HELLO FROM THAILAND

It's Monday night at 9:30 and I'm in the lobby of our Bangkok hotel using the internet. That link goes to information about the place. 9:30pm here is roughly 7:30am there, so I'm wishing everyone a good morning.

The trip so far has been surprisingly comfortable. After a couple of hours with Tom and Kate exploring the seedier side of San Francisco for shorts and aspirin, we boarded our Cathay Pacific 747 and spent 13 hours arcing from San Francisco north and over to near Tokyo, then south across Taiwan and into Hong Kong. The Cathay Pacific flight was surprisingly comfortable. True to their word, we had tv screens in the seats in front of us and we watched whatever we wanted. For Jill and me, mostly our eyelids. They fed us well and it was quite a pleasant experience.

We only spent two hours in the Hong Kong airport, but it was pretty quiet early in the morning. There was evidence of the SARS outbreak. All passengers staying in Hong Kong, rather than going on to other destinations, had to fill out a health declaration form, have their temperature taken (I didn't find out exactly how that was done...) and then you walk through an area where a really high-tech infrared camera detects your body heat. We did that ourselves and it was kinda spooky looking on the monitor for everyone to see.

Bangkok is a surprisingly comfortable city in many ways. For a developing country, it's cleaner, nicer and it feels like a little bit less of a headache than Mexico City. We haven't yet felt like we were choking on gas fumes. We've taken an elevated train to most everywhere we've gone of any distance. Today, we went over and took a boat along the Chao Phraya river to the old city center where we toured many wats (temples) and the old royal palace.

To date, we haven't been able to find a computer with a USB port, so I'm unable to upload any of my photos. Suffice it to say, there's plenty of them. We have photographed nearly every meal we've had, plus various street scenes, scenes of and around the elevated train, interesting buildings, and of course, the wats and the royal palace. But here's the Temple of the Emerald Buddha we visited today:


Although the weather is sweltering and humid, we're compensated by being able to visit everything and eat anywhere we want for extremely cheap. Our hotel room, in the center of town right near the train, has been barely over $10. Tonight we had our most expensive meal that in the States would have cost $45. For the both of us, it was $10. And everywhere you go, the aroma of the most incredible food wafts around the corner. Not only that, but the orchids are blooming everywhere and you can't miss all the sprays of color. It's quite a remarkable place. Every corner a new sky scraper in all sorts of shapes and designs are springing up.

Bangkok isn't without its negatives, though. I suppose for both of us, the most unpleasant thing isn't the weather (though it can be oppressive) or all of the stairs you climb here to transit or hotel rooms (elevators haven't yet seemed to have taken hold of the Thai imagination), but rather the occasional middle-aged farang or foreign white man being escorted, well, by an escort around town. Fortunately, none of the women have obviously been under-aged girls. But it's still quite disturbing. I won't write a dissertation about it, but it's quite out in the open. Neither the men nor the women try to conceal anything. The ironic thing is that the locals do not condone the activity, even though they don't openly object. It's just that Thais are incredibly passive about unpleasantries because of their culture of "saving face" or avoiding conflict. But the white men don't seem to understand it, or if they do it's doubly wicked, so they assume that the locals think it's alright.

My time is running out. We're safe and sound and I'll update again soon with better information. Tomorrow we're headed for Krabi on the south Andaman Sea. After a two-hour goose chase looking for a recommended travel agent, we settled on a different one and we'll be flying Thai Airways to Krabi at 8am (while you're watching the 6pm news). Bye!