The Season of Breath tells the story of three months in Thailand, from Pattaya to the rice fields of Isan. Every place in the book is real. Here is a little road journal for following Michael, Gabriel and Chu, with a line from the book at every stop.
Pattaya: the trip begins among friends
For the first few days, they play tourist, crisscrossing Pattaya by Grab: “a pharmacy worker from Isan, a sick guy from Liège and another guy from Liège in flip-flops.” At the Terminal 21 shopping mall, every floor is dressed up as a different country, with a papier-mâché fishing harbor and an Eiffel Tower standing among the escalators. Then a speedboat to the island across the bay, and at last, a real beach.
The Pratumnak neighborhood, between Pattaya and Jomtien, gives the third chapter its title. Quieter than the center, it’s where the journey really begins.
Bangkok: the river and the hospital lobby
In Bangkok, Chu works at the pharmacy of Saint Louis Hospital. Every evening, Michael waits for her in the lobby, in a wooden armchair facing a statue of the Virgin Mary. Then she steps out of the elevator, her jacket over her arm, and says: “Shall we eat?”
The chapter “The River” follows the Chao Phraya, the city’s great artery. And on the flight to Koh Samui, Chu points out to Michael a round green patch in a bend of the river: Bang Krachao, “the green lung of Bangkok.” “Even Bangkok breathed better than I did. I found that unfair, and then I found it funny, and then I found it beautiful.”
Koh Samui: Bophut and the Fisherman’s Village
In Bophut, on Samui’s north coast, the hotel balcony looks out over a sea that is “pale green, clear, calm as a bowl of soup left to cool,” and over the old pilings of a long-gone pier, “very dignified.”
Bophut’s Fisherman’s Village doesn’t have many fishermen left. It’s a narrow street running along the beach, lined with old wooden houses where Chinese merchants once bought copra and dried fish. On Friday evenings it closes to cars and becomes the Walking Street: wok-fried pad thai, skewers, banana pancakes, musicians… and fried insects, which Chu buys “the way you’d buy a bag of chips.”
Ang Thong: the day of happiness
Ang Thong National Park is a cluster of some forty islands off Samui, an hour away by speedboat: “green islands planted in a turquoise sea like broccoli in a bowl of soup.” Michael and Chu go kayaking there, her up front, him on the paddle. “It was there, between two strokes of the paddle, at the foot of a cliff in Ang Thong, that I thought I was happy. Not pleased. Not fine. Happy.”
Good to know: in Ang Thong, you have to earn the viewpoint overlooking the famous emerald-green lagoon: the climb is steep. Michael chose to stay at the bottom, “and I didn’t regret a thing.”
Isan: Chu’s house and the lake
The journey ends in the northeast, in Isan, in Chu’s village: a straight road between flooded rice paddies, a two-story house from two different eras, and life lived under a big corrugated-metal awning. It’s there, far from the beaches, that you understand Thailand best.
And then there’s the lake, with its floating restaurants: bamboo platforms tied to the shore by a cable, which a boy pushes out onto the water. “A restaurant that delivers you to the middle of a lake, where nobody can leave before the meal is over.” And if the cable snaps? “Then we live here.”
And you, what would your itinerary be?
This trip isn’t a tourist circuit; it’s a life. But it makes you want to take your time, to climb the steps one by one, and sometimes to stop just before the top. To plan the Bangkok part, the Thailand Notebook and the practical guide are there for you.
The book
The Season of Breath: three months in Thailand, a true story that is funny and full of light. Available in English as a PDF ebook.
