Thailand

I have passed through Bangkok four times now. I love the place. It has a great variety of districts: the backpacker haven of Khao San Road; the splendour of Rattanakosin; the air-conditioned shopping paradise near Siam Square; the bustling insanity of Chinatown. And that is not to mention places that are simply conventionally Thai, like Thonburi. I love the fact that, like London, the river is at its heart and the most convenient way to get around is usually by ferry.

The most interesting tourist location is the Grand Palace. It is still used for royal occasions, but the royal family actually live in Dusit. Within the enormous grounds – the perimeter is over a mile in length - is the Wat Phra Kaeow, which houses the holiest Buddha in the land. Take the Wat Phra Kaeow and the Grand Palace, Wat Po and Wat Arun and you have a trinity of beautiful Thai temples.

I was surprised to find that they were not on the UNESCO World Heritage List. In my view they are far more impressive than, say, George Town and Melaka.

There are 878 sites on the UNESCO list, skewed considerably towards Europe. Greece has about 20, the UK has 27 (I’ve been to 11 or 12), the USA a surprisingly low 20, Italy 42 (I’ve been to 13).

I have not deliberately collected them, but have nevertheless visited 12 of the 22 in the region.

In Indonesia (out of 7):
• Borobudur
• Komodo National Park
• Prambanan

Malaysia (out of 3)
• Kinabalu National Park
• Historic Cities of the Straits of Malacca

Thailand (out of 5)
• Ayutthaya
• Sukhothai

Laos (out of 2)
• Luang Prabang

Vietnam (out of 5)
• Hạ Long Bay
• Huế
• Hội An
• Mỹ Sơn.

Wat Phra Kaeow was built towards the end of the eighteenth century. The capital of southern Thailand had been in Ayutthaya, to the north of Bangkok. In 1766 the Burmese army besieged the place, and after heroic but doomed resistance, the city fell in 1767. The Burmese sacked it conscientiously. The king escaped but is said to have starved to death ten days later, and that was the end of the Ayutthayan dynasty. One of the generals, though, Taksin, had seen the writing on the wall beforehand, sneaked out of the city with a few friends and headed for Chanthaburi, on the coast near Cambodia. From there he regrouped, convoked an army and evicted the Burmese, for good, out of the whole of Siam including the north. Naturally, he became a king, and he put one of his mates on the throne of the northern kingdom of Lan Na, based in Chiang Mai, which became a client kingdom. Taksin had his capital in Thonburi, in Bangkok but on the west bank of the river.

Over the years Taksin became more and more paranoid and was overtaken by delusions of grandeur, even divinity. Once he said “we are a grandmother” there was a coup. It is a great sin to spill royal blood, so he was tied up in a bag and humanely clubbed to death instead. Or someone was; there are rumours that the understudy got to play Taksin for the day. The throne was handed to another of the heroes of 1767, General Chakri. He founded the dynasty that exists today, and is now usually known as Rama I. (Thailand has inherited a dilute version of the Khmer/Cham idea of devaraja, the divinity of the king. Calling yourself after an avatar of a god helps.) The current king is Rama IX.

It was Rama I who moved the capital to Rattanakosin, on the east bank. Being in effect an island between a river and a canal, it was more defensible. Naturally, he had to build a palace, administrative quarters and a temple. The palace complex was built from 1782 onwards.

The Emerald Buddha was discovered in Chiang Rai, almost on the border with Laos and Burma, in 1434. It was covered in plaster, and it was only when some plaster fell off after an accident that the abbot realised what was inside: a little emerald Buddha. Actually, it isn’t emerald; it is jadeite, one of the two types of jade (the other being nephrite).

The image was taken to Lamphang, in north Thailand, at the insistence of the elephant supposed to be carrying the image to Chiang Mai. It was kept there for thirty years and was eventually taken to Chiang Mai, where it was enshrined in the Wat Chedi Luang for eighty years. In the sixteenth century there was a gap in succession, and an unknown German prince was invited over to be king. (Actually a Lao prince called Setthathirath.) He did not spend very long in Chiang Mai before succeeding to his father’s throne and taking the Emerald Buddha to Luang Prabang with him.

Rama I managed to get the Emerald Buddha back from Vientiane in 1778 – in Bush style, by conquering Laos - and he needed to build a temple to house it. So he ordered the construction of a temple, in good Ayutthayan style naturally, and this is the Wat Phra Kaeow. Indeed, the architecture of Rattanakosin is a faithful copy of Ayutthayan style.

The wat complex is guarded by yakshas.

The bot is surrounded by hundreds of garudas holding nagas.

The Emerald Buddha sits on a multi-tiered wooden throne nine metres high. His golden clothes are ceremoniously changed by the king or a representative three times a year: for the wet season, the dry season and the cold season. It is now the cold season and the Buddha is well wrapped up. (The term 'cool season' is relative, since the average daily maximum temperature is only three degrees or so below that during the hot season, but the difference is perceptible, particularly at night. I have been waking up feeling chilly.)

Walk or float anywhere around Rattanakosin and the spires of Wat Phra Kaeow dominate the skyline. The most visible spires are those of the three buildings of the upper terrace, next to the bot that houses the Emerald Buddha.

The golden spike on the upper terrace is the Phra Si Rattana Chedi, built by Rama IV. (Phra, as far as I can tell, means, holy, and prefixes the names of all sorts of people, buildings and statues.) It is a direct copy of a wat in Ayutthaya (I forget which), and, being a chedi, houses holy relics of the Buddha, in this case a fragment of the holy sternum. Judging by the number of stupas, he possessed a remarkable anatomy.

In the middle is a square syringe called a Mondop. Built by Rama I, it houses the Tripitaka, the Buddhist scriptures. It is never open.

The third large building on the upper terrace is the Royal Pantheon. It looks like a Thai bot with a Khmer prang stuck on top of it. Inside the Pantheon are exactly life-sized statues of the kings of the Chakri dynasty, but it is seldom open.

Visible from the upper terrace is a line of nine porcelain prangs. Here are three.

One of the smaller chedis is very photogenic, being surrounded by demon and monkey caryatids.

The oldest buildings in the palace complex are the Dusit Maha Prasat throne hall and the Phra Maha Monthian Audience Hall.

The Dusit Maha Prasat is an audience hall, built in 1790. It houses the original throne, and is used for lying in state. The body is embalmed and may have to wait in the hall for a year or two before being cremated on a special day. The king’s older sister was cremated recently nearly a year after her death.

The Phra Maha Monthian, built in 1785, was the king’s residential complex. There is an audience hall at the front, where the king gives his birthday speech. The king has to spend the first night after his coronation in this palace.

Between the two building complexes is a newer building, the Chakri Maha Prasat, known to Thais as the farang in a Thai hat. It was built in 1882 under the great Chulalongkorn, Rama V. Chulalongkorn had been educated in a western tradition – his father, Mongkut, was the king of the entirely unhistorical The King and I, still banned in Thailand - and was doing his best to retain his country’s independence while taking what he could of western technology, particularly in the fields of medicine and warfare. He wanted a neoclassical building and retained an English architect, but other members of his family demurred. They compromised and added a Thai roof.

On duty at the front are a pair of guards, unsmiling and immobile like those at St James's. Except a bit shorter.

It used to be the site of the elephant stables and there are statues where the tethering posts used to be.

The first time I visited, I did not manage to see much of the palace buildings, as it came on to pour tropically.

Rama I, who began the building of the palace, also took the Ramayana and turned it into an epic poem in Thai, called the Ramakien. In Thailand you are usually told that Rama I did it; in fact he wrote the poem in exactly the same way that King James translated the Bible into English. It runs to 3,000 pages. The Ramakien has become the national epic, due partly no doubt to the fact that the king promoted it. Around the walls of his new wat he had the Ramakien painted.

The frieze, first painted over two hundred years ago, is substantially renovated every fifty years, but it is constantly being painted like the Forth Bridge. (Actually, the Forth Bridge is no longer painted constantly. We need a new simile.) It is great fun to walk around, if completely baffling. There are verse inscriptions for each panel, in Thai naturally. Even if you know the Ramayana, the Ramakien frieze is a bit different. Many of the characters, for example, have different names, and Hanuman plays a greater role in the Thai version:

Rama is Ram in the Thai version
Ravana is Thotsakan
Sita is Sida
Sugriwa is Sukhreep
Lakshmana is Lak, and so on.

The paintings are vibrant, with plenty of gold leaf. There is no perspective and usually no horizon. There are a lot of towns; despite the fact that the story is set elsewhere, the architecture of the towns is very detailed and entirely Thai. The frieze is extremely imaginative and often bloody.

And among the heroics are everyday scenes. These monkeys are playing ta kraw with a light rattan ball. It is also seen around Indonesia and is played at the SE Asian Games. There are several versions, but the one you see most often is like volleyball for the feet. I saw a good match in Rantepao, Tana Toraja. Skill levels were amazing, particularly when it came to the smash, or spike.

A chariot.

The monkeys punish their prisoners.

Rama shoots; he scores.

Sita says: talk to the hand.

Hanuman turns himself into a bridge.

Kumbakarna turns himself into a dam, in order to block the water supplies of Rama's army.

Sugriwa breaks the Pichai Molee parasol.

Hanuman chats up Suphanmacha.

Hanuman puts Rama's pavilion in his mouth, but doesn't inhale.

I did not take advantage of all that Chiang Mai has to offer – I'm not referring to the go-go bars – because I’ve been in jobseeking mode. I didn’t go to Doi Inthanon National Park, for example, or visited the wats in Lamphun. So my memories of the place will not be as pleasant as they might have been. I could try to turn back into a tourist for the time left on the trip – which may not be long – but I decided it would be easier to go somewhere else and reinvent myself as a tourist there.

I made a mistake siting myself right in the tourist zone by the Tha Phae gate at the eastern edge of the old town. None of the local restaurants serve real Thai food. It would be better to stay right in the middle of the old town, or to the east of it near the Ping river, or to the west near the university.

Yesterday I gave khao soi another go, prompted by Adam, a friend from old job. Khao soi and raw sausages are the two dishes for which Chiang Mai is most known. I had eaten it a couple of times and it had been a perfectly pleasant egg noodle soup with a sauce tasting like yellow curry. Yesterday I walked to a place on the outskirts of town and tried the khao soi there. It was brown, rather than yellow, with very little coconut cream in it. The dish originally came from Burma, which is not too far away, and this version was probably more authentic, since it tasted like an Indian curry. In fact, tasting blind, I would have said it was a mulligatawny. The sausages were fantastic though.

As I munched and slurped a funeral passed. First in the procession came the saffron monks. Then walked the funeral group, in black. Some of them dragged the wooden funeral pavilion, twelve foot tall and ornately decorated. In front of the coffin lay a photograph of the dead woman. Pavilion and coffin would be burnt shortly afterwards. And behind the pavilion came a car with enormous speakers strapped to the roof, blaring tuneless music.

Yesterday lunch: a cheese and pickle sandwich. Just as good.

I went to the zoo in the afternoon. It is potentially a very good zoo, but is marred by the inadequate map and useless signposting. I spent most of the time walking down roads not seeing animals. The aquarium is OK, but not really worth the money.

Last night I went to a place called The Pub and had a pie and chips. Then I joined the pub quiz, playing with John and Peter from Salisbury. All the teams were amazingly homogeneous: middle-aged men. All the teams got four or five on music and nine on history. We won, though, and were given two 500 baht vouchers. One came to me and the other to the other two. I spent my voucher and they spent theirs. It was only afterwards that I realised that I had spent half of the prize for three people.

This was, I can only think, the result of a heuristic called ‘anchoring and alcohol’. The people who first identified it were Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two intellectual heroes of mine. Kahneman, a psychologist, received a Nobel prize in economics a few years back; Tversky would have done too but he was dead. (The Nobels do not go to dead people, otherwise surely Rosalind Franklin would have got one.) They called it the ‘anchoring and adjustment’ heuristic. To oversimplify, once you have thought of a number, it is hard to think of anything else. Once I was given a plastic 500 baht card, it became mine, even though the allocation was unfair. That’s my excuse anyway.

I have been agonising for several days over whether to go to Cambodia or southern Thailand. Before setting off I would have said that there were two places I definitely wanted to visit: Angkor and Sarawak. In the event I haven’t made it to either.

Nevertheless I think I am going to head south. The problem is that I do not know when the trip comes to an end. This may be my last ten days travelling, and I want to enjoy them to the maximum. That means doing what I most enjoy: diving and looking at animals. And after travelling up to Chiang Mai via Ayutthaya and Sukhothai I am sick to death of wats, temporarily I hope. And tired of travelling, actually. Alternatively, I could just stay in Bangkok and concentrate on gastronomy.

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In Our Time has broadcast a four-programme special on Darwin, in honour of the bicentennial. I can’t wait to listen to it. You don’t hear anything about Darwin in this part of the world. Newton and Shakespeare aren't so big either.

Fire spiny eels.

Brown lemurs.

Leopard shark.

Silver pheasant

Indian roller.

White-cheeked gibbon.

Musicians at the Sunday Market.

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I have put together a job application or two (male model and president for life of Uzbekistan, since you ask). Reviewing my old CVs, I am encouraged to discover that I invented penicillin, the safety pin and the internet and brought peace to millions.

To the west of the old city is a wildly eccentric museum called Insect World. It is run by Manop Rattanarithikul, who is in his mid-seventies. It all started when he was employed as a collector, paid 12 baht a day, for the Malaria and Filariasis Control of Thailand project, run by the US Army. In time he grew to like mosquitoes. He would catch them by allowing them to land on his arm; when they had to be kept alive, he would keep them in a box with holes that were small enough to prevent escape but large enough to allow the mosquitoes to feed on his arm. Not surprisingly, he has had malaria many times.

He went to university in Bangkok, where he met his wife Rampa. She too became a mosquito taxonomist and then a medical entomologist. They both spent the summer of 1965 at the Smithsonian Institue in DC as mosquito taxonomists. Manop eventually went off to practise law but Rampa remained a taxonomist and has, since 1961, identified 436 mosquitoes in Thailand, including 18 new species. There are about 3,000 species in the world. She completed a PhD at Kobe University in 1996.

The entrance is crammed with wooden objects carved by the action of water or by termites. It’s not hugely interesting. The room at the back is devoted to mainly mosquitoes, and partly to butterflies and beetles. Manop loves mosquitoes to well beyond the point of lunacy. “The mosquito bites to remind you of good spirits relations,” he says. “She wishes everybody to love and care for each other.”

He says she, of course, because the males do not suck blood. They live instead on tree sap or flower nectar. He is at pains to emphasise that only ten of the 436 species are disease vectors. The diseases spread by mosquitoes include malaria (by genus Anopheles), dengue fever (by Aedes species), Japanese encephalitis (by genus Culex), and Filariasis (by species of the genus Mansonia). Filariasis is also known as elephant foot, and produces extraordinary swelling of the lower limbs and often of the external genitalia. Nasty. Fortunately the chances of someone in good health developing the disease after being bitten are 1 in 500,000.

Only three hundred people a year actually die of malaria in Thailand, which is nothing from an African perspective. The government’s longstanding malaria prevention project has been fairly successful. On the other hand, in 2007 there were 58,836 cases of dengue fever in Thailand.

They have examples of the mosquito species pinned behind glass – although there are also a lot of live, hungry mosquitoes in the museum. I have been much bothered, in Indonesia especially, by a fairly large mosquito which flies swiftly enough that it is difficult to smack. It bites repeatedly in one meal and the bites swell a fair bit. Its limbs are striped black and white like Cat in the Hat’s stovepipe hat (except that’s red and white). I couldn’t find it in the collection.

Manop also paints, in a common Thai style, using garish Hyde Park Corner colours. Mosquitoes are in all of the paintings, often feeding on humans. He is on the mosquitoes’ side.

Upstairs there is a rather more orthodox collection of insects, mainly butterflies, moths and beetles (estimates vary enormously, but there are thought to be 180,000 species of Lepidoptera and 290,000 of Coleoptera, so they are the two largest orders of insects). The beetles and butterflies of southeast Asia, as Wallace found, are truly outlandish. (This is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Wallace’s esteemed colleague Charles Darwin.) There are hundreds of specimens of his longhorn beetles in the museum. These are scarabs.

This is a weevil that much resembles a weevil illustrated in The Malay Archipelago.

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In Bangkok large numbers of middle-aged men are walking around with Thai girls or boys. They are not all married. A large proportion of tourists travelling from Europe to Thailand come for sex, and they go to Bangkok and Pattaya. Or so I thought. But Chiang Mai is also full of such temporary couples.

I went to the Night Market last night and on the way I saw where these couples meet. The street leading to the market is lined with bars and restaurants. The girls sit out the front of the bars and greet every male passerby. You can’t go into one of these bars for a quiet drink. There are also a couple of gogo bars with shows.

I assume they are girls, anyway. You can never tell in Thailand. On Saturday night I saw lots of ladyboys out on the town and dressed to kill. As is often observed, they have great legs.

I didn’t find the market especially interesting. There are lots of stalls selling items largely of limited quality, as at home. I’m not in the market for cushion covers, woven cloth bags or wooden boxes. It would be different if were a girl or collected knick-knacks. It’s a sign that I have been to too many markets.

As in Bangkok, tiny Hmong (or Yao?) women wander around trying to sell wooden objects that make a noise like a frog.

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My blog has now had 45,000 visits.

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The day before visiting the Museum I attended a cookery course at the Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School. It was very well organised, as it needed to be with 19 of us (the school operates seven days a week, and at that rate makes weekly revenues of £2,700, which goes a long way in Thailand).

There were three demonstrators, who took turns, and owner and TV chef Sompon Nabnian. We cooked and ate six dishes and got a recipe book at the end of it.

There is nothing difficult about Thai cookery, but I have not cooked a thing in over nine months and found it difficult even to put together a phad thai (the only boring dish in Thailand, which all the tourists eat). We also made tom yam gung, gaeng kheo wan gai (green curry), laab gai, tord man plaa (fish cakes) and tab tim grob (water chestnuts in coconut milk). Lao cookery is almost identical – Isaan and Lao cultures are much the same – but on the Lao cookery course we used MSG, or chicken stock as a substitute. Here we used palm sugar instead, which as well as tasting sweet and slightly spicy, contains glutamates. It’s a better solution.

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Dhammachakra flags and votive pendants at a wat in Chiang Mai.

And an alien.

As I mentioned a week ago, I have returned to the land of wais and smiles, and popular protests against democracy. I had expected that the trouble in Bangkok, the temporary closure of Bangkok’s airport, and the negative travel advice from foreign ministries around the world might have reduced the number of tourists, but I cannot see any fall. There are more tourists in Bangkok and in Chiang Mai than in the whole of Indonesia, bar Bali.

Anyone who knows me will realise that there is no danger of being my caught in a fire in a nightclub, thank goodness. I am back in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, in a pleasant café called Daily Delight. I was here for a night back in March, but never got to enter the old town. First impressions of Chiang Mai are merely moderate. It seems like Khao San Road but with nicer cafes. So far, I would say Ubud is far classier; but I haven’t been to the museums yet.

But the food is good here. I haven’t written about food in a while. A lunch in Bangkok, on the banks of the Chao Praya river: fried rice with crispy fish, spring onion and galangal and a salad of cold oysters, prawns and squid with slices of raw garlic and a lime and chilli sauce. Nothing extraordinary, but very nice. Lunch on the banks of the same river in Ayutthaya, crispy catfish and mango salad, and pickled Thai sausage. Lunch yesterday: a creamy curry noodle soup called khao soi, followed by hot bananas in coconut milk. There is a lot of variety in Thai food: the curries and soups are familiar, but the stir-fries and spicy salads are less so. And the raw, fermented sausages entirely so.

I have decided to stop here for a while. There is plenty to do – wats, cookery courses, trekking – but more importantly I need to put a CV together and start applying for jobs, and this is as good a place as any. The process of reviewing my 'career' and completing application forms is extremely aversive, and I have been indulging in lots of displacement activities, such as uploading photos to flickr.

The Thais have their own (lunar) new year, but they also celebrate our Gregorian Tết with enthusiasm. (Incidentally, the original meaning of Tết in Vietnamese is a growth notch in a bamboo stem, and it can be applied to any festival.) Fireworks play a big role, of course – not least because there are plenty of Chinese people in Thailand – but there is one lovely tradition that I have not seen before.

People carry large transparent plastic bags to the banks of the old town’s moat. When opened out they are squat cylinders with the bottom end open. To the open end is affixed a candle, and once the air in the sac has expanded, the balloon ascends. Releasing them is a silent act, individually meaningless but beautiful in aggregate, a far more refined tradition than our own crass, pet-torturing, look-at-me-fuck-you technicolour squibs.

The miniature Montgolfier machines drift slowly heavenwards, reaching hundreds of feet or more. Those near the ground are clouds of amber jellyfish. Upon rising they shrink to points, and last night the celestial hemisphere had new, ever-shifting constellations of orange orbs. The Chinese no doubt see dragons everywhere; I saw the cities of the northern hemisphere in polar projection.

(I later spoke to some tourists who had been in Luang Prabang over the new year, and that said that they do the same thing there.)

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A less wonderful tradition is one of many Asian viruses, karaoke. In my room in Chiang Mai my ears were assailed by the worst singing I have ever heard – two women who manage to miss the correct notes, and each others', by every possible margin, including the maximum (probably a fifth, if you think logarithmically).

As the old year died I was watching Quantum of Solace on my laptop: a fairly poor movie with a poor title (Fleming's own), but Daniel Craig was terrific.

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One of the relatively few tourists I met in the Bandas was a French-Pyrenean who went by the name of Ganesh. He imports goods from India and sells them in markets. He has tattoos of Ganesh, but he looks more like Rasputin.

Anyway, he is very well travelled, and he told me that Muslim women in Indonesia undergo “female circumcision”, which is against the law in many western countries.

I was not sure whether to believe it, but sure enough the Ulema Council of Indonesia said in 2006 that female circumcision is “necessary” for Muslims. It “cleans the filth from the genitals” said a spokesman, H Amidhan. According to this article in the New York Times, 96% of Muslim women in Indonesia have been cut. It’s amazing. Most people know that many African women are circumcised, but fewer know what happens in Asia. It’s important to note that apparently circumcision in Indonesia is a ritual, er, prick with a needle or removal of the prepuce only, but one of the aims is apparently to reduce libido, which presumably works by making intercourse painful.

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A last reading list of 2008:

The Last Templar, Raymond Khoury. Sub-Brown: very bad in every way.
Un Uomo di Altri Tempi, #115 in the series 'Julia: Le Avventure di una Criminologa', by Giancarlo Berardi. A noir (giallo) comic series; discovered, surprisingly, in Banda.
Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd.
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak.
The Daughters of Cain, Colin Dexter
Indonesian Banda, Willard A Hanna
Empire of the Sun, J G Ballard.
Festival for All the Dead, Colin Dexter.
Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, Penguin Classics edition
Ever After, Graham Swift.
Disco for the Departed, Colin Cotterill. Third in the delightful Dr Siri series.
Mr Clarinet, Nick Stone.

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.