Thai Smiles, Part 40: At The Amphawa Floating Markets

Spring roll vending boat at the Amphawa Floating Market

Welcome back to the Thailand portion of the blog, everyone. Thanks for hanging in there while I was away.

Being back home is always a comfort on one level or another, but there's always a flurry of activity needed shortly after landing back on home turf, when I least feel like it. I'm sure most of you know that anything left undone is still waiting for us when we return. Not that it's any different at home on a daily basis; I've shouted at the dishes in the kitchen sink any number of times in hopes of them washing themselves, but so far that's proved a fool's errand.

Two weeks of mail lay in the basket. Most of it was bills, and some of it needed attention sooner rather than later, but a lot of it was just junk.  Tending to that is never a pleasant task, but it's part and parcel of being able to get away, I suppose, and I try to keep that in mind as I unpack, wash clothes and settle back into the regular routine.  Part of that is crawling into my own bed again, and regardless of where my travels have taken me and no matter how wonderful the trip was I'm always grateful for that.

I received an email from someone asking if we were ever going to get back to the Amphawa stories to wrap up my stay there, and it seems like a good time to do just that.  I'll post about another part of that getaway next, but let's ease back into things with some photos taken at the night market there.

The "Beauty Queen" collects donations with her friends

A girl sells satay sticks in a stall at the Amphawa night market

Dried peanuts, peas and beans - crunchy walk-away snacks

One Last Sunrise Before Heading Home

Dawn gives a rosy glow to the sky and ocean to the East. The lower Southern slope of Haleakalsa is visible at the middle left, coming down to the water

Haleakala means "the house of the sun" in the Hawaiian language, and the volcanic crater that is one half of the island of Maui is a tourist stop for many. The more adventurous make the 30-mile drive up the side of the volcano from Paia to see the sun rise over the massive crater from 10,000 feet - high enough to have some frost in the Winter months. Nobody packs cold weather clothing when going to Hawaii, so they stand and shiver in the dark as the sky lightens and the sun breaks over the far side of the crater, some wrapped in blankets they've swiped from their hotels and rentals to wrap themselves in.

I did no such thing this trip, having made the two hour drive up the severe switchbacks more than often enough over the years, thank you - so I contented myself with watching dawn from my lanai (balcony) early this morning.

Today will be a travel day; flying back to the mainland with a herd of farang, most weary from running about on their holidays in Hawaii, some sunburned and/or peeling, some still attired in their aloha wear - but very few really ready to leave the islands and head back to their everyday responsibilities, that's fairly certain.

Tomorrow will be a day of digging out from under email (and snail-mail) and I don't expect to be online to post a proper Friday entry, so odds are I'll see you back here on Monday and we'll continue from there.

Thanks for checking in the past couple of weeks. It's been nice to have you along.

Another Tropical Sunset

Another miserable day in paradise...

Surf's Up, Boys - Some Photos

No offense, but there are many other things I'd rather be doing here than composing a post... so here are some pictures I took yesterday.  The North side of the island here has the best exposure for the surf coming in off of the ocean, and as a result has the best spots to watch people of all ages riding the waves.

If the sunlight is right the water turns a beautiful aquamarine or turquoise blue that can be breathtaking when combined with the bright white of the froth caused by air being churned into it.

The surfer's cars line the roads near the vantage point I usually watch from, and they come hurrying along to where the rocky trail leads them down to the water, firmly holding their surf boards under their arms.  With the gusty winds that are almost always blasting away up there they need to keep them from acting as sails that could push them off balance and send them ass over tit down to the bottom, bouncing off of rocks along the way.

The waves in the pictures today are nowhere near competition height, but if you've ever lifted a five gallon/19 liter bucket of water you can understand the power behind a wall of water this size has.  Of course, the wave itself has no way of knowing how delicate the creatures are that attempt to skim along it's crescent face, and it obviously doesn't care.

Most of us are more than content to merely watch the show, or to walk down an easier path to the rocky ledges below and watch the water spraying up in the sunshine there.

Same Same, But Different! Part 9: Some Sugar In My Bowl

Sugar cane in Hawaii - same-same other tropical places

May 30th a year ago there was a post about processing (tao tan) the sap from sugar palms in a smaller roadside  place Southeast of Bangkok. While I was driving back home today here in Hawaii I thought of that story while cruising through thousands of acres of sugar cane and caught myself saying "same same, but different," as if I were hawking something from streetside in the Land of Smiles.

Along about the same time my nose caught the distinctive, almost sickly-sweet smell of recently burned sugar cane, and since there were no billowing clouds of smoke to signal immediate danger from doing so I followed a couple of dirt roads down to take a look-see.  

Lining these red-dirt roads were heaps of sugar cane, partially blackened by the fires that had been set a couple of days before to burn the drying leaves off of the seven- to eight-foot densely-planted fields of leafy stalks that normally sway and undulate like a green sea in the trade winds.  That in and of itself is an impressive sight when you're flying over them.

There's  around 20,000 thousand acres of it harvested in Hawaii each year, down from what seems to have been the high of 140,000 acres in 1940 - most likely because of the high amount of water needed to irrigate it and the environmental fallout, both figurative and literal.  That produces around 200,000 tons of sugar.  The latest figure I could find for Thailand (1996) was 62,000 tons.

Farmers stop watering the cane a few months before they intend to harvest it, and this allows the cane leaves to dry out, making it easier to burn - and burn it does.  If you're anywhere in the area you can see the dense, wide plumes of smoke rising into the sky, taking with it the ashes from the quick, wild burn.

A small amount of cane after a burn

The wind carries and spreads that around, and while it makes for some gorgeous sunsets that particulate matter is just as irritating for the lungs of some folks as the pollution in, say, Bangkok or somewhere in the countryside of Thailand; the sugar and rice fields often being burned off there at the end of the season, too. In addition to the smoke there's also what is sometimes called "black snow" here; bits of black ash that rain down wherever the breezes carry them - sometimes to the other side of the island or further.

The claw! The claw! - egrets watch the loading and look for food

After the cane leaves are burned away, it's bulldozed down into long, heaping rows that are then scooped up with a claw and loaded onto trucks, like the one below.  From there it's taken to a processing plant, where it's ground up and turned into raw sugar, molasses, brown sugar and the snow-white version you're used to seeing.

A loaded truck heads for the plant

A good 40 years ago I was in Mexico for a month and lived in a small town that was kept alive by virtue of a sugar processing factory a few kilometers away from the home I stayed in. When the wind was not in our favor you couldn't get away from the sweet smell of the plant. I'm reminded of that time so often while here in the islands, and it's a nice memory.

A old processing plant in Puunene, Hawaii - still up and running

Checking In From Paradise

Sunrise - while having coffee and waking up

Thanks for the good wishes, folks, but to save answering any more individual (but thoughtful) messages: I'm just staying a while in a favorite spot in Hawaii.  I've always disliked the somewhat snooty tone many people use when they talk about their "Summer home" or "little vacation place" so rather than risk sounding like a snob I didn't even try.  Sorry.

Early morning rain out over Molokini

I hadn't been back "home" here in a couple of years, and I was overdue in catching up on some basic maintenance, as well as some R-and-R time.  As much as I love Thailand, sometimes The Islands beckon - and this time I answered the siren's call.  We'll see if I'm dashed into the rocks, I guess.

Along with the food, the tropical feel to the place, the beaches and the guilty pleasure of being hidden away there's also the huge plus of an enormous Asian and Pacific Islander population.  As I've said before: sometimes you walk past the scenery, and sometimes the scenery walks past you - even at dusk while taking sunset photos...

Here's hoping all is well with you, wherever you are, and thanks again for checking up on me.  I'm fine, and I'll be back closer to my drives of Thailand photos in a short while. Meanwhile, I'll check in with photos from around here.

An egret flew by my table at brunch this morning

On The Beach

From the plane, before landing

This photo shows some of the more than six miles of relatively quiet beach I've been visiting since the late 1970s. It's familiar territory for me, and I probably feel at home because I am home; or at my second home, at least.

I tend to burn easily, so like in Thailand I walk more in the mornings and evenings, and I walk it a LOT. This visit has been no exception, and the rest of the days are spent doing some minor maintenance to the place, reading, visiting old haunts for lunch and doing some minor shopping.

Oh, yes - and often doing as close to nothing as possible. I need to get back to that now. Just thought I'd say hello.

Break Time, Folks

Nice sunset, isn't it? I'm hopefully going to seeing a lot more of them before I fly back to the mainland in a couple of weeks, and while I'm guessing I'll post some while I'm on here on vacation - after all, the blog's a hobby I have fun with, too - it's probably not going to be very regularly.

Face facts... given the choice between posting online or walking out along on this beach in front of my place here, which would you choose?

If you picked being online please seriously consider some sort of counselling!

See you here again soon.

Bangkok City View: The Big Picture vs The Details

A slice of Bangkok  - from 80+ floors to a single one.

From a vantage point above street level it's easier to see the vast differences in building structures in Bangkok, ranging from the 80+ floors of the taller Baiyoke tower to everyday businesses and homes on ground level. I was perhaps 10 floors up when I took the three photos above that are blended into one.

Naturally, landowners there inevitably have the final say on who or what inhabits the dirt they hold claim to, and because of that there are occasionally displacements of homes and businesses as a larger fish comes along to snap up the smaller ones. I don't recall what was sitting where the construction is going on in these pictures; maybe smaller shops, maybe houses.

My guess is that the building codes in Thailand fall somewhere to the left of "anything goes," but it's often interesting to see the juxtaposition of modern buildings and much simpler buildings. I suppose the phrase "money talks" has a lot to do with it.

It's always interesting to take time and explore the area you're visiting and notice how folks there live - at least, I think it's interesting. I'm well aware that there are visitors to Thailand who see nothing before dusk when they go on the prowl, but that's their loss. Give me a room with a view, a good zoom lens or compact set of binoculars and - with luck - a relatively clean window any day.

Take as an example the photo above. It's the lower right-hand corner of the larger stitched photo up top, but if you look closely you can see a microcosm of city life in Bangkok. It has almost everything but a 7-Eleven. Along with an oddly-angled city block crowned by a saffron-colored shopfront you have buildings with residences of varying stripes.

Rooftop gardens, clothes hanging outside of upper floor windows or enclosed in chain-link fenced areas that turn open-air space into living space, some of the ubiquitous silvery metal rooftop tanks - up where the sun can help heat the water held inside, and down on the street a bus and a small pick-up truck out making their rounds.

If you look closer you'll notice a man standing in the doorway of a shop, and to his left is what I believe is a casual restaurant on the corner.

Bangkok sidewalks being the grossly under-maintained horror show they often are you have to look where you're stepping, so if you're on the street walking you'd miss this insight to the area. It's for this reason alone that I encourage you to take time to really look out of the window in your room, wherever it is you stay. Not just at the view overall, but the detail within it.

[By the way, in addition to the somewhat odd angle the blending software gave to the green-screened construction in the top image there's something unusual in one of today's pictures; something I added myself that wasn't in the original image.  Clicking on the images to enlarge them will probably help.  Can you spot it?]

Answer: In the middle (vertical) photo there's a guy leaning on a post on the 4th floor from the top, next to the red vertical metalwork - and the identical man on the 5th floor from the top, and another on the 6th from the top, and still another one on the 7th from the top. Looks like Where's Waldo has nothing on me!

"Putting The Boys To Bed"

"Time to stop work and rest?" I'd asked a man who was collapsing umbrellas on the North end of Pattaya Beach. "Yes," he replied, not missing a stroke as he moved along the line of them along the sand. "Putting the boys to bed!" It was one of those times I wished I spoke more Thai or he spoke more English, as I was curious to know where he'd heard the expression.

Watching him it was clear he'd done this a thousand times; perhaps ten thousand.  Another man was folding up the beach chairs and carrying them up to stack in orderly piles closer to the sidewalk that meanders along Beach Road for a couple of miles.

I was rewarding myself with a walk along the shore to watch the sun setting over the Gulf of Thailand after a full day of more or less constructive activity, and I was stopping often to watch this daily ritual as concessions were closing down for the day. From my vantage point on the sand I could see almost all of the way down along the curve of Pattaya Beach to the start of Walking Street.

You could hear each of the beach chair's wooden frames making a clacking, slapping sound that could be heard stretching down the shoreline as stand after stand closed up for the day and put their own supply away.  There were so many chairs snapping shut along the way that it sounded a little like crickets chirping off into the distance.

Jet skis were also being jockeyed away, their engines awakened and revved up by young men who then zoomed off on them, detouring every so often to cut a sharp turn and send a wall of spray up high above their heads; the water turning pink and orange as it was illuminated by the sun setting behind it.

The children of the concession owners and workers played along in front of where their parents were on task, occupied themselves in the "labors" of children at play: digging troughs, heaping sand up into castles and stopping every so often to examine more closely something they found while digging.  Sometimes one would rise from their squatting stance and run to Mama or Papa to proudly show them their discovery.

There was no need to stay at any one spot to see the entire process; the routines were virtually identical, and done almost at the same time.  I could walk along the beach and see it happen from start to finish as the sun lowered itself behind a latticework of clouds, making portions of them glow like stained glass.

By the time I'd walked to the area where I'd planned to have dinner most of them were done for the day and sitting to visit among themselves while the last few customers/stragglers sat in their chairs. Some played cards, some played chess, some just talked over the drinks they shared as their day drew to a close.

I took a last photo of some finished stacks, roped together for the night and said "Nighty night, boys. See you tomorrow."