Month: May 2020

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Body Surfing and The Meaning of Life

By now you know I’m stuck in southern Thailand. In this case “stuck“ seems like a very enjoyable interpretation.  One friend in Hawaii yesterday told me Japan might allow me back in soon. I responded, “I hope not“.  

I set my daily schedule basically by jellyfish. The second determination is weather. The only thing I have scheduled every day is going to the beach and getting some exercise in the ocean.  The jellyfish start to come in at about 5:45 in the evening so I try to get to the beach at about 5:15 to get a half hour swim.  The second constraint is whether or not it’s cloudy. If it’s cloudy I can go down to the beach anytime and not get sunburned. And after about 5:15 the sun starts below the palm trees and I don’t wind up getting too much sun.  

Two days ago there was absolutely no wind and the ocean was so calm and glass like, some thing I have very rarely seen in my five years on the ocean.  you could get your eye right down just above the water line and see all the way along the water to the beach 5 km away.  That is a real zero situation to do body surfing in but there are many different kinds of swimming.

Four days ago it rained very hard at the beach and produced a very interesting and beautiful effect on the water. The drops falling on the water bounce off and project silver pillars, millions of them, a short distance into the air producing over a long distance a very deep fog like Haze. And there is some thing especially fun about having rain pouring down on you which is cooler than the ocean water.  The ocean water here near the shore is about 82°F (28°C).  The inclines are only a degree or two lower. 

Here I think it’s a good idea to tell you I hate swimming pools.  The chlorine and the other things that come from humans, deposited it in the water, are very bad for humans.  On top of that so many people expect swimmers to go in a straight line. I never learned to do swimming in a straight line. Well, I guess I did at the community swimming pool when I was just a kid. But almost all my swimming has been in the ocean, copying the swimming techniques of the otters and seals. That is not exactly straight line, competition swimming.  Oh, i just remembered getting suspended from the pool for short periods of time for swimming like a seal.

Sometimes we’re lucky enough to get enough wind so we can get some kind of waves. The beach here in Khanom is a very shallow and gradual slope so it doesn’t really produce the large, close to the beach waves you see in Hawaii, La Jolla or other beaches where the shore slope is greater. So for body surfing this is not really a great beach. However, given the right circumstances it can produce large enough waves to just enjoy and have fun with and get washed up on the beach.  

Some people talk about techniques to body surfing. I am not sure i know the formal “techniques”. I just DO IT. What I enjoy is finding the right technique to place the body given a certain wave. It’s not all successes.  

I look at body surfing as an analogy to life and how to live. Most of it is about where you are, position and what the circumstances are, the wave.  You are in a certain position that is not easily and rapidly changeable.  The water is the most massive thing on earth that controls you. If you think you control the water you will die.  It is important to find the right position for your kind of body surfing. On top of that you have the choice of wave to avoid. You can either duck under and avoid it totally, you can smash headfirst into the middle of it, or you can let it smash you and roll you into the beach.  Those are decisions you need to make fairly quickly.  But also given a certain wave there are different body stances. You can put your arm out and try to position yourself to the top of the wave and sort of surf it in. You can try to catch it in the middle and ride it until it breaks, giving you a little bit more pressure towards the shore. You can start at the bottom, go sideways and decide to go under it and skip it or to let it propel you to the top by itself. But even if you go to the top of the wave if it curls too soon it can curl you and smash you down on the beach. It’s about position, decision making and timing. That’s how I see life.  So for me, going into the ocean is life. When I was a little kid we would go to La Jolla to visit our grandparents and uncles and aunts. They lived just one street up from the beach and we accessed the beach through a public walkway going down to what we called “whispering Sands“. The sand squeaked under our feet as we walked and that’s why we called it “ whispering Sands“.  It’s way south of the Cove.  

Every time I got to the beach I had this crazy feeling, very physical. There was a rope connecting me and the ocean and the ocean was pulling me in.   There was no way when I went to the beach I couldn’t resist going in. The pull was way too strong. Even if I had to strip down to my underpants I would still go in.  But I learned at an early age respect for the ocean is the most important thing. It is similar to the respect we need to have for life. If you don’t respect the ocean and understand it you will die.  I have come close to death in the ocean several times. Once was not my doing but the other time was due to a lack of respect, and the mistake was almost fatal. 

That’s all folks!

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Monster Ants – Thailand

I have to admit I’ve used a little bit of hyperbole here. What you see in this video is not really gigantic ants, something you might envision from the title, The title I imagined from my childhood similar to “the revenge of the cyclops“ (I don’t think that was a real movie though I do remember the cyclops movie). But they can be very dangerous nonetheless. 

Back in the 1990s I bought a Samsung laptop, one of their first, which was really very subpar. No, wait, that’s not the right computer. Delete that from your memory. I put together a desktop in about 1994 with an inexpensive keyboard. One day Some of the keys on the keyboard were not working. I looked around and I saw a constant trail of ants going, where I thought was under the keyboard but was actually a constant stream going inside the keyboard. I took the keyboard apart and I found these itsy-bitsy, teeny weenie pieces of silicon all stacked up close to where the ants were coming inside the keyboard. Those keyboards had a silicone pad underneath the keys that would create the travel distance and “pop back“ function for the key so it would go back into the up position after pushing down.  The ants had broken off little tiny pieces of silicon and decided they were important to take back to the nest and I guess before they could get them all out of the keyboard they decided to do a stocking up next to the entrance/exit for another group of ants to take back to the nest. I was guessing they had divided up the jobs between the ants. One would break off little silicone pieces and take them back to stack up near the keyboard exit and the other group would carry the little pieces back to the nest. When I looked closely I saw the stream of ants leaving the keyboard actually had very small tiny pieces of silicone meant for the nest. 

So this is where the nomen “monster“ comes from. Last week I had taken my MacBook air outside to work on the patio table and then returned it back inside the room. Later in the evening I noticed ants going in and out the USB-C port and imagined the worst, a repeat of 1994 and the attempted total destruction of my computer. That’s when I went to get this little green poison thing to put by the computer. It worked.

Some of you may think this is a very cruel way to deal with ants but I can assure you, according to the computer world, it was life or death,  it was them for me.

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The Gold Mine in World Travel

I was able to escape California for Singapore on March 12 which was pretty lucky for me. On the 17th I flew from Singapore to Thailand just one day before Singapore shut down flights and Thailand and Malaysia shut down new entries into the country. 

As many of you know I am now stuck in Thailand with the only other country available being the US. But I have spent way too much time there and have absolutely no interest in going back right now. Maybe sometime I’ll go visit the national parks.  

I had a bank account in Thailand and thought I should probably change all that old, diverse foreign currency into Thai Baht in Singapore, where the exchange rates are good, and take that cash with me to deposit in the Thai bank so I could use my ATM card in Thailand instead of using the debit cards from foreign accounts which incur rather high withdrawal fees in Thailand.

So, going up to the foreign-exchange counter, pulling out my international currency wallet and going through the currencies the exchange company would change for me, which happened to be a much more excepting number of older bills then what a Thai bank would exchange, I was surprised to find that about 3/4 of all the foreign cash I had extra from visits to different countries had exceeded US$1,700.  They gave me an envelope with about 55,000 Thai baht and I vowed to make it last as long as possible.

When I got to Thailand I found that the bank account has been closed since the balance had decreased below a certain amount for a certain period of time and they did not allow tourist to open bank accounts anymore in Thailand so I was stuck with the envelope of cash. My hope was to make it last about two months if possible which was the longest amount of time I would be able to stay in Thailand with just a tourist stamp and without a visa.

To my amazement it turned two months a few days ago and I had almost made the cash stretch out to the limit except for about US$60. All of my expenses included hotels, food and anything else I needed.  Of course the current health crisis has helped slightly with a decrease in hotel prices, the free use of the motorcycle where I am now and the free dogs and cats at the resort. Since I am the only customer, most of the time, the free dogs and cats for company is very helpful. Let’s hear it for free dogs and cats. Hip, Hip, Horranimals!

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Raining Cats and Dogs

We are having some very unusual amount of rain here in the southern part of Thailand, Nakhon Si Thammarat, but that’s not really what this is about. It’s about cats and dogs. Or maybe I should say dogs and cats because the dogs are much more friendly and dogs have become much greater friends than the cats, so the cats come second.

The Place I am staying, I am the only customer now except for an occasional day stopper, has two dogs and three or four cats. I’m not gonna spend too much time on the cats, not only because they’re fewer numbe but also because of what they did to tease my dog, DC, when I was living in Phuket, Thailand. Late at night the cats used to stand on top of the truck and make DC bark for hours on end, teasing him, showing him how they can jump up on the top of the car and he can’t. Total neighborhood mafia.

But I am friendly to cats and with cats if they abide by my rules. I certainly am not going to bend to their will and to allow them to use their evil nature to control and subdue me. But since I already said they ranked number two in my book let me get to the dogs.

Most houses have dogs they keep outside mostly in the front as guard dogs. And most of the people really don’t take great physical care of their dogs so they tend to get all sorts of problems that don’t get fixed especially abrasions and skin problems like mange. In the countryside there are not too many of the small yuppie dogs that actually resemble large rats more than they do dogs. That shows some of my prejudice but then I’ve had some experiences that make me feel that way. The last yuppie dog I had a run-in with i nicknamed football for an obvious reason which I’m sure you can guess. When a dog bites you, that’s the last straw.

Dog with mange
The purple is probably some treatment for mange or another skin problem.

So most of the dogs in the countryside tend to be medium size dogs, bigger than a beagle and smaller than a Labrador. That’s what they call the typical Thai dog which has blood lines from several different dog breeds including Ridgeback. But almost all the dogs here tend to be very mild tempered, kind of like the people, with A few exceptions.

Since I have been in Thailand for a number of years (not recently) I have some kind of sense of how to manage the typical dogs kept outside. They tend to be very friendly on the whole and there is a way to manage certain problems such as the motorcycle chasers.

One way to manage motorcycle chasers is to do what I don’t do and not what I saw a European fellow do a couple weeks ago and which I don’t recommend, is to kick at the dog and then stop the motorcycle and harass the dog. Knowing the dogs here tend to be very mild-mannered is the key to knowing how to manage dogs. Mild manner is also the general emotion of the motorcycle chasers. When I get one or two dogs chasing me and trying to bite at me I slow down and stop. The dogs stop pursuing me and sometimes slink away or in some cases just shy away slightly. If I see them slink away then I know they are not going to be easy to get to know. If they just shy away, I turn off my motorcycle, get off and crouch down, talking to the dog and holding out my hand palm upward. Most of the time the dog will come to me so I will pet it and find a place it’s itching and scratch it, and then we become friends. Sometimes we get down to Exchanging cat jokes and that is always hilarious. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard of a dog laugh it’s belly off at the joke about the three cats walking into the bar.

Just a few days ago I slowly passed by a house with a larger Labrador sized dog I made friends with, one that was chasing my motorcycle several times before. The dog came over and greeted me I started scratching her behind ear and places where I knew she was itchy. She proceeded to climb onto my scooter, standard 100 cc motorcycle in Thailand which in other countries is 50 cc (More about that later), and so, well, of course you know this wasn’t going in my planed direction.

By this time the little boy who’s dog it was came out of the house and was trying to talk with me but my kid Thai is not that good so I just said to him, a mistake, “go together“. Since I haven’t been in Thailand for a While, my Thai is a little rusty and I sometimes don’t say everything I mean to say. I was meaning to say “I can’t take her with me“. But all the words didn’t come out. So I think the little boy thought I wanted to steal his dog. Ever since I haven’t seen the dog outside. Well I got the dog off the motorcycle, scooter, and proceeded to the beach for my daily swim.

My buddy on the beach road

That’s kind of the long story of how to manage motorcycle chasing dogs in Thailand.

A smaller buddy

I have two good dog friends here, one small dog and one larger dog. The larger dog is very very friendly, a short hair, so when I help her get that shedding hair out, which is very itchy, she just keeps asking for more. But there are limits to every good thing. Remember what happened to Oliver when he asked for “some more“?

The smaller dog is noisier than the big dog, which is very often the case with smaller dogs, from my experience at least. She’s a very good guard dog but sometimes even the slightest sound, A bird on the other side of the wall, will have her imagining thieves coming to steal her food and massacre all her friends.

This Resort’s Big Dog and Little Dog

I think I made a mistake and took a walk to the end of the dirt road with the two dogs. A couple days later they seem to get into their head that this was going to be a routine thing. But I found out later they normally just walk as far as next door which is a relative’s resort and then come back again. The problem is, even without me, they start going down the opposite direction to the end of the dirt road and encroaching on other dogs territories which means only one thing, mayhem. And now the small dog will walk ahead of the big dog, strutting her stuff and showing how powerful she is. But when another dog comes to clean the territory she runs way behind the big dog. So then the big dog gets into a conflagration. It turns into something like a typical Bar brawl where nobody gets really badly damaged, just damaged enough to feel they protected their precious reputation and territory.

So now I see the owner of the dogs walking the big one on a leash and not allowing her to go in the opposite direction. That’s what tipped me off, I had created an issue. So I just keep my mouth shut and stay friends with the dogs here inside the bungalow resort.

As for the cats, the black-and-white one doesn’t like to be touched but she will come into the room, sleep on my lap, and be content as anything. I like it best when cats are sleeping. We all know the end of the world could happen when all the cats decide to wake up and cause trouble.

The white cat
The tabby

The tabby, evidently, has been replaced. She is still here but the owner went to the temple and for some reason wound up with a new kitten that nobody wanted and the tabby became jealous and doesn’t want to be around the owner so the tabby wants to spend time with me. She loves to be petted and held and comforted but so far she hasn’t tried to sleep on my lap. The behavior of the two cats is tolerable and that’s the only reason I write about them. I am not hoping for a franchise hamburger shop to be set up in the small town. Not yet anyway.

To end on a Happy note, “As long as the roots are not severed, all will be well in the garden“. If you know that phrase you are truly an eclectic comedy lover. Hint – nope, not today.

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USEFUL NATURE

A very simple thing  washed up in large numbers on the beach, something called a cuttlefish bone.  it isn’t really a bone it’s cartilage on one side plus some other softer substance on the other. But it IS the internal skeleton of the cuttlefish. When the cuttlefish dies this is all that’s left and it is light so it floats to the surface and washes up on the beach. 

A Cornell college friend, Francis Wu, told me when he was a kid his mother used these to scrub the dishes. One side of the “bone“ is smooth, hard cartilage. The other side is a softer and abrasive substance. When he told me what his mother used them for I tried peeling off the outer edges of the cartilage and using the softer side to scrub some dishes.  It’s not only does an excellent job of scrubbing the dishes it also is a biodegradable substance that can be washed off, taken back to the beach and let to wait for thousands of years to become a new substance. 

Don’t you dare kill a cuttlefish to get this bone or I will come after you. Joking aside, if you happen to be walking on the beach and see these in quantity, pick one up and try it out. It’s better than buying plastic and having it wind up in the ocean to kill animals and to degrade into microparticles we subsequently eat.