In which I muzzle myself, for once…

(Written (partly) at the Erawan restaurant, Vang Vieng, Laos, 9:00 PM, March 8th, 2007)…

Over the years, I’ve incubated a huge rant in which I unleashed all my frustrations with backpacker culture. I finally wrote it out, borrowing liberally from Alex Garland, and yet now the rant sits untouched in my notebook. It won’t make it onto my blog for now. Why not?

Because here in Vang Vieng, the quintessential backpacker town, nearly bereft of local culture and bloated with what wealthy European and American adolescents consider an “authentic” travel experience, I still had an absolute blast. I did so largely by avoiding the backpacker haunts (with one notably entertaining exception), but I still think I should shelve my tirade for now. The real post follows...

Vang Vieng is an unspeakably lovely little town enwombed in sheer karst cliffs and pristine tropical grass forests. The village lies about 170 north of Vientiene, a distance that takes about 4 hours by bus along Laos’ main highway, which is two lanes wide and windier than my worst imaginings. Our driver was more generous with the horn than the brake pedal, but I still had time to watch a chunk of Laos pass by at a somewhat leisurely pass. Small herds of water buffalo cooled themselves in dark streams and foraged in terraced paddies awaiting the planting in May. Freshly burned fields explained the smoke shadowing the entire region; farmers scorch their fields of excess vegetation, briefly nitrogenating the soil at the expense of much of its long-term fertility.

Houses of unpainted concrete or woven bamboo (with an implausible number of satellite dishes) lined almost the whole route, but I rarely got the impression that human habitation stretched more than a few hundred metres back from the road. At all times and in all directions imposing limestone hills, thickly forested and apparently untouched, cordoned off further sprawl.

Laos is thinly populated, six million people in a mountainous country more than four-fifths covered by virgin forest. The same economic and political repression that has mired the populace in poverty has oddly left much of the wilderness unscathed. I have very little idea why this happened in Laos while all her communist brethren suffered immense environmental destruction.

Now that I’m here, I find Vang Vieng to be cute and friendly despite the grotesque backpacker bloat. Virtually every building in the centre of town is a guest house, restaurant, or laundry shop – and usually all three. Dozens of “TV bars” litter the key streets – tiny restaurants, all with identical uninspiring menus, in which a handful of zonked-out westerners chow down on French fries and stare blankly at bootleg reruns of “Friends” or “Family Guy”. You can sit in one bar watching one episode of Friends and hear a half dozen other episodes of the same damn show echoing from the adjacent TV bars. Authentic travel it ain’t.

I’ve avoided the TV bars for now – I watch enough bootleg TV back at my place in Chiang Mai, and don’t need it on vacation. Instead I ate dinner twice at two different restaurants, both equally lackluster and poorly served – neither time did my meal arrive even remotely as ordered. But I’m full, so I’ll call it a marginal victory, and I have a gigantic bag of peanut M&M’s (a great rarity in SE Asia) that I bought at my guest house. Life could be much worse.



Between dinners I took a walk around town as the sun vanished abruptly. In the darkness, at least, there’s very little to see here beyond the aforementioned guesthouses. I did meet quite a few friendly locals, curious cows and apprehensive street dogs. I also encountered a bridge marked on each end by two unexploded American bombs half-buried in the soil. Given that unexploded ordnance (UXOs) continues to kill hundred of Laotians a year, this light-hearted reference was a wee bit discordant.



Sure, Vang Vieng proper might not have much to salve the soul – but I’ve found the remedy to that. Tomorrow I’ll be spending the day out on the Mae Nam Song river – first on a lighthearted caving diversion deep in the mountains to the north, and then kayaking 15 kilometres downriver back to Vang Vieng. If I were to do this whole lovely trip again, I’d reverse my course and head north to south, from Luang Prabang to Vientiane. That way I could kayaking all the way from Vang Vieng down to the capital, a three-day trip amidst glorious scenery. I’m sure it sounds like more fun than it actually is, but hey – still worth a shot. Meanwhile, tomorrow should be a fine time all the same.

In which I bubble with minor pride...

This has got to be one of the best pictures I've even taken. Wasn't easy.



In other news, I've worked out a fantastic deal with the fine lady who runs the little hole-in-the-wall where I eat lunch most days. The place make great, ultra-authentic food for microscopic prices - about $0.75 a plate. They're so low rent they don't have menus, and the corkboard tables are disintegrating - it's about as Thai as you can get. But I've grown tired of eating the same half-dozen dishes (namely, the ones whose names I know). So, with the help of my Thai phrasebook (using it for pointing rather than speaking, of course), we've worked out a new deal. I no longer order lunch. Every day she makes me whatever she thinks I'll like. In return, I eat it. She's never steered me wrong yet, and she instinctively understands that as I'm a weakling foreigner she'd best tone down the chilis. It's a good way to go.

In which I wax ecological…

(Written at La Gondola restaurant, Vientiane, 6:30 PM, 2007)

This afternoon, between first and second dinner, I walked out to the middle of the Mekong. At its peak the mighty river is at least two kilometers across, but now, at the height of dry season, it has narrowed to perhaps a quarter of that. I’m glad, since in wetter months my walk would have been a touch more harrowing. As it is, I was able to get a fascinating hint of the lifeblood of this entire region.

Cutting sneakily through the main tourist waterfront drag of Vientiane, running a gauntlet of “Tuk-tuk!” and “Hello! Where you go!” was the first step in my walk. Past the shops and restaurants, I elbowed through head-high grasses and edged down a steep footpath and found myself on a narrow mudflat that twitched with ruddy-coloured frogs no larger than my thumbnail. They were so small and moved so erratically that I first thought they were bugs, and I may have stepped on some before I even noticed them. Stepping lightly and slowly didn’t scare them from my path consistently enough and I eventually took to crouching and blowing furiously at the ground before each step. This odd behaviour seemed to scare off the tiny beasties (who were far too well camouflaged for their own good) and, more important, much amused the five Lao teenage boys who greeted me at the water’s edge.



They waded in a torpid stream that branched off the main river for about a kilometer before rejoining it. Like a dozen others I passed on my walk, they were fishing by hand. Taking turns, each would vanish briefly in an explosion of bubbles and, and then re-emerge clasping a wriggling six-inch fish between both hands and smiling in triumph. The water was too muddy to open one’s eyes underneath, so they must have been fishing by touch alone, and yet they rarely resurfaced empty-handed. I couldn’t tell if they were doing it for food or sport – I didn’t see a bucket for storing the catch, and their infectiously cheerful competitiveness reminded me more of a game of street hockey than a work session.



They and several more obviously industrious hand-fishers along that tributary gave me a tiny hint of what the Mekong river and its branches mean to the people of this region. Most Westerners (myself included, until today) know the river mainly as a charnel house for American soldiers during the Vietnam War (known here, by the way, as the Second Indochinese War). I wish more visitors here would try to get to know the river a little better – drinking a Beerlao at a waterfront bar, while great fun, doesn’t really count.

I picked my way across a makeshift bridge of driftwood across the muck and mud and onto the vast sand island, at least a kilometer wide, that sits in the middle of the Mekong. I met six kids playing an amusing game of piggyback boxing. They smilingly obliged my photos.






A few more locals whirled on dirtbikes in the distance. At the edge of the river proper, a few dozen Lao leapt briefly (or were shoved) into the water. The river was several hundred meters wide, swift-moving and unnervingly deep. The occasional small ferry plied its way – too late in the day for much traffic – and in the fading daylight I could dimly see the distant lights of riverside industry through the rust haze of the burning season.



Why am I making such a fuss over this simple river? Because there’s a casual intimacy in these people’s relationship with the Mekong that took me by great surprise. At home, a river is mainly an obstacle to be bridged, and then rarely considered except by those who make their living on the water.

But here the river provides everything to virtually everyone. The Mekong is not merely the lifeblood of the people of Southeast Asia, it’s their highway, their playground, their supermarket and, let’s face it, their sewer. A quarter of a billion people in six countries live and die by what happens to this river. Until I saw it I had no idea of how important it is. At the least, I’m newly convinced that no traveler has really visited Southeast Asia until they’ve set a foot in the Mekong.

In which my gradual creative rehabilitation continues...

I'm in the midst of a massive reworking of my flickr page, hence the lack of Laos posting today. More to come. Plenty of photos are up from the first couple of days of my trip, but in no particular order and with inadequate description... soon this will be corrected.

In which I complete my journey through Laotian history…

(Written mostly at Kop Chai Deu restaurant, Vientiane on March 6th, 2007)

The Lao National Museum is, to put it succinctly, an odd place where communism is worshipped and Laos overflowed with prosperity once the foreign oppressors were vanquished. Skipping over a vast and (to me) completely uninteresting exhibit on the historical interactions between Laos and the Netherlands, I poked through the museum’s core, a series of dry and dusty rooms chronicling Laos’ endless conquests by, and wars of liberation against, pretty much everyone.

Local leftist luminaries (again I applaud alliteration) like Kaysorn Phomsivane, the founder of the revolutionary Pathet Lao, stood in sculpted and painted form alongside better-known international symbols like Ho Chi Minh, Gorbachev, Marx and Lenin. The main hall runs through a gamut of international occupations of Laos, from ancient Burmese and Khmer overlords, to the Japanese, the French, and eventually the Americans who attempted to hobble the Laotian communists through their Hmong tribal proxies. The room is speckled with paintings of villages forced to toil for the occupiers, and sun-faded black-and-white photos of cruelly injured civilians and victorious Lao revolutionaries. Interspersed throughout are glass display cases full of American M-16s, empty artillery shells and CIA field binoculars, among many other paraphernalia of war.

The 1962-75 proxy war that raged between the CIA and the North Vietnamese along Laos’ eastern border with Vietnam is known as “The Secret War” for good reason. It was one of the most underreported news stories of the 20th century, and yet it was staggering in scale. It’s vastly more complex than I’m able to relate – I have only the dimmest understanding of the war. The North Vietnamese essentially occupied half of Laos to gain vital strategic territory for the fight in Vietnam; the Americans responded by bombing the living shit out of the entire country. Sorry for the crassness. I wish I had a more polite way to describe it, but I don’t – over the nine or so years of the Secret War, the US ran nearly 300,000 bombing missions to support a thousand CIA agents and the 75,000 Hmong insurgents they were training. Those sorties dropped more tons of explosive on Laos (about 3 million tons, if memory serves) than were dropped on Japan or Germany during World War II – the unexploded remnants of which continue to mutilate Lao civilians by the hundreds every year. Yet the US government at the time refused to acknowledge that the war was even underway, while the CIA bomber pilots flew in civilian clothes lest they be captured.

Eventually, despite all this, the North Vietnamese crushed the US-supported Hmong rebels and their CIA “advisors”, driving the few Americans out and brutalizing the surviving Hmong. Why the history lesson? Because as little of this information was on display in the Lao museum as there is in the typical American history book. According to the government-approved histories I saw at the museum, the heroic Lao forces fought back against the cruel American imperialists, and through pluck and brilliance and ideological superiority, singlehandedly drove them out. I couldn’t find one mention of the fact that it was North Vietnam that invaded Laos first, nor that the NVA carried the major burden in evicting the Americans again; come to think of it, the entire country of Vietnam went unmentioned, along with the fact that Vietnam colonized Laos after the war and that Laos remains a Vietnamese political vassal to this day.

The government-approved storyline, one of triumphant communism vanquishing oppressors and unshackling the poor, apparently left no room for military occupation by Laos’ ideological brethren in Vietnam. Come to think of it, according to the museum, Laos’ history more or less ended entirely in 1975 when the last of the Americans were driven out and a workers’ paradise was presumably established. There was no mention of the grinding poverty that continues to enslave most Lao, nor of the periodic peasant uprisings in response to government oppression. There was certainly no talk of the sporadic and ongoing Hmong insurgency and the vicious ethnic persecution the government has launched to quell it.

There was a small room full of ascending bar charts which, though untranslated, clearly meant to indicate ever-expanding prosperity and a handful of photos of shining breweries and pharmaceutical plants. But the numbers don’t lie – Lao’s communist revolution was embarrassingly brief and unsuccessful even by the miserable standards of real-world Marxism. It gained traction in 1970, was renounced in all but name by 1990, and left the people as poor as when they started. Laos’ literacy rate (58%) remains a disgrace, rural poverty is some of the most oppressive you’ll see outside central Africa, and the Communist Party still clings furiously to power. Life in Laos, for the vast majority, remains nasty, brutish and short – not to mention illiterate and oppressed.

Needless to say, my one glimpse of official Laotian ideology left me perplexed and a touch pissed off. The Lao government has been very explicit that it has absolutely *no* interest in fostering multi-party elections, permitting political criticism, or loosening the tight reins on the press. Fortunately, some other things are changing here, and not a minute too soon. Economic growth has begun to take off and life is haltingly starting to improve for ordinary Laotians. It’ll be interesting to see how economic growth affects one-party rule – like a micro-China, perhaps.

In the meantime, at least all those vicious oppressors left Laos with some great food. I’m going out for pasta now – I’ll write more when I hit Vang Vieng tomorrow and start doing some outdoorsy stuff.

In which I take an entertainment break...

I watched 300 yesterday, and heartily recommend it to anybody with an appetite for big, pretty action flicks. It's admittedly a little thin in the story department, even considering the paucity of the underlying material. But it's well acted, expertly paced, and full of inappropriately entertaining violence. Most important, it's about the most gloriously shot movie I've seen in years - it's satisfying to finally see the green-screen revolution be used in service of serious visual art. Go see it if it's at all your thing - and if you've got a reasonably strong stomach.

In which I get sidetracked…

(Written at 4:30 PM March 6th, 2007 at the Kop Chai Deu Restaurant, Vientiane)

Overfed and a wee bit bored, this afternoon I toddled through the supremely lackluster Lao National Museum, a sun-bleached and inconceivably dusty monolithic shrine to Laos’ past sufferings (admittedly plentiful) and great victories (rather more scarce). I dutifully paid my 10,000 kip (about one US dollar) and retreated from the lethal tropical sun for an hour, hoping to get a glimpse of Lao politics, of which I know very little. I certainly accomplished that, but only by reading between the lines…

Apparently attempting to broaden the museum’s appeal beyond diehard communists (a devout but notably dwindling demographic), the Ministry of Information and Culture has added new (i.e. slightly less dusty) exhibits celebrating prehistoric Laos.

Yay! Larb! Larb is a delightfully pungent and simple Lao stirfry made from bean sprouts, fresh dill and basil, nominal quantities of veggies and peppers, and a generous mound of ground beef. It’s served with a cup of sticky rice so structurally sound that I’m meant to tear it apart by hand rather than use a utensil. Yummy! You may have inferred that I tend to write while I wait for my food to arrive. It’s a good system.

Where was I? Oh yes, the Lao National Museum. Anyhow, there was a large room, complete with cheesy dinosaur diorama, dedicated to prehistoric Laos. Apparently this country has been inhabited for a *very* long time, and is an archeologist’s paradise. I even got to see one of the massive urns – millennia old, a metre wide and half again as high, weighing 300 kilos and carved directly out of a single block of stone – that I won’t get to see on the Plain of Jars. It was a welcome tidbit. Unfortunately, most of the exhibit was clearly intended for people with a passion for rocks (which I don’t have) or for amateur archaeologists (which I’m not), or at least for people who can read Lao (do you even have to ask?).

Fortunately, the rest of the museum focused on two of my abiding passions, politics and human foolishness, with a healthy dose of ideological self-worship.

Interruption.

2 women in their 20s, ragged with hard poverty and each with a swaddled infant at her hip, appeared beside my patio table to beg me briefly for money. I told them no and turned back to my food, rather less comfortably than before.

I don’t give money to beggars – ever. Hell, neither does Muhammad Yunus. I’ve long since acknowledged that even if beggars were to spend the money carefully and wisely (hardly assured), giving to them is about the least efficient way to help the poor. It doesn’t benefit from the foresight and economies of scale that larger, well-focused charities do. It does nothing to reward local creativity and entrepreneurship (and probably works to crowd them out, in fact). Besides, I usually tell myself that the work I do more than balances the karmic scales.

So why the hell do I still feel so guilty? In part, it’s because the decision not to give to beggars is *much* harder in the developing world than back home, where panhandlers receive some government support and the charity they receive most often goes straight into their veins. Here there’s no government support of any kind, for anyone. No welfare payments, no health care, no soup kitchens. The poor and hungry and sick stay that way, and for too many of them begging is the only thing that sustains them. All the reasons I listed above still stand, but they’re a lot harder to rationalize in Laos then they are on Vancouver’s East Side. Hell, I probably feel guilty mainly because I’m hungrily chowing down on my larb, while in full view of four people who are right now hungrier than I’ve ever been.

The Australian couple at the next table simply turned their heads when the begging women arrived, and refused to speak to them or otherwise acknowledge their existence. For all my reasoning, is there really any difference between me and that consciously oblivious couple? The two women and their hungry children surely don’t think so.

Bloody hell. I’ve lost all desire to write about the museum right now, surreal though it was. Sorry for a downer post. I’ll try to write something funny tomorrow.

In which I speak surely too soon…

(Written at 12:00 PM, March 6th, Le Grillon French Restaurant, Vientiane.)

Having whiled away a fascinating morning standing in line at the Thai consulate, awaiting my visa with hundreds of other Westerners who are also pretending not to work and live in Thailand, I haven’t yet seen much of Laos. I did wander a short while around Vientiane, and I’m ready to launch into some surely premature observations on this tiny country.

Someone better-traveled than I, but cursed with a sadly unmemorable name, wrote that “Laos is one of the last quiet countries”. If that’s still true, then Vientiane is surely not the place to prove it. This small capital of about 250,000, a forest of low-rises and small temples, fed by pleasantly broad French boulevards and narrow lanes, isn’t lurking in some silent pre-industrial past.

Ooh, my pizza just arrived! Onion, garlic, pepper, mushrooms, ham and criminally large quantities of respectable French cheese. Looks tasty.

Vientiane buzzes with far more energy than I’d expected. Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t Bangkok or Singapore. Laos is a desperately poor country, near the very bottom of Asia’s economic ladder. The literacy rate here is a disgraceful 58 percent, life expectancy… and the per capita income is much closer to the hardest parts of sub-Saharan Africa than to Laos’ next-door neighbours, Thailand and Vietnam.

But there’s still a world of difference between destitute societies on the way down and those on the way up. In Zambia, Zimbabwe and Nicaragua, for example, the finest buildings were the remnants of old colonial infrastructure, rotteing amidst grinding poverty and gruesome kleptocracy. Especially in the first two examples, there was a palpable sense that the good times (such as they were) were long past, and few people expected growth to reverse their grim fortunes. A side note: A belated Happy 83rd Birthday to Uncle Bob, the feckless thug who personally ruined the most promising country in Africa. May it be his last!

Laos is in the same league as Zimbabwe for poverty (or at least it was until Zim began its sickening nosedive six years ago). But, following the lead of its ideological brethren next door in China, the Lao Communist Party began liberalizing the economy by increments in the late 1980s, without much loosening political restraints. The results have been dramatic. Funded by tourism and a moderate resource boom (whose environmental consequences are not yet clear) the economy is vigorously expanding, at least here in Vientiane. New buildings and infrastructure are under construction everywhere in sight, small businesses are sprouting, and shiny tuk-tuks and quite a few very new vehicles jostle on freshly paved roads. It’s on a very modest scale, of course, but when we consider Laos’ miserable starting conditions, this is remarkable progress. It’s not hard to imagine that this is what much of China looked like 15 or so years ago, when their own liberalization was taking root.

Of course, I’m looking in a very small place in a fairly large country. 90 percent of Lao live in rural areas, and subsistence agriculture employs 80 percent of the workforce. It would be foolish for me to judge the country’s progress based on a walking tour of the showcase city… so I’m heading out of town. I don’t have all the time I’d like to explore the country – that’ll have to wait until July or August – but after I collect my visa tomorrow I’ll head straight out of town. Lamentably, I don’t have time to visit the remote Plain of Jars, but the trip north to Luang Prabang should provide a better opportunity to see the real Laos, even though it runs along the country’s most developed corridor. Until then, I’ll devote myself to walking around town and, more importantly, eating six times a day. More to come.

In which I offer 3 conclusions, illuminate a problem, and offer a strange solution… (kindly bear with a long post – there’s something in it for you)

(Written in Vientiane, Laos – March 5th, 2007)

I haven’t heard so much French spoken since my first trip overseas, to England and France in 1998, traveling with my father and enabled entirely by his generosity. Not surprisingly, Laos couldn’t be much further removed from France, and her days as a French colony ended half a century ago, but a handful of connections make Vientiane a very pleasant place to spend a couple of days.

Although few Laotians bother to learn French these days, the country’s remnant francophonism and, more importantly, the legacy of fine French food continue to lure French tourists. Several of the occupy the tables on the 2nd-floor balcony of the Le Creperie, where I now enjoy a shockingly authentic caramel-and-meringue concoction while overlooking the darkened central square of Vientiane. Though I can understand little of their conversation, Spanish having rudely elbowed French out of my verbal cortex, their chatter is surprisingly soothing – a touch of unexpected elegance.

The food here in Vientiane is supremely tasty, more than compensating for the monolithic architectural drabness that appears to accompany Laos’ vestigial communism. Having enjoyed a delightful chicken-and-wild-mushroom baguette, a hefty order of chicken tikka, and a couple of desserts (a three different restaurants in total), I suppose I didn’t really need another food fix here at Le Creperie. But I felt I needed a suitably cosmopolitan spot to navel-gaze, so I hauled my pen and notebook across the street and up the stairs, so best to scribble out the following:

Conclusion 1) I’m in a bored funk. Not here in Laos (which is spiffy), just in general. I don’t mean that I’m unhappy, merely that, Thailand and all notwithstanding, I face very little challenge in my daily existence. Life here is comfortable, but more routine than you’d expect – wake up, bike to work, toil lightly, eat well, hit the gym if so motivated, and wrap up the day hanging with friends or incinerating digital aliens. Save for occasional weekend sightseeing and a handful of kickass trips like this one, life here differs very little from life at home in Vancouver.

My work is pleasant but unchallenging. I don’t have as much opportunity to teach my students as I would like – though that’s likely to change a bit in coming weeks – and I fill the rest of my time with the same necessary but mundane tasks like writing web copy and editing papers for which I would have been much better-remunerated were I still labouring in corporate whoredom.

None of this sounds terribly difficult, I know – and that’s precisely the point. I feel like I lack opportunities for much personal growth here, even though that’s exactly what I came here to look for in the first place. I’ve been surviving here (quite well, in fact) but I feel static, and uncreative. The solution, it seems, is to force growth and creativity upon myself. My ideal solution would be to travel like mad around Asia at every opportunity, but financial reality has already drowned that option. Nor can I afford the new camera I so desperately crave to feed my growing interest in serious photography. And so, lacking creative aptitudes in virtually all other fields, this blog must be my outlet.

Every single damn bloody %*$%*# day.

I’m going to force myself to blog more as a solution to my (admittedly trivial) problems.

Except…

Conclusion 2) I’ve thought this before, and I haven’t stuck with it long enough to make it work. I’m a champion procrastinator and a world-class squanderer of valuable time. Although I love writing, it’s all too easy every day to postpone it in favour of other pursuit that less resemble work and more resemble sitting on my ass. Time and again I’ve resolved to blog more (as you’ve likely noticed), only to have my brittle determination shattered by whatever obscure link trail I’ve started following on Wikipedia that day.

Which leads us to…

Conclusion 3) I’ll need help, and I’m willing to pay for it. Here’s the new deal: for the next month, I’m going to write at least one solid paragraph every single day. Any time I miss a full calendar day, I will award $10 to the first person who calls me on it (by posting in the previous day’s comments). $10 is my entire disposable income for one day – real money to me, folks: 5 big meals out, 10 delicious Thai teas, 4 trips to the movies, or about 6 litres of not-too-bad local beer. You get the idea. I’m good for it – you’ll get your money.

I know it’s tacky, I know it’s weird. But I’m hopeful it’ll drive me to write, and inspire some of you to put some pressure on me – probably less out of greed than out of sheer bloody-mindedness (Christian, I’m looking at you with that one.)

I’m taking the liberty of establishing some exemptions – conditions under which I ain’t nobody anything for not posting.
1. Hospitalization.
2. Total loss of web access everywhere for the full day.
3. Civil War, but only if it results in exemptions 1 or 2 coming to pass.

Ok, let’s see how it works – in a month I’ll take a look and see how much money I owe and whether I feel more creative. Thanks in advance for your help – next up, lots more Laos!

In which I offer more red meat to my fellow international politics fanatics...

There's a ridiculously star-studded (and equally depressing) roundtable discussion here about the future of Iraq. Pretty interesting stuff if it's your thing.

In which I follow one of my political passions...

Albeit with heart-wrenching disappointment. As long-time readers know, I've followed the miseries Robert Mugabe has inflicted on the once-lovely Zimbabwe. Incomprehensibly, it actually seems to be getting worse, with Zimbabwe's quiet starvation is far exceeding the far more obvious butchery in Darfur.

In which I return to Chiang Mai to discover that something has changed for the worse…

Namely the choking grey miasma that now hangs over the city. The burning season has begun, late in the dry period when the worst of the summer heat approaches. Farmers across Southeast Asia are scorching their fields (or the virgin forest) of excess vegetation in the viciously myopic hope of wringing another year of fertility from the taxed soil. So the ominous smoke of slash-and-burn agriculture, which I had expected (and found in great quantity) in Laos, is now omnipresent in Northern Thailand as well. I’ve been told that this is the worst pollution in the region’s history, and I believe it. The greyness coats my contact lenses with abrasive grit, suffuses everything with a faint acrid stink, and at times runs so thick it’s hard to spot the sun (admittedly a blessing at midday). With not a drop of rain in five months (nor any expected for three more), and the air absolutely motionless, it seems it will be some time before Chiang Mai becomes fit for human habitation once again. And yet here I’ll be. At least work is picking up.

At least while I cower in the conditioned air of my apartment, hiding from Asia’s justifiably legendary air pollution, I will at least have time for some blogging. Tonight is a time for transcription, though it may take some time: my notebook scribblings are nearly illegible even to me, a fact of which I’m vaguely proud.

In the meantime, it’s time for Paul Literary Review!!! Yay! On my vacation (which ended eons too early), I got fifty pages into Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 before losing patience with its endlessly self-referential humour and slow pace. I’ll give it another shot in a few days – I’m fairly certain I’m the only person alive who hasn’t read this book.

Instead I ran through Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which delighted me by making a thoroughly ludicrous scenario (life trapped in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, for anyone who’s been under a rock since 2002) audaciously believable, and then making it bloody entertaining. It’s a quick and rewarding read – I highly recommend it to anyone capable of silencing their inner skeptic for a day or so.

Whereas I recommend Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist only to literary masochists and Republicans. I can’t remember the last time I read a book of such paralyzing stupidity – and certainly not one that came so highly recommended. I bought it based on the (somewhat hedgy) accolades on the back cover and some glowing word-of-mouth; had I been able to break the shrink-wrap, I’d have discovered that such esteemed critics as self-actualization guru Tony Robinson are the book’s most fervent proponents. And no wonder – The Alchemist is a babbly self-help book masquerading as a novel. Its infuriating (and incoherent) preachiness (about such lunacies as The Soul of the World – don’t ask) is equaled only by its textureless prose and miserably static characters. It's a quick read too, but that's still 90 minutes I've lost forever, and I'm deeply bitter about that - I could have wasted that time playing World of Warcraft, dammit! If you’ve been fortunate enough not to read this embarrassingly lame book, then keep it that way; if you once suffered through it, know that I share your pain.

Ok, more blogging to come ASAP – and some photos and (gasp!) video of my Laotian pratfalls!

In which I'm alive and well...

Having procured some new scars kayaking down the Mae Nam Song river in the middle of Laos and subsequently leaping from a rope swing, I've finally arrived safely in Luang Prabang, the lovely, UNESCO-listed heart of northern Laos. It feels rather more like being in the French Alps, so thoroughly preserved are the remnants of French colonization. In fact, I'm about to rush out to visit what's apparently one of the world's finest French restaurants, so my post gets cut short here. I'll be returning to Chiang Mai (by plane, thank Vishnu, rather than by bus) tomorrow, and details aplenty will arrive then - including tales of the distressingly numerous, well-armed and polite(?) insurgents lining the highway to Luang Prabang.

In which I'm allergic to backpackers...

But they're everywhere! I'm in Vang Vieng, a tiny and lovely little town 200 kilometres north of Vientiane. It's my rest stop on my way to Luang Prabang in the far north... but it's overrun with backpackers! Imperious, self-righteous, homogenizing backpackers (wait a minute, did I just accidentally describe myself?). In any event, I can hear four or five different TVs playing "Family Guy" at bars surrounding the internet cafe - such is the homogenizing influence of the Western explorer.

The blog posts continue to accumulate in my notebook. Soon all will be unleashed.

In which I've arrived in Vientiane, Laos...

And I'm eating suspiciously well, given that this is a miserably poor quasi-communist country. Also, it's quite hot here in the landlocked heart of Indochina. I've been blogging plentifully (in my notebook), but limited internet access prohibits a wholesale uploading of my ruminations, most likely until I get back to Chiang Mai on Sunday. Such is life. Also, I'm concocting a tacky yet innovative new plan that will keep me blogging consistently (Hint: there's money involved, mostly mine).

More to come when technical limitations permit.

In which I go questing far afield...

In search of a decent hamburger.

For reasons which escape me, hamburgers in Thailand are all fried, McDonalds'-style, and I've been unable to find a decent barbecued burger in six months here. As fried burgers go, the local ones are fine, but nobody seems to grasp what an absurd compromise that is.

And yet, four or five months ago, someone from Indonesia told me that Southeast Asia's best burger joint is in Vientiane, the Laotian capital about 12 hours' bus travel from here. So I'm going looking for a fine authentic hamburger, in the landlocked, thinly populated geopgraphical heart of Indochina. Sure, makes sense. (And while I'm at it, I'll get a new visa so Thailand doesn't deport me.)

Vientiane (so named because the colonial French overlords couldn't pronounce "Wieng Chan") apparently has few charms beyond fine sandwiches, so once my visa woes are resolved I'll head northeast (I think) to explore the mysterious Plain of Jars. Then I'll zip over to Luang Prabang, a reputedly lovely hybrid of SE Asian charm and French food and architecture - UNESCO tells me that I'd be foolish to miss it. And then I'll fly back to Chiang Mai somehow next Sunday... I think. Lao Airlines has been a little unclear on that point.

I'll have a spot of spare time while I wait for my visa in Vientiane and ride buses around this anachronistic country, and I'm leaving my computer and DVD player at home (shocking!), so my notebook will occupy my time. This should result in many many blog posts, of the sort that have been promised abundantly in recent weeks but continuously sidelined by my newly hectic work schedule.

Wish me luck - I'll be carefully avoiding UXOs, gorging myself on the best of the local food, and avoiding some of the more noxious Lao "delicacies". More on those later, when I better come to grips with some of the profoundly odd things considered tasty in Southeast Asia. See you in a week, less if I can find a decent Internet connection - not something at which Communist countries usually excel.

In which I'm testing the potential of the New Blogger...

They won me over with a brilliant Battlestar Galactica analogy, so now I'm exploring the much-ballyhooed conveniences of Blogger 2.0, with an eye towards better use of photos and integrating my previous travel blogs dating back to Japan in 2000. Other posting is on brief hiatus until I've done so...

In which I bow to tradition...

And wish everyone a Happy Valentine's Day!

Normally one to go all out for the occasion, this year I'll settle for living vicariously through my students, many of whom have never observed the day before. Now, fully apprised of the details, they're in an absolute frenzy, making endless calls to significant others and giggling maniacally in a way that Southeast Asians seem to have a preternatural talent for. At the best of times they're inquisitive, but they've taken Valentine's Day as a license to question everyone they meet about their respective personal life, with an indefatigable curiousity that would shame Mike Wallace. It's fascinating to see, but I'm damn glad it only happens once a year.

In which I recounted requested details...

I'll eat almost anything. Not because I'm an indiscriminating consumer, but because I feel it's hypocritical to travel all over the place and yet reject local foods. Hence the camel burgers and pigeon in Cairo, the crab's brains in Tokyo, and various non-endangered antelopes in Africa. But I've previously drawn the line at insects, for reasons of pure visceral disgust. Having never eaten on before, I expected both taste and texture to repel me, so I've avoided them insistently and felt somewhat less the traveller for doing so.

Yet on Monday evening, while relaxing at a patio bar near my apartment with some coworkers (three Americans and two Burmese), the travelling bug man wheeled his little cart up beside our table. The cart was piled high with a distressingly wide variety of dried and pan-fried insects - crickets, grasshoppers, cockroaches, and a bewildering array of grubs and larvae. Two of the American women in our group bounded gleefully towards the cart and began picking through free samples, munching on crickets and the like, all the while offering the disclaimer "We're from Tennessee!" - which I took to mean that bugs are a staple protein in the American South. While i circled the cart in apprehension and they bought a tray of assorted arthropods, the friendly vendor held a massive metal spoon towards me, laden with insects in an obvious act of charity.

I have no idea how to say "yuck" in Thai, and I didn't want to offend the guy. So, probably facilitated by a curious libation called a "Chinese Eye" (which is, far as I could tell, is neither Chinese nor ocular), I acted before my revulsion reflexes could set in, and quickly picked the most innocuous thing I saw - a mid-sized grub of some variety, most likely a grasshopper larvae.

And I ate it.

I popped it into my mouth, bit down quickly, and swallowed with all haste. It wasn't enough. The texture was grotesque enough, and completely alien - I've never eaten an entire animal in one bite before, organs and all. Gooey and foul. The taste, however, was in an entirely different league - a noxious blend of insect innards that polluted my entire mouth instantly and snidely remained in my mouth despite copious rinsing with Coke and more, erm, antiseptic beverages. I've never tasted anything like it, so my only benchmark to describe it is evil. If racism or global warming had a flavour, that would be it - something so viscerally cruel that it threatens to stomp out even the possibility of ever sampling anything tasty again. For several minutes I was genuinely frightened that my tastebuds would reject all food forevermore. Evil.

It passed, but my loathing for ingesting insects has not. I used to say "No thanks" - now it'll be a principled, vehement "Never again."

In which I frantically search for water...

I just willingly ate a bug for the first time in my life. It will be the last.

Now let us never speak of this again.

In which I'm back in Chiang Mai...

... after a week in Bangkok and Cha Am (Thailand's most mediocre beach) for a conference with CUSO.

This might sound exciting, but beloved Bangkok was only in transit, and my time in Cha Am is memorable largely for cold showers, long days in overheated conference rooms, and the forced company of an exceedingly surly vegetarian.

However, there were also kleptomaniacal monkeys, lotus swamps under dubious stewardship, a tiger with CP, and some truly fine food. Pictures and more details to follow once I've showered and slept.

In which I again explore the depths of my capacity for inadvertent self-mutilation...

Yesterday afternoon, I was cheerfully eating some delicious kimchi while watching TV. A strange turn of events interrupted the fun and left my fork jabbed into the palm of my hand. The injury itself was quite superficial, hardly needing a bandaid - and was entirely out of concert with the level of excruciating pain it inspired. It turns out that the last thing you want to accidentally inject under your skin is a powerful mixture of exotic Korean chilies.

That is all.

In which I dabble in Thai politics...

Largely because my trip to Burma consisted of: 1. Step across the border. 2. Buy Chinese DVDs. 3. Step back into Thailand. Total time in Burma < 30 minutes. Not exactly the stuff of travel legend, so instead I'll launch into a rambling dissertation on Thailand's political travails.

You're all aware that Thailand's somewhat dodgy civilian government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was overthrown in an abrupt but bloodless coup last September, two disorienting days after I arrived here. The coup was greeted by a startling (to me) level of public acclaim from people who were remarkably eager to ditch their hard-won democratic gains. The military government swiftly appointed an ex-general as interim prime minister, and promised a overwhelming flood of evidence into Thaksin's alleged corruption - the presumed preponderance of which was the stated justification for the coup.

Fast-forward to year's end, 2006. The government has been glacially slow to lift martial law, partly reneging on its own promises to do so within 3 months after the coup. Though there have been no harsh crackdowns, normal political assembly and protest remains banned. The military government has provided not one whit of evidence of Thaksin's corruption - supposedly so endemic and irrefutable that it compelled a reluctant military to burn Thailand's democracy in order to save it. And then, as you've surely heard, a series of ten small bombs in garbage cans detonated in Bangkok during New Year's Eve celebrations, killing three. A couple more were set off a few days ago at Bangkok media outlets, apparently without injury.

Awash with the luxury of geographical and cultural distance from the bombings (Chiang Mai is 800km north of Bangkok), I rapidly assumed that southern Thailand's long-simmering Muslim insurgency had finally made the expected migration to the capital. All public speculation has dismissed this option, however, and everyone quickly focused on the idea that members of the police or military were responsible - for reasons unknown to me, but the locals know their politics better than I do, so I'll give them the nod. The coup leadership instantly began insinuating (though not explicitly, nor with any evidence) that some of ousted PM Thaksin's uniformed supporters planted the bombs in order to undermine the military's promise of law and order. Other rumours rapidly began to fly of an imminent coup within the coup - the junta's secondary commanders potentially ousting the higher-ups, not to restore Thaksin but to refocus the coup on its ostensible democratic ideals.

All the while, a ludicrous clampdown on free speech continues. The military government apparently considers Thaksin Shinawatra so infectiously corrupt that they won't allow his words on the Thai airwaves, lest his evil taint the populace. CNN International interviewed him last week, in a session I fortunately caught on satellite TV. No saint he, but he merely insisted that no evidence of his corruption has been produced (true), that the coup has not followed through on its promise to restore political liberties (true), and that the government is unfairly censoring him (ditto). The remarkably innocuous interview was banned on Thai cable TV, and all Thaksin segments were mysteriously replaced by muzak-accompanied still photos of Will Smith, Tom Cruise, and Britney Spears (Huh?!). Much of the press, including the noxious English-language Bangkok Post, has shown astonishing fealty to this denial of free speech. The Post, in particular, seems to contentedly defend every move by the coup leaders and daily denounces Thaksin as evil incarnate. I have no idea if the Thai-language media are so spineless.

The next month will be critical. The dictatorship has offered to allow Thaksin back into the country (he's in exile in London at the moment) provided he remains out of politics. Content not to dispute the obvious illegality of the junta's barring him from office absent any criminal charges, Thaksin seems instead to be biding his time to make sure they're not likely to throw him in jail the moment he steps off his jet in Bangkok. He'll be out the country for a while yet, but rumours of his return could set off a wave of Thaksin nostalgia if the coup leadership doesn't soon liberalize things around here. The attendant confrontations could turn ugly - I stand by my September prediction that men with guns don't willingly give up power.

More critical, the army has promised that in one month's time it will release the results of its inquests into corruption under the old government. The suprising legitimacy of the coup will rest heavily on the results - no corruption, no reason for the coup to be tolerated (except for their guns, naturally). I have no doubt that if it comes to that, they'll fabricate evidence, but I'm pretty sure many Thais are expecting the same sleight-of-hand and will be poring closely over the evidence. I have my doubts they'll come up with anything substantive.

So what then? I expect public discontent with the military to grow, and the military (ever convinced of their own selflessness) to begin feeling slightly pressured and isolated. Without more evidence, I can't put much stock in rumours of a coup within the coup, or of a counter-coup by Thaksin supporters. So I re-ask the same question I raised in September: will there be violence? Well, for starters, there already has - a little sooner than I had predicted, but I'm still claiming points for that one.

Will there be more? Seems likely. If the coup was behind the bombings, then their motive to carry out more attacks may increase - they'll want to appear the bulwark against chaos. If Thaksin's supporters were behind it, then it seems certain that they'll grow more agitated as the military's case against their golden boy falls through. There also remains the possibility of future crackdowns against the protests that are sure to spring up eventually.

So am I safe here in Chiang Mai? Certainly looks that way. Chiang Mai's in a very sleepy part of a very sleepy country (recent turmoil notwithstanding). It's quiet and peaceful up here, without a hint of political unrest. Thais are difficult to rattle - losing your cool means losing face here, so nobody does it... ever. They continue about their daily business, and so do I. There's no reason to expect a rapid disintegration in Bangkok, let alone here in the far North. Don't worry, I've got no martyr complex. If things start to go downhill, I'll leave (pending DFAIT's sage advice). For now, that isn't happening... but I'll keep reading the tea leaves.

In which it's 3 AM...

... and I'm going back to bed in a moment. I've badly neglected this blog of late, for a variety of reasons, but since I'm making a quick run over the Burmese border to get a visa tomorrow, I'd best get back to sleep ASAP. But in an effort to get the posting ball rolling again, I'm making an explicit promise to post when I get home late tomorrow evening, about one or more of the following: work or the periodically frustrating lack thereof, the surreal Disneylandesque grandeur of the Royal Flora Ratchaphruek festival, my minimally successful attempts to find authentic Mexican food in Southeast Asia, my upcoming trip to Laos, my involuntary trip to Cha-am (a seedy beach semi-resort outside Bangkok) next week, and of course, tomorrow's trip into poor wretched Burma.

This I solemnly vow.

In which I'm back, and I'm thoroughly terrified...

One of my coworkers had a baby a few months ago, and now she's back at work. She's recorded a 3-second clip of her son laughing, and is using it as her cellphone ringtone.

I'm sure this sounded like a cute idea at the time, but in practice it's just the creepiest thing I've ever heard. She consistently leaves her cellphone unattended in our shared office, and so, several times a day, a rapidly repeating clip of disembodied infant laughter emerges from her backpack, or her desk, or elsewhere. It's very unsettling.

In other news, Chiang Mai has been entirely spared the moderate confusion unfolding in Bangkok over the last couple of weeks. Things are tranquil here... perhaps overly so. More to follow...

In which I can't stop watching the Daily Show...

I continue to find this lovely clip profoundly cathartic...

In which I go on hiatus...

Sorry folks, I'm going dark for a couple of weeks. I'm home for the holidays, and some other serious stuff's come up very quickly, so I won't have much opportunity to blog. You'll hear from me (at the latest) when I go back to Thailand in three weeks.

Happy Holidays!

In which I offer a Thailand fun fact...

Thailand is sufficiently enamoured of tourists that the government actually throws festivals to commemorate their arrival. I'm not kidding: right now, the market district of Chiang Mai is in the throes of "Chiang Mai Mardi Gras: Celebrating the Start of the Tourist Season".

This is a very unusual country.

In other news, after a night spent in a hotel room whose comfort level and price displayed no correlation whatsoever to each other (take that as you will), I made it back into my apartment Wednesday morning. I'm astonished that an apartment complex that houses closes to a thousand people has no way of accomodating someone who lost their keys after 6:30 PM. Between that and the decrepit internet access, I'm looking for a snazzier place to live.

Meanwhile, I'm thoroughly occupied this week, teaching a 1-week course into which I am apparently to condense a comprehensive education on Economics, Globalization, and Natural Resources. Ummm... the odds ain't good. But it will at the very least wreak havoc on my blogging schedule. Moreover, I'll be well and truly too busy to notice the passage of the final days before my Christmas vacation. Ye gods, I'm excited to visit home.

In which I confess some foolishness...

Tonight you were supposed to get a bonanza post about the King of Thailand's birthday, as well as my attempts to suss out how the odd Thai calendar works.

Yet I, in my infinite wisdom, have locked myself out of my apartment, and will be spending my evening dealing with that instead. I've exiled myself from my phone, my computer, and the key to my bike lock, hobbling myself rather effectively. I can't remembered the last time I so profoundly inconvenienced myself with so little effort... I'm actually a little proud of myself. Thank Vishnu for the glory of internet cafes.

So instead of learning about the grand festival of idolatry known as the King's Birthday, you'll ponder the transpirings of the evening as I try to track down someone who can open my apartment. Leaven your terror and worry with the knowledge that I played my first full soccer game ever today. The other team was distinctly unnerved by my unorthodox yet wildly inventive strategy of scoring on my own goal, and yet more confused by my curious inattentiveness once my team tethered me to my goalposts in the curious hope that I'd do less harm as goalie. In fact, our opponents were so disoriented by my brilliantly innovative gameplay that we actually won, a victory for which I claim full credit.

OK, back to cajoling the obnoxious little man who manages my apartment. You'll hear more soon... and if I don't come back, avenge my death!

In which I promise to reutrn to Thailand-specific blogging within a few hours...

But first!

Wal-Mart has announced that it is saying "thank you" to its employees for tolerating recent wage caps, enforced graveyard shifts, and other indignities.

Chief among the new perks will be a "special polo shirt" for associates who have served Wal-Mart for more than 20 years.

On one level, this is brilliant PR by Wal-Mart. After all, it's completely immune to satire - I've been staring at the page for 10 minutes trying to think of a snarky comment that doesn't sound blindingly obvious and therefore infantile. I've thus far failed miserably, and as such I give congratulations to Wal-Mart's marketing monkeys - well done, guys!

In which I explore another of Thailand's nifty qualities, though unfortunately through the dull eyes of an economist... (Sorry for the wonkery - you've been warned!)

One of the finer joys of living in this delightful corner of Southeast Asia is the sparkling range of options opened up by the rock-bottom cost of living. I'll talk about these in a sec, but first you'll have to either slog or scroll through some amateur financial analysis. Though comparable in wealth to Costa Rica, and a hefty notch up the GDP ladder from Botswana, I've found that Thailand is dramatically cheaper than either of them - especially dear extortionate Bots. It would take a better (and better-paid) economist than I to fully suss out the reasons for this, but my theory is something along these lines.

Botswana has such dramatic income inequality that the country is cleanly bisected into two parallel economies, predictably assigned to the haves and the have-nots (Costa Rica, much less so). The middle class is virtually non-existent: either you share a standpipe with a hundred other people, or you have a swimming pool all to yourself. Those on the bottom rungs don't starve or lack for education - a major improvement from many of Botswana's African neighbours - but they eat a diet of dirt-cheap maize meal and beef stew, and live in phenomenally modest housing. The other 15%, by contrast, live unsurprisingly comfortable lives, with precisely the price tag you'd expect. As a result, a slightly-paid intern like myself ended up paying five hundred dollars a month to share a single-level house with 4 other people, since the alternative was to pay $15 for an unlit room in an airless shack. There was no middle ground.

But here in Thailand I live at least as comfortably as I did in Botswana, for a fraction of the price. My apartment costs less than half of what it did in Bots, and I eat out constantly for a quarter of the price I paid in Africa - even at the roadside food stalls. I suppose that Thailand, vast income disparities notwithstanding, has enough of a middle class to sustain modestly priced accomodation, restaurants, and services. A proper full-spectrum economy exists, with survivable lifestyles available to everyone from the just-a-notch-above-rock-bottom poor to the unimaginably wealthy. The numberless hordes of Western budget backpackers further motivate Thailand's fiercely competitive entrepreneurs to provide modest-yet-appealing amenities.

But (and here's the thought that launched this heretofore dull post in the first place) the really interesting thing isn't living well enough for dirt cheap - it's discovering how far money can go when one is willing to splurge a little. Case in point: I could get a haircut for a dollar or two here, and probably go home no more miserable about the result than I usually am after a haircut (which, for the record, is moderately so). But at the franchised (and ludicrously overstaffed) hair joint at the corner of my street, I paid a locally exorbitant fee just to see how far my money can go - and received the most ludicrously luxurious haircut experience imaginable.

If I recall correctly (I may have blacked out somewhat) I received 3 absurdly meticulous rounds of shampooing, followed by a 20-minute scalp massage. The haircut itself took place in the world's most comfortable barber's chair, while an attendant constantly provided my choice of an immense variety of complimentary beverages and a broad selection of German-language magazines (well, hey, nothing's perfect). Afterwards, another round of shampooing and brain massage completed the hour-or-so long experience. The price tag for this little slice of haircut heaven? A sky-high seven dollars.

And this situation crops up nearly everywhere else in Thailand. Those willing to pay something closer to Western prices find unimaginable luxury. Example number two: the movie theatres here are modern and well-equipped, on a par with those at home. A standard evening ticket costs 90 baht - about $2.50 Canadian. Yet the lucky cinephile willing to pay a Canadian-style price - in this case, 14 dollars - enjoys the "Emperor Class" experience - a private viewing room with luxury recliners, an immaculate personal washroom, and hyper-attentive table service. Of course, I have yet to justify such an expense, but I'm sure as hell going to try it before I leave.

The bottom line - you can live comfortably in Thailand for peanuts, or you can live like a wayward Saudi Prince for a few dollars more. Either way, it's hard to go wrong here - and illuminates yet another reason why so many western visitors to Thailand find it hard to leave again.

In which I muse droolingly about the foods I must eat when I land in Vancouver...

Thai food is delicious and healthy, and apparently there's a wealth of various European restaurants on offer in Chiang Mai that I have yet to sample. There's no lack of variety here if one is willing to pony up the cash, and restaurants are truly everywhere, on every street corner and hidden in every alleyway nook. I'll never starve here.

But the novelty of daily pad thai and moo ga-tiam is rapidly fading, and even the beloved khao soy curry noodle soup is wearing slightly thin. My first attempt to get an honest sit-down, non-McD's hamburger ended with me accidentally eating a live earwig (I think) and somewhat soured me on what I'm told is otherwise told is Chiang Mai's best burger joint. So I found myself idly drafting (as oft occurs when I travel) a list of foods I miss terribly, and upon which I will gorge myself within moments of my holiday return.

An honest-to-God gigantic barbecued hamburger. Even the famed burger restaurants here, high earwig content notwithstanding, are sunk by their insistence on frying burgers. Yuck.

Sushi! Of course. Chiang Mai's well inland, and I've thus dodged the seamy-looking sushi joint in the mall next door to me.

A gargantuan slab of steak. Surely available here, but not at any of the micro-budget restaurants I frequent...

Anything from Simba's. The less bloodthirsty East African spices seem like a mild daydream compared to the vicious Thai peppers.

Tacos. Definitely tacos. Apparently there's a great Mexican restaurant around here somewhere, but I have yet to find it.

A proper Reuben sandwich - smoked beef is an unheard-of concept in Northern Thailand. The simply astonishing number of New Yorkers I've met here all seem to share this hankering.

A Nanaimo bar and a Timmy's donut. Speaks for itself.

Beef shawerma from the Babylon Cafe on Robson.

Mango ice cream from Mondo Gelato - if there's a real ice cream shop here, I haven't found it.

A Caesar! Duh.

Uncle Fatih's 99 cent pizza, a Vancouver institution I only discovered days before my September departure, to my lasting shame.

My trademark panang curry. It seems odd be salivating over a Thai curry, but I haven't been able to find the stuff here, so I'll have to make it up at home. In fact, I think I'm mostly looking forward to making a meal of my own - a grievous sin forbidden in my current apartment. I've eaten out for every meal (aside from breakfast cereal) in the last three months, and a self-cooked feast is something I sincerely miss. Methinks I'll need a new apartment soon.

In which I plead forgiveness...

Sorry, folks, school's been consuming my life since last Monday. You'll hear more, including a return to the fun and hilarity you've come to expect, at the end of the week.

In which I offer the week's best YouTube!

In which I whine...

Ever have a day when having a good book to read is the only thing that keeps you sane?

In which I recount at last the glory of Loi Krathong...

I don't think I've seen any stars in my time in Chiang Mai. The particular Thai predilection for neon and other luminous signage hides the heavens very effectively within the city, and I have yet to spend an evening outside Chiang Mai. I hadn't thought about this much since I arrived.

But I suspect this only amplified my joy and wonder on Saturday night, when I looked up from the center of the city to see the sky lit by hundreds of red and yellow stars, like newborn constellations rising slowly and shrinking into sharp points thousands of feet above my head. One of the greatest joys of Loi Krathong, the Thai Festival of light, is that countless thousands of people light crude but effective balloon lamps - huge paper bags with rings of paraffin anchored to the bottom - and set them adrift over the city. I stood at the edge of the Mae Nam Ping river, the calm eye to Loi Krathong's frenetic hurricane, and watched while pyrotechnics exploded from every corner of Chiang Mai. Individually, the lanterns are pretty - and great fun to set loose. But when viewed by the hundreds across the great sweep of the city, the effect is beyond magical. It's one of the most beautiful things I've seen.

It's also next to impossible to photograph, at least with the unimpressive alchemy of my reasonably-priced camera and my modest photographic skills. My attempts to capture the actual flying lanterns turned out underwhelming at best, so I'll keep them to myself. But by way of compensation, here's a photo of some locals cheerfully lighting their own lantern - it really is a group effort with several people holding the contraption inflated while the paraffin heats, so that it doesn't collapse on itself and immolate.



A bit of background - cheerfully offered by the tiny, effervescent woman from whom I bought my krathong. Loi Krathong is takes place on the weekend nearest the full moon of the twelfth lunar month, usually in early November. People purchase wondrously decorated banana leaf rafts called krathongs - about eight inches across and festooned with flowers, candles, and incense - and float them down the river, ideally along with their sins and misfortune. The effect it to fill much of the massive, leisurely river with thousands drifting stars, mirroring the glorious canopy of lanterns above.

This is a ritual of apology to the river goddess Khongkha, and it has been incorporated into the near-universal Theraveda Buddhist rites observed in Thailand.
Naturally, though of indeterminate spirituality myself, I suppose everyone can do with a little expunging of sins from time to time. So here I hoist my krathong - which is truly much nicer than most of the other kratongs, particularly according to the lady who sold it to me.



And, here's the same krathong (far left) enjoying its journey down the Mae Nam Ping...



Loi Krathong has three nights, by the way, Saturday through Monday. Saturday was the glorious yet occasionally tranquil celebration of fire and good cheer I mention above. I sat with new friends (some NGO workers, and some people I met on the songthaew) in the delightful Riverside Restaurant for several hours, indulging in curious food and plentiful cocktails, enjoying the fine conversation and the omnipresent pyrotechnics. In fact, here's an unexceptionable but rather attractive (dont'cha think?) photo of me in that very milieu:



Sunday, the festival's centrepiece was a city-wide epileptic fit of bad manners and worse judgment - particularly as regards appropriate places to fling military-grade firecrackers. But there's still much fun to be had. I lit a lantern of my own, for example, and after a long and worrisome pause it finally took hesitant flight (photo to come soon). I set free the above-described krathong, and I witnessed the fascinating and somewhat oddly-textured parade that wends through east Chiang Mai in the final nights. Witness, for example, a robotic elephant:



Followed shortly by someone apparently associated with the Royal Family:



Try as I did, I couldn't find a unifying theme to this parade - except of course, Thai-ness. In fact, that Thai-ness was the most fascinating thing about the festival. The Thais, their habit of applauding military coups notwithstanding, love their country and culture with a pride bordering on jingoism. It's not abrasive (not yet, anyway), just interesting to watch, and it seems to have bestowed a curious sort of cultural resilience to Thailand. Foreign tourists are everywhere, and Loi Krathong was particularly clogged with them (us?), but somehow the festival, for all its noise and pomp and commerce, still struck me as remarkably, authentically Thai. There was no denying that Loi Krathong was for the Thais, and we farang, for all the fun we had, were just welcome visitors - the festival wasn't held for our benefit at all. This may sound mundane, but if you've seen the gravitational effect that heavy tourist traffic tends to have on local rites around the world, it's remarkable. Usually, through no deliberate effort on anyone's part, the locus of major events shifts to tourists, simply because that's where the money is.

Yet while there was no shortage of merchants hawking unidentified goods in fractured English, I didn't sense even a hint of pandering in the entire event. Thailand is large enough, populous enough, wealthy enough and has a rich enough tradition to support its own complete culture without necessary resort to foreign influence - a luxury few developing countries are able (or willing) to afford. It's a refreshing thing, and I'm beginning to expect (cautiously) that this integrity across Thailand (with the likely exception of the backpacker oases of the far south). I look forward to finding out.

Loi Krathong, of course, made a stunning place to start. I've decided, my ongoing adventures with Photoshop notwithstanding, that it's perhaps not meant to be photographed. Like Victoria Falls, which I found similarly confounds photography, it can only really be understood in person. If you want to know what I mean, you know where to find out. I promise you, it'll be worth the trip.

In which I'm in awe...

Bottle rockets are detonating outside my window, the smallest audible sign of the astonishing, heartbreakingly beautiful Loy Krathong Festival of Light underway in Chiang Mai. I've spent the last two nights there, and I've seen some of the most gorgeous sights imaginable.

Not sure what I'm talking about? Worry not, all will be discussed in detail tomorrow. By virtue of being a nighttime light festival, Luy Krathong is virtually unphotographeable, at least with my camera, but I'll see if I can learn how to use Photoshop to massage some underexposed frames into coherence.

Much more detail to come... but I've got to go to bed. My eyes are a touch bleary from staring skyward for the last two days... oh, but what fun it's been.

In which I wish all a Happy Hallowe'en

The day came and went with little fanfare here, save for a modest but quite entertaining party for my students. Oh, how I do look forward to my next full-blown Hallowe'en... next year, perhaps.

Anybody get up to anything really exciting?

In which I revert briefly to my wonkish academic self...

Here's a great article from the New York Times Magazine on the progressive weakening of Islamic legal standards prohibiting the killing of noncombatants, and the implications thereof for an Iranian nuclear bomb. It combines two of my great academic loves, terrorism and nuclear non-proliferation, so it surely holds more fascination for me than for most others. But if it's your cup of cocoa, I highly recommend giving it a read.

In which I offer a minor cultural tidbit...

In most Southeast Asian languages, polite speaking requires that you put an honorific at the end of many phrases, which depends only on the sex of the speaker. For example, in Thai, a man would say "Thank you, krep" and a woman "Thank you, kaa" - regardless of who's listening.

Now that they're learning English, my most scrupulously polite students have carried this habit with them into their new language. As a result, many male students are refering to everyone as "Sir" - both male and female. The female students, predictably, are calling everyone "Ma'am" with a similar disregard for the sex of the listener.

It is proving very difficult to break them of this habit.

In which I celebrate...

I got a 92 on my thesis! Joy!

Now I am the proud owner of a Master of Arts (with "Distinction") in International Peace Studies. Yay me!

I have successfully completed the UPeace chapter of my life - now make a go of the Thailand chapter.

Moreover, now I must see if I can chisel my thesis into publishable (and comprehensible) portions. I'm fairly certain that the fine oflks in my department gave me the grade at last because they couldn't stand to read the damn thing again...

In which I respond to emails both concerned and curious...

Fear not, all my bits are still attached. After my menacing post a few days back - which I feel adequately conveyed my then-foul mood at Thai traffic - several kindly folks feared that something worse than ill temper had befallen me, and emailed inquiries of worry. All's well - in fact, I have yet to so much as skin a knee in Thailand, despite the abundant foolishness of buying a bicycle rather than add to the ubiquitous throng of motor scooters.

Yet my good health is no thanks to Thai drivers (expect undue generalizations to follow), whose contagious friendliness and impeccable manners elsewhere in life is not carried with them onto the pavement. Mistake me not, Thailand has far from the worst traffic I've seen. It's certainly a step up from Egypt, where the rules of the road were mere formalities except when (literally) clarified by the barrel of an AK47. It's thankfully not Botswana, where the generally sparse traffic was made occasional nightmare by the fact that many locals considered drunk driving a legitimate competitive sport. And the modern, well-maintained road surface is a world away from the disintegrating asphalt that rattled my skull in Costa Rica or (shudder) Mozambique.

By these measures, this seething stew of cars, trucks, scooters, tuk-tuks and the damnable song-taew minibuses seems almost... civilized. In fact, Chiang Mai drivers actually obey stoplights and even use their turn signals from time to time - treasured luxuries for a jaded developing-world pedestrian such as myself. Nor are their technical skills sub-par. Thai drivers display preternatural reflexes and a surgical talent for threading their varied vehicles through whatever minute pore has opened in the motorized pandemonium.

But they marry these individually laudable traits to a white-knuckled appetite for relativistic speeds and all the high regard for personal space you'd expect from an ecstasy-popping labrador retriever. The result is a weaving, careening body vehicular in which lane boundaries frequently disappear and scooters are ever shrieking through the capillary-like spaces between the cars. No inch of roadspace is wasted. In the midst of all this, for a half hour each morning and each afternoon, is wee me on my silly farang bicycle.

I've long since imprinted to the drive-on-the-left customs of Thai traffic. I hug the outer left edge of the road whenever vaguely possible, and I've gotten quite adept at spotting the viable gaps in traffic for that bewildering odyssey known as crossing a street. But no amount of road sense could adequately prepare me for drivers who think a thumbs-breadth is adequate clearance when they zip by at 100 km/h. Much less was I ready for the ultimate traffic nightmare - scooter and tuk-tuk drivers who hurtle directly at me in the wrong direction while I naively cling to belief that as long as I remain in my left-hand scooter lane, no harm can befall me. With only a "what the hell is your problem" stare betraying their intentions, these drivers, a dozen a day at least, prefer to pass a block or five the wrong way to the (admitted) conundrum of crossing the street and driving the non-insane way.

The end result? I've been run off the road (though thankfully never off my bike) a handful of times in the last week, and never once has it brightened my day. I'm glad I ignored CUSO's absurd penny-pinching strictures and bought a $400 bike that can handle being occasionally thrust over broken pavement or outright grassland. I'm sure that decision has saved me much heartbreak.

And how now do I cope? Mainly (and counterintuitively) by going faster and riding far more aggressively than I would have dared back home. If I can keep up with the scooters, I seem to earn their grudging respect, and I can apparently outwit the cars by more boldly (yet carefully - don't worry, Mom!) exploiting the gaps therebetween. I spent the day riding this way through the worst of downtown Chiang Mai, and felt safer than I have all week. I'll get the hang of this yet... and, with any luck, I'll still have all my fingers when I'm done!

PS - Chiang Mai, though lovely and welcoming, is surely the most pedestrian-unfriendly city I've ever seen... more on that to come.

In which I follow up...

... on something other than the traffic.

Looks Like the North Korean nuke was the real thing... though I'm astonished that they managed such a minute yield yet still had a nuclear detonation. Usually if a plutonium bomb fizzles, the surrounding explosive triggers blast it to smithereens before any criticality occurs (as I recall, anyhow).

Whatever the technical details, this is by far the very best take on it I've seen.

(Seems almost too easy to link to The Onion - as though I should feel guilty for discovering such wit and wisdom online with so little effort).

More to come on the bicycle life here...

Paul's number one rule about riding a bike in Thailand:

Don't.

In which my brain hurts...

Writing a necessary (and necessarily unpleasant) presentation on fascism for my students tomorrow has proven surpringly emotionally corrosive. Now I'm miserable from looking at pictures of Hitler, and I still have a ton of work to do. Oh well, that presentation's wrapped up - maybe two hours of writing about theocracy and anarchism will lift my spirits.

In which I give notice...

My job, which I can't ever write about online, is consuming my life completely this week. Posts will resume after Friday.

In which I cheerfully await this afternoon's class...

... namely because my students are hung over. Last night, they and I and the rest of the staff of my to-remain-unnamed organization tromped out to the Chiang Mai German Microbrewery. If that sounds eclectic, you should imagine to cognitive dissonance provoked by eating tom kha gai, pork schnitzel, seafood fried rice, and German sausage, all the while dousing it with generous quantities of brewed-on-the-premises German lager.

Very generous quantities, in fact. Unaccustomed to the strength of Bavarian brews, and moreover quite eager to partake voluminously since they spend most of their days tucked away on our tiny compound, several of the students indulged waaaay past their limits. Grudging smiles and unfocused stares seem to be the order of the day today.

And I rather doubt they finished the homework I gave them yesterday...

In which I don't know what to think...

So did it work or not?

Reliable sources are saying that the explosion detonated in North Korea had a force of about half a kiloton - the explosive power of 500 tons of TNT, set off simultaneously. That's awfully small for a nuclear test, but much too large for an outright dud. And here's a peculiar fact: building ultra-low-yield nuclear bombs is actually technically much harder than crafting their larger siblings.

So if those yield estimates are right, that leaves two options. Either North Korea's nuclear weapons scientists are actually much, much better at their jobs than anybody suspected (not bloody likely), or North Korea blew up a thousand tons of conventional high explosive underground in an attempt to fakea nuclear test (entirely in keeping with the character of the textbook Stalinist regime). North Korea has been awfully insistent that no radiation was leaked - a coverup, perhaps? Either way, the detection (or not) of bomb-produced radioactive isotopes will be the key to understanding what went on.

C'mon, I wanna know. If this was a fake, then much of what I said yesterrday is moot. Except the part about Bush having driven the world off a cliff - tht part still stands.

In which I'm dismayed...

Well, this is just no good at all.

The news that North Korea has tested a nuclear bomb is, at some level, no surprise at all. But it's a startling reminder of how much more uncertain the world has become under six years of Bush's stewardship. Yet another harrowing failure to add to the long litany...

I did my honours thesis, way back in 2003 on North Korea's nuclear program, so don't get me wrong - North Korea was almost certainly already a nuclear power, and has been since the early nineties. But in those comforting days, they had only one or (at most) two bombs - not enough to test one, and certainly too few to put any on the open market. That they were actively seeking the means to make more became clear in 2002, when it became clear that Kim Jong Il was testing the limits of the porous restrictions he accepted from the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1994.

And in response to this news, Bush and his cabal neocon thugs did... nothing. They offered only rhetoric as Pyongyang acknowledged and then, with growing bellicosity, accelerated its nuclear programs. The DPRK took the wraps off its then-sealed plutonium production facilities and openly resumed the construction of new plants. The current best guess is that the bomb detonated today was built with plutonium from just those facilities - facilities that might still be decommissioned if the US had shown genuine global leadership. But instead Bush launched a war of choice against another backwards power that had no WMDs whatsoever, while comprehensively ignoring a grave strategic threat in North Korea.

Could this have been prevented? Maybe not - the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (I still chuckle at that name), more isolated and fearful than any state on Earth, had compelling strategic motives to seek nuclear weapons. It's possible that they might not have been dissuaded by any threats or temptations - perhaps not even the diplomatic recognition and security guarantees that they so desperately crave from the US. But what can reasonably ascertain is that the path Bush took - a toothless, provocative combination of belligerent rhetoric and diplomatic neglect - was the one formula absolutely guaranteed to facilitate Pyongyang's nuclear program.

Why does this matter so much? Isn't North Korea too isolated, too purposeless and frightened to ever use its bombs? Perhaps, but there are other consequences almost too nightmarish to contemplate. First and most ominous is that North Korea sells every thing it can get its hands on - rockets, nuclear technology, small arms, drugs, and so much more. The hundreds of millions of dollars that a nuclear weapon would fetch on the market will seem mighty tempting to one of the world's poorest countries - particularly as their new reactors at Taechon and Yongbyon come online, enabling North Korea to build dozens of nuclear bombs every year. And the DPRK is not known for its discretion in selecting customers - a terrorist group's money is just as good as, say, Iran's. Anybody think this is alaramist fantasy? Think again.

It's no less disturbing to think that this could provoke an arms race in East Asia. China's already armed to the teeth, but the governments Japan and even South Korea are certainly reappraising their non-nuclear status today. If you share my opinion that every new nuclear power results in a substantially more frightening world, then you'll be as distressed as I was by an unsettlingly middle-of-the-road assessment of how long it would take Japan to build its first nuclear bomb if it so choose. 48 hours. That's not even the lowest estimate.

This has also left the world without feasible strategic options for disarming North Korea. If Kim's paranoid regime has enough bombs to test one, then they surely have enough to build a credible strategic deterrent - at least half a dozen. Any military action against North Korea would surely be reciprocated with a fission explosion in Tokyo Harbour. The world's diplomatic leverage has been similarly neutered, consigning the North's long-suffering 23 million people to another eon of poverty and repression. And I'm dreading, without a touch of facetiousness, the not-far-off day that the Republicans begin to argue that a nuclear North Korea only demonstrates the need for airstrikes against Iran. We're going to be decades repairing the damage that the Republican Party has done to the world.


P.S. On the plus side, I've just taught my first class in Government and Politics - I'll write more about that tomorrow, by which time I should have stopped scowling at today's news.

P.P.S. This is a fine reference on North Korea's nukes.

In which food remains the center of my life...

Warning: minute details of eating in Thailand follow - none too fascinating unless you're as food-obsessed as I.

Thailand is a culinary mecca, with an endless variety of hyper-local cuisines and edible oddities to terrify the traveler. But I’m nothing if not a slave to ritual, so in keeping with my personal travel tradition, I went to McDonalds for lunch on my first day here. I do this foolish thing not because I so desperately crave their cardboard burgers, but because it always seems to tell me two things: one, a McD’s cheeseburger changes not one whit anywhere on Earth, and second, that the peripheral menu items give a surprisingly accurate picture of the culinary tastes of each new home. In Japan I found the teriyaki burger (delicious!) and the au gratin burger (which I never tried, to my boundless shame). In Costa Rica, the Mac Shack had a rice-and-beans Gallo Pinto breakfast and unappealing fried chicken drumlets. Here in Thailand I was aghast at their hot pie flavours – no apple or cherry to be found here. Instead they’ve filled that fine pastry with your choice of pineapple, corn, and taro root (a potato-lke starch, for the uninitiated). I know I have to eat one of those latter two at some point, but I choose to procrastination until I’ve had a short stretch to acclimatize myself to the Thai palate.

Going to McD’s on my first day serves another purpose – it provides a not-too-intimidating stepping-stone into the frightening world of foreign-language commerce. I’m not a very good traveler in a couple of really important ways. The foremost in my mind right now is that I’m terrified of speaking to people in another language unless I’ve got a reasonable certainty that I’ll be understand. Whereas other travelers are quite content to wildly gesticulate and spit out a charmless yet functional approximation of the local phrase for “green curry noodle soup”, I tend to freeze up and avoid conversation altogether. More problematic, I tend to get hungry since I don’t have any idea how to order food. In my first few months in Japan I ate half my meals from the local 7-Eleven rather than stumble through a conversation without functional Japanese. This mistake I refuse to repeat.

Lonely Planet redeemed itself once more for it oft out-of-date info, by directing me to another ideal stepping stone for lunch the next day: the immense MBK Food Centre in Bangkok. This cavernous, wondrous creation occupies a substantial portion of the seventh floor of one of the capital's major malls with stall after stall of food vendors of every conceivable variety. Lest mall food be seen as cultural heresy, Lonely Planet accurately described the MBK as having all the roadside food stalls in the city crammed into one place, with the glorious addition of English signage and without Bangkok's foul street-level air. All I had to do was exchange 200 Baht (about 6 dollars) into stall coupons, and had one of the happiest afternoons in recent memory. Though overjoyed to see that Indian, Arab, and various Western cuisines were available, I piously dedicated myself to Thai food with a slavish rite newly designed to maximize my culinary joy. I ate a meal, wandered the mall until marginally hungry again, ordered anew, and repeated the process. This availed me of wonderful servings of pad thai (fried rice noodles and a notoriously popular farang dish), tom yam gung (citrus seafood soup), a huge steaming bowl of pork leg stew, and an indescribable, unrelatable, untransliterateable noodle soup piled high with fried balls of ground fish.

I tried to phase it out with a bowl of durian and sticky rice for dessert, but cultural incompatibilities reared their foul heads. Durian is a peculiar fruit beloved by Thais and many elsewhere in East Asia. Having never tried it, I gamely dug in and learnt the first real lesson of my tme in Thailand: never eat durian, no matter the circumstance or reward. It reeks of ammonia, imparts a curious texture I imagine to match a mouthful of talcum powder, and tastes powerfully of pure evil. Unwilling to end on a low note, I ate around the remaining deathfruit and returned for a bowl of always-reliable sticky rice with mango, which did not disappoint. Four delicious lunches + two desserts - six dollars = one day very well spent.

Now that I'm in Chiang Mai, my Thai hasn't improved but my willingness to order food surely has. Thailand caters far more frequently to foreign tourists than Japan, and in a major city like Chiang Mai, many restaurants have English menus. I'm also suppressing my urge to clam up when talking to Thai speakers, and so have nt yet starved. I've taken to eating most of my lunches at a tiny hole-in-the-wall a few kilometres from the school where I work, and the place lacks menus in any language, so I've been ordering delightful Pad Thai and Pad Kapow (KAPOW!! It's like a Batman episode!) in mangled but comprehensible Thai. I've discovered, as well, that smaller though fully functional food courts like the MBK centre are scattered around the city. One sits a few seconds walk from my new apartment (the subject of a near-future post), and provides a large chunk of my daily sustenance.

The cuisine of Chiang Mai, 800 kilometres north of Bangkok, sports a number of regional peculiarities, some very charming, and some less so. I've become absolutely infatuated with Khao Soy, a coconut-curry soup served with tender chunks of chicken, soft egg noodles, and a joyful handful of crunchy fried noodles and shallots on top. It's the finest addition to my core diet since I discovered Hon's hot and sour soup a few years back. I fear terribly that, like the engawa-zushi I so prized in Japan, it will vanish forever from my life when I return to Vancouver.

Other local specialties will not be missed, nor even attempted. At one of the night markets near my home (also the subject of a future post) countless food stall appear between dusk and 10PM every Friday and Saturday. One of these sports a dozen dictionary-sized baskets, each heaped high with a different multi-legged delicacy. Grasshoppers, cockroaches, silkworms, spiders - all the things you never wanted to eat are here. I like to consider myself pretty flexible as regards new foods, but I draw the line at insects - and somehow I feel like a lesser traveler as a result.

I'll have content myself with bowl after bowl of khao soy, pad thai, and whatever non-crawling food gets put in front of me. Pretty healthy stuff all around too - despite eating four meals or so every day, I've lost 10 pounds since I arrived (thanks in no small part to my bike, the riding of which will amusy and terrify in a future post). Great food, good health, and rock-bottom prices... all told, a damn fine foundation on which to build a good year.

In which I excuse myself...

I'll be in Bangkok for the next couple of days for a meeting with CUSO, hopefully filling my spare time eating khao soy and perusing the electronics supermalls. See you in a few days!

Disbelief ensues...

Today Thailand's ruling military junta announced the new interim Prime Minister, the respected ex-general Surayud Chulanont. This keeps the schedule the junta enacted during the takeover less than two weeks ago, and I suppose that Mr Surayud ex-military status might qualify him as the "civilian" leader the army promised. The Council for Democratic Reform under Constitutional Monarchy (CDRM) (the junta's unwieldy public name) is proceeding with extensive investigations into allegations of corruption and vote-rigging under the prior regime. Other new agencies have been set up to ensure economic and political stability in the next year leading up to the free elections the government has pledged. The coup, in short, is going as smoothly as could possibly have been hoped for.

So why am I more uneasy about Thailand's future than when the coup first occured?

Several reasons, methinks, all of which are painfully rooted in a thousand historical examples. The first: the CDRM has been quietly issuing a series of pronouncements restricting unauthorized political activities: public protests, grassroots meetings, and other foundations of functional democracy. Though last week's media blackout has inevitably ended - the junta couldn't have perpetuated it even if they'd tried - and no troops have (to my knowledge) been enforcing the new restrictions, I am not reassured. I can't shake the feeling that these pronouncements are meant to create a sort of semi-legal "Hey, we warned you!" foundation for a future crackdown. If the junta were truly dedicated to (re)building a civilian democracy, shouldn't they be encouraging a noisy public debate right now? I've seen no word of expiration date, so there's no way to know when these restrictions will be lifted. Moreover, the army promises to "assist" the new government and ensure its smooth and clean function, a menacing proclamation they apparently consider reassuring. Protests and politics will come - they always do - and these measures put the lie to the CDRM's stated determination to return their power to the people of Thailand.

The second ill portent is the foul feeling I get every time I read the newspaper's opinion and letters section. One writer to yesterday's Bangkok Post argues that "General Sonthi and his troops [the coup's leaders, naturally] should be commended for a job well done", while another proclaims the coup "a wonderful opportunity... to achieve a better democratic climate for the entire nation" and decries the disheartening "global condemnation coming from world leaders". The opinion pieces are, with few exceptions, similarly glowing, as they have been for weeks. More than eighty percent of polled Thais profess approval for the coup, and even the most thoughtful criticism has been muted and damn hard to find.

Shouldn't I be reassured, since the Thais have a far better grasp of their country's politics than I do? You'd think so, but I keep coming back to one of history's ugliest lessons: democracies become tyrannies with the full consent of the governed. From the Roman Republic to Nazi Germany to Bush's America we see the same pattern - the public, riven by fear and frustration, welcomes new overlords who promise security and stability. Even George Bloody Lucas had it right in Star Wars Episode III (obligatory nerd reference) "So this is how liberty dies... to thunderous applause." In this I'm appalled by the Thais' terrible grasp of history - especially their own history. Thailand has seen twenty-three coups in the last 80 years, none of which restored democracy or devolved power to the people. The Economist informs me that during the last coup, in 1991, the public responded much as they have this time - by welcoming the troops in the streets and thanking them for overthrowing a corrupt and unpopular government. As time wore on and the military clutched the reins long past their due, the public mood soured, leading to a wave of unrest that culminated in the slaughter of hundreds of Bangkok protesters. Yet no one in Thailand seems to be drawing much attention to those ugly days.

Which brings me, after a very lengthy post, to my third and final point. Men who take power by force do not willingly relinquish it. I know that, as a good political scientist, I shouldn't make such generalizations, and there are a handful of marginal examples that prove me wrong. But there have been thousands of coups and other military takeovers throughout history, and vanishingly few have returned the power back to civilians without a fight. This is precisely why the line between civilian and military power must be so rigid, and the military always under civilian control. Thaksin, the ousted Prime Minister, was a foul and corrupt leader despite his few good policies, and he deserved to be turfed from office. But the political wheels were turning, however slowly, and there was little to justify crossing the line into outright military control. It's immensely disheartening to see that the Thai public seems not to have learned this critical lesson, and each new fragment of press coverage diminishes my hopes for a peaceful outcome.

Will there be bloodshed? I think so. It's no sure thing - depending immensely on how the junta conducts itself in coming weeks - and it won't happen now or next month, but it's getting increasingly hard to see how this will end without violence. It's a very sobering thought.