Good To Be Home

We left Chiang Mai last Thursday morning and it's only Tuesday night now, but it feels like we've been gone a couple of weeks. The more that is packed into a period of time, the faster the time seems to go, and the longer it seems to have been. Or so it seems to me.
V gave us these two of her rare bananas. I think she called them elephant's toe, or ingrown toenail. And then there was a bunch of another type known as lady's breast bananas. A couple were yellow and the rest green and should be yellow in a day or two. [Above and right is the inside of the banana. Which I added Wednesday afternoon.]




The flight back from Bangkok went easily. And we were greeted in the airport hallway to the exit by orchid after orchid plant. Mostly they looked like cymbidiums, but there was a variety of orchids - maybe a hundred different plants, each with several sprays of flowers.






































And when we got out of the airport, we were greeted by the relative coolth of Chiang Mai after the Bangkok heat. (The computer says it's 79 here and 86 in Bangkok, but that doesn't factor in the extra humidity in Bangkok as well.)








And then there was the full moon. We've been keeping track of time by watching the moon wax and wane. It was full the day before we left Anchorage - January 12. And it was full when we were in Kuala Lumpur when our 30 days were up in Thailand. And now our second 30 days are up. When the moon is full again, we'll be just back in Anchorage.

Bangkok Airport Free Wifi

As of now - March 10, 2009 - there's free wifi in the Domestic Terminal Food Court. Speedtouch. Couldn't find it in other places in the airport.

Message to US Hmong Community from Thai Hmong Farmer

One of the demonstrators was a Hmong farmer. In the video below he sends a message in the Hmong language to his brothers and sisters in the US and elsewhere.

So, folks in Anchorage. Those of you who know how to get hold of the Hmong community, tell them to check out this video I took today (March 10, 2009 Thai Time). And people in other states with Hmong communities, let them know this video is available. Thanks.



[Update: Thursday, March 12, 2009 9pm Thai Time; Someone found this post pretty quickly and posted a link at a Google Group for Hmong. Within 24 hours some 60 people had watched the video. Two comments were up on the Google Group, but they're in Hmong so I have no idea what they say. But I'm trying to get the man in the video the information. So, thanks for getting the information out, whoever you are.]

Bangkok Farmers' Demonstration

[Tuesday, March 10, 2009 3pm Thai time]
J and I managed to get over to where my colleagues and the farmers they work with are demonstration. They were originally scheduled to go home tonight, but a group of the demonstrators are supposed to be meeting the prime minister tomorrow, so they aren't sure how long they are staying. But we're headed home tonight. I've written about some of the issues in previous posts. I'll just put up the pictures now.

We got there after they marched to Government House today, so no action shots.

We wandered into the Southern Thai part first.
They were happy to show me their sign and have me photograph it.
Then the sent us to the Northern Thai section.

We passed the stage.

And this is what things look like pretty much. Lots of people sitting around under the blue tarps. It's really hot and humid.

Finally I found my group. It was good to see people I recognized and who recognized me. But everyone was friendly to us, even those who had no idea why I was there.

They were cooking lunch at this point.

And checking to see what news about the demonstration was in the newspaper.

And resting.

Here's the laundry area. I know my group left Thursday night and
today is Tuesday, so they've been here a while.

Here's the water and shower area. Also a nearby hotel was letting them take showers for 5 or 10 Baht a head if I remember right.

Here are some of the farmers I first met in Petchabul
in early January, and then a few times later.

It's hot out there.

And here's J and Ew (from our office) catching up.

OK, I realize this is just pictures, but it will have to do for now. I'm also going to post a video next. I took these pictures a couple of hours ago.

Paul Krassner Advice for Bloggers

J gave me a the February 2009 copy of Sun magazine last night insisting that I should know about it. This morning (I need to say it is really hot outside at 8am. In Chiang Mai it cools down at night. In Hanoi it was mostly in the 60’s and low 70s (16˚-22˚ C. But it’s HOT here.)I read the interview of Paul Krassner, who I’m vaguely familiar with, and who is described in Sun as having

been spreading his witty, sometimes snide, and often political brand of humor since the late 1950’s.

He was a violin prodigy who played at Carnegie Hall at 6 and wrote for the Steve Allen show and Mad magazine and edited Lenny Bruce’s autobiography among other things like writing the Realist.

Blogging gives all of us the chance to be social critics, and Krassner, now 76, offers some comments that I think bloggers should consider.

People don’t like to be lectured to, but if you can make them laugh, their defenses come down, and for the time being they’ve accepted whatever truth is embedded in your humor. When a large audience of people are laughing together, no matter how disparate their backgrounds are, it’s a unifying moment. But who’s to say how long that moment of truth or unity lasts and whether it leads to any action? p. 6

The more repression there is the more need there is for irreverence toward those who are responsible for that repression. But too often sarcasm passes for irony, name-calling passes for insight, bleeped-out four-letter-words pass for wit, and lowest-common-denominator jokes pass for analysis. Satire should have a point of view. It doesn’t have to get a belly laught. It does have to present criticism. p. 7

The picture is my computer in the guest house at J&V’s place. The other is the view from the guest house porch.





It's not quite as hot as I thought earlier, it was the effect of coming out of the air conditioning.

Bangkok Stop

At JL's insistence, we added a night in Bangkok on our trip home from Hanoi. J was in my Peace Corps group and was in the next province to mine 40 some years ago. He's been involved with Peace Corps and/or AID until he retired and now lives in Bangkok in a house he and his wife built [remodeled] on her old family property. [She said she would have built such a big house.] We're staying in a beautiful guest house in the back.

They heard that banana trees were a good way to green up the yard fast after the construction and so now they have a collection of lots (I forgot the number) of different kinds of banana trees. This was perhaps the strangest - it's got hundreds of tiny bananas.

This condo building towers above their place. It's distinction is that every condo has its own swimming pool. But J isn't sure they have enough money to finish it. It seems that nothing's been done on it for a while and it's not done. The penthouse on top comes with its own helipad. So if you're interested, email me and I'll get you in contact with J.

We walked around the neighborhood. This will give you a little idea.

J wanted something at the supermarket, so I checked out the fish department.

750 Baht is about $20. So this Tasmanian salmon is under $10 a pound.
Presumably this is previously frozen salmon and farmed salmon,
but I didn't see anything that gave that sort of info.

Then we stopped at the Spa for some iced chocolates and I had mandarin-passion fruit.

Then tonight we had dinner at a beautiful Northern Thai place close by.
Here's the fish dish. With all the ingredients of Miang.

Here are the culprits at dinner.

I really don't have much time to say much more. I'm feeling a little guilty staying at this beautiful spot while my colleagues are a few kilometers away sleeping on the street in front of Government House. I did talk to Bon by phone today and the Prime Minister has signed something - I think to set up a committee to study and resolve the issues the farmers have brought to Bangkok. I'm hoping to get down there tomorrow before we fly home. They are due to bus home tomorrow night.

I'm letting Hanoi sink in before writing anything more. All I know is that I was headachy the whole time. That's not my style. I'm guessing it was the traffic and noise - and trying to dodge motorcycles every time I crossed a street.

Oh yes, tomorrow is the 50th Anniversary of the Tibetan Uprising. Tibet's been closed off and they are expecting protests at Chinese embassies around the world. Apparently there's been disputes among Tibetans and there may be more vigorous protests than in the past, possibly even some suicides in protest. Or so the rumors go.

Halong Bay

Everyone said that Halong Bay was a must. J doesn't like being on water, no, her semi-circular canal doesn't like it. So I said fine, we'll do other things. But she talked to several people and read the books and all said the water was flat calm. And it was mostly, and the little part that had ripples she got through with no problem.

These are pictures of the bay, our hotel at Catma Island, and back today in the bay again.
We've just started the cruise. There is something wonderfully serendipitous about being on a short tour, thrown together with people you will share a day or two with and probably never see again.

Here's a little boat that came up along side and a

little boy climbed onto our ship to sell fruit.

Getting lunch ready in the boat's kitchen. There was a separate vegetarian table which we shared with an Austrian vetinarian. She and a friend were traveling while their husbands were diving.

We stopped to see a large cave that was only discovered in 1996. I asked why there were no bats. I was told, they got rid of them because of the tourists.

You can get a little sense of the scale by looking at the people in the lower left hand corner. The main room was huge - probably 75 meters high.

Here are J an a couple from near Southhampton, UK.

J hadn't wanted the trip that included sleeping on the boat. So our group got a bus on Catma Island and rode through a National Park to the town on the other side. Here's our hotel from where we had breakfast this morning.

The town from the breakfast deck.

T is from Vancouver. He and J bonded because they were both very sensitive to the water. It was a little ripply this morning so they both got outside.

Then off the boat at Halong Bay for lunch and then back on the bus,
to make our way back to Hanoi.

But not without another pottery stop. Here's T with his Vietnamese-Canadian girlfriend.

Halong Bay itself was pleasant and peaceful, but with grey skies it wasn't quite as amazing as it was billed. Perhaps it's that we've been spoiled by Prince William Sound and Resurrection Bay. The rocky walls looked a lot like those Alaska Bays, but without the snow capped mountains rising above them. And the Bay itself seemed dead. There were raptors flying above the islands and a few other largish black birds, but we saw not one bird anywhere on the water. We saw no animals in the water. There must be fish in there. There was a fair amount of debris floating around.

The rest of the trip was relatively quiet. I had Robert, a Dutch young man on one side. He's been traveling around SE Asia for four months and goes back to Amsterdam in a week or so. On the other side was a Taiwanese engineer who works in Ho Chi Minh City. Now we're at the Star Hotel and tomorrow we're headed for Bangkok where we'll stay with Jim Lehman, an old Peace Corps buddy, and then we'll got back to Chiang Mai Tuesday night. My co-workers are all in Bangkok anyway for the demonstration so I haven't missed anything - well, I missed the demonstration. Maybe we'll have time to go say hello tomorrow.