It felt like a lucky escape. Back in Bangkok, some 36 hours after we left, both Brigid and I looked at each other — over a much craved drink or five — and said simul­ta­ne­ously ‘thank god’.

It was Pattaya.

It was hell on earth. And we spent a night there (on business).

Everyone’s heard of Pat­taya of course. Some 180km south-east of Bangkok, the town was more or less cre­ated by the US air­force dur­ing the Viet­nam war when they plonked a giant B-52 base close-by at U-Tapao, which in turn quickly led to a vast red-light dis­trict beyond the gates.

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It really doesn’t seem like two years since we stood on the top floor of our town­house and watched smoke rise as a cou­ple of malls, banks, The Stock Exchange and a cin­ema — a total of 35 build­ings — burned a few kilo­me­tres west of here after the army moved in to clear the Red Shirt pro­tes­tors who’d been encamped in (and had com­pletely paral­ysed then shut down) the retail heart of this mega-opolis. They’d been there for two months, cost­ing the city and the coun­try mil­lions and, at least in the short term, some 60,000 jobs.

It clearly couldn’t be allowed to con­tinue and an impasse seem­ing irre­solv­able - but nobody was really pre­pared for what hap­pened in those final few days of mayhem.

How­ever worse than the fires and the money lost, were the shock­ing deaths of some 91 peo­ple in cir­cum­stances that remain less than trans­par­ent (and cer­tainly far less clear-cut than many off­shore rights advo­cates would have you believe) in an ear­lier bat­tle around the Khao San Road area, a cou­ple of skir­mishes around the city and then that dread­ful finale on May 19th, 2010.

At the time of writ­ing some 18 sep­a­rate enquires are under­way includ­ing one into the Japan­ese film jour­nal­ist Hiro Muramoto’s death, but the pace of enquiry is the cause of con­tin­u­ing national friction.

All that aside — and I have to remain pub­licly apo­lit­i­cal on all this — what was obvi­ous was the sense of mas­sive national trauma and intense (pan-political spec­trum) shock the blood spilt caused. The coun­try was psy­cho­log­i­cally trau­ma­tised and is still try­ing to come to terms with how it ended up in a place where 89 of its cit­i­zens (and two for­eign­ers — Muramoto and Ital­ian jour­nal­ist Fabio Polenghi) lay dead in the streets of its capital.

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I tend to find that a blog­ging ennui sets in when in New Zealand. I have no idea why — per­haps the weather, the heav­ier food, the extended social routes, the lack of a per­sonal work­ing space, or per­haps just because.

In 2012 I’ve spent some 2 1/2 of the 4 months to date in the coun­try and blogged very sporadically.

I think i’m just mak­ing excuses.

So, here I am back in South East Asia and you imme­di­ately get the urge to scrib­ble again. I guess sit­ting in the midst of a aspir­ing cold war with the poten­tial to go hot on the edges does focus the mind some­what. I don’t think it will — go hot that is — but you do some­times won­der if there are those beyond the region who would like noth­ing more.

Two things came at me — both Asia cen­tric yet glob­ally sig­nif­i­cant — which I had a mind to say some­thing about, and to link because they’re clearly related.

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