I am a rock, I am an island

The top picture is of Tom on the ferry across the Gulf of Thailand to the island of Koh Mak. It is a long, 3 hour ferry ride to the island. Tom slept on the way back.

There is a picture of me on the rocks at the corral reaf end of the island. I cut my hand when i fellin right after this picture. Dumbass. Then the picture of Tom & I on our last night and the sunset.

All in all, fantastic trip, and we only have the next 50 hours of traveling to go. We are in the port city of Trat, and will take the 6 hour bus ride into Bangkok at 6 pm, arriving at about midnight, get to the airport, and hopefully be a few hours early instead of rushing to get there. Then it is the long traveling.

I will post more when I get home, and I will tell you right now, I'd give my left arm for a real, american juicy, greasy, drippy cheeseburger right about now!

Wish us luck, and see everyone on the flip side of the world.

We're on the road to nowhere

We are in the jungles of Chiang Rai Province, northern Thailand. These are the three pictures from our hike from our guest house (Akha Hill House) through the jungle. It was a fun trek, but at about 97 degrees, it was a hot one.

We spent two nights at the Akha Hill House. It was quiet and cold in the mornings, but the rest of the days were boiling hot.

We had a hell of a time up to Chiang Rai in the first place. We took an early morning bus, changed over somewhere, and then got to Fuong late, and had to hire a songthaew to drive exceptionally fast to get us up to Akha River house, which has the only transportation to Akha Hill House in the mountains. We were going very fast to make it the 104 km in under two hours.

We have spent most of the past week on buses it seems. I think Tom is tired of being on buses, but tonight, finally, we get on a plane to get back to Bangkok, taxi to bus terminal, and hopefully catch the last bus to Trat at 11:30 pm, overnight bus trip to Trat, songthaew to port city and ferry out to Koh Mak or Koh Wai, we haven't decided.

If it all works out, in less than 12 hours, we will be basking int he glorious beaches of a small island in the Gulf of Thailand. If we are delayed at the airport, then we won't get to the island until late tomorrow night after having slept in the bus terminal all Friday night, missed the first ferry to the island, and then get to the island at night, not sure of guest house as it is, and get crankier.

Then we'll bask in the glow of the warm glowingness of the southern Thailand sun.

On the road to find out

The top picture is Tom at one of the ruins in Ayutthaya, the second picture is of the night market there. We ate there two nights, and it was excellent.

This is Tom on the Motor Bike. Yes, we rode motor bikes throughout Me Hong Son, in the northern part of Thailand. We each had bad ass powder puff blue Honda Waves! We were our own roving gang!

The first picture is of me at the Fish Cave in Mae Hong Son. Beautiful place.

The second picture is of Tom with the mountains in the background after our hike.

As maybe you can tell, I can't seem to get Blogger to work right on these machines. It is quite frustrating to wait in line for a computer, then try to download pictures, then try to upload them correctly, and the format to be fucked up.

If anyone is reading these updates, please comment. If not, I'm not going to waste my time and money doing it from here, as it is getting progressively frustrating if no one is reading/following our progress.

So much for the city.

These are pictures from different things so far in Thailand. The first one is of the market at Patpong Road in Bangkok. You can buy anything from watches to flesh on Patpong, and no one complains.

The second picture is of Tom on the floating raft on the River Kwai that was our room for two night in Kanchanaburi, about 2 hours north of Bangkok. We left Bangkok to head north and see some of the countryside. The picture under that is Tom in Hellsfire Pass. This is part of the story of how the Japanese in World War II made locals who were conscripted and POWs build athe Thai-Burma Railway to supply Japanese troops in their fight against the Chinese.



The lats two pictures are of Tom & I at different sites of the ruins of Ayutthaya, the former capital of the Kindgdom of Siam. A lot of the ruins are preserved from the 14 & 15th centuries. Very cool.

So far the trip has been great. I actually got some strange 36 hour flubug thing that had me feeling just aweful, but I somehow survived, and now am ready for more siteseeing. As you can see from the last photo, I have gone native with my blue shirt.

The weather has cooperated. It is currently about 97 degrees here, with clear skies for days. Hopefully, that will continue for another two weeks.

People on the river are happy to give

I will have to say that Wat Po, the Temple of the Reclining Buddha, is more impressive than pictures can ever do it justice. The palace is phenominal, as usual, but it is a palace. You expect it to be phenominal. The Reclining Buddha is HUGE, and you are taken aback at how huge.

(These pictures are off of my cell phone. Not bad, surprisingly.)

(I have only a short time to update, and I am hammered right now (7:30m Sunday night) so I will be impressed if a) this is in any semblenc of proper english, and b) this actually gets posted correctly.)

We are in Bangkok. This is a picture of Tom across the river from the Rama VIII bridge.

We are having a wonderful time, having been to the Grand Palace, the temple of the emerald buddha, Wat Arun, Wat Po, and a ton of other places (including the store earlier today to get a lot of Beer Chang where I learned I am now a lightweight.

The flight was very long, but Tom was a trooper who slept the last 5 hours of the flight from Tokyo to Bangkok. I, as previously predicted, was not able to sleep at all on any of the flights, but we made it and have been having fun.

We also took a long tail boat tour this morning. You get on the boat, and the driver takes you around the Choa Phraya River & surrounding canals. It is quite awesome a spectacle.

We are eating quite well, drinking quite well, and living quite well. I don't think Tom has been overwhelmed as of yet, so that is good. He is much more laid back than I give him credit for, to be honest. He is taking everything and making some good decisions. I like that.

Well, we are off to Pat Pon Road (spelled wrong I am sure, but I don't care right now.) I hope to update soon.

I love the Islands. That's my escapism.

After Ayutthaya, we are going North, stopping at several different places until we arrive in Chaing Rai. When Tom & I are in Chaing Rai, we are going to spend time with the Akha Hill Tribe while Eltee heads off to a Burmese market for the day. We will come back to stay with him long enough to catcha plane, fly to Bangkok, and then a bus to Trat, and then a ferry to Koh Mak, a small island in the Gulf of Thailand.

Koh Mak is a coconut farm, so there are coconuts everywhere.

And obviously fat guys on the beaches.

And fat guys in their bungalows

And sunsets over the beach

 And then we will be home.

I hope to be able to update every few days on here.  We shall see, but as I wake up in 6 hours from now to start the journey, I will take my leave 
and hope everyone has a great February.  I know I plan on it!

Away you will go sailin’, in a race among the ruins. If you plan to face tomorrow, do it soon.

Ayutthaya was the capital of the Kingdom of Siam, what is today called the Kingdom of Thailand, from about 1350 until it was destroyed by the Burmese army in 1767 and the new capital was built in Thonburi, what is today a district of Bangkok, the modern day capital of Thailand.

I found Ayutthaya to be a very pleasant, history filled city. It is also the only time in Thailand I had a hot shower, and that was only because the water tanks on top of my guest house had been baking in the sun all day long and I took a shower in the evening. Ayutthaya is covered in this brownish red clay dust, and I was covered in it and didn’t want to sleep that dirty after a day of biking around.

There are ancient ruins all throughout Ayutthaya, and you are able, usually for a small fee, to walk amongst the ruins, travel into 700-800 year old temples. And you can pose on the landings of some of these temples for your friends to take pictures.

A great story I have from my 2 days in Ayutthaya, and this might help explain my friend Eltee to you, or at least his ability to always be prepared. We got a little lost riding the bikes back to our guest house, and we went down an alley. Out of nowhere to our left came these two dogs, barking and growling, clearly sounding like they were all ready for dinner.

I did what any normal person would do: I pedaled faster and pulled the bike to the right to get away from what I was certain was two rabid and hungry dogs. Eltee, on the other hand, with no hesitation, steered his bike to the left, right at the two dogs and barked right back at them.

The dogs responded by yapping, putting their tails between their legs, and running the opposite way.

And then, since Thai roads are set up on the opposite side from USA, like they are in the UK, about 5 minutes later I came seconds away from being run over by a bus since I thought I was crossing the correct turning lane when in reality I was pedaling faster to get right in front of the bus.

As usually, Eltee kept pedaling assuming I’d make it through. When we finally stopped and my heart was still pounding from what I saw as my near death experience, he was calm as a cucumber and said “Well, you didn’t get hit, so we might as well enjoy another beer together.”

All in all, one of my favorite places in Thailand, though I was only there a short time. Tom & I will be there for about the same amount of time, so I hope we get to see all the ruins, and none of the rabid dogs or oncoming buses. But maybe I should tell him these stories so that he can be more prepared than I was.

We gonna rock down to Electric Avenue, and then we'll take it higher

Interesting few days on the run-up to leaving for Thailand. I’ve been able to run about every other day, which is different than I wanted to run, but I had a lot of things to do this past weekend, with Carl & his new boyfriend in town from DC, and Toby came in from Chicago. So I didn’t run on Friday, but Pittsburgh got hit with 3-4 inches of snow, so I shoveled my driveway, which took about 2 hours. I only know the time it took because I listened to two different 80’s new wave compilations on the iPod.

Yesterday morning I woke up, and suddenly, at about 6:25 am, the main breakers tripped, and all the electricity in my house went off, obviously. When I went down, the main breaker was so hot to the touch I couldn’t hold my finger on it for more than a few second.

By the evening, my nephew, the new electrician, came over and we shut down half the house to make sure that the electric heat pump could pull enough power to heat the house and not trip the breakers in the middle of the night and freeze me out.

It is nice to have an electrician in the family. My grandfather is an electrician, and he has been willing to work, but I’ve only owned the house for 20 months and he has basically been retired for the past 5 years. My nephew is young enough that he has the energy to come to my house after a long day of work and be able to help out. And he is hoping that the weather will break over the next few weeks while I am gone and he will upgrade my service to 200 amp to allow for the obvious extra electricity needed for the heat pump.

In order to try to get enough electricity for the heat pump, I had to turn off the freezer, and store much food in coolers I have on my back yard now. I don’t think I realized how much frozen fruits & vegetables I’ve bought and stuck in the back of the freezer. When I get back from Thailand, as long as the electricity works soon, I will have plenty of frozen fruits & veggies!

I ran for 30 minutes, 3.1 miles. I was a little down from I have been doing, but it won’t matter. My whole weight loss program is a train wreck currently. I am at 226 lbs yesterday morning, and it is a chubby 226 lbs. I have allowed myself to get so far off of my diet that it is effecting everything. My pants are getting slightly tighter, and that hasn’t happened in almost a year. Well, actually, I couldn’t even fit into these jeans, so the fact I fit into them now is still a good thing, but I want to continue my positive, healthy progress.

There have been a few people at my workplace who have lost a good deal of weight, only to gain it back after a time. I want this to be a lifestyle change, not some fashionable thing I do for a year and then allow myself to become unhealthy again.

All I can do now is come back from Thailand refreshed and ready to start eating right and then add the weight training program.

My car battery is going quickly, and it is turning over the engine rougher & rougher each morning. All I gotta do is have the car start 5 more times before I leave for Thailand. And if I am home when it doesn’t start up, I have use of Gary’s car while he is in England.

Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge on the River Kwai

On Day 5, we will head by bus up to Kanchanaburi, which is well known because it is the setting for the actual events and the movie based on the happenings during the end of World War II at The Bridge on the River Kwai.   The bridge is a major tourist attractions, of course, and there are many museums and sites dedicated to what happened, and what little is known about, the Japanese & Thai partnership during WWII.

One Japanese tourist that was staying at the same guest house as us in Kanchanaburi actually came up to me afterwards, asked if I was from an Allied country, I said I was American, and he apologized.  He said he didn't know about what happened there, what his people had done, as this isn't taught in Japan.  He had just come back from one of the museums, where he had just learned that the Japanese used western Allies POWs, as well as downtrodden Asians,  as forced labor to create a railway from the Gulf of Thailand through Burma so that the Japanese army could get supplies to fight the Chinese.  

16,000 Allied POWs died making this railway, and it is referred to these days as 
the Death Railway.

This is me, of course, on the actual bridge.  The guest house I stayed in was on the River Kwai.  Not next to it, actually floating on top of it.  It was very cool.

There is a superstition in Thailand that you will have luck for one year of you ride on 
an elephant.  I don't know if I had any more  luck the year after I did ride one, but it was cool.  

One very strange occurrence, though, is that the elephant rider, a poor boy I assume but he will ride the same elephant for the life of the elephant, actually started 
stroking my legs when we were walking through the jungle.

I gave him a tip to stop doing it.  It was actually creepy, and I hope this year he doesn't start
weird shit with my nephew & I riding the elephant together.  But I will have some money for 
the tip. 

We only spent 2 night in Kanchanaburi, and really, I think that is all my nephew & I will be staying this time as well.  You can see quite a bit on a long, one day trip, and that is what we will be doing.

Tomorrow, I will talk about Ayutthaya, the former capital of the Kingdom of Siam.

When I'm in a traffic jam He don't care if I say "damn." I can let all my curses roll, Plastic Jesus doesn't hear

We are going to take a temple tour by tuk tuk, a sort of motorized rickshaw.


More accurately, a tuk tuk is a wide open, recklessly driven, 3-wheeled tin or sheet metal bodied motorized tricycle. They whip in an out of the congested traffic of Bangkok with ease, but I always fear they are just seconds away from tipping over.


When my friend says that on Sunday we will be having a temple tour by tuk tuk, I don’t actually know what he is saying. I don’t think we’d rent a tuk tuk to take us from temple to temple, as they are ubiquitous in Bangkok, so easy to get one. But I don’t think they are just sitting next to all the temples, waiting for westerners to hire them. Most westerners don’t go to temples. The tuk tuks are usually around all the shopping districts and really big attractions, like the Grand Palace.

There are two temples I am waiting to see, one for the first time.

I’ve been to the Wat Saket, or Temple of the Golden Mount.

It is one of the oldest temples in Bangkok, dating back 300-400 years. It was built on the highest hill in Bangkok, and off of the roof, it does have a great view of the western side of the city.


The next one is Wat Pho, or more famously, The Temple of the Reclining Buddha. This is home to the single largest Buddha image in the world, obviously the Reclining Buddha. This image is 46 meters long by 15 meters high, with mother of pearl eyes and on the soles of its feet, which are huge and depict different Chinese and Indian scenes. I have wanted to see it, so I will on next Sunday!

While your temple still survives, you at least are still alive

Wat Arun translates into Temple of the Dawn.  It is a Buddhist temple on the banks of the Chao Phraya river in Bangkok, and it is a most impressive looking temple. The central spire, called a prang, is the highlight of the temple. It rises about 80 meters up, and you can walk up the central prang to the doors.



Wat Arun is hundreds of years old, and oddly enough I couldn’t locate a reference that place that would put an exact date on when it was built, only that it was built while Ayutthaya was the capital, between 1350 & 1767. It was once home to the Emerald Buddha before that was moved to its current home in 1784
 
I did not visit Wat Arun when I was in Bangkok. These are two pictures I took while on the boat. We saw it from across the river, and the last day I was in Bangkok the sun was coming up behind it, and it looked magnificent. We were all packed up going to the train station to get up to Kanchanaburi, where the Bridge over the River Kwai is located.

So when Tom & I go to the Wat Arun next Saturday, it will be the first time I see it for myself up close. I am all sorts of excited!  Lots of pictures to come!

You can't see me suddenly, I got pictures on my mind

This is from my May/June trip to Amsterdam

This is from my June/July trip to Rome


This is from my Championship softball game in August


This is from my November trip to the United Kingdom - Stonhenge obviously


This is from Leeds Castle in November

 

Through the years, through all the good and bad

This is me in Kindergarten - cute, ain't I?


This is me in college, 1989, at about 270 lbs.


This is 1992 in Brooklyn, I had lost weight and was at 195 lbs.




This is at my absolute heaviest, 272 lbs, on my first tour in Europe (Tower of London here)

This was in July 2005 in Paris, was at about 255 lbs.

 

You don’t have to worry cause you have no money, people on the river are happy to give

(This is me on a klong tour in Bangkok in 2004.  This is officially the first picture of me I've put on this blog.)

I took what is called a klong boat tour when I was in Bangkok. This is a long tail boat that takes you for a few hours around the city on the Chao Phraya river.

In looking through the pictures, it amazes me how Bangkok, maybe out of necessity or maybe out of ingenuity, utilizes the rivers & canals around it. The back porches of people's homes are the river. They keep boats off the back porch, and that is how they get from place to place, tying up their boats along the river and going shopping. Some older women actually will row around to different market sites or work sites and cook lunch for the construction workers, kind of a floating fast food restaurant.

There are regular boats that are part of the public transportation for the city. Instead of taking the bus, you take the boat, and it is usually much faster than the bus. Traffic congestion in Bangkok is horrible.

The river is an important part of Thailand’s history. Barges have been for centuries to carry sacred images of the Buddha from place to place, or to bring the current ruler into an area. On the klong boat tour, there is a stop off at the Royal Barge Museum, and it is breathtaking the craftsmanship that has gone into these Royal Barges. On the Chao Phraya river, they do have the Royal Barge Procession. 15 of these processions have taken place during the reign of the current king, King Rama IX, or King Bhumibol.  A version of the procession has been happening in Thailand for 700 years.

This will be another activity my nephew & I will do while we are in Bangkok for those first 4 days.

One night in Bangkok and the world's your oyster. The bars are temples but the pearls ain't free

(This is a picture I took in 2004 of the Emerald Buddha.  It is also the first photo I've ever put on my blog!  Yeah me!)

The Grand Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha will probably be the first tourist destination we visit in Bangkok. That will be early morning Saturday, less than 12 hours after we land. I don’t know if my nephew is going to be coherent enough to enjoy it after 29 hours of traveling, but he will be there!

The Grand Palace in Bangkok was built starting in 1782, and was the official residency of the Kings of Thailand from that time until the middle of the 20th century. It is a sprawling complex of beautiful buildings, temples, offices and gardens. It also contains the Temple to the Emerald Buddha, the most important icon in Thai Buddhism.

The Emerald Buddha is actually a small Buddha statue made of jade. Legend has it that it is either a 1,000 years old and came from India, or it is 500 years old and was found following a plaster Buddha being struck by lightning and the Emerald Buddha was under it. Either way, it is a beautiful, small, green statue of the Buddha that is the centerpiece of Wat Phrakaew (“Wat” means “Temple” in Thai.)

We have to also take off our shoes to go into the temples. I remember what looked like hundreds of pairs of sandals on the steps leading into the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. And how these would have been stolen had it been in the west. But in Buddhist Thailand, it is the norm to leave your shoes/sandals in front of the temple and not expect them to be stolen.

I wouldn’t do the same thing with my iPod or digital camera, of course. I ain’t crazy!

The art work on the outside and the inside of the complex is phenomenal, and is quintessential Thai in it’s intricacy, color and detail. I hope I can put up a picture here that will show the beauty.

One of my favorite places that I went to in Bangkok was this small garden off to the side of all the busyness of the palace and temple. It was quiet, it was beautiful and it was reflective. And I am looking forward to sitting in the middle of this garden and reflecting on having my nephew with me. And my good friend Eltee.

Here is a link to the Grand Palace and Temple of the Emerald Buddha: Grand Palace and the Temple os the Emerald Buddha