Thailand

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.

According to the 2007 economic review of the Bangkok Post, less than one in six of Thailand's labour force paid income tax. 10% of these taxpayers paid 90% of the income tax.

So it's not surprising that Thai politics is dominated by various kinds of 'populism' - that is, policies dominated by pork barrel programmes. The wonder of it all is that Thailand is running both a small fiscal surplus and a fairly large current account surplus.

Room to expand the tax base is limited, however. 49% of the population works in argiculture, producing just 10% of GDP. Average monthly income in agriculture is around £60 a month, so there's little to tax. Incomes in financial intermediation and education pay six times as much, and the multinationals over twenty.

In R v Brown (1993), the House of Lords imposed criminal sanctions on certain sincerely consenting sexual acts between adults. An illiberal milestone. The court of ultimate error decided that the acts constituted violence and not were not solely within the sexual field; and it added that if actual bodily harm was inflicted deliberately, consent was no defence. The fact that the acts were homosexual may not have been irrelevant to their Lordships' distaste. The acts were certainly eye-watering: pouring hot wax down the urethra and nailing one's member to the table are the two that I remember, indeed cannot forget.

Given the choice between the acts of R v Brown and the trip I have just finished, I would choose the trip. But only just. The first leg, to Bahrain, was fine, the second leg rendered dreadful by a pair of sociopathic Frenchmen. I have now been awake for 25 hours and have yet to check into my room. The taxi driver spotted me as a basket case, didn't switch the metre on and made up an outrageous price.

While waiting for the room to become ready I wandered round MBK, which is great. (I only just resisted the urge to buy a new camera, knowing that I am at the moment incapable of rational thought.) I may spend the week there. Food is sold on every floor of the emporium. For breakfast I had some crispy pork with rice for 60p. (In my disassociated state I automatically added chilli sauce and chillies, which was unwise.) Which is just as well, because I can't get any money out of the ATMs.

But it's great to be here, after weeks of hassle. The culture shock is less than I got in Naples. So far.

This afternoon will hold a trip back to MBK to see Jumper, more grazing, and then a very early night.

By the sound of it, Bangkok is a Chicago economist's perfervid fantasy: everything is available, for a price. So there's no need to pack medicines, for example.

And everyone knows that the gravest sin is to overpack. But I always do, because I take books. Books are, as Savonarola insisted, a burning issue.

The dilemma is particularly severe on this trip, because I could take a number of guidebooks (the yellow Lonely Planet weighs as much as a late Harry Potter), and there are all sorts of other books that I'm only ever likely to read while generously leisured, swinging in a hammock (to take some ambitious examples from my shelves, Karl Popper The Open Society and its Enemies; two books on financial mathematics; James Joyce Ulysses; Gibbon Decline and Fall, unabridged; Zoe Oldenbourg The World is Not Enough; A Book of Middle English; etc).

English books are available on the road, but they are a) very expensive or b) fairly expensive, second-hand, and rubbish (Cherish Your Inner Tree). What Is To Be Done?

Soon, the answer will be to take an e-book, the book equivalent of an i-pod. I looked at various e-ink devices:
- Amazon Kindle. Looks great. Uses a 3G network, so can be used to download content anywhere. Anywhere with an NFL franchise, that is. Not sold outside the US.
- Readius by Polymer Vision. Features a screen that rolls up, 4 GB memory, 10-day battery life, 5 inches across the diagonal when unrolled. It has both USB and mobile phone functionality. Unlike Kindle, it will operate almost worldwide, using 3G network. It weighs only 115g! Will also play MP3 files and audio books. The downside: it will be launched in the third quarter of the year at a cost comparable to an i-phone.
- The Sony PRS-500 Reader is an ageing e-book reader in the US. More recently, Sony introduced the PRS-505. Neither has wireless or 3G functionality, and neither is available in the UK. End of research.
- Sony LIBRIé. This is a Japanese language reader. It can be hacked for other languages, but that's beyond me. And it's getting on.
- Hanlin eReader by Jinke, a Chinese company, which allegedly also calls it the i-book. Retails for $325. Also sold in Turkey as the WalkBook, $310. Nothing to suggest it's available in the UK, which for electronics companies is a small island off Africa.
- Cybook Gen3 by Bookeen. At least this is sold in the UK. It costs £245 direct from bookeen but is currently sold out. Weighs 174g, with USB connection.
- iRex Technologies iLiad Reader. Also available in the UK. This comes with a stylus and you can annotate PDFs, with some difficulty it seems. USB or Ethernet. At £377 + VAT, it's very expensive.

It's too soon to take one travellling, it seems. Right now, they cost a lot and have low connectivity. It's not worth spending several hundred pounds to avoid the burden of carrying a few books. So the answer at the moment is to give up, or even, at a pinch, to mail books to Bangkok. In fact I've compromised and downloaded quite a lot of free content from Project Gutenberg. It has thousands of classics, although they're generally in old editions or old translations, like Wordsworth Classics but costing even less. I'm considering taking my laptop with me for various reasons. Even if I do, I don't suppose I'm going to want to read much on it, because reading from a small backlit LCD screen is hard on the eyes (this is the motivation behind the beautiful nanotechnology that is e-ink). I do, though, have some good stuff in fun-size quanta: Aesop, Arabian Nights, Boccaccio, Sherlock Holmes, Saki, Wodehouse. I'm looking forward to these.