The mammatjes. Part I: The sunburn.

Katlijn and her mom flying kites in Bangkok.

Katlijn's mom, Chris, and Chris' childhood friend, Emmy, flew all the way from Belgium to join us on our three week exploration of South Thailand. As they are both Dutch-speaking, mothers, and diminutive in stature, we affectionately referred to them as "the mammatjes" (meaning "little mommies"). For our part, we enjoyed their company immensely. For their part, they let us take the lead and temporarily turned the tables on their former roles as parents.

Chris and Emmy: little people on a big adventure.

Our first days together generally consisted of gorging ourselves on Geert's complimentary buffet breakfasts followed by languishing about in Bangkok's smoggy heat. During this time, we introduced the mammatjes to some of the city's redeeming qualities: Thai food, 200 Baht foot massages, and Starbucks coffee. However, it soon became apparent that getting out of Bangkok as soon as possible was in everyone's best interest.

Statue and the grand palace gold glistening in the heat of the day.

Scenes of the Damnoen Saduak Floating Market.

Our first attempt was to rent an air-conditioned car and visit several nearby attractions including the Bridge on the River Kwai: a site made famous by David Lean's memorable war epic. We caught a ride on the historic "death railroad" while Emmy entertained the local passengers who much appreciated her zany style of humour.

The "death railway", built by laborers and POWs during World War II, provided a vital supply line linking Thailand to Burma where the Japanese waged war against the British Empire. It is estimated that 16,000 allied prisoners and as many as 100,000 labourers died of malnutrition and disease during its construction.

While the bridge does exist, and Alec Guiness unforgettable in his portrayal of the quintessential British officer, the film is otherwise fictional. The real bridge was bombed by the allies along with hundreds of prisoners placed on the bridge as a deterrent by the Japanese. The current structure is a re-construction.

Nowadays, the infamous bridge is a tourist circus and the nearby museum comically inappropriate. Housed in a dingy concrete building is a bizarre assortment of random junk accompanied by uninformative explanations gushing over Japan's engineering genius and their alliance with Thailand during World War II. The best part is the hilarious butchered English which reads like a dramatic war novel written in baby-speak. A ridiculously grizzly exhibit featuring dead body parts floating down the water has the caption "after allied bombing of the bridge, bodies lay about in the river all higgeldy-piggeldy". And after the allies dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, "the city was obliterated in a jiffy". You just can't come up with comedy like that on purpose. In stark contrast to the museum's many grotesque wax exhibits, Katlijn and I found ourselves trying desperately to stifle an uncontrollable gut-laughter and though we left the Bridge on the River Kwai in tears, I am guessing they weren't quite the kind intended by the museum curators.

Andrew and a monk who cares for injured and orphaned tigers at a temple outside Bangkok.

After our Bridge on the River Kwai experience, it was clear to me that perhaps the only way to halt my rapidly growing cynicism of Thailand was to change scenes entirely. The next day, we booked a flight to a place called "Rayleigh", and left for Thailand's much vaunted beaches.

Rayleigh beach was our home for the next five days. It consists of gorgeous stretches of white sand beaches and turquoise waters nestled between looming limestone cliffs.

Within hours of our plane touching down, we were swindled by a taxi driver, hoodwinked by a travel agent, and ripped off by a smug boatman who brought us to within swimming distance of Rayleigh beach. By late afternoon, Katlijn and I were still wading through slippery rock-strewn waters while heaving the mammatjes' monstrous suit-cases to our piece of paradise. A long search for budget accommodation resulted in the sad realization that Thailand's backpackers were being priced out of the market. While the sublime limestone cliffs and thick jungles relented to the growing consumerism of expensive holiday resorts, budget travellers are segregated into a "backpacker ghetto" of dilapidated huts on a dubious strip of beach property. Access to this ghetto is controlled by a mafia of smug boatmen.

In addition to hosting the wasted backpacker crowd, the ghetto is also the meeting place for hundreds of the world's mountain climbers on pilgrimage to Rayleigh's limestone climbing mecca.

Limestone not only makes for great karst scenery and excellent climbing, it is ideal material for caving.

To the astonished gaze of apathetic Thais and lethargic beach bums, Katlijn's tourist-induced alter-ego (dubbed "The Mad Woman" by Emmy) was still furiously sprinting up and down the beach, evading bronzed bikini-clad crowds, and dragging those massive suitcases through the sand as the sun set over Rayleigh. Miraculously, she discovered one last neighborhood of creepy budget bungalows outside the ghetto, hidden just behind one of Rayleigh's swankiest resorts. After a brief discussion, we contrived the following arrangement: we took the creepy bungalows, the mammatjes took the swanky resort, and we just hung out with them all the time.

Emmy, Katlijn and her mom going native.

By nightfall, we heard what would soon become the familiar sound of the mammatjes giggling in the distance like Indian hotelmen. When we came to investigate, we found what would soon become the familiar sight of two little mammatjes made ridiculously tiny by their own over-sized beds, scantily-dressed and lying in a grotesque display of gluttony, indulging shamelessly in the comfort of the best value hotel room I have ever seen in my life. Their bulging suitcases, it turns out, were largely full of booze.

View from Chris and Emmy's hotel.

The next morning, we sat together with two slightly-hungover mammatjes peering out at our surroundings from their gorgeous patio lookout. While Thailand's tourist hordes, the inevitable scams, and the jaded boatmen was enough to bring out the inner mad-woman in anyone, Raileigh's blanched turquoise cliffs reflecting off the clear turquoise waters, and the white sands contrasting with the deep jungle greens were simply stunning. Thailand, to my surprise, was rather slow to grow on us. Nevertheless, by about the same time we had recovered from our first really bad sunburn, our cynicism had also, somehow, faded away.

But first, the sunburn

I thought it would be fun to rent a couple of kayaks and paddle out to a good snorkel spot at a place called Chicken Island. "You rent kayaks from me. Good price. You get to Chicken Island in thirty minutes", a slippery boatman assured me. With that, we set out into the open sea in search of another piece of paradise.

The mammatjes about to leave Rayleigh for the open seas.

About two hours later, Katlijn and I nearly collapsed in exhaustion on some remote island off the Andaman coast, our arms throbbing in protest. Wondering about their fate, we looked back into the distant waters: the poor mammatjes were but a dot on the horizon. Slowly, the dot grew larger until a kayak, then two paddles, and finally two determined little women could barely be discerned paddling furiously in the distance across the open sea. Muttering incoherently about how they lost sight of land and wanted to go back to Belgium, the mammatjes finally arrived.

Fortunately for us, there were a couple of food stalls on the island (there are food stalls everywhere in Thailand), and a few members of the boat mafia smiling knowingly at our misfortune.

"Is this chicken island ?" I asked the boatman.

"This no chicken island ! Chicken Island thirty minutes further," he replied smugly, not even making an effort to control the onset of his own gut-laughter.

The boats were conveniently full of other tourists, and while it may still have been possible to pay the mafia an extortionate rate for a ride back to the backpacker ghetto, we decided not to bother inquiring. The mammatjes bravely gathered their strength and, full of the wisdom that can only be garnered after a life-time of experience, aimed their small craft at the open sea towards their air-conditioned accommodation waiting for them back in Rayleigh, full of booze. In contrast, Katlijn and I briefly rested our sore limbs and, full of the naive reckless abandon of youth, set out to find the mythical Chicken Island.

After another hour paddling about until our arms had turned into two heavy jelly-like weights, a small lump of land emerged in the distance. After squinting my eyes in the sun and tilting my head to one side, I decided it looked suitably enough like a chicken and declared our quest a complete success. We dawned our snorkel gear and jumped into the water to enjoy ten glorious minutes with the tropical fish before we had to turn around for the long haul back to Rayleigh.

While it took us only a few more hours to kayak back to our bungalows, our arms wouldn't forgive us for days. That evening, we made our ritual visit to the mammatjes only to find two scantily dressed, glutinous, diminutive lobsters nursing their sore limbs and sun-burned bodies with a bottle of pastis, muttering something about going back to Belgium.

"Ik wil naar thuis !"

As Katlijn and I walked back to our bungalows in the dark, we began to worry about both the mental and physical health of the battered mammatjes. Chris had committed the classic blunder of forgetting to put sun-screen on her feet which, exposed in the kayak beneath Thailand's powerful sun, had turned a remarkably unnatural shade of purple. Emmy's legs were afflicted with some, as yet unidentified, form of severe sun rash which looked alarmingly like pictures I once saw of a tropical flesh eating disease. The two of them could be heard through the night giggling maniacally as they drank away the entire contents of their super-sized suitcases: Chris had clearly lost her marbles and Emmy's normally sharp wit had been reduced to juvenile toilet humour.

After a long day, Katlijn and I lay down in the wet heat of our creepy bungalow under the heavy weight of guilt and concern, finally understanding what it must have been like for our mammatjes when we were kids.