(Bew)Air Asia

I booked my flight to Singapre through Air Asia. It’s a low fare airline, but for new users like me, there are a couple of things to beware of:

1. You have to book each leg of the trip separately. So my Chiang Mai - Singapore trip had to be booked
A. Chiang Mai-Bangkok, then I had to start all over with the second booking
B. Bangkok - Singapore

You have to fill in the forms all over again. OK, my computer had the info ready to plug in, but still. And if the second flight isn’t available, then there’s a hefty fee for changing the first flight. It might be better to call and let them check on these things before you commit your credit card.

And if your first flight is late and you miss the connecting flight on Air Asia - you lose your fare and everything!!

2. The prices are wildly deceptive. They show you the price for the flight. The Chiang Mai - Bangkok leg was listed as 449Baht. Somewhere on the page it says not including fees and taxes. But when I got to the next page it was 1386 Baht including a fuel surchage of 550 Baht.

3. Very limited luggage. 15 Kilos (about 33 pounds) is your limit. Carry on is 7 Kilos. How much if you have more? In Thailand it is 80 Baht per kilo extra (almost $3) and between Bangkok and Singapore it’s 186 Baht per kilo.

And since each flight is separate, you have to pay the extra for each leg of the flight.

This is fine for short term trips and as long as you know all this in advance, you can plan which trips would work best on Air Asia. I’d guess the best time to use Air Asia is for single flight trips with minimal luggage.

The Racket Tailed Drongo Shot

twenty or thirty times it calls

penetrating deep into my sleeping brain
it's not even light yet, go back to sleep.

several days now this morning racket
just out our window

today it is light
I groggily get up to see


Not the drongo call I know
My brain still in bed as I watch him
fly away


[Photos © whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com All Rights Reserved]

To hear this guy, watch the video here.

Refugee Nation out of Hibernation and KyiMayMaung Too

Burmese exile Kyi May Maung put links to my Border Run posts on her blog this week. She's also got two poems in a new anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, & Beyond. She has glowing praise for the book from the likes of Nobel Laureate, Nadine Gordimer, Pulitzer Prize Winner, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Howard Zinn, People's History of the United States. Also lots of links to sites about Burma.

And Refugee Nation, the Laotian American theater group out of LA that wowed the audience at Out North last fall, has started writing on their blog again and will be performing in April in Berkeley.

April 25th Benefit Tickets:
Center for Lao Studies / Legacies of War

April 26th Tickets
La Pena Cultural Center

So this is a warning to my Berkeley/Oakland readers (both of you that I know of) to check it out. They offered a great view into what it means to be Laotian-American today. Their blog seems to have started in Alaska last November at the end of their national tour and petered out after they got back to LA.

Just consider for a moment all that traveling: planes, trains and automobiles from June to December in and out of town from New York, North Carolina, Massachusetts and Alaska, the miles, the people, the energy and effort, the changes in time and weather...it's exhausting! It's work!! So we felt we needed to take a breather. Calm ourselves. Be with ourselves. Be down with ourselves and during that time we took time to evaluate 2007 and all it's struggles and successes and take that knowledge to plan out the 2008 series of Refugee Nation events to come. We hope you follow us again because our batteries are fully charged and we look forward to making impact with people, places and things...promise. So come along for the ride or better yet come see us in person when we are in town. It's a lot nicer face to face, smile to smile.

Racket Tailed Drongo Video, Finally For Real

Something was snagging up this video - either some audio, some frames from the video, or the final titling. I rebuilt the video piece by piece and saved it until it started balking again. So here it is. After the title you have to wait about 10 seconds to see the drongo fly by the first time (it seems much longer). But wait for the slow motion version of each shot, especially the second one. Then you can see the tails clearly. I cut out the stills, but you can see them in the previous post.

Racket Tailed Drongo Video, Finally

[Click the picture to enlarge it]

The racket tailed drongo is always followed by these two long tail feathers which seem to disappear just before there's a wider feather and then the end of the tail. There are several that fly around here, but they've been incredibly hard to catch with the camera. [Go here for an even better shot taken the next day.]

But persistence pays off. Here are two on video. It's all explained on the video. To hear the drongo's strange electronic call, listen to the end of the video here.

[I don't know what's happening. iMovie keeps crashing while it's trying to save the video. I need to remake it I think, but I don't have time now. I'll add it in later when I get it figured out.]

Scooping Thai News, Almost

I was telling Bon at lunch today about seeing the gaur and the monk at the temple on Sunday. She reacted with surprise and said she saw a story like that in the newspaper today. When we got back to the office she showed me. I guess you could say I had a number of exclusive stories, like the village protest over the land survey. But as far as I know, no one else covered them. This is the first one that I've posted that I know of that was posted almost simultaneously in a national Thai newspaper. But only my loyal readers and a few people in the office are likely to know that.

I have to admit, their photographer got a lot closer than I did, but I got more story - and background on gaurs.



Of course, remembering the sign in the temple about boasting and bragging, I'm just letting you know that my surprise at this wild animal living so close to this populated area and befriending the monks was news for the Thais too. (You'd think I'd never been in Alaska, let alone had moose sleep in my backyard, but this is Thailand, the land of the endangered species.)

Black Naped Oriole

This one was really clear and easy to identify using the binoculars, but you couldn't tell in the photos. I wouldn't have known he was there if I hadn't seen him fly to the perch. In the upper photo, he's on the far left on the highest branch coming out of the side of the frame. He was there for all of maybe 15 seconds. I realize I've set up unrealistic standards, wanting to not only see the birds, but to photograph them too. Anon, I'm going to look into a camera like yours when I get back . My serious birder friend Dianne doesn't even have a camera. What you can't see in the picture are his bandit black stripes over his eyes, his other black markings on his tail and underparts, and his reddish beak.

And, coming soon, are pictures of the racket-tailed drongo in flight. These guys show themselves for five or ten seconds at a time. I finally figured out their flight path from our balcony - just a short opening - and knowing they were in the area, just kept the video camera on until they flew by. I'll try to edit the video tonight.

1950's Mike Wallace Interviews

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas Austin has about 65 Mike Wallace interviews from 1957 and 1958 on their website. The people he interviewed were all very well known names at the time, some still are. I haven't had a chance to listen to them yet, but this seems like an incredibly interesting way to connect to American history and to get some perspective on how some things have changed, how other things haven't changed at all.

There's a tendency to think that the time you live in is when people really know what's going on. But I've always been amazed reading books from the past at how aware and 'modern' people from previous centuries and millennia were.

I've picked a few of the interviews to give you an idea of what's there. Great for those with ipods to listen to in the car or at the gym. Find out how we got to where we are today. I've included the brief bios since many of the names will not be familiar to a lot of people today. (And Monica, no I didn't know who they all were either. The first one's for you though.)


Thanks to reader JM for this great tip, which he found when Salon.com discussed the interview with Pearl Buck.

Mortimer Adler
9/7/1958

Mortimer Adler, president of the Institute for Philosophical Research, former professor of the philosophy of law at the University of Chicago, and author of The Idea of Freedom, talks to Wallace about conceptions of freedom, capitalism, socialism, and the American worker.



Charles Percy
7/6/1958

Charles Percy, president of Bell & Howell, talks to Wallace about the role of government in the economic system, about private enterprise's involvement in public services, tax reform, and the soviet economic system.



Henry Kissinger
7/13/1958

Adlai Stevenson
6/1/1958

Adlai Stevenson, former governor of Illinois and twice the Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States, talks to Wallace about American politics, the difficulty in persuading good people to become involved in politics, diversity, elections, and the need for the average citizen to be involved in government.

William O. Douglas
5/11/1958

William Douglas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, talks with Wallace about freedom of expression and the freedom to exchange ideas. In Douglas's book, The Right of the People, he wrote, "In recent years, as we have denounced the loss of liberties abroad we have witnessed its decline here in America."


Salvadore Dali
4/19/1958

Salvador Dali, the surrealist painter, talks to Wallace about genius, the subconscious, weakness, old age and luxury, death, religion, and dreams.


Reinhold Niebuhr
4/27/1958

Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, vice president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, on leave to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and one of the most important and challenging religious thinkers in the world, talks to Wallace about the separation between church and state, Catholicism, Protestantism, anti-Semitism, communism, and nuclear war.

Oscar Hammerstein II
3/15/1958

One of the most successful and controversial figures in show business and Broadway lyricist for such classics as Oklahoma!, The King and I, and South Pacific, Oscar Hammerstein II talks to Wallace about sentimentality, racism, religion, and politics.

[He was like a father to Sweeney Todd composer Stephen Sondheim]

Pearl Buck
2/8/1958

Pearl Buck, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning novelist, talks to Wallace about American women, marriage, career versus family, and the difference between men and women.

Walter Reuther
1/25/1958

Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, talks to Wallace about his plan for profit sharing for auto workers, which was being attacked as a "giant step toward socialism."

Drew Pearson
12/7/1957

Drew Pearson, syndicated columnist, talks to Wallace about Sputnik, a third world war, Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, and about being called a vicious liar by prominent politicians.

Eleanor Roosevelt
11/23/1957

Eleanor Roosevelt, former first lady, talks to Wallace about Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Republicans, Democrats, the Soviet Union, Westbrook Pegler, her son's relationship with Dominican leader Rafael Trujillo, race, and garlic pills.


Kirk Douglas
11/2/1957

Kirk Douglas, a film star who had recently completed two films, Paths of Glory and The Vikings, talks to Wallace about acting, fame, the charge that Hollywood films misrepresent America abroad, Nazis, Communists, and European versus American women.
[Michael Douglas' father]

Malcolm Muggeridge
10/19/1957

Malcolm Muggeridge, former editor of Punch Magazine and one of England's leading intellectuals, talks to Wallace about his article in The Saturday Evening Post in which he created an international furor by criticizing Queen Elizabeth.


Orval Faubus
9/15/1957

Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas, talks to Wallace from the Governor's mansion in Little Rock during his standoff with the Federal Government over the integration of Little Rock Central High School. Faubus had called in the National Guard to bar the African-American students from the school and had met the day before this interview with President Eisenhower in an effort to resolve the conflict.


Margaret Sanger
9/21/1957

Margaret Sanger, the leader of the birth control movement in America, talks to Wallace about why she became an advocate for birth control, over-population, the Catholic Church, and morality.


Frank Lloyd Wright
9/1/1957 and 9/28/1957

This interview was recorded in two parts. Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the greatest architects of the 20th century, talks to Wallace about religion, war, mercy killing, art, critics, his mile-high skyscraper, America's youth, sex, morality, politics, nature, and death.
Thanks to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation for their cooperation in presenting this interview here. This interview is available on home video through the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.



Eddie Arcaro
9/8/1957

Eddie Arcaro, the most celebrated jockey in America, winner of 5 Kentucky Derbys and 22 million dollars in purses over a 25-year career, talks with Wallace about horse racing, gambling, drugging of horses, and the pressure to win.

[Sports scandals with drugs are nothing new]

Senator James Eastland
7/28/1957

Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, who has been called "The Voice of the White South," talks to Wallace about segregation, slavery, the Soviet Union, voting rights laws, and the Ku Klux Klan.
NOTE: This interview contains language that may be offensive to some people.
[Listen to a Mississippi Senator when segregation was still the law in the South]

Bob Feller
8/4/1957

Bob Feller, one of the great baseball pitchers of all time, talks to Wallace about ballplayers' salaries, the reserve clause, rich ball clubs, Pay TV, beer companies as sponsors, bean balls, gambling, and Joe DiMaggio versus Ted Williams.


Charles "Commando" Kelly
6/30/1957

Chuck "Commando" Kelly, recipient of the Medal of Honor in World War II, talks to Wallace about his financial troubles, unemployment, the Korean War, and nuclear weapons.


Steve Allen
7/7/1957

Steve Allen, comedian, musician, and television personality, talks to Wallace about his rivalry with Ed Sullivan, his television show, and awards.


Gloria Swanson
4/28/1957

Gloria Swanson, one of Hollywood's most spectacular stars, talks to Wallace about why she is not making films, sex appeal, Hollywood in the 1920s, marriage, plastic surgery, and cancer cures.


Eldon Edwards
5/5/1957

Eldon Edwards, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, talks to Wallace about the South's attitude toward the KKK, the Klan's membership, segregation, the NAACP, communism, and J. Edgar Hoover.

Things Just Happen - Fixing Flats, Meeting a Monk and a Gaur Part 2

[Double click on any picture to enlarge it]


In addition to passing Wat Umong everyday on the way to work, I also pass a sign about Wildlife Conservation, but the road goes uphill. And it's hot. But one morning about a ten days ago, I rode up and discovered . . .well I'm not quite sure what. There's an office.



There's a huge bird cage full of bulbuls, and even when they're in a cage I can't get a good picture. I'd been thinking about cages and how awful it is to put birds in cages. This all arose from watching the birds off our balcony and how much space they use.









There were also some caged deer. I got to them from the backside so there were lots of fences between us.











And there was a free family of white crested laughing thrushes. I'm guessing this was the pair we'd seen at the garden restaurant behind Wat Ramphoeng a while back - it's less than a quarter mile away as the thrush flies. (It's on the tree trunk, lower left. Like always you can double click to enlarge the pictures.)




So as we walked around the lake after the monk chat and I saw a paved road that looked like it went out, I began to wonder if it went to the wildlife conservation area. It did. And now it was around five pm, cloudy, cool, and we saw the thrushes again. J moved very quickly when she saw a snake go by (I never saw it) and so we went past the picnic area to the nature trail.

It's the end of the dry season, so most things are very dry. But there was a small damned up lake and a kingfisher flew across. There were lots of birds, I got some on camera in just brief glimpses, not very good. And these red flowers.



Then we ran into this monk with a wheel barrow of old leaves and cow dung. He asked us what we were doing here - in curiosity, not challenging us - and we had a long discussion about birds, living things, where I work, Buddhism (this was where my Thai vocabulary began to fail me, but he did say that all living things love life more than anything else and there was a sign near by that said the same thing.) Which made it all the more curious when he spoke about an Alaskan friend - in the Air Force - who comes to Thailand frequently and is an avid fisher and hunter who likes antique guns. Then he told us there was a wild woowa. (I think cow must be the only animal we have in English for which there is no generic name for both the male and female - well I guess there's peacock too, and if I think about it I might think of more.) He said the monks can walk up to it and feed it and it licks their arms. Did we want to see it?





Well of course. So he walked us over to see if it was there. It was. It was this huge wild bull. Later I thought of the word gaur, googled it, and sure enough, that's what it was. It was staring straight at me in the distance as I tried to keep up with the monk. Joan stopped earlier. And it clearly wasn't comfortable with me either, so I stopped as the monk went on.


There were some small deer that appeared to be caged down there, but the bull was free and later ran off through the wildlife area. I have to say I was amazed to see a huge animal like that loose right here on the edge of Thailand's second biggest city. But from this area, it really looks like it's forest all the way up the mountain side of Doi (Mt) Suthep. And clearly this gaur has found friends among the monks who do feed it. I know we wouldn't have seen it had the monk not taken us over there (though we weren't far away) and that the gaur would have run off if we'd gotten close. As I think about it, it looked at us the way a moose does - trying to figure out who we were and whether we were a problem. We weren't wearing orange monk's robes.

The ultimateungulate has this description:

Body Length: 250-330 cm / 8.3-11 ft.
Shoulder Height: 170-220 cm / 5.6-7.2 ft.
Tail Length: 70-100 cm / 28-40 in.
Weight: 700-1000 kg / 1540-2200 lb.

The dark brown coat is short and dense, while the lower legs are white to tan in colour. There is a dewlap under the chin which extends between the front legs. There is a shoulder hump which is especially pronounced in adult males. The horns are found in both sexes, and grow from the sides of the head, curving upwards. Yellow at the base and turning black at the tips, they grow to a length of 80 cm / 32 inches. A bulging grey-tan ridge connects the horns on the forehead.

Ecology and Behavior

Where gaurs have not been disturbed, they are basically diurnal, being most active in the morning and late afternoon and resting during the hottest time of the day. However, where populations have been molested by human populations, the gaur has become largely nocturnal, rarely seen in the open after 8:00 in the morning. During the dry season, herds congregate and remain in small areas, dispersing into the hills with the arrival of the monsoon. While gaurs are dependent on water for drinking, they do not seem to bathe or wallow. When alarmed, gaurs crash into the jungle at a surprising speed. Gaurs live in herds led by a single adult male. During the peak of the breeding season, unattached males wander widely in search of receptive females. No serious fighting has been recorded between males, with size being the major factor in determining dominance. Males make a mating call of clear, resonant tones which may carry for more than 1.6 kilometers. Gaurs have also been known to make a whistling snort as an alarm call, and a low, cow-like moo. The average population density is about 0.6 animals per square kilometer, with herds having home ranges of around 80 square kilometers.

Family group: Small mixed herds of 2-40 individuals. Adult males may be solitary.
Diet: Grasses, shoots and fruit.
Main Predators: Tiger, leopard.

Distribution

Tropical woodlands in India, Indochina, and the Malay Peninsula.

Countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia (Peninsular Malaysia), Myanmar, Nepal, Thailand, Viet Nam (IUCN, 2002).

I'm used to eucalyptus trees from growing up in Southern California, but I've never seen bark like this. It's a piece of art. The monk showed us a birds nest just on the other side of trunk.
He also said the cicadas sounded different before and after the rain, better before. Now I know where they got the sound they put in table saws. It's from the cicadas, but amplified a bit.

(click on the black arrow in the yellow square) Chiang Mai Forest Cicadas uploaded by AKRaven



As I said it is the dry season. Though the Thai New Year is coming up next week and the rains should be coming before long. The Songkran festival is when people soak each other with water and Chiang Mai is supposed to have the wildest Songkran festival. The moat around the old town has been filled with water and there were even people swimming in it Saturday when we came back from Mae Sai.





He said that a hummingbird like bird feeds on these tiny pink flowers. We see a bird like that from our balcony.







We walked back through the Wat grounds which has words of wisdom posted here and there on trees. Then we walked back to pick up my tire from the bike shop and headed home.


We've seen the signs for the Heinrich Böll Foundation when we first got here, but never actually found the place. Since the sign is right near the tire repair place, we decided to try to find it. We ended up at this compound at the end of a small back street. (Sorry it was getting dark, but I still think a little blur is better than the artificial light of a flash. This is what it really looked like.) And as I looked to see if the tiny street went further, I realized that it ended in part of the Wat Padaeng temple grounds just a short ways from our building. The dogs didn't like us cutting through their property, but they stayed up on the hill and did their barking from there.

When we got home and put the tire back on the bike, I discovered that the rear tire was now flat, so we took the bike back to the bike shop where he pulled out two thorns and put on two patches. At 20 Baht a patch, I was now almost $2 down because of thorns. It would be another 20 Baht when I discovered the rear tire flat again Monday (yesterday) morning and he found another thorn he'd missed in the bad evening light. But he had a good sense of humor and when I told him I hoped we wouldn't meet again soon, he said I could come by just to chat.

Things Just Happen - Fixing Flats, Meeting a Monk and a Gaur

Last Wednesday I rode my bike to the bike shop to get the rear brake tightened. He fixed this and that too and then I rode into the old town to meet J for dinner. Since she doesn't have a bike here or show an interest in one, she walks a lot. (If you ride anywhere besides the back sois I take to work, you really have to ride in the traffic.




No bike lanes, no sidewalks you could ride on - you can barely walk on them. So it can be pretty intimidating.) So we walked home - it took about two hours. Just before we got home I realized we needed bananas and I was ready to ride up Thanon (road) Suthep. But my bike was weird. I had a flat in front. So I just pushed it the rest of the way home. And the next day we left for Mae Sai.

So yesterday (Sunday) I borrowed a monkey wrench and took the front wheel off and we walked to a little shop that fixes flats.

We left the wheel there and walked up the road to Wat Umong. This temple is known as the forest temple. I ride past it every day on the way to and from work, but I'd never been in it. J had gone in once to look around. This is a major wat that tourists go to, but it isn't in the middle of town. For most people, you have to work to get to it. So it seemed like, since it's in our neighborhood, we ought to check it out.

After looking at a few books on Buddhism, environmental issues in Thailand, meditation, we moved on.







Looking at the map, we decided to just follow the trail. This is not your average Wat. It's in a forest and the buildings are scattered here and there amongst the trees.
First we went to the library. I haven't been in one for a while, so it was nice to browse the books - they had English as well as Thai and other languages.


The middle sign is in English and says there will be Monk talks in English on Sundays from 3-5 at the fish pond. It was four. The blue arrow signs points to the fish pond.
So we wandered down and found about 15 foreigners sitting in a little round pavilion next to what was more a small man made lake than a pond, listening to a British (I think) monk talking about Buddhism.

A young man asked for a definition of Enlightenment. The monk explained why simple explanations were problematic. Then he described enlightenment, using his hands, as two sheaves of grass leaning against each other. One is a person, the other is reality. Then his hands collapsed. When man no longer sees the world from his subjective view, when this separation between a man and the world collapses - that's enlightenment. (I've fudged a bit because I can't remember exactly the words he used.)

I was struck by how this parallels one of the points of post-modernists who talk about how we objectify the world instead seeing ourselves as being part of the world. (That's not quite right either, but there is a connection here that I can't explain well.) The monk had to attend to things at 4:30 and so we wandered further along the trail around the lake.

[The internet connection ended last night at this point. I was going to write more on this post, but it's long enough and I'll do a part 2 later to finish Sunday. I'm in the office again, working on my presentation that will be sometime this week. No one else is here again - they were supposed to get back yesterday (Monday) night - so I have a quiet place to get this powerpoint so it makes the points I need to make in a fun way. They really have a lot of their planning in place - thanks in part to the requirements of the original grant application to Oxfam. Now it's just a question of being able to break down the major expected outcomes (it's taken me a long time to learn that in Thai well enough to roll easily off my tongue. In Thai it translates as "results that we expect to receive" or ผลที่คาดว่าจะได้รับ)
into steps that need to get there. Maybe I'll do a post on that too. So this is it for now. I'll do the monk and gaur in part 2.)