Yes I’m dumb.

Happily dumb I admit, but dumb nevertheless. This can be extrapolated from sequentially irrational behaviour on my part.

Firstly, and this is not necessarily the dumb part: I like walking.

I like walking in Bangkok (and other supposedly un-walkable Asian cities and towns) because it allows me to see the city as I would could never in a car or anonymously in the underground or Skytrain. It allows me to explore the grain of the city, and it, as a bonus, offers excellent and needed exercise in places that you, frankly, would have to be nuts to ride a pushbike in – and that would almost be my preference if it was at all a rational option, at least some of the time.

That said, with insane 24 hour gridlock traffic, cycling – so I was told when sitting in on a cycling discussion at Kiwi Foo 2012 – is less dangerous in congested cities than in faster flowing cities with less traffic like Auckland¹. However Brigid has quite staunchly told me that she’ll leave me if I a) do this, or b) ever open another nightclub.

I began walking in London in the early 1980s after I rapidly worked out that I would never begin to understand the geography and topography of the city I was then living in by sitting on a seat in the smelly underground. I took to riding buses as a preference and then to walking when time wasn’t an issue.

My A to Z bible had, as they all did, a grid of the city in the front and would use a yellow highlighter to cross out a grid-block once I’d explored it. It was an odd thing to do I guess, but then I do eccentric things (that being the point of this post) and over the next couple of years I’d yellowed 1/2 of the map of London. I knew more of the city at ground level than many people who’d lived their lives there – one woman I met, aged late 20s, had never been north of the Thames, despite having a car, because she was centred in South London.

I walked little in Bali, mostly because once you’ve seen one market selling machined wooden cats, Paul Smith knockoffs and Bintang singlets you’ve seen them all. There were also too many people from Perth – and massive holes everywhere in the footpaths that took the unwary into the local sewer system.

However, I’ve been known to walk really dumb distances in Singapore, various Chinese cities, Hong Kong, KL, Jakarta and various Central Java towns when the urge takes.

And Bangkok. In the Royal Swamp, like London, my habit is usually to go to a distant train station in this monster megapolis and just attempt to walk back in a vaguely homeward direction. Rarely do I make it all the way, but it’s not unknown for me to cover 5-10k depending on the heat and the energy I can muster.

Mad dogs and…

Arguably the dumb part….

But you see stuff. You see life. And they see you and of course wonder – sometimes loudly, sometimes you just know they’re thinking it and it will come up over that evening’s Tom Yum Goong - about the ridiculous glowing farang in a city where absolutely nobody walks unless it’s inside an air conditioned shopping precent or to and from a taxi.

It also allows me to bypass the endless and endlessly irritating vid-ads in the trains for skin-whitening cream, iPads/Tabs, various sugary fizz drinks and other mass market fodder, which has to be a bonus.

So I decided. I decided to walk from Fortune Town, a large IT mall with a new floor of second hand vinyl stores that entices me to look rather than spend right now given the very large room of shelved vinyl I already have to deal with in Auckland, to Victory Monument, a towering unattractive needle strangely dedicated to a ‘victory’ in the 1940s which was actually a draw or a defeat depending on who you talk to  - the generals who got trashed decided to lie a little and were able to do so since they were running the place at the time – around which are now literally thousands of market stalls, competing fortune tellers and more, drawn by the large university next to it and the huge numbers of buses that leave from here for all over the city and the country. On a Saturday afternoon up to half a million pass through and other days are only a little quieter.

This was Saturday afternoon.

Looking at the map (excerpted above) it’s pretty direct and not that far, and so – after an hour or more longingly touching Japanese pressings of old Motown, CTI, Philly and Impulse albums – I stepped out into the midday sun.

It didn’t start well. The hotel on the corner of Rama IX and Fortune Town, a big old musty Mercure with a very low-lit foyer full of Arab traders and their be-burka-ed wives drinking short sweet coffees whilst being told off for smoking, had shut the Rama IX gate – I say shut but it was blocked with a steel barricade and two dumpsters full of garbage – and I was forced to backtrack at least 300m to the Thanon Ratchadaphrisek entrance before finally escaping.

And I walked. Cheerily: I don’t mind being seen as the imported village buffoon as long as I get my exercise and get to see. On the map I assumed it was easy, with the normal local mashup of market stalls, a 7/11 or two and clusters of stores that looked like they had been there for a century of more, as they may have been. Like much of older Bangkok.

I was wrong. There were building sites: new upmarket condo sites with big signs filled with rendered images of lawns, pools and expensive cars designed to tempt, that were just strange, including one with a smiling kathoey lying (sexily?) on a lawn. The video on their website (and no, I don’t know why I did either) is even odder. And there were big emptied sites primed for impending monster luxury condo construction between the building sites. This was a road on the move socially.

This must be the only country in the world where ladyboys are used to sell prestige condos as a matter of course and nobody blinks. I like that.

There was traffic.

The traffic was, this being Rama IX and a major trans-city semi-highway, trucks, buses and more trucks, each one of which seemed to have escaped the clutches of the required emission testers. The air was filthy yellow, it was 40 degrees, there were no trees and the fucking road just went on forever.

I’d walk around a corner or over a bump only to see more building sites. Once I saw a tree.

I thought about stopping one of the passing stream of taxis but refused to be defeated and walked on. “I am just going outside and may be some time.”

I found a 7/11. You always, always, always find a 7/11 in Bangkok. Newbies will say ‘it’s near the 7/11′. Everything in urban Thailand is near the 7/11 – there are 8,000 of them. Every 7/11 is near a 7/11.

There were a couple of stalls selling food.

The bottle of water from the store washed the yellow stuff from my throat and I crossed over the road via an over-bridge. A small bunch of kids on the over-bridge pointed at me and started to laugh. I started to laugh at the crazy man too but walked on dazed.

I had poured a large part of the water bottle over my face but that wasn’t the primary reason my shirt had mutated from an article of clothing to a drenched rag. People in cars starred. I swam on, with sweat dripping onto my dark glasses from my brow blurring and adding to the spectacle I no doubt presented.

I looked at my phone. It refused to pinpoint my GPS location. Google’s mapping service had decided – at this particular moment – to blindside this particular square of greater Bangkok. I was, it seemed, in the only place in the metropolitan area without wi-fi.

I’d left the construction sites and there was a strip of shops – all bar one shuttered up for, I guess, demolition in preparation for a condo.

There was an obviously long closed Pizza Hut. It had a fresh sign outside, painted onto the window beside the broken door. I guess nobody had told the marketing guys it was closed.

The exception was a glorious feathery costume shop. Inside stood half a dozen ladyboys trying on their extravagantly sequinned and be-feathered showgirl costumes. Some stood looking in long mirrors – posing and strutting as I suspect (and no I really don’t know) they would for the lads down in Patpong in these same brief costumes later that night – whilst others just, again, starred back at me. One blew a kiss and I pointed at my camera questioningly. I’m sure these ‘girls’ rarely say no to photos but they waved me away and I crawled on.

I walked around a corner. I was at a huge intersection, with a network of pedestrian over-bridges, a motorway on-ramp and some 5 lanes each way. It wasn’t on the map and the GPS was still playing dumb.

Two guys working on a phone-box looked at me.

“Victory Monument, yuu tee nee?” I asked. One pointed me around to the left so I wandered 100 metres or so until the footpath died and I found myself standing on the edge of the road filled with oncoming trucks looking for the motorway on-ramp. I ran across the road. Two old ladies were grooming a black labrador which seemed to have been given yellow dyed streaks. It wagged its tail and one of the women told it off.

“Victory Monument, yuu tee nee?”

They both looked at me, thought for a moment and both pointed in opposite directions.

I took a gamble, less calculated than random and headed down the best groomed looking avenue running off the intersection. It went on and on. An abandoned apartment building had a few food stalls out the front so I splashed out another seven baht for iced water. Then there was a large school. And Ministry of something, even larger. Much larger.

Brigid rang. ‘Where are you?’

“I have no idea.”

“Where are you going?”

“Victory Monument.”

“When will you get there?”

“Soon, I hope.” And I said goodbye.

I looked up and saw a huge green road-sign, pointing towards yet another motorway onramp (Bangkok’s raised highway system is both vast and endlessly confusing – there is no end or beginning to it and they sell atlases devoted just to it). It said ‘Don Muang’, the old airport far, far, far from the centre of town. I’m fucked, I decided.

I walked under the motorway, having decided to seek a cab and admit defeat, and an old man offered me a green drink. I declined and shook the sweat off the phone. The GPS had found life and there I was, less than 200m from Victory Monument. I’d been walking parallel to one its converging roadways for a kilometre or so and, no, neither old lady, who – like the Londoners I met years before – may never have actually been to the monument coming as they did from the pre-Skytrain and Metro era when the traffic was so awful almost nobody left their ‘burb unless they absolutely had to.

Around the corner I was thrilled – no that’s not the word at all - ecstatic to see, peering through yet another on-ramp, the approaching distant needle. I sat for a moment and gathered myself.

I stank and was wrecked but I had no choice, I needed to get to the monument, clean up somehow and get on the train home.

Oblivious to much of what was around me I moved on to a crossing – with a green walk light – and was forced to find the energy to run to dodge a mini-bus which clearly had no intention of stopping – it may have been the same one. It was related.

That didn’t help.

Walking into the massive pressing crowds that gather all around the monument I noticed I was the only person who had space. A large hole quickly formed around me in the crowd as I walked through. There was an up side to all this – at least to me. I knew, however, that this was because I was grossly socially unattractive after two hours of extreme heat and fumes. The way I both looked and smelled was offensive.

Sorry.

A young girl and her boyfriend stood above me on the walkway and looked down.

They pointed at me – the wallowing, sweating white man who failed – as we always do – to heed the warnings of those who know better: we will never belong here, and our unhealthy, dairy produce primed, bodies will never learn to deal with their heat – and laughed.

I shrank and tried to be as inconspicuous as a farang can be in Thailand, which is never much.

I waited a discreet time in a quiet corner of an air conditioned mall, and invested in both perfumed wipes and a deodorant before I struggled towards the packed Skytrain.

On the Skywalk toward the train, a man tried to give me a bible. I’m not sure it would’ve helped so I smiled no.

I spent about 15 minutes on the walkway – a man was making a loud political speech on the moment foot although nobody was listening, and the multitude of moving advertising hoardings tried to sell me – yep – skin whitener, an iPad, fast food and a holiday in Australia.

I went home.

I’ve just noticed a warning on the above map: ‘Note don’t try and and walk to Thailand Cultural Centre from here’, ‘here’ being the similarly named Thailand Cultural Centre Station. The two look as if they are right next to each other – about half a centimetre – but clearly walking the distance is ill-advised. I feel dumb.

In the 24 months I’ve lived Bangkok I’ve had to deal with two national – I guess this is the most appropriate word – catastrophes, although in both, to date, I’ve not suffered physically.

The first, in the earlier half of 2010, was the initially mostly peaceful occupation of several central parts of the city by 50,000+ Red Shirt supporters, followed by descent into the armed confrontation, fires and horrible bloodshed that shook us all at time. It was geographically near to us, although not that close in such a huge city, and despite the garbage in the foreign media at no time did we feel at all unsafe – however it was still happening in my city, in places I know well and regard as home, places I visit and pass through all the time. And, yes it was emotionally harrowing and exhausting.

I, like many who were lucky enough not to have been in the direct line of fire, perhaps didn’t realise quite how much so until a few weeks afterwards – having told our families and friends all was fine all the way through.

I blogged about it here and here.

And now, beginning some 14 months after the fires, we have these floods – variously touted here as the worst in 50 years, and the worst ever.

Whichever it is, and without making any wider claims about climate change, there is no doubt these are annually getting fiercer and more regular.

It’s an odd stalemate at the moment. The waters seem stalled at the fast flowing and capacity filled Klong Bang Sue (pronounced Baang Seu for the benefit of the waggish) with only a few dribbles – in relative terms – finding their way a few metres south towards the expanses and towers of central Din Daeng, and heavily built up north of Victory Monument zones that mostly signify the start of the inner Bangkok ‘burbs.

As with almost every natural catastrophic event (or, really, any event) of the last 36 months or more, social media has driven the reporting and news flow. In both instances here the traditional news reportage and the the outlets for that – TV, newspaper, radio – have been left behind scurrying around to add quickly dated past data to their increasingly irrelevant online, paper, and – with one exception in Thailand this time – broadcast outlets.

What has really hit me this time is the way the social conversations have mutated too, in just over a year. Profoundly – both structurally and in content.

Twitter has increasing usurped Facebook, despite the fact that in Bangkok alone some 8 million plus people have FB accounts and this time around little of importance – at least in the English language which of course is a major proviso in Thailand but it can be perhaps judged by how much activity is on twitter in Thai and by the fact that any site of any note in the Thai language sector is being either dual-languaged, or linked to in the English discourse – seems to be on Zuckerberg’s monster aside from private chat and the usual barrage of phone images.

So, yes Twitter is it, and Twitter is being continually linked to at least a dozen semi-live Google maps including the very useful one on the Bangkok Metro Administration flood site (in Thai, but with Google translator that’s no barrier) which also links to a range of other data such including the hugely important live klong (canal) levels feed, and the definitive one from a retired French army topographer, @thaikamala, and updated every hour or so.

They all show an almost stagnant frontline (and stagnant it will be as the water recedes – yeekk) over the past few days despite the endless naysayers preaching and praying for oblivion and ‘equal pain’ for the city south.

And that is where, too, Twitter has changed.

In 2010 it made sense to follow several key people, most especially a few key reporters and adventurous, brave (read: often insane) freelancers. They fired a constant string of instant news reports in less than 140 characters which provided a continuous news and information stream often 24 hours ahead the printed mediums, which seemed to remain largely oblivious of the paradigm shift.

The printed medium is still as irrelevant as it was in 2010 this time around but the information flow driving twitter no longer comes from the people who may work for, or have some connection to a traditional MSM base.

I’m no longer following a list, but, instead, dependent on a hash tag. Tags are nothing new, we all use them daily – to search and follow or create trends. And yep, I used tags to narrow or search last time around, but this was complicated by the fact that there was no defined single tag and thus we had a confusion of #s which seem to multiply almost daily.

The story has changed this: in 2010 the story was driven by key players and decision makers and localised in a series of key locations, thus reporters and newsfolk had access that the rest could not hope to have and the role of the mass twitterati was to just fire crowd-sourced tweets of happening events as they transpired, alongside the inevitable raft of opinions, theory and asides.

2011 is completely different beast. We have a huge mass of almost uncontrollable water, many billions of litres, bearing down on one of the most populated urban areas on the planet.

The government, both local and national, have – for a variety of reasons – for all their mixed efforts, time and time again been cast aside by the brutal force of a sodden mother nature as it moves down towards the sea, following the paths of least resistance.

Repeatedly, over and over, government has made promises to both Thailand and to the global industries and stock markets – causing global economic turmoil that will go deep into 2012 – that it hasn’t been able to keep.

These have come back to bite a young government - perhaps unfairly, but bite badly it does, and the political endgame is going to play out long after the flood have gone.

This means, however, that many of the decisions and much of the public momentum, aside from evacuations and the final semi-successful massive barrier, coupled with pumps, laid across the north of central and east Bangkok, have been largely stripped out of the hands and headquarters of officialdom.

The story, instead has come from people in the front line, both in the floods and awaiting the water. All fifteen million or so of us.

And that’s taken the essential twitter source away from those lists of insiders to the much wider world defined by the tags #thaiflood, in Thai, and #thaifloodeng, for we English speakers.

Both tags also seemed to have established themselves in twitterstan without decision or formal protocol and then were organically adopted. Nobody decided – officially that is – that these tags were to become the conversation pit and news zone for the floods. They simply did and they’ve become all pervasive.

They’ve become communities. Naturally #thaiflood is somewhere I rarely go for obvious reasons, but #thaifloodeng has been running in my saved tags almost continuously for the last three weeks at least.

I like it, find it invaluable – and I hate it.

The regular subscribers and tweeters (of which I’m not one – I lurk, absorb and derive information – expatria the world over terrifies me mostly) have obviously personalities – some positive, some negative and all developing as the days and weeks pass.

There are the angry folk – many pissed off that they’re having to deal with up to two metres of water outside or downstairs. You feel their pain but there are a few – more than a few – who are keen to see anyone who hasn’t had to suffer, most especially those of us in the parts of Bangkok which remain dry, despite the fairly obvious fact that trashing the central infrastructure of the nation and the capital not going to reduce their pain, nor is it going to be helpful as the nation recovers from the personal and economic pain that these things cause.

There are the stir crazy, stuck in a increasingly skanky watery world that seems to have no near end. Rationality seems to have become more and more, as the days become weeks, subsumed by anger and irrationality. Some have become progressively worse, lashing out at others they see as more fortunate, as time passes. It hurts to watch.

There are a few who are just plain nasty – they hate Thailand, they hate Asia, they hate everything. Mostly they just pollute the forums of Thai Visa but this seems to have offered another vehicle for their odiousness. Their profiles are mostly anonymous.

Then there is the woman who writes a reasonably good food blog, albeit on the conservative side. Her earlier tweets were helpful and positive, although the aforementioned nasties jumped on her and accused her of trying to push traffic to her blog, to which the obvious response was, yes, so what…

Sadly as the waters surrounded her place, she increasingly slipped into the mode of the angry folk, clamouring to see the whole universe swamped with a metre of water and to hell with it. They deserve it too.

A shame.

There are endless keyboard pundits.  Opinions, conspiracies, counter opinions, some of interest, some less so, some cautiously expressed, some less so. Uninformed – mostly – armchair pundits espouse theories on water flows/physics/religion/politics/grand plans/climatology/water barriers/chemistry and just about anything else.

Filtering the disinformation and noise from anything more worthwhile has, or at least is until you quickly work out who’s who, become a time consuming skill.

YuroFukurou’s user-friendly blocking filters are working overtime.

This group has a large noisy sub-group: those who endlessly mock the current Prime Minister and her government – because we know that they would’ve done so very much better….

Blaming a government who were only just being sworn in as the waters forced their way south seems to be de rigour for many, echoing the litany of vitriolic columns in the strongly anti-incumbent daily rag The Nation.

*to clarify – and cover my butt here: I’m not taking a pro or anti anyone stance  - I view Thai politics as an interested but confused non-partisan observer*

And there are, by a margin, the plain helpful (lest I be accused of broadsiding all the, literally, thousands who have posted to the tag) including a small group of dedicated amateurs (or not quite so amateur – thinking of the tireless work of Richard Barrow, a travel blogger, who has literally cycled his way around the city tweeting reports daily as he goes) who have posted and reported news in a fairly dedicated way and given us the daily stories – crucial as the water seemed unstoppable – that much of the city was depending on.

An extraordinarily moving series of tweets today told the story of a muslim family who’s two year old had just drowned. They were unable to bury the toddler within 24 hours as required as the cemetery was underwater.

Given the flow, dominance, preciseness and immediacy of news online from non-traditional sources it’s less than surprising that – English language at least, the two daily papers have, after a brief attempt early on, settled in an almost numbed minimalist reporting phase, offering little more than reiterations of press releases and recounting the opinions cast elsewhere by informed others. The Nation has moved its primary focus back to to its ongoing semi-obsessive agenda of criticising the new government whatever it does, including this week relentless attacks on Yingluck for planning attendance at the long scheduled APEC Conference, and then – a day later – for cancelling the trip (Hillary is coming to her instead), whilst The Bangkok Post seems to have more or less given up full stop, reverting to the stock market and the odd travel story and restaurant review.

The evening on-line flurry of news updates (written I assume as they prepare the next day’s print edition) attempting to catch up on a day which they’ve mostly missed seen somehow sad and only underline how much they’ve abdicated – unwillingly or even unknowingly as is the way with most daily press worldwide – their news role to the amateurs.

Instead, the nightly PBS broadcasts (in both Thai and English) featuring Dr. Seri Suparathit of Rangsit University Centre on Climate Change and Disaster, a easy, well spoken well regarded Asian expert on natural disasters (the Japanese involved him post-Tsunami) have become a national must watch and the professor has become the first superstar of the floods – his words are eagerly and instantly dissected by twitter & talk radio.

“He is the ONLY one I trust” wrote one tweeter on #thaifloodeng – undoubtably helped by the fact that he seems to have more of a predictive understanding of the day to day progress of the waters than anyone the government agencies seem able to produce.

There’ll soon be Seri T shirts in the markets if they’re not there already.

The pictures on this page were taken yesterday at Lad Prao Junction, Chatuchak Park, Bang Sue Klong at both Ratchada and just south of Chatuchak.

This is quite surreal.

Thirty or so kilometres north of here whole suburbs are underwater, as are universities and industrial estates full of all sorts of plants including some one the most high-tech digital manufacturers on the planet. And yet none of that technology and know-how has prevented billions of litres of water stripping the lives away from at least 3 million people and destroying some 600,000 homes in the provinces above and to the side of the gigantic urban sprawl that is Bangkok.

Further south, in the still dry inner city (a huge area itself, some 1500 square kilometres) its 9 million inhabitants (the metropolitan area is 15 million – not all that is flooded by any means, with estimates ranging from 5 to 15% awash as of today) wait to see if or when the boom is going to drop.

I’ve not lived in a city under siege before.

That said, in the past five years we’ve been through several earthquakes, a volcano erupting, a typhoon, two terrorist bombings, a city aflame with open urban warfare and now a cataclysmic flood.

How many lives do I have left?

Of course, in this case I have no real right to even think such things. I’m privileged. Hundreds of thousands are homeless, out of a job – at least temporarily – or have lost family.

And there are, perhaps, hundreds of farmed crocs loose in the waters just to add to the misery and threat. Nobody really knows how many. One is too many.

And then there are snakes.

In the dry bits of Bangkok (so far – as I write the heavens have just exploded with thunder and lightening and torrents are now coming down) the unrealness of this all is quite dazing. But at least we are dry, or as dry as we often are.

Trying to get my head around at least a small part of this, I went for a couple of extended walks around the central city earlier in the week – around the malls, down to the river, and – mistakenly – through the sleaze pit area around Soi Nana, a place I’ve, to now, completely avoided in the years I’ve been here.

I wish I hadn’t gone – to Nana that is – as the horrible old men with their newly acquired 18 year old ‘girlfriends’ were expressing their mutually advantageous but dispirit attractions – true love – everywhere, oblivious I guess to anything beyond the coming moments.

I imagine when you’ve reached a place where you see nothing wrong with taking some young country girl a quarter or more your age, doing it primarily for the bucks, back to meet your kids as their new ‘mother’, then your world is pretty odd anyway. It makes me barf.

Onwards.

Down by the Sathorn Central pier which I’ve used countless times, the river was high – so high it completely covered the normally exposed bridge supports and was noticablely vicious. Only the tourists were foolishly waiting for the clearly almost impossible to manoeuvre cross-river ferries which seemed to be trusting prayers and luck to make it across.

There was water on the footpath and sandbags. It had recently flooded.

At the interesection of Ratchaprasong and Rama 1 – which only 15 months earlier had seen pitched battles and department stores aflame – luxury goods stores already had sandbags, and workers building these higher as I watched.

The proximity of the crucial San Saep Canal, which feeds directly into the Chao Praya (and rather unfortunately flows some 500 metres from our front door too), was obviously something that weighed, as was the recent recovery and re-openings from the damage of 2010.

Across the canal, outside the twin multi-story fashion Platinum fashion malls and the IT floors of Plantip Plaza it seemed as tourist busy as ever. There were hustlers, taxis, tuk-tuks and shoppers everywhere, stepping over and making some use of the omni-present sandbags.

Miss Canon Camera – on stage as part of the Digital Camera Expo 2011 – chose me to sing a song to – trying to insist I join her on her plastic be-flowered podium behind the table with the white plastic bunny on it.

I demurred and stepped outside again, ignoring her fading pleas…

I watched a classic Krung Thep scam taking place.

I tried to warn her from a distance – with loud hand gestures – but she was disinterested in what must have looked like some bizarre farang waving very oddly. Instead, she opted to take the advice being given by the well dressed man – sketching directions on her map as is the way – and was last seen heading off into Pratunum’s mazed alleys in a tuk-tuk.

I briefly wondered what that would cost her but let it go – I tried, and it happens daily after all, water or no water.

Back over the bridge, outside Central World and Isetan it was even more surreal. I wandered unprepared into thousands of well-heeled Bangkokians celebrating what was being called the Bangkok Fun Fest – joyously hosted by a radio station.

There were celebrities everywhere – being chased by camera crews and autograph hunters – and a female singer who, if the screams provided a rough indicator, was a huge pop star.

Every time she spoke between songs her voice was drowned in the wails, and kids looked suitably distraught as she flashed across the big screens.

Twenty or so kilometres north of the Bangkok Fun Fest, people – families and children included – were scrambling to save their worlds and their lives. Nowhere in the Central World festivities did I see a collection or donation facility.

Maybe I missed it. I hope so.

Nor did I see any indication or awareness of irony as the rich kids of the city took photos of each other on their iPads and Tabs and consumed the many flavours of gelato and bountiful designer foods on offer. ¹

A couple of days later we were taking off on our long scheduled few days to Hanoi.

Flying north east out of Suvarmabhumi you see the vast blue spread of water blanketing almost endlessly the bordering provinces, with towns, cities, commerce, universities & schools, their massive industrial parks (wanna buy a new Toyota in the USA – you may have to wait) and rice crops (these floods have knocked just under 10% of this year’s annual global rice trade for six, trashing 1.6 million hectares of fertile productive land).

All the satellite imagery, Google and Nostra maps in the world can’t prepare you for this.

It went on for at least 15 minutes more or less like this. There are people down there…..

Seven days later, the city has sobered noticeably. The traffic is sparse, the footpaths empty and many smaller businesses are securely boarded up. The rich kids have likely fled, leaving the city in droves with their parents – down to the holiday home in Hua Hin or Pattaya; the corporates and the embassies have also jumped ship as the waters supposedly rush in.

Except they haven’t. Yet.

And the word increasingly and cautiously out there is that much of Bangkok may have dodged the bullet – at least the parts beyond the sodden fringes. And even there the parts underwater are less than universal. This is a town, as vast and sprawling as it is ², where 30cm of water in a street – what would considered a flood most elsewhere – is a weekly event in many parts during the wet season.

Jumping ship -especially for those whom such flooding is little more than an inconvenience (and lets face it, living on the third floor of a condo or higher it’s going to be little more than that unless you have kids and/or elderly to think of) – and leaving those who simply can’t leave to face the worst of it somehow seems wrong.

Brigid and I, in Hanoi yesterday, talked the pros and cons over before deciding on our return today. It is home after all.

Somehow it seemed like the right thing to do.

I hate having to do this (especially given that I’ve been so slack in my blogging herein in recent weeks / months and that I’ve just been told off elsewhere – lightheartedly – for not being patriotic enough online) but fuck it, someone has to, or should.

In case you missed it, big news in South East Asia – that bit of the world just north-west of the Gold Coast if you are confused – floods of a semi-biblical nature (and they probably are of a similar magnitude to those which inspired a scribe to write in ancient times blissfully unaware in his misplaced bronze age faith that it would expand idiotically over the years) are overwhelming and trashing large parts of the region, killing to date some 700+ people.

In Thailand the death toll has hit 315 today, over 14,000 factories are underwater including huge Honda and Toyota plants, and a Western Digital complex which produces 25% of the world’s hard drives.

Some 600,000 people are unable to work and vastly more have lost their homes, livestock and worlds.

It’s horrendous and unimaginable.

To put it in terms that many in the west may understand: the cost of a computer (and rice) will likely rise.

Many New Zealanders live in the region, but just as importantly many people who live, work and have emigrated to New Zealand are from here and have families. I can’t begin to comprehend how worried – distraught – they must be. And anxious for updated news.

So, I thought I’d do, what I’ve done before, and check the NZ media. I’m aware from family and friends that both the main TV networks and the paid OZ based networks are covering this.

Stuff has a comprehensive AP sourced story with added Reuters video. It was up to date and also featured on the home page.

And so to the New Zealand Herald – the newspaper (and I use the word cautiously) that sees itself as the newspaper of record in the country.

Nothing on the front page. Lots of rugby. A story about a woman who was fired for taking a bus to work or not taking a bus to work or something. A couple of crime stories, a bubble from the aways foolish Garth George who would have trouble getting a letter to the editor printed most elsewhere, and an important – although not as important as the rugby day to day in the Herald – story about the awful Rena disaster.

I went to the world page. Nothing – although a featured story told me that ‘Police bust an elaborate scam involving a private eye, former showgirls and corrupt officers’ in LA.

News.

I went to the Asia sub-section. These were the top stories:

At number five there was a story about the South East Asian floods, with reference to Thailand. It was this. It is four days out of date in a story which is fluidly (sorry..) changing hourly.

And frankly it’s disgraceful and appalling.

As a newspaper the New Zealand Herald has become almost worthless, so much so that my father has now cancelled a subscription active since the 1930s. And he’s neither a liberal or a radically right wing person. ‘None of our friends get the paper anymore – there’s nothing in it’ he told me. My sister also no longer subscribes and told me the same.

Perhaps they are not average and perhaps most of the target demographic enjoy news subsumed by rugby, crime and endless facile travel columns about Tuscany and the like. Or worthless ’opinion’ pieces by the likes of George, Paul Holmes, Deborah Coddington and Kere Woodham.

I suspect not in the long term, and The New Zealand Herald looks like a flagbearer for the decline of the newspaper industry from here.

In case anyone did want news from the floods, these two maps, both sourced from The Bangkok Post might be both shocking and instructive. The site itself has news and I’d recommend The Nation (they are the two major English language papers) and – for more detailed stuff either the facebook page ThaiFlood Eng or the twitter tag #thaifloodeng -rt (the last bit cuts out the endless retweets).

TAN has a 24hr live TV feed in English and there are several 24hr online Thai language channels including TNN.

Or, hell, just go to any online news source of any substance worldwide – they’re all on to it – just not The New Zealand Herald.

I’ve been to the borders of hell and back: I’ve been driven (many times) in rural Java. I’ve gone around a corner and seen a bus – countless people hanging off the doors and hugging the roof – being overtaken by a grossly overloaded – and I mean grossly, with the load twice the height of the vehicle – truck swaying from side to side on a two lane road which is better described as one step up from a quarry – on my side of the road.

Without a moment’s pause, Ali (the driver) careered into the grass verge, which I could see somewhere had a ditch beginning in it, and we missed the truck – which seemed to be doing a similar 120km/h to us – by centimetres.

Peering up from the space I was now cowering in near the floor (none of the seat-belts worked), I noted that Ali was calmly tugging on his kretek and txting whilst projecting the clattering, shaking early 90s vintage Toyota van – which in most lands would’ve been long assigned to the junkyard but in Indonesia is seen as a state of the art SUV, complete with welded in seating, long collapsed but still in use – back onto one of the dusty road-behemoth battered tracks that Indonesia likes to call roads.

Another day in Jawa Tengah. We drove on and repeated variations of the same scenario over and over again.

Those days, however, having moved trans-SEA, seemed to be in the hazy past. The endless endorphins that driving in Indonesia pump into your body perhaps blur the long term memory.

Bangkok has heavy, heavy traffic – nothing outside of Jakarta that I’ve seen comes close. Aucklanders talk of traffic issues. I smile and mostly keep quiet. However, mostly the driving verges on the sane and almost rational in the royal city, and, aside from the odd feisty cab driver – a global phenomena surely – it never suggests rural Indonesia.

It’s funny how complacent time and space makes one. I’d forgotten most of this until earlier this week.

We went on holiday.

It was a brief one to be sure, but last Sunday four of us – Brigid, our friends Blake and Sandra, and myself – went to Hua Hin.

A couple of hundred kms south of Bangkok, I’d never been before but long wanted to. We tossed up how to best get there. Rent a car (seemed like a hassle for two days)? Fly (the trip to the airport and the etc. bits would take longer than the flight)? Train (five hours – it may have romantic charm on a longer trip away, but not for two days)?

We settled on the bus down. The public bus system in Thailand is, as I’ve said before, quick, cheap and very efficient.

So off we went.

Uneventful and easy.

Hua Hin is absolutely lovely – perhaps best described as a Thai twist on Brighton – a small (-ish: some 90,000 people) seaside town with cute winding lanes, a pier (albeit not quite Brighton’s) and truckloads of character. It is, we were told, partially melded by the fact that it’s the town where the royals holiday, and there a large palace – open to the public when the king or his whanau is not in residence.

It was fun. We ate lots of food, swam, ate more food, found a bar which served pints of beer in frozen mugs, and then ate more.

On the Tuesday we checked out, called the cab and dragged ourselves reluctantly back to the bus station. On the way there the driver pointed at a big blue vehicle coming in the other direction.

‘Bus to Bangkok’, he said.

That’s cool, thought I, they go every half an hour or so.

We were dropped at the office and the woman outside in the clean white shirt with a badge on the front and blue epaulettes said: ‘Two hours.’

We let out a uniform groan.

She offered a mini-bus. We went inside. ‘Two hours’ said the small man in the clean white shirt with a badge on the front and blue epaulettes. He offered us a mini-bus. A choice of two mini buses: 1 to Mo Chit, or 1 to Victory Monument.

We nodded and suppressed more groans. The big blue buses are comfy and relaxing. The mini-buses on offer looked too small and cramped.

Two hours is two hours though, so we paid our 180B each and clambered in.

Aside from the huge crack across the left side of the front windscreen it seemed fine – newish and clean. I grabbed the seat at the very back – a little higher than the rest of the seats and next to the bags. It seemed roomy and suited to a large farang.

That was my first mistake.

I noted the sign on the window that warned against assault rifles, sex or goats in the van.

As we headed out onto the highway – Thailand has good roading – unlike Indonesia – with four lane divided highways transversing the nation, I began to think that the road was rather uneven. I was being bumped into the air every few seconds and couldn’t see a bloody thing.

I realised I was sitting over the wheels. And our driver had no understand of various concepts. These seemed to include passenger comfort, easing into corners, and slowing for bumps or road works. As he accelerated I found myself dividing my time between the roof and the seat. I was being flung vertically every few seconds and my head was more familiar with the roof than my headphones which simply refused to stay on.

The driver was a bloody maniac.

One word came back to me.

Ali.

Fucking Ali and his fucking kretek flashed before my eyes – as I bashed my crown on the roof yet again. I clenched the handrail to steady myself but it was pointless.

We passed the bus. The 12pm bus to Bangkok – about twenty minutes after we’d left. Between blows to my head I worked out we were travelling at an average speed of three times the bus.

Drive safely the big cream road sign said, in both Thai and English.

The van swerved, at some speed and without the usual touch on the brakes to smooth the manoeuvre, off one highway onto another, inches behind the car in front, and we swung into a big gas station and stopped.

I twisted my back into a rough approximation of what I thought it was supposed to look like and crawled forward to a spare seat ahead. My head throbbed from the blows. I sat. I hopefully mused, ‘this seat must be better’.

Blake stepped out for some air. When he returned he was pale. ‘They’re filling the CNG tank – it’s in the front of the van, behind the radiator.’

I felt confused by it all – the blows to the head, my twisted back, and now the cheerless information that we had an IED positioned at the front of a van being driven by a lunatic.

‘At least it will be quick,’ he finished.

The driver, his fag hanging from his lips, pumped the last of the CNG, and then we were off – back to the main highway.

The break and the now-full tank seemed to have added zest and vigour to our driver, who was now snorting out of one of those small plastic bottles that, I’m told by Thai folk, contain something that ‘make you go faster’. Joy.

He did.

We were soon hurtling along the motorway at speeds of 140km/h. My understanding has always been that mini-buses like the one we were in would top out at about 100. I was wrong. I’m loathe to use the words: dead wrong.

Our speeding – perhaps speed induced – driver was now repeatedly accelerating up to the vehicles blocking his way ahead. When he reached a point a few centimetres from the back of the car or truck in front, he would hit the brakes hard. Our radiator – with the potentially lethal  CNG tank just behind it, would be so close to the next car that we could sometimes see what the passengers in the rear seat were reading.


The driver would then drop back and repeat the process over and over again, until either the guy ahead pulled aside, or a narrow gap appeared somewhere – sometimes between two lumbering trucks, whereupon he’d grit his teeth, lean forward, pump the pedal, and – pushing the groaning people-mover far beyond it’s intended maximum velocity – roar through.

Everyone in the van – aside from the Thai girl behind Blake, who was wisely sound asleep for the whole trip – would audibly take a relieved breath and release their white knuckled grips on the seat in front.

Until the driver, a few moments later, repeated the same procedure, and we all sucked in air and held our breath, grasping quickly again at whatever attached handle or seat edge our hands reached first.


As we hit the outskirts of Bangkok, we passed another bus from Hua Hin. ‘The ten o’clock’, Blake opined. I guess it must have been.

The highway into the city offered no respite – it got worse. We stormed, after a crawling up its back trunk for a kilometre or two, past a grey Toyota sedan. The speedometer said 145. The car took it as a challenge and blatted past us at what must have been at least 150. We then overtook the car and the two of us went back and forth as we bulleted precariously along the multi-lane elevated highway into the central city, swerving from lane to lane, pausing only to stop – from 140 to nought in a flash (we all tumbled forward and my head reacquainted itself with the car body) at the toll gate.



Eventually we pulled into the garage off Victory Monument, and crawled out. The driver stood, smiling, with a thumb raised high.

Last night – in one of those awful throwaway rags that celebrate the horrible world where fat ugly old white men hang out with young wee Thai girls and call it true love – I saw a story about the vans. The writer called these vehicles ‘godsends’. I concur – meeting our various makers – be they Thor, Ik Onka, Allah, Yahweh or the vagaries of Buddhist nirvana seemed like a very real possibility in those two hours.

Ali, you are forgiven.

I used to blog a lot more.

I’ve written about five posts in the past couple of weeks but when it came to hit the publish button, I decided otherwise.

There was a time when I used to write almost daily. Much of it was nonsense. Some of it was not.

It mattered not either way.

I didn’t mind whether anyone read it, although the stats have been fairly good from time to time. No, that was not the point. Mostly I wrote just to put things down, to express an emotion or to get a thought out of the way so I could mentally move on.

I wrote – often – when I was angry. I wrote when I was exhilarated. I wrote to exorcise nostalgia or to document things that I thought needed mentioning by someone before the moment passed forever.

Many times I wrote when I was amused or bemused.

Indonesia, and in particular Bali provided a lot of material for the latter – rarely a day passed when I was not confronted with the odd. Many days the odd was more bizarre. Sometimes it was funny bizarre, sometimes it was rather unfunny bizarre. It is a bizarre place.

As my twitter-buddy Matt said in a tweet which caused a belly laugh:

bewildering how much of a functioning disaster Bali is. like drunk guy staggering through traffic and somehow getting through alive

Thailand doesn’t offer the bizarre in the same way. Unlike Indonesia they mostly have it together. Things work and there is a logical process to the way the world functions. Thus, I almost miss the bizarre, the broken, the irrational and the illogical that is Indonesian day-to-day. It offered inspiration.

I almost miss it. But, of course, I really don’t. The amusement, which often conflates to shock and then to horror is only a part of the day there and on balance I’d rather have working as a daily starting line than broken.

The other reason I stopped posting as regularly was the fact I was doing, and am doing, so much writing, most as yet unpublished – one book done, another in draft and other bits and pieces that all partially fulfil my need to create something now that I’m not actively involved in the creation or dispersement of music (something which I miss and has clawed an unffilled hole in me – I fully understand why Roger went back when all logic says out right now is much wiser).

I was, I guess, worded out most days.

That said, this city does inspire. I wander some days almost randomly. 99% of the non-Thai that come here see so little of it. Krungthepmahanakhonmamonrattanakosinmahintharayuthayampahadilokphopnoppharatratchathani-buriromudomratchaniwetmahasathanamonphimanawatansathitsakkathattiyawitsanukamprasit (the world’s longest place name – don’t let New Zealanders or Welsh tell you otherwise) as it is  more correctly known, is to most tourists a few blocks of naughty bars, a river, a palace and temple or three, the unwashed hippie-fest of Kao Sahn Rd, a bunch of mega-malls that dwarf almost everything in the west and a floating market.

Which, to be honest, working off the guidebooks and internet, was all it was to me the first couple of times, although on the second I had an urge to see what was off the so-called Groovy Map and in doing so discovered the pretty wonderful ‘burb we now live in, which exists well outside the beaten non-resident track.

Bangkok is a city of some twelve million people and is a complex clash between the thousand year history of the only nation in Asia never to have been colonised or conquered and the second decade of the 21st Century which it embraces fervently. This is a city with 17,000 free wi-fi terminals running next to amulet markets that have existed longer than anyone knows or has recorded.

Wi-fi is no novelty ¹ so I went to the Amulet market.

The intriguing thing about Thailand – truthfully about Asia as a whole – is, as I said once before, that you turn a corner and never, ever have any idea what you may find. In New Zealand, and indeed in much of the west, you almost always know exactly what’s around the next corner. That sort of surprise is rarely part of the day there. It can be reassuring and sometimes I miss it.

Sometimes.

I’ve arrived at the pier (N9) from the River Express Boat to, once you get past the scamsters (‘the palace is closed today’ sort, or as the warning signs amusingly say ‘wiley strangers’) and the throngs of Dutch, Germans and Japanese ² head on up to either the 24 hour flower markets, or a couple of cafés we like, many times. To do so I’ve always turned right after the hawkers that crowd the pier exit selling hats, water, snacks and almost every possible variation on useless junk you’ll never look at again.

Today I turned left and walked. I walked into Thailand’s superstitious past present and future. The past part, walking into a market like that, is obvious. The present also because it still is and for many – most – Thai people, these talisman – small statuettes of Buddha, carved penises, and animals – are incredibly powerful, bring luck and ward off evil.  The future, not only because they protect from or herd the future, but also because the street and the market off it are also home to large numbers of that other Thai phenomena: the fortune teller. The most educated Thai, even if they don’t actually visit these people, are usually wary of dismissing the words of these populist seers, who can be found everywhere, often in clusters on the side of the road or inside the huge suburban malls. The (true) story is told of a western guy who’s girlfriend, a translator with the government, left him because a fortune teller warned her that he would be unfaithful in the years to come. He’d done nothing errant to date but she said, sadly and despite his pleas of innocence,  she couldn’t stay and left.

Two weeks ago, amongst the swarms of students you find clustering around the Victory Monument junction I saw a massive line stretching out of a market area and around the corner. I went to look and saw they were all queuing for one hunched over old woman to predict their future. The ever so patient queue was mostly kids consumed on their Blackberrys and iPods as they waited.

Past, present and future.

Within a fifty metres of the throngs beyond pier N9 the tourists had disappeared – I’d stepped outside the guidebook zones and I was back in Thailand again.  Quickly the footpath became almost impassible. It was after all Saturday afternoon and the path had been narrowed by the beginnings of what I’d assess without fear of being corrected were several hundred street stalls selling luck, and by dozens of orange clad monks and ordinary Thai folk hunting for that same luck. There were familes with kids sucking on Walls ice creams in tow, groups of businessmen, increasing as I walked on, and primly dressed wealthy matrons with their drivers parked without complaint as they hunted for that one ceramic icon they needed to muster up the magic to improve or protect their lives or loved ones.

The market proper headed off the street about 150 metres on and seemed to be, looking in, somewhat quieter than the crush outside. I bought a ten baht bag of those delicious caramelised deep fried bananas I like but which seem harder and harder to find, and headed on in.

It was quieter but only because it looked to be where very the serious trading was done. I walked through the mazed undercover alleys and came upon what I guess was the amulet trading floor – the amulet equivalent of the NASDAC. I went to take a photo or four and was warned off by a sharp bark from a guy in a cage. I was, as far as I could see, the only (nervous) farang in the labyrinth.

Behind rows of solid wire cages sat men (and a couple of women) while a large and serious grouping of monks, business people and traders, many of whom looked decidedly ancient, studied the charms intently using photographic loupes, moving slowly from one to the next then often darting back for a second look. Some were talking money, others were moving from trader to trader but all were focused on the tiny carved effigies which were carefully laid out in open flat cabinets. These weren’t the 50B varieties that filled boxes and trays outside by the thousand and many of the traders were, after putting down the loupe, ringing, I suspected, clients to discuss a find or a price.

I was intrigued but there is only so much intrigue I can fit into a moment so I headed north through the alleys, past more dealers, less intense and more relaxed in their pitch, then past a mini market within a market which sold second hand dentures (yeeech) and into the graduation outfits lane before coming back out into a small enclosed soi, with two storied shophouses and a roof, which could have been in Paris. It was full of more fortune tellers and a huge ginger cat.  Easily the biggest doemstoc  feline I’ve seen, I walked towards it but it glared back and made a strange hissing noise. I knew which one of us would be the worse from the encounter so I reversed back and found myself back in the street, next to the deep fried banana vendor again.

I turned left once more and then again into a market going through to a cross river pier (N 11). I saw the fab shop that sells T-shirts with sixties Thai pop stars on the front and the most famous Thai Indie rekkid store of them all, Nong, and I was back in my comfort zone.
Feel free to file this post under nonsense but I may begin to scribble again.

The things they do to sell you Sprite.

This last shot has really nothing to do with the above (although the guy, I swear, is holding a complimentary cup of Sprite).