We dropped into Bangkok with severe jet lag and sent our broken gadgets on their own holiday to the technology Shangri La of Singapore.

Thailand has its lips firmly wrapped around the fire hose of American capital and tourism. The opportunity and inequality of the unchecked market are readily apparent. Bangkok is a huge sprawling city of gleaming steel and glass towers next to shanty towns. The city is an environmental disaster area of sewage and motorcycle fumes cut with the sweet stink of coconut. The air quality ranges from eye-stinging on a good day to choking on a bad one. American corporations control the real money, but the rich locals are ethnic Chinese. They parade around in their bling and mercedes like gangsters. The Thai’s, however, are a happy and optimistic people.

Thailand is a constitutional monarchy. A hard thing to understand is that most everyone uncynically loves the king. Every business and home has a small shrine to the royal family. If you go to a Thai restaurant at home, it will too. The king is Thailand, he’s Thai pride. He’s given direct credit for all Thailand’s success. Thailand is an economic jewel in the region and Bangkok is the only fully modern city. The king’s not a bad guy either, as far as royalty goes. Taxi drivers crack up with pity whenever we mention that we don’t like our head of state.

There’s no gay movement here, because there’s no anti-gay establishment to move against. This is most readily apparent in the large number of girl-boys. One out of every 20 or 30 guys just feels that way and dresses that way. While its not necessarily “normal”, nobody seems to give them crap. Looking around, it gives you a better perspective on what the sociological situation probably is in the west.

To kill some time we went to see the fights at Lumphini Stadium. The guys came out and just lit into each other with knees and elbows. They even manage to get off these fast kicks to the neck sometimes. People bet like mad all around the ring while live musicians accompany the action. A reverse spinning elbow makes a hell of a sound when it hits someone’s head. We got to see several weight classes fight and a couple fellas get put to sleep before their bedtime. Our brutal appetites satisfied, we high tailed it out of the city.

We went to the quaint little island of Koh Samet while we waited for our stuff to be repaired. We got some much needed time relaxing on the beach. While we were there, the festival of Floating Lights took place and we found a little old woman in town to cook delightful local dishes for us.

When our equipment came back from its holiday, we zipped south without checking the weather. Huge mistake. The monsoon was spitting out storms from the Philippines every three days. This sucked a lot because we got trapped for a long time on the big islands of the south, which are nasty tourist traps. Eventually the storms abated, we had some calm seas and our Thai time had a very happy ending.

Diving was as otherworldly as I hoped it would be. All of a sudden we could fly and were amongst thousands of brightly colored animals of every size and shape. Many of the animals were killing each other, which greatly added to the entertainment. On our first dive a trigger fish attacked our instructor. This pie sized blue fish with gold stripes and large bony beak leaped out of the coral and went nuts on his fins. You cannot beat diving for wildlife observation. I could spend all day down at 18 meters just watching the infinitely varied kaleidescope of eels and anemones, fish and more fish.

Our mission accomplished, we lusted for more new experiences. On the cheap, we took boat and bus back up to Bangkok. With very little sleep, our transport dropped us in the backpacker ghetto at six in the morning. We stumbled over to a travel agent and asked how to get to Cambodia. She rushed us on to a waiting mini-bus and we continued our journey without rest…

Island photos.

We hung out in Chang Mai for a while, its a nice sleepy city you can walk all over. The food in the north is so good we took a cooking class. They took us to the market and showed us how to shop and stuff. We also got Thai massages which was fun because we got to talk to the masseuses for an hour, but the actual massage is a cross between passive yoga and losing at jujitsu. I think Mandy may have liked hers.

We were going to take Laos Air to Laung Prabang from Chang Mai until we found out they use a lot of old single hulled Chinese planes without radar. They circle around looking for a hole in the clouds and go back if they find none. It would have been exciting, but we were worried about time and went with Bangkok Air.

Laung Prabang is a nice little jungle town, much like Iquitos in Peru. We took a boat down the river today to a whiskey making village and an old cave where’s there’s a shrine. Looking out of the cave you can see these great mountains through the mist that make up the river valley. The people are very friendly and there are tons of cute babies. The geckos go “gek-o! gek-o!” very loudly. They also have a lot of water buffalo here, any many are albinos. We’ve spotted some birdwing butterflies and lots of birds we can’t identify. The Mekong is sourrounded by lots of  jutting sandstone mountains, some of which have temples or statues on top of them. Giant stone cats and nagas (half woman half snake) seem to guard a lot of things.

There are 9,000 kip to the US dollar and the bills only go up to 5,000 kip. We think of prices in kilo-kip and the locals are more than ready to accept dollars even though I think its illegal. They’re just much easier to carry and their value is a lot more stable. The Laos Peoples Democratic Republic is anything but, and I think they try to filter the net as best as they can. I heard a lot of locals call long distance to Thailand to get real access which is also illegal. Visitors have to register with the local police if they intend to stay the night.

The language is very very similar to Thai and we’re having fun discovering the differences. There’s a big French influence as Laos was partitioned by the French as a buffer to Thailand for French Vietnam. We ate in a great little French cafe the other night and stayed too late. The locals go to bed a 9pm sharp, everything shuts down and we got locked out of our guest house. We’re making an effort to be more polite tonight. We plan on seeing a bunch of temples tomorrow and figuring out how to get down to the capital, Vantien so we can get back to Bangkok for our flight home. See y’all soon, Lao gong.

Look! Here’s some pictures of us that Cee took.

Mandy and I are in Chang Mai. We flew here today from Bangkok. Life here more sedate than frenetic Bangkok with its Asian ultra- modern skyscrapers sprouting out of open air fruit and meat markets. Gleaming chromium steel and gold everything with people sleeping on the steps. Much of it is more modern than American cities, selling Japanese electronics that will show up in the states next year or maybe never as the technology evolves. Bangkok is filled with Europeans and Japanese. Elephants shoulder aside Toyota land cruisers and tuk-tuking taxi-trikes on the street. Six lanes of traffic on the city streets all drive on (mostly) the wrong side and fill the air with smelly haze. Long live the king. The Thai’s truly love their king and his grand palace is amazing and resplendent. You don’t know it yet, but you’re looking forward to pictures of it.

I am physically afraid of the ride home. It took us 36 hours of travel to get from BOS to BKK after the engines cut out on the 747 over Alaska.

We’re hanging out here in the north where the food is amazing on our way to Laos. We might get a day back in Bangkok when we return. The major Thai cities are fully bilingual absolutely everything is in Thai and English (and often in English and then Thai). All the Japanese and Europeans speak English to get around. Things should be even more interesting farther north or in Laos as we get away from the monoculture and away from English.

Its nice that all the wildlife is different. I wish we had some bird books or monkey books. We’ve been pretty bad about pictures, but we’ll try to be more snap-happy.  Cee’s website has a lot of pictures of the grand palace and Bangkok. They’re a great preview to our physical snapshots, and faster than the developing time we’ll need. Pippin and Cee lived in the south on the islands for a while. We haven’t been there, but we’re gonna go see a night market and I hear there’s a giant water-fight holiday called Songkran coming up. We’ll try to write soon.

Pictures Cee took of us in Chang Mai.