Asia 2008

The traditional Thai salve/vale/mea culpa is the wai, made by placing the palms together in front of the thorax with the fingers pointing skyward. (The same gesture is a nop in Laos.) A small accompanying bow seems to be common, although not obligatory. Change the height of the hands and it changes the status of the wai: there's the rub.

It’s charming to be waied after a short conversation or transaction (I may sound all memsahib, but it really is the most charming greeting gesture I can think of). While in the retail paradise of Siam Square, I didn’t generally respond, usually because I had my hands full. But the guidebooks say you should reciprocate. More recently I have responded; it has felt a little forced and I’ve got it over with as quickly as possible. But it gets a little easier.

I have taken an absurd number of photos of roofs (rooves? Tolkien says dwarves, I recall) in Bangkok. It is the shape of the roofs that makes traditional Thai buildings distinctive. Your average ubosot/bot is wooden, has a rectangular or subtly boat-shaped plan, a tiled Swiss-pitched roof (or overlapping roofs, like the armour of an armadillo or a Roman legionary) and thick square columns.

As an example, take the Buddhaisawan Chapel in the grounds of the National Museum, which holds the second-holiest Buddha in the kingdom:

What strikes the eye is the adornment to the the roofs at the corners of the gables and the eaves. At the end of each roof is a cho fa (sky tassel) finial. These look like stylised birds, and so they may be: eg Garudas, guardian bird spirits in Thailand (originally singular, and the mount of Vishnu). Often the bird could be interpreted to be grasping a naga (chief serpent demon type, traditional enemy of Garuda, again borrowed from India via Cambodia), whose tail appears as a finial lower down. But the same shape also sometimes appears as a finial without a snake attached. And the meaning of the shapes is a mystery. There is a style called swan's tail, which apparently adorns boats and barges: not being a devotee of poultry arse, I don't know what it looks like. So the taxonomy is incomplete: further research is needed. My next stamp collecting-exercise.

In any case, it is the finials - which the Thais sensibly copied from the Khmer Cambodians - that add elegance, curvature and lightness to the edifices. So here are some photos.

In the National Museum:

In Wat Phra Kaeow, the royal wat that is home to the Emerald Buddha:

Nearly twenty years ago I had dinner in Pucallpa, in the Peruvian Amazon. I swallowed a mouthful of something lava-hot, and within a minute sweat was dripping off the end of my nose. The waiter said the offending chilli was called an ají, and it was the hottest I have ever had. That’s the first time I can remember flowing rather than glowing.

Here I’ve been happy to be not too obnoxious, literally speaking. While more blubbery farang have been red and dripping, I haven’t been sweating at all. But then, it hasn’t been hot by local standards. That changed last night, when it rained. After a short shower, the humidity just went through the roof. At the same time I managed to get lost, and splashed through dark side streets taking a long cut. By the time I got back to the Skytrain twenty minutes later, I’d sublimed through mere moistness and was dripping from forehead and neck. It was not a good look, and to Thai noses I probably smelt like a durian. And in this humidity, once it’s started it doesn’t stop. So I went for a curry.

A walk around the ‘MBK Food Center’ is a touch offputting. Among all the other sweet and savoury aromas on offer is a smell that, to me, reeks of chicken gone slightly off. This does not inspire confidence in the freshness of the food.

But freshness probably has nothing to do with it. I smelt it in the Tokyu department store too. It is the putrid smell of Thailand’s most highly-prized fruit, the durian, which is just coming into season. Some compare it to a ripe cheese. Alfred Russel Wallace compared it to custard flavoured with almonds; perhaps he was sniffing a different kind of durian. In any case, even Thais find the stink offensive, and carrying them on public transport or into hotels is not allowed.

I tried some a couple of days ago with some sweet sticky rice. The flavour was sweet and savoury, the sweetness probably coming from the rice. A taste yet to be acquired. The brain says 'this is fruit' but the visceral signals ('no, it's old carrion') dominate. I’ll try to give it another go or two.

A quaint headline in today’s free daily, the Daily Xpress. Actually it wasn’t much of a story – Bangkok has more than twice as much particulate pollution as anywhere else in Thailand, gasp! (Cough, splutter.) Bangkok has 2.5 million cars, the rest of the country 3.9 million.

Here's a main road (Rama I) in Bangkok, with the Skytrain running above it:

Last weekend the concentration of PM10s reached 206 μg/m3 in Din Daeng and 140 μg/m3 in Bang Kungthien; the government’s defined ‘safe’ level is 120 μg/m3. Concentrations rise when the weather is cool, relatively speaking, as it has been. Like many others, I’ve been wearing a mask in the street.

See cleanairnet for up-to-date information.