Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
New fun and games. Flickr now has videos and I once again have a compact camera that takes them so…
Now Introducing: Real Live Video!
My first day cycling after leaving Bangkok.
And at the end of the day…
(The local air-con bus picked up me and my bike no problem and to my complete and total surprise charged me nilch! Nada. Zero!)
That night I realized I had a visa issue (see Thai Visa tirade/update below) and only got to cycle around town the next day while waiting for a train. Nice town though…
(Ended up hitching a ride with a German & Thai couple to Ranong from Chumpon, then going to Burma for a day and able to get a new 30-day Thai visa upon re-entry. If only someone besides the immigration office on the border itself could’ve told me the actual rules, it would’ve been a very simple process.)
For more photos of this adventure, see Thailand, Hua Hin to Chaiya slideshow.
May 18th, 2008 at 5:11 am
Hey!, I got an email from a guy who recognized the area in the first video… and he said those noisy water pump places are where they raise the cheap shrimp that I’ve been eating! Don’t think they’ll be running out soon… not even with my voracious appetite.
(He also has a PhD in biosciences and I really don’t know jack about that stuff - as revealed, haha - so thanks Morgan!)
May 18th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Just found out how the ‘comment’ thing works here at your marvelous website! At the risk of becoming the lurking weirdo, I do have to comment…
Of course, there’s always a chance that I’m very much wrong about the noisy water pits (in spite of the PhD, which actually is in the epidemiology of diseases; but, not those of shrimp!)! Making your own bubbles in a bathtub is likely easier (and requires less diesel) than keeping oxygen in the turbid waters of tropical ex-mangrove swamps now ponds/tanks… Yeah, we too felt guilty for a few days (over the recently departed mangroves… whither art they when the cyclones strike?), and ordered chicken instead in the night markets for a time. Didn’t last too long. You tend to get over it when the food tastes too good to be true! Just don’t mention the dreaded ‘white spot’ disease of shrimp while you’re on the road in Thailand or they’re likely to lynch you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_spot_syndrome
The virus (100% mortality in farmed shrimp) has turned many a southeast Asian: Thai (and, Viet) boomtown into a ghosttown over night. When we went through in 2000 there were several towns where it was clearly de rigeur to have that “I just lost a fortune” look (along with the empty Jack Daniels bottle in one’s hand).
June 2nd, 2008 at 8:35 am
Actually, as it always seems to happen… like when you learn a new word you see it everywhere… I shortly thereafter met a shrimp farm owner in Hua Hin (on the southern Thai coast) and continued to see them up and down the coast. Blissful ignorance in these matters however has releaved me of all guilt of consumption… :)