I’ve posted our vacation videos on YouTube. You can see them on the YouTube site by going here:

• youtube.com/chaosweb

Or you can view them here on the Chaosweb site:

• http://tinyurl.com/2mqgsl

(By the way, I have a couple of projects to finish up for our trip: I’ll be putting up the edited photos in the gallery and writing reviews of the hotels, services and gadgets we used.)

Within hours of  first setting foot in Thailand six years ago, we were standing before the Emerald Buddha in Wat Phra Kaew in Bangkok. It’s somewhat fitting that we wound up there again on the last day of our trip today.

We have, over time, followed in the footsteps of this peculiar little object. It was discovered in a hidden place in the fifteenth century in Chiang Rai, today near where the corners of Thailand, Laos and Burma meet today. (We had visited Chiang Rai a couple of years ago.) Then it went to Chiang Mai, where it was installed at Wat Chedi Luang, which we’ve visited many times and where our visit started a month ago. When the king of Chiang Mai left no heir in 16th century, it travelled to Luang Prabang in Laos and then to Vientiane when the capital moved again. (Also places we’ve been on this trip.) Finally in the 18th century, when Rama I captured Laos for Thailand, the Emerald Buddha was brought to Thonburi, the former capital across the river next to Wat Arun, the Temple of the Dawn. Later that century, it was enthroned in its present location.

	Throughout time, it has been an important Buddha image for Thailand, these days it is the most important one. Oddly small (it’s barely 2 meters tall), it’s actually made of a single piece of jade. Closely associated with the monarchy, it is revered as much as King Bhumipol himself. Perched way off the ground in Wat Phra Kaew, it has three outfits, one for the cool (or dry), rainy and hot seasons. The king changes the outfits himself in the thrice-yearly ceremonies.
	I have never seen a good, really clear photograph of it, probably because no cameras are allowed inside the temple itself. This is the best I could manage

The entire temple complex surrounding our little friend is spectacular, befitting its status as the country’s Vatican, as it were.
A characteristic of temples in SE Asia is the use of murals to tell stories to the people. The tales typically are on one of two subjects. One is the life of Lord Buddha and the jataka, or previous lives, he had. The other is the stories from the Ramakien, which for those of you who know Hindu mythology, is remarkably like the Ramayana.
These gilded garuda, mythical winged creatures, guard the temple of the Emerald Buddha.
Another common decorate figure is the Apsara, or Kinnaree, a lion-bird-woman creature. They are often represented in Thai and Khmer temple dances.
There is an incredible scale model of the main temple at Angkor Wat, which, at one time, was part of Thailand.
Almost no surface is without decoration of some sort. The bulk of it is brilliant glassic mosaics.
The cumulative effect is quite stunning.

Outside of the temple grounds proper, there is the Grand Palace itself. No longer in use as a Royal Residence, it is that fascinating blend of European and Thai architecture we saw at Bang Pa In palace.

Thailand, of course, is still in a period of mourning for HRH Princess Galyani, who died of abdomincal cancer at the new year. (I don’t know how everyone can dress in black in the heat.) As we came into the Grand Palace, a crowd of people was waiting for something to happen. What, we weren’t sure.
Tom, who wasn’t dressed respectfully enough for the Grand Palace, had been sent out to the street to buy some pants to cover his offending kneecaps. He stopped by the tent in the picture above to pull them on, when the royal entourage came driving by on its way to one of the mourning events. Tom got to see the King and Queen of Thailand!

Wilting in the heat, we left the palace and walked through the amulet market where, besides the allegedly ancient amulets, you can find street corner denture makers. We got on the wrong river ferry and wound in Thonburi, which is was great because we settled into a riverside cafe for some cold drinks. We had to get back to the hotel to pack, but we squeezed out a few more minutes of activities by going to a 200-year old mansion for dinner and then for a last foot massage. What more could we ask for? Then it was off to Suvvanabhumi Airport for the long trip home.

Looking over our vacation pictures, it hardly seems possible we’ve seen so much, been so many places and ate so well this month. All in all, not a bad way at all to spend four weeks.

Today started with an early departure from Bangkok, boarding a bus to go north to the ancient capital, Ayutthaya.

First up, though, was a visit to a summer palace, Bang Pa-In, a fascinating mishmash of Asian and European architecture.

We started in mist, caused by the time of year and by the fires used to clear rice fields.
To start the style parade, there’s this lovely Thai pavilion used to celebrate the King’s birthday.
This mansion in French colonial style was finished in the mid-1990s for Queen Sirikit.
There’s this Seussical lookout tower, Withun Thatsana, with lovely views of the palace grounds.
Modelled on something at Versailles, one can buy ice cream cones here these days.
The jewel of the building collection is the King’s Chinese place, Wehat Chamrun Palace. It’s worth pointing out that, like many of the Thai palaces, not a single nail was used here in construction. Unfortunately we couldn’t take pictures inside because the camera flashes were degrading all the gold decorations, it’s an opulent place, complete with a very imperial reception room.

Bangkok, or Krung Thep - City of Angels, is the fourth capital of Thailand. The first was further north in Sukhothai. The second, which we visited today, was Ayuthaya, powerful seat of the Siam kingdom for four centuries. Ayuthaya was the formidable sparring partner with the unsuccessful European colonists, seat of power when the Thai kingdom extended into Burma, Laos and Cambodia. It fell in the mid-18th century to the invading Burmese army during the famous War of the Elephants. After that, the kingdom fled to Thonburi and eventually Ratanakosin Island in Bangkok.

Today it’s a Unesco World Heritage site (yes, the third we’ve visited during this trip) because of remarkable quality of its Khmer-style (Cambodian) runis. Many of the ruins look remarkably like the ones we saw in Angkor Wat a couple of years ago. Our tour guide made repeated reference to “the former times”, a charmingly French turn of phrase to describe the old empire.

Our visit included Wat Phra Mahathat with its Khmer prangs and the famous bodhi tree-engulfed Buddha head. We also visited a royal palace ruins next to Wat Phana Choeng which now houses an enormous 60-foot tall Buddha image.

Here’s some of the things we saw:

To finish the day, we went on a 2-1/2 hour cruise down the Chao Phraya River back to Bangkok.
The Chao Phraya is very alive, with people living on its banks…
…and travelling to and fro along its length and breadth.
Two of the magnificent sights when we got back into Bangkok were Wat Arun, or Temple of the Dawn, decorated with thousands upon thousands of shards of broken pottery…
…and Wat Phra Kaew, home of the Emeerald Buddha, the holiest image in the kingdom, and the Grand Palace.

Afterwards we spent a pleasant hour antiquing by the river, admiring Thailand’s beautiful decorative arts.

Even though Thailand as a whole is cooler than our previous visits, Bangkok is still hot and the “feels like” temperature can be much higher what with all the concrete. For example, tomorrow’s forecast is 97F, but will feel like 107F. So the smart tourist will plan outdoor adventures for the morning, leaving river trips or air-conditioned shopping for the afternoon.

If you’ve followed our travels, you’ll know we like ’sightseeing’ at markets. The granddaddy of them all in Thailand is the Chatuchak Weekend Market. Only held on the weekends (because just two days a week leaves everyone utterly exhausted), it covers an impossibly large piece of land with mazes of narrow corridors under tin roofs with shops selling just about anything you can imagine. That’s where we headed this morning, making it our main activity of the day.

We got their using Bangkok’s subway-in-the-sky.
There are dozens of these entryways, separated by many more alley entrances, giving you some idea of how large the place is.
Chatuchak is very popular with tourists, who are still outnumbered by the Thais who actually do their household shopping here.
We always head first to the garden building, which is like visiting a botanical garden, but more concentrated. I collected some seeds for our summer garden, including tiny pea-sized eggplants which I never see back home.
Once past there, you can buy just about anything…

Of course, with all that shopping, hunger isn’t far behind and there is no want on that count either.

On previous visits, we could still see the infamous endangered species trade in the animal section. Thankfully, that’s gone or, at least, well-hidden now. Pretty standard pet store stuff. I particularly liked the selection of bantam (miniature) poultry.

After five hours of walking, shopping and looking in that heat, exhaustion set in.
So we finished our day at one of the huge, blissfully air-conditioned shopping malls. We lunched at the top-floor food court for more great khao soy (curried noodles) and a dessert made of green sago (tapioca) in coconut milk with salty young coconut meat and corn. Yum!

After endless delays at the Phuket Airport (they have only 9 gates…how hard can it be??), we arrived in Bangkok tonight. There’s a little hotel in Silom we’ve always stayed at, the Swiss Lodge, and we’re here again. They were extremely kind and upgraded us to a suite since it’s our anniversary and we’ve been here before. There’s one odd thing to report: there’s a copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s “The Way to Happiness” in the drawer instead of the standard Bible and Book of Buddha. The location is extremely convenient because it’s right below the Sky Train, Bangkok’s above-ground subway. The Sky Train and the river ferries are by far the best ways to get around (if you’re going somewhere they are) because they get you away from some of the Bangkok smog. Also, Lumphini Park, a large green space is just down the street.

In addition, Patpong, referred to in that Abba-ish song, One Night in Bangkok, is just a skip away. If you didn’t know, Patpong is where that extraordinary physical feat of expelling ping pong balls from one’s body originated.

More important was dinner, so we headed to Soi 4, off Covent Road for the gay ghetto here. A vast improvement over Phuket’s, it’s a lot of fun. There’s the Telephone Bar where, like the stage version of Cabaret, you can dial direct from table to table. There’s Balcony Bar with white leather couches out on the street, tres chic. Our meal was at an Egyptian-themed restaurant, the Sphinx. Pretty good food too.

A day’s rest yesterday helped speed recovery from my little cold, so we were back on our feet, running hither and yon.

Our hotel, the Amari Coral Beach Resort is on its own private spit of land with a private beach. A lovely place, I thought I’d share some views. Here’s Tom at our room, #1111.
The two	pools.
	One of the three restaurants, all open air. There’s Thai, a highly-regarded Italian and an “International”. This is the third, where the breakfast service is held.
The first night, we had a so-so dinner in the Thai restaurant and I wondered why. Well, it seems that’s the crowd that’s catered to, as I realized at breakfast the next day. It’s a humungous buffet with hardly any Thai food. I saw a lot of plates being carried out loaded with pork and beans! One fellow had a plate loaded with nothing but an inch-thick stack of bacon, covered in turn by 10 slices of toast. Yum. Ah, tourists.
These are the open-air massage pavilions. We didn’t avail ourselves here in Phuket, but they are lovely.
	The hotel has a private jetty, for sunning, drinking, and swimming. Very nice.
The landscaping is quite nice. Here’s some unusual red-bark palm.	And one of my favorite tropical plants, the fan-tail palm.

I’d been planning on getting new concert clothes tailored on this trip. In Phuket there are three things one tires of quickly: offers of tuktuk transport, offers of oily Thai massage and cheap tailors (well four, if you count all the junk food).  I was lucky to find an excellent tailor here. Bespoke clothes are an affordable luxury in SE Asia!

Our most unusual vacation activity ever was a visit to the dentist’s office for some teeth whitening.

Tom saw a newspaper story about the profile of typical tourist to Phuket. They come for two weeks, sit in the same beach chair in Patong day after day, and drink. Sounds like a great vacation, doesn’t it?

No wonder Phuket is my least favorite food part of our trip, because that situation naturally leads to this:

Even so, Phuket is beautiful, with long stretches of white sand beaches. We had a great morning sunning, about 5 minutes short of being burnt to a crisp in the sub-tropical sun. The Andaman Sea is famous for extraordinary snorkeling and diving. Because of the lost day, we didn’t take a trip out to deep water, but still were able to do some pleasant snorkeling right next to the beach to see really pretty coral and fish.

In December we didn’t truly celebrate our anniversary, waiting for one of our favorite restaurants here, the fabulously romantic Baan Rim Pa, perched on a cliff overlooking the water and out to the city. It was worth the wait. In stark contrast to the beach scene, the food is here is authentically Thai, but very refined. There’s even a good jazz trio (which turns into a quintet when the piano player triples on organ pedals and trumpet while still playing the piano with his left hand.

We started with a green eggplant salad, topped with crabmeat and dried shrimp.
A whole fried fish with chili jam.
	Soft shell crab with chili.
Pineapple fried rice.
	And classic mango and sticky rice.
And the carved fruit centerpiece that we didn’t eat, but admired.

Afterwards we visited Phuket’s gay “ghetto”, the Paradise Complex. Old-school bars here are fairly small, with storefronts maybe 15-20 feet wide. Imagine strings of them lining both sides of the street, each blaring their own special music, touts out front to tempt passers by. We sat with our diet sodas and watched the spectacle. There was a go-go boy bar which, inexplicably, had a gaggle of drag queens in wedding dresses out front to lure you in. There were all the straight people on the way into the Paradise Hotel…the elderly women seemed to take particular delight in interacting with the ladyboys. Of course there were the decrepit old men out for a fling, bless their hearts. And there was another fashion parade of guys in couture drag scurrying from their dressing rooms down the street to their home bar. Altogether, very entertaining.

A few minutes before I fired off this shot, we were on our little scooter in the middle of deluge with thunder and lightening. Really and truly, it was fun. We haven’t had rain yet in Thailand on any of our visits and it was great to see the sky opening up over the bay.

Today’s a good day for it too, because I managed to catch a cold in Hanoi and it seems to be finding its stride today. This is the best part of the trip for such a thing to happen since we are lounging around most of the time anyway. Knock on wood, we’ve both been as healthy as hogs on this trip. One strategy came from our doctor: Pepto Bismol twice a day. It might coat things making it more difficult for the nasties to plant a flag.

Tonight’s activities are thrilling: room service and a movie. Oh well, a little down time is a good thing, right? We’ve been maintaining a fairly strenuous pace for the 21 days we’ve been gone so far.

As we went to bed last night, we were startled to hear a band playing in the lobby nearby at a deafening volume. Of course I called to complain and was told the band would be playing until 1 in the morning! Tom went down to complain some more and was offered three more rooms, all as deafening as ours. Not only would it bother our rest, it would spoil the week for us as we had been so looking forward to hearing the waves from our room, far from the bustle and din of Hanoi and of Patong. Like so many things it all worked out and we moved to a much better room today with a better view and more quiet. It even has a number lucky for us, 1111, very close to our home address.

Regardless of the previous evening’s mishap, this was the view waiting for us the next morning:

After breakfast we took advantage of one of the two pools and took care not to get sunburnt.
		Venturing down the hill into town for a little of mid-day exploring…
		Now, I’m sure you’ve heard of the intellectual piracy in places like SE Asia. It’s here, for sure. There are a couple of new twists this year though. Along with Hollywood movies, American TV shows are almost as popular at streets stalls. Then I had never seen this: pirated newspapers!

		As always, we picked up a 125cc motor scooter to zoom around on. It’s dangerous with these drivers, but pretty fun. The bike’s an automatic and very strangely, my feet still have muscle memory from my long-gone motorcycle days and search for the shift pedal.

When the tsunami hit, we were immediately concerned about the people we’d met on previous traips. At the top of our list was Kenya, whose restaurant is barely a few feet about the beach level. With no way to contact him or others, it had to wait until our trip this year. Imagine, then, our delight to see our old pal, effervescent and flaboyment as ever at his restaurant, the Sea Hag.
He claimed to have remembered us, which, if nothing else, was flattering, and we had a good chat. Of course the reason we met him in the first place was because of his food, which is wonderful. Especially in a place like Phuket, where I suspect most tourists come to be at the beach and not to be in Thailand, the country’s food suffers at many places. Maybe it’s because it has to be toned down so much for meeker palates. What people don’t appreciate is that Thai food is about balance and when you diminish one aspect (spiciness), you diminish the whole. Anyway, our first dish was like coming home, prawns wrapped in noodles which seemed to float around the shrimp, seemingly unattached. Honestly, this is the best execution of this dish I’ve ever had.

Whew! What a long day. Rising at 5.30am to catch our flights down to Phuket, Hanoi was just about freezing, raining and pretty miserable. Just the right time to get out of Dodge and to start the vacation part of our vacation.

We’ve had some experience with Phuket and were very curious to see how the recovery post-tsunami is coming along. It’s very startling to see the amount of new construction, often side-by-side with old familiar buildings. The state of tourism is still far below what it used to be. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. If you don’t already know, Phuket has something of a seedy reputation, particularly with the hostess bars along Bangla Road. That was already somewhat subdued when we first visited, but now it’s beginning to remind me of the transformations of Manhattan or Las Vegas. People, apparently, are still staying away in droves except, very oddly, for Russian tourists who seem to speak the predominant language around town these days.

We’re staying at an honest-to-goodness resort, which means we very well may just sit on our butts by their pools or private beach for the entire 4-day stay. It’s a nice place, but I was confused about the message they’re trying to convey when we opened the minibar to find strawberry-flavored condoms, breath mints and cockroach spray.

Returning to Hanoi after our trip to Halong Bay, we were both slightly amazed that all of sudden the city seemed less overwhelming, more manageable and easier to deal with. It’s still unavoidable getting a bit lost in the maze of streets in the Old Quarter, but it’s not at all disconcerting now.

The fish in a clay pot that we had for dinner last bowled Tom over. The grilled duck “Hanoi” style was very good and the meat was much gamier than we’re used to owing to the fact it’s wild meat. The papaya and beef salad was pretty good, tame compared to the som tum in Thailand. We went to a place called the 69 Bar-Restaurant, another one of the Lonely Planet guidebook’s picks. (It’s very strange: just about every tourist wherever we go is clutching one of those guidebooks to their chest, worriedly checking to make sure they get everything on the list. Not us…I scanned the pages before we left and we look at them on my tiny computer when we need to.)

The city was in a very festive mood last night. Lots of shops closed up early, young people were thronging the clubs and there was a big extravaganza by Hoan Kiem Lake starting the countdown to Hanoi’s 1000th anniversary in 2 years. (Everything is also gearing up for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year in a few weeks.)

We thought it might happen and it did: the weather turned cold and wet today. So we started the day right by finding a pho place on the street and settling into a steaming bowl of noodles and broth. It’s really a great way to start the day and sticks with you. I’ve noticed that the chilis here in the north are very different than southern ones: the southern ones slap you in the face and fade quickly, while Hanoi’s start off slowly and linger for a while.
		The Old Quarter is organized by the guild streets. There’s a funeral monument street, tin street, toy street, shoe street and so on. Today we ran across musical instrument where we found 4-string banjos and violins in addition to all the traditional instruments.
We spent the morning wandering around Hoan Kiem Lake, the heart of Hanoi. Here’s the turtle pagoda…there’s a creation myth about Hanoi involving an Arthurian sword, the King and a turtle.
		And here’s the bridge leading to the Temple of Jade.
Then some time wandering the streets just soaking it all up.

Tonight, we went to see the Vietnam National Symphony perform in the formerly grand Opera House. It was interesting to see another house based on the Opera in Paris (we’d seen one in Rio de Janeiro as well). A Lalo/Rimsky-Korsakov program, I can’t say that the orchestra pretended to be anything other than what it is. The feeling came back, however, of the time I spent in the Hong Kong Philharmonic, where music was lived in such a vacuum. Also the brass section sounded a lot like the traffic horns just outside.

Before that for our last dinner in Hanoi at we had bun cha, another participatory dish with sizzling beef, a cold broth made of fish sauce, lime juice and chili, rice noodles and a wonderful assortment of herby greens, many unfamiliar.

So we leave Vietnam. Incredibly glad to have been here, pleased to be leaving now. I wish I could have gotten more of a sense how well the Communist government does by its people, but beyond the oppressive Soviet-era architecture and the Orwellian speaker announcements, people seemed to be the same as anywhere: more good than bad, pleasant to talk with, interesting to watch.