Observer - Hua Hin and Cha-am Regular features, stories and articles

BACK ISSUES

Regular features from February 2006 122nd Issue

Reality bites.

In to February now and by this time most expat's heads are back to normal and facing the reality of another year. Probably if you're like me, the New Year resolutions are already history but we could have restarted them from Chinese New Year or perhaps Songkran would be even better.

If we are lucky enough to be in a position to have a portfolio of savings, then this is the time you should really have a good look at it. It has been my experience that after a long good relaxing holiday that when I finally get back in the groove of living I have always been more relaxed and decisive about the decisions I make.

After all what is the point of having a portfolio of savings? To most people it determines, not the quality of life, but certainly our standard of living. We take an income from it and hopefully that income goes higher every year and our standard of living improves every year- Just as happened to most of us when we were working.

Of course if our portfolio is not working very well then urgent action should be taken to make sure that it does. Just as if you were an employer and a worker was non productive then you would have replaced him or her.

For most people living in the Hua Hin area who made a conscious decision to retire here that was in retrospect a pretty adventurous decision.

People like you are generally not the type to keep all your savings in the bank and settle for a little interest. More than likely you are prepared to take some chance with your capital as you realize that over time inflation despite being at record lows for a long period has not gone away and is still a threat to our standard of living. Most of you will probably have a balanced portfolio and dependant on age and risk tolerance will have a certain amount of your investments in speculative investments.

That part of your portfolio should at least have equalled the following performance. If not, think seriously about change because this has been an outstanding year for growth as the following figures show.

The following are all Swiss based funds and as regular readers will know in the July 2005 issue last year I recommended readers to go for these funds.

If you took my advice then and let me know about it because you will have been a big winner.

The first column shows year to date performance when I recommended them to you.

The second column shows performance for the year to December 31st.2005.

Fund Name	Performance As quoted in “OBSERVER” July 2005	End of year 2005 Performance
Merrill Lynch Emerging Eur.	+21.19%	+71.90%
Merrill Lynch Japan Opp. Fund	+11.77%	+60.75%
Fidelity Agg.European Fund	+18.8%	+38.54%
J.P.Morgan European small caps.	+20.6%	+43.41%
J.P.Morgan Latin America Equity A	+28.9%	+75.39%
Vontobel Far East Equity fund	+18.39%	+33.60%
Fidelity Funds American Fund.	+17%	+28.74%
Sector Funds
Pictec Biotec	+10.03%	+29.50%
Merrill Lynch World Mining	+14.02%	+66.40%

I can hardly believe how great the performance has been. It's seldom we get all our predictions right but a pleasant surprise is always welcome. These are actual performance figures for the past year, double-checked and certified.

Two points to make.

Some people advocate tracker funds saying offshore funds are generally too expensive. Well the Dow finished in negative territory for the year while Fidelity's American fund grew by 28.74%. I think that blows the tracker cheap myth out of the water.

Also look around for advice. Don't think that just because the”Observer” in Hua Hin is a long established provincial monthly magazine and deals mostly and very well with local issues that you wont get great advice here.

Keep an open mind. You could have paid Goldman Sachs or J.P.Morgan big bucks for advice and let me ask you if their recommendation would have been better than you could have read here. We're not called “Money Wizard” for nothing.

After all as someone who gave up a probably comfortable enough life in the West to take the chance of a new life here in Hua Hin, I guess you will probably want to take a little chance to improve your standard of living. Make the decision now before reality bites.

If you would like further information or clarification on any matter discussed, please contact jerry@swissinvestcenter.net

Mag's Page

First, a belated tribute from Mags and Billy to our old friend Eric, who passed away suddenly before Christmas in Cha-Am.

Eric went back to the Pattaya days, and it was a pleasant surprise to find him on our doorstep again over six years ago, when we moved to Hua Hin. Like many other old timers Eric would have wanted to go peacefully in his adopted country, which he loved, and preferably with a tot of Sangsom Coke!

He will be sadly missed.

There are plenty of good reasons why Ex Pats want to stay in the Land of Smiles. Last year we looked at some of the pitfalls involving U.K. State Benefits, pension payments abroad, and the difficulties that can be faced by some people returning to the U.K. after a lengthy absence. Many of these problems can be overcome by informed preparation and planning, but there is one thing you can never be fully prepared for. Culture shock.

After a year back ‘home' I thought I'd adjusted pretty well, all things considered, and even survived the festive season intact. That was until two routine little irritants needed to be dealt with, namely a corn and a cough.

Coughs go with the climate and territory, and for 40 years I have sworn by Benylin, an ‘over the counter' remedy. Easy. A quick pit stop at the Pharmacy on the way to work and all would be well.

Wrong. Buying a bottle of industrial strength cough medicine these days in the U.K. is like pulling hens' teeth. The Pharmacist, (they are still all predominantly males of a certain age who smile at you benevolently from a safe distance) conducted a full 10 minute enquiry into existing prescription medication, relying heavily on computer technology, before agreeing to part with a small bottle of the precious liquid. Anyone would think they didn't really want to take your money. In Thailand the prospect of a 300 baht sale would have Pharmacists falling over themselves in their excitement.

Corns - like Thrush - are things that for some reason only women will admit to having. Maybe men don't get them because they tend to wear more sensible shoes. When did you last hear a man complaining that his new golf shoes were killing him?

Whatever, the annoying little devils are best dealt with swiftly with a sharp blade wielded by a professional. First though an appointment must be made. Culture shock number one - a three-week wait.

Followed by Culture Shock number two - a lengthy form must be completed. No less than 24 medical history questions must be answered before you even get your socks off, ending with ‘what problem brought you to the clinic?' To which it is very tempting to answer ‘my feet!'

Now ladies, how many of us have been for a manicure and pedicure in Thailand and ended up losing a spot of blood in the process? Do we shout and complain? No. A sticky plaster is all we need.

Here in the U.K. however, we are encouraged to sue at the drop of a scalpel. Litigation, once the exclusive domain of Americans, is now a growth industry, with promises of ‘No Win No Fee' everywhere you turn. Little wonder that fringe health care workers are so cautious.

Litigation Culture extends to all walks of life. Trip over a twig on the sidewalk? Sue your local Council.

Have a little bump in the car? Sue. Shortfall in your Endowment Mortgage? Sue.

Even the various train operators print ‘wet leaf' disclaimers on timetables. For those Europeans who are unfamiliar with this curiously British phenomenon, there is a Wet Leaf Season in the U.K. which can result in the complete disruption of train services, as apparently trains and wet leafs on tracks do not mix very well. It never seemed to happen in the age of steam, but that's progress I guess.

Sadly it is all the sort of progress that will no doubt catch up with the Land of Smiles one day. Hopefully long after our time!

Footnote: People who suffer with Diabetes should always consult a qualified professional with any foot problem, as they are more susceptible to serious complications resulting from any infection.

Film Review

Director: Ang Lee

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway, Randy Quaid

Length: 134 minutes

This is, most appropriately in our Valentine issue, a love story from director Ang Lee in which the taboo word "love" is never spoken. In fact the whole movie is a rich, spacious, passionate way of showing, not telling, feelings that dare not speak their name - and doing so with superb intelligence and magnificent candour The movie has just won 4 Golden Globe Awards, for Best Director (Motion Picture) - Ang Lee, Best Motion Picture (Drama), Best Original Song - Gustavo Santaolalla (music), Bernie Taupin (lyrics) for the song "A Love That Will Never Grow Old", and Best Screenplay (Motion Picture) - Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Many critics now believe it will do extremely well at the forthcoming Oscars. Brokeback Mountain is an adaptation of a piece of writing from 1997 by Annie Proulx: the tale of two itinerant ranch-hands in the early 1960s, Ennis and Jack (Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal), who get a summer's work shepherding on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming .

Thrown together, lonely and frustrated, Ennis and Jack find that their relationship has grown deeper and fiercer than friendship and they have sex. It is a glorious, revelatory experience, and safe from society's disapproval on that remote Arcadian spot they are at one with their own natures and with nature itself. And for the rest of their lives, unhappily married with children, meeting every few years as notional buddies for furtive "fishing trips", they yearn to recapture that brief shining moment of happiness and truth.

Beautifully composed and wonderfully acted, this film is massively superior to the last Proulx adaptation - the woeful Shipping News - and far better than Ang Lee's last cowboy movie, his very moderate civil war drama Ride With the Devil. Most literary adaptations are crushed, concertina-ed affairs in which a novel's various chapters, scenes and characters are squeezed out. A short story is different, and this movie gives you the feeling of wings being spread, not clipped. There is a real sense here that the dimensions and space of the film have been stretched, and screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana have developed and extrapolated the source material with flair, in particular giving a dramatic presence to the women in Ennis and Jack's story. The wives are destined to be baffled and hurt, and crucially realise that it is they, and not their menfolk, who are expected to live out their lives in a state of denial.

If anyone is the seducer it is Jack, played by Gyllenhaal, whose performance - along with his presence in Sam Mendes's forthcoming Gulf war movie Jarhead - shows that he has matured into one of the most charismatic actors of his generation. Jack is a rodeo rider, a guy who lopes and mopes around fairs most of his professional life in exchange for a few seconds of thrashing ecstatically on the back of a bucking steer before being painfully and all too quickly thrown off. The sexual metaphor is not, however, laboured, and Jack's attempts to draw out the laconic, strong-and-silent Ennis are not predatory but open-hearted and good-natured. Ennis himself is a humble ranch-hand by trade, only doing the job so that he can make enough cash to marry his sweetheart Alma (Michelle Williams) and, as he fiercely tells Jack, he "ain't no queer". After their first sex, Ennis grimly heads off to his sheep, getting into a habit of making work an alibi for non-commitment that will last him for the rest of his life.

It is a desperately sad story in many ways, a story of two wasted lives, but a beautiful and moving story, too. Jake becomes a sellout, working for his obnoxious father-in-law selling farm machinery, and Ennis turns into a grumpy and taciturn old cowpoke - their true selves become more poignantly inaccessible with each unsatisfactory holiday together. Further than this, Brokeback Mountain is the story of how most of our lives, gay and straight, are defined by one moment in which things go gloriously and naturally right, when everything falls into place, but which is then infected by the bacilli of wrongness. Ennis and Jack, flawed as they are, do their best to resist the encroachment of that infection; they fight not just against bigotry, but dullness and mediocrity. Their story is not tragic, but heroic.

Book Review

Everything You Need to Know about Bird Flu & What You Can Do to Prepare for It by Jo Revill

Reviewed by Dinah Gardner

Books about bird flu are breeding almost as fast as the H5N1 virus can replicate itself inside a bird's gut. Last year we had How to Survive the Bird Flu, The Bird Flu Preparedness Planner, Bird Flu: Everything You Need to Know and my personal favourite for sheer scare-mongering, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu.

The latest to join the flock is Jo Revill's, which neither defuses the media hype behind the disease nor offers much more than can be gleaned from some careful surfing on the World Health Organization website.

The paperback, written by the health editor of Britain's Observer newspaper, charts the evolution of the disease from its first suspected appearance in 1996 in China to the situation today when it has become endemic in Asia and has spread to pockets of Europe.

It explains how the virus kills humans - the lungs flood with immune cells (cytokine) and the patient drowns in what's known as a cytokine storm - but stresses that the vast majority of those of who might catch the disease during a pandemic will likely come down with no more than a very severe case of flu that will knock them out of action for about three weeks.

It also examines how the world is preparing for a possible pandemic and discusses emergency measures such as whether security forces will impose quarantine on those who fall sick, who will be given priority to scarce supplies of vaccines and how a mass mortality plan might be formulated - or more simply what to do with all the dead bodies.

Revill also dips into some interesting side issues - likely inspired by some of her Sunday features in the left-leaning Observer. In the first half of the book, she discusses how catastrophic it would be if poverty-stricken regions of Africa, so far H5N1-free, were to be hit by bird flu; how mass poultry culls may lead to worsening malnutrition rates in the developing world as relatively cheap sources of protein - chicken and eggs - are wiped from markets in Southeast Asia; and how the West - namely the US - has been dragging its heels in helping the nation worst affected by the disease to date, Vietnam.

More chillingly, Revill suggests that in the event of a pandemic, rich nations will pump money into developing vaccines that will simply not be available to poorer countries such as Cambodia and Vietnam.

At times, Everything You Need to Know about Bird Flu reads like a dumbed-down TV news report. Revill tackles such absurdities as, "My daughter has a pet budgie. Should I still let her touch it?" And she devotes two-thirds of a page to explaining how to wash your hands with soap and water - 30 seconds minimum and use dry towels, in case you didn't know.

Despite claiming to go beyond the sensational headlines, the language of Revill's pseudo-scientific book is littered with words designed to instil fear. The virus is variously described as lethal, devastating, ominous, insidious, an elusive invader, the perfect form of bio terrorism, and most alarming of all, the killer in the rice paddies (my emphasis). It's not a case of "if", it's "when" a pandemic will appear. And that, she warns, will be within two years.

But scare mongering and dramatics aside, Revill does dish up the key facts in an accessible and easily understood manner. She explains why bird flu is potentially so dangerous - "H5N1 has been picked out as the flu subtype where a mutation into a fully 'humanized' strain is most likely to occur and cause a pandemic simply because the reservoir of disease is so great" - what "H5N1" actually means, how it could develop into a humanized form, how the drug Tamiflu reduces the severity of symptoms and how it might become impotent later on, how bird flu is likely to be spread and how quickly an effective vaccine could be developed - apparently four to six months after outbreaks begin.

The main problem with this kind of book is that the story is changing so fast - death tolls rise, more discoveries are made about the disease and the drugs used to treat it, and outbreaks spread and recede. While this review was being written, the disease claimed its first fatality outside Asia - a 14-year-old boy from Turkey who worked on a poultry farm.

Although it has been updated to December, the shelf life of Everything You Need to Know about Bird Flu may prove to be shorter than the future of a chicken caught with a cold.

Everything You Need to Know about Bird Flu & What You Can Do to Prepare for It by Jo Revill. Rodale International, 2005. ISBN 1-4050-9573-3. Price US$12, 224 pages.

Dinah Gardner is a freelance journalist based in Beijing. Copyright www.atimes.com