, rambutan, eggplants and mountains of chilies in Phuket.
The whole reverence with which eating and drinking were celebrated also mirrored each other across the two cultures. Meals were grand occasions for extended communal enjoyment, full of banter, gossip, shared gustatory pleasure and copious libations to wash down the endless courses. Often occurring outdoors, these meals were a joyous contrast to the cold, often lonely, mastication of ‘meat and two veg’. which formed a major part of both Peter Mayle’s and my own post-war boyhoods!
These many similarities between my Phuketian baptism and that of Peter Mayle in Provence lead me to ponder the possibility of writing the book ‘A Year in Phuket’ then turning it into a global bestseller, with film rights, celebrity and financial rewards to match. I’m sure I’m not the first to have had this romantic idea, but thus far this 700-word article, rather than a 200-page book, will have to suffice!
‘Bicycling’ Baz Daniel has been penning his Blazing Saddles column, chronicling his cycling adventures in Phuket and beyond, since 2013.