love driving in Thailand. Or to be more accurate, I love being driven in Thailand provided I’m able to call out “Stop!” whenever we pass one of the many interesting food or produce stalls that abound on the highways. In fact I do this so frequently that unplanned overnight stops are a common occurrence. You see in the UK you have “Little Chefs” and the like and you could play spot the difference with those. In Thailand you’re spoilt for choice. There it was, literally in the middle of nowhere, a giant purple sheep. “Stop!”. Well I had to, truth be told I would have probably done the same for a normal looking sheep of normal size; sheep are not something you come across often in Thailand. Elephants, monkeys, but not sheep and certainly not giant purple sheep. There had to be a story behind it, and there was. A love story in fact. India has its monument to love in the Taj Mahal, Thailand has Paris Hilton the sheep.
I got chatting to the owner, a former financial trader from Bangkok who decided that there was more to life and wanted to spend more time with his girlfriend and to say he was totally head over heels in love with her would be rather understating the case. Now for reasons that I was never able to actually find out, the girlfriend was also head over heels in love with sheep!
The solution was obvious. Buy a big plot of land far north enough where at least for part of the year the temperatures would be more to the liking of sheep. Then build a cafe/restaurant and decorate it with declarations of love on a whimsical theme. In English of course, Thai is not exactly a romantic language.
Next you have to stock the place with sheep. I never did get to meet the girlfriend but here she is with her sheep.
Now whilst this part of northern Thailand is cool for some of the year it can also be blisteringly hot at other times. Once again the solution was obvious, build a nice home for the sheep, fully air-conditioned of course.
Build heart shaped pond and stock with fish for visitors to feed.
Build whimiscal themed loo's for foolish visitors who wish to prance about :-)
And you have Sweet Memory Valley, home of Paris Hilton the Sheep. Also now home to doggies Romeo and Juliet apparently!
So why is the sheep named Paris Hilton? Well the owner's girlfriend is a Paris Hilton fan (we all have our cross to bear in life) and so of course they built a big purple sheep and named it Paris Hilton. Doesn't make sense ? Well you are not Thai. So how does it make sense if you are Thai then? Well it doesn't, but that's fine by us as it doesn't have to make sense, this is Thailand (TIT) and Thailand is the land of the absurd. A wise foreigner in Thailand just rolls with it, the frustrated foreigner is the one who tries to make sense of it 
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Erik
January 09, 2021
Beautiful!