We arrive in Thailand

 

So here we are in Thailand’s newest airport in Bangkok.  The name of the airport is Suvarnabhumi and is pronounced [sù.wān.nā.pʰūːm].  In the suitcases and cardboard boxes are our trikes.  Notice the word in the background.  “Exchange” is a word that means give us your money and we will give you some of ours worth less than you gave us.  It also means sell us back our money and we will pay you with your money again at a lose.  Some how that doesn’t seem fair as I should at lease make a little money sometime

The pilot had the “pedal to the metal” from Norita, Japan to Bangkok so we arrived 40 minutes early.   Usually my sister in laws pick us up upon arrival, but this year we decided to do something different in order to learn how we might be able to make our arrival in BKK easier for all parties.  We decided to take the “light rail” link from the airport to the downtown area near my sister in laws nursing college.  Unfortunately it does not start until 6 AM in the morning so  waiting around the terminal is necessary and we had gotten in 40 minutes early making the wait even longer.  The link is reasonably priced at 45 Baht for a one way ticket, with the present value of 32.8 Baht per dollar.  It is brand new and allows groups of travellers to move to and from the airport to the downtown area without needing to use either taxi or buses.  Access to the train is straight forward from the basement of the airport.  All announcements are made in both clear English and Thai. Clear Thai you might ask? Yes it is very clear as I can understand it which is not always true when speaking with people in other parts of Thailand where the language has been influenced by other countries like Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia. Thailand being the strongest economical power in south east Asia has all the problems every other economically strong country has including illegal immigration which influences the language.  In the north eastern part of the country a large majority of country people are from Laos or were raised by Laotian speaking parents so accents and pronunciation  can be very different from central Thai or what might be called Bangkok Thai. Funny thing is the language in Bangkok is no longer so pure as it was say 30 years ago before the big economical boom.  Many rural people have moved into the cities seeking a better life and and they have influenced the spoken language within Bangkok.  Older residents still speak good clear Thai, but some of the people have accents and pronunciation hard to understand. 

The simplest way to describe the Thai language is that it is based around 5 tones.  There is the middle tone or what might be referred to as the normal tone, there is a rising tone which starts as the middle tone and rises in pitch, and a high tone which starts high and stays high.  With these tones there is a falling tone which starts as a normal tone and then falls and a low tone which starts low and stays low.  How these tones are used determines what is being said.  Take for example a word which is spoken as the English word “MY”.  Depending on tone it can have the following meanings:  Wood, No, Silk, Burn & New. Five tones, five different words. It is still pronounced “MY” but as the tone rises or falls the meaning of the word changes. It is my understanding the people who are good at music learn the language easier.  I once though I might be tone deaf and that is not correct, but hearing the tones and reproducing them is very difficult for me.

So I would imagine those folks in Casper, Wyoming are still very cold, and the winters in this area of Thailand are also cold.  Just yesterday it was nearly 64 degrees at night.  I say that with a smile on my face, but every thing is relative and there are Thais here wearing heavy sweaters and wool caps in the morning as I ride down the street in a light weight jersey.  Once the sun comes up I start to turned into a boiled lobster and need to start covering exposed parts of my body to prevent sun burn. I also ride around the country smelling like an eucalyptus tree for the better part of every day as one of the more popular mosquito repellents is made from eucalyptus .  It smells better than DEET, but is not as effective so it must be applied more often. 

I decided to leave some of my usual riding gear home for this trip. 

All signs indicate that I might be very lucky if I keep my normal weight this trip even with riding nearly daily.  I like Thai food so much that it is difficult to keep the fork on the plate and not in my mouth. I hope once we get to riding on a daily basis that I can lose a little weight or at the very least not gain it.

New Year is celebrated with much noise and glee.  As usual the fireworks especially fire crackers started around 11:00 PM and became intense at  midnight. One would think people were using mortars and artillery rounds from the sound that was being made.  It sounded like the sound track from a war movie. I always worry about windows being broken from the shear volume of the sound and intensity.  This year’s celebration loud as it was didn’t last the usual whole night.  It seems that by 12:30 AM it was tapering off and by 1:00 AM it was quiet, unlike last year where the Karaoke bars were blasting all night long along with the endless firecrackers.  Last year I could still smell the black powder from the fire crackers in the morning at 6:00 AM which was not present this year, so I guess the devaluation of the Baht put a dampener on this year’s celebration.

We plan for warmer days

 

So why Thailand?  Well I am married to a Thai lady and we go to Thailand almost every year to visit family and there is the standard Wyoming winter to consider.  We had our first major storm in October this year. A large number of tree branches from my neighbors yard ended up on my garage or along side it after the storm in October. Snow with the density of concrete and the stickiness of 3M gorilla tape clung to the branches and leaves until the branches split off the trunks falling randomly here and there.  While I was out cutting up one fallen branch with a buck saw I heard a cracking sound above my head sand I took off running. This was the headache I dodged.

Any place in Thailand would be great for a starting point, but we decided for a symbolic one like the northern most tip of the country.

One can’t go any further north without being in Myanmar formerly known as Burma. This is the point we will travel to after arriving in Thailand to begin our tour.  We will post pictures of us and our trikes when we get there.
So how does one go about getting a red trike which looks like this to Thailand?   I tried stuffing it into a carry on bag, but it would not go in the little rectangular sizing box at the gate. 

I was therefore forced to become more creative. So I took my standard bike tools and with a little tinkering you can get to this, the ICE Adventure trike Chinese puzzle.  arrive in the states to the news that all Dreamliners had been grounded due to pesky lithium battery fire issues. 

One suitcase and one heavy cardboard box both legal size limit for the airline to avoid oversize charges and you are ready to go.  When I arrive in Thailand I go pay a Chinese bicycle mechanic to reassemble the trike.     I really do know how to put it back together myself and it takes about 3 hours depending on how many rum and cokes I had in the hours before and the degree of jetlag I am experiencing. 

Myron and I plan to fly to Bangkok by Boeing 787 Dreamliner.  Last year my wife and I returned from Thailand on one of the first Dreamliners to be flying. It is a very nice plane with more leg room than most, quiet and generally well appointed even in the “Cattle pen” section.  While boarding we walked all the way to the tail section before we realized we were indeed in coach and not some sort of business class.  Never had so much room with all my fellow bovine travelers. So I had a very favorable opinion of the new Dreamliner until we

So it would seem that not only laptops catch fire with lithium batteries.   Having your laptop catch fire and melt down in your lap is a minor problem with maybe your nether regions suffering some damage, but when you plane catches on fire in mid flight one usually has more to worry about then having their chestnuts roasted.

MORE THOUGHTS

• DENGUE AND MALARIA

I have been traveling in Thailand off and on for the past 25 years.  It seems some years or months of the year the mosquitoes can be so bad one might thing they were a biblical plague, while other years they are the usual minor nuisance.  Unfortunately Dengue fever is on the rise world wide and Thailand is also experiencing more cases. Heck, you don’t need to go to the time and trouble of flying to southeast Asia, you can get your very own case of Dengue now in Florida as of last year. Dengue goes by many names depending on where you are living.  In Africa it is call “Break Bone” disease, because when it settles into your bone marrow it feels as though some force is trying to snap your bones.  In Thailand it is called “The fever which causes you to bleed”. As your platelet levels drop you can start to bleed internally and externally if you suffer any injury. There may be a bad rash, except it isn’t a rash as there are no raised area, just bleeding fine blood vessels in your skin. The worse case is called “Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever with Shock Syndrome” which comes with a little added plus of extreme low blood pressure causing one to pass out without warning. So where did I come about this wealth of knowledge regarding Dengue you might ask.  Like most everything I have learned in life that I know well it came from the “school of hard knocks”.  Last year I came down with Dengue with shock syndrome while in Thailand.  The condition starts with Flu like symptoms. I ask the reader isn’t it strange how many different maladies have “flu like symptoms”? Sort of like the question “what does it taste like”?  The usual answer is “Well Clem this here barbequed rice rat tastes just like chicken”. 

Yes this is me and yes it really itched. I also didn’t get to brush my teeth for 8 days due to that pesky bleeding issue. I don’t want people thinking that Thailand is some sort of disease ridden country as again you can come down with this now in Florida.  This was day two of the fever.  I went to a local hospital to be diagnosed with flu and possible allergic reaction of some sort of plant.  The rash was covering my entire body including the bottom of my feet.  The doctor must have been thinking I had been running nude through some local poison ivy to have had such a reaction.  As I was to find out later he was wrong.  I didn’t know how wrong until two days later while loading my trike on the top rack of my sister in laws SUV to go to the bus station so I could ride in a tour to Cambodia. As I was lifting the trike it did seem heavier than usual, but I had been a bit under the weather so I though no big thing.  I reached down, picked up my trike and set it on the roof rack.  That was the last thing I remembered until I heard my wife’s voice and the smell of dirty asphalt was in my nose.  My wife said I went down like someone had turned off a light switch. So my wife and her sisters are trying to get me to my feet and I am feeling like the morning after a wild party without the head ache. My wife says I am a bit of a hard head,  so to prove her wrong I do what most men do and say “I’m good”.  Well I was good until I walked about ten feet to the curb, where I performed my second performance of dead man falling.  Lucky for me I didn’t go down on the asphalt this time and had good old plain concrete to break my fall. After regaining what little sense my wife claims I have I agreed that maybe I should rest so we started up some stairs to the condo.  My sister in laws didn’t think it wise that I try to walk up a flight of stairs so my wife and I took the elevator.  Many elevators in Thailand can only be described as tiny some are nearly miniscule.  This one was something in between.   My two sister in laws bounded up the stairs to meet the arriving elevator only to find me laying on top of my wife in the elevator after my third time passing out.  Lucky for me this time I had a nice soft wife to land on. I was marched down the hall to the condo and deposited on a bed while my wife and sister in laws started the decision on what to do next.  It was obvious to even me I was not to make the tour to Cambodia no matter how badly I wanted to go, yet being a man I was still trying to talk them into letting me ride. Sometime later two young Thai men appeared at our condo door and I was duck walked down the stairs by them to the SUV, belted in so if I passed out again  would not eat part of the either the dash or the seat in front of me.  I truly can’t remember if I was sitting in the front or back for the trip to Bangkok. When we reached the hospital I was again diagnosed with flu like symptoms.  It was recommended that I go home and rest until I mentioned that my chest hurt.  Best thing I could have done.  People where looking at my gray hair and alarms went off regarding a possible heart attack.  I was taken to a heart specialist who looked me over, did all the blood pressure things and then said “I can’t be 100% sure until tests are done, but I think you have Dengue fever and the worse kind”. I was really confused.  What type of heart problem was Dengue Fever?  So I am admitted and off to a private room I go, blood is drawn, time passes and finally the doctor appears to tell me yes I am a winner and the prize is Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever.  Of course the doctor was very professional and really didn’t present the diagnosis in that way, but I did feel like I had won some sort of bogus prize for being careless with mosquitoes.  It is good fortune that a heart doctor knew more than his specialty and got me going the right direction.  So two days in Pakchong hospital near my home, and 6 days in a hospital in Bangkok I am finally release to go my merry way.  I have been in many a hospital before and I never felt I needed that wheel chair ride to the front door, but this time I was glad for the chair and the young man pushing it.  I was still feeling a bit weak, hell I was so feeble if a puppy had come up and jumped against my leg to greet me I would have most likely have fallen, only this time I would have seen the asphalt or concrete coming towards my head. 

So what is one to do regarding Dengue fever and or malaria whether it be in Thailand or Florida and the $100,000 answer is try not to get bitten my mosquitoes. The little buggers are most active early morning and evening around dusk and then less so at night. I can think of only a few times I have worn mosquito repellant in the last 25 years, but that is going to change on this trip. I now plan to bath in mosquito repellant especially during peak activity times and I will also be using a insect tent, which I recently purchased. The tent will be soaked in Permethrin to keep the little buggers away from the tent so they can not bite any part of my body laying against the fabric. So anytime I am in accommodations that lack proper screening I will be curled up inside of this tent as it is only six feet long and tiny little me is six feet six inches long. For one pound of weight on the trike it makes me feel much better in the battle against mosquito bites.