Asia - August, 1996

8/16 - On the road again!

Wow! I'm in Japan! Layover on the way to Singapore. This trip started on an interesting foot... When I got to the airport they told me the flight was over sold & asked if I would fly on Singapore Air (which is one of the world's great airlines), so I said sure. They said it would be non-stop, so I said great! Then while we were waiting for it to get finalized I said what time does it get in. It was 2 hrs after my scheduled arival so I knew it wasn't non-stop... turned out I was going to go thru Korea! Then they said no go & put me in 1st class on my original flight. Cool! Just as the plane was about to leave they asked for a volunteer to take tomorrow's flight. Promised a $400 cash incentive, paid hotel... Since I will be 2 days early anyway I said OK & got off the plane. Then they said they found a seat, so I got back on the plane without my $400. But the 1st class service was nice...

So anyway... I'm in Japan. It's 5:20 PM Friday and I got on the plane in SF 11 hours ago at 2:00 PM on Thursday. The trip across the dateline always does funny things. Arrive Singapore after midnight, Sat AM.

I'm looking forward to seeing an old friend & his family tomorrow night in Singapore. I've known Pang Wee for 7 years; he left Seagate a couple years back, but I was able to get in touch & I think I will be having dinner at his place. He's a great guy.

I'm carrying what looks like a baby shower gift for another friend of 7 years in Bangkok. I worked & played tennis with Madan in Scotts Valley for years before he took a long term assignment in Bangkok. He got married last year & I guess must be having a kid. I think he is making plans for some kind of activity next weekend somewhere in Thailand.

Sayanara!

8/19 - Singapore

Back in Singapore after 6 years; much the same but much has changed. The George Washington of Singapore has retired & turned over the place to a successor. It's a democracy, but nobody would think of electing the opposition...like Mexico. Refurbishment of stuff from the colonial era continues unabated as does construction of new skyscrapers & huge apartment complexes. I ate tonight at the refurbed Raffles Hotel. She was a gem of the colonial era, best hotel in the Orient a hundred years ago. Last time I was here she was a wreck, just starting the rebuild. It's not really a hotel anymore, now another shopping mall with some of the trendiest names in the world. But eating there was an experience... elegant, outside in the courtyard, under awnings in the gentle, steady rain. Got a feeling for what it might have been like in the old British Empire.

Had dinner Saturday night with my old chum Pang Wee. He has moved on & is doing well at his new job. Hoped to see his family; he has a lovely wife and 3 girls. I remember only the oldest who was a really cute 3 year old last I was here. But all the gals were at Moms so PW & I had boys night out. Got a bit tipsy on a pitcher of Tiger Beer (the Singapore label), then ate at a steamboat open air place. Steamboat is where you cook your own din right at the table. There is a pot of boiling water, heated by flame from a propane tank, & you go to a buffet & pick up whatever raw materials you want: beef, chicken, fish, prawns, cut crab, vegies, tofu, noodles, etc, & bring them back to the table. A new twist has been added in 6 years: besides the pot of water, there is also a cast iron platform around the water pot so you can also fry stuff if you like that better than boiling. PW says the idea came over from Korea & has been adopted here. Steamboat is kind of fun, but also kinda like work. You have to keep a steady flow of food going to the pot or pan so you can eat. If you forget to take it off, it gets over-cooked & if you forget to add more, you run out of cooked stuff to eat. After a while you can drink some of the water from the pot since it's now a broth & PW says it has a lot of vitamins.

Yesterday (Sunday) went over to a place called Tang Dynasty City, kind of a theme park based on Chinese history from around 600 AD... around the time of the Great Wall and the Terra Cotta Army. It was a mixed bag. It was neat to see the re-creations, architecture, Wall, etc, but it was also pretty blatently commercial with lots of junk for sale. The re-creation of the Terra Cotta Army was cool, but the presentation was kind of hokey. Also went to the Haunted Mansion, which was supposed to be scary with "state of the art" sound. Turned out to be down right amaturish, about what you expect from a grade school Halloween carnival. The park was also unfinished, & it looked like the costruction just stopped 10 or 20 years ago when they ran out of money & probably will never be finished. The overall effect is like an oreintal Disneyland on a shoe lace.

8/23 - Malaysia

This is definitely the Third World. I'm in Penang, which is an island off the north west coast of the Malay peninsula. It's a Singapore wannabee, but it has a long way to go. I think it's going to end up another Bangkok because it looks like they are going to way outgrow the infrastructure. Lots of high-rise apartments & some nice luxury hotels, but the average people here don't have it too good. Lot of shacks, open air eateries with nonexistent hygiene, cows by the side of the road, dead rat on the road, bad traffic, swarms of motor bikes, buses spewing black exhaust, taxis kind of seedy...It's very tropical here, jungle where it hasn't been built up. The temp seems to swing between 80 at night & 90 during the day, very humid.

Really nice hotel. The lobby is in a big open atrium with no walls. Swallows fly in circles at the top of the atrium. They have a waterfall going into the swimming pool! It's kind of up on a hill & away from downtown, so I haven't had a chance to get out & mingle like I do when I can. Went home with my counterpart here last night; he's a US guy on a 2 year assignment here. Lives in a kind of ivory tower with his family, but they do try to mingle with the locals. He drove me around the island a bit so I got to see some of what there is here. Today I had to travel across the bridge to the mainland to visit another factory so I saw a little more. The bridge goes across a bit of the Indian Ocean! All the local people have been very friendly & outgoing.

Malay is an interesting language. Very maleable. They adopt a lot of English words, but they spell them phonetically, like komputer, karbohidrat, restaran. They use the same alphabet we do so its easy to pronounce; here's some words from the paper (I have no idea what they mean): bahasa jiwa bangsa. Reminds me of our old highschool nonsense phrase kawabunga bwana!

I fly to Bankok tomorrow. My friend Madan is meeting me at the airport & I understand we are going somewhere outside of Bangkok for the weekend, but I don't know where. Also don't know where I will be from one day to the next during the week. We have about 6 plants in Thailand & I think he has me visiting several. Will be staying at the Landmark Hotel during the week, right in the heart of the city. Have stayed there before when I was in Bangkok.

Ciao...I'll see if I can send this tonight.

8/25 - Thailand

Wow! I feel like I'm on sensory overload. There is so much to say about Thailand and I've barely been here 24 hours. So many contrasts.

Met up with Madan (also affectionately known as MadMan) & he rushed us off to a coastal resort area known as Cha-Am, about 80 or 90 miles to the southwest. Actually Sirha rushed us...literally. He's Madan's driver & he used all the tricks of his trade to get us to Cha-Am in about 3 hours. The name of the game is keep moving, even if it looks impossible. We took a "short cut" around the clogged up highways across about 10 or 15 miles of streets in north & west Bangkok. We zigged & zagged through all kinds of stuff for over an hour to finally get to the outskirts. Then it was like rush hour for another hour or so until we finally got to open road. They have this insane system on major highways: no intersections, just periodic U-turns with no signals. The problem is cars & trucks stack up waiting for an opening in the traffic, so all the cars behind them have to merge into the left (outside) lane. Then they finally get an opening and all of them tailgate thru the turn, causing traffic from the other direction to come to a standstill and also merge to the outside. So it just kind of constantly forces traffic to reshuffle & guarantees stop & go traffic. And go they do whenever they get the chance. Sirha was able to reach about 170 KPH (about 100 MPH) on the open road for short stretches. It was one thing to go 180 on the German Autobahn, where the road is execellent and everyone follows the code of staying the hell out of the fast lane. But here is was an experience in trust. I give him credit...he never did anything stupid & we never had any close calls.

Madan's Thai bride Ning (her nick name) was with us. She's about 7 months along. Very pretty gal, well educated & well off. Fun to talk with although her English is still heavily accented & choppy. The resort was nice, 5 star. Had dinner at a French restaurant at the hotel. This morning it was raining pretty steadily, but not too heavily. One of the reasons Madan chose Cha-Am was to try to escape the remnants of typhoon Niki which is drenching northern & eastern Thailand after flooding Viet Nam & Cambodia. I went out and collected sea shells in the rain. It was very warm, almost like taking a shower. The surf was pretty warm too, probably well over 80 degrees. There were sea shells everywhere. I collected a few nice ones, but I could have collected a truckload. After breakfast we went back down to the beach & Madan rented a jet ski. I climbed on back & we went joy riding for about 20 minutes in the Gulf of Thailand. Then we played 5 games of squash, a form of racket ball, very fast. I got beat pretty bad, but it was a good workout. Then we played tennis for about a half hour. I was soaked in sweat by then so we finished off our stay in the pool. Very pleasant outing. We drove down the road a bit & had a late lunch at an open air seafood place; had some interesting fish dishes, including cat fish, grouper & sea bass. Then the 2 1/2 hour trip back to Bangkok.

Funny kind of commerce I noticed along the highway. Whenever we went thru an area that had a significant industry, they would have roadside stands selling the stuff. Some examples were ducks (roasted with the heads still on & hanging in pexiglass boxes), sea salt (10 kilo bags), cane juice. But the really odd thing was that they didn't just have 1 or 2 stands, they had maybe 20, spaced a few hundred feet apart, stand after stand selling the same thing (that's a lot of ducks!). Hard to see how the economics of that works since hardly anyone was stopping at any of the stands.

The countryside down by Cha-Am was also a study in contrasts. Mostly low flat jungle, with lots of fields, rice paddys, etc. Punctuated by these oddly shaped hills that just erupt out of the flats almost like jungle covered temples. On closer examination you can see that they are essentially solid rock, looking like very old volcanic formations. A couple of them had temples on them.

Thailand is basically Buddist (after Muslim Malaysia & polyglot Singapore), but it is Thai Buddism which is kind of special. There are lots of showy temples occurring with great regularity, some more elegant than others, some with giant gold standing Buddas in front. But there is a strong element of spirit worship too, not something you normally associate with Buddism. Every home & business has at least 1 & usually 2 spirit houses on the premisis. These are quite elaborate little model temples (ranging from maybe a foot high on a 2 foot pedestal to 4 or 5 feet on a large 3 or 4 foot pedestal). They are all painted in bright colors with lots of gold and decorated with garlands & stuff. Ning says that people take care of the spirits so they will bring them good fortune & ward off bad luck. They have diviners that come & tell you where to put your spirit house (for a fee I'm sure). Even saw a house out in the middle of a field. Ning says sometimes when something bad happens, they put up a spirit house so it won't come back. You see a lot of them at places where accidents are common.

I could probably write for another hour, but it's starting to get late & I have to get up early in the morning to head to one of our plants here, probably about an hour drive, but I will have my own driver, so I'll probably try to catch up on some work. Will probably write again in a couple days.

8/26 - Memorable Meals

Didn't think I'd be writing again this soon, but after the din I had tonight, I'm just feeling very reflective. Ate at the restaurant at the top of my hotel, The Hibuscus, 31st floor of the Landmark. Besides being a great meal, they had a harpist playing...one of my favorite instruments...and she had a great style, occasionally accompanying it with subtle vocals distinctly oriental. Put me to reflecting on what a great year this has been and how fortunate I am. Much the way I was feeling with Tim a couple of weeks ago as we were summit hopping in the Yosemite back country. Why am I so lucky?

I've had a string of memorable meals for months now, but this is the first time I've sat down & recorded one. For the record, the entree was Sole on Spinach au Gratin, & it was done to perfection, lightly browned ... (makes me think of Monty Python describing chocolate covered frogs...only the tenderest young frogs, washed in spring water, delicately yada yada...).

Anyway, couldn't help thinking about the last 4 months, one great trip after another. Essentially an unlimited travel budget. I must be dreaming.

I'd best sign off before I get really drippy...

8/28 - More Impressions of Bangkok

The sensory assault continues... I went shopping this evening for a baby present for Madan & Ning. Decided to walk since I had seen a department store a few blocks away. Along the way the sidewalks are jammed with stalls of every sort, including street vendors, etc, selling everything imaginable: cheap clothes (lots of imitation Calvin Kleins, etc), cheap watches (also imitations), leather goods, souvenirs (including mounted bugs, stuffed cobras, T shirts, carved elephants, you name it), cheap art, cheap food, cheap silk... with hardly breathing space between. Lots of tailor shops where you can by made to order suits, shirts, etc, at bargain prices, jewelry shops, service businesses. Occasional upscale places like Armani stores, Benz dealers, hotels. And then the beggars & pimps. Some of the beggars are truly pathetic, deformities, missing fingers, feet, hands, etc, scattered a few each block. What are you supposed to do? I dropped coins for a few, but so many & so wretched! I've seen all this before: no change in 7 years except maybe more of everything. And it is hot and humid, so after the few block walk you are panting for air and can hardly wait for the air conditioned store.

The contrast here between rich and poor is astounding. You see lots of beautiful people in designer fashions, virtually every one carrying a cell phone. The rich here really have it good. But the poor!

Getting to & from the office each day is an adventure. I have my own driver who waits for me in the lobby each morning & is there faithfully at 5 or so to whisk me back to the hotel. Whisk is a relative term of course! It implies taking lots of back alleys during the height of commute to avoid clogged arteries. Streets are filthy. Lots of smells of every description & some not describable. Madan & I walked a block or so down a back street from his place to a restaurant last night. A couple of large trucks steamed by along the way and raised huge dust clouds. You just had to hold your breath... no telling what's in the dust.

Ate at the top of the hotel again tonight, mostly so I could enjoy some more harp music. Then came back to my room & had mangosteens for dessert. I bought a few while out shopping earlier. Wonderful fruit. They call it the queen of fruits here. Size of small apples with a thick plum colored peel. Inside are 6 pure white sections (kind of like citrus) & 1or 2 smallish pits. How to describe the taste... closest I can come is sherbet! Not sure what flavor tho, maybe a sweet citrus. Smooth texture. Yum! I ate 4 of them. Cost about 15 cents each at the grocery.

Reminded me about one of the touches they have at the restaurant upstairs... they follow the European practice of serving sorbet before the main course. But they serve it in a dish made of ice! Veddy elegant.

Nuff for now...

8/31 - Back at Narita

Narita... as in Tokyo airport again... 2 hour layover, then back home after a 10 hour flight. Boy did this day start out bad... Got up on time at 4 AM for my 6:05 departure, was ready for my pre-arranged hotel ride to the airport by 4:35... no driver! Mild panic! Shows up a few minutes later & we are off for what is supposed to be a 20 minute ride to the airport. But this guy acts like he has never driven before. Goes 80 KPH (not even 50 MPH) on a wide open expressway. Afraid to pass slower cars, wanders between lanes, sometimes straddling the lane markers. At last we get to the airport. It's 5:10, still plenty of time... There is a delay at the check-in counter... at 5:20 I get there, give her my ticket & passport. She says she needs 250 Baht ($10) for airport tax. No cash! I worked it out just right... no baht left over to have to change back to bucks, but didn't know about the airport tax! Can't take credit cards... Grab my stuff & head for ATM... ATM's shut down in Bangkok at 10 PM & aren't open yet! Go to exchange booth, they take credit cards. She wants my passport which is back at the check-in counter! Rush back to get it... she runs it thru the card reader... card reader says "Call"... she calls & tells me line is down for 20 minutes... Tells me "Go to next booth." No one there! No place to get cash! Major panic! Back to check-in... No help. Ask for manager... He's busy. Ask for boarding pass, maybe I can get cash inside terminal. She refuses. Rush back to exchange booth & start shouting! No one moved by my problem. No cash! It's 5:45. Haven't cleared immigration or Xray, no tickee. What to do. I ask another guy who apparently wants just to change some money if I can borrow $10. He saves me! Nice guy. Business professor from U of Penn. We exchange business cards, I run to check-in still pushing my baggage around in a cart, grab my pass & board about 5:55. Whew! Slept most of the 5 hour flight to Tokyo.

Not much else to say about Bangkok. Had an easy day yesterday; things had gone so well during the week, that there really wasn't much to do. Caught up on email, wrapped up the visit & was back poolside at the hotel a little after noon. Caught some rays, took a short steam bath & basically took it easy all afternoon.

Watched part of the US Open (tennis) on an Indian sports channel... Interesting to hear commentary from the other side of the planet. Agassi was playing an Indian guy, so the commentator wasn't exactly impartial. Andre loses first set & trails bad in 2nd. Indian commentator is joking about Andre getting beat in 3 sets. Andre at break point to go down 0-5 in 2nd. Holds on, then wins 18 of next 19 games to blow away Paes. Indian commentator got quiet during 3rd set & I got lunch. Then I watched a cricket match. Wanted to see if I could figure out this strange game with wierd scores like 244 for 5, win by 3 wicketts. Games go on forever. Am I missing something? This turns out to be an abbreviated form called 1-day cricket... match "only" takes 6 hours vs days for the traditional form. It turns out to be kind of interesting, Aussies vs Sri Lanka... 2 best teams in the world. I skip part of it & go have dinner, but still see plenty. Basically it's a bit like baseball, except the batter is near the middle of the field, there are no foul lines & the pitcher (called a bowler) can bounce the pitch. Batter makes out if ball is caught in the air or if he is too slow running across to the opposie line. Until he makes out, he just keeps hitting. Sometimes a batter will score more than 100 runs before going out & in fact a couple of days ago, vs India, on of the Sri Lankans never got out. Was still batting when the game was over. In short form they play 50 overs, where an over is 6 pitches. One side bats , for 50 overs, then the other. Side with most runs wins. In long form, I think they play until every player makes out, no limit on overs. No wonder it never ends. Pretty boring except when they finally get a guy out or if it is getting close to the end.

Guess that's all I have for now. Glad I don't have any more long trips for a while.