English What Now? is an ongoing series based around the humorous, head-scratching, or just plain amusing English found around Thailand observed and written by Teresa Derr.
Teresa Derr, 134 YinD
Recently, I visited one of the more well-known hiking spots in Thailand, Phu Kradueng in Loei. The trip itself was amazing and very accessible, with plenty of well-done English translations for the signs. There were still some that made me smile:
Perfect English – that everyone was ignoring. There were several parts of Phu Kradueng that were blocked off for hikers, usually with the warning that wild elephants are dangerous. Of course, of the areas that we could access, signs often ordered us not to enter past 3pm. My (joking) first thought was to wonder how the park staff taught the wild elephants to tell time so that they wouldn’t disturb hikers before 3pm.
I’ll be honest, my first thought when reading this sign was that it meant: “Don’t be Square” (I’m always super behind on the slang – if you told me that ‘closed’ meant you were uncool, I’d say yeah, that checks out.) This cliff in particular, the Sunrise Cliff, certainly felt like you had to be there in order to not be Square/Closed! It felt like everyone in the campground made the 1km trek in the dark at 5am to watch the (rather unimpressive -_- sorry, Hot Season) sunrise at 6am.
Lom Sak Cliff is the most popular cliff to take pictures at, so it amused me that all of the “You Are Here” signs were spelled correctly except for this one. Perhaps we were the hares, for hopping to the cliffs so fast! Or maybe we were slow…we covered about 10km in around four hours, stopping to take plenty of pictures. But not even a tortoise would have been able to resist stopping at the views we saw.
This brought so many things to mind. Irony that the writer was clearly not alone in carving things into this rock. Amazement that people were carving things into rocks. Wonderment because, at least on this one rock, I was alone on top of the world. Alan Walker, because he has a song called Alone and I have not been able to stop singing his new song, Who I Am…
I don’t know what the person who carved this here was thinking or if we had any of the same thoughts pass through our heads. I can’t really say I’m glad people are carving their names into rocks, but I can say I’m glad I found it.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It was a wonderful trip, perhaps made even more so that I was able to find interesting English to make jokes about in my own head when I was tired of trying to listen to the Thai conversations around me. I do so amuse myself, and I hope you can laugh along with me! Until next time.
Sticky Rice 