Thailand, Bangkok, 03-03-2009, nightime. Bangkok has turned from a chaotic messy third-world city into a modern affluent mega-town harbouring a well-off middle class and millions of desperate mostly nothern Thais dreaming of a their Break in this sweltering hot metropole, Burmese day workers happy to slave away all day for a full cups of boiled rice with a few chunks though chicken meat. It is near 19.00 hours and our Tuk Tuk is moving swiftly to and fro in the early evening traffic jam. Our driver, a young Karen hilltribe person from near the Burmese border is a maniac reversing in [View Full Entry]

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Thailand, Bangkok, 03-03-2009, late afternoon. Though Bangkok centre might look like it is sufficiently well off with expensive looking skycrapers going dozens of floors up in the sweltering hot Thai air, a modern looking subway system, highways on top of each other and on top of that the infamous skytrain - the very name should say it all - chaotic traffic jams and a food stall at every corner as well as in between, blueish hot clouds approaching from their cooking pots, the air surrouning the food stall haevy with the strong smell of Thai spices..... Still...there is an other side [View Full Entry]

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Bangkok, 03-03-2009, The skytrain is rattling overhead me while I sit on the back of a Bangkok motorbike taxi as always risking my very life in the madhouse, superjammed Bangkok traffic. Despite the early hour this metropole is already swelletring under a hot Thai sun while early commuters quietly accept the pointlessness of their haste caught up in a static traffic line. Exhaust fumes poisoning the lungs of fast-food cooking stall merchants selling dozens of varieties of typical Thai sweets, so popular for breakfast among the Thai. At other stalls I see Thai business men in expensive Arman [View Full Entry]

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En route to Penang by overnight train from Penang to Bangkok, 02-03-2009. If I was a normal person I would have spent at least one of two dozen trips coming to Thailand, as a monk, a western Farang monk attained at a small Wat somewhere in the poor Northern provinces of the Isaan, a small settlement where the locals survive on a barebread excistence but where the family patriach somehow always seems to have the necessary Thai Baht to finance a nightly trip to the village's poolhall - you should really understand the second function of a poolhall in Thailand by [View Full Entry]

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Malasia, Penang, Buttersworth, 01-03-2009. As usual when I stay overnight in Penang I lodge at the Li Peng Hotel, cheap but you really get what you pay for, spaciouos rooms though but noicy with the Chinese channels on TV at the highest volume all day and deep into the night. Twenty-two years ago when I first arrived at Penang by 500 Dutch Guilders first class return air ticket bought by the Dutch Embassy but whith my own dough, after my little stint in a Thai police holding cell, I came to Penang. I remember walking down the tourist district wondering how [View Full Entry]

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The Sumatran Straights between Medan and Penang. 28-02-2009 Zoom in... All day by stupid local transport, a rusty old bus that could normally hold 20 passengers but somehow seems to contain at least double that number - lets not forget my fellow travellers' life stock, rowdy roosters in big ratan baskets eyeing me curiously from their baboo wooden prison, frequent stops in small settlements where local females would quickly hop on hoping to sell some mangos...village children making a race that was destined to fail from the beginning but hoping to spot a whiteface like me, their da [View Full Entry]

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Sumatra,Medan. 27-02-2009. Back in Medan, this dusty typical third world muslim town full with stinking open gutters, heavy traffic of the rusty type and people evrywhere going to and fro on a mad quest for Allah only knows what. For the sake of convenience - and still having lots of local tatty notes of Rp. still in my pocket that need to get out of there - I decided on an airco minibus to Medan - 25.000 Rp. for a local bus and 70.000 Rp. for a airco minivan with the added advantage they drop you off in front of the [View Full Entry]

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Indonesia, Sumatra, Lake Toba, Tuk Tuk, 25-02-2009. As usual during my evenings here in Tuk Tuk I have moved over to Peter Nit Noi Chang's guest house, not to hang out with Mister Fatso the presumed child molester but to have a cold Bintang together with Mama Cesca, his landlady. There is usually no mistaking Peter's bulky shape sitting outside the guest house enjoying the last warm rays of sun of the day, his long goatee hanging down on his sweaty chest disappearing in the layers of human fat, always trying to strike up a conversation with me - a lonely [View Full Entry]

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Indonesia, Sumatra, Lake Toba, Tomok, 24-02-2009. The quiet foreiger's enclave Tuk Tuk on the bulb shaped peninsula facing Parapat on the main land, might be tranquil and peacefull given over almost completely to agriculture now that all the foreigners that once wandered around its winding and hilly streets, are gone. The village has gone back to its quiet village life where gossip is the main entertainment of the local populace. Tomok, maybe an easy five kilometer walk from Tuk Tuk, is like Ambarita just another small hamlet where women do all the drudgery in and around the house [View Full Entry]

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Indonesia, Sumatra, Lake Toba, Tuk Tuk, 23-02-2009. Though I've for a change moved into a top-end hotel in Tuk Tuk, still my room is in a serious state of neglect with an army of red forest ants marching right through the middle of the room coming out of a crack in one wall and leaving my territory again through a hole in the opposite wall. They start there endless trek at early sun-up and finish it at late afternoon sun-down, two neat lines never bothering to check the rest of my place, just up and down they go with me accepting [View Full Entry]

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