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I got home just as scheduled Friday evening after about 33 hours from Bangkok hotel to Del Mar home. A quiet weekend sleeping and awaking at odd times.
This morning I am right back on schedule awaking at 0730. I did 4 loads of laundry yesterday. Today I must go to the grocery and reload with supplies. And there are several movies that are now playing that I must go see. I hope to be back in my usual routine by the end of the week.
This should be the last blog entry for a while.

On the Way Home

Friday , 23 December, 10am Seoul Korea

I am on the way back. I left Thailand at 0150hr Bangkok time.
I have 10 hours here in the Seoul airport leaving at 1930 local time.
I should arrive LAX at 1330 PST and should be in San Diego at 1630.

Last nite I met my cousin Jean again for dinner accompanied by her grandson Avedon (my 2nd cousin twice removed) and Avi's friend. We ate at a restaurant called "Cabbages and Condoms."
It is part of the PDA...the Population Community and Development Association...a non-governmental organization founded in 1974 to deal with population problems in Thailand. It evolved into dealing with the HIV/AIDS problems here. The founder thinks that condoms should be as easily available as cabbages are...thus the name for it's 4 restaurants and 3 resorts throughout Thailand.
The food was very good and reasonably priced. Excellent Thai food. And the company was interesting.

The Grand Palace area

Thursday, 22 December 10am

Yesterday, I successfully made it to the Grand Palace and the associated temple complexes. I used the SkyTrain to the River and then the boat up river to the Grand Palace...it took about 55 minutes. Much more reliable than a taxi ride and much cheaper.
The main temple building houses the Emerald Buddha which is the most sacred item in Thai buddhism...fought over and moved several times around southeast asia over the last 400 years.
It has rested in it's present spot for about 200 years. Of course since it is not allowed to be photographed, I have no photo of it.






The detail and intricacy of the exterior and interior wall designs is spectacular. This is a series of buildings and temple complexes that were built over the past 200 years by the Kings of the Chakra Dynasty as each tried to out-do the other. Not much order to the overall area but overwhelming in it's detail.

Today is my last day here in Thailand as my flight leaves at 1am tomorrow morning. Well, at least the traffic to the Airport will be light at that hour.

A Post for Relatives...mostly

Wednesday Morning 21 December

Last evening I had dinner with 2nd cousin (her grandmother and my grandfather were brother and sister) Jean Wolfe Walzer. What an interesting woman! I hadn't seen her in 40 years, but she was easily recognizable as a Wolfe. She was a wine expert in San Francisco. Wrote about, judged, reviewed, set up wine lists for restaurants. Then lived in New Mexico on a ranch for 4 years. Then she moved to Cambodia, to China and for the last 6 years in Bangkok to teach English writing at a local university. We dined at a local Thai restaurant which was very good.

Today I will try to make it to the Grand Palace and the Emerald Buddha at Wat Phra Kaew.

A Better Beach

Monday, 5pm 19 December


I got to this beach by taking one of the "taxi/bus" vehicles that ply the streets of this resort area. They are pick-up trucks with a row of benches on each side. They cost 10 Baht (25 cents) a ride.

I found a better, more restful beach today. It is about a 3km ride south of the main beach.

It has a broader sand beach, a wide brick walkway and no road behind it. It has many palm trees.









With beach chairs placed under a protective array of beach umbrellas. There are vendors of food and massages wondering the area.
I had a 90 minute massage then read a book before going back to the hotel.

You can easily avoid the sun on these beaches with the way they array the umbrellas. If you want sun...take a front chair

Tomorrow morning, I will return to Bangkok for 2+ days before returning to San Diego. I talked to a 2nd cousin who I found out has lived in Bangkok for the last 6 years. I will meet her for dinner tomorrow evening

Along the Beach

Sunday afternoon, 18 December

Each hotel here in Thailand has a small pagoda called a "spirit house".....to keep away bad spirits and safeguard the place. You can find these outside homes and businesses. There usually is one or several small buddhas inside with various decorations. This is the one in front of the Pattaya Marriott.

This is a look north at Pattaya Beach. It is a thin patch of beach that is filled with beach chairs, backed by Beach Rd filled with cars, trucks and motorbikes. Across the road are an assortment of shops, bars, restaurants and hotels. There are salespeople winding thru the beach chairs offering items for lunch and drinks...and massages. Jet skis and boat rides are available. Not very serene. There are other beaches in Thailand that are quiet and very beautiful....not bad clones of Miami Beach in the '60's.


This is Ronald McDonald giving the traditional Thai greeting with palms together and a small head nod. It is a sign of respect and thanks. It is called a "wai".

Saturday, 17 December

This morning I walked up and down the beach...it was very pleasant. I got a seat in one area and had 2 boys give me a foot and head massage for 30+ minutes...it cost $10.
I went to a movie this afternoon at the shopping mall attached to the hotel...King Kong...with ticket and popcorn and drink it cost $4.50 !!
This is an inexpensive place to retire! A usa retiree in Chiang Mai told me it cost him and his wife about $20,000/yr to live !!

Holiday Season

9am, Saturday, 17 December

The December holiday season is a universal exercise in commerce. Two days after the King's Birthday holiday, the King's pictures came down and the "Christmas" lights came up.... Decorating hotels, markets, etc. In a country that is 95% Buddhist and does not celebrate the birth of Christ, the opportunity to promote commercial interests is not missed. Shopping malls and markets are festive with sales. People talk about gifts and parties. Of course some of this is for New Years Day, but the New Year does not start until February in most asian cultures...a lunar calendar.
Let Festivus Reign!!

Travel from North to the South

Friday, 16 December, 7pm

Today I left Chiang Mai and flew south to the Bangkok airport and hired a car to drive me 2 1/2 hours to Pattaya, a beach resort. I will rest and relax for 3+ days. This is appropriate because this place was a small fishing village until the late '60's when the USA armed forces came here for R & R during the Vietnam adventure. Now it is the largest beach resort in SouthEast Asia. A bustling, often sleazy town with lots of visitors. Today walking around a bit I heard many different languages and accents, of course Thai, Japanese, French, American, Aussie, British, various east European, Arabic, Indian...very international.
The weather has cooled down. In Chiang Mai it was pleasant and breezy and very clear yesterday and today. Here it is very breezy and temps seem to be in the high 70's..."cold" the hotel staff is saying. I will go out later and visit and observe the sleaze.

This is a 600 year old chedi in the ancient capital of Chiang Rai province or the old Lanna Kingdom.


















This is a foto of a couple of monks browsing for digital cameras at a consumer electronics mall in Chiang Mai.

Every male in Thailand serves some time as a monk..be it for a couple of weeks or a lifetime. It is expected that this time of service and spiritual cleansing be done. The time averages out to about 4-6 months.

The 2 pics above were taken at Hilltribe Villages.

The woman with the knife was at a Yao village.

The 2 girls are Longneck Karens. They start wearing those brass coils at about age 6-7 years. The brass coil weighs up to 10-12 pounds on an adult. So the shoulders and upper ribs are pushed down but the neck bones are normal on x-ray. So the lowered shoulders and upper chest give the appearance/illusion of a long neck. Legend has it that this tradition started when 2 girls were killed by a tiger that bit them in the neck. So the tribal elders decreed that they should wear these coils for protection.

The last pic is of an area above the Mae Khong River at the confluence of the Thai, Burmese, Laotian borders.

More pictures

The forest near one of the Hilltribe villages

At the end of a long-tailed boat ride in the river near the Burma border

Some pics at the Elephant Training Camp....lots of fun!

Pictures from the North

At the Orchid farm

A group of Hilltribe kids dressed up for the tourists

The next 2 pics are at the Night Market Chiang Mai..some kids that are camera shy
and everyone deserves a Thai foot massage

Pics soon ...I hope

13 December...10:30 pm

Back in Chiang Mai after visits to Burmese border, Golden Triangle aand drive back.
I think I will be able to post pictures tomorrow as I think I have figured out how to copy them to a CD-RW and then take it to an internet cafe and access them so I can post them.
Tonite I went to a neat Thai restaurant on a wooden deck on the banks of the Ping River with live Thai folk music. I went there with a local guy that I had met on the internet a couple of months ago.

Near the Golden Triangle

Tonite (8:30pm Monday 12 December in Thailand) I am sitting in an internet cafe in a nice hotel in Chiang Rai in the extreme north, near the Golden Triangle. Very interesting day...visited an orchid farm, a teakwood furniture factory, a place where they make paper products from elephant dung (really!), an elephant training camp, an hour ride on an elephant into the thick forest, a boat ride on the Mae Kok River and visited 3 hilltribe villages. Tomorrow we go to the Burmese border and explore the Golden Triangle and then return to Chiang Mai. I hope to be able to post some pictures on Friday when I get back to a Marriott in the beach resort of Pattaya....or sooner if I can find an internet cafe that can read the CD that I backed up my pictures to.

Cooking School

December 11, 1pm, Chiang Mai

Yesterday I had a local guide show me around the local market where absolutely everthing was for sale except actual human persons. Among the foods was a variety of stir fried insects; which are apparently popular snacks here. We saw a few temples, one of which had the largest Buddha that is carved from teakwood.
Last nite an add on to my tour was announced... a visit to a Thai cooking school where I would be taught to cook a dish and then allowed to eat it...it was coconut soup with chicken and assorted vegetables. But the interesting thing was that me and 10 other westerners were on stage as part of an exhibit at the Chiang Mai Food Exposition. We were the only tourists there, everyone else was a local. Sort of like a couunty fair atmosphere. And we were a source of great amusement as we prepared our dish. All in good fun; the Thais have fun at whatever they do. After I ate my food, I looked around at the amazing variety of foods there......sticky rice sausage, assorted vegetables and meats, noodles, rice, etc. I stopped at the booth of a local Italian restaurant and had a nice lasagna to fill me up after my coconut milk chicken soup. At the end of the evening we received a graduation certificate from the Director of the School in a grand ceremony.
This morning my official 3 day tour of the North started, with a temple at the top of a local mountain and a visit to a teakwood furniture factory and a silk shop.
Tomorrow, an elephant training camp visit is part of the day.

I am in Chiang Mai

Saturday, 10 am
For the next 5-6 days I will be at a hotel that does not have broadband internet access, so it will be hard to upload photos. Chiang Mai is the major city of the North, but only has 200,00o people. They had their local Mardi Gras here in the Nite Bazaar area...it was wild....pictures to follow.

Trip to Ayutthaya

Thursday, I took a daylong tour to visit the ancient Thai capital that is 50 miles up river from Bangkok. A bus drive up there with a stop at the Summer Palace, Bang Pa-In, and a return by large boat with buffet lunch. It was a nice day, excellent weather and pleasant company.
This was the capital from 1380 to 1767 when the Burmese captured and ransacked Ayutthaya and the capital was moved to Bangkok.
Today, I fly up north to Chiang Mai.

Bangkok Traffic Tour

Friday, 7am 9 December....
I took a tour of traffic in Bangkok.
On Wednesday, I tried to go to the Grand Palace because bit was closed for 2 days because of the King's Birthday. Unfortunately 50,000 teachers were mad and had a demonstration around government buildings. My taxi driver estimated a 2 hour cab ride. Therefore , we decided to go by boat in River but it took 45 minutes to get to pier from Hotel. since it was already 1pm, I gave up and had a nice lunch at the Shangri-La Hotel riverside. Then I took the SkyTrain, with a few stops, back to the hotel. After Thursday's bus and boat tour to Ayutthaya, the ruined ancient capital about 50 miles up the river from Bangkok, it took almost 2 hours to return to my hotel thru the traffic. It may be the worse traffic I have ever seen......but not single honk nor angry driver! They have learned to deal with it. When at all possible I will take the SkyTrain and river boat to avoid streets!
The SkyTrain is very nice......it is elevated at the 3-5 story level above the streets..and is clean and efficient...but it has only 2 lines so it's coverage is somewhat limited.

Tour of Temples and Khlong

7 December, Wednesday

Yesterday, I took a 6 hour afternoon tour of several temple complexes (Wats) and a long-boat ride into one of the remaining canals or khlongs. Bangkok used to have as many canals as Venice or Amsterdam, but many of these have been filled up so roads and highways could be built to try to deal with the quadrupling of population in the last 50 years. The long-boat is a special Bangkok creation with a long, shallow, narrow boat powered by a diesel truck engine mounted on the stern with a long driveshaft extending behind.
We saw the Golden Buddha made of 5 1/2 tons of solid gold. The Marble Temple made with carerra marble from Italy. The Wat Pho where monks live in a quiet place in the middle of the city. And the Temple of Dawn across the river which is made of inlaid broken pieces of Chinese porcelain-- the Chinese porcelain objects broke during a storm during import by ship. The King decided to use the pieces in a mosaic.

Yesterday, I took a ride on the public boat along the Chao Praya River and saw some temples and other boat traffic. There are many magnificent hotels and high-rise residential buildings on the river bank. The breeze as the boat cruises along is very cooling in the humid air. Also went to Dusit Park and visited the "big house" It is a 80 room teak-wood house that one of the Kings from early 1900's lived in. It is decorated in cooling pastel shades of green and pink and purple and painted a light gold color on the outside...that's me standing in front of it. To visit it you must remove your shoes and can't wear shorts out of respect for the Royal family. If you show up with shorts, they have sarongs that they loan you to cover your legs so you can visit.

I had a nice dinner at Anna's Cafe (yes, named after that Anna from the "King and I") of real Thai food...beef curry, shrimp padthai, ground fried catfish and fried fish cakes. And then early to bed. I went to the Hotel gym this morning and I seem oriented to Thai time now.

A tuk-tuk

As promised a few pictures of tuk-tuks. I took a wild ride on one today and will probably never get on another. They are useful because they can wind around and get thru the horrible traffic, but scary without a helmet. And speed is apparently a virtue with the drivers. This my ride above.
Also is a line-up of tuk-tuks outside the Zoo exit trying to pick up fares. There were lots of children as there was no school on the King's Birthday.

Thailand is Closed Today

8am, 5 December Monday
Not really, it is a national holiday today...the King's Birthday so their are no tours of the Grand Palace and the main large Wat (temple complex) on the Palace grounds. Bars and clubs are also closed today. The King is held in great respect in Thailand.

My luggage arrived this morning at 3am as promised....24 hours after I arrived. That's good.

Last evening I took a cab to one of the nitelife districts for dinner and "exploration". The taxis here are very cheap..the ride from the airport was $11; to the nitelife district it was $1.30! A real car! Not the motorcycle pulled rickshaw they call a tuk-tuk. I will take my camera today and take a picture of a tuk-tuk. "tuk-tuk" is the sound that the motorcycle makes as it hauls you and a friend around.

My Luggage Didn't

Noon 4 December, Thai time.
When I arrived at 1am this morning, my bag was not on the plane. I was afraid that it might not make the close connection caused by the delay getting to LAX. But I was informed this afternoon by the concierge here at the JW Marriott that KAL had found it and it will arrive on tonite's flight. So it will be delivered to the hotel and I should have it first thing in the morning.......I hope.

So I slept a few hours and got up and showered and explored the local area looking for underwear and a shirt or two. I discovered within a hundred yards of my hotel front door a MacDonalds, a Starbucks, a Haagen-Daz, a KFC, a Pizza Hut, a 7/11 and a New York Deli. I should be fine.

I will rest this afternoon and try to find a Thai restaurant for this evening.
Later.....

I Made It to Asia

I'm sitting in the Korean Airlines (KAL) Business Class Lounge with a wireless internet connection muching on some Korean mystery snacks and Coca Cola. The 12 hour flight from LAX was good. I was well fed..lunch and dinner with some snacks between. Comfortable, not luxurious seats with plenty of room. Very eager to please cabin staff.

The flight from San Diego to LAX was a source of concern and stress. Morning fog along the So Cal coast caused delays so my 26 minute flight was delayed an hour. So I had an hour to get to the International Terminal. Unfortunately 15 minutes of that time was spent trying to find my carry-on backpack as they had to check it in the baggage compartment because I discovered that the overhead compartments in the small regional jet were not large enough. And when we landed in LAX, they couldn't find it! The first American Eagle person gave one of those I-don't-give-a-shit looks and futzed around. Meanwhile another more experienced gate staffperson went back and found it deep in the baggage comparment in a cubbyhole. Good thing because I had all my diabetes pills, hypertension and cholesterol pills in that bag. Then I had to run/walk to the KAL desk at the international terminal. I got there 25 minutes before take-off, it was empty except for 2 airline ladies who whisked me thru check-in and accompanied me down the hall to the head of the security line. I got to the gate in time as one of the last to board. I don't need that stress. I love punctuality.


In 2 hours I leave on a 6 hour flight to Bangkok arriving there at 1230am. Since my baggage was checked thru form San diego, I am hoping it made it over to KAL at LAX in time to make the trip with me!

I Leave Tomorrow Morning

I leave tomorrow morning from San Diego at 0850 and fly to LAX then to Seoul and on to Bangkok arriving at 0020hr on Sunday...about 26 hours enroute and 9,000 miles.
Today I must do final packing to see if the things I selected to take will fit in my luggage.
I am using 120,000 Delta Skymiles for a business class ticket on their SkyTeam partner Korean Air.