FunkyPix2

Dear Chiangmai Diary - our Capitalist Elitist politically-correct edition

2012-01-12T11:44:00.000+07:00

Chiangmai's iBerry mega-mutt has acquired sunnies.

Dear Reader, this post is a just a rag-tag collection of Updates and Oddities from our home-base in Chiang Mai for your visual delectation and delight. After this, I'll moth-ball FunkyPix2 until we get back from our forthcoming trip to southern India. Yep, Marie feels the urge to sample some Ganesh Chaturthi, Churmi Laddu, Puli Keerai and other dishes so familiar to you all.
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While we're on the topic of large animals, here's a nauseating sight from the local department store in Chiangmai:

Better than the Chiangmai Night Safari, actually...

...less smelly, and free.

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...and now for the Chiangmai Weather Report. Here's another scattered storm, seen from our balcony. This one missed us...

That's our kitchen window on the right.

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All you weird foreigners, like those Strayans in the remote colony Deown Under can marvel at the following disaster msg I got on my iPhone a few weeks ago. Melbournites should maybe consider asking Ms Gillard for disaster relief funds, come July, based on the Thai precedent:

Thaivisa.com is a useful news source for expats in or out of Thailand.

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...and while we're in the political Twittershere, here's an iPhone screenshot of a "say-it-all" tweet from wlfriends.org:

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"It is the absolute responsibility
of everybody in uniform to
disobey an order that is

either illegal or immoral".

(US General Peter Pace, Feb 17, 2006).

Therefore, all charges against Bradley Manning
and Julian Assange have to be dropped.
They deserve a Nobel Peace Prize, not that
disappointing drone-monger Berreck Obomber.

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I just cannot let the racist Australian Liberal Party MP Theresa Gambaro get off scott free for accusing migrants of having body odour and needing to be trained to stand in queues. She's the party's Citizenship Spokesperson, for goodness sake! For such hatespeak, may her political career go rapidly south, despite her belated attempt at an apology. It showcases her fundamental lack of understanding of her job. May I politely remind Ms Gambaro that Australia welcomed new European arrivals, some of whom were probably named Gambaro, to Australia in the post-WW2 decade. As a child, I recall the taunts and name-calling ('dagos', and later, 'wogs' etc) along with cruel accusations of garlic-breath from then-new strange foods like pizza, lasagne and spaghetti, without which Australians of 2012 would all but starve to death. Back in the fifties and sixties, Italians were also unfairly singled-out for their body-odour. One generation on, and nothing has changed. Racist John Howard re-ignited it. Racist mud sticks. FAIL.
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This mini-poem (by Leonard Robbins) succinctly makes the point:

How a minority

Reaching majority

Seizing authority

Hates a minority.

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I also remind the good readers of Funkypix2 that Australia is the only country in the world where the word 'Liberal' means 'Conservative'. In fact, the very name "Liberal Party" is a Big. Fat. Lie. But one might expect no less from a corporate suck like Tony Rabbit. I only wish I could un-see that disgusting image of Mr Rabbit in his Speedos. Never again, please... just don't.
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OK, politics finished! On with matters more domestic. Thailand's economic recovery is being led by secondhand dress/bag/shoes sales:

Marie volunteered to assist at a Thai friend's market stall. It all rapidly outgrew the umbrella, but mâi bpen rai, it was a fine day anyway, chok-dee ca. The ghost of the Funky Bitz North Queensland Marketing Empire lives on. And yeah, thanks, my back's recovered now.
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Speaking of commerce, a new dress shop opened on the ground floor of our condominium last week. Every good Thai shop needs to be consecrated by Buddhist monks, and we attended the ceremony:

Lots of chanting, food, prayers, food, incense, drinks, food, prayers, then we finished with a big Thai meal in case any passers-by felt hungry. An elderly Japanese couple had turned up for the proceedings in their little white jalopy:

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Undoubtedly, having a big Mitsuoka Sports parked immediately outside might well help to attract promising financial karma to the shop. The owners weren't reticent about telling everyone how much their car cost, either. A paltry 3.5 million Baht... or was it Yen? Hell, who cares? [pout]. We're now members of the OCCUPY HUAYKAEW ROAD MOVEMENT. Please donate to our cause... we wanna join the Nouveau One-Percenters. Yeah, sure, our other car is a Honda Jazz, fully equipped with steering wheel and cigarette lighter that works, so there... even though we [ahem] don't even smoke. Ain't Capitalism grand?
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Nic and Joe, still proudly in the 99%, are here for a few months to work. Here they are at Chiang Dao in a staff meeting, being photographed incognito with their iced mango juices by the FunkyPix staff photographer:

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...and here's the view of Chiang Dao mountain from their breakfast table - yes, I agree, it was a rather smoggy day. Farmers, as usual at this time of year, had been burning off old stubble in rice paddies:

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Of course, when at Chiang Dao, do visit the limestone caves:

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South of Maesai there is a temple cave with the usual de rigeur covered staircase leading up the mountain to the cave. But what particularly caught our eye was the unexpected crowd of people grimly hanging on by their fingernails from the Buddha statue on top of the pillar.
My oh my, Enlightenment sure is hard-earned if you're a 99-percenter:

(You can embiggen any photo by clicking on it)

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Ta-daaa !!!
Episode Two of the Redshirt Army Propaganda Chronicles:

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(Sound FX: threateningly low-pitched sub-tone to play during this paragraph)
It was previously spotted outside Thaksin Shinawatra's Silk Shop near our condo. This time the dreaded Redshirt rickshaw, still festooned with pictures of the new (Redblouse?) prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra, made a cameo appearance at Chiangmai's "Three Kings" monument, perhaps in an attempt to score good historical karma. Ah, but serendipity had cunningly conspired to park it next to a politically loaded NO LEFT TURN sign. Not only that, but also in a NO PARKING zone, as designated by the red/white kerb. Curiously, as suggested by Thai legal precedent, it's OK to break the law if you are a bonafide member of the Shinawatra clan ...or on its defacto payroll (aka "perhaps-to-be-rewarded-later-after-the-boss-gets-back" list).
(Sound FX fade out)
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Meanwhile, back at home on our balcony, our marble statue of the Quan Yin [goddess of mercy] has finally got its act together and started giving the thirsty naga-dragon its long-awaited drink:

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Finally, for your eternal amusement, we present some odd sights spotted around Chiangmai:

"...and your final destination today, sir?"

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"Ground differs level" (code for 'ramp')

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"Partridge eggs". Possibly Quail? Any other bids?

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...and welcome to Nature In Motions, the logical sequel to Poo Mobile:

Coin-in-the-slot "Santa Crore" stays there all year,

but the Muzak continues to crank out carols only until about June.

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Seize you later, after we gets back from outback India.

Bangkok, the 2011 floods, and premonitions of a watery Armageddon

2011-12-05T23:27:00.024+07:00

This recent photo is a sadly humorous hint of the looming threat to Bangkok's very existence. Bangkok's Watery Doom may well creep up silently in the next 10 years, perhaps 15 (if luck holds). The city is only one metre above sea level (on average), and has been sinking by about 10cm per year. Oh bittersweet Arithmetic! thy name spells Truth.
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If you click on this link, you will get an interactive flood map (flood.firetree.net) which will look something like this:

(You can biggen any photo by clicking on it)

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Your family can have hours of fun mercilessly flooding the entire city of Bangkok with whatever depth of water you choose. Whee! It's just as if you're playing some silly computer game, except that, like, this is for real, dude... The map represents average Sea Level under normal conditions at present. But with a mere click of your mouse, you can raise Sea Level by any depth you dictate - simply click the drop-down menu at the top left of your screen. Watch what happens to the entire Bangkok river delta. Ouch.
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Note, though, that some areas on the coast near Bangkok, notably Samut Sakhon and Samut Prakan, are already regularly under seawater at high tides. They're an omen of things to come.
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Or you can zoom in to visit whichever specific part of Bangkok you want to inundate. To zoom in to the glitzy shopping tourist area around Pathumwan, Silom and Siam Square, for instance, click the + (the slider at the top left corner of the map) about 4 or 5 times. You'll arrive at a screen which looks like this:

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You may notice, however, that the deeper you click your desired flood-depths, the more the central area of Bangkok (around Pathumwan, Silom, Siam Square, etc) appears to remain stubbornly and reassuringly dry. But no, it's not perched on a hill, nor protected by dyke walls à la Holland. Even if you increase flooding to, say, as much as TWENTY metres deep, there are still apparently some spots which remain dry!
So... can the technology be so wrong??
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Simple explanation: the central city area is extremely highly built-up, with large trees frequently filling gaps between buildings. The mapping satellite necessarily understands the tops of these buildings and treetops as representing ground-level, thereby considerably under-estimating realistic flood depths. Only in larger open flat areas - such as Benjakiti Park (just to the east of Lumphini Park) - is the terrible and soggy truth more accurately revealed. Some twenty million environmental refugees may need to re-locate - quite soon. That's a monumentally more massive evacuation than George Dubya Bush's tiny dress rehearsal at New Orleans.
George? Remember George?

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Many people - initially those with means - are already choosing to abandon Bangkok in search of drier areas. Prices for nearby elevated land - what there is of it - are truly skyrocketing out of reach of all but the One-Percenters. One of the logical and eligible new places to colonize, at first glance, might appear to be Kanchanaburi, to Bangkok's north-west. But that may well be a case of "out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire". Kanchanaburi is on a known earthquake fault-line, yet boasts a huge dam whose wall is already visibly damaged. A major breach could wipe out no fewer than 13 provinces, including Bangkok. The wall is rated as "safe" only for quakes up to 7.5 on the Richter Scale. Er, now what were those principles we were supposed to have learned from Fukushima?

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But do I note (with some surprise, I must confess) that the Thai parliament has (as I suggested back in 2007) cautiously raised the sensitive possibility of re-locating Bangkok in its entirety - wow. At last, someone's waking up! A move like this, as it happens, would actually be a continuation of an ancient Thai tradition. The Thai capital has been shifted several times over its history (eg Sukhothai, Ayuthaya, etc), but that was well before the era before concrete skyscrapers, Skytrains and other recent idiosyncracies such as "permanency". Traditional Thai teak houses were once designed without nails to be dimantle-able and easily relocated. I suspect this latest timid hint about shifting Bangkok will promptly get shunted sideways - these are fragile political/economic times. Sure, the proposal seems to have submerged into political oblivion already - it's all too hard - but there can be no doubt that the 2011 Big Flood will change the Thai national conversation forever.
Besides, there will soon be precious little choice.

Ironically, a traditional symbol threading itself through the silken fabric of Thai

society is that of the Boat. Bangkok in particular used to be very much a water-

based culture ('Venice of the East'), with food-vendors paddling canoes from house

to house along endless networks of canals. These days, antique "noodle-vendor

canoes" are frequently featured in restaurants, even way up on dry land, as

prestigious historical evidence of the establishment's 'food pedigree'.

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OK... let's talk Causes. Why does Bangkok flood?
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Firstly, filling in Bangkok's networks of canals to create roads was a bad call - FAIL - and has contributed in no small part to the city's current flood woes. These days, floodwater now has nowhere to spread out when a monsoon flood does come down the river delta - as it always has - from the north. Bangkok was built on a huge swampy drain, let's face it (another bad call: FAIL). Suvarnaphumi Airport, for example, was built on an area formerly known as 'Cobra Swamp' (nŏng nguu hao). It is still one of the lowest areas in all Bangkok, but now has a 3.5 metre dyke wall all round to keep floods out (and the cobras in??).
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Secondly, unregulated massive pumping up of groundwater (for both commercial and domestic use) is contributing to the entire cityscape sagging loosely downwards under its hugely heavy load of concrete and steel... FAIL. (Get a load of this pic of the Skytrain near Siam Square, or here at Ratchaprasong intersection. Imagine the foundations). Bangkok literally floats on a giant waterbed - Thai people are quite blasé about fresh cracks appearing in walls or floors... mâi bpen rai.
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And thirdly (but hardly least), do I need to mention those pesky rising sea-levels due to Global Warming? Note also that Bangkok's Chao Phrya river is tidal for quite some distance inland, therefore can virtually stop flowing at times of very high tides, thereby severely increasing the back-flow into the few remaining canals. Even back in 1992, while I was staying at a friend's house in Bangkok, he warned me that the downstairs toilet only flushed properly at low tide... and yep, you bet, that failed too :-(
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So - how much longer can Thai people continue to look away, citing Severe Chronic Cognitive Dissonance Syndrome? Bangkok, which is slowly succumbing under this gigantic environmental pincer effect, is even now being unwillingly forced to revert to its traditional boating habits:

What will this Bangkok street look like by 2020?
Hey, but at least canoes don't emit CO₂;-)

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After you're done flooding Bangkok, why not navigate the map

to check the flood status of your own country/town/street?

Good luck (in Thai: chok-dee).

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Site sponsored by https://funkypix2-real-estate-bargains-4u.com
a warm & fuzzy subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation Canoe-Sales Division.
Proudly supporting Vulture Capitalism, World Bank Bailouts,
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Dear Diary: Who's a grandpa now? Loykratong 2011. China trip. SO much to catch you up on.

2011-11-15T16:26:00.077+07:00

Dennekka Rae Wilde Symes will break hearts in time to come.

Yep, we're quite the dotty grandparents.

FINALLY - we got to visit our grand-daughter Dennekka in Straya. And wouldn't you know it... as soon as we left, out popped another - Sonny John Wilde Symes - weighing in at a hefty 9lb 8oz, thereby automatically qualifying for the Mount Isa Under 4 football team. Now we're dotty all over again, and will just have to go back asap to be introduced to Sonny :)
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Also visited my ageing mother again ('great-granny' Noreen Stokes) in Adelaide, and Nicolette in Sydney... hi, Nic & Fadi. Yep, it was a full-blown "catch-up-with-the-rellies" trip, and we're not down from the high yet.

Granny and Grandpa get to know Dennekka.

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Being a family is tiring work.
Sonny relaxes on an internally-heated orthopaedic mattress called "Dad".

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Fa-aantastic to see my son Dale again after 7 years here in Thailand, and to finally meet Jasmine, Dennekka's mum (who was 8 months at the time ...hi Jasmine, hope you're feeling more sprightly now :) Well done to the pair of you, and we certainly admire your Big Joint Project.
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Since our last post, Marie went from Chiangmai to Shanghai & Yiwu with 2 friends for 10 days of retail therapy, rides in Very Fast Trains, and politely refusing Fido Burgers. Here are some of her funky pix:

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The 'Bund', from the British colonial occupation of Shanghai.

Modernity peeps out from behind... and below:

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You can biggen any photo by clicking on it.

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OK, the floods. In the meantime, Bangkok, as you may have noticed, has had a few floods. Take a look at this Youtube film taken from a helicopter. Try to imagine living like this and maintaining your patience for weeks on end - and this was when the floods had not yet reached their peak during high tide times. Here's the Weather Underground website for more detail, maps.
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You can decide whether these pics are serious or funny:

See more flood pix here, including cats with life-jackets, a sky-scraper
tricycle, a tuk-tuk on stilts, and a motorcycle with a snorkel.
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As I've said before in FunkyPix2, building an ever-heavier city on a spongy river delta with a high water table (read: "drain") was never going to be a winner. Poor choice. FAIL. And now there's global warming to add to the problems of a city sinking by about 10cm per year. Per year! Bangkok, on average, sits only one metre above sea level - ONE metre! Do the sums. Future swamp, man. Parts of Samut Sakhon are already permanently under sea-water. Hey, Chiangmai's lookin' even better, folks :)

BREAKIN' NOOZE... Thai parliament is currently considering the possibility of relocating the entire city of Bangkok! Over the centuries, the capital has been shifted to various locations such as Sukhothai, Ayuthaya, etc, so another move would be a continuation of an age-old Thai tradition. But that was in the days before skyscrapers, concrete and permanence. I'm trying to imagine what the abandonned ruins of Bangkok's Skytrain might look like to tourists 700 years from now ("Hey check this out, Marrvin, ah think there merst hayav bin two perrallel medal rails alahng herre... ah jess cain't imeergine what thayat mardev bin used forr... and Oh My Guard, thar's a jargantic ledder 'M' in red'n'yella"... weirrd"). In an eerie parallel development next-door in Burma, the military regime has literally abandonned Rangoon and built a whole new capital at Naypyidaw. Stay tooned to funkypix2.com/realestatebargains4u.

The Bangkok floods have played a big role in Thailand's ongoing "red vs yellow" political circus, too. Roll up! Roll up! The main reason the newly-elected Redshirt prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra was pushed into power was to legislate to get her criminal fugitive brother Thaksin Shinawatra back into the country without having to serve his (fully deserved) 2-year jail sentence for corruption. Any unilterally legislated amnesty like that would make a total ass of the Law... and (Buddha bless us all) that is exactly what is happening. And hey, when better to do it than during a flood disaster which might help to dampen down enthusiasm for street protests!

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So PM Yingluck, flustered and keen to avoid any political blame for her brother's dodgy amnesty, found herself "unfortunately" stranded [sob] out in the flooded provinces at the time of the cabinet meeting. Her army helicopter had no night navigation equipment, she plaintively bleated (it did, actually, and there was a backup 'copter as well). Hmm. Zero cred... FAIL. Meanwhile, the deputy PM (Chalerm) went ahead with a highly secretive Cabinet meeting with a sign on the door 'INNER CIRCLE CRONIES ONLY'. After the meeting, the public wasn't permitted to know the outcome. Ain't Thai democracy grand? Well, er, "flexible", let's say.

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x Yingluck: What amnesty? I'm stranded out here. Ask Chalerm.
x Chalerm: Shh, it's our secret. Parliamentary privilege, y'know.
x Govt (redshirted) spokesman: Dunno, nobody told me nuffink.
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In fact, plans for Yellowshirt protests against Big Brother Thaksin's proposed amnesty (and/or return of confiscated passport) are already underway, floods or no floods. This next pic could well be foretaste of another uprising in the weeks to come. Perhaps Bangkokians should brace for the OCCUPY SANSAEB CANAL Movement, the revolution which may be known to Historians as "The Thai Autumn", designed to discourage tourists from ever setting foot in the country again...

The Million Man Paddle? Well, it might flush the water out to sea if they

paddled hard enough. You think I'm kidding? No less an authority than

Yingluck's hand-picked Science Minister ordered 1000 boats to rev their

engines on the Chao Phrya River to speed water out to sea (here's the pic).

Yup, any Grade 10 science student could pick the flaws in that bright plan,

but nevertheless, the government trumpeted the exercise as a huge success.
(I also predict the publication of an electronic game called "Angry Boats")

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By contrast, it's sunny and dry up here in beautiful Chiangmai. The living's good, and still as tasty as ever :) Here's a recent view from our apartment balcony...

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...but here's what things might look like if we were in Bangkok at the moment...

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As you might have guessed from our paper lanterns, it was the time of the Loy Kratong festival in Thailand - although Bangkok sadly had to cancel theirs due to the floods. As a consequence, lots of tourists bypassed Bangkok in favour of Chiangmai. During Loy Krathong, one dispatches one's previous year's bad luck and accumulated evil-ness off down the river in little candle-boats, or away into the sky in hot-air paper lanterns. Really it's just an excuse to be kids again... especially when it comes to the fireworks which are freely available in shops everywhere. Dennekka, where are you?
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So - here are a few of our 2011 Loy Kratong pix, among which the eagle-eyed observer may spot some cameo appearances by Anna. Last year's festival is reported here. But we start with me having an altercation with a passing lion even before evening fell:

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A restaurant regaled with typical Loykrathong decorations:

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Kratongs float off, taking with them all your ill fortune, offering you a fresh start.
They comprise a plate-sized banana-leaf boat, a candle, 3 sticks of incense, flowers,
a small coin and hopes for the future. Many people add a fingernail clipping or some
of their hair to personalize it.

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Kratongs on sale near the Ping River

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The royal sacred white elephant. Legend has it that the king who established

Chiangmai more than 700 years ago decided that it was auspicious to do so after

a white elephant was seen walking three times clockwise around the summit
of Mount Doi Suthep (that mountain visible from our balcony).
After the third circuit the critter, like, dropped dead.

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Yet another noodle vendor canoe...

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Marie gives hi-fours to a new friend

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In this brief Youtube video clip of Chiangmai's Loykratong street parade, you get to see the legendary Buddhist ascetic hermit Phra Reusii getting his annual gong. After all these years, Phra Reusii still hasn't got a Facebook page, yet he makes damn sure that his float is followed by the customary 50,000 decibel speaker-stack playing the ubiquitous Loy Krathong song. Probably spent years on his mountain-top composing it. Towards the end of the video, you'll see a few of the thousands of hot-air paper lanterns as they continuously rise into the night sky (the video will open in its own window for your convenience - after viewing, just close it and you'll be right back here again).

Quite a bit of technology to catch up on, old fruit . . .

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Anna, en route from the UK to Asutralia, stopped by to say g'day to a 3-week old tiger cub and feed a few other assorted mini-beasties:

(Anna's the one lacking stripes)

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The gorilla her dreams

(See what happens when you forget to feed one?)

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The train driver is reaching for the button called "Squirt Venom Now".
Water, actually. We assume.
The red sign reads: HEAD, HANDS, FEET DO NOT APPLY OUTSIDE OF CAR

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...and Marie, our DNA (Designated Neandertal Authority), narrowly escaped being roasted alive by a volcanic eruption (just visible behind the tree) at Chiangmai Zoo's Adventure Park. Boiling lava oozes up threateningly between cracks in the foreground:

Lean close to your screen and you might hear faint but scary roaring.

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Later, we saddled up the Honda Jazz and rode up to the pretty and lush region north of Chiang Rai, close to the Burmese border. Visited the village of Mae Salong, which is Thailand's "Little Beijing". The population is distinctly of a Chinese persuasion, being decendants of the Kuomintang who were given Thai settlement rights in exchange for (allegedly) ceasing opium production in the years of the Golden Triangle warlord Khun Sa. Although not spectacular, here is one of the old Chinese-style houses which hadn't been excessively chintzed up for the tourist industry:

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...and going to the opposite extreme, the so-called White Temple (Wat Rong Kuhn) near Chiang Rai is as glitzy/touristy as they come. Here is a dramatic little cautionary tale about the down sides of drinking alcohol (hey, you should see the one about smoking):

Yeah, OK, but there's a string of bars just down the road.

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Anna's gone back to Straya now, but en route we saw some of Bangkok. As we only went to the central city and the airport, it was all dry - the rich folks had enough spare dosh to bribe officials to devert floodwater around the city in the east and western 'burbs. We noticed, however, that Capitalism was taking its natural course, and opportunistic 'flood-gear' fashion shops were popping up on every corner:

A whole new meaning to the term 'Venture Capital Float'. And after returning to

Chiangmai, we noticed sudden increases in land values in more elevated regions.

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Water in the Chao Phrya River was fast, turbulent, brown as anything, and carrying all sorts of suspicious objects along in its frothy wake:

Bangkok: old & new.

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When in Bangkok, what to do? Here's your answer:

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Waiting for Anna's plane at the airport, we unearthed further evidence that Thailand's economic recovery is being spear-headed by exports of flatscreen TVs. During our trip to India, we had seen a constant stream of flat-screens arriving in Kolkata and Delhi. This, however, was the first time we had seen them at the start of their trip, in the departure queues at Bangkok airport. So funny... mm, well, I guess you had to be there...

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We'll miss Anna, and wish her the best of luck finding work etc, but we worry because the down-and-under recession in Straya has hit everybody really hard…
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* People are getting pre-declined credit cards in the mail;
* Wives are having sex with their husbands because they can’t afford batteries;
* CEO’s are now playing miniature golf;
* A stripper was killed when her audience showered her with rolls of 5-cent coins while she danced;
* If the bank returns your check marked “Insufficient Funds,” you call them and ask if they meant you or them;
* McDonald’s is selling the 1/4 ouncer;
* Angelina Jolie adopted a child from Melbourne;
* Parents in North Shore are firing their nannies and learning their children’s names;
* A boatload of Australian refugees was arrested near Indonesia (my blogs always come true);
* Casinos in Queensland are now owned by Somali pirates.
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I was so depressed last night thinking about the economy, wars, jobs, savings, retirement funds, etc., I called the Suicide Hotline. I got a call centre in Pakistan, and when I told them I was suicidal, they got all excited and asked if I could drive a truck.

Dear Thailand Diary...

2011-08-25T14:24:00.011+07:00

Camel Inactive. This weird papier-mache beastie confronted us for a few weeks as we

did our twice-daily Jolly Geriatric Walk (Hobble?) around the nearby shoppimg centre.

Having just returned from an Oddysey in Rajasthan, it was all a bit too deja-pas-vu.
jj
PS - I've created a new search category called "Dear Thailand Diary".
Stay-at-home posts such as this one can henceforth be conveniently found grouped
there, as distinct from those under "Thailand Culture"or "Travels Outside Thailand".
See all your search options under "Browse by Category" in the sidebar >>>

jj
We've actually stayed put in Thailand for a few consecutive months now... almost a record for unrepentant travel-addicts such as we. Various friends and family have been a part of it all, and our collective misdeeds are documented below in a scrambled sort of fashion for your amusement/amazement...

Kuhn Anna prepares her trusty iPhone for her fearless assault on Bangkok's 84-storey Baiyoke Tower. Yep, amazing how all the abseiling ropes can get squeezed into such a tiny device - and she still managed to txt msg us on the way down.
Then she donned her pith helmet, climbed aboard a water-buffalo, and went exploring the 700 year old ruins of Sukhothai, one of Thailand's numerous former capitals:

...and at Si Satchanali, site of some of Asia's most ancient pottery kilns:

Walking under the belly of the giant elephant (at the northern town of Denchai) traditionally confers great powers on you. Mr Thaksin always made a point of doing it oh-so-humbly, but only ever bothered if TV cameras were rolling.
And speaking of Matters Political, here are a few of the posters from the recent election. Yup, things are different in Thailand...

(Our visiting friends Kevin and Trish learned a few important political

pointers which I trust they plan to transmit to Australia's Mr Rabbit.)

Sure, Thailand now has yet another government it deserves. But until the Thai education system undergoes a transformation and weans its students off rote-learning in favour of analysis and critical thinking, simplistic unfundable campaign promises from both parties will continue to sway sucker voters. How about a 25% increase in the basic wage? Yeehah, why the hell not? Or maybe free tablet computers for 800,000 children. Yippee, freebies! Duh, and when all the cheering died down after the election, somebody noted that there was no porn filter, and, um, who was gonna pay for those increased wages? Stay tuned for the predictable back-flips, folks.

Now the new PM is caving in to pressure from Redshirts to restore the 1997 constitution. This parallels the urge of Australia's former Howard government to return to the 1950s...

...and another iconic Thai metaphor, just for good measure:

I have to admit, though, that the chaos is fun. There's always a surprise around the next corner:

Internally-illuminated statues near Chiangmai's 700 year-old Suan Dtok gate.

We took a short holiday from retirement at Hua Hin beach (about 2 hours drive south of Bangkok). Ostensibly the sea air was to help Marie to recover from a viral flu, but in truth it was mostly an excuse to get back to the superlative seafood buffet (drool) overlooking the beach at the Sofitel Resort:

M had a Gothic Moment in the lobby while recovering from the meal:

On our walks we noted that the old Huahin is fast disappearing. It used to be principally a fishing village - now it's morphing into a tourist town with fishermen attached. Traditional teak houses like this one are rare now...

...while German, Danish and Scandanavian cultures are swamping the scene (hey, when Russians and/or Israelis come en masse, we'll go elsewhere. Some Thai hotels at the tourist beaches already refuse entry to Israelis as they are frequently problematic).

Yep, road signs are different in Hua Hin:

Alan, our sapphire-miner friend from Queensland, came on a 3-week dental holiday to the red north. Here he is at the Chiangmai Night Safari (he's the one in red):

...and went camping in a wee hoosie ('sala'):

...and visited Chiangmai's silver wat (Wat Srisuphan) with its regulation standing portrait of the King:

Marie's been going to Thai classes, and despite me trying to crib off her lessons, she's becoming completely incomprehensible to me. Phuut chaa-gwaa daai mai khrap? I'm just jealous. And lazy.

Here she is walkling to school while I continue to fritter my time away composing music - this is one of my infamous "Where's Wally" picture series:

You can biggen any picture by clicking on it.

Here's the view towards Doi Suthep from the same balcony. First dry, then wet'n'windy:

...but on calmer nights (when you sneak out for a snack at the fridge, for instance),it looks more like this from the kitchen:

[see more pix of the apartment and Marie's cave]

The balcony is our Social Central. Here's the occasion of Ronny's 80th birthday with a bunch of our Thai and Farang friends, with Ronny/Rani literally talking up a five-o'clock storm - which, because of R's eloquent oratory, no-one actually noticed:

In fact, the wet season is by far the best time of year for cool weather, flowering trees, avoiding crowds, etc. Just don't tell the tourists. We want it all for ourselves.

And being kept indoors on your 60th is the perfect excuse, of course, to whip up a mini-trifle:

...but you always have to be wary of raids from local ratbag sugarholic maniacs:

(burp)

The threateningly red colour of the cherries on the trifle proved to be an ominous portent of the radical redecoration of the King's portrait on Huaykeaw Road, as storm-clouds gather on the distant horizon. What is mean? Passing in front is one of numerous new Fukushima refugees, gratefully lugging home some radiation-free shopping.

Then we hopped a passing Lao Airlines twin-prop for the 1-hour flight from Chiangmai to Luangprabang for a quick sandwich:

On the approach to Luangprabang, formerly the French colonial administrative capital.

The river is the Mae Naam Khan, which feeds nearby into the Mae Khong.

Sisavangvong St, the main drag, hasa few more lights at night now, but they're all provided by privately-owned restaurants and shops, not government streetlights. Ironic, that, for a country which promotes itself as Asia's 'generator'. Huuuuge amounts of cash goes into the Lao government's pockets from selling hydro-electricity to Thailand, but ordinary citizens in the burbs continue to rely on self-funded kersene/candle-power and early bed-times.

The night-market carries on as usual.

A nearby building site uses thin strips of bamboo as internal reinforcement for a new concrete floor.

Maybe they couldnl't afford rio bar due to corruption expenses.

Outside our hotel ('Luangprabang Residence'... excellent) was a daily morning market selling all manner of veg and meats, including live eels and frogs, unidentifiable parts of un-named animals, plus a clearly identifiable calf foetus, complete of course:

A child enjoys the sensations of paddling his toes among a seething mass of squirming eels.

A signature Laotian condiment is the so-called Buffalo Jam. Help yourself to packets

of dried buffalo skin, the key ingredient. Hey, it works for me... quite nice, actually.

Off to school again, this time to a class in Laotian cookery. Marg and Andy happened to be there. The chef is closely inspecting how Marie is folding her spring rolls... perhaps he's picking up some tips:

(Beware the scarecrow in the fake rice paddy... he reputedly adores sweet & sour fish)

Laotian Desserts 101. Sticky rice with mango. We pigged out over lunch.

That evening we ate out... no we didn't cook it... local specialty dishes inclding a rather tasty Mae Khong Terapia:

Watch this space [----------] for a link to our forthcoming trip to Oz.

Oo-roo, seer mite.

Indian Odyssey, Xmas 2010 (Part 1 of 4)

2011-03-18T23:30:00.003+07:00

"Camel-thorn" treat for Kalu the Camel, in the Thar Desert, Rajasthan, India

At last - our account of the eight weeks spent traveling through northern India, plus one week in Sri Lanka. Where to start?? Right here in Part 1 is a good spot. When you complete Part 1, you'll get a link to continue to Part 2, and so forth.

Part 1 Bangkok, Kolkata, a wedding in Delhi, Headhunting in Nagaland, Darjeerling, Agra, Orcha Fort, Khajuraho, Varanasi, Sarnath.

On the other hand, you may care to leap direct to Part 2, 3, or 4 via the following links:
Part 2 Goa, Mumbai, Aurangabad, Ellora & Ajanta Cave Temples, Delhi.
Part 3 Mt Abu, Udaipur, Chittorgarh, Ranakpur, Kumbhalgarh Fort, Deogarh Palace, Rohet, Manver Camp.
Part 4 Johdpur, Mehrangarh Fort, Jaipur, Amber Fort, Mandawar, as well as both the Jaipur & Galle Literary Festivals.

These four posts are consecutive, making it a rather long read in total, so you may prefer to read only one of the 4 at a time. Either way, grab yourself a coffee and settle in. Film clips are all quite short so shouldn't take long to load. Any photo can be enlarged by clicking on it (after viewing it, click your 'Back' button).
If you came here specifically to look at any of our earlier posts, don't spend time scrolling down: it's simpler to use the links in the sidebar under Browse by Category or Browse our Archives >>>>

And now we depart from home in Chiang Mai: (streamers, tears, hankies)
mmmm
Brief stopover in Bangkok
Air Asia hostess announcements: "Prease present your boring pus"... "Thank you for your tension".
In a Bangkok dress shop, Marie detected a new goth-sensationalist trend in mannequin styles:

...and found a new musical friend outside Siam Paragon:

Next morning, after observing a whole batch of lottery tickets being blessed by a Buddhist monk, we took an early Indian Jet Airways fright to Kolkata (Announcement: "Grew indoo bosition for dake-off"). The plane was peppered with Thai pilgrims in identical white outfits and gnome-like white knitted beanies, heading off to Sarnath and/or Bodhgaya. Yep, we'd be seeing Sarnath soon, too.
mmm
Kolkata
The first thing that strikes you about Calcutta is the NOISE level. Then the amount of poverty. Sure, I'm aware of the current fascination with perving on other peoples' misfortunes ever since Slumdog Millionaire (sometimes dubbed 'Poverty Porn'), but the squalor certainly did hit me in the face. We're just naive people who live in modern luxuriousThailand. Here's a Kolkata shoe-repair shop:

...and here's a family home with street frontage and a water feature:

But having said all that, there is now a rapidly rising middle-class with disposable income - we're certainly seeing increasing numbers of them as tourists in Thailand. But - caveat emptor - India's caste system is still a controlling feature of the social landscape, but determined individuals CAN escape its vice-like grip if both motivated and lucky... and it's usually to do with the Lure of the Rupee, of course...
Here's a pedi-rickshaw with a customer ostentatiously brandishing his mobile phone - big status symbol:

Kolkata's traffic noise (mainly horns) has to be experienced ...but maybe once is enough:

A typical night market street in a more middle-class area of Kolkata:

A Family Wedding ...in Delhi
(Thanks Rajika, Michael, Nick & Penny! It was all great fun :-)
One of Marie's relatives got married in a full Hindu ceremony in the Delhi Military Cantonment.
The brass band played on... gosh, this is a class act:

...then the bagpipers arrived...

...and kept bonging on till the wedding party arrived...

Marie chats with cousin Rajika Horsburgh

All I need is a colourful turban thingo, a bejewelled plastic sword,
and... oh yes, a Hindi phrasebook.

Nagaland and the Hornbill Festival 2010
After a return flight to Kolkata to listen to the next movement of its Symphony for Horns, it was another early morning flight to Nagaland. In ignorance, we made the near fatal error of choosing Air India. Oh dear. After a five-hour delay then 15 minutes in the air, the ricketty old twin-prop had to return to the airport with oil leaking from one engine. Then the compensation bun-fight began... accommodation overnight to be arranged and paid for by Air India... guarantee of a (different!) flight next day...

For your interest, here's a brief video clip of the ensuing scene at the Air India Customer Service Desk (I missed the most violent bits because I was wedged against people and couldn't safely get my camera out). To get the most realistic effect, turn up your volume...

Dimapur (the capital of Nagaland) was nothing special, but I do fondly remember an excellent Mutton Keema curry. It nearly converted me to Indian food. Mutton = goat, throughout Asia. I reckon I ate my way through most of a goat during the 2 months in India... yum. Bleat.

Nagaland is a newly-established state of India to the north-west of Bangladesh and abutting Burma. It's as far east as you can go in India. In reality, it is a bureaucratic amalgamation of many different sub-groups of Naga tribes, not all of whom have always been on neighbourly terms or respect borders. Competitive head-hunting was their favourite sport in the 19th century, but Baptist missionaries put a stop to that. Now that they're converted to Christianity, they've switched to soul-hunting instead. Not really all that different, methinks.

Anyway, once a year in November they all gather for a dance, music & culture expo to attract much needed tourist dollars. There isn't really much of that, however - last year there were only 1400 foreign tourists visited Nagaland, and I estimate most of those would have been during the week of the festival. Hotel accommodation is woeful because [a] they have little experience of western-style hotels, and [b] they couldn't afford to build infrastructure for the 51 weeks of the year when the place was empty. Tourism is awkward because travellers need to apppy to Delhi for a Restricted Area Permit at least 2 months in advance, and are required to travel either as a married couple or in a group of at least four. It is also mandatory to have an official guide 24/7.

But it's worth the trouble if you can stand the 'hotels' and lack of electricity. Maybe better to avoid the Solitary Rice Hotel - Foodings & Lodgings, for instance. Menu items - "Fresh Crim & Pie", or perhaps "Baby & Capsicum Fish" (huh? are they still hunting heads?). But the festival itself is certainly worthwhile and unique in a 'staged' kind of way... it has its own dedicated cultural 'village' site centered on a performance ring - a bit like a large open-air circus:

Hornbill feathers are a prominent symbol among Naga tribes.

Some of the many tribes arrive...

...and wait their turn to perform...

...and later return from their performance...

Performance on a log drum:

Male dancers/singers.

(Musicologists alert! Here are some genuine home-grown whole-tone harmonies...)

...and some female dancers:

...and a male/female responsorial song:

Spot the Odd-One-Out:

Marie likes red. She blended in well, but was a tad wary of the spears.
Nearby, in the Gents loo, I saw "Please Flash" scribbled in marker pen above the urinal.

...and a few photos from around Kohima. Bear in mind it is considerably more elevated than Dimapur, so is quite cool:

(Sign: "Not all men clean their cities but real men do")

Marie and Ellen after a comfortingly hot masala tea plus samosas.

Soon after that we walked past the "Merry Marble" headstone shop.

Main street, Kohima

Seyie, our official guide, proudly shows us a sacred magic stone, believed by locals to have

fallen from heaven. What goes on in the minds of ex-Headhunter Baptists?

It can be tricky to track down internet services in downtown Kohima.

Darjeerling
From Kohima we drove to Dimapur where we said goodbye to our driver Bablu, and took a 5hr train to Guwahati. After a brief sojourn in the cloth markets, we caught a SpiceJet flight to Bagdogra. Here was our view of the Himalayas poking through the clouds. Jaws dropped. Where exactly do clouds stop and snow begin?

From nearby Siliguri we expected to ride to Darjeerling on the ancient British narrow-guage miniature 'Toy Train', as we had previously bought online tickets for the cute little 8-hour trip...

The Toy Train on its infamous "Loop".

...but ah, the best laid plans! It had been cancelled that day due to security precautions. So we drove up the mountain in 2 hours, roughly following the same path as the train would have taken. Halfway up we were, indeed, delayed by a noisy demonstration by Gorka separatists agitating for the establishment of Gorkhaland (Gurkaland) as a separate state of India. Not really a viable project in my opinion, but hey, who am I to meddle?

Here's a 7-second clip of the demo, sufficient to give you the idea:

They had the propaganda well under way:

The view down from the passenger window. It was getting colder by the minute.

Darjeerling was f#*king cold to say the least. No wonder the Brits chose it as their preferred 'hill station' in the 19th century. It constitutes, after all, the foothills of the Himalayas:. In this pic you are standing (well rugged up) at 2200m; the range in the distance is 8300m.

I stayed chained to the heater in the Snow Lion Homestay.

Some oh-so British architecture:

...and some 'gee-wiz' Indian infrastructure:

Darjeerling's water reticulation system.

As u can see, all the joins leak after cars back onto the pipes.

On the way down from Darjeerling (a day early, to escape certain death by freezing), there were Tea Fields Forever... like this one near Siliguri:

Agra
Flew from Bagdogra to Delhi [yes, again, but this time as tourists, not wedding guests], then drove to Agra. Too many places to describe fully - have a look at some pix instead, starting with the Agra Fort:

(yes, marble)

The mesh breeze-screens are marble too. They used to hang wet hessian over them for air-con.
In the distance looms the Taj Mahal.

The gateway into the Taj Mahal's grounds would be impressive all on its own:

The Sanskrit inscriptions get progressively further apart the higher you go,

in order to all look equally spaced from ground level.

Marie with Baldy. Well, ya can't not take this shot, can ya?

There are two small mosques either side of the Taj Mahal (which is actually a tomb, not a mosque). Perspective dictates that they look small by comparison, but in actual fact, they're big too. Clever architectural sleight of hand. The postcard sunset was free:

No photos allowed inside the Taj, but much of it was inlaid and patterned intricately with inlaid semi-precious coloured stones. Afterwards we went to a marble showroom (tout-code for "shop") which employed workmen doing the same sort of inlay work. This marble really is extremely hard. Here's a 14" piece they wanted to sell to us for a trillion rupees, plus a 4' Ganesh, which, er, cost a bit m-m-more... delivered to your door, of course:

An early morning shortcut to the train station took us through some truly slummy lanes. In the Stygian pre-dawn misty darkness were blanketed people huddled close around cow-pat fires on the mud-flats, or sleeping wrapped close to each other for warmth. Cattle wore blankets. These are the shots you regret missing... From the train, moonscapes of erosion with interspersed fields of yellow mustard crops. So verry many mustards, sirrh.

Next, Orcha, and its Jehangir Mahal (Mahal = Palace):

Mr Annan chats with Marie while the photographer :) zips around...

...and the same area, but seen from downstairs:

Dance floor for the Maharajah's concubines: Marie does an impromptu Riverdance.

This was strictly a 'women only' zone, except for the Maharajah and some eunuch guards.

We were treated to an expert description of the Nine Incarnations of Vishnu.

Charles Darwin would probably have approved.

...and finally, the impressive exterior. This was both fort and palace:

Meanwhile, back in the more prosaic town square near the "Pompous Tea Emporium" and a door with a sign "Harvard Playgroup":

I'm sure I'd make a fine Sadhu... my forehead's got a bigger paintable area than his.

Khajuraho

Psst! Want erotic carvings?? Khajuraho has every variety carved into its temples. Amazingly good condition for having been in the weather for 1000 years. The worst damage happened during the Moghul Empire in the 15th century when Muslims went around smashing a lot of it - especially faces - because the Koran said representations of the human body or animals were improper. Therefore these temples are officially 'dead' in Hindu terms. They can be preserved 'as is', but can no longer be used for official religious purposes.

Here's the Goddess Temple. That day, lucky for us, the giant 12-foot Goddess was at home:

There's a row of elephants along one wall, all looking primly pachydermal.

But this one is turning around and grinning as it peeks at a pair of lovers.

It all got too much for us...

Khajuraho has jollies for everyone. Hours of fun for all the family.

Varanasi ...the throbbing heart of Hindu India.

I must go down to the Ghats again

To the lonely Ghats and the cows...

Varanasi turned out to be my real India, though... rather like stepping into pages of grubby old copies of National Geographic (plus scratch'n'sniff, plus soundtrack). Some cities boast impressive monuments, but Varanassi has Humanity, and a lot of it. Sensory overload: smells, hooting, crowds, pedi-rickshaws, monkeys, beggars. Festering black drains. Mazes of sunless cobbled lanes, redolent with urine and dog/cow shit, gravitate erratically down towards the banks of the Ganges. Personal space is an irrelevant western folly here - be it between cows, goats or people.

Cows are respected and granted freedom of the city because they are believed by Hindus to be in their penultimate incarnation before rebirth as a human. They are Future Humans... although we did find a few cafes selling Future Human Curry with nan-bread. Not Hindu ones, though.

Cows, along with dogs, pigs and monkeys, scavenge left-over morsels from Varanasi's rubbish carts.

Varanasi is a living holy city by comparison to some of its lifeless predecessors - I can still hear Angkor's spooky silence. Varanasi's evening Hindu rituals along the chilly Ghats of the Ganges beggar all the senses. Chanting, incense, clattering choruses of brass bells, candle offerings gliding slowly past your boat... Loy Kratong every single night. Old Sadhu dressed in orange, carrying a Shiva trident draped with marigolds. Here comes an itinerant cow with blue horns (I'd guess in honour of the god Shiva, the Destroyer-cum-Recycler. Dozens of cremation wood-fires studded amid the orange smoky glow of sodium lights give the Cremation Ghats an other-worldly Dante-esque feel. But it is very much of this world... fortunately the breeze wafted the odours in the other direction.

Charon the Boatman conveys us towards some of the night cremations on the banks of the Ganges

[file pic]

Pilgrims row towards the Ganga Aarta ceremonial area:

Further upriver, boats jostle for position to view the evening Hindu religious ceremonies:

Hindu evening rituals, Varanasi Ghats:

Further along next morning, in the river-misty cold colourlessness of first light, is the first cremation of the day on the greenish-grey mud near the water's edge. A mere twenty metres downstream, loin-clothed dhobi-wallahs do their thwackety-thwack laundry in the opaque sewage-coloured water. Yep, downstream. Having had some laundry done, we may well now be wearing traces of fresh human ash. After a body is burned, the ashes plus most remaining bones are swept into the water (what the *%! does the bottom of the river LOOK like??), then small barefoot 'untouchable' boys compete to retrieve any unburned fragments of wood for the next customer. And thus the karmic wheel slowly but inexorably turns, hundreds of times, until very late every night.

Dhobiwallahs working near a morning cremation. The body is wrapped in gold foil:

A quiet morning on the Varanasi Ghats - exotic and novel for us, but this is the daily routine reality for countless thousands:

Ironically, municipal signs next to colossal stacks of firewood implore citizens to 'Keep Varanasi Clean & Green'.

It pays, however, to ignore the bloated cow half-submerged in the grotesque band of anaerobic green slime, discarded marigold garlands, and plastic bags along the river's holy bank. Overheard a guide telling his clients that the Ganges' water wasn't over-polluted - because it was full of minerals. Yup, sure. Everywhere, piles of plastic bags/bottles and rubbish smolder, a metaphor for the cremation of the Oil Age itself, perhaps. So far, our lungs are holding out... but maybe not for long, forlorn falangs...

More quotidien scenes in the lanes near the Ganges at Varanasi:

Also spotted a government "Bhang" shop selling happy chocolate.

Pilgrims in the early morning. The seagulls(!) migrate here annually, escaping the Mongolian winter.

Sadhus pass an old tree shrine, 200m from the Ganges.

Baby goat discovers a feed.

School buses (above, and below)

Sign outside Benares University:

"Donate generously to the free meals scheme for the poor meritorious students"

Fresh unpasteurized milk is distributed from Varanasi's early morning milk market.

Near Varanasi is Sarnath, where the Buddha delivered his first sermon.

Not a spectacular place. Quite ordinary, really. Perhaps that's part of Buddha's message.

But he might not have anticipated the sheer numbers of pilgrims by 2011,

nor the establishment of accommodation such as the Holi Day Inn.

Plus... The Lord Buddha English School.

Thus ends Part 1. Click here to bring up Part 2 in its own window.

In Part 2 you will visit

Goa, Mumbai, Aurangabad, Ellora & Ajanta Cave Temples, and Delhi.

Indian Odyssey, Xmas 2010 (Part 2 of 4)

2011-03-18T23:25:00.001+07:00

In the exciting first episode our heroes braved Bangkok, cruised Calcutta, went to a wedding, navigated Nagaland, dallied in Darjeerling, Agra, Khajuraho and Varanasi. Please join them again here as they go gaga in Goa...

Goa - welcome relief from the cold of Darjeerling.
Now for a week's 'holiday-from-a-holiday' at the Portuguese-tinted state of Goa - much warmer and definitely more of a tourist 'scene', although numbers are well down this year due to economics and the recent Varanasi bomb. We chose this Christian state for the Xmas period (even though we're not at all of a Christian persuasion) because we just wanted to observe how locals celebrated... and also needed a break from the cold.

Illuminated stars are all the rage here during Xmas. Goans hold an annual

crib competition. In this photo, onlookers check out Mary and Joseph, the

Three Wise Men, and (of course) a model Portuguese galleon listing heavily

to one side. But wait! ...the crib is empty! Fear not, Ye Doubting Thomases,

a holy plastic doll (presumably male) will magically appear by Xmas morning,

so no brainwashed kiddies need be disappointed.

Everywhere there are crumbling 500 year-old churches:

...one of which is the St Francis Xavier Church. Uncle Frank gazes imperiously down at you from the row of glass peep-holes provided for him in his private loft:

Close by, incongruously, the Francis Xavier General Store trades busily. Crucifixes painted on prows of beached fishing boats. A quarry truck named Infant Jesus. Hotel named Villa Immaculata... Sunset walks along peaceful Benaulim Beach, a refuge from the doof-doof younger scene of the North Goan beaches. Tourists go paragliding: we sense a slow-burning tension between the fishing and tourism industries here. Cows sleepily chewing their cud on the beach - between the lifesaver flags, sensibly. Toilet pigs... don't ask.

Marie alternately toasted on the beach then dipped gingerly in the surprisingly cool Arabian Sea, and I retreated to a cancer-free muzak-free zone to sample some Goan kingfish curry and mango lassi and to scribble down more music. In due course we fully expected to encounter some 17th century Portuguese soldiers with rusty muskets, or at least some rogue colonial spice traders driving locals in chains...

Our quest led us to Goa's Anjuna Market with all its hippies (mostly Western) still trapped in the 1960s and ageing disgracefully in tragic period outfits. The tourist-targeted stalls were, of course, charging lethal prices:

Sign on a market stall:

Customer is King.

King never bargains.

No need to travel to Rajasthan - it all comes to Goa.

Where's Wally?

...and there were a lot of well-preserved old Portuguese-era houses:

(Note the tres cool name above the window arch.
To biggen the photo, click on it. After, click your 'Back' button).

No glass. Window panels were made of slivers of sea-shell to admit light. I recalled mediaeval windows in Sussex which used stretched rabbit skins for the same purpose:

...and we sent another parcel back home to Chiangmai, this time the winter clothes we would no longer need. Here a tailor at Margao stitches the required cloth wrapping over our scrounged cardboard box:

Mumbai Saturday Sunday Mumbai Tuesday...

Announcements from crew of Jet-Lite flight:
mm "Dee aeroblane is being helmed by Gaptain Zanjay..."
mm "Blease upright your zeat, sirrh".

The 'Fort' district of Mumbai (formerly Bombay) is an island museum brimming with stunning (if now sometimes shabby) architectural relics of the British Raj era. It's almost as if London's Leadenhall Street district (the Wall St of the 19th century) had been convicted, picked up bodily, and transported to India to atone for colonial atrocities committed by its own Royal Evil East India Company:

Yet even London can hardly compete with the flippant magnificence of Mumbai's old British High Court with its playful corkscrew towers, or the deliberate gothic extravagance of the Victoria Terminus railway station. These were clearly intended to be psychological tools of colonial intimidation, massively overwhelming anything built previously by Indians. "Take note: we are now your new bosses... see, even our railway stations are more majestic than your puny Princes' palaces":

Nearby, Mumbai's millions seem flatly lifeless as they ply zombie-like through the choking smog of the streets. They have dead eyes even though they can see, dead spirits which accept that stinking squalor and eye-stinging pollution are their binding destiny. But hey, I also found my first excellent coffee since arriving in India a whole month ago. And one might spot an occasional silver Mercedes coupé ostentatiously strutting through the honking herds of cheap yellow & black taxis. Yes, in Mumbai (India's financial nerve centre), those who can afford to pay can have it all - while hundreds of thousands of others sleep on gritty pavements amid their own excrement. Money is their god, the street their temple. But unlike Varanassi, there are no itinerant cows allowed here - they've long since been encouraged to graze their way out to rural areas where they won't dent as many car doors and raise insurance premiums.

Lack of local language can impede things. My conversation with waiter:

=== "Is this mutton boneless? ...or does it have bone inside?"
=== "Yes, sirrh" [slight head wobble]
=== "Er... does that mean 'bone' or 'no bone'?
=== "No boneless, sirrh" [increased wobble]
=== "Um, is that "No, boneless", or "No boneless"?
=== "Yes sirrh" [wobble-panic ensues]
=== "OK, I'll have it " [sigh...]

Aurangabad, Ellora & Ajanta Cave Temples

Aurangabad: a generic dusty inland Indian industrial city which has long since squeezed past the confines of its tumble-down city walls. But it boasts hidden treasure - the jaw-dropping complex of 34 Cave Temples near the village of Ellora make the 30km bumpy road trip worth every rupee.

The Kailasanatha (Kailash) Temple

Standing on the hillside at the approximate spot where King Krishna dreamed up the

idea of this temple, you begin to comprehend just how much rock had to be removed.

Twelve centuries ago, King Krishna stood on the slope of a basalt mountain and imagined an enormous Hindu temple carved out of the rock - right underneath his feet. He marked out the lines and over three generations, thousands of workmen chipped straight down through the solid rock with handtools, cutting out a colossal wedge like a huge slice of pie removed from the side of the mountain. I estimate it to measure at least 80m deep, 90m wide, and 120 metres from front gate to rear wall, About 200,000 tons of rock had to go, they estimate. In the centre the king preserved a massive chunk of rock, one-and-a-half times as high as Greece's Parthenon, which stonemasons began shaping into what is now a multi-storey solid-rock temple representing Mount Kailash, Lord Shiva's mythological Himalayan abode. It is exquisitely carved with scenes from Hindu mythology, and its perimeter guarded by stone elephants:

Looking along the rear wall of the Kailash temple.

(I took the following movie from near the guard elephants)

In this next movie, Marie is underneath the temple building, photographing the Hindu demon Ravana shaking Mount Kailash:

...and here is a pan of the Kailash temple from just inside the front entrance... spot the two larger-than-life trunkless elephants, and a cameo appearance by Dr. Marie Livingstone:

Some of the older temples date back to the last centuries before Christ and belongs to Hinayana period of Buddhism in later part of 2nd century AD. Buddha images here at Ellora date from the era when Buddhism first began practising adoration of images. The next photos (and movie) shows an example of whole monasteries, complete with meditation cubicles, dug into the side of the mountain:

Might this have been a prototype of our Nakornping Condominium??

By contrast, the Ajanta Caves are a series of 33 temples and monasteries dug laterally into the face of a long curved cliff. Like their elder siblings at Ellora, the Ajanta temples were all built by simply removing any unwanted rock that didn't look like temple material:

The deep ribs forming the ceiling of this cathedral-like cave not only offered

strength but a place to insert richly carved wood panels, long since disappeared.

There are still some traces of coloured paint on the walls and pillars.

On the walls of one of these caves resides India's most ancient Hindu art, kept nowadays in almost total darkness to preserve the remaining colours. This is India's Sistine Chapel ...but the noise level from the hordes of rampaging garlic-breath schoolchildren on the day of our visit was anything but religious or respectful:

Very dark location for this ancient painting? fresco? Difficult to see in situ ...so later

I light-enhanced the photo a little so I could check for myself what it had looked like.

This facade had a little accident at some point. Indian civilization had discovered gravity
some 500 years before Britain's Celts were running around painted in woad.

Might this temple have been India's equivalent of Newton's apple??

Here in India, it was we who were the exotic minority. Countless people wanted to have their photo taken with us, the tattooed lady and the white-bearded giant. One request was memorable: "I vould like to gapture with you".

Delhi ...yes, Delhi again, briefly.

Things are getting greener in Delhi. There's obviously been a push to plant trees and control rubbish. Buses run on LPG. Car horns are thankfully under control. And Marie found an electric rickshaw:

Near Delhi's famous Qutab Minar [sandstone tower], there were many spider-like ricketty structures assembled in almost random patchwork styles by the Moghuls from assorted wreckage of exquisite Hindu temples they had destroyed. More interesting/curious/strange in some ways than the tower itself:

Thus ends Part 2. Click here to bring up Part 3 in its own window.

In Part 3 you will visit
Mt Abu, Udaipur, Chittorgarh, Ranakpur, Kumbhalgarh,
Deogarh, Rohet & Manver Camp.

Indian Odyssey, Xmas 2010 (Part 3 of 4)

2011-03-18T23:20:00.005+07:00

In Part 1 and Part 2 of "Indian Odyssey", our two Weary Explorers conquered central and north-east India. In the next exciting episode, they tackle various impregnable forts dotted around the desert state of Rajasthan in the far north-west of India. First, though, they discovered a delightful secret hidden away in remote Mount Abu...

Mount Abu Rajasthan's only hill-station.
We stayed at the residence of one of the local maharajahs - the pink/yellow mahal on the hill in the photo. It seems these days like almost everyone claims to be a maharajah, a maharajah's brother-in-law, etc, especially since the British offered them an annuity in lieu of continuing their 'royal' status after Independence in 1947...

Legend has it that some Hindu god made this lake by scraping it out with his fingernails.

The lake is awfully green, and there's a simple reason for that, but hardly appropriate
for genteel conversation on this wholesome family website. But it's to do with shit.

Our balcony at the palace-cum-hotel.

Fine, OK, but the beds were hard and the heater wholly inadequate...

What a winner. Mt Abu can boast what I consider to be the highest quality (if physically smaller) Jain temple we saw on our entire trip, the Dilwara temple, built between 11th and 13th centuries. The marble is truly white and clean, and the carving is unbelievably detailed and fine. Marble roses have near-transparent petals. Fingernails show tiny cuticles. But sadly, no photos are allowed - it is a "living" temple and flash would disturb worship. But, um, here are a couple I didn't take:

Designed, I think, to give the other-worldly impression that the the

roof domes float on air and that the stone isn't heavy at all.

This is an upwards shot of a marble ceiling panel. The countersunk section

measures about 3 feet square, and, unbelievably, is all a SINGLE PIECE of

marble. This 3D panel, as well as the amazing central rose panel (out of sight

at the apex of the dome in the previous photo) had to be carved in situ by
the sculptor lying on his back. The usual system of carving-then-positioning

wouldn't work (the carving here was too fine and the elephant would likely
have wrecked it during the final heavy lift). This depth of carving was
achieved by scraping and filing rather than chipping.

Otherwise, Mt Abu doesn't have a lot to offer except relative peace and quiet, and walks around Fingernail Lake. Here are few snaps taken around town, beginning with porters who enthusiastically offer to push/pull you (plus your luggage) in their trendy air-conditioned taxi-wheelbarrow:

Hobbitts be here inside this boulder

Udaipur City of palaces, tourists, and a fake lake.
I'll begin with an aerial shot which I nicked from a brochure - it gives a fair idea of the artificial lake for which the heart of Udaipur is known. Competing for space along its banks are various palaces built shoulder-to-shoulder by generations of Maharajahs:

...and now come for a stroll into the internal courtyard:

Imagine how this looked when it still had all its coloured glass inserts.

A swinging chair for the Maharani's idle hours on Farcebook

Where are the Wallies?

A kerosene fan in the Udaipur Palace Museum :-)

Of course I was inspired to go one better, and immediately invented the kerosene laptop.

Speaking of inventiveness, this horsiphant (elephorse?) successfully confused

enemy elephants. Elephants instinctively protect their young.

The trunk probably also suppressed any urge on the part of the horse

to indulge in impulse grazing during the heat of battle.

One Maharajah's vast collection of vintage Rolls-Royces.

Yep, his other car is probably a Honda Jazz.

...and in the street outside the palaces, the Rolls-Royce of the Desert (4WD)

In Udaipur's Botanical Gardens ("Women Only"; made originally for the Maharani) we were treated to an exuberant folk dance. I suspect, however, there were men involved:

mmm
Chittorgarh Fort (a short-ish drive from Udaipur)

This fort was substantially destroyed by the Moghul emperors. They didn't actually want to occupy it, but destroyed it as an act of power to break the defeated Hindu enemy's spirit. Chittorgarh is but a shattered shadow of its former self. One photo should suffice:

The "Tower of Victory", naturally, was defaced as well:

Of more interest was a sandstone Jain temple, although not as finely carved - or as white - as the one back at Mt Abu. Although defaced, this was still being used as a "living" temple. India abounds with contradictions.

On the way back there were more tribal nomads on the road. Gaily-caparisoned camel trains of nomadic gypsies ply four-lane highways, an incongruous confluence of ancient and modern. The camels drip tassels of rainbow colours and sequins. Rajasthani colour serves as a cheery counterpoint to the uniform prickly drabness of the desert, but also can denote caste, occupation or social status:

The women generally do the gathering and carrying of firewood.

Out here in the north-western desert, people are gnarled, brown and tough but kind and accepting. Women sari-clad mostly in brilliant day-glo pinks, oranges, reds and yellows, glitter head-to-toe with silver sequins and studded brass nose-rings with small bells, carrying strapped bundles of firewood or shiny water-pots on their heads. Faces often modestly veiled with transparent flimsy material. Men, dustily barefoot or sandalled, wear bulbous brightly coloured turbans and once-white linen dhotis, gathered between knobbly knees.

Ranakpur Jain Temple

...was by far the largest Jain temple we saw. Fifteenth century. Every one of its 1,444 white(ish) marble columns is carved uniquely, and its area of 48,000 sq ft and 24 domes meant, of course, that I got thoroughly disoriented and lost inside. I suffered 'supermarket syndrome'. Marie's head, however, contains a built-in GPS, so I got out OK, thank Shiva...

Where's Wally?

Kumbhalgarh ('garh' = fort)

Surly and sulking on a forbidding ridge, Kumbhalgarh Fort is smaller than Chittorgarh had been, but it holds its head proud and mightily high. Unlike Chittorgarh, it was never properly conquered by the Moghuls.

Kumbhalgarh Fort, seen first from the approach road:

Kumbhalgarh's first gate: (yep, that's a child leading the cattle)

Trudge your way steeply up up up through an impregnable series of massive stone gateways, some bristling with sharpened metal anti-elephant spikes. Such gates were usually positioned just after a sharp corner so that a charging elephant couldn't get up any speed:

Up, up, ever up the flights of polished marble stairwells to the fluted domes on the highest ramparts. From up here you can look down on that approach road and any foolish invaders:

Outside the fort, the decimated remains of a buffalo carcass unnervingly remind one that Leopards Be Here. That night, out of reach of leopards, Marie recovers her nerve by whooping it up a bit with a rollicking Rajasthani maiden...

...and later I relax with the Indian Sunday Times and discover a gratuitously doctored gory photo on the front page:

Wow, that's more sensationalist even than the most populist Thai newspapers!

Apart from the badly photoshopped blood, notice the report of the local temperature.

Deogarh

It's certainly getting more parched round these parts. Wan slanting sunlight on a clear and chilly January morning. Dry bracken, an occasional scribbly grey-green tree, hunched against the cold. Lethargic cattle, grazing among scattered rubbish, claim their patch of sun. Brownly barren and jagged hills, eroding for aeons, punctuate an otherwise level or undulating sandscape. Some patches of low-crouching frothy acacias, curiously green. Dry stone wall fences meander aimlessly into the beige distance. As we drive through the dusty village and up the hill to the hotel, we enter an unexpected and different world: a converted former palace offering everything possible in luxury:

At Deogarh Palace, recently converted to a hotel by the 15th generation Ranak (king), we were housed in a 3-room apartment which was built in 1670. Originally a royal reception room (the "Kawandwara"), our bedroom walls were painted with fading 340 year-old originals of Lord Krishna, elephant battles etc. We could scarcely believe it - this was literally the most intimate possible encounter between Tourism and Culture:

For the sake of preserving the colours, I switched off the camera's flash.

Come on a walk-thru tour of the apartment:

Deogarh's dance show:

Steep descent along a ridge during a train joyride

Give biscuit = friend forever.

Black-faced Macaques will snatch cameras if they look vaguely edible.

Rohet

Flat sparse desert around the village of Rohet, where we stayed at Rohetgarh Palace, yet another former royal abode. Ostentatiously over-restored place, clearly reliant on sweetheart deals with tour companies... otherwise how would they attract enough visitors way out here?

The jeep "safari" took us to see some antelope grazing in fields of mustard oil crops, then to a Bishnoi vegetarian village (Hindu) with its mud/cowpoo thatched huts:

Posing for a living? Gold is where you find it.

The Bishnoi are vegetarian and actively protect the local wildlife. When the Indian filmstar Salman Khan shot a blackbuck antelope in their tribal territory, they got, like, real cranky. They made sure he got convicted, but even so continued to pursue him - almost like a fatwa (except they're Hindu). During a much publicised marathon in Jaipur, they harrassed the guy as he ran:

Click any photo if you wish to enlarge it. Afterwards, click your 'Back' button

We were treated to an opium "Welcome Ceremony" in a Brahmin village - clearly a tourist whitewash to disguise the lucrative backroom trade ("Orpium nod do hyor grrowing, Sirrh". Grrow nearr Udaipurrh"). We could have a drink of mild opium if we wanted, offered to us direct from the host's cupped right hand. Bit like coffee - apparently:

Marie tests an opium karrel. The blue wall indicates the house of a Brahmin caste, ie,
they probably command enough clout to have done a cosy deal with the palace.

Whatever she had, I want some.
There is a legal opium growing license for 20 acres (for medicinal opium),
but they covertly grow 25, so there are some handy 'left-overs' which they
have probably agreed to share. Everyone (except tourists) understands that.

Back at the palace, a post-dinner magic show was compelling - but (ironically) served to reaffirm that there isn't really a huge amount to do at Rohet that isn't illegal or fattening.

Manvar Camp

Sands to the horizon in all directions - a Bedouin-style tent encampment, a five-star fairy-tale dream. We've stepped into the film-set of 'Arabian Nights'. Maharajahs, we! Elegantly turbaned chai-wallah brings a tray of hot masala tea in fine bone china cups... Both of us astride Kalu the Camel, lurching over sandhills towards the sunset... Silver service dinner of goat-meat and Tandoori Roti in the dining tent... Traditional musicians and dancers lit by log-fires... Wine and spiced paneer under a crisp diamond-sprinkled half-moon sky... Heated tent on our return... and hot-water bottles! Reality never gets this good. It's all romantic illusion, of course, but when they do it as sublimely as this, gee, all is forgiven:

Kalu [left] apprehensively awaits us

Sorry about the horizon.
It's awkward to manage a camera with one hand while bouncing atop a camel.

Kalu was jiggered after carrying two westerners, and was soon lulled
to sleep by a musician who just happened to be busking nearby...

Thus ends Part 3. Now click here to view Part 4 (the final episode)

In Part 4 you will visit
Johdpur, Mehrangarh Fort, Jaipur, the Amber Fort, and Mandawar,
then see the Literature Festivals at both Jaipur and Galle.

Indian Odyssey, Xmas 2010 (Part 4 of 4), including the Jaipur and Galle Literary Festivals

2011-03-18T23:15:00.003+07:00

In our fourth and final exciting episode, our heroes complete their tour of the north-west Indian state of Rajasthan, then head off to TWO Literary Festivals at Jaipur (near Delhi), and Galle (in Sri Lanka). But first, grab your sword and don your armour for a trip back to old India...

Johdpur and nearby Mehrangarh Fort
Introductory local scenes around Johdpur...
(Play the game called "Spot-a-Fort"...I bet you miss this one)

Mehrangarh Fort guards the city against its most currently feared enemy,

known internationally as "A Drop in Tourist Numbers".

Boundaries & borders: the perfect metaphor for India's cultural-religious divide.

Mehrangarh Fort near Jodhpur: just when you thought Indian architecture couldn't possibly provide any further superlatives, this 15th century fort/palace raises the 'wow' bar. Pictures shall tell the story...

Brahmin Alert! Johdpur is known as the "Blue City".

The Mehrangarh museum was genuinely interesting, clean and well-lit. There were many old palanquins, mostly equipped with a dicky-seat for the servant holding an umbrella and/or weapons to protect the royal passenger/s. This can be understood as the forerunner of 'Business Class'...

They made the next one specifically for the visit of Queen Victoria to India...

... but weren't warned about how fat she was - so quickly had to whip up this one::

Fifty Ways To Kill Your ...........................
[insert Relative of your choice]:

Imagine the havoc this could wreak on the world gold price:

No, that's not the Wallies

...and the Ladies Quarters [read: 'prison'?] on the way to the Exit. The fine mesh screens are the giveaway - the architectural equivalent of a woman's face-veil:

...plus musicians busking. They may sound (to the unschooled western ear) as if they're freely improvising, but the voice is paralleling the instrument (Ravanahatha*) almost exactly. The woman rarely peeked out from under her veil:

* Info about the bowed stringed instrument in the video, the 'Ravanahatha' (Wikipedia.com): "The primary version of the violin which the West boasts of to be their creation was first played by Ravana of Ramayana. History behind this string instrument is as follows:

Ravana's mother Kaikasi, an ardent devotee of Shiva, was eager to go and live in the god's abode on Mount Kailash in the Himalayas. Ravana opposed the plan vehemently, but to please his mother he promised to bring Mount Kailash itself to Sri Lanka.
As Ravana was lifting the mountain, an angry Shiva trapped his 10 heads and 20 arms. Writhing in pain, Ravana prayed for mercy. When Shiva let him off, Ravana decided to sing his praise and instantly made an accompanying instrument using one of his heads, an arm and some of his hair. mmm

mmm
Jaipur ...the 'Pink' City.
Maybe pinky-orange doesn't show the dirt as much as blue...

(I trust you found the fort already?)

The Hawa Mahal ("Palace of the Winds/Breeze") is located in the town centre.

From behind its 953 carved lattice windows, the royal wives/concubines

were permitted to perve on the daily activities of commoners.

It was built to imitate the shape of Krishna's golden crown.

The famous deco-style Raj Mandir cinema, Jaipur, venue for many Bollywood hits

Jaipur... rather prosaic, even unlovely, seen from the incoming train, but coyly begins revealing a few hidden assets. Draped over fifteen kilometres of rocky ridges, the 'Great Wall of India' encircles the iconic Amber Fort atop the mountain, and is still the home of the current (nominal) Maharajah. The carefully planned city is painted largely in a pastel shade of salmon-pink, but royal palaces try to distinguish themselves with amber yellow... perhaps suggestive of gold. Despite the Amber Fort's tourist reputation, I wasn't as overwhelmed as I was at Mehrangarh... but maybe after two months on the road I'm either suffering fort-fatigue or just becoming [sigh] more Indian.
So I'll show you a pic of our hotel room instead ;-)

We stayed here for several days and also throughout the

Jaipur Literature Festival. The hotel's owner, a Mr Singh,

complete with turban, choofed off every night on his old

Royal Enfield motorcycle to listen to music at the Lit Fest.

mmm
In this last fort pic [hooray], convoys of gaily-caparisoned and coulourfully painted elephants ferry tourists up and down the hill to the Amber Fort. In the distance is the so-called Great Wall of India, snaking over the mountains:

Meanwhile, back in town, an itinerant donkey (wearing a tie) eats a kite. Jaipur had its kite festival just 2 days before, and every tree and electricity wire was festooned with dead kites:

I'm inspired yet again. A kerosene iron.

I felt a mysterious empathy with the white cow.

Festive purple powder decorates the street as Ganesh arrives on a float...

...while a camel team stops to admire:

A camel is a horse designed by a committee.

Sorry, Kalu, you deserved better.

One of the 19th century Maharajahs was a smart astronomer/astrologer. This huge sundial is one of the many interesting devices he made in a kind of theme park. It is accurate to 2 seconds per 24hrs:

One Jaipur Maharajah owned this prototype of the very first Honda Jazz Model-T.

Mandawar Desert Resort
We were decidedly underwhelmed by the Mandawar's 'Desert Resort', a classic tourist trap disguised as a rural Rajasthani village of round mud-brick/cow-poo thatched huts. The less said the better:

Isolation encourages their restaurant to charge sadistic prices. Refusing to play their game, we simply slipped out to a chow-house in a nearby village and ate well for less than a quarter of the price. And although we were entitled to watch the resort's dance show while other guests ate dinner, we were made to feel so unwelcome that we bristled and turned on our heels. Why? They expected us to buy their obscenely expensive drinks. By their predatory attitude, Mandawar actively undermines the interests of Indian tourism. We left a day earlier than scheduled and headed back to Jaipur to prepare for the....
mmm
Jaipur Literary Festival ...the contradictions continue...
Jaipur... as much filth and degrading poverty as we've seen anywhere in India. Every morning, thousands of pavement families are sleep in rows, bundled side by side in dirty blankets, making streets resemble morgues. Human shit provides a daily-renewed obstacle path along most pavements ...or what's left of pavements. The confronting pungency of urine lances the nostrils. Even street dogs recoil from the stygian puddles of foul black ooze and trampled rubbish.

Abruptly the pall of squalor melts away as the colourful entrance arch of the Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF) materializes before us. Stroll through this Indian Looking Glass into a world of wealth, erudition and incisive intellect. As always, India manages to contradict itself at every turn.

A bagpiper welcomes visitors on the first day:

There are 4 venues, starting at the Front Lawns...

...two other similar tents, and the exotic Durbar Hall (which, curiously, resembled a expansive version of our hotel room)...

The sub-continent excels at Chaos, and the JLF is a noble example. The opening address begins a quarter of an hour late, unhinging the schedule for the rest of the day... and the printed programs have yet to arrive. Each of the four event venues is only half the size required, so competition for seats is intense. Many resign themselves to standing in the sun, listening from outside. Crowds shuffle in all directions simultaneously, vertical sardines squashed claustrophobically together in a vast slab of multi-coloured humanity, moving glacier-slow in a hapless attempt to reach the next venue on time.

Free masala tea from the chai-wallah, served hot in traditional recyclable clay cups :-)

Lunchtime: at the Festival's tiny cafe, it requires a full twenty minutes before an overwhelmed waiter takes your order - and eventually the (expensive) food arrives. They forgot the cutlery. But as I eat, my mind reluctantly wanders back to the hungry eyes and gaunt faces in the dusty streets outside this manufactured middle-class sanctuary. Do I feel Guilt? Shame? Gratitude? What is appropriate... or inappropriate?

Having so comprehensively bagged the festival's organisation, I must say that some of the events themselves did provid satisfying moments of insight, wit and shared literary experience. Nam Le, Antony Loewenstein, Orhan Pamuk, Moshin Hamid, Kieran Desai, William Dalrymple, Marie Burrows, J.M. Coetzee, M.J. Akbar, Patrick French, Izzeldin Abuelaish, William Fiennes, etc. Dozens more, including many excellent Indian writers. Organised minds helped to counterbalance the craziness which otherwise raged around us. But as Indians themselves often dispassionately quip, "That's India!". And Festival Co-ordinator Patrick French has acknowledged the need for a larger venue next year. And - it's all free admission.

Irvine Welsh engagingly read an extract from an as yet unpublished book,
then discussed his style and influences in the Baithak tent.

Earlier, a special treat was hearing J.M. Coetzee read one of his works.

The Galle Literary Festival, Sri Lanka.

Our SpiceJet flight wobbles late into Colombo at 2.30am after a turbulent flight from Chennai. Next morning, buy two simcards. Travel by car to a hotel at Unawatuna Beach in order to attend the Galle Literary Festival (GLF). En route, local election rallies periodically block progress (grr), armies of tuk-tuks bristling with loudspeakers and excited men (not one woman!) waving their preferred team colours. The new simcards turns out to have almost no coverage (grr)... buy new simcards (grr). An afternoon thunderstorm prompts leaks in the hotel room (grr), flooding the floor. Nothing seems to be going smoothly for us.

Perhaps these inauspicious happenings were just premonitions of the unfortunate literary turbulence here at the Galle Literary Flop. Many of the major invited writers boycotted it, either out of concern about the Srilankan government's shocking human rights record, or, according to rumour, due to visa problems.

In the recent past, many writers have rightly expressed particular concern over the unsolved 'disappearances' of more than a dozen local Srilankan journalists who had written critically about the autocratic regime of Mahinda Rajapakse, now a democracy in name only. We too had discussed whether or not to come to Srilanka, but had decided in favour on the grounds that a mute absence may actually be less effective a protest than a live and actively vocal presence. So we purchased only one day pass instead of our usual four, and told all and sundry in Galle and Colombo that this is our last visit... and openly citing Chairman Mah's bad behaviour as our cause célèbre.

The wife and son of Prageeth Eknaligoda (the Sri Lankan journalist who disappeared

on 24 Jan 2010) made a highly courageous appearance at the Galle Literary Festival.

BRAVO!

A group of ladies from the East Melbourne Book Circle, chatting nearby over cups

of tea, probably had no concept at all - or care - about the adrenalin-pumping risk

this pair was taking. Sri Lanka's present political environment can turn deadly

poisonous if you cross Rajapakse, his family or cronies.

Local Sri Lankans who may be concerned are less at liberty to speak out. Most, however, are just seem relieved that the long un-civil war is finally over, and prefer to overlook any gory details as to how it was executed. It's always the victor who writes - and is privileged to selectively conceal - the "history". By way of footnote, I suspect the the Chairman is most grateful that so many of his potential critics at the festival have 'disappeared' themselves so willingly... with not even any need for him to waste precious bullets.

Also, due to the last-minute absence of star bills such as Orhan Pamuk, Kieran Desai and Damon Galgut, it turned out that only one day out of four was marginally attractive enough to us to merit attendance. Even so, we decided to skip one of the sessions, and departed Galle a day early.

Unsurprisingly, attendance was noticeably down compared to previous years, significantly among western visitors. This boycott represents a possible death knell for the festival as we know it, as customer trust is damaged if not destroyed. Oh dear, "Brand Galle" is going down in flames. It's a shame, because the boycott by the authors wasn't the fault of the festival committee - the authors have all had plenty of time to consider their political stance or visa status, and should have decided whether or not to absent themselves long before this (as indeed some more considerate ones had done). Doing a last-minute no-show like this constitutes a rude slap-in-the-face to the very people who are their most devoted readers and customers, people who have paid for international airfares, taxis, hotel rooms and meals, not to mention festival tickets. Do the sums.

Accordingly, we won't consider returning in 2012 unless (a) trust can be re-established, say, by means of writer contracts AND (b) a number of higher profile writers are engaged. Galle may morph into a good local Asian forum - we saw budding signs of that this year. Certainly the large majority of audience appeared to be the Colombo middle class, (ie, mostly mute or unaware apologists for Rajapakse). A former prime minister of Srilanka, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, visited this year's festival - how about that for government endorsement! It's all getting rather uncomfortably cosy and incestuous in here....

Any serious literary festival professing to be of international status, however, will rise or fall depending on the variety and quality of its invited authors - assuming they can be motivated to actually turn up (grr). The GLF must now decide what it wants to be.

This nuclear sunset over Unawatuna Beach, just south of Galle on our

last day of the Festival, suggested an obvious metaphor.

Thus ends the 4th and final part of "Indian Odyssey".

Click here if you would like to return to Part 1.

Click here if you would like to return to Part 2.

Click here if you would like to return to Part 3.

A Chiangmai Loy Kratong 2010 update. It sounds like Baghdad outside tonight

2010-11-20T22:09:00.008+07:00

While in Bali, I invented the Nucleatte Coffee.

Goes off with a bang when you add cinnamon.

A brief diary update: We've been back in Chiangmai for a whole 3 weeks now after the Bali trip. Just settling in again... but we're off to India next week. Hell, two months of dosa masala & lentils - methane alert!

Marie after a Nucleatte Coffee

The above pic, and the one below, were taken in the surrealistic shopping centre where we often do our daily geriatric walkercise tours:

Until recently there was a 25-foot Tyrannosaurus Rex head just near here.

We always expecting the White Rabbit to dart past. Or maybe a happy fish.

Now it's the festival of Loy Kratong (I suggest doing a Google Image Search using the search terms Loy Kratong Chiang Mai 2010). This year there are lots of new molded plastic statues, all internally-lit, dotted around the old walled city and its 700 year-old moat. No doubt the statues will do their part to encourage all the bad luck and evil spirits to float off down the river with the hundreds of traditional floating candle 'kratongs', or to flee into the sky with the hot-air yee-peng paper lanterns:

... and oh yes, of course, some internally-lit giant t-shirts for the God of Commerce...

...and a shop-counter shrine to encourage the spirits to make customers spend lots of money. Apparently, the spirits apparently enjoy consuming red things (like Cherry Cheer or strawberry jelly), red being the colour that Chinese-Thai tradition equates with Power and Strength:

One fruit-juice stall sported a sign: WE LOVE JUICE BEAUTY
Hmm... what is mean?

Meanwhile, down south, Bangkok is the ungrateful recipient of the north's secondhand floodwater. People in some parts of the city are having to get around on raised wooden footpaths - as in this Bangkok Post photo of the stairs at Saphan Thaksin SkyTrain Station:

(I'm sure we can trust that the red shirt was an unfortunate coincidence)

Bangkok, built inadvisedly on a river delta floodplain, will surely have a short life and a merry one. At the same time as Climate Change is creeping water levels ever higher, the sheer physical weight of the city is causing it to sink by about a centimetre per year. It might also help to mention that a lot of Bangkok's groundwater is being pumped out - not too smart. Have a squint at our prophetic post on this very blog from some years ago. And psst, don't be tempted to buy real estate in Bangkok.

We shall try to keep y'all updated on our progress around India. First, it's off to Kolkata, a flashy Indian military wedding in Delhi, then to the Hornbill Festival in Nagaland. Where's Nagaland, I hear you ask. OK, stay tuned to FunkyPix2 for news of the latest trends in head-hunting fashions.

The 2010 Ubud Writers Festival ...and into the wild blue Bali of Beyond

2010-10-21T19:12:00.005+07:00

Marie relaxes after enjoying a special Balinese Mushroom Milkshake.

No, not at Kuta Beach, but at the Ubud Writers Festival in Bali.

Sometimes I need to remind myself sternly that we do actually live here in Thailand. But only 3 weeks after our return from a month in Burma, we flapped off to Bali for the Ubud Writers Festival and some undeserved R&R.

More of that shortly, but first a brief report on events back home here in Chiangmai:

Our pet vine (Srilankan Strangling Spinach) is aggressively colonising the balcony view, obviously enjoying the onset of the monsoon season.
In fact, Chiangmai's floods were unusually deep this year... damned lucky the camera was waterproof:

Marie models some of the latest fashions from the local Warrarot Flea Market:

And so to Bali. Here's the usual eye-massaging landscape of rice paddy terraces:

...and Marie demonstrates how to anticipate the arrival of a dish of Beef Rendang, a particularly apposite choice as this happened to be the district of Rendang. While waiting, she reached out with her marker pen and sketched in the outline of the volcano in the distance (Gunung Agung) as you might see it on a clear day. It killed 2,000 people in its last eruption in 1963, including the entire family of one of our taxi-drivers:

The Pura Besakih (Hindu) temple is to Bali what St Pauls is to London. It was a wet day but hey, what's a few drops of water?

Bali insisted on presenting an array exotic old cars. There's a bit of expatriate money floating around, methinks:

And so to Ubud, that den of Literary Iniquity nestling among the mountainous landscape of central Bali. Here's a local man taking a bath in one of the many streams, just as we were walking to the opening session:

Many more photos, together with comments about the festival, are available by clicking here.

Dear Diary: Dangers & Annoyances... Notes from our Burma/Myanmar Travel Chronicles, 2010

2010-08-09T22:27:00.000+07:00

A typical banknote from Burma: limp, filthy, many patches, and needing more.

That basically sums up the Burma of today.

Let's put it this way: traveling in Burma ain't for the faint-hearted. On our 5th trip (yes, we are crazy) we still made some wrong turns, dodgy decisions and hard yards. Tourist infrastructure just isn't set up for your imagined armchair ride. But now (after the event!) we consider it was all worthwhile, all weaving threads in the (violins, please) Great Tapestry of Life...

Let's get the picture postcard thing out of the way first...

Buffalo taxi at Mingun, north of Mandalay.

...and head straight to one of the upper middle-class streets in a classy area of Rangoon (Yangon, in Junta-speak). This lovely old building, like most, is being allowed to decay under years of grime and grunge:

And on the opposite end of the social scale is a shanty leaning against a tree on a public riverbank at Myitkyina, way up north in Kachin State:

But there were contrasts, too, of a different nature. In the ex-colonial British "hill station" town of Pyin U Lin, east of Mandalay, one could be forgiven for thinking that you'd suddenly been transported to rural Suffolk. This was pure John Constable, but twenty degrees warmer...

An ex-British mansion in the cool of Pyin U Lin. The Burmese Military has appropriated all of these for itself.

For a photo-diary of the trip, click here. It will open in a new window for your convenience, and take you through a nightmare river trip, a long limestone cave emerging into a fairytale valley, expose you to the delights of epicurean Nylon ice-cream, and lead you through the dark alleys of Rangoon's drug market (yes we have no electricity again)...

The "Hua Hin Solution" to Chiangmai's pollution... regardless of Takki Shinegra's Redshirts

2010-04-28T09:20:00.006+07:00

Queen Neptune Strikes Back - we join Snorkaholics Anonymous.

Honest, it's the best way to avoid getting soaked over Songkran.

Back home at Chiangmai it was dramatically evident what we had to do. ESCAPE. THE. SMOKE. POLLUTION. Promptly signed a 2-month contract (March/April) on an apartment on the beach at Hua Hin (south of Bangkok), and began to breathe normally.

*There were the snorkelling/canoeing trips to the islands of Koh Talu and Koh Tao, jostling for elbow room with 3 trillion fish and wall-to-wall tourists.

*There was the ill-fated but not too-embarrassing attempt to learn Kite-Boarding (think: "flop").

*There were mysterious (but undoubtedly tasty) menu items like "Spicy Soured Cattle's Cleaning Cloth with Parch Rice" and other gems to tempt your jaded palate.

*There were pointy-hatted gnomes on the white sand beaches attempting to catch up to speeding tanned Vikings brandishing ski-poles.

*There was a Successful Pre-Emptive Retail Strike deep into the heartland of enemy Redshirt Territory in Bunker-kok [FX threatening music]...

...and the Glorious Adventures kept coming.

All this - and more - can be yours merely by clicking here.

Go on, you know you want to: it'll come up in a new window for your convenience ...and it's guaranteed 100% carb-free.

Jane Bond Does Huahin

BANK BAILOUT BINGO: "Socialize the losses, but quietly Privatize any gains".

2010-03-10T20:08:00.023+07:00

When wealthy people and CEOs stuff up, they can expect cushy government (tax-funded) handouts. When poor people stuff up, it spells stress and poverty, plus offers lucrative new opportunities for lawyers, Real Estate tycoons, trauma and marriage counsellors. It appears that taxation revenue flows mainly uphill, towards the big end of town.

Now that the Big Bailout Bucks have topped up the coffers of the financial giants again, I note with cynical sideways glance that corporate fat-cats are (once again) slyly receiving their millions in bonuses and perks, just like before. This is symptomatic of the underlying purpose of Capitalism (a.k.a. Compassionate Conservatism's Poignant Concern for the Extremely Wealthy). Hey city hall, bail me out too! All I want is less to do, more time to do it, and higher pay for not getting it done. My point here is this - I'm not personally ready yet to dive back into the stockmarket big-time. It's not over till the fat CEO sinks. The other elephant in the room is the Yuan/Dollar stand-off... something's gotta give, and when it does, whoa, stand back!

Some facts:

* in the West, about 1% of the population of wealthy countries control 95% of the wealth; and
* in those wealthy countries recovering fastest from the 2009 economic meltdown, there is now a significantly increasing proportion of people falling below the poverty line...

Conclusions:

Capitalism is not only achieving its goal of making the Very Rich even richer, but now it's even causing increased poverty within wealthy countries themselves! Wealth and power are concentrating in the hands of fewer and fewer people, to no-one's advantage but their own:

According to the present Rules Of Capitalism, disadvantaged people are expected to lose in order to make those profits possible. Observe, for instance, how rich folks are quickly moving in to buy up thousands of cheap "bank-owned" homes which have sadly flooded the real-estate market (do I sufficiently conjure up the image of tears?)

...and how the corporate sector expressed such unbounded glee (behind closed boardroom doors) that Copenhagen was such a successful failure... Their anti-Climate lobbying cost them millions, but hey short-term corporate profits should be maintained at all costs...
...um... shouldn't they?

...and now, HOURS of fun for all the family ...even better than The Simpsons!!

Presenting Fat-cat FunkyPix2's

Dictionary of Right-wing/Conservative Terminology

is sure to assist you to win your next game of Bailout Bingo:

* alternative energy sources /n./ New locations to drill for gas and oil.

* bankruptcy /n./ A means of escaping debt available to corporations but not to poor people.

* class warfare /n./ Any attempt to raise the minimum wage.

* God /n./ Senior Pentagon adviser (war is Her way of teaching geography to Americans)

* growth /n./ 1. The justification for tax cuts for the rich. 2. What happens to the national debt when policy is made according to Definition 1.

* healthy forest /n./ No tree left behind.

* honesty /n./ Lies told in simple declarative sentences (e.g., "Freedom is on the march.").

* House of Representatives /n./ Exclusive club; entry fee: $1 million to $5 million (See: Senate.)

* insanity /n./ See: staying the course. May also apply to otherwise sane liberal presidents.

* laziness /n./ When the poor are not working.

* leisure time /n./ When the wealthy are not working.

* liberal(s) /n./ Followers of the Antichrist. (Note that in Australia, the major conservative right-wing party named itself the "Liberal Party". For starters, how's that for a Big Fatcat Lie? The party's now led from behind by that God-bothering Catholic fanatic, Mr Rabbit (See: 1. pro-life, and 2. woman.)

* No Child Left Behind /riff./ There are always jobs in the military.

* pro-life /adj./ Valuing human life up until birth.

* Senate /n./ Exclusive club; entry fee: $10 million to $30 million.

* staying the course /interj./slang./ Continuing to perform the same actions and expecting different results (See: insanity.)

* shit happens /interj./slang./ I don't have to live in Baghdad.

* voter fraud /n./ A significant minority turnout.

* woman /n./ 1. Person who can be trusted to raise a child but can't be trusted to decide whether or not she wishes to have a child. 2. Person who must have all decisions regarding her reproductive functions made by men she wouldn't want to have sex with in the first place.

FunkyPix2's Thought of the Day

And those who were seen dancing were thought
to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

Here's Michael Moore's entertaining trailer to his film Capitalism: A Love Story. Often, I find Moore's jargonistic style annoyingly American, but gee the guy's heart is in the right place when it comes to supporting the underdog against exploitation by the Super Well-Heeled. He keenly laments that whatever hits the fan will probably not automatically be distributed evenly (eg health care) so he's taking active steps to improve things... I can only respect that.

PS: note the dramatically gloating manner in which George Dumbya Bush announces the words "global meltdown", as if he were somehow pleased about the crash... Um, was he? Could it all have been manipulated deliberately? The principal beneficiaries of a financial spring clean are always going to be the already-wealthy classes.

...and lastly, here's FunkyPix2's footnote to the foolishly fatal financial fuzziness of federal fiscal fantasy. Apart from stuff like "the cheque's in the mail", here's ALL you need to know about Stimulus payments, Bailouts, Tax rebates etc:

Q: What is an Economic Stimulus Payment?

A: It's money that the federal government will send to taxpayers.

Q: Where will the government get this money?

A: From taxpayers.

Q: So the government is giving me back my own money?

A: Only a little of it. Just the part you overpaid to start with.

Q: What's the purpose of this payment?

A: The plan is that you'll use that money to buy a high-definition flat screen TV set, thus stimulating the economy.

Q: But isn't that stimulating the economy of China?

A: Shut up.

Morality VS Democracy: The crime scene, the morning after Thaksin gets a long-overdue lesson

2010-02-26T23:44:00.033+07:00

Compassion Central: Funkypix2’s offer to poor Mr Thaksin should adequately compensate him for the Supreme Court's confiscation of "his" U$1.4 billion.

U$1,400,000,000, now returned to its rightful owner, the Thai people. That's enough to create 1,400 millionaires, and it won't fit on my calculator. Gosh, now he has to personally scrape by on a mere ONE billion $1,000,000,000 or so... how will he manage to pay the rent? ...hence FunkyPix2's heartfelt rescue package (first made way back in 2007).

Ironic. Now Mr Thaksin is grudgingly advising politicians to stay out of politics. Is he at last perhaps beginning to cotton on to the idea that being involved in politics DOES necessarily require a disengagement from personal gain? I don't think so. It underlines his persisting attitude that he was entitled to be the bonus-grabbing CEO of Thailand, not a fair-dealing even-handed prime minister. A statesman is supposed to help the State, not steal from it.

Unaccountably, these Redshirts are upset that their own stolen money (1.4 billion baht) has now been legally returned to themselves. Perversely, they wanted the thief to keep the loot. Er, am I missing something here? Maybe they're worried about no longer getting their regular bribe to attend demonstrations? Truth is that Thai people are accustomed to admiring anyone who is street-savvy enough to get rich - by fair means OR foul. One Redshirt recently said in a newspaper that it didn't matter to her that Thaksin was corrupt ...because he is a charismatic leader. That's hardly what I'd call a principled position to assist a struggling democracy to find its feet. The relevant question Thai people need to ask each other right now is...

"What would Buddha do?"

Kuhn Thaksin swiftly pocketed 76 billion baht from the illegal sale of Shincorp to Singapore, then immediately snuk it out of Thailand and into tax-free havens in the British Virgin Islands. Pure piracy. Let’s get out the calculator and have some fun finding out precisely what that vast amount of cash might look like. For starters, laid in a flat stack of 1000-baht notes (Thailand's largest denomination note), it would create a tower 700 metres higher than Mt Everest.

The redshirts' underlying gripe isn't really about Thaksin's money, however. Like myself, most of them can't begin to imagine that amount of money. The real problem, the oft unspoken subtext, is about social inequity. There's a yawning chasm of wealth separating Thailand's wealthy middle-class urban elites from its rural poor, and I too feel compassion and sympathy about that. The situation in Thailand parallels the wealth gap in Srilanka between Singhalese and Tamils and other ethnically bilateral countries.

The current protests will probably not immediately prompt change, but in the long term may cause the urban middle-classes and Bangkok elites to become more consciously aware of their position of social advantage. Poorer people may begin to put upward pressure on wages so that countries like Japan are less inclined to exploit the present low wages of Thai workers. Workers may eventually unionize. And if education moved from rote-learning to a more "analytical-questioning" model, all Thais would be empowered to think critically and constructively in their evaluation of propaganda. In many such respects, Thailand is still back where the West was in the 1950s.

In the meantime, Thailand's Redshirts continue to simplistically believe that Thaksin Shinawatra is their Shining Robin Hood on a white horse, come to rescue them from poverty... even though his glib promises to relieve farmers' debts never even looked like materializing during his watch. The simple solution for Abhisit, the current PM, is to visibly direct much of Thaksin's confiscated money towards the Poor, especially in the Northern Isaan areas. And to do it ASAP, before riots ensue in Bangkok - again. The Redshirt leaders will hopefully realize that it is in the interests of the rural poor that Thaksin does not delay any such disbursement by appealing the the Supreme Court decision. If their "black-magic-curse" decision to splash blood around Bangkok is anything to go by, however, they aren't much in the business of Deep Thought. History proves that most Revolutionaries are merely Reactionaries in disguise.

Update 1 from the front-line: a video, taken as the Redshirts began converging on Bangkok, mid-March 2010. Each person gets identified and paid 2000 baht. Who was the very kind donor? This was about the time Mr Thaksin left Dubai and flew "secretly" into Siem Riep in Northern Cambodia, from whence he is now close enough to blow raspberries at Bangkok. Anything to stay in the public eye.

Update 2: No, Update 1 was wrong. It was another planted rumour, no doubt another chess move on Thaksin's part, a deliberate strategy to continue his chronic attention-deficit "Jack-in-the-Box" media stunts of popping up randomly all over the world... rather like some weird global arcade game. No, he wasn't in Cambodia; he was spotted enjoying coffee and cake in Montenegro. Now I desperately need a candid photo and a speech-bubble that reads Let Them Eat Rice.

Update 3: The Thai politics soap-opera gets funnier by the minute. Thaksin, in his shoot-from-the-lip knee-jerk manner, compared PM Abhisit to Hitler. In the very same breath, he accused the PM of being surrounded by homosexuals with emotional problems! (Hey, which decade are we in? I also trust that Thaksin's own son won't 't get too annoyed with his Dad over that minor slur). Next, Thaksin accused Abhisit of being mentally unstable - which instantly triggered a lawsuit from Abhisit, of course, who couldn't possibly have let that one go through to the keeper unchallenged. Soon afterwards, a report from Bangkok police confirming an assassination plot on the PM elicited conspicuous silence from the Thaksin camp. Meanwhile, the Redshirts have splashed 100 litres or so of their own blood around Abhisit's home in Bangkok. Besides being condemned by health authorities as unhealthy, even dangerous, (not to mention sheer waste) this prank is nothing more than a transparent attempt by superstitious farmers at histrionic headline-grabbing... faux "Black Magic".

Note that they stored their blood in ordinary plastic DRINKING bottles (eeew!!), then proceeded to tread in it themselves, thus contradicting their own admonition that the PM didn't respect the blood of Thai people (Thai culture dictates that putting your shoe on anything is disrespectful). Redshirts, police and photographers alike were all spotted with blood. Small plastic bags of blood sailed gaily over the fence and spattered inside... like a grisly premonition of the forthcoming Songkran water-throwing festival (which is, ironically, supposed to be about respect for one's elders). In all, the Redshirt crusade has been a giant media flop, an embarrassing exercise in shooting themselves (and Thailand) in the foot. So glad we weren't there.

Just good friends. Dr Thaksin & Saddam Hun Sen.

Peaceful protests by Redshirts.

Most Redshirts are now dispersing from Bangkok.

Catholic sainthood, Genocidal Piety, and Saving Souls in Petrie Dishes

2010-02-23T17:22:00.039+07:00

YOU TOO can enter in Saint Mary's
Wet Habit Competition - even if you're a guy

Saint Mary of Australia?? According to Christianity's multiple interpretations of the word "saint", I now feel justified in declaring my own dear wife a saint. She is henceforth to be addressed as Saint Marie of Thailand. You may send flowers, money, cards, cheques, Buddha relics, or hefty cash offerings for your soul.

You may detect my liberal-humanist antipathy to Christianity. Christians are as blindly inconsistent as any other unthinking religious cult. The fact is, the various Christianities are every bit as tribal as Muslim factions in Afghanistan and the Middle East. All are killing each other to prove who has the best Invisible Friend. Duh. They may have chosen to forget that Judao-Christianity and Islam all share the same god.

Why should one feel obligated to label oneself as an "Atheist". I hardly
feel the need to defend myself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist".

Far be it from me to be casting nasturtiums at Saint Mary of Penola, South Australia. She seems to have been, by many accounts, a genuinely strong and trustworthy person. However, it's a mighty leap of doctrine/faith from there to pin a gold sainthood medal on her. All it took to convince Rome's eager-to-please authorities was that two sick people (both Catholics, of course) both swore they were divinely cured because they somehow succeeded in convincing this long-dead nun to pray to an Invisible Friend on their behalf.

Moreover, it seems like strangely circular reasoning to fall back on Human-generated evidence as proof of a Divine event when the underlying premise of the Bible is a belief in the superiority of God’s own words over mere human ones. In this regard, what will the literal Christian (or Jew, for that matter) intuit when reading God’s alleged words in Deuteronomy 22:13-21 where He/She wrote that if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep? Either the Bible is right …or it isn't. We shouldn't be forced to pick and choose if we elect to subscribe to the doctrine of divine infallibility. Read about more Biblical inconsistencies here in (divinely-inspired) Wikipedia.

So, what about these two miraculous cures by Mary? Rates of self-induced natural remission from sickness are well within this range of statistical likelihood. And self-induced recovery from illness happens to just as many people who aren't Catholic: the auto-curative capability of the highly motivated mind is well-documented, even if it remains stubbornly inexplicable. The brain is still a mysterious black box. Research into the field is still fairly much at an embryonic stage of "poke-it-here-and-see-what-happens".

If the literal-addicted Christian insists that everything in the Bible is accurate, then s/he must accept that the Vatican's wholly-fabricated definition of a “saint” is wrong. Nowhere in any human edition of the Bible does it describe a saint as some sort of 'extra holy' person. Nor does it mention that a saint is able to act as an intermediary with God any more effectively than any other person. In fact, the Bible states clearly that anyone who believes in Jesus is a saint (Ps. 16:3; Rom. 1:7; 8:27; Phil. 1:1; Heb. 6:10). So by canonizing Mary McKillop, the Pope is literally declaring that she is Australia's first (and only) Christian. Listen to this Australian radio news item (all my links open for your convenience in new windows).

Of course, it’s obvious enough that the Marketing and PR Department at the Vatican deliberately uses canonizations as a targeted media strategy to dazzle potential new converts with holy smoke, magic and mirrors. Or, more to the point, to dissuade the flood of defecting rats from the leaky Roman ark. Hey, it's a competitive market for Souls out there in Religionland. And right now is certainly a convenient moment to have a big glitzy canonization party with lots of fresh photos of happy pilgrims en route to Penola - Benedict urgently needs to distract media attention away from paedophile priest cover-up scandals etc. (Convenient, too, that Mary had been named ‘Mary’… “Saint Krystal-Brianna” just wouldn’t have been convincing).

Yep, media attention is the Big Clue. Instead of going to all the fuss of creating new saints, the Vatican mostly prefers to recycle old ones. In the next photo, relics of St Anthony of Padua (dressed in his Sunday best) get paraded through Colombo airport at the start of a recent 3-week Holiday in Srilanka. The media, you'll notice, had been invited:

Now to pick nits… what exactly does it mean to “believe in Jesus”? I personally believe in Jesus ...to the extent that I'm fairly confident from corroborated historical accounts that the physical man did actually exist… even though his real name was Jeshua bin Joseph, his skin was probably considerably darker than our western white-washed storybook pictures would suggest, and he was hunted down by Roman authorities because he was regarded as a dangerous fundamentalist Jewish terror extremist. Do I therefore qualify as a Christian… or [eek!] worse still, a saint?
OMG I’m praying not…

The family-size greek-style "St Paul" pizza...
based on a fresco in St Paul's Cathedral.

Anyway, the pope's canonization of Straya’s own brand new Saint Meery [‘saint’ pronounced as in ‘pint’] is a suitable trigger for another of my anti-Christianity photo-offensives. Yew bloody liddle bewdy, mite!

Browse more of my "Religious Issues" posts in the
"Browse by Category" tab in the sidebar on your screen >>>>

Click to embiggen. Afterwards, click your BACK button.

Characteristic Christian compassion and caring

"But verily I say unto you, circles are sexier"

Uh-huh, it all makes good saints to me...

The Hebrew language, just like English, uses idioms which can't possibly be taken literally. How easily, for instance, might a non-speaker of English misinterpret our common idiom "to catch a bus"? Likewise, if a Hebrew person didn't like you, s/he might call you a "son of a viper". If you were a kind person, you might get called a "son of kindness". Examples can be found dotted throughout the Old Testament. But when St Paul the Greek (who had a relatively feeble grasp of the Hebrew language) heard Rabbi Jeshua described as a "son of God", he chose in his pious ignorance to take them absolutely literally. In Hebrew, the idiom simply simply described someone as a good or god-fearing person. How many millions of innocent people have since died as a result of this linguistic error? Why, in the year 2010, do we all still have to submit to this fatally foggy mindset? I'm eternally astonished that Christians are satisfied to believe rather than to know, especially given the Bible's inconsistent evidence and gross mistranslations.

The above scene may have been the Holy Madonna's lot if the Catholic church had been invented back in Jeshua's day. Referring to Mother Theresa, Christopher Hitchens wrote that she: "was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."

Queen Benedick II. Gotta love the cute tail !

Benedict catches a glimpse of the Fashion Channel.

Did you realize that it is highly probable that Rabbi Jesus was a member of the ultra-strict Jewish Essene sect? The Bible frequently discusses the activities of the Pharisees and Sadducees, but is conspicuously silent about the other major Jewish sub-group, the Essenes. One has to suspect a deliberate 2000-year propaganda whitewash by people with vested interests in concealing the fact that Christianity was not totally original but (ironically) based largely on ancient teachings of conservative Judaism. For sure, everything is different since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1945. Indeed, it looks alarmingly likely that Christianity was based on a HUGE mistake, or a number of them. It is generally understood that the Vatican has one or two of the particularly sensitive Dead Sea Scrolls scrolls securely locked away from curious bloggers and other inconvenient weirdos who seek Honesty and Transparency.

Click to embiggen. Afterwards, click your BACK button.

Since the 13th century, souls of babies who died before they could be baptized were deemed to have gone to a holy 'place' which the Catholic Church mysteriously named LIMBO. There they awaited Judgement Day ...and (hopefully) for someone to change their nappies (=diapers). Limbo isn't mentioned in the Bible at all, but the Church simply fabricated it to appease bereaved parents who were illiterate and therefore unable to verify what their trusted priest told them. The problem with lies is that you have to make up more lies to cover your tracks - AND you need a reliable memory. The Church finally decided just a few years ago that it could no longer continue the embarrassing charade and confessed that Limbo never had existed. My question is this: Where will all those tiny souls go now? Here's the heart-warming family-friendly answer, right here on your trustworthy FunkyPix2.

Every sperm is sacred. I quote Sam Harris in Letter to a Christian Nation: "Of course, the church's position on abortion takes no more notice of the details of biology than it does of the reality of human suffering. It has been estimated that 50% of all human conceptions end in spontaneous abortion, usually without a woman even realizing that she was pregnant. In fact, a full 20% of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. The obvious truth here that cries out for acknowledgement: if God exists, He is the most prolific abortionist of all."
Hey Jude, Limbo must have been be awfully crowded in its day.

Something vital got lost in the translation.....
exactly as happened when the Gospels were translated first from Jesus's native language (Aramaic) into Hebrew, and then again (by St Paul) into Greek... then later into Latin, and again into English, Swahili, Thai..... Christianity ought to be re-named Paulanity - only a Greek could have so easily accepted the idea of gods coming down to earth to mate with humans, then returning. Greek gods did it routinely. A strictly conservative Jew like Rabbi Jeshua would never have even thought of it. It was Paul who put the words in his mouth - posthumously.

Click to embiggen. Afterwards, click the BACK button.

Language greatly determines Thought. The Hebrew text of Isaiah, for instance, uses the word 'alma' which simply means 'young woman' ...with no implication of virginity. St Paul couldn't have known that due to the vastly different semantic world of his native language Greek...
...so why didn't his Supervising Editor intercede?

iup5yei[wo,dtfj

Either the Bible is right, or it isn't. The sixth Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Murder, seems to be severely contradicted by this reading from DEUTERONOMY 13:6, beginning at verse 8:

If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son, or your daughter, or the wife of your bosom, or your friend who is as your own soul, entices you secretly, saying, "Let us go and serve other gods"... you shall not yield to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him, nor shall you conceal him; but you shall kill him; your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. You shall stone him to death with stones, because he sought to draw you away from the LORD your God...

Nowhere in the New Testament did Rabbi J. ever contradict this barbarism. In fact, at several points he endorsed it:

For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven... For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of heaven. - MATTHEW 5:18-20

Interestingly, Rabbi Jesus was claiming that the Pharisees and scribes, the very highest ranks of the Jewish faith, were not qualified enough to get to heaven. That was precisely one of the frequent claims of the Essene sect.

Finally, here are 20 more reasons to abandon Christianity.

Diary update: Anna Does Chiangmai, February 2010

2010-02-20T23:20:00.003+07:00

.................... Multiple Choice Test: Anna and Marie have

......................... [a] found a new secret friend in the Siam Center, Bangkok

......................... [b] to pee mighty urgently

......................... [c] just downed their third chaippuchino of the morning

......................... [d] all of the above are correct

After returning from an oh-so-post-colonial adventure in Sri Lanka at the Galle Literary Festival, Anna and Marie returned to Chiangmai determined to out-Biggle Biggles.

Here they are, lost in the dangerous haunted tunnels under Chiangmai's ancient Buddhist temple Wat U-mong... conferring whether to turn left to confront a fierce Dragon, or turn right to visit a drink-stall:

More of their brave Thailand adventures are here (this link will open in a new window for your convenience. When finished, close it and you'll be right back where you are now).

Winning the Peace in Sri Lanka: It's not over till the Tamil lady sings

2010-02-11T17:20:00.006+07:00

>>> NEWSFLASH !! >>>

BRITISH P.M. GORDON BROWN
ARRESTS OPPOSITION LEADER

Colombo, 9 Feb 2010. Prime Minister Gordon Brown this morning arrested Opposition politician David Cameron for the alleged crime of being involved in politics.
Mr Cameron's whereabouts tonight are unknown. He was violently dragged from a tea party at Buckingham Palace and driven away at speed. This is consistent with a pattern of unexplained disappearances of journalists and anti-Brown dissidents over the past year or so as the country moves towards totalitarian status alongside rogue states such as Burma, Sudan or North Korea.
Mr Brown denied knowledge of any such abductions but claimed that the recent closure of the newspaper The Monday Leader was necessary "in the nation's security interest in order to prevent corruption and to suppress dangerously anti-Democratic minority groups such as the Whigs, Tories, and other terrorist militia". He later added: "We do not have Censorship here. What we do have is merely a limitation on what the Media can say".
Mr Brown (a.k.a."King Gordon I") is also said to have stated that he soon intends to abolish parliament altogether as it is "a bloody waste of oxygen", although this breaking news remains unconfirmed due to an apparent shortage of journalists. CDN-FOX.

Confused?? Yeah, me too.
OK, fantasy over. Flip to the reality of post-war (pre-peace?) Sri Lanka...

Exactly following the model provided by the mega-wealthy middle-class Thaksin Shinawatra (formerly of Thailand), Mahinda Rajapakse achieves power by targeting the vote of the rural Sinhalese, sufficient in number to give him an electoral majority. As in Thailand, farmers are thought to be the easiest political prey who, due to their relatively limited formal education, are less capable of assessing propaganda bias when it is fed to them. Simple. But there's more operating behind the scenes - and as usual it comes down to money, of course.

Many people are unaware of the massive impact China has had on the history of Srilanka over the past couple of years since Mahinda Rajapakse visited Beijing. That visit gave China the courage to no longer be wary of offending India. Just as China has bank-rolled the governments of Burma and Sudan (among others) in a quest for economic empire, Sri Lanka has received massive soft loans and military assistance. Without this help, the 25-year struggle against the Tamil Tigers could not possibly have ended so abruptly, and Rajapakse would not therefore have had so many electoral aces up his sleeve. China certainly has Tamil blood on its hands. Who do you think vetoed the UN resolution about investigating war crimes in the Tamil prison camps in the north? I suggest Chinese tourists be wary around Jaffna.

Rajapakse is fanning the flames of international competition too. Last week he popped up in Moscow for a photo-op with President Medvedev and to shore up deals with Russia to explore for oil [etc] off the coast of Sri Lanka. The USA is competing furiously to keep its interests alive in the face of Chinese investment. China is in a stronger financial situation by comparison with the USA following the 2009 meltdown of Capitalism. It is the financial cat; the USA is its mouse. China has realised that the Wild West's "shoot-your-way-in" model of colonialism isn't going to work in today's world. Colonialism can now be done better - and more cheaply - by email and online transfers.

China's state-owned CHEC Corporation is bank-rolling a huge new expressway which will soon connect Sri Lanka to the huge new Chinese-funded seaport at the southern town of Hambantota. Surprise surprise, Hambantota district is Rajapakse's own constituency - much of the money was siphoned off for his massive election campaign). Explanation? As world oil supplies shrink, China desperately needs a chain of windows onto the Indian ocean and in particular onto the Arabian Gulf. (For this same reason it has inveigled its way financially into Burma and is building a seaport at Sitwe ...which explains why the Burmese military junta can afford to be so scornful of UN sanctions.)

To the Sri Lankan rural majority, Rajapakse's waltzing on the world's stage probably seems grandly impressive ...and progressive. In the short term, people's expectations of re-vitalized economic activity may be superficially fulfilled as they observe building projects sprouting everywhere, plus find some short-term labouring jobs. In the longer term, there will be a dawning disillusionment as people begin realizing that the People's Dictatorship of Sri Lanka has been set up principally to benefit the already-wealthy Singhalese middle-class of Colombo and the southern provinces ...not the rural majority.

Is this not a recipe for grass-roots Tamil unrest all over again? Is this not a sordid re-run of colonial history by another name? Could Sri Lanka be sleep-walking into selling its soul for a pittance? It's not too late - Rajapakse faces another election in April. Is there a new Opposition phoenix rising from the ashes to bell the cat? Fonseka, even though his platform was essentially not so different from that of Rajapakse, was correct in his objective of not concentrating too much power in the hands of one person. Parliament must at all costs be allowed to dissent and counter-balance. Even if I were a Rajapakse supporter, I would now consider voting elsewhere in order to reduce his huge majority by just one vote ...after all, History is the sum of individual actions. It would prove healthier for the country to have a half-decent Opposition.

I refer you to this Canadian CBC article for balanced background reading. There are also more of my comments about Tamil-Singhalese reconciliation in my recent previous post about the Galle Literary Festival. Alternatively, just scroll down past this natty collection of one-liners...

The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.
- Tommy Smothers

A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
- Dr Laurence J. Peter

Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.
- Mark Twain

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
- Noam Chomsky

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.
- Former US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart

Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without it being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.
- Winston Churchill

Only the suppressed word is dangerous.
- Ludwig Bome