Free The Grey Man by John Curtis Page A

go to find a young girl. No one in the bars seemed overly suspicious of me or my requests, but nor was I getting anywhere.
    By day I was approaching as many charities and NGOs as I could, to see if anyone could use my services. I was getting a very lukewarm reception and some were probably suspicious of me and my motives. One group that did give me a decent hearing ended our meeting by telling me that they might be able to involve me in their work, but they were a bit busy at the moment and I should get back to them in March. This was in September. Great, I thought; I could be dead by March.
    I was starting to get pissed off. I was cashed up and offering to pay my way and support whatever programs people wanted to involve me in, but I was getting turned away at every step. Now that I run a charitable organisation myself, I know that it's not always easy to find work for new volunteers at the drop of a hat, and often people don't deliver despite their initial keenness. Still, this was getting ridiculous.
    Meanwhile I was coming into contact with more and more westerners, many of them expats living in Chiang Mai. Some of the foreigners who had settled permanently in Thailand had interesting backgrounds. I met a Canadian guy who had been barred from Vietnam after being accused of being a CIA agent. His girlfriend was a member of the Vietnamese intelligence service but he didn't know that when he met her. An American I met had flown SR-71 spy planes during the Vietnam War and another had flown U-2 spy planes with Francis Gary Powers, who had been shot down over Russia during the Cold War. I also came across former Foreign Legionnaires and plenty of other people with military backgrounds. I'm sure some of them were bullshitters but there was never a dull day in Thailand.
    Many of the expats I met were trying to live a western life transported to Thailand, and I thought that was crazy. Things do move at a different pace in Thailand and people who can't handle that slower pace of life exhibit a kind of old-world colonial smugness and disdain for the locals that I found infuriating. The fact is that many expats are in the country because they either couldn't make it in business in the west, their income is minimal and they need a cheap lifestyle, or they're there for cheap sex – or all of the above.
    Some of the westerners I met, of course, had simply fallen in love with the place, but I was amazed to meet people who had lived in Thailand for ten or twenty years and could barely order a beer in the local language. I'm not boasting by saying that I could hold a reasonable conversation in Thai within a couple of months of being there – it was simply because I took the time to learn the language. I was also surprised, given their long-term connections with the west and westerners, that more Thais weren't fluent in English. Some who purported to have master's degrees in English couldn't speak it well at all. However, I found no shortage of locals – often complete strangers – happy to converse with me and help me learn. I found that if you took the time to try to learn about the local culture, people were incredibly welcoming and friendly.
    I loved the climate in Chiang Mai. There was an enveloping warmth, but being in a valley it tended to trap pollution, of which there was no shortage, largely from the tuk tuks. I also liked the city itself, although I still don't know exactly why. It's got nothing in particular to recommend it – it's a large city nestled in a natural geographic bowl surrounded by mountains with no beach and no pristine rainforest or anything like that – but it had a certain feel to it. I liked its tumbledown streets that give it a tangible sense of history, and walking those streets I was almost overpowered with that quintessential smell of Asia, a heady, almost sickening sweet-and-sour smell of flowers, spices and rotting refuse.
    I also did some exploring outside of Chiang Mai, mostly