Cheapo shopping in Thong Pha Phum

Cheap goods in small-town Thailand: one of the little joys of traveling in this Southeast Asian nation, even if (like me) shopping is usually the last thing you want to do.

If you need something handy – something for your travels, maybe – the deals you can get in small shops and from vendors on the side of the road can be unbelievable. As I found out in Thong Pha Phum, though, sometimes you get what you pay for.

This is a tale both inspirational and cautionary: in a single day in Thong Pha Phum I managed to get a great deal and waste money all on the same block of the same street.

Now that is Thailand shopping in a microcosm.

Good purchase: Shirts

Clothes are easy to find for sale in Thailand. Somehow all kinds of street vendors and small shop owners end up with cheaply made but reliable (enough for me) shirts, pants, and whatever else you need.

Traveling with clothes you bought locally can be part of the fun: you won’t exactly fit in (especially if you’re a white guy in Asia) but it can feel like you’re wearing your surroundings. It’s nice to merge with your destinations.

So when I happened by a couple shops selling the shirts I like – short sleeve, button down, with a breast pocket – near the bus stop in Thong Pha Phum I decided on a whim to stop in and check them out.

I ended up buying one from each, both plaid. One was a sort of pale blue and pink, the other was yellow-orange with brown stripes. Just the right balance of decorativeness and casualness.

Both were priced at 150 baht, about US$5. But when I handed the second guy 140 baht in bills and started digging for change for the remaining 10 baht, the guy smiled and waved it off. Cool, 33-cent discount.

These shirts will proudly join the rest of my clothes in my pack – they’re cool in the Thai heat, they weigh very little, and I bought them in the actual place I’m wearing them.

I am becoming Thailand.

Bad purchase: Haunted wristwatch

My other acquisition wasn’t as smooth. For I decided, not having owned one for several years, that I could use a wristwatch, and wouldn’t be dissuaded from buying the one I wanted.

A couple of little shops just down the street from the shirts shops were selling watches. At one they were priced at 650 baht, at the other 250 baht.

$21 vs. $8. Guess which one I went to.

The 25o-baht guy had several watches in a case on his counter, and while they didn’t seem especially high-quality there were some nice designs, and I cheerfully looked over them trying to imagine each one on my wrist.

At this price, from this dodgy-looking concrete box, I didn’t expect any watch to last too long. If I got a month out of it I’d be quite happy. I only really need it when catching a train or a bus. Otherwise I never care what time it is.

I selected one, but the hands weren’t moving. The guy spoke English well enough for a transaction such as this, and he tried to persuade me to pick a different one.

But I liked it, and I adopted an inquisitive face and pointed again. He took it out (the customer is always right) and offered to put a new battery in it. Sounded good to me.

He disappeared into an even smaller concrete box in the back – the office – and emerged a couple minutes later; the watch’s hands were moving!

Incurably optimistic, I figured the watch was good to go for several weeks at least. I paid him and put it on my wrist, walking to the bus stop from where I was leaving for the town of Sangkhlaburi shortly.

I sat in the shade of the covered bus stop on the side of the street, watching cars and people go by and glancing at my watch every few minutes. The hands kept moving.

However, after 90 minutes I noticed that the hands on the watch had stopped. Then as I watched, they started again by themselves. Even through my optimism haze I knew this wasn’t a good sign.

I wondered if I had time to go back down to the shop and try to swap it out. Just then, though, my bus pulled up.

I got on the bus, took my seat, and took the watch off so I could thump it and make sure the little button was pressed in correctly. The strap broke when I took the watch off.

And I noticed that the plastic coating on the back of the strap was flaking off.

Broken and unwearable, the watch went into my pocket as I sighed. But I wasn’t giving up yet.

Once I arrived in Sangkhlaburi, I bought a sewing kit at the local 7-11 and, despite my extraordinarily rudimentary sewing skills, fixed the strap.

Studying the watch more, I noticed that when it was working, the second hand was getting caught at the same spot during each revolution, on the “4”. I’d smack it and it would start up. Maybe whatever was catching it would smooth itself over. Maybe?

Finally I waited for 6:00:00 exactly on my computer, and set the watch to the exact same time. I was testing it to see if it was losing time at a regular rate. Then I could still use it as a ramshackle but basically reliable timepiece via some quick calculations and daily resetting.

Soon after this, I put the watch on and the strap loop broke. No problem – it has two loops! (My optimism was becoming more sad than anything.)

After six hours, the watch had lost about one second every 50 seconds of real time.

But after ten hours, that rate was totally different – one second every 82 seconds. Later still, it was one second every 68 seconds.

These were reasonably close, I thought. Maybe I can still use it to at least tell me the general time.

Two days later the watch was dead. Totally. Nothing would revive it, and against all my instincts (“I just paid $8 for this thing!”) I threw the blasted thing in the trash.

Rest in piece, you piece of…

Philosophical post-script

An hour after tossing out the ex-watch, on a bus headed back towards Kanchanaburi I ended up back in Thong Pha Phum, where the bus pulled up for a half-hour wait. The watch vendor was just down the street.

If I had kept the inert timepiece I could very well have gone and exchanged it for a better one. But no, I had thrown it away the moment it appeared unsalvageable and my optimism finally ran out.

I shook my head at the silliness of it all. And I figured that the lesson to learn from this whole episode was: never lose optimism! If I’d have kept the watch I might have a nice new one now that works.

Have you ever bought something while traveling that immediately broke?

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