A quiet paradise? hardly!

One aspect of living in Thailand that everyone quickly notices is the excessive noise everywhere. It’s as if local people love making noise, be it singing karaoke, broadcasting messages over tannoys, promoting products with amplifiers, revving their motorbikes, wielding angle grinders or talking loudly on their mobile phone.

It can be quite unnerving being among the din of a Thailand city, and any illusions that this was a peacefully quiet Asian escape are soon shattered when you arrive in Thailand. To find peace and quiet you truly do have to go off into the mountains and even then there is no guarantee that a local villager won’t be piercing the silence with an electric saw as he adds extensions to his house.

Any farang who has lived here even for a few months will complain to you that it’s virtually impossible to escape some sort of unmindful noise. Simply put, wherever you are there will, sooner or later, be karaoke drifting across the neighbourhood. Or an unwelcome 7am wake up call from the local village headman as he broadcasts the day’s announcements over an extensive tannoy system that is part and parcel of every old fashioned neighbourhood in Thailand. Usually these droll, pedantic and often meaningless ‘announcements’ go on for 20 minutes, with some music either side and this is as Thai as chilli paste and fish sauce. There is nothing you can do about it, and any suggestion that it’s perhaps a tad loud will be met with indignation.

We Westerners value peace and quiet, but for Thais its quite the opposite. They are a communal-based group of people, where being alone isn’t common. In fact silence and solitude is rather uncomfortable for them in general. Noise means activity, company, liveliness and progress. They are remarkably good at ignoring the din around them and getting on with life.

To suggest to a Thai that you can’t concentrate with backgroud noise is perhaps a bit bewildering to them. They can get on with their job with all sorts of distractions, while Westerners tend to tackle tasks with a deeper sense of concentration which can be more easily disturbed. Thais on the other hand work with much shallower thought processes.

They also have an unbelievable ability to fall asleep under any noise conditions, and will nod off while all around them are noisy TVs and stereos. My interpretation of this is that Westerners generally have far more active minds, and instinctive continual trains of thought that keep us awake, but I don’t think Thai people experience this problem as much. So, while we are getting irate and wound up by the neighbour’s late night singing, the Thais simply ignore it and fall asleep. They can quite easily follow a movie while their children loudly play Sony Playstation meters away, it doesn’t bother them. You could be watching the news and they will mindlessly walk up and turn on the stereo in the same room. If you are successfully Thai you can listen to both in the same room.

And then there is the construction noise that is so much a part of Thailand. To Thais this probably means progress and another leap forward towards a modern city of concrete and steel. Thailand has seen so much building and growth over the last 30 years that they are all used to jack-hammers and angle grinders and such as a background soundtrack to their daily lives. Thais love building, it’s a national obsession, and everyone is congratulated in exercising their right to build. Wherever you live in Thailand you’ll be on a virtual building site as new homes go up around you and old ones are replaced. The noise will start promptly at 7am and continue sometime late into the evening, seven days a week.

Oh yes, and don’t think of sleeping in. Thais are early starters. It’s part of their time-honoured routine to get work done early while it is cool. They’ll all be napping through the hot afternoon while you are busy being a nine-to-fiver. By 7am the traffic is in full swing and everyone is up and busy making noise.

Your only solution is to do what most middle class Thais do; bolt yourself up in your air-conditioned house which has far more concrete than glass, put on the TV and shut out the noise. It explains why so many are now moving into prestigious and over-priced housing projects where all the houses are completed before they move in. This keeps the riff raff out, and some of the noise.

Guide to Phuket