An Adventurer’s Seven Point Guide to Living an Interesting Life

By Jason Schoonover

Jason Schoonover is often asked, ‘How come you get to live such an interesting life while the rest of us got stuck with jobs, spouse, kids and mortgage? How did you do it?’ A Fellow Emeritus, Stefansson Medalist, Citation of Merit awardee and on the Honor Roll of the prestigious Explorers Club, Jason lives a very interesting life. He has led over 40 expeditions in as many years, including 10 archaeological canoe adventures with Capt. Norm Baker, Thor Heyerdahl’s First Mate on the Ra and Tigris reed boat voyages, as his own First Mate; 18-person dinosaur bone hunting expeditions with noted paleontologist Phil Currie as his Field Leader, one of which resulted in a major find; fixed a Sri Lankan Devil Dance shoot for Survivorman Les Stroud; explored South and Southeast Asian jungles and the Himalayas seeking anthropological collections for museums worldwide; and excavated Paleolithic caves along Thailand’s River Kwai with Sir Rod Beattie which resulted in the building of a museum. He’s also been charged by a bull elephant, dived on shipwrecks, produced major stage shows, and been around the world several times. His real life of adventure crossed over into fiction in the Bantam international bestselling adventure-thriller Thai Gold, and his non-fiction Adventurous Dreams, Adventurous Lives was an award winner. In this inspirational book, he shows you—often with humor—how you can avoid digging a rut or, if you’re already in one, how to climb out of it and live one too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jason Schoonover
• Release date: Jan 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311875495

Jason Schoonover

Jason Schoonover—writer, adventurer, expedition leader, ethnologist, archaeologist, paleontologist, geologist, canoeist, naturalist, photographer and Fellow Emeritus, Stefansson Medalist, Citation of Merit awardee, and on the Honor Roll of The Explorers Club—was brought up on farms, villages and towns in Saskatchewan, Canada, and cities like Saskatoon and Vancouver. This explains why he feels equally at home canoeing in the remote north of his homeland, one of his passions, and living in mega-cities like Bangkok.Following university (Simon Fraser, English and History, 1970, Vancouver), he launched a multi-media career as a disk jockey, and expanded into writing, directing and producing in radio, TV, stage, newspapers and magazines, including stints as a columnist. His largest stage production was writing, directing and producing Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s 80th birthday party gala in 1975, an extravaganza involving over 300 performers and personnel. He founded Schoonover Properties and invested everything in Saskatoon real estate. Since 1977, he’s been gainfully unemployed and began traveling in earnest.On his first solo around the world, stringing travel as a photo-journalist to Canadian and U.S. dailies, he discovered a new and fascinating career in Asia—anthropological collecting for museums internationally. He moved to Bangkok in 1982. This exciting lifestyle led to the publication in 1988 of his first adventure novel, The Bangkok Collection, which became the Bantam international paperback bestseller Thai Gold the following year. All his books, fiction and non-fiction, are in the adventure field.He’s been Team Leader on over 40 expeditions, including several 18-member dinosaur bone hunting forays in Alberta with renowned paleontologist Phil Currie as his Field Leader—which resulted in a major find; explored Asian jungles and the Himalaya piecing together ethnographic collections for museums; excavated caves in Thailand for Paleolithic finds resulting in the building of a museum; fixed the opening episode for Les Survivorman Stroud’s Beyond Survival in Sri Lanka; led numerous canoe expeditions with Capt. Norm Baker, Thor Heyerdahl’s First Mate on the Ra voyages across the Atlantic, as his own First Mate; and explored Thailand’s abandoned WW-II River Kwai Death Railway with Sir Rodney Beattie. He’s also been charged by a bull elephant, dived on shipwrecks and been around the world several times.He was profiled in Jerry’s Hopkins’ Bangkok Babylon: The Real-Life Exploits of Bangkok’s Legendary Expatriates is often Stranger than Fiction, and featured in Jim McCormick and Maryann Karinch’s Business Lessons from the Edge: Learn How Extreme Athletes Use Intelligent Risk Taking to Succeed in Business.Jason splits his year between Thailand and Canada. You can guess which seasons he spends where. His consort, the Imperial Dragon Lady Madame Su Hattori, has kindly been enduring the unendurable since 1988.“A major writer of the Southeast Asian scene.” Bangkok POST“Jason Schoonover is among a small handful of authors who inspired me to become a writer.” Jack DuBrul, co-author with Clive Cussler of six novels and of his own Philip Mercer series.

Book preview

An Adventurer’s Seven Point Guide

to Living an Interesting Life

by

Jason Schoonover

To those dreaming of living an interesting life. It begins with a dream.

A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.

Lao Tzu

The journey is the destination.

Bic Parker

Pre-expedition Notes

We wake from a dreamless sleep to life, we spend a long day, then we go back to sleep. Shouldn’t we make that day as interesting as possible?

Bic Parker

I’m told I live an interesting life.

In fact, I’ve been told it so often over so many decades that I’ve become used to hearing it, although I continue to be flattered. Some go so far as to claim I’m the most interesting person they’ve met, which always takes me aback. Often these compliments come from people I’ve known all my life, and since I’m happily sledding down the far side of the hill—I was born in 1946, the first year of the Baby Boom now surging into the Geezer Boom—that’s some time. Indeed, I’m the same age as that old guy in the Dos Equis beer commercials, although I’m nowhere as interesting as he is. He’s won the life time achievement award twice and I haven’t even won it once.

But I know I live an interesting life. And why not? We all only have one life to live—why would anyone want to live a boring one? And yet the vast majority of people do exactly that, something that never ceases to amaze me.

Lifestyles have come a long way since Henry David Thoreau noted that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Indeed, those of us born since 1946 slipped squalling into the greatest Golden Age in history. It’s possible now for billions of people to live stimulating lives. This is most true in the West, but increasingly so around the world as an international middle class bursts into existence. However, few take full advantage of it.

I’m now at an age that I can compose this book. It’s sage advice that a writer should write about what he or she knows about, and I’ve put in my 10,000 hours. It’s actually more like 10,000 days—and more. I’ve walked the walk. Herein, I tell you how I did it and the lessons I learned both from my life—and others’—in hopes that you might have an interesting life too.

I’m not famous. Only they are allowed the indulgence of autobiography. At the same time I’m told time and again that I’ve achieved something rare and admired. I’m surprised I did, and I relate to that consummate gentleman Hugh Downs when he emailed me his contribution to Adventurous Dreams, Adventurous Lives. In it I had invited 120 luminaries to tell me in their own words when and how the dreams were born launching their remarkable lives, and the turning points leading to their fulfillment. Hugh wrote, My dream is true as chronicled, but my aspiration was so distant I really never expected to have success either with media activities or with adventures. But they unfolded together out of that dream.

I’ll give examples of activities I do that are described as interesting—and not only tell you how I came to do them but show you how you can too. And what are some of these?

As a paleontologist, I’ve been team leader on 18-person expeditions, one of which resulted in a major dinosaur find. As an archeologist, I’ve led innumerable canoe expeditions into northern Canada seeking long lost fur trading posts; to Paleolithic cave digs along Thailand’s River Kwai, trying to understand how our forefathers lived. The latter led to the development of the Hintok River Camp Museum. It also displays our remarkable finds from along the nearby WW-II Death Railway made infamous by Bridge Over the River Kwai. I’ve rummaged around South and Southeast Asian jungles and the Himalayas piecing together anthropological collections for museums around the world, such as the Smithsonian Institution. I’ve led geological expeditions. Indeed, I’ve organized and led over 40 expeditions, and I can’t count the times I’ve headed out alone. Indeed again, I’ve roamed solo around the world, to date, four times.

I’ve long been called an adventurer. By definition, adventurers and explorers live the most exciting, fascinating, remarkable and interesting lives on the planet and I want you to join us. I don’t have a Ph.D. or formal studies in any of these disciplines but I’ve collaborated with the world’s top authorities. I’ll show you the paths leading into those fields. In fact, I’ll take you inside expeditions so you can experience what they’re like. Really, what I want to demonstrate is just how much fun they are.

There are people who are far more adventurous than I am. I’ve never been to the top of Everest like Sir Edmund Hillary; dived to the bottom of the deepest trench in the world like Don Walsh in Trieste and Jim Cameron in Deepsea Challenger; rocketed to the moon like Buzz Aldrin; climbed any of the world’s seven highest peaks, the quest Pat Morrow pioneered; drifted across the Atlantic in a reed boat raft like Capt. Norm Baker did with Thor Heyerdahl in Ra and Ra-II; circumnavigated the planet by manpower alone like Colin Angus; drifted around the globe in a balloon like Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones; discovered the Titanic like Robert Ballard; or dived on hundreds of Bronze Age shipwrecks along the Turkish coast like George Bass—but I’m acquainted with them all except Heyerdahl and some are close friends. Knowing people like this is interesting in itself—especially when some are childhood heroes, like Don Walsh. There’ll be a chapter on this—how having interesting friends is a key ingredient to having an interesting life and how to meet and make them part of your life. Believe it or not, there is a way. And a place.

I will introduce you to role models like these, many famous, some not so, that I have the pleasure and honor of knowing who serve as my role models. Sometimes I’ll nick names to protect privacy. I will occasionally recommend a guide book or a guesthouse and the like. I’m not affiliated with them. I recommend them because I consider them to be the best. When I use my life as an example, it won’t always be presented in chronology; the point is foremost, the sources secondary. There’s chapters that you may wish to skip, that aren’t relevant to your situation.

This guide will benefit foremost the young, those still unencumbered of the whole catastrophe of wife, kids, jobs and mortgages as Zorba the Greek lamented with such passionate pathos. Life conspires to trap people in recirculating rhythms generation after generation, like jobs and families. So all pervasive is the indoctrination that most people just aren’t aware that there are paths to take in life other than blindly following the ones they were imprinted with growing up in their family homes and communities. They don’t see that we’re an assembly line society, that they all are. It’s difficult to escape that powerful conditioning—the brainwashing we all go through which creates the automatons 95% of societies are stocked with—but it can be done.

The second group it will most benefit are those on the other end of life—retired and free of the burdens of kids, jobs and mortgages. This generation is expected to be the longest lived in history and can look forward to upwards of 30 years of freedom. And that means the freedom to live life to its fullest.

For those in the middle who think they’re firmly fixed to ball and chain, there’s still ways to file through your padlock. It just might take longer, that period depending on how thick the lock is you’ve snapped on. To mix metaphors, I’ll show you how to dig footholds in the sides of your rut so you can climb out. Many already have the time and means to live extremely interesting lives but their chains are internal. Ultimately, they’re all internal.

This is a book about reinventing yourself. There is nothing more liberating. I wish I could say it will be easy to achieve—that all you have to decide this is what you want to do and then simply go do it. But like any worthwhile goal, it ain’t that easy to reach without grit and guts and hard work and sacrifice in the beginning. I remember being 18 and working on the order desk of a slaughter house. I was driving to work in my cold VW bug one dark morning (Canadian winter days are very short, adding to their misery) listening to the song by the Animals called We Gotta Get Out of This Place (if it’s the last thing we ever do, there’s a better life for me and you….) and it just tore me up. I was young and already caged in the workaday world. I was a prisoner because I wasn’t lucky enough to have been born into wealth. Money buys freedom.

That wasn’t even my lowest low. That came just before I stepped up to that job, one where I could dress in clean clothes. It was as a hot tar roofer working for minimum wages while early winter snow swirled around me. I quit in the middle of the day. The foreman didn’t even blink. He was used to it.

Throughout my life, especially in the 1960s and ’70’s, I’d read about men with high pressure careers who threw it all off to run away to live off the land, or sail to the South Pacific. They often were advertising executives. They always had a wife, kids and a mortgage, that whole Zorban catastrophe—but they still grabbed the family and ran away to follow their dreams. I always admired people like that. That’s why these heroic escapes found their way into newspapers; everyone likes to learn about innocent prisoners who broke out, like Papillon and Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. It inspires hope in the rest of us. Before I was thoroughly locked down in the 9-5 penitentiary that is life, I wiggled between the bars and scrambled over the wall. Yes, I was lucky because I was skinny then and could do so, but there’s no reason why you can’t make good your escape, even if you are hanging from a stone wall by chains around your wrists.

Why strive for an interesting life? It’s a stupid question, but since I asked it, I’m not insulting anyone but me. Because it’s fulfilling and makes you happy. Happier than any other endeavor. An interesting life is a fun life. Remember all the fun you had as a kid? It didn’t get any better than that, did it?

In the same manner as an article on The Explorers Club changed my life as a boy by opening up a whole vista of possibility, I hope this guide will do the same for you. I wish I had it to read when I was 10.

Let me show you how you can go out and play again, whatever your age and means.

Chapter One

You Are What You Do

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

Eleanor Roosevelt

First of all, what do I do that’s considered so interesting? Well, quite a few things really, and I’ve mentioned some. To avoid having to blow my own horn, I’ll let Jerry Hopkins strike up the band. He’s Bangkok’s dean of writers. Among almost 40 other books, he wrote the first biography on Elvis and co-penned No One Here Gets Out Alive, the Jim Morrison biography which Oliver Stone based the movie The Doors on. If anyone should be writing this book, it’s Jerry. His life is a model for living an interesting life.

Inspired by the writing of Ernie Pyle, the famous WW-II Stars and Stripes reporter, he decided at the age of nine he was going to be one too. Within two years of graduating from journalism, he launched a life-long career on the international stage as a writer-producer for Mike Wallace on one of his pre-60 minutes shows, wrote for The Village Voice during the late 1950s, then moved on to be a talent coordinator for Steve Allan in LA. There he continued to meet everyone who was anyone, including introducing Groucho to Lenny (and witnessing Bruce slumped in his bathroom in the Hollywood Hills, the needle dangling from his arm). On Allan’s show, he introduced Frank Zappa to the world (playing a bicycle as a musical instrument; Allan suggested that Jerry not go that far out again), and dated Teri Garr for two years. This segued into a 20-year gig writing and interviewing for Rolling Stone. Choosing to live in some of the most captivating places in the world, after years in New York, Los Angeles, London and Hawaii he moved to Bangkok in the early ’90s. He’s lived down the soi, or sidestreet, from me since then. Jerry knows how to live an extremely interesting life—and it’s because he put himself in a position to meet fascinating people. And his curiosity has never waned.

In Bangkok Babylon: The Real-life Exploits of Bangkok’s Legendary Expatriates are often Stranger than Fiction, Jerry profiled 25 so-called interesting expats. I was one. He titled mine The Collector. It’s a little dated since he published it in 2009. I’ve now been to several more countries, had a couple more books published, and I do a lot more than rummage in jungles for anthropological collections, but you’ll get the idea:

How many men who are now fifty years old or older got their first exposure to sex in the pages of National Geographic magazine? Thousands? Millions?

Now, answer me this: how many of those men went beyond the photographs of bare-breasted natives and read the stories as well and became explorers and adventurers?

Jason Schoonover may be one of the few. He, like the generation that followed that bought Playboy for the articles (or so they said), admits he enjoyed the illustrations—the only other soft porn available to him at the time was in the lingerie section of the Canadian Sears catalog—but he swears that he read every issue of the Geographic ever published, leading, eventually, to a career tramping some of the most remote parts of the world and membership as a Fellow in the world-renowned Explorers Club.

A native of Saskatchewan, born in 1946, Jason was the son of a man who delivered milk and ran the local livery stable. The family farm et cetera failed when I was four and my father moved onward and upward to becoming a horrendous drunk, rising all the way to skid row in his later years, a total failure at everything. He and his sister, he says, thus effectively were raised by their mother, a second grade school teacher.

They lived in Carrot River, a frontier town (pop. 900), in a house heated by a wood-burning stove, water fetched in buckets from the well, where wheat field meet a virgin birch, pine and poplar forest that runs north eight hundred miles to the Barren Land’s tree line. It was in that boreal forest beginning two blocks from our home that I fell in love with Nature and the outdoors and where I feel most at home.

Following four years of English Literature and History at Simon Fraser University outside Vancouver, he became a popular radio personality and started freelancing for newspapers, magazines, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as well as stage, writing, directing and producing retired Prime Minister Diefenbaker’s 80th birthday gala at Saskatoon’s Centennial Auditorium. He also owned and operated Saskatoon’s first taped music DJ operation, investing his profits in income-producing real estate, founding Schoonover Properties in 1975. Since 1977, he boasts, he’s been gainfully unemployed, his travels to more than fifty countries paid for by the revenue from his rental property. From a high of eight multi-unit properties, he now has a single family dwelling and four duplexes, most of them in Saskatoon’s prime university area, all managed by a professional company that does that sort of thing.

In 1978, on his first solo trip around the world, he says, I found myself staying in a dollar-a-day room just inside the jungle in a village in Sri Lanka. Like out of a movie—no kidding—drums were beating in the distance in the jungle night. I asked the owner what they were. ‘Devil dance, sar,’ he replied. ‘Devil dance? Is it possible to see it?’’ ‘Of course, sar. I’ll be happy to take you.’

For the next two months, Jason assembled a collection of ninety-seven masks, costumes, drums, whistles, bells, and other ritual paraphernalia, along with sound recordings and photos. He sold the fully documented collection to the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology and when the Smithsonian Institution asked him to assemble a similar collection, he jumped at the chance to make this his new career, moving to Bangkok.

From 1978 to 1985, Jason sold a dozen collections to a half-dozen museums around the world, from Germany to Japan, some under contract, other times on speculation, also selling to individual collectors and antiquity and primitive art shops across the US and Canada. His contracts now secure in Sri Lanka, most of these items were devil dance artifacts, although one collection focused on Tantric Buddhist and folk trappings from Nepal, Tibet, and Assam, and another that included masks from Indonesia.

I remember an Indonesian mask I paid $5 for that I sold as part of a collection for $175—so the profits were good.

Still, he concluded that the market was thin. There were three hundred and fifty ethnological museums in the world but only two handfuls had any tickets, and many of them were already stocked with Asian ethnography or the curators had other interests. Once I had filled the existing holes, those markets dried up. It was time for another career change.

So he invented an alter ego named Lee Rivers and wrote a novel called The Bangkok Collection, published in Canada in 1988, republished world-wide a year later by Bantam in New York as Thai Gold. River’s specialties are eastern antiquities, exotic women, and high-priced danger, the American edition crowed on its back cover. The bearded author’s photo showed him in a snakeskin jacket and the paperback mentioned memberships in The Explorers Club of New York and the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand. He was single, the blurb continued, and lives comfortably out of a burgundy Samsonite and a khaki knapsack and can most often be found somewhere in Asia.

Indiana Jones, step back! There’s a new guy in town, and this one—Lee Rivers—was, by Jason’s admission, taller and more courageous than himself, but not quite as smart. Maybe that explains why in the book and in a sequel, Opium Dream, published in Thailand in 2002, Rivers has a running dialog with his penis, an appendage he calls Ol’ Thunder. A third novel, The Manila Galleon, was to be published in 2004.

Despite, or maybe because of, outrageous characters and plots, the novels were pretty good. One reviewer called Opium Dream, a story that takes Rivers to Afghanistan and the long-lost burial site of Kublai Khan, a fast paced Robert Ludlum-meets-Steven Spielberg romp, an opinion not far off the mark. Once the reader made the leap of faith required by many novels (and films) in this genre, Dream, like its predecessor, was an action-packed fun ride from Saigon to Cairo that, unlike many others in the field, made few mistakes; most fiction set in this region was so riddled with glaring errors it was clear the authors spent only a little time there or were hurrying to meet a deadline. By 2003, Jason had been a visitor or part-time resident of Asia for twenty-five years and was proud that the descriptions of culture and place, from the Golden Triangle to Afghanistan, invariably rang true.

Jason continued to divide his time between Thailand and Toontown, as he called it, where he shared his home in the same upper middle class university neighborhood with Su Hattori, an Intensive Care Unit coordinator he often called the Imperial Dragon Lady.

Old, quality character homes and doctors, lawyers, professors and businessman, and even a few artists, predominate on either side of the boulevard, he said. "We’re one block from the river and the position where local gal Joni Mitchell stood to paint the painting on the cover of her second album, Clouds. We have 2,575 square feet, which is a bit small, but only because of all the anthro junk.

Much about a man’s character is revealed by such stuff when it’s used to feather his nest. By his own description, Jason’s home is more like a pack rat’s than a bird’s.

Guests are usually agape at our house because it’s like living in an anthropological museum, he says. "Where tribal art doesn’t cover the walls and floors, there’s original prairie art and a series of Kama Sutra renditions on wafers of elephant ivory. One room features over eighty authentic masks. We have Neolithic stone tools from Laos, Thailand and Turkey; bronze age axe heads from Laos and Vietnam; textiles from several hill tribes; framed tropical insects; a collection of about a dozen 2,500-year-old Mother Goddess terra-cottas from Sri Lanka; basket work from several Southeast Asian tribes, including three over four feet tall; king cobra and alligator skins; shields and spears framing the fireplace. Sherpa walking sticks; Buddhist statues; a dozen-piece collection of Vietnamese water puppets; and dinosaur bones. And nothing is new or touristo, although he insists nothing is really valuable and the security system in his home is to discourage kids from trashing his place while swiping his stereo.

Collecting is in my bones. I’ve never thrown anything away, from my Boy Scout hat to the baseball glove I got in Grade Four to the beads on the Cree moccasins I wore in Grade Six. Elvis’s and the Beatles’ first album covers are pinned to the ceiling of the guest room where a net on the wall displays more than a hundred and twenty-five antique fishing lures. I’m a collector of damned near everything. Ethnography just doesn’t command the prices that archaeological artifacts do and I don’t move in that market, for which I have ethical misgivings.

Unlike centuries old stone carvings, ethnographic items are rarely over a hundred years old, most often just a few years or decades, and invariably still in production. For example, a new mask can easily be carved to replace the one I acquired for a museum where the hardware and software—the documentation—of the cult will be safe and saved for posterity. If the 20th century was a steamroller on these subcultures, this one will flatten them completely within the next couple of decades, highlighting the urgency that they find refuge in museums or the fact of their existence will be lost forever.

Jason’s story sounds like one he might have read in his beloved National Geographic. When he talks of other valued possessions in his home, he begins to sound like an article in Outside or Guns & Ammo. Our flatwater and whitewater experiences in our seventeen-foot, six-inch Kevlar Hellman canoe with ash trim and two wood laminated twenty-six-ounce paddles wholly tune me up for another year, he says. But I also love drinking beer and fishing and own an old tub with a steering wheel and a thirty-five-year old thirty-three-horse Johnson. Stomping around stubble fields and golden-leafed forests soaking up the rich autumn aromas while stalking game birds with my .12-gauge Remington 1000 semi-automatic shotgun is another enormous pleasure. I also have a backup Winchester 2200 .12 gauge pump which is a piece of crap, but which I use as bear spray while canoeing; a Mossberg .16 gauge model 190 shotgun for grouse which is more of a collector’s item, the gauge not having adequate punching power; a beautiful fitting and smooth lever-action Savage .243 for big game; an Enfield .30-.06 for bigger game like elk and moose; a .22 Cooey semi-automatic for popping the heads off grouse; and, finally, my old single-shot bee-bee gun my dad gave me when I was five, and which rests proudly at the top of the rack. I shoot for the table, not the wall. There’s nothing as delicious—and healthy—as sizzling Bambi steaks....

He’s also a gastronomical adventurer. Once when the geese he was hunting didn’t come, I got bored and when a crow flew over, I blasted it. Crow tastes and has the texture of a tire —and I even slow-roasted it—like a steel-belted Michelin summer 206/60 R-15s off our Nissan 240SX. Of a record grasshopper year on the prairies, he said, Many people thought I was nuts sweeping them into my specimen net. Straight into the boiling water and they turn red like lobsters and have such a delicate, delicious flavor!

In Thailand, his life is somewhat more confined, austere, but the image of a man thumping his chest like one of Dian Fossey’s gorillas remains. In Bangkok, he stays in small guest house rooms, where he boils his drinking water on a hotplate, eats many of his meals on the street, wears rumpled safari suits and cheap Hawaiian shirts (always in sandals and shorts), but he also roams afield, returning to Sri Lanka for more devil dancing, crewing on a friend’s yacht in a race in the Andaman Sea. He calls himself a half-time expat and makes it clear that as much as I absolutely love Canada’s fabulous summers and autumns, which he spends in the outdoors, that at the first sign of snow and cold—both four letter words—he runs shrieking in terror to the airport and a plane back to that beautiful sauna that is Asia.

"Thailand is simply the most beautiful, exotic country on the planet, and the only one that’s truly and wholly livable. If it weren’t for Thailand, life on this planet, with its too, too restrictive cultures, would be unbearable. Although Canada is sheer heaven in summer, it’s seven shades of hell in the winter. Islam is disturbing; Hinduism is an eye-roller; and Christianity has been a 2,000-year scourge on Western Civilization. The prissy, politically correct part of our Western culture disgusts me.

"Thailand, on the other hand, with its tranquil, laissez faire Buddhism and lazy pace has its mind wide open, the way the rest of the world should be in so, so many