The winter people arrive in the first week of December.
You can spot them on the first morning. They are pale in a way the rest of us forgot was possible. They have proper suitcases, the hard kind with 4 small wheels, and the wheels do not work on the pavement here, so for the first 2 days you see them carrying their suitcases in their arms like boxes. The same week, the prices on the laminated menus along the beach road go up by 20 baht, and nobody pretends they did not.
By the second week they have a routine, and I usually do not.
There is one couple I know better than the others, because they stay in the guesthouse I use when I am in Hua Hin. They are from Finland, I think. It might be Estonia. I have heard both, and I have left it too long to ask.
They are in their fifties. Both of them have ordinary jobs at home, with a manager and holidays and a payroll department. She does the accounts for a company that makes windows. He works on the booking system for a ferry company. For 4 months a year their companies let them work from here, as long as they keep home hours.
So they swim at 7 in the morning, eat lunch at 11 and start work at 1 in the afternoon. They finish at 9 at night, when the evening is half over for everybody else. I have walked past room 6 at 8:30 and heard her on a call, in a language I do not speak, saying one number very clearly 3 times.
They rent their flat at home to a student for the winter, and she told me that covers most of this. They also save on heating, which she said as if it was the best part.
He is the quiet one. He fixes things that are not his. The first winter he mended the hinge on the guesthouse gate, and the next winter he mended it again, because a delivery scooter had hit it in the meantime.
The owner of the guesthouse keeps a box for them in the storeroom.
It sits there from March to December, behind the spare mattresses. Their kettle. 2 good pillows they bought the first year, because the guesthouse pillows are flat. A folding rack for drying clothes. Half a jar of instant coffee, which is probably not the same half jar every year, but I like to think it is.
In the last week of November the owner takes the box out and puts everything in room 6 before they land. She does not tell them she is doing it. It is just there when they open the door.
They have come 6 winters in a row. Every year they bring the owner's daughter chocolate from the airport. She was about 9 the first time. She is 15 now and acts too old for it, and eats it anyway.
Last winter only she came.
He had something with his heart. Not serious, she said, and she said it twice. She kept the same hours, swam on her own at 7, and flew home 2 weeks early. I did not ask why.
They are booked again for this December, both of them. The owner told me in a message, which she does not usually send.
For a long time I did not take people like them seriously. Most full-timers out here do not.
We have names for them. Snowbirds, like the birds that fly south for the winter. Tourists with laptops. You hear it at the table when they leave early to go and start work. They are not really moving, the story goes. They have a return ticket, and in the story we tell each other out here, a return ticket means you did not really leave.
I believed some of that for years. It was a nice thing to believe. It made my life the brave one.
What I see now is simpler than that.
They have a home. A real one, with their name on the door and neighbours who take in their post. And they have a place out here that remembers them. A room with their kettle already in it. An owner who knows to give them the ground floor, because his knee does not like stairs. A 15 year old who waits for chocolate and pretends she is not waiting.
Most of us full-timers gave up the first thing to come out here, and we move too often to ever get the second.
I have been in this town for 3 of the last 5 winters. Every time, I turned up without telling anybody and took whatever room was free.
Nobody keeps a box for me, and that is fair.
Andrew - No Refunds •••
