The Firecloud Report

The Golden Triangle

2012-01-17T10:56:00.008-05:00

The strange thing about these sculpted hands and skulls reaching up out of a pit where bad folk go, is that someone has painted a single fingernail red.

Where do bad folks go when they die?
They don't go to heaven where the angels fly
They go to a lake of fire and fry
Won't see 'em again till the 4th of July

There's an Opium Museum up on the the Thai/Laos/Burma border. It's mostly about the British squaring up their balance of trade with opium balls. It's a fine museum, but leave three or four hours to visit and take it all in. There are movies about the CIA and all kinds of Golden Triangle history things that you might find interesting.

The visit starts with a walk up a dimly lit long tunnel with eerie music and tortured human images carved into the tunnel walls.

There is no order to the pictures here today. Just another weird day in the Golden Triangle. Cooking eggs in boiling hot springs for breakfast, talking to bald-headed monks, seeing surrealistic strange structures, eating the local food....

The inside of this temple had a lot of white strings in it which created an interesting visual view of the Buddha. Visual view is not as redundant as it sounds. Consider spiritual view, overview or other views...

This old, bald monk is building a new place for the young monks to sleep and cook. It's all open air. The weather does not require heaters for the most part.

This is an adjunct structure going up near an old temple along a remote river off the beaten path. . It's sort of a boat-like temple thingy.

Our driver, Ken on the temple boat..

Carol and Bennett draw a stick in the temple which gives number that leads to a written fortune. Their fortune says that the new baby is not expected anytime soon.

Ken tells me that the people who use the temple make these things and people vote for the most beautiful by placing money in them. The money is used for maintenance and additions...

The old temple next to the new boat structure on the river.

We are the only customers in this open air restaurant. The food is good and very spicy. Fortunately both Bennett and Ken are fluent in Thai.

Down the road, This ultra modern temple has some odd images, including all the hands coming out of the pit. Maybe they are drawing on Christian images. Maybe we were once visited by really ugly aliens? Interesting use of Spanish Moss?

The temples vary greatly in design. This one is fairly new. It was built by a really wealthy businessman. As far as Bennett knows, it was built to make merit. He doesn't accept large gifts, support monks or do good works. We think we see him sitting by the temple entrance...

The Red Rose Hotel in Chaing Rai is built around a Disneyland motif. It is intended for only short-term occupancy.We drive all around at night to look for it because Ken and Bennett think we will find it interesting. We went into one very humid room that had some kind of bugs that bit Mrs. Phred. I wonder what Walt Disney would think?

This is the little mermaid room.

I think this room is the little engine that could.

Behind Carol is Burma. Behind Bennett is Laos. They are standing in Thailand. The three countries are divided by the Mekong and the smaller river that joins it from between them to the left.

Chiang Mai, Thailand

2012-01-12T16:50:00.002-05:00

We got up at 5Am on our 3rd day in Thailand for the 400 mile flight to Chaing Mai. The highlight of the day is snakehead soup and a snakehead fish dish that is super spicy.

Bennett and Ken spend the day taking us to mountain temples. There are as many temples in Chiang Mai as there are in Bangkok.

This remote mountain temple only had one monk. We had a conversation in English.

The Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep temple is at 3,500 feet in the mountains overlooking Chiang Mai.

The temple is very famous and draws lots of tourists like us.

The temple was built in this site after a white elephant trumpeted three times and died on the spot in 1368 A.D.

Chiang Mai from the temple overlook.

Chiang

The Reclining Buddha and the Grand Palace

2012-01-11T00:01:00.004-05:00

Rattanakosin Island
Bangkok, Thailand

The old city (Rattanakosin Island) has both the Wat Po Temple complex and, right next door, the Grand Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. We spend our last afternoon in Bangkok wandering though these fantastic structures.

The Wat Po Temple is also Known also as the Temple of the Reclining Buddha. Its official name is Wat Phra Chettuphon Wimon Mangkhalaram Ratchaworamahawihan. A major feature of the temple is the figure of the reclining Buddha, which is 50 feet tall and 135 feet long.

The temple is the home of the Thai massage. There are many different Buddha forms. We see the one below frequently. I think of him as the Snakehead Buddha.

If you forget to take off your shoes in the temples, there is usually a monk to yell at you. After the first day I ditch my lace up tennis shoes and wear the slip on loafers.

Mrs. Phred in the Wat Po Temple complex. There are 80,000 square meters of buildings, Buddhas and statuary in this huge complex.

Rows of Buddhas are fairly common features of the larger and more opulent temples.

You see these structures often at temples. I think they are possibly called "stupas". According to Wiki, building a stupa is considered extremely beneficial, leaving very positive karmic imprints in the mind. Future benefits from this action will result in fortunate rebirths. Fortunate worldly benefits will be the result, such as being born into a rich family, having a beautiful body, a nice voice, and being attractive and bringing joy to others and having a long and happy life, in which one's wishes are fulfilled quickly. On the absolute level, one will also be able to reach enlightenment, the goal of Buddhism, quickly.

On the other hand, cousin Bennett called these structures (or something similar) "Chedis" and said that they were cosmic energy accumulators....or holy object reliquaries. Take your pick...

Eventually, we move on to the Grand Palace.

I think this is the King's Palace. He doesn't live here, but shows up sometimes for ceremonial occasions.

Strangers in a Strange Land

2012-01-10T17:33:00.000-05:00

Bangkok, Thailand

Now that I have time on my hands again, I'm publishing a few more pictures of our recent trip. These are from our second day where we begin with the free breakfast at the Lebua Tower . We have dragon fruit and strange local foods like fried dumplings with sweet insides in addition to the standard bacon and egg choices. We're running hard to see it all today because it's the end of our time in Bangkok, probably forever.

There is a little temple in front of the hotel that intrigues us from our room on the 36th floor. It is surrounded by big new hotels. It reminds me of the Trinity Church next to Wall Street in lower Manhattan. This view is looking back up at the Lebua Tower.

.A zoom view from our room....

This ad is on the inside of the hotel elevator door.

The temple is locked up. There are lots of kids in green uniforms in the temple compound. They are in school. We can see the river traffic from our room. We got a hotel a couple of blocks from the river because of the flood worries.

After wandering through the local neighborhood we decide to walk to the big temples two miles away. The day and traffic begin to heat up so we hire a tuk-yuk after about 15 blocks of walking..

We ask to be taken to the Temple of the Golden Buddha. Our tuk-tuk driver does not speak English so I point to my wedding ring and say "Buddha". That actually worked.

The solid gold Buddha weighs about 10 tons. He was covered with plaster for many centuries and discovered accidentally when a moving crane knocked off some of his outer coat.

These are the tuk-tuks in case you were wondering.

I'm not sure who the little person in the pink shirt might be. I don't think I noticed her at the time...

Our driver takes us to another minor temple before dropping us at the Wat Po Temple complex.

These pink elephants are in the street. In the background you can see the spires and spikes of the temples in the King's palace complex. The center building is the Temple of the Emerald Buddha.

The First Day in Bangkok

2012-01-09T08:32:00.010-05:00

Bangkok, Thailand

We can't get into the King's temple complex. Apparently it's the King's birthday. It's the same king that was in charge when I was here in 1967. Everybody still loves him, but you can't see what Wiki has to say about him. He's got that site blocked. I've been waiting to discuss the king until I was out of the country. American Joe Gordon is serving 2.5 years for translating part of a biography that the king found offensive. The sentence was relatively light compared to other recent cases. In November, 61-year-old Amphon Tangnoppakul was sentenced to 20 years in jail for sending four text messages deemed to be offensive to the queen.

I bought one of these funny hats at the Temple of Dawn and I've been wearing full time it at the RV park since we returned to Florida.It's a lot classier than a baseball hat in my view.

We grabbed a tuk-tuk at the closed palace entrance and the driver took us to a jewelry store and a clothing store against our wishes. I had enough of that and paid him off to take us back where he picked us up. We then took a long walk though a sidewalk market beside the palace walls and then got on the river ferry for $.20 to take us over the river to the Temple of Dawn.

The temple owes much of its decor to a sunken British ship that was filled with fine English china. Either that or Chinese ships filled with broken china for ballast. Despite its name (coming from Aruna, the Indian god of the dawn), the best pictures of the temple are taken at sunset from the other side of the river.

I think you can see Mrs. Phred climbing the temple (Wat Arun). She's the tiny climber with the blue shirt at the top of the stairs. Wat means temple, so Arun must mean dawn.

After the temple we chartered a long tail boat for a cruise up the river. We were the only passengers. There is much evidence of the recent flooding in the houses along the Chao Phraya river.

The floating market has been completely disrupted by the floods. There is only one vendor in a boat to represent the entire crowded floating market. We bought some bottled water and a beer for our boat driver from this hardy holdout.

A good place to rent one of these boats for an hour or two is at the Temple of Dawn. That is just over the river from the Wat Po temple complex which itself takes many hours to wander though. Wat Po has the huge reclining Buddha and lots of other remarkable stuff to see. The street outside the temple is full of tour buses and tuk-tuks.

The King's palace complex is huge and right next to the Wat Po temple. The Temple of the Emerald Buddha is the centrepiece of the King's compound. The picture below is just a common temple somewhere on the river in Bangkok.

After the river cruise we negotiated a return to the Oriental hotel river dock. It's five or six blocks from our hotel. There are sandbags everywhere because of the recent floods.

Notice the high water mark on this riverfront house.

and here is another flood victim.

I've been looking forward to dinner in the night air on the 66th floor of the hotel for months. It's grossly overpriced and the meal is skimpy, but the view is fantastic and music is good. The restaurant is called the Sirocco.

Incredible....high altitude rock...

There is another restaurant on a higher level. We had Mojitos up there on a balcony overlook before dinner. I imagine that the food is even pricier and skimpier.

Stairway to heaven...."it's just a spring clean for the May Queen"....say that backwards enough times and you're deep into satanic verses...

Pink Elephants and Buddhas

2012-01-08T18:38:00.000-05:00

Bangkok, Thailand

After flying for 36 hours and arriving at 3 AM, you stumble out into the bright morning sun armed with a digital camera and a determination to see the sights and take some pictures.

The hotel room is all marble, granite and mirrors. The $600 room is going for $150 because the flood news has frightened the international tourist crowd. On top of that, they've upgraded us to a suite. It's the most luxurious place we've ever stayed and they throw in a great breakfast and free internet.

This is the Lebua Towers, where much of Hangover II was filmed. I can't wait to see it.

We did a pretty good job with Bangkok, considering that we only had two days to take it all in.

We rode a lot of tuk-tuks, had some clothes made, climbed the Temple of Dawn, cruised the river in a long tail boat, saw the Reclining Buddha, the solid Gold Buddha, the Emerald Buddha, the King's Palace complex, and the Wat po Temple complex. We ate in the open night air on the 66th floor of the hotel and listened to some good bands and drank some expensive mojitos....

So the first day I took 150 pictures. It's hard to do all that and publish a comprehensive daily blog while suffering from a severe sleep deficit.....so now I'm going back and pushing a few more pictures up online (mostly for my own amusement)....

You know...pink elephants, Buddhas...that sort of thing...

What Condition is Your Condition In?

2012-01-05T07:00:00.003-05:00

Four dead in Coos bay before 9 AM. The life jackets and boat washed up on the beach. You should wear life jackets in small boats when there are water hazards...

I woke up this mornin' with the sundown shinin' in
I found my mind in a brown paper bag within
I tripped on a cloud and fell-a eight miles high
I tore my mind on a jagged sky
I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in

Some Pix Picks from 2011

2012-01-03T09:25:00.014-05:00

The big New Years Eve party at Sun and Fun was a great success. I avoided it until 11:30 PM and joined the party stone sober. A wise man said that New Year's Eve is when you get so drunk that you kiss the person you're married to.

I think Oscar Wilde said that New Year resolutions are like checks drawn on bank where you don't have an account.

I sorted through 6,000 2011 pix today and pulled out 36 that I liked the most. Often it's not the composition, it's the memory...

Warning...these are vacation pictures.... look at your own peril...

Store window in Jerome, Arizona

Waterfalls in Zion National Park, Utah

Hoodoos in Bryce National Park, Utah

The Devil's Garden in Arches National Park, Utah

Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco

California redwoods

Coos Bay, Oregon

Hoh rainforest in the Olympic National Park, Washington

Port Townsend, Washington

Seattle, Washington

Mount Baker, Washington

Goat Haunt ranger station, Glacier National Park, Montana

High Tea at the Prince of Wales Hotel in Waterton, Canada

Early Fall in Clayton, New York

Waterfall near Quebec City, Quebec.

Night in Bangkok, Thailand

Temple complex in Bangkok

Statue by a stream at a remote mountain temple in northern Thailand

Phred gives a banana to an Elephant in northern Thailand.

Nice kitty!

Orchid farm in Thailand

Flowers and fog at General Duan's Tomb near the Thai/Burma border

Monks in Northern Thailand

Flowers and Temple in the Golden Triangle area (Burma, Laos, Thailand)

Buddha in Chiang Mai Thailand (I think this is at the Monk University).

Abandoned temple in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Saigon skyline at dusk/ Rooftop swimming pool

Chinatown in Saigon

Village on the Mekong River in Vietnam

Temple in Phnom Pehn, Cambodia

Flowers and Temple, Phnom Pehn, Cambodia

Man watering oxen, Cambodia

Bamboo Bridge, Kampong Trolach, Cambodia

Ta Prohm Temple, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Ta Prohm Temple, Cambodia

Angkor Wat Temple, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Angkor Thom Temple, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Banteay Srei Temple, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Dragon on the lakeshore, Hanoi , Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum, Hanoi, Vietnam

Living in the Blue Bus

2011-12-31T10:43:00.007-05:00

A lot of the people we met on vacation were curious about our home. We bought the Blue Bus in 2008. It has 38,000 miles on it. Some people call these things RVs. Others call them motor homes. This one weighs 20,000 pounds. It has a 6.8 liter Ford V-10 engine that gets about 7.5 MPG with a 75 gallon gas tank. We live here all the time except when we go on vacation and have no plans to return to an immobile home.

Inside, the sofa makes into a double bed for visiting grandchildren. We also have a blowup bed for the floor and the dining table makes into another bed. The driver's seat and passenger's seat swivel around when we're parked.

The bus is 35 feet long. The passenger side has an electric awning and a slide room in the bedroom to provide some extra living space when parked. The awning can be set to retract automatically at various wind speeds. The drivers side has a bigger "slide room" that contains the sofa, dining table and refrigerator. The slide rooms go in and out with a push of a button. Since these pictures were taken, we have removed the carpet and vinyl floor from the living area and put in a vinyl floor that looks like wood. So much easier to maintain.

This is a view of the kitchen sink and a propane stove and oven. A smaller oven above is electric and is both microwave and conventional. A propane heater is below the sink.

There are two HD TV sets, one over the dashboard and another in the bedroom. They run on cable, satellite, antenna and a DVD player. Sometimes we get 500 channels with nothing to watch. The Rv has three video cameras for viewing traffic on the sides and back. The back camera also has a speaker so Mrs. Phred can talk to me when we are backing into a new home.

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The refrigerator has an ice maker. It also has a computer that tells it to operate on propane or alternating current, depending on what's available.

Bedroom.

Italian washer/dryer.

Four hydraulic jacks level the RV when parked.

An automatic satellite dish on the roof finds the satellite when you turn it on.

Two roof air conditioners also are heat pumps as an alternative to using propane for heat.

The tow bar for the Toyota.

Here is where you plug in sewer, electric and fresh water when parked. If these are not available, you can function on battery power, generator power and the fresh water, gray water and black water holding tanks for a week or so before finding a place to dump. There are two six volt batteries and a 50 amp generator.

The "toad". The RV is 13 feet, six inches tall. Some bridges aren't. The whole package is 55 feet in length.

I cook most meals outdoors. This goes in the Toyota trunk for travel.

My bathroom.

Mrs. Phred's bathroom.

Home is where the wheels are.

Thinking Back

2011-12-30T16:14:00.007-05:00

Sarasota, Florida

The vacation was really interesting. The best part was meeting the people. In Thailand, Carol's cousin Bennett was extremely kind to arrange almost a week of sightseeing. It was good to see him again. You never know when will be the last time. It's hard to imagine topping this vacation.

Our local guide and driver in Thailand, Ken, was extremely knowledgeable about things to do and see in Northern Thailand. We liked him a lot and we felt privileged to meet his wife and three children for dinner one night in Chiang Mai.

In Cambodia, our guides were Bantah and Sothy. They both had personal experience with the Khmer Rouge and the genocides in Cambodia at very young ages. Despite this, they were very humorous and knowledgeable guides.

Tony and Henry (so what makes me think they might have other names?) were our guides throughout South Vietnam, Cambodia and North Vietnam. Tony was responsible for our section of the group and helped us overcome some Visa difficulties. They both were very likable people who showed a great deal of wisdom and maturity in dealing with some of the more difficult and crotchety members of the tour.

Tony would end each evening by singing a beautiful rendition of some song that Frank Sinatra might have managed on a good day. Such likeable people. It's hard to believe that we were trying to rack up a body count on people like Tony's father 45 years ago. What were we thinking?

Leaving Hanoi

2011-12-28T21:21:00.046-05:00

Hanoi, Vietnam

Hanoi was an interesting place. We only had one day there to see things and now we are having breakfast in the Hanoi Airport and are 3 hours into our 36 hour journey back to Sarasota. The picture below shows Ray inspecting a column of NVA veterans. The veterans are visiting the Ho Chi Minh memorial complex in the centre of Hanoi. Ray is now in his 80s. Ray is a veteran of WWII, Korea and Vietnam and has his veteran hat on for the picture. Ray's wife passed away a year ago during the holidays. He's taking this trip by himself.

You can't take any pictures in the huge mausoleum. They move small groups though quickly. Ray come close to collapsing from shortness of breath and I fall back and help him slowly move past the body. One of the Honor guards approaches and asks if Ray is all right. Another guard motions impatiently for us to move along more quickly. We ignore him and move past the body as soon as Ray can begin to catch his breath.

Uncle Ho wanted to be cremated and have his ashes spread in both halves of Vietnam after reunification, but they ignore his wishes and do a Lenin style display of his body in this giant mausoleum.They close the memorial two months a year to refurbish the body. Uncle Ho died in 1969 before he could see the reunification that occured in 1975.

In the market, I see a street artist doing a copy of a stylised portrait of Hunter S. Thompson.

The wiring in Asian cities we visit always appears as if it would be difficult to troubleshoot. We really like our Vietnamese guide, Tony. Tony says that when they have an electrical problem, it is not uncommon to just give up and string a new wire.

We see the lake in the centre of Hanoi. They fished John McCain out of it with a broken arm after he parachuted out of his Navy fighter jet. This dragon is on the lake shore.

The dragon seems to have a happy face (and so does the statue in the background).

They customise scooters and bicycles in very innovative ways to transport goods.

The weave and dance of vehicles though intersections and roundabouts is completely amazing. They all seem to ignore what traffic lights there are. A double beep on the horn seems to mean "watch out, I'm coming past".

We visit the Hanoi Hilton, where some American fliers were imprisoned. The building below was right at the edge of the little historic prison, which was also used by the French. It had a guillotine at that time. The prison itself is just not all that photogenic. The cells are very dark and do not photograph well. There is a video explaining how well the Air Force POWs were treated. I'm sure that when Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib become museums, we will produce something very similar. The victor gets to write the history.

ABT (Another Beautiful Temple).

2011-12-26T06:52:00.002-05:00

Angkor Thom Temple
Siem Reap, Cambodia

The Angkorean Empire lasted from the 9th to the 15th century.

The empire was ruled by a series of god-kings who commissioned a number of fantastic phallic shaped temples.

The kings had extensive canals dug, which held water during the dry seasons. This water and the fish and water of the nearby Tonlé Sap (the "Great Lake") helped to proved three rice crops a year and sufficient resources to support all the construction.

The area was abandoned to the jungle because of attacks and incursions by the nearby Thai people.

The French naturalist Mahout rediscoved the area in 1860 and the French colonized Cambodia from 1863 to 1954..

You buy a three day pass for $40 to visit all the temples you can handle. The pass has your picture and is checked at each site you visit.

The U.S. dollar is widely used within Cambodia. We're packing to fly to Hanoi today. We'll have one full day there before flying back to the real world

Tomb Raiders

2011-12-26T01:50:00.004-05:00

Siem Reap, Cambodia

We begin the day with the Ta Prohm Temple. This is where Angelina Jolie filmed "Tomb Raiders" when she played Laura Croft.

After discovering all these lost temples in the jungle, they decided to leave just this one with some of the trees intact as a sop to popular taste.

Lately, however, they are clearing away more of the vegetation and working hard to restore the temple to a closer approximation of its original appearance.

The trees of this temple have tempted many writers to wretched excess. For example, this quote from Maurice Glaize (a scholar of the Angkor period culture).

On every side, in fantastic over-scale, the trunks of the silk-cotton trees soar skywards under a shadowy green canopy, their long spreading skirts trailing the ground and their endless roots coiling more like reptiles than plants

There are so many wooden steps and tourists wandering about the temple that most photos I take need to be heavily cropped to eliminate the modern anachronisms.

Mr. and Mrs. Phred mug for the camera.

This is only one of the fantastic construction projects of Jayavarman VII . The temple was called Rajavihara ("royal temple"), today known as Ta Prohm ("ancestor Brahma"). It is also called the Jungle Temple. The foundation was laid in 1186 A.D. and the site was abandoned after the fall of the Khmer Empire for nearly 400 years.

The second temple we saw today was the more delicate pink sandstone temple called "Banteay Srei".

We must have seen 50 beautiful temples in the last month.

From now on we will refer to any more temples as ABT (Another Beautiful Temple).

They're shipping us out to Hanoi in the morning....

Christmas in Cambodia

2011-12-25T06:25:00.004-05:00

Angkor Wat Temple
Siem Reap, Cambodia

The temple lies within a moat that is 200 yards wide. Inside the moat, an outer wall 15 feet high surrounds the temple. The wall is 2.2 miles in length.

The complex was begun by Suryavarman II (ruled 1113 – c. 1150). Our guide refers to him as King S2. In 1177, about 27 years after the death of S2, Angkor was sacked by the Chams. After that a new king, Jayavarman VII, who established a new capital. Our guide calls him J7.

Our guide says that the sandstone to build the temple was brought in by raft from a quarry 25 miles away. He says that 40,000 elephants, 70,000 rafts and 8,000 engineers were used in the construction.

Within the walls, the temple rises in three different levels. At the center a single funeral jar was found. This is perhaps the most eneregy ever expended to dispose of a corpse.

There are some bullet holes in the outer walls. The Khmer Rouge occupied the temple as a military base for a time. Our guide says that he lived here when he was three. He is a funny guy. He tells lots of jokes and laughs hysterically at them.

The walls are covered witl delicate carvings. The labor involved in carving hundreds of thousands of sqaure feet of sanstone is almost unimaginable.

Angkor Wat is the largest religious structure in the world, but it is only the southernmost of a whole complex of historically important structures.

The temple was abandoned to the jungle for 400 years and rediscovered by a French explorer in 1860. He wandered the jungle for seven years before stumbling upon the complex.

This is one of the library buildings inside the outer walls and outside the temple itself.

I lost ny glasses taking the library picture. Mrs. Phred forced me to leave the tour and retrace my steps to look for them. They were laying in the path only about a half mile from were we started to search.

Cambodian Dancing Queen

2011-12-24T02:59:00.009-05:00

Siem Reap, Cambodia

I really had to work to get this videa posted. First I had to download it from someone elses Iphone. Then I had to load a Kodak program to play it on my PC. I tried uploading it directly to blogger, but they don't like MOV files. So I opened a You Tube account, uploaded it there and then embedded the You Tube videa in this blog....blah...

The best way to view this is to click where it says "You tube" and go directly to you tube for a bigger image.

We wake up on the boat in Kampong Cham and wait for the bus to take us to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat.

It's a five hour bus ride though Cambodia. On the way we stop to look at a rubber tree plantation.

The hotel in Siem Reap is nicely landscaped.

It's Christmas Eve and our 45th anniversary tonight.

Asians like to decorate for Christmas, even if they are mostly Buddhist or Muslim.

The weather is hot and steamy. I'm glad it's winter. This is high season for tourists.

We have dinner on the patio the first night. It is a buffet. The food is really bad. Everything is full of bones. Even the chicken is full of shattered bone as if it has been chopped with a machete. I'd put that down to local custom except the hotel manager is very urbane from Sicily. He's got a contract to provide the meal and is trying to make a profit on non-return customers. We get that in Florida a .lot.'

Local children sing Christmas carols and local artists do traditional dances to entertain the hotel guests..

Running Around With Her Hair on Fire

2011-12-23T05:55:00.005-05:00

On the Mekong River

The boat cabin came with an adapter that seemed to work OK with the laptop, which needs 12.5 volts of direct current. I plugged in Carol's hair curler and she mentioned that it got hot really fast. Then her hair started to smoke.

So I plugged in the transformer we carry that steps down 250 volts alternating current to 110 volts.

One thing is still the same as it was in the 1960s. It's the depressing poverty that you see everywhere. One difference is that the thatched huts and sheet metal dwellings usually have a TV antenna or even a satellite dish.

This morning we trudged up a hill to visit a temple/monastary. I forgot my camera sim card. Some kids took me to the school where the monks were learning math. There was a sign that said, "THE TIME IS MONEY". I thought that was very zen.

Mekong means "the mother of all rivers" so when you say Mekong River, you are saying "Mother River River".

We visit more Cambodian hilltop temples in the morning and afternoon.

Finally we visit the Amica village. they are harvesting rice and carrying it to store on carts, in baskets on poles and carrying baskets of rice on their heads.

Before going to the village we stop to buy toys, pencils and notebooks for the village children.

TV antenna on the upper right.

We transfer to a bus today for a four hour drive to Siem Reap. Angkor Wat is nearby, which should be a high point of the tour.

This is the first place we go with no children asking politely for money. Here they know that the tourists will give small gifts as they leave. They sing for us and we sing for them (If you're happy clap your hands).

It takes a million bamboo poles to build this bridge. They put it up every year and take it down before the rainy season. It can handle a car.

Kampong Cham, Cambodia

2011-12-22T07:19:00.004-05:00

This is my 3rd week not smoking. I'm taking a great drug called Chantix which supresses the urge to smoke and gives you very interesting and bizarre dreams.

I really like this entertaining side effect. This morning, as I was walking in the village, a big white dog kept snapping at my ankles if I wandered too close to the hut it was protecting.

I met a man who said his name was Jim Donnelly and he asked me to go with him deeper into the jungle.

We saw giant tree roots growing in an ancient temple and vampire bats and strange fruit everywhere.

A wall of the temple disolved before my eyes into anguished spirits who circled us chanting strange Buddhist mantras.

I found a skeleton wearing a tatttered flight suit near the temple. His dogtags said James A Donnelly.

Then we woke up and went to visit Chong Koh Island,

Lots of mosques here, but more Buddhist temples.

The people are thinning out as we move upriver. This is a kapok tree plantation. The trees are used to make fabric and incense.

Sunrise at Phnom Pehn, where the day began.

In the background here you man make out a bamboo bridge which stretches a half mile over the Mekong. This is near Kampong Cham where we dock to spend the night.

Kampong Trolach, Cambodia

2011-12-21T05:54:00.007-05:00

We cruise up the Mekong to the little village of Kampong Trolach. The river is wide and swift. There are eleborate floating systems in place to net fish all along the river. Mrs. Phred wishes you to know that she took most of these pictures....

Both Muslim mosques and Buddhist temples appear on the river banks.

The top deck has a bar. Drinks are free unless you want something imported. I've been drinking Harpoon gin with tonic water.

Away from the big city, the river supports people who live by farming and fishing. The population fell from 8 million to about 5.5 million under Pol Pot. It has since increased to 14 million. What you notice most is the absense of older people.

Life expectancy for Cambodian men has increased from 45 to 59 in the last 30 years. Women last about five years more on average.

These farmers use small gasoline powered pumps to draw water from the river for irrigation and other purposes.

When we arrive in Kampong Trolach, about 30 oxcarts are waiting to transport us several miles to an old monastary in the jungle.

I ride with Ray, a veteran of WWII, Korea and Vietnam. He has a bad back and age age related problems, but he hangs in there for the bumpy ride. The wooden wheels and lack of shock absorbers induce him to buy a ride on a scooter for the return trip.

It's dawn here. The sun is just coming up on tomorrow already as rush hour and quiting time are happening half a world from here.

After the oxcart ride we return to the boat and cruise back to Phnom Pehn. I send Mrs. Phred out to get cash, and she did, but she spent it all at the Russian market for jewelry. One lady had here purse snatched while riding in a tuk-tuk. We were warned to keep a grip on things.

This little girl walked by my cart all the way back to the boat. I think she wanted to practice her English (which was good). We sang the "If you're happy, clap your hands" song. She pointed out her home, grandfather, mother and baby brother as we passed through her village.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

2011-12-20T06:38:00.010-05:00

Phnom Penh is the capital city of Cambodia. There are construction cranes and big buildings on both sides of the river. Investment is finding a way.

These first two pictures show a more rural way of life. The rice paddies stretch back about a half mile from the Mekong, then you hit a treeline. There's no sign of roads or electrical wires until you approach the big city.

We'll be spending our 45th anniversary in Siem Reap. So far no mosquitoes and we're eating and drinking all the local stuff with no adverse results.

Bennett says the "strange fruit" i put in the blog is called rambutan,. In Thai it's called "ngoh". That word is also used pejoratively to describe people like Mrs. Phred that have kinky hair.

We get a cyclo ride to the Palace of the Cambodian King and a museum of antiquities.

These flowers grow on the trunk of the Buddha tree. Our guide tells us that Buddha was born, achieved enlightenment and died under a tree like this.

Our guide was seven when Pol Pot emptied out the city and sent all the people to the country to become rice farmers. He lost 12 members of his family and only has one relative left. We run the numbers and figure he is about the same age as our son.

A third of the population of Cambodia was exterminated during the four years after 1975 that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge rant the country. We go to Security Centre 21, which was one of several hundred torture centres where confessions were extracted before those millions who confessed to being CIA or KGB were sent to the killing fields.

Each person who confessed after brutal torture turned in everyone he knew and they, in turn, did the same until over 2,000,000 were killed and buried in mass graves.

Our guide was seven. He says that anyone younger was killed because they were too young to be useful and those older than 12 were also killed because their brains were too set in their ways.

The suspects were tortured 16 hours a day until they confessed and implicated everyone they ever knew. Some tried to commit suicide by taking a header from the third floor or hanging themselves in the bathroom. To prevent this barbed wire was installed over the balconies and the prisoners were given ammunition boxes to defecate and urinate into.

Our guide had the job of empyting the boxes at age seven. He says the the solids were used in the garden and the "smelly" liquids were emptied into a large urn. When prisoners fainted from the torture they were revived by being dunked into the urns.

Fried chicken and free WiFI.

Pol Pot was reported to be a nice Buddhist boy who would never hurt a fly. However, the nature of man is strangely plastic regardless of which, if any, religion is involved Pol Pot was either insane or opering under the insane delusion that reducing the population from 8 million to 1 million and making them all farmers would be a good thing.

This is Security Center 21, where confessions were extracted.

Farmers near the memorial at one of the Killing Fields.

Crossing into Cambodia

2011-12-19T01:15:00.004-05:00

Chau Doc, Vietnam

In the morning we load into rickshaws for a ride around Chau Doc.

Our guide, Tony, was explaining the Vietnamese subsidized economy that existed until 1985. He had to go to the store at 4AM with a pork or rice coupon. He took a brick with him and when he had to go to the bathroom, he would say to an older person, "Uncle would you watch my brick". He likes the market economy much better. He says the old economy made everyone lazy.

The river here in Chau Doc is covered with little houses that appear to be floating. Actually they go down 15 feet to the river bottom and enclose 200,000 fish (taplia). The fish eat a ton a fish food every day and take a year to reach full size (about 2 kilos). The food costs $350 a day, but at the end the family should make a 40% profit. The fish are transported live to factories and then frozen and sent to Wal-Mart in the U.S.

These are fish transport boats. they have holes in the side and are partially filled with water for the journey to the factory.

A woman gathers hyacinth stalks to dry and sell.

We visited an ethnic Cham village on the river later. They are Muslims. The Cambodians invaded here back when Pol Pot was in charge and killed about 3,000 of them. That caused the reunified Vietnamese to invade Cambodia and restore sanity.

The book I'm reading is called "The Peoples History of the Vietnam War". I'm up to the chapter where the Cambodians go insane and start killing people for saying things like, "the food is not tasty".

Cham children say "hello'.

Later, Mrs. Phred goes shopping in Chau Doc and takes a picture of this furniture. We end the evening in Phnom Pehn after a long run upriver.

Ensie Wiensie Spider

2011-12-18T06:20:00.008-05:00

Mekong River, Vietnam...
Sa Dec City and Cu Lao Gieng Island

They have built some impressive bridges here since the war ended. In 1985 they adopted a market economy so you can see some big modern factories along the river.

We get on a little boat to visit Sa Dec City on the river in the morning.

This lady is collecting Hyacinth stalks. When dried she can sell them for $1.20 a kilo.

The city has extensive kilns for baking bricks, floor tiles and roof tiles.The pictures are a little dull, so just imagine. We also visited a rice processing factory.

Strange fruit.

The market is hectic. Mrs. Phred wonders how they can sell so much food. Motor scooters and people vie for the right of way. Fruit, vegetables, snails, eels, fish, chickens and rice. As far as I can tell rice is about 50 cents a kilo. They seem to have an inflation problem here. The 21,000 dongs to the dollar is a clue. The banks pay 14% on dong deposits, but only 2% on dollars.

I meet Mr. Henderson onboard. He served in the Merchant Marine in WWII at age 15. He was also a marine in Korea when the Americans went north and when they came back south chased by the Chinese. He also served in Vietnam. His wife of 54 years died last ye3ar at this time. I think he came on the trip to not be alone. Daisy sat down next to us. Her husband of 57 years died almost on the same day last year. Kismet.

This is our boat, the Tonie Pandaw. Somehow they have adopted the image of a turkey and their icon.

The boat is full of doctors, lawyers and investment bankers. They all have interesting stories. Eleanor and Cam are from Canada. They lived extensively in Asia and Africa and did microfinance deals for poor farmers. Peter is an Australian vegetarian. He went to school at Berkeley in 1969 when things were total chaos. Now he lives in Hong Kong and works as an investment banker specialising in commodities.

We visit the island of Cu Lao Gieng on the Makong in the afternoon. The villagers are very friendly and curious (especially the children).

They have these strange vehicles to haul the rice out of the paddies.

One of the village rice fields.

Chicken.

These guys are stringing Christmas lights on the village's Catholic church. The work barefoot.

Mrs. Phred cracks up the village kids, teaching them how the eensie wiensie spider went up the waterspout.

The Mekong River

2011-12-17T06:43:00.003-05:00

Cai Be, Vietnam

We check out of the Saigon hotel and pile onto the bus for a 90 minute drive to My Tho on the Mekong River.

The boat is cozy with about 25 cabins. Ours is right next to the dining room and the landing dock. Our cabin has two bunks on the opposite sides of the room. They are built-in so we wave at each other at bedtime.

We visit the riverside village of Cai Be in the afternoon. They are making rice krispies and peanut brittle for export to Saigon. It's a small scale operation.

The villagers are also distilling rice wine, which has the taste and kick of white lightning. I can buy a bottle with a cobra in it for 550,000 dongs but it won't pass TSA scrutiny with our carryons.

We have duck for dinner and a native four piece band come aboard for entertainment in the evening. Their instruments are traditional and non-western. The scale they use is not "do-re-me-fa-so-la-te-do".

We'll be rossing into Cambodia today or tomorrow...I'm not sure when.

A Tourist's Day in Saigon

2011-12-16T06:09:00.009-05:00

We have a busy day scheduled by the tour company. They put all the Americans on the same bus. The guide suffers all complaints and abuses in silence or with polite responses.

We visit the Reunification Palace, which was the Presidential palace until a North Vietnamese tank crashed the gates in 1975. The palace before that was built by the French and bombed by two South Vietnamese pilots flying U.S. made Skyraiders. They were annoyed were Diem and destroyed the old palace in 1962. Both Diem and Kennedy are assassinated the following year.

Madame Nhu was the wife of Ngô Đình Nhu who was the brother and chief adviser to President Ngô Đình Diệm. As Diệm was a lifelong bachelor, and because she and her family lived in the president's palace, she was considered to be the first lady. She was called the Dragon Lady and was tiny, cute and voluptuous but also was widely detested as a personalty, She verbally abused both her husband and his brother. She said, "Power is wonderful, but total power is totally wonderful".

When her husband and brother were assassinated, with the approval of Kennedy, Madam Nhu was shopping in California with her children. She died in Europe in April of 2011.

Next we cruise Chinatown in the bus. There are an estimated 3,000,000 motor scooters in Saigon. You can cross the street easily though a swarm of them as long as you maintain a consistent pace. That allows them to swerve around you. At night, a river of young people on scooters flow around our bus like schools of fast fish around a lumbering whale. There are no old people braving the flow. They drive three abreast with inches of separation They interweave though intersections with breath stopping boldness. Where are they going? I don't know....

Chinatown in Saigon.

We visit the War Remnants museum next. A man with two amputated arms comes up and says hello. There is something wrong with his face and eyes. He offers his stump and I shake it. He says he set off a land mine. I buy a Vietnamese phrase book and a history of the war from him. It's all about class struggle and how history is sometimes made from the bottom up. The author has little use for the American Government or either of the Vietnamese governments. He finds the Americans and Vietnamese peasants who actually had to fight the war equally oppressed. I think I agree with his premise. Later the vendor returns to talk a little. I mention that it is hot and he observes that it is also humid. He wishes me a good trip.

They have a lot of pictures of Agent Orange deformed babies. Some of these are the children of American soldiers after they returned home. They also document atrocities committed by the South Vietnamese on captured Viet Cong. There is little doubt that both sides engaged in bad conduct.

Next we visit the post office, which is also kind of a banking centre that sells souvenirs.

The post office has a Christmas tree. Eight percent of the 90,000,000 Vietnamese are Catholic.

The last stop before dinner is a lacquer factory. They make lovely artwork. Mrs. Phred and I discuss it and decide it doesn't make sense to acquire more possessions. We only just managed to give all ours away last year.

Lacquered paintings.

Four Million Dongs

2011-12-15T19:59:00.000-05:00

Saigon,Vietnam

The ATM only let me have 2,000,000 dongs at a time so I made two withdrwals and have 40 notes with 100,000 dongs on each note.

The long taxi ride to the hotel was a flat ten dollars, with none of the usual financial games. The driver refused a tip. He must have blown his horn 10,000 times at motorbikes.

Saigon's skyline has changed drastically since my last visit in 1968.

Today we pile onto buses and see the sights of Saigon.

Tomorrow we'll be on the Mekong river heading up into Colonel Kurtz territory in Cambodia.

There is a lovely bamboo Christmas tree in the lobby.

Mrs. Phred has a lot of bites. She hopes we are not bringing a load of bedbugs back to the RV.

They Built a Rubber Monk

2011-12-15T04:39:00.005-05:00

~~Saigon~~ Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

We got up today at 0500 to catch a flight out of Chang Mai to Bangkok. We then flew on Qatar Air to Saigon and landed at what we used to call Ton Son Nhut Air Force Base. It looks about the same except for the new terminal. The old bunkers for the fighters are still on the field and are covered with moss. One had a big yellow peace symbol.

The grassy area between runways brings back memories.

I landed here on a sunny day years ago. The crew left me on the plane alone and they all went to fill out paperwork. Helicopters landed and left bodies on the grass in front of the airplane. The soldiers must have been dead because they were bloody, still and unattended. I went for a walk. There was a warehouse with a tin roof and no walls. It is filled with aluminum coffins stacked five high. I thought about the procurement process and the casualty estimates going into this warehouse. There were big profits for a coffin company somewhere back in the mid-west. I estimated that the shed had 6,000 coffins waiting for occupants, about a five month supply at 400 a week.

This morning a drunk American wandered up and asked if we knew where his guest house was located. Drunk, tired and hopelessly lost in a big foreign city at 5:30 AM....poor guy.

We visited evem more temples yesterday in Chiang Mai. This one had a lot of elephants at one time, but someone has stolen most of them. The temple had 5,000 pounds of gold plating 700 years ago, but it's all gone missing sometime in the last 700 years..

and its 1,2,3 what are we fightin for?

don't ask me i don't give a dam, the next stop is Vietnam,

and its 5,6,7 open up the pearly gates.

Well there aint no time to wonder why

WHOPEE we're all gunna die.

In some temples you take off your shoes and walk in to find one or two very wise looking old monks lost in silent meditation. It's very intimidating until you realize that they are made out of rubber.

For our last night Bennett takes us to a traditional Thai dinner with Thai dancers. It's interesting, especially the hill dancers. The food is dumbed down and relatively bland for the tourists.

Temples and Old Times

2011-12-13T21:07:00.006-05:00

Chiang Rai, Thailand

Mountains, forest, the Kok river

mist in the sky

the golden rice field,

the Beauty that everyone is dumfounded with...

Here is a video snippet of Bennett playing as a featured artist at the Lincoln Center with the New York Philharmonic. It was Aaron Copeland's 85th birthday. We saw this concert live on TV when it happened.

We're spending our last three days in Thailand at the Mountain View Guest House in Chaing Rai. It costs $20 a night. It's clean and has breakfast, laundry service and blazing fast free internet.

This Chedri is at the University for monks in Chaing Mai. There are as many temples here as there are in Bangkok.

Next to the temple and chedi are the royal tombs for the Thai princes and their descendants.

Dogs and cats are common at temples, but some have bad flea problems.

Carol and Ken discussing the royal tombs.

Old Chiang Mai was abandoned because of flooding. This chedi is at the site of the old city.

You can bang the gongs and ring the bells at Buddhist temples, but remove your shoes before entering the temple.

A food vendor in the old city.

Tree flowers.

A recently excavated old city chedi.

A cat in a Shan temple. This one was nibbling flower petals. There are an estimated 6,000,000 ethnic Shan. Some 2,000,000 of them have fled south from Burma into Thailand. In Burma the government siezes young Shan men in their villages and makes them work on road projects with no pay or food.

The most humble thatched huts tenf to have satellite dishes like this temple.

Bennett and Carol look at pictures of the grandchildren.

Bennett's home is wall-to-wall bookcases and media in all rooms (musical scores, books, video tapes, cassettes, vinyl, DVDs, Cds).

Carol, Frieda and Jil (left to right).

Bennett's fulltime driver is Sam. Sam has a motor scooter with a big tubular box for a sidecar that Bennett bought. Carol rides behind Sam on the scooter and Bennett and I ride in the sidecar to an Italian restaurant. It's all very strange. Now I'm sure that Bennett is never coming back.

Here are two of Ken's children. They are very polite, handsome and well behaved in the restaurant. They are only 6 and 5, but they have a very good headstart on English. They are playing a game on the Ipad that requires them to pick things with English names and put them on a train.

Bennett at the Lincoln Center in New York City.

On the Thailand/Burma Border

2011-12-12T10:05:00.004-05:00

Golden Triangle

After Carol and Bennett return from feeding the monks, we have breakfast at our guest house on the river.

We ate on our patio last night. I had a whole fish with a Thai sauce. It was incredibly fresh and delicious.

We spot a woman weaving and stop to talk.

I talk Mrs. Phred into buying a traditional native skirt to wear around the pool.

We see a Burmese style temple and stop to explore.

This is a stack of rice stalks. Bennett was translating for me and I thought he was saying "rice stocks". Language is difficult. Sometimes even speaking the same language leads to confusion and misunderstanding.

We stop and buy some cookies and pork rinds from this lady. We pass on the fermented beans wrapped in banana leaves.

Water lilies speak for themselves.

A long tail boat on a river near the Burma border.

A Thai army officer shows us pictures of his drug busts.He recently caught two kids with a load of amphetamines from Burma. They both got 35 years. He says Thai jails are no fun but that they are better than those of the local Wah tribe people. The Wah just dig a pit and keep you in it in your own waste.

He says he can spot a smuggler. They have:
Black lips
Trembling unfocused eyes
Looking around nervously

This is a spirit house. They are an apology to the spirits for dispossessing them by building a structure. The spirits live in the spirit house.
Carol and Bennett examine an electric fortune telling machine in the Wat Baun Mai Mawk Jaan( Temple of the fog sneezing flowers).

Our last stop is a visit to a cave complex. We have lunch and pick up a guide to the cave system.

The complex is a combination of Buddist Temple and caves. Mrs Phred keeps telling me to watch my step and watch my head as we crawl though narrow passages. After she slips and fall down she quiets down a lot about that stuff.

Off the Beaten Track

2011-12-11T20:06:00.025-05:00

The Golden Triangle, Thailand

Before dawn we peek out the window of our Chaing Rai hotel and see two monks in orange robes. They pass under the streetlight on the deserted avenue carrying bowls. When you give monks food, you need to thank them for providing an opportunity to earn merit. Mrs. Phred and I wander the streets and find a temple to visit before breakfast.

The Akha tribe are ethnic Chinese hill people. Bennett says they are very poor.

Ken keeps the village children entertained with his IPAD2. He has good Internet service almost everywhere in the northern mountains.

The Akha tend to wear their wealth on their heads in the form of silver.

It's Sunday so we go to the little village church and listen to the songs and watch the dances.

Next we drive to the Temple of the Caves. It's quiet. No one is there and the caves are gated off.

We stop in a tea shop and meet a couple from Bangkok. The tea shop is in extremely heavy and cold fog on a hilltop at 4,000 feet. The man says his home was flooded up to his neck and that a 45 foot crocodile came in the front door after escaping from the crocodile farm.

We visit the Museum of Chinese Martyrs. This is dedicated to the Chinese Nationalist troops who wandered
into these mountains after the Communist takeover of China in 1949. The museum displays recount a number of very small scale battles (called annihilations) fought against both Thai and Burmese armies. The accounts stain credibilty. They annihillate the Burmese attacking force and then withdraw to save Burmese face? Ultimately many of these troops were marched to Chiang Mai and flown to Taiwan.

Doi Mae Salong is a very remote Chinese village about 80 Km NE of Chiang Rai. We have duck and other very spicy things for lunch and then drive to General Duan's grave. The General was a Kuiomintang Chinese soldier who retreated to Burma in 1949 and was driven into these Thailand mountains in 1961. He adopted a 13 year old boy who lives at the monument behind a plastic sheet. The boy is now 63 and he vigilantly guards the General's grave. The Poinsettas around the monument are very pretty in the fog.

We checked into the Garden Home guest house for the evening. It's a small town that is mostly a retreat for Buddhists. We hear horns and loudspeakers in the morning. Bennett and Carol buy some fruits to give the monks for breakfast and earn merit. Four monks accept the food and Carol and Bennett kneel to accept a blessing in union from all four monks.

The Wat Thaton is high on a hill and strangely lighted at night. Bennett questions a monk about this and learns that it is kept lighted so that the repressed Buddhists in Burma can see the light. The temple also seems to be call Chedi Kaew which Bennett says means roughly Chrystal Relic Holder/ Energy Accumulator.

The trees around Wat Thaton are also lighted.

The temple has an amazing collection of Buddist artifacts.

It's a lovely building with a spiralling walkway which leads up to an amazing psychedelic climax.

The architecture is also very beautiful and they pipe in Buddist chants that zone me out. I think this is my favorite temple.

The Golden Triangle

2011-12-10T20:22:00.003-05:00

On the Thai, Burma and Laos Borders

We load into Ken's Corolla and begin a three day journey through the Golden Triangle in the far northern part of Thailand. We stop at Hot Springs and buy some eggs to boil. Bennett says eating two eggs a day will repel mosquitoes.

Later we come upon the Wat Bang Pong temple. It is relatively modest. The courtyard is full of Thai people who find us rather curious.

The monk says that this new construction will house the monks who are associated with the Temple. It is wonderful that Bennett is fluent in Thai.

A few miles further on we take a detour onto some side roads to see the Temple of the Golden Angel (Wat Pho Chao Thong Thip). They are building a symbolic boat of some sort on the river.

Carol and Bennett shake out numbered sticks which lead to fortune papers. Carol is not to expect a baby soon.

We have lunch in a little restaurant constructed of sticks and a thatched roof. The toilet flushes by poring in a pan of water. The food is very good and spicy and inexpensive.

The Wat Wrong Koon Temple (Muddy Corner is Bennett's translation) is our next stop. Garish means excessively flighty. This temple is garish, white and airy.

A rich businessman built this temple. He only accepts temple donations up to 10,000 baht. He makes no offerings to monks or other good works. Bennett suspects he built the temple to earn merit.

One must live a good life or end up in something like Buddhist purgatory.

This Men's Room sign is fairly explicit.

Temples ahead!

We go to the Excellent Opium Museum at the tip of Northern Thailand. You begin by walking up a long tunnel with eerie music and tortured images.

Burma is in the upper left over the river. Laos is to the right over the Mekong River. We're standing on the tip of Thailand. This is the Golden Traingle according to the Thai Tourism Bureau.

Finally in the evening we visit a "Short Time" hotel in Chiang Rai. It is called the Red Rose. The rooms all have themes. This room is the "Little Mermaid" room. Disney would be annoyed if they only knew.

Most of the rooms are occupied. We go into one very steamy room called the Herbal Sauna room. Insects of some sort, possibly fleas, bite Mrs. Phred.

Occupy the Tiger's Cage

2011-12-09T18:25:00.000-05:00

Somewhere North of Chiang Mai

This post was delayed from December 9 until I could work out some issues with the a new sim card.

We are moving up into the Golden Triangle this morning for three dayswith Bennett and Ken (our driver and guide). Yesterday we took a long ride on an elephant and Mrs. Phred spent 15 minutes in a cage petting a very large tiger.

Ken is our driver. Bennett arranged for us to hire him for a week to see the more remote areas of Northern Thailand. He's doing a great job.

We stopped in an orchid farm.

We stopped to see some butterflies and settled for a tub full of scorpions.

Chiang Mai, Thailand

2011-12-08T16:45:00.005-05:00

We catch a ride 400 miles north from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. We fly Bangkok Airways. It's about an hour flight.

Bennett is waiting at the airport to greet us. He has arranged a car and driver (Ken) for the week.

They play Christmas songs on the A-300 speaker system. Christmas is big here, Bennett says, however, that they tend to mix up Santa and the elves with Snow White and the seven dwarfs, so you may see Snow White and Grumpy in department store displays. A happy time to give gifts.

We see three temples before lunch. One is in the mountains in a jungle setting. I talk to a young monk in a red robe. I say "good morning" and he laughs and says "good afternoon". It's 2PM.

The monk asks How I am, how I feel and where I'm from. I answer as carefully as possible. He says the temple complex is a year old when I ask how old it is. I ask how old the buildings are and he says about 600 years.

We vistit a more formal temple called Wat Phra That Doi Sutep. It was commissioned by King Kuena who ruled from 1367-1368.There is a Hmong village near the temple where cars park and many stalls that sell fruit, drinks and souveneirs. We take a cable car to the top. The temple has a great view looking down to Chiang Mai.

The temple has a lot of tourists, but also a lot of local worshippers. They burn candles and incense and offer flowers to the Buddhas. You can buy a bowl of coins and drop one in each of 108 bowls, .representing the 108 different auspicious characteristics of a Buddha.

A mountain stream.

Ken takes us to a very rustic mountainside restaurant. It's down an unlikely dirt road. Sleeping dogs wake up as we pass and move out of the road. This is not a restaurant you would be likely to find without an excellent local guide.

I order snakehead fish sausage and snakehead fish soup. They are both spicy hot and delicious.

This Christmas tree is in the lobby of our hotel, the Royal Princess.

We put the Deet bug spray in 4 ounce plastic bottles to get it through TSA. It melted all the bottles into a smelly, sticky plastic goop inside our backpack. Very strange. I thought plastic was indestructible. No wonder mosquitoes hate Deet.

I lost my memory stick with all my usernames and passwords. Spent most of the night online changing passwords. We even made one call to the States over the hotel phone system. In the morning we found the memory stick on the floor. I think I'll add "5" to all my passwords listed on the memory stick to foil hackers in case I lose the file again. For example, the password Phred666 will now be listed as Phred671 on the memory stick.

A mountain temple in the jungle.

The Emerald Buddha

2011-12-07T17:35:00.001-05:00

Bangkok

There are big crowds at the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. You can't take pictures inside so most of those on the floor gazing up in rapture are not tourists. I get a shot of the Emeral Buddha from outside the Temple, through a doorway, with an extreme zoom.

I like the way the Buddhists concentrate on virtues rather than sins, turning philosophy inside out.

Some of the virtues are:
Danam (giving)
Silam (righteous conduct)
Pariccagam (personal scacrifice: material and spiritual)
Ajjavan (honesty and freedom from pretence)
Maddavam (gentleness and humility)
Tapam (concentration of effort)
Akkodham (freedom from anger)
Avhimsa (freedom from malice)
Khanti (patience)
Avirodhanam (avoidance of wrongdoing)

The Solid Gold Buddha

2011-12-07T10:01:00.035-05:00

The connection here is flaky. It's getting late and I keep losing my work. Therefore the commentary on this blog will be brief.

We walk all day and visit some of the most famous and amazing temples. The city has grown an astounding amount since I was last here in a flight suit 45 years ago.

I could write a book about the ways I've been conned by tuk-tuk drivers in only two days. It is best to stick with metered taxis which are very inexpensive.

After breakfast we start out walking north, then grab a tuk-tuk to the Golden Buddha when the heat and traffic become overwhelming.

The Golden Buddha is solid gold and weighs about eight tons. It was covered with plaster centuries ago because of an invasion and pretty much forgotten as time passed. A few years ago it was bumped by a crane and the monks were very surprised to see what was beneath.

I love these three pink elephants outside the palace complex on the island that contains the old city.

The Reclining Buddha in the Wat Po temple complex is about 135 feet long. We pay off our tuk-tuk driver and hoof it from here to the palace complex, which contains the Emerald Buddha temple.

Yawn...Goodnight world...signing out at midnight. Off to Chiang Mai in the mountains in the morning. Hope it's cooler.

Pearl Harbor Day in Bangkok

2011-12-06T18:15:00.011-05:00

Our Hotel at the Lebua Tower includes breakfast and a free internet connection. We are 12 hours ahead so it's Pearl Harbor day here already. Breakfast is interesting. We have dumplings stuffed with strange things and fruits we have never seen before. The chili and pepper sauces for the dumplings are not usual fare.

In the evening we have mojitos and duck breast on the 63rd floor of the hotel. The open air restaurant has interesting panoramic views of the giant city.

There is a more formal restaurant two floors above in the Dome. You can't wear sandals there so that lets us out because Mrs. Phred didn't bring real shoes.

They filmed Hangover II right here. I really want to see it. The bar below hangs out over the city and changes colors.

They upgraded us to a suite that is very lovely. It's about twice as big as our Rv and outfitted with lots of granite and marble. We have a balcony overlooking the river. I would smoke there if I hadn't quit...Oh Well...

48 Hours (Tampa to Bangkok)

2011-12-06T11:20:00.006-05:00

Bangkok, Thailand

Up at 5AM and off to long term parking in the Tampa airport.

We fly to New York on a bankrupt airline and get our seats on China East to Shanghai. Its a 15 hour flight. Our seats are the two middle seats in a four seat row. There are five Chinese babies in the row directly in front of us. Apparently they all have colic. The flight goes over the North Pole and down though Siberia.

In Shanghai we meet customs and immigration inspector #03893. He is very nice compared to American customs and immigration. Red China has changed. The Shanghai airport had free wifi, but Google was pretty much blocked out except for Gmail.

We planned to visit the palace complex in the old city but it was closed for the King's birthday. He is 87. He was also the king when I was here 45 years ago. The King was born in Cambridge, Mass. I would tell you more but his wiki page is blocked in Thailand by royal decree. It must be good to be a monarch.

Instead we grab a Tuk-Tuk (motor scooter with two passenger seats) and see a temple, a jewelry store and a tailor.

Later we go to the Temple of Dawn and take a long boat cruise on the river.

This is called the Floating Buddha as seen from the river.

The floating market is down to just one boat because of the flooding. We buy water and a beer for our boat captain from the floating vendor.

We nap a few hours in the afternoon and in the evening we have Mojitos and dinner on the 64th floor of our hotel.

Mrs. Phred climbs the Temple of Dawn.

Parts of the City have been flooded and show damage but the water is receding now.

The Temple used a lot of English china that was recovered from a ship wreck.

The bow of our long tail boat. After the river tour we get dropped of near our hotel.

All in all, more stimulation than we normally get in 48 hours.

Funny Faces

2011-11-30T15:55:00.001-05:00

It's been a slow month for the report. I've been playing with some of the funny camera features on Mrs. Phred's IPAD.

We fly out to Bangkok Sunday morning. I found a long term rental place to stash the Toyota for $3 a day. It's very insecure in a bad neighborhood, but, Hey, what's insurance for anyway?

After Bangkok we travel North to Chiang Mai and do some travel in the back country with cousin Bennett and our driver, Ken.

Then on to Saigon. I never saw any of Saigon except the Ton Son Nhut airbase. After that we travel up the Mekong river through Cambodia and then back to Hanoi and home.

I hope to get enough WIFI to publish a few blogs on nthe trip.

We'll be back late on the 30th of December in time to catch a New Year's Eve party...

Dreading the long plane rides to Asia, but looking forward to seeing some new faces and places.

Back to Bangkok

2011-11-12T14:35:00.010-05:00

The Sirocco is an open air skybar and restaurant on the 63rd floor of the Tower hotel. Perhaps a drink after we arrive at 2AM?

Just north is the Oriental hotel. Breakfast on the terrace has been suggested by Mrs. Phred's cousin who lives in Chaing Mai.. About a 1/2 mile further north along the river is the River City shopping complex. Proceeding north another mile is Chinatown and north of that is Ratanakosin Island.

Wat Traimit (The Temple of the Golden Buddha ) is the first sight on the island. This is a 5 ton solid gold
Buddha that was covered with plaster for six centuries and recently rediscovered..

Ratanakosin Island (The Old City) is on the Chao Phraya River just north of Chinatown. Founded by King Rama I in 1782 at the start of the Chakri Dynasty, it was originally carved out of a bend in the river to strengthen the defensive position of the new Siamese capital. Sights include the Grand Palace. In the palace complex is the Wat Phra Kaew. (Temple of the Emerald Buddha). The canal circling the west bowing river bend to the east makes this an island of sorts.

The Grand Palace was an astounding and unexpected sight from the window of my C-124 at 600 feet. I think that our pilot flew past on the way out just to give us a peek...the sight sticks...

Wat Pho (40 meter long Lying Buddha) is immediately south of the palace complex.

Wat Arun (The Temple of Dawn) is on the river bank opposite the grand palace. The bridge is to the south of the palace if we walk. I climbed this when I was young.

The Snake farm is about two miles east of the hotel. Chartering a long-tail boat to see Wat Arun, the canals and the floating market might be fun for part of a day.

I haven't yet located The four faced Buddha at the Erawan Shrine. This is actually Lord Brahma who is one of the Trinity of Hindu Gods.The other two are Lord Vishnu, the sustainer and Lord Siva the destroyer. Brahma is said to be born from a lotus leaf sprouting from the navel of Vishnu.

Two days there and we're gone....The Chote Chitr has been recommended to us by Bennett as the best place to eat in Bangkok...I remember eating Pepper Steak and visiting massage parlors from on the last trip...maybe Mrs. Phred can get a massage...

Thailand Trip

2011-11-11T11:40:00.003-05:00

The first part of our vacation will be in Thailand. We move on to Cambodia and Vietnam on December 15th. We will be on the Mekong River in deepest Cambodia for Christmas Eve, our 45th anniversary.

ใช้เงินเท่าไหร่? How much money?

สนามบินกรุงเทพฯ BKK Airport

โรงแรมสเตททาวเวอร์ State Tower Hotel (Hangover II filmed here)
December 5,6,7 ...1050 Silom Road, Bangkok

โรงแรมรอยัลปริ๊น Royal Princess Hotel December 8,9... 112 Chang Klan Road, Chiang Mai

Travel in northern Thailand...December 10,11, 12...Golden Triangle?

Mountain View Guesthouse Dec 12,13,14 Chang Pheuk Gate, Chiang Mai

We have our vaccinations, electrical adapters, alarm clock, insect repellent, Thai currency and Old Spice Classic deodorant for cousin Bennett ready to go. It's time to do some late stage planning on places to see while we're there and accumulate some basic taxi driver phases.

The blog is about the best program I have for pictures and strange alphabets, so I'll probably do my plans right here.

Veteran's Day

2011-11-11T00:01:00.001-05:00

"Only the dead have seen the end of war." - Santayana

I was 19. It was 1963. I just wrecked the 6th car that my father bought for me. Somehow I ended up in an orange grove with a bottle of vodka and the '55 Ford station wagon seemed to have done battle with the grove. My father wanted me to join the military.

I go to Jacksonville for induction and testing and get the duty of sheparding 10 recruits to San Antonio. They say something about intelligence tests. We arrive at 1AM and they put on a show with a guy who "talks back". They take him outside and pretend to beat the shit out of him in a noisy fashion. Some 19 year olds will believe anything.

I request some testing and score a 98 percentile on the Air Force Officer's Emotional Stability test. I pretend I am Captain Jack Armstong. I get an assignment to the Air Cadet Program...That would make me a navigator, but the program is killed off after I get my slot.

My Drill Insrtuctor tells me, "Dougherty, You want to be an officer? You wouldn't make a good pimple on an Airman's ass."

I go instead to radio relay school. I spit shine the sole of my boots and a West Point Lieutenant becomes extremely impressed and takes visiting Congressmen to see my boots. I get promoted to being a student leader of a wing of 900 airmem. I don't have to march anymore, I just give commands.

I am in the latrine with a loser lifer four-striper. We discuss cleaning the urinals and I offer an opinion. He points at his stripes and tells me that they don't pay me to think. The next day I get my promotion and watch him burn that I am the same rank after 9 months that he has attained after 20 years.

After 18 months of college on the Air Force's tab to complete my degree I go back to San Antonio for Officer Training School. My 1st wife writes to the four-star general and calls me a communist sex-pervert.

I give my statement to the OSI (Office of Special Investigation) and offer my ex-wife $10,000 to go away. During the investigation, the Colonel in charge of OTS creates a special rank for me. He makes me an OT General. My insignia is blank shoulder boards. The lower classmen with chickenstripes on their boards think that I am their lowerclassmen, just arrived early. I have to sneak down to the chowhall to eat at odd hours to avoid any misunderstanding. I feel ike Major Major Major in "Catch 22".

Eventually they clear me and give me the choice of pilot training or navigator training. It's 1965 and they only want aircrews. I note the number of F-105s going down in VietNam, so I volunteer for Navigator training. It was a good year. I played poker with my classmates and visit Mrs. Phred in San Francisco. LSD is in. The next three years are spent navigating the Pacific. I Loved Navigator school. Generally I eat braunswagger, mayonaisse, onion and tomato sandwiches and play poker with my classmates. One night I come home from poker at 6AM and find Mrs. Phred in tears. That teaches me something about women or at least about Mrs. Phred. We spend two hours a day on physical training and self defense skills. I still think about smashing nose bones into brain cavities and crushing rib cages with my knees.

In 2003 my Cousin Danny was on vacation and we're going fishing in the morning. We see each other more often now for fly-in family funerals and less often for fun. We sit on the front porch in the warm February evening in our rockers, drinking beer, and talking about the impending Iraq invasion and tomorrow's fishing trip. We swat mosquitoes and trade stories. Danny was a SeaBee. SeaBees are extremely competent military construction specialists.

Danny listens to my Qui Nhon story.

The Qui Nhon airfield is on the coast. It runs north and south with a big mountain on the west side and the South China Sea to the east. We land at twilight during the 2nd Tet offensive to deliver cargo. We were the only airplane on the field. Tracer bullets from .50 calibre machine guns are going over our heads from the east up into the hills. We walk to a command tent in the dark. There are spent bullet cartridges on the ground and runway.

Inside the tent a lot of soldiers are sitting on the dirt floor and listening to rock music on a boom box. We go in to get someone to sign for the helicopters we are dropping off. When we go back to the airplane an Army Major climbs on board with a rifle. He is very excited and he wants us to take all his broken helicopters with us because he thinks they are attracting the wrong kind of attention. That makes me consider the fact that we are in a huge silver airplane sitting there in the moonlight wasting time talking to this fool.

The Major keeps putting the barrel of his rifle in the stomach of the aircraft commander to emphasize his argument, which I think is rude. Eventually the AC gets the Major on the HF radio to Saigon and they convince the Major that we actually have something else to do that is important. The Major gives up and leaves just before we do. We make a night flight out and the night sky is filled with flares and tongues of flame from 'spooky' C-47s.

Danny is really surprised by this:
"Bobby, I was there in Qui Nhon that night. The power and lights went out and a magnesium flare landed on one of our sheds. There was a lot of sniping going on. Bullets were rattling around everywhere. The Lieutenant ordered me up on the roof to put out the fire. I told him to go fuck himself, I'd build him a new shed in the morning if that one burns. We had lots of plywood."

Danny was a New York union electrician before he joined the SeaBees so his response seems about right. What is strange is that we have seen each other frequently for the last forty years and never discussed the war before the eve of the Iraq invasion.
Danny gives me his impression of Viet Nam:

"It was Murder...Murder...Murder...I saw a cook pull out a .38 and shoot a sergeant in the head after a really stupid argument. I had to stand guard on the cook for twelve hours before they took him away. It happened all the time."

Danny tells me more about bullets whizzing by and rattling around and how that made him feel. Our grandfather was gassed in the 'Great War' and died after a couple of years so we never knew him. We discuss our fathers. Uncle Bruce was in the 101st Airborne and crashed his glider in Normandy on D-Day. One Waco glider is still on display in a museum near Bayeaux in Normandy. My dad drove a half-track in France and Germany. I tell Danny about the bus loads of young French children that still come to place roses on the graves at the Normandy American cemetery each June.

I share more stories with Danny in the moonlight as we rock and drink more beer. Our verb tenses and memories get a little jumbled by time and beer. Then and now get mixed up.

When I graduated from Navigator school, Carol wore white gloves and a pillbox hat for the graduation ceremony like the one Jackie Kennedy had in Dallas. My standing in the class is near the top. The students with the best scores are always sent to the Strategic Air Command. Later I approached the squadron commander in the Officer's Club and asked him if he could arrange to get me into B-52s because I have always been fascinated by large nuclear weapons. My assignment to unarmed C-124 cargo planes came through the following week.

Once I landed in Saigon on a sunny day. The crew left me on the plane alone and they all went to fill out paperwork. Helicopters landed and left bodies on the grass in front of the airplane. The soldiers must have been dead because they were bloody, still and unattended. I went for a walk. There was a warehouse with a tin roof and no walls. It is 100 yards long, 50 feet wide and 10 feet high. The open warehouse is filled with aluminium coffins stacked five high. I thought about the procurement process and the casualty estimates going into this warehouse. There were big profits for a coffin company somewhere back in the mid-west. I estimated that the shed had 6,000 coffins waiting for occupants, about a five month supply at 400 a week.

The bright moon is coming up. We discuss moon phases and guess the Iraq invasion date. We discuss the number of mothers who will receive bad news and a coffin. We're way off on both issues. He asks if we lost any men. I told him about the accidents and how glad I was that the C-141s hauled back all the coffins and the badly wounded because they were jets and could make the 12,000 mile trip to the States in a day instead of a week. Meat in the tropics goes bad quickly, but temperatures drop two degrees per thousand feet so at 35,000 feet the cargo bay temperature of a jet transport can be regulated to prevent further deterioration on the trip home before the coffins are delivered to the family.

The Da Nang accident happened in March, 1967. The C-141 taxied across a runway 18-right and was impacted by a fully loaded fighter-bomber. The fighter pilot ejected and was OK. The C-141 crew all died and burned a big hole in the runway. The control tower tapes were 'being changed' and the tower personnel claimed the taxi instructions were misunderstood and that our crew made a mistake.

The Cam Rahn Bay accident happened a month later. The pilot involved earned a medal for landing a C-124 in Adak. The wing on his C-124 broke off between the 3rd and 4th engine and he brought it in anyway. He was transitioned to C-141s. This time he took off from Cam Rahn Bay and crashed into the bay at the end of the runway. Everyone died except the co-pilot who had no memory. Analysis revealed that the newly deployed C-141 has an 'autoland' system which sensed an airspeed of 120 and reverses the engines and deploys the flaps. This system works great on landings, but you don't want to leave it engaged on take-off just because you are too excited to follow the check-list in a war zone.

Danny asks if I got any R & R in Bangkok. I told him not exactly but gave him one Thai story.

One morning we got a briefing in Da Nang. The intelligence guy shows us where the other guys have located radar controlled anti-aircraft gun in the Laos jungle. We went around the ones they knew about. It's a long flight across Viet Nam to Laos and then though Laos, along the Northern border of Cambodia, then down to the heart of Thailand. Cambodia is unfriendly. Cambodia doesn't want to get involved with our craziness by taking sides for some reason. It's one of those inscrutable oriental things, I guess.

In Thailand we were in the clouds with no visibility at 8,000 feet. As we got within VHF range of Bangkok (about 125 miles) the pilot talks to the approach control guy whose native language is pretty obviously not English. I hear the approach control guy erroneously acknowledge us as being 25 miles out as he gives the pilot instructions to descend to 2,000 feet. The pilot cuts the engines and begins to descend. Being a constantly frightened navigator makes me acutely aware of my surroundings at all times. I check the map and notify the pilot that he will be hitting a pile of rocks that are at 5,000 feet elevation in approximately three minutes. The old grizzled flight engineer across the crew compartment gave me a very toothy smile and the thumbs up sign.

Whenever we get to Bangkok the enlisted men find a way to disable the plane for a week or so. Some of them are very creative. I enjoyed the company of the young enlisted loadmasters and the old flight engineer master sergeants more than the old pilot officers. Once, I'm counselled about 'fraternization', which seems to be typical old officer 'chickenshit', worth ignoring.

In Bangkok an old woman on the canal threw me a mild narcotic, Betel nut. Her teeth were orange and her smile is genuine. Later I bought a fishhead dinner for the equivalent of five cents from a man in a canoe on the canal. He had one plate and he washed it in the canal between customers.

I met a man in a bar very late at night who I suspect is an agent for someone. He pumps me for information. I tell him, What I am transporting is very secret, so don't tell anyone but, we are stockpiling hundreds of 24-megaton hydrogen bombs for use in the next Tet offensive as a big surprise.I sometimes wonder if he filed a report about that and where he filed it. Moscow? Whitehall? Langley? Sydney?

Danny tells me a murder story about a 'fragged' officer in Qui Nhon. We discuss draft dodgers and privileged sons that are elected President and then order invasions and cruise missile strikes. I tell him the story about 'Thuds'.

The F-105 'Thud' is a huge, obsolete fighter-bomber that we appear to be trying to use up in raids on North Viet Nam. The in-joke is that 'thud' is the sound that the F-105 makes when it is shot down and hits the ground. Nearly 400 of the 700 built are shot down. They were built as nuclear bombers and lack self-sealing fuel tanks so even small ground fire causes a leak and a fire. The dual hydraulic lines are close together so a single hit takes out both lines and the elevators lock in the up position causing them to dive into the ground. They are no match for the old nimble MiGs and can only escape by dumping bombs and external tanks and going supersonic on the deck, leaving behind a trail of half-burned kerosene.

We land on a metal strip runway in U Dorn in northern Thailand to deliver cargo. I pop my head out of the C-124 top hatch to wave at a line of ten F-105s leaving for a raid on North Viet Nam. The first nine pilots wave back, but the last one gives me the finger. Most of my graduating class in Officer Training School became F-105 pilots. I saw navigator school as a better long-term career choice.

Danny takes another sip and is silent so I launch into my China story.
The approach to the capital of Taiwan is down a very narrow canyon. The old Major in the left seat has been flying a desk for a long time. He tries to handle the approach down the canyon. He keeps throttling back and the airplane starts to shudder in an impending stall. The stall warning horn goes off. The Aircraft Commander, flying right seat, keeps yelling MAX power!!! The old major throttles up for a minute and then backs off again into another stall configuration. We are about 200 feet off the ground. This happens about ten times.

When we got off the airplane an older navigator on board tells me, We cheated death again. This make me feel my nervousness and fears were warranted. We cross the runway to the crew bus and duck as a flight of vampire bats swoop close by. When we get ready to leave, a Chinese Nationalist Army guy aims his huge M-1 Garand rifle at the flight engineer in the top hatch as a clear sign that he wants us to stop on the Taxiway. The flight engineer drops like a rock out of the open top hatch to get his head out of sight. These wonderful and friendly Chinese are our friends. We leave and enter the South China Sea again. We hear the 'real' Chinese HF radio service talking in English, sort of. They repeat the phrase yellow running capitalist lackey imperialist dog bandits at least once in every sentence. They have a script of approved sentences. Each sentence contains this phrase at least once.

We make the short flight from Taipei to Okinawa and arrive at Kadena AFB at dawn. A startling futuristic airplane painted black lands and taxis to a hangar. They close the hangar doors very quickly.What was that?, I ask.What was what?, is the answer. You didn't see anything, I'm told.The SR-71 airplane I didn't see has been taking pictures in China...no wonder the Chinese are obsessed about dogs.

Danny asks if I was afraid since I had a safe job shuttling cargo back and forth. I tell him a few more stories that stay in my head and come back often.

We take off from Guam heading 1800 miles west to Clark Air Force base in the Philippines. We are doing 200 nautical miles an hour (a nautical mile is about 1.15 real miles). It's another nice day to cross the Philippines Sea. I hum and update my fuel consumption chart. I'm dead reckoning but I can get a sun line every 45 minutes. As the day passes the sun line changes from a speed line to a course line. There is a wall of black clouds ahead. I turn the weather radar up to its maximum range of 100 miles. I see a solid wall 75 miles ahead. The pilot asks if we have enough gas to go back. I tell him no. He wants to know if we can divert North to Taipei. I tell him no way we have enough gas. We are at 8,000 feet. Nobody predicted a typhoon. We press ahead. Night is falling.

As we enter the wall we hit a severe updraft. The altimeter looks like a clock gone crazy. We are climbing thousands of feet a minute. We pass 16,000 feet and put on our oxygen masks. It's really turbulent. The pilot noses us over into a dive. The airspeed goes from 200 to 450 and hangs there. We're diving and still going up. Blood boils above 30,000 feet without a pressure suit...we hit 22,000 feet, still diving, still going up. It's pitch black except for red instrument lights.

The pilots talk to each other. Holy shit these controls are stiff, one says. Then comes the first downdraft. The combined effects of the downdraft and dive are spectacular. The pilots stop worrying about boiling blood and start to worry about hitting the ocean. They put the plane into a climb. The flight engineer kicks in the superchargers. We go to MAX power. The engines start to overheat and are approaching red lines for heat and RPM. The airspeed drops to 130 and the stall warning klaxon sounds continuously. Still we plummet. We pass 3,000 feet.

This aircraft was old. The wings fall off sometimes in just moderate turbulence. The airplane is climbing and falling and bouncing and shuddering on the thin edge of stalling. The stall warning horn keeps droning. The pilots talk again on the intercom. One says, Don't lose it. The other grunts. Oh. Here's another updraft in the nick of time. The cycle repeats again and again.

Eventually we make it to Clark AFB. We go to the officers club and listen to the 1940s style Phillipino big band. We go home to our crew trailer. We look at the sky for vampire bats. The trailer entrance smells intensely of very rancid sweat. Cousin Rex, was at Clark AFB for medical treatment. He had just been wounded for the third time, shot though both lungs. I didn't get to see him.

What happened to Rex?, I ask Danny

"I see him now and then, he's a truck driver", is Danny's response. I tell him the gooney bird story.

Midway Island is about half way between Japan and Hawaii. The birds of Midway have evolved on the island with no fear of predators. Gooney Birds are fun to watch. They are great fliers but have mid-air collisions. The also have to run to take off and often stumble and crash on both take-off and landing. During mating season they dance for days with heads thrown back, chests out, bills clacking and singing. Later the baby birds are huge balls of fluff. If you approach the nests they get excited and throw up on your shoes. They fly away for years and come back to nest in exactly the same spot. This can be inconvenient if a runway has been constructed since they then nest on the runway. They're also known as albatross.

We take off from Midway at 0400 local time. The Aircraft Commander has ordered the empty airplane loaded with fuel at 10% over the maximum allowable gross take-off weight because he wants to make Washington State in one giant 2,800 mile flight. He's got a new Toyota in the back and wants to miss Hawaii Customs. Our airplane lumbers down the runway and shudders up to an altitude of about 5 feet at the end of the runway. It hangs there for an small eternity kicking up prop-wash in the Pacific. I'm hoping we don't turn and put a wing in the water or lose an engine. I'm reminded of Earhart's last take-off from Lae City, overloaded with gas. An overcast Pacific is very dark at 0400. Eventually, we burn off fuel and begin to slowly climb out to 8,000 feet for the long trip home.

The return trip is 14 hours. We're in the clouds all the way with nothing except dead reckoning. As we approach the Pacific coast and pick up TACAN signals it becomes obvious that I missed my estimate of crossing the the ADIZ (Air Defense Identification Zone) by ten minutes rather than the allowable five minutes. My 'check ride' navigator begins to scream at me, turns red and blows spittle in my direction. I find this behaviour curious considering the available navigation aids and stared at him without response. Then he makes some notes and tells me I passed my 'stress test'.

I'm sure by now that Danny feels like I do about the war, so I tell him about my rubber stamp.

I had a rubber stamp made at a Tacoma office supply store. It said Kill a Commie for Christ. I kept the stamp and an ink pad in one pocket of my flight suit along with a .38 calibre revolver. I began to use the stamp on the walls of officer club rest-rooms throughout the Pacific. It was my sneaky way of protesting the war.

Danny asks, Do you still have the stamp?

I find it and show it to him. The ink pad is dry. It's in the box with my tarnished wings and unheroic medals and ribbons.

"When did you get out?", he asks.

About when Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. Remember the inner city riots? Hundreds were killed, mostly black people shot by police with shotguns. The cities burned. I was briefed on a massive plan to transport troops to trouble spots to maintain order at the point of machine guns. We were ready.

I got out after five years. After the 3,000 mile drive back to Tampa I watched Bobby Kennedy being shot on live television.

Danny yawns again after all these old stories...and the beer is gone. We dump the bottles and go to bed.

The next day we catch and cook grey snapper and grouper. A man on the boat tells us a story about catching 2,000-pound halibut in Alaska and I file it for future reference. I think of reeling up soft gray Volkswagens. Danny decides to stay another day and we do it again. Danny's middle son, Bruce, left last week for Iraq as an young Army officer. I hope Danny has talked to him about leading and protecting his men.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - Santayana

Watch out for the kid with the orange shoes

2011-10-30T10:25:00.003-05:00

North Carolina

Four of the seven grandchildren went with me to play soccer Saturday.

I took the four that were old enough not to need car seats. It was very cold and a little wet.

The oldest is a referee.

Little Bob was scoring ten goals a game in his age group so he moved up to play with the 8 to 10 year age group.

I heard one of the Dads on the other team say, "Watch out for that kid with the orange shoes".

He's a fast mover...

An exciting game.

Not Home Alone

2011-10-27T16:56:00.051-05:00

North Carolina

Mrs. Phred got an IPAD2 for her birthday so now we can download books from a variety of different "APPS", play "Angry Birds" and try to avoid zombies while driving a virtual car down a desert highway. We also have an APP that is trying to teach us Thai phrases like "Where is the bathroom?" and "please bring our check".

Mrs. Phred's cousin in Chiang Mai, Thailand has hundreds of piano albums and songs available in the Apple Store. Our passports came back with a visa good for ninety days from the Royal Embassy of Cambodia. The only worry we have now is the increasing flooding in Bangkok, which looks to still be there by December 4th. Our hotel in Bangkok is where "Hangover II" was filmed.

Christmas and our 45th anniversary on Christmas Eve will be on the Mekong River in Cambodia. Like the song "Holiday in Cambodia" says, "..pack a wife". Click on the MP3 thingy to the right side of the blog to hear the song.

The grandchildren are easy to amuse. Playing dodge ball on the trampoline or swinging them high in the hammock sends the little ones into paroxysms of laughter. Our oldest grandson taught us to program and use the new IPAD2.

The cameras on the front and back of the IPAD are very cool. I love the way the display rotates when you spin the pad around.

Once more unto the breach

2011-10-16T16:03:00.004-05:00

Sarasota, Florida

We will be going up to Raleigh to overlook the seven grandchildren next week. After that, Mrs. Phred and I will catch a fast train to New York City and leave the Toyota behind. I think the train is the Orange Blossom Special.

We'll take sleeping bags and some simple cooking equipment and join the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. If they can do it in Egypt, we can do it too...or maybe not.. The forces of oppression have never been stronger...Even Jimmy Hoffa would be daunted by the scale of the corporate and banking money in the pockets of our politicians. The worst that can happen is that they start shooting us like Kent State or Syria. I don't care. Our grandchildren deserve better than a lifetime of paying off banking fraud and graft.

I expect that as Winter progresses the rain and snow will decimate our ranks, but Mrs Phred and I plan to be in New York for the long term. I hope there are bathrooms..but, if not..we are prepared to sacrifice for the future...

We are leaving for Bangkok on December 4th...so nobody's perfect.

All Gimped Up

2011-10-14T15:50:00.005-05:00

O'leary's Bar...Sarasota Beach

We went to the beach last night to watch the sun set, drink some dark rum and eat a shrimp salad croissant.

Mrs. Phred is going to test her shrimp allergy before we head out to Bangkok because we understand that they put shrimp paste in almost everything.

A dear friend (that I've never met) told me about the free program, Gimp 2.0. I've been playing with it a little. I could see it becoming a major time waster.

I call this Gimped one "Sunset in Sarasota"

This is the same picture before Gimp.

This is "The Phreds on Lido Beach".

The one below is "The Phreds at the Edge of the Grand Canyon".

This is "Red Fish, Blue Fish".

This is "15 ton Solid Gold Buddha".

Antelope Canyon in Arizona....

The News Gets Weird

2011-10-11T18:28:00.003-05:00

Believe it (or not)

So Mitt Romney belongs to a "cult" religion? Excuse me? Pot? Kettle? Black?

Sadly, my man, Obama, has extended the civil rights abuses of George Bush. He can now decide to summarily execute American citizens with a pen scratch and a Hellfire missile.. Off with his head....(belch)...

The whole global financial system teeters on the edge of a vote by Slovakia to support an increase in the ECB (European Central Bank) assets or not....Slovakia????

We are faced with getting a lot of shots for our visit to Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam...

The Center for disease control recommends

Tetanus shots
Polio booster shots
Malaria pills
Typhoid shots
Hepatitis A and B shots
Japanese encephalitis shots

The Sarasota Health department is willing to help us with this for about $800. I'm starting to think that Part D prescription insurance would almost have paid for itself.

There's a statue in Bangkok that is a 15 ton solid gold Buddha. It's over 10 feet tall. 600 years ago it was covered with plaster because of an invasion. They were surprised a few years ago when a crane knocked off some plaster during a 1950 demolition of this minor temple and the gold shined though. Now tourists like me go to see it.

$36,000 a pound times 30,000 pounds is a little more than a billion dollars...I am no longer impressed with less than a triillion...to steal a 15 ton Buddha would take some planning...

I struggle to remember Bangkok in 1967. There was the lovely Temple of Dawn, a pyramid inlaid with broken blue and white china. I had a lunch from a vendor in a boat on the canal. He had one plate and one fork that he washed in the canal between customers. The rice and fish head cost a baht (that was a nickle then, but 3 cents now). My air force shots must have protected me from the feces and other drek in the canal.

I remember climbing the stairs of the temple. They were very steep, but I was young, stupid and fearless. We rode down the canal in a "long-tail" boat. Back then I think that 4 cylinder Renault engines were very common. This guy looks like he's handling a a Chevy V-8. Time marches on.

An old lady on the canal with orange gums smiled at me and tossed me a narcotic betel nut. Betel nut makes your gums orange.

Running Down The Road

2011-10-05T18:13:00.004-05:00

Sarasota, Florida

The trip from upstate New York to Florida took us three days.

We spent the first night in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Maryland and the second in a Georgia rest area.

When we were younger we could do a 70 hour cruise from Seattle to Miami at a constant 80 MPH by stocking up on coffee at truck stops. Now we are old and easily fatigued.

Quebec city is a lovely place. It is perhaps the oldest city in North America.

30 people settled her 400 years ago and 21 of them died during the first winter.

On the way back a piece of metal flashing separated from the under carraige and started dragging on the ground. I wired it up and we continued South.

The process of obtaining visas for Cambodia and Vietnam is not easy.

Just as an example, they both require photos 4 by 6 centimeters in size. That's 1.57 inches by 2.36 inches. So you have to start by converting that to 32nds of an inch. they want 2 and 12/32 by 1 and 18/32nds.

Cambodia has an e-visa. I got one for $50 but it only works at the two major airports. Since we are entering Cambodia on the Mekong River, that won't work.

So I'm working on getting a visa by mail. The website for the Royal Cambodian Embassy says to fill out a form and send in a bank check, but they don't specify an amount.

So I e-mail the embassy and they tell me that I should send $45 Australian dollars for each visa by mail. I suspect that they also want the same amount of US dollars, but the difficulty is real.