Two Pics from Today and a Link to a Past Trip!

Day 018 of Our Winter:  The morning was nice. We walked out to the junction to stop at a pharmacy and a grocery store. I picked up some prescription medicine in blister packs. All medicine comes in the pop-out-a-pill format in Sri Lanka. I think it has to do with both high, tropical humidity and customer convenience. I like travelling with the more convenient format.  These two pictures are of the smaller road where the house is and the larger junction where a lot of shops are.

Having blister-packs will come in handy.  We have a whole month of travel planned with Jay's sisters while based in Sri Lanka this winter. First, we leave for Dubai in mid-December. We have a week on the MSC Euribia cruise ship. We'll stay for an extra week in Dubai and return to Sri Lanka before the New Year.  In addition, we have decided to travel in Thailand for a bit in January and February. We went with the ladies once but that was just a short visit in Bangkok.  Sri Lankans no longer require a visa and this helps to make popping on a 3.5 hour flight easy and pretty cheap.

   

So, this time we have time to try to visit other places in Thailand. In the last decade just Jay and I made a few short visits to Thailand when we stayed for winters in places like Malaysia and Cambodia. A  place I'd like to visit is Chiang Mai as Jay and I haven't been to that city since 1991. That's 34 years ago and it would be a great place to revisit. 

Of course, it's easier to get to Pattaya. Some travellers board a bus right at the airport and go south.  We did that during that 90's era but also returned again much more recently. This is where this journal comes in really handy. I just searched for the fun, beach city and instantly came up with our 11-day revisit in 2018. 

Entries in my journal are always displayed in reverse chronological order. So, you can get nearly the first one by scrolling to the bottom of this linked page. I do appreciate being able to review our comings and goings here. Relying sheerly on one's memory means that many specific details inevitably get lost over time.  It's better to have words and pictures as a backup!

Thirty-Three Years Ago

Day 80 - Jay and I just went to print out a few PDFs from Expedia.ca.  We bought our own tickets and hotels for a planned February trip rather than relying on an agency.  Jay, his sisters, and I will fly to Singapore for four nights and then we will continue to BKK for ten nights in Thailand's biggest city.  

Although everything is on our phones, we appreciate being able to reference paper before and during trips.  We are in Nugegoda so services such as printing are just outside the door.  We walked to the intersection and stopped at a shop that prints and does photocopies.  (I had my haircut for the first time this year too.  The barber was experienced and did a good job so I tipped him an extra 31 cents for a total cost of US $1.87.)

All this planning for Bangkok made me consider when Jay and I first visited.  Right at the end of Operation Desert Storm better known as the first Gulf War, we were able to fly again.   We left from work in Bahrain.  We had hunkered down during the war and were ready for a vacation.  We stayed for five weeks.  So as well as visiting Bangkok, we spent time in Pattaya and Phuket in the south, and Chang Mai in northern Thailand.

 

Talc, Menthol, Parfum, and Triclocarban

Hundreds of brands, that you think are unique, are owned by the likes of Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, or Pfizer. Still, as we have lived on many sides of the globe, we know products that are unique to specific markets.



I returned from SE Asia with my prickly-heat powder for the summer. I planned that two cans would last for seven months and that turned out perfectly. This can of Snake Brand powder is just about empty. The cooling body powder is manufactured in Thailand by The British Dispensary Co., Ltd.

Another Vacation from Our Vacation

Day 102 - We were looking at the calendar and figuring out how much winter we have left. Actually, I mean we were figuring out how many days until our trip back to Vancouver through Hong Kong.

We found that we have enough time to take a little trip near the end of this month and into April. It wasn't really designed to be a scouting journey for a future winter, but I suppose it could end up being so. We saw online that it'd be easy to fly from Siem Reap to Bangkok. We plan to spend twelve nights in Pattaya. Life here is quiet. A getaway will make for a noisy, crowded contrast to the subsequent remaining week and a half in Siem Reap. Our winter will finish at the end of the Khmer New Year.

Jay and I have visited Thailand on a number of different occasions, but I was unsure when we visited Pattaya's beach. My self-sleuthing indicates our one and only visit was in April of 1991. During an earlier part of the trip, we saw Bangkok and Chang Mai. An old colleague, Don Richardson suggested we visit right after flight restrictions were ending for the first 'Gulf War'. Pattaya was not as big a city 27 years ago. (There was quite a bit less of me too.) I found personal proof of these facts on YouTube.

Day 19 - Planes to Phnom Penh

Although only in the air for a total of 2:35 hours, we did spend the better part of the day flying from Rangoon, Burma to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It all went rather effortlessly. Thank you, AirAsia for taking off and landing on time in both instances. The stopover in Bangkok was a little longer than necessary but it is better to have it that way than to not have enough time!

Jay posted three photos on Facebook for today. He was eating breakfast at the airport in Yangon, lunch at the Don Mugang terminal in Bangkok, and dinner in a restaurant in Phnom Penh. I shall just include the photo of my lunch in the airport in Thailand. I first heard of American Fried Rice as a breakfast as a tourist to Thailand in the 1980's. It was generally breakfast.

We made it to the hotel and this seems like a real tourist area. How nice to run be roughing it a little less obviously than in Burma. They're not set up for visitors yet, really!

Day 2 - One Day in Bangkok

We spent the day hoofing it about a lot Chinatown and the older part of the city. It's not hard to get lost on foot. The city is sprawling so a little bit on the maps ends up being miles! The river was, perhaps is, the lifeblood of the city. We didn't do a lot of touristy things as not much changes in a temple from year to year.



In the evening, we again walked around Silom / Suriwong. It's a little less gritty and a little more gentrified, unfortunately. It's hard not to trip over aging tourists trying to buy a new knock-off purse or cheap goods. That's okay though.

Day 1 - SE Asia: Here We Are!

I toyed with the idea of continuing on to Day 86 in the title.  Although technically today is a continuation of our ongoing trip, the three months in Sri Lanka are now complete.  It seems time to start numbering afresh.  We left Colombo airport over an hour late, at around d 2:30 am.  Somebody's computer system was down and we received boarding passes that were handwritten!

The flight itself was fine.  Ah, can you remember the days in North American air travel when food and free drinks were served?  Even in this short, 3.5 hour flight to Bangkok we dined.  The Airbus 380 had 70 rows of seats with very posh and extensive electronic flight entertainment.  I watched a some 2012 best international television advertisements and slept very little.

Of course when we got into BKK we were an hour late and every other flight must have arrived at the same time.  We waited 45 minutes in line to get our free visas.  That being said, they were efficiently processing literally thousands of people.  This was our first trip into town on the new airport train.  Very efficient, pleasant, and cheap.  (It dives home the point of how very expensive and inefficient Vancouver's Translink really is.)

We connected to the SkyTrain and checked into our hotel at about 10:00.  Then, we slept until about 4:00.

We finally walked around and ended up first getting some Thai soup.  We walked Patpong and later ate some fried rice and chicken.  I said on Facebook,

"Comforting to see that even 25 years after my first visit, vendors are still hawking fake Rolexes at the night market and bored-looking girls are still dancing in the doorways of Patpong. Oh, Bangkok!"

Chong Nonsi SkyTrain Station near our hotel in Bangkok.

Cloth Lasts

I saw that Jay had this tank top in his bag in Puerto Vallarta this month. This evening I was searching through my Flickr collection. I noticed the same outfit. The thing is, this image was scanned from an old photo taken on the beach in Pukhet, Thailand in 1991. Those were Bahrain days.

Obviously we are maturing. I too have clothes older than an adult student I'm currently teaching.

What's Wrong With Me?

"Putting things off" should be a personal mantra. It's nice to have a gift at doing something even if that thing is procrastination.

I absolutely enjoy keeping a daily journal, even on those days when writing something seems more of a chore than a pleasure. I like collecting stuff online. Simply putting a few words online a day leads to a substantial amount of text over time. Nobody is arguing that it's crucial or even interesting but often just keeping at something is fulfilling. While I've been occupied moving this data over to blogspot.com, I've been reminded of how much information I have actually amassed here.

For all the blog's merits, I'd have to say that having thousands of pictures on Flickr seems even more important to me. I love the idea of always having some of my most treasured images with me (as long as I am near an Internet connection). When coming back from a vacation though, it always seems like a struggle to get the whole trip uploaded.  I generally start off well but fade in the home stretch.



For example, Wat Po above has been sitting since October on my hard drive waiting to join its Flickr friends. I just haven't gotten around to upload the Cambodia week of the Sri Lanka / Thailand / Cambodia vacation of last fall. Wait, I don't think I've put the most recent Christmas and New Years in NYC up yet either. Oh my, I think I still have the last two weeks of our great Italian vacation to upload as well. That was in the fall of 2008!

Another ‘One Night’

I think I already used One Night in Bangkok as a title for a blog entry. This time I mean that we only have one night remaining. We catch Japan Air at 8:15 tomorrow morning and after 14 hours of flying and a two-hour stop-over, we’ll also arrive in Vancouver tomorrow!

Today we went to Chinatown. Little did we know that it was a holiday today. The streets seemed a little empty for a Friday morning. We walked to Sala Daeng to get the Metro.

I feel so old last visiting Bangkok before either the Sky Train or subway systems. They sure make getting around more convenient. We noticed that the connection to the new airport is being tested. That will really make getting into town easier.

It was only two stops to Hua Lumpong, the main train station. That area is also the entrance to Chinatown. It was packed because it was a holiday. Thousands were on their way, dressed in white, to visit a big temple by the river. What colour and sounds! First though, we stopped to see the “Golden Buddha” at Wat Traimit. The 3-meter statue is made of 5.5 tons of pure gold. At today’s price of gold at over $1000 an ounce, I’ll let you calculate it’s value. This statue has a very interesting history. In 1957 a stucco Buddha was being moved because of the development of the port. By accident, the crane dropped it. It didn’t smash though, it just cracked and revealed a pure gold one inside. In centuries past, it was covered to protect it from invading Burmese. Some accidents can turn out for the best, I guess.

We ate from street vendors on the way back.

Now in the hotel room, we have yet to decide how to spend the one remaining night.

Out of Bus Windows

Today, we were picked up by a van at 7:20 am to be taken to a bus heading back to Bangkok.  Other vans and tuk-tuks slowly brought people to the same bus, so we didn’t get moving until 8:45.  It took us to the border.  It stopped at the government run tourist bus area where we got a short ride to the border on another free bus.  We had to exit Cambodia there.  We also had to get another free visa for Thailand there.  There were many tourists and it took nearly an hour.

On the Thai side we waited until another nine tourists got through and a new van brought us to a hotel to wait for the ‘big bus’.  It was 2 o’clock by then so we ate.  Eventually, all the other passengers arrived and we were shepherded onto the  ‘big bus’.  The air conditioning was pretty weak but it was fairly comfortable.  We hit Bangkok at rush hour but then this city is in constant rush hour.  It dropped us off in a different part of the city at 7:15.  We had to take a tuk-tuk to the National Stadium Sky Train Station, so we could get to our hotel at Chong Nonsi.  It was nice to get a shower after a little over 12 hours of travelling.  It was a bit easier getting to Siem Reap on our own but today our tickets were only $7.50 each.

After checking in, we went out to a nice outside seafood restaurant for dinner.  I will remember feeding a cat the ends of all my shrimps.  I am happy to be eating anything this time here.  My stomach was not up to ‘real food’ during the first days here.

Wat Po

I'm in the room. I have had a bout a rather strong intestinal flu. (Those words seems to adequately mask the actually symptions making this suitable for the blog.) I'm usually such a good tourist throwing away all old conventions, and jumping right into a new environment. Therefore, it feels strange that I ate at a Subway rather than having authentic Thai food. Jay feels it's not something I ate here but rather the alcholic coconut toddy I had on my last day in Lanka. Hum. That is known to affect the uniniatated. Hum. For most of the morning I felt pretty good. The weather was okay.


We went up the river to Wat Po. We toured the Golden Temple years ago, but going back to Wat Po was a nice diversion. We used to take tuk tuks around, now they're few and far between. We got right on the Sky Train station and exitted at the river. Since our last time here, tourist-friendly boats ply the river stops. I retook a picture at the foot of the reclining Buddha that I may have orginally taken in the 1980's.

If one lives long enough all familiar things eventually seem new again!

Taking It Slowly

Last night I got something or other.  It may have been something I ate although I generally have a cast-iron stomach.  It may be have been related to hauling bags around in the heat.  Maybe it was N1H1.  All I know is that I had a fever last night and it has taken me most of the day to achieve the normality I am approaching.

It rained heavily this morning.  It was a warm rain and getting into and out of air conditioned places kept me quite dry.  We did get on the BTS and traveled about four stops to walk around Siam Square.  On the way back we did the same several stops closer at Sala Daeng.

We went to Pat Pong night market area early last night.  We’ll probably do so again later.  Things get rolling late here.

Chong Nonsi

Our flight arrived on time.  That meant we were through customs by 7:00.  We grabbed breakfast (hot Thai soup) next to the Express Bus pickup at the airport.  Of course, that put us in one of those busses during rush hour.  I haven’t been here since the 90’s and although there are new elevated trains and highways, the traffic jams are similar to those I remember.  From the express bus we took the BST station to Chong Nonsi.  First we exitting on the wrong side of the road and could  not locate the place we wanted to stay.  The system wasn’t set up for toting around 50 lb bags, which we hope to leave at the hotel during our travels to Cambodia later in the week.

At last,we checked into the Om Yim Lodge at about 10:15 as our room was already prepared.  We paid for three nights.

After sleeping for only about 20 minutes last night, we went to right to bed.  Rather than for the two hours planned we got up at 3:00 pm.  A cursory walk out about down Silom Road to the corner of Lumpini Park gave us an updated memory map of the area.

Now we’re in the room checking maps to see where things are.

One Night in Bangkok

Yeah, I’m old enough to have visited this city in the past when that song was playing on the radio here.  Actually, we didn’t get into town at all.  But the beds in the Novotel Bangkok Airport Hotel are excellent.  This is pretty posh accommodation compared our usual standards.  I’m so thankful that it came as a free voucher with our tickets.  I’m even more thankful that they allowed us to stay until our departure time.  We will check out at about 7:00 pm.

We were surprised that we had to go through immigration to get to the hotel, for some reason, we’d assumed it was in the airport building itself.  There was certainly a lot of business for the agents although our flight from Tokyo arrived after 11:00 pm.  After the shuttle dropped us off, we were so dog tired we slept fitfully through until 9:00 am.  We got up, forwent the expensive buffet breakfast downstairs and, instead, discovered the way to walk through the parking garage.  It takes less than 10 minutes.  We had intended on taking a shuttle bus into Bangkok but waited for nearly an hour for the A1 for Salom Road.  It didn’t come and then it started to rain.  The gals manning the outside sales office were fairly preoccupied with everything except work but did manage to give us our money back.  Although we had been on the tarmac we’d never bee in the Swamiboomee airport.  We ate in a little food court on the ground floor of the airport.  It must’ve been the cheapest place in the airport as we saw all the flight staff also grabbing food there.  We went back into the hotel and again somewhat accidently slept until 5:30 pm.  Gads, will I ever be able to catch up with the time on this side of the Pacific?

Our three hour flight departs from here at 10:25 pm.  It’s hard to believe we will be winging our way over the island and into Colombo in such a short time from now.

Thailand: Which Years?

I'm not nearly as organized as I sometimes imagine. For example this morning, I posted a 2.5 minute YouTube link about Angkor Wat on my Facebook wall. I mentioned that after our month in Sri Lanka, we'll be stopping in Bangkok and then making our way into Cambodia for about a week. One friend commented on how nice Thais are. I replied that we'd visited there starting back in the 1980's.

I thought I'd quickly find and post an old scanned photo. You see, almost 350 of more than 5,800 of my images on Flickr are old scanned ones. Surely, some from Thailand would've made it into the mix. Yet, when I typed in a search, nothing came up. What?

Perhaps I could spare an hour to scan and upload a few to better represent various parts of my life. I found some in the big photo box. I scanned and tweaked them. Old photos often require a substantial amount of editing to get 'em up to speed. I have added ten or eleven to my Flickr collection.


The next problem came though when I went to date them. There were several of those tiny albums that used to hold one roll only. There were no dates on the back of any of them. I went back to my 'master document' that often contains specific references of events going back to graduation from college. I could only find one reference to Thailand. That was the five week trip that Jay and I took while I was working in Bahrain. I know I've been at least two more times than that and Jay went additional times during vacations and in transit on long trips. Alas, I'm at a loss. I marked all the photos as being taken in March of 1991 only because I cannot figure out when the other times would've occurred. (Also, by the size of the camcorder in the photo above, it had to be the early 1990's.) I need to wait until Jay gets home from work to ask him. He remembers everything!

Playing Tag as an Adult

I'm not exactly typical. This may be true in a number of ways but I've never thought of normalcy as being particularly important. In this case, however, I'm only referring to the fact I've got over five and a half thousand photos online. To some, that may sound like a lot. Yet in actuality, digital images are easy to snap and cheap to accumulate.

It wasn't that long ago when folks had just space for 24 negatives on a roll of film. What's amazing to me is that kids are growing up with the ability to snap everything they come across in their lives. It is a situation somewhat different than trying to develop one's own rolls in a makeshift dark room and paying dearly for each release of the shutter.

I pay Flickr's annual fee which amounts to about the same as I used to drop at the drug store for double prints from a roll or two. There's a lot more traction in an image that can show up on a monitor nearly anywhere. It has been relatively easy to dump thousands of images online. The key though is organization. In Flickr, the tags one gives a photo determines the ability to quickly locate it at a later time. Each tag is like entering that single image into numerous albums. The power comes though searching. For example, I can type my own name and any keyword to find a particular picture.

Try "Dennis Hurd" and "Grand Canyon".

As well as my own stuff, Flickr becomes a valuable resource for scoping out places before visiting them. For example, we continue to refine our upcoming big trip of 2009. After a month in Sri Lanka, we make a stopover for two weeks on our return. We'll use Bangkok as a base to visit both Cambodia and Malaysia. We wanted to see if we could find pictures of Lumpini Park in Bangkok. Because of the ability of my new graphics card, I switched over from my monitor to the large LCD television. There are nearly 2,000 photos in the following slide show. Mine however have not been taken and will not be added until the end of October.

Freeing Other Media

There can be a blush of excitement after scanning an old photo. One realizes that the actual paper artifact has been granted an entirely new digital life. It cannot fade further. Multiple copies can exist. It can even be easily passed around via email or a web page. I most recently added a blog entry along these lines a month ago.

Similarly, after languishing on 8mm video tape in a drawer for sixteen years, I helped this video capture from Thailand make its escape. That country was a common vacation destination for colleagues in the Gulf. In fact, we went up to visit another teacher, Mr. Don Richardson. This particular clip was made in old Chaing Mai. We were on break when living in Bahrain. Later that summer, I finished my work there and took up teaching duties in Dubai.

This grainy, 2 1/2-minute clip does not accurately show the environment. It does, however, show personal events that until recently were difficult to access and impossible to share.

Being Creative or a Historian?

As a follow up to yesterday's entry, I rolled another three tapes through an old 8mm analog camcorder and onto my hard disk via a capture card. I selected a trio of tapes from 1991. It was a spring vacation from Bahrain. We first flew into Sri Lanka and spent a few days with the family; subsequently, we went on to Thailand. We, of course, landed in Bangkok. Next, we made our way up to Changmai. We met colleague Don Richardson there. We also made it south to see both Pattaya and Phuket.

It was interesting pulling up these images on my computer and television screens. Although a far cry from HDTV, they are more than sufficient to bring back forgotten memories. Movement and sound add a lot. Why doesn't my present digital camcorder ever leave the drawer, I wonder? I couldn't help but notice how much thinner I was fifteen years ago. Jay's the same size, he just had a lot of hair then. Small conversations were interesting. For example, I mentioned to a tourist that we were beginning to notice the black clouds from the Kuwaiti oil fires, down on our little island of residence. Those were the days of Gulf War I.

Getting this information burnt to DVDs is a long and boring process. It becomes so much more accessible when it is the new format though. I didn't even want to cut out the long sequences we shot when we were new to shooting video. With the remote that comes with the DVD player, it is very easy to rush through boring patches at 16X or greater.

The creative side of me thought about using editing software to remove mistakes and add music and transitions. Yet the archivist in me contends that capturing exactly what was on the tapes is a purer rendition of history.

Globalization

Yesterday in the evening, we headed on the SkyTrain through Burnaby and into the downtown core of Vancouver. Even though all was damp and dark, the mountains which shoulder the city, were obvious. We were on our way to a dinner at the apartment of friends. Early on, the host put on a disc which included family photos on the DVD player. We saw people, houses, and land in south-eastern Nepal. A bit later in the evening, there was a discussion of New Years in various cultures and first hand accounts from countries such as Japan, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. Later in the evening the discussion turned to the current world affairs regarding the cartoons of Mohammad and some spoke of knowledge from the living and working in the Middle East. There were many other topics too, of course. A flight attendant had to leave a bit early as today he's on his way to Dallas and connecting to work a flight to Osaka.

When coming home, I discovered my actual life had turned out to be as interesting as those National Geographic magazines I collected as an adolescent.