Dear Diary: it's the dampish-and-not-too-wet-yet season in Chiangmai

OK I'm beginning to panic...mango and lychee season is coming to an end here in Chiang Mai. Guess we'll just have to fall back on emergency supplies of papaya, mangosteen, grapes, bananas, strawberries, custard apples, watermelon, purple figs, passionfruit, avocadoes, dragonfruit, kiwifruit, persimmons, pineapples, mulberries, sapodillas, jackfruit and durian ...plus the odd guava or longan (sigh).

This is just a brief catch-up on our latest exciting (legal) activities around Xiengmai and Huahin (yes, Huahin again!).  Not a heavy Wet so far this year, even though it sometimes looks promising.      
  
 Here, for example, is what is commonly known as a 'scattered shower':

 
 Now - continuing with the food theme - the latest Sticky-rice Burger with a finger-lickin' chicken-and-msg pattie, and other delicacies for when you're feeling a little squiddish:

 

WARNING: contains "pure evaporated cane juice"

 

...and of course it's just fine to install a hairdressing salon smack in the middle of a supermarket food aisle... well, isn't it? What could possibly be wrong with that?

 
Well yeah, food needs decoration to make it tastier:

 
...and there's colourful wine for the kids as well:

  

Then it was off in the Little Blue Bobble-mobile up north to Maesai because Nic needed to do a 'visa run', crossing over briefly into Burma (formerly 'Myanmar' :)  Stayed overnight at our usual thatched hut balanced on stilts over the river:

 
It rained hard all night, and the river rose spectacularly high and fast. Next morning, it was not possible for the usual crowds of illegal border crossers to wade accross. On a dry day, it's a very porous border indeed. Visa? What visa?

  Illegal? What am I saying? It's not possible for any human to be 'illegal'.

 
Chiangmai's scrambled egg trees are blooming:
 (photo sneakily stolen from Galen Garwood... thanky you, Galen):

 

...but they do seem to attract tiny Predator Drones: 

  The view of Mount Doi Suthep from our balcony.

  

 All that yellow probably made the local Redshirts feel uneasy, so they had a little strut around town, making a lot of noise with their Grateful Dead speaker-stack on a truck. They're upset because the Constitution Court just told them they couldn't single-handedly change the Constitution without a referendum. These guys don't want to understand democracy or the rule of law because they want their criminal leader (whose name begins with T) brought back and 'forgiven' for stealing billions of their own money. Huh?  They are an embarrassment to Thailand in the eyes of the world:

 

..and wouldn't you know it - as soon as we arrived in Hua Hin (the beach two hours south-west of BKK), who was the very first person we bumped into (in a fashionably sessee shade of red)?

The Thai caption reads: "Angel"
 

  For about 0.2 of a second I imagined this frothy kid's outfit on our granddaughter in Straya... but then, thankfully, the feeling passed:

 

We can reccommend the foodcourt at Tesco Huahin. This stall gets top marks for value and taste. $2 will get you a large and yumacious feed:

 

Hua Hin's seafood is to-die-for, cuz it's freshly caught and never frozen. Here's some of it at the KO Restaurant in the Huahin nightmarket, where $6 gets you a sizzling hotplate of the best and freshest spicy fried seafood ever. Get some before you drop off your twig:

'KO' is pronounced 'gor' and means 'island' - as in Ko Samui.

 

 Huahin's Scandinavian-Danish controlled real-estate market seems to still be doing OK, but we thought this was not a particularly auspicious spot to put an ad for a luxury condominium:

 

...and speaking of luxury, how's this for an expensive-looking chrome Thai-style gate with pretensions and false promises? You should see the fence! Yep, it's the Catholic Church at Huahin, where the church building is cunningly multi-roofed ...in fact, disguised just like a Buddhist Temple:

 

Back home again to Xiengmai to check on the progress of the new 8-storey building going up in front of Anne's cafe near the entrance lobby to our condo building. This funky pic was taken from the lift lobby on floor 14... What does it want, a cup of coffee or something?

 

...and a new shop display window:

They drive among us...

School bus in Thailand...

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Finally, my usual 'Politics Postscript'...
 
First... Banksy's honest take on the Olympix:

 
 Second... an observation. Next door to us in Burma, things are alleged to be "normalizing" - if you choose to believe Americanized corporate hookers like Rupert Murdoch and his propaganda brochures like 'The Australian' newspaper.
 
In fact, things are FAR from what we think of as 'normal' for ethnic minorities like the Kachin, Rohinga etc, in fact most of the Burmese ethnic sub-groups ...except the Burmans themselves - the "aristocracy", in effect. During our five visits to Burma over the years we have observed both ends of Burma's social spectrum, but the most dodgy areas were carefully witheld from us... "Not allow go further, sir. Muss go back now".  Roadblocks prevent independent tourists from going to trouble-spots "for our own good". Yeah, right. Group-tour operators know not to bother.
 

Seveny-eight were killed in Burma's Rakhine State (mostly Muslim, near the border with India) just a few days ago in yet another episode of ethnic cleansing. I know only because I subscribe to local Twitter and sms feeds here in Thailand. However, the only thing that got to the mainstream News that day was the announcement of the huge new port at Dawei (Tavoy), near Rangoon. The Burmese know exactly how to use media smokescreens to distract Joe Public's attention.
Timing is everything.
 
It ain't over till the skinny lady sings.
(Same deal in Sri Lanka with the Rajapakse dictatorship).
 
The West is selectively blind when it comes to neo-colonial exploitation, and Burma is a seductively low-hanging fruit with plenty of resources and (above all) a non-unionized labour force that is willing to work for even fewer peanuts per day than Chinese workers. Unfortunately, few of the benefits and even less of the money/capital inflow will filter down to ordinary citizens, especially in the less-touristed and remote "no-go" insurgent areas where even Phillip Morris and Nike won't be allowed to build their sweat-shops.
 

You know who is going to benefit. T'is we who are fast becoming Burma's Big New Problem.

  

Corporations (ie, you and me) take by far the biggest slice, the Burmese military and fat-cat elite take a decent portion, and some among the Burmese middle-class will be handed a few symbolic crumbs whenever cameras are rolling:

STUPIDLY LETTING OTHER REGIMES CAPITALIZE

formerly known as SLORC

  

The Burmese elite 1% understand very well that once the process of 'opening up the country' has begun, greedy western corporations and politicians will smell big profits. They know that the last thing any lobbyist wants at this stage of the cut-throat game of Burmese 'Monopoly' would be to have to defend its corporate investments against accusations of human rights violations. So something has to be made invisible to the media (or "disappeared") - either the investments or the violations.

Go on, guess which.

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

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

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.

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

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

Diary update: Anna Does Chiangmai, February 2010

.................... 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).

Train humans, not elephants. A review of Galen Garwood's film "PANOM: Cousin to the Clouds"

Galen Garwood's film PANOM premiered here in Chiangmai last evening to rapturous applause and admiration. It deals with the nature and issues surrounding the interaction between people and elephants. And it does so in a coolly non-anthropomorphic way, nevertheless seething with depth of feeling that cannot fail to move.

The DVD will be available soon. The trailer may be viewed at

http://www.galengarwood.com/

REVIEW: The Chiangmai University Art Center Theatre was packed nearly full, and the film was applauded very generously, as well it deserved. Galen's heartfelt pachydermal passions were clear to all.

The film tackled head-on the serious bottleneck facing the very survival of the Asian elephant, necessarily provoking more Questions than Answers. Now that the status of the elephant has descended to that of forestry labourer and, more recently, to that of mere tourist entertainer, where to now? In PANOM, Galen prods and suggests in his powerfully gentle way that a change in human attitude is the first step to restoring the dignity and future of these ancient and highly intelligent creatures. His film palpably affected those who watched it at its premiere last night. Many, including myself, were teary.

The DVD will be available soon at www.galengarwood.com ...you genuinely won't know whether to laugh or cry as you watch elephants literally singing along with obvious delight as Jamie Seiber performs for them so hauntingly on her electric cello. All profits will go to the Friends of the Asian Elephant hospital (FAE).

A case in point... a broken-spirited young elephant, complete with a humiliating blinking red tail-light, is taught how to beg tourists for 50-cent bananas along Huaykeaw Road, Chiangmai, not far from our apartment. Not cute:

...and a bored elephant swings its trunk for something to do
as it waits for tourists near a Mae Rim resort:

 

 Re-train humans, not elephants.