Asia 2008

I’m in Bangkok suffering from a huge lull in motivation, I hope temporary. It may have something to do with the humidity. Instead I’ve been burning cash but have little to show for it. That’s what comes of hanging around the shopping centres.

There are a number of food vendors among the market stalls just east of Central World shopping centre. One of them sells grilled insects such as crickets and cockroaches. Even hen they're deceased and grilled, I can’t bear to look at roaches. Don’t you know where they’ve been? And I’m not convinced that merely grilling a cockroach would kill it, if nukes don’t. So I went for a bag of crickets, with a little chilli sauce. They’re crunchier than a soft-shelled crab but not as crunchy as a prawn’s tail. They absorb the smoke of the grill and they taste a lot like pork scratchings - much nicer than a tepid sausage I had at the same time. They’re anatomically perfect down to the spiky hind shins, and they vary significantly in size. The largest ones have huge, downward-curving abdomens and they are more than a mouthful; I couldn’t bring myself to bite them in half.

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The Queen Saovabha Memorial Snake Farm was founded in 1923 to provide antivenins for victims of snake bites. It was the second such farm in the world, the first being in Brazil. It is a serious endeavour and the snake farm is part of a local hospital and affiliated to the WHO. (They also give vaccinations and a rabies post-exposure clinic so I returned this morning to be jabbed with live encephalitis.) They milk the venom from the snakes and inject it into horses. They take blood from the immunised horses, extract the plasma and that’s it: antivenin in immunoglobulin form. Some is kept in Thailand and some is exported.

You can see the various snakes behind glass, but they also put on shows twice a day. A loopy herpetologist with an ear-mike talks about the snakes while they show, in series, king cobra; cobra; banded krait; many-banded krait (perhaps); and white-lipped pit viper.

Most snakes sense vibrations, so the best thing to do if you meet one is stand still. A pit viper, however, senses body heat, so the best thing to do is run. Cobras and kraits use neurotoxins; pit vipers’ venom causes tissue and blood clotting injures. This is a white-lipped pit viper.

The king cobras are the biggest.

But scariest are the monocled cobras, which hiss.

The snake handlers stand around in wellington boots and go just near enough to the snakes to cause them to rear up and display their naga hoods, to hiss and occasionally to strike. Then the handlers have to grab them to put them back in their box; that takes real skill and occasionally a handler will get bitten and perhaps lose a finger.

I was in the front row, very close to the snakes, and they advised us to stay still…

They also showed us an Asiatic rat snake, a copperhead rat snake and a Burmese python. These are not venomous. There is a project to increase the numbers of rat snakes in the rice fields because they eat rats (as do the farmers). I think the snake I handled in the Mekong delta was a Burmese python.

For some reason Australia has ended up with the most poisonous animals. It has the four most poisonous snakes in the world; the most poisonous spider (the funnelweb, at its most poisonous in central Sydney); and the most poisonous jellyfish (the box jellyfish).

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Monday was a yellow day in Bangkok. Perhaps half of the locals wear yellow T-shirts with the national crest on the breast. People here are hugely royalist and they sincerely love their king. (If any don’t, they stay quiet: it would be like professing Catharism at the Vatican.) They also wear orange plastic wrist bands inscribed with ‘Long Live the King’. On Monday a lot of yellow-shirted people came to Siam Square to participate in a demonstration against the Electoral Committee, which they say is corrupt.

Tuesday was a largely pink day.

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On Sunday night as I wandered towards the Metro I smelt elephant. I’ve obviously learnt something on this trip.

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Sad but true: one of the most popular products on sale in pharmacies in Thailand, as in Vietnam, is whitening lotion. For Thais, the paler the skin, the better. Most westerners want a tan. We all want to be cafe latte.

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I asked the nice guy who sold me a replacement mobile (I’ve lost all my contacts, by the way) about the cheap i-pods. ‘Made in China’ he said. But do they work? ‘Yes. For a few months.’ I’ve bought one to replace one that disappeared in Sapa, but I can’t make it work. My Chinese isn't good enough.

I flew back to Bangkok on Friday the Thirteenth. I'm staying in the shopping district and agonising over whether to splash out on a digital SLR. Given the number of photos I take I think it ought to be done, but the prices here are comparable to those on line in London, and I wouldn't trust a warranty. I'll probably wait until Singapore.

Some things jump out after Vietnam:

• they drive on the left.
• no-one uses the horn.
• most people wear shoes instead of flip-flops.
• the Thais – at least the affluent in the shopping centres – are significantly fatter than the Vietnamese. Coconut milk, second only to polar bear milk in fat content, may have something to do with it.
• the watches and clothes on sale in the Siam Paragon are genuine! More interesting is MBK, which is like an indoor market with a younger clientele. Some of the shops on the periphery of the floor sell an 8GB i-pod nano for the official price of 7,590 baht. The stalls in the middle purport to sell the same thing for 1,000-2,000 baht - less than the price of 8GB of flash memory. How can both co-exist in the same market? The answer must be heterogeneous consumers who select themselves into different price bands. For the separating equilibrium to sustain itself in the face of such a price disparity, the cheaper product must be significantly inferior. Which means it can’t be the real thing: a fake, with pirated software. I intend to find out.
  

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The USSR under Gorbachev began to reduce aid to Vietnam in the late 1980s. It dried up completely in 1991. Around that that time the joke went as follows

Message from the USSR to Vietnam: “prepare to tighten belts”. The reply: “send belts”.

On which subject, I am reminded of a remark I once heard attributed to JM Keynes, although I have not been able to find it since.

There are two ways to tighten your belt. One, tighten your belt. Two, eat more.

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More French words in Vietnamese:

• Pho mai, cheese
• Ga, station.
  

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I hope someone will tell me if I’ve mentioned this before on the blog; I am becoming increasingly confused between conversations and the blog. Who Wants to be a Millionaire airs in Vietnam (and in Thailand). One of the questions had the following answers: (a) tau, (b) tau, (c) tau, (d) tau. The words were differentiated only by tone.

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In northern Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and southern Vietnam, it is the rainy season. Most days, it rains heavily for about an hour a day; the rest of the time it may be cloudy or sunny. Yet almost every day the BBC weather forecast for Saigon and Bangkok gives 'rain' as the predominant weather feature. Rain for an hour a day is not a predominant feature; nor is a forecast a useful guide to conduct when it says the same thing every day.

On our way between Chiangs Mai and Khong we stopped for lunch outside Chiang Rai - which is, incidentally, in the Golden Triangle. Over the road was Wat Rong Khun, a modern wat, designed and built by an artist by the name of Chalermchai Kositpipat. Construction began in 1998 and is nearly complete.

It is a modern take on an old theme, and unique in Thailand in being all white; it looks as if it was carved from sugar candy.

The bot is one of the less rectilinear buildings I have seen.

The finials look like winged elephants. Species mixes are common in Buddhism, as in Greek and Rowlingian mythology.

To get into the bot, you have to walk over a bridge guarded by a couple of spirits. Demonic hands stretch out from below.

The walls of the bot contain a representation of “an escape from the defilements of temptation”. It’s uncannily like a Last Judgment, which Buddha in the place where Jesus would be. The style is sci-fi art. Darth Vader appears. There is a plane crashing into the Twin Towers (its position in the picture implies opprobrium, not glorification).

Did I mention taking an elephant ride in Chiang Mai a couple of weeks ago? I don’t think I did. We got to Chiang Mai early in the morning and while some of the group went off to a cookery class, Rae and I took a minibus to an elephant reserve outside Chiang Mai. We spent about an hour perched on top of a balding forty-something elephant as it strolled around the nearby landscape.

It’s not a comfortable way to travel, and it was unbelievably hot. We had both pointlessly brought rucksacks with us, as well as cameras. We had bought bunches of bananas too, to feed the elephant. I ended up covered in banana as the bunches disintegrated in my lap. Elephant power consumption must run well into the kilowatts, so they can eat an endless number of bananas. They also get through 40 or 50 kg of feed a day.

Elephants are a bit of a problem in Thailand. They used to carry loads, provide power, and function as tanks in battles; now all that is done mechanically. You see small elephants sometimes in the streets of Bangkok and Chiang Mai. This is, obviously, not their natural environment. Their keepers ask for money for the elephants, but then abandon the elephants when they get too big. Inevitably, these abandoned elephants cause problems. So the advice is not to give to these people.

Quite often our elephant would stop and lift its trunk, demanding bananas. So long as we had any, Rae would oblige. It was a long reach forward.

Occasionally the elephant would stop altogether and trumpet.

There are all sorts of words for elephant in Thai, for immature female, mature female, mature male and so on. The only one I can remember, other than Chang (which is a brand of beer with a picture of an elephant on the front) is Phan, an immature female. This is Phan Dii, an 8-year old female.

I'm joining the tour to Laos this evening and I don't know how much blogging I'll be doing in the next couple of weeks.

Here are some photos which I don't have the time to link to any narrative.

Escalators at MBK

Siam Paragon Centre

Walkway to MBK Centre

Chao Praya and the Peninsula Hotel from Saphan Thaksin

Traffic outside Chatuchak Park

Puppies on sale at Chatuchak Market

Food stall on Thanon Sukhumvit

Small child encouraging a dependency culture, Sanam Luang

Kites in Sanam Luang