Tag: #folksytravel

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Batteries in Paradise

By now you might be getting a glimpse of my tactics. I try to draw you into the subject and then once I have you captured I go through the story, whatever it is. Today I’m going to explain what I mean by “batteries in paradise“.

When you travel abroad you need to take a variety of electronic devices to do this that and the other even if it’s just some odd piece of equipment. For me, having been in the computer business for more than 45 years I just can’t get away from computing devices. Currently with me I have my iPhone, my iPad Mini 4 and my MacBook Air. All of them run on batteries.  

Previously I never had a habit of just sitting down and consuming a lot of information someplace where I didn’t have my large screen and computer attached to it. Now that happens to be a MacBook Air.   My luxurious suite room ($18/day -eat your heart out) has a TV with an HDMI port so I just plug my computer into that but it isn’t the kind of sitting situation where I can comfortably use a keyboard and a mouse so I prefer to sit outside in my private patio, drink some coffee and for the first time in years use my 3 year old iPad Mini 4 to consume information and to use on various applications to do this that and the other, especially email. 

I use my MacBook Air for heavier computing such as the development of our family digital museum, extensive emails with attachments, complicated document creation, watching videos and online material in the evening, and doing some fairly extensive financial work. 

I thought my iPhone XS would be useful mostly during the commute, which it was, but now it seems to be the most convenient device to do financial transactions and a few other various jobs such as international Skype calls.

So now I wind up charging my phone only once every two days since I don’t use it as much. My iPad fulfills most of my morning news consumption and simple data transactions.  It works fine with dictation which helps a lot since typing on these smaller digital devices is time-consuming and not really good for the tendons and muscles.  So this iPad needs to be charged up at least once a day. I even have an extra fairly high powered external battery to pump it up while I’m working if I need extra power.  In the morning sitting outside without the air conditioner is very comfortable and a lot better on my sinuses.  It’s warm outside but when you get used to the heat and the humidity it’s often more comfortable sitting outside and bearing the heat rather than going in and out of air-conditioning. 

My MIT colleagues and students bought me an extra smaller battery which I use to power the iPhone when I need to inside or outside.  

During thunderstorms, which happen now about every third day, it is wise to unplug my laptop. Trust me! Bad things can happen especially in Thailand where there is no ground ( Earth) used in most small buildings.  One thing to note about the HDMI external monitor is some thing I found after I got the MacBook air and had it constantly plugged into the external monitor. Even with your monitor off it drains the battery if it’s connected to the MacBook Air. I couldn’t figure out why it was very very difficult and time-consuming to get the MacBook Air to start up. I found each time the battery was zero.  So don’t leave your external monitor, especially HDMI connection, plugged into a laptop if the laptop is not also plugged in for charging.  Oh, I didn’t mention just before the battery drained in the laptop because I didn’t have it plugged into a power outlet while I had the HDMI cable attached.

So if you’re traveling extensively I highly recommend making sure you have your devices charged up by the morning and also have some kind of portable battery to carry with you during the day. There are probably many times you will run out of battery power especially the way some of the devices react to touch even if they’re in a backpack, turning on and off, executing applications even when you haven’t touched it.  And when that one photo or sound you want to record comes into view or into hearing distance you don’t want to have a dead mobile device.  So that’s about “batteries in paradise“.   HAVE A NICE DAY!

in Paradise. By now you might be getting a glimpse of my tactics. I try to draw you into the subject and then once I have you captured I go through the story, whatever it is. Today I’m going to explain what I mean by “batteries in paradise“.

When you travel abroad you need to take a variety of electronic devices to do this that and the other even if it’s just some odd piece of equipment. For me, having been in the computer business for more than 45 years I just can’t get away from computing devices. Currently with me I have my iPhone, my iPad Mini 4 and my MacBook Air. All of them run on batteries.  

Previously I never had a habit of just sitting down and consuming a lot of information someplace where I didn’t have my large screen and computer attached to it. Now that happens to be a MacBook Air.   My luxurious suite room ($18/day -eat your heart out) has a TV with an HDMI port so I just plug my computer into that but it isn’t the kind of sitting situation where I can comfortably use a keyboard and a mouse so I prefer to sit outside in my private patio, drink some coffee and for the first time in years use my 3 year old iPad Mini 4 to consume information and to use on various applications to do this that and the other, especially email. 

I use my MacBook Air for heavier computing such as the development of our family digital museum, extensive emails with attachments, complicated document creation, watching videos and online material in the evening, and doing some fairly extensive financial work. 

I thought my iPhone XS would be useful mostly during the commute, which it was, but now it seems to be the most convenient device to do financial transactions and a few other various jobs such as international Skype calls.

So now I wind up charging my phone only once every two days since I don’t use it as much. My iPad fulfills most of my morning news consumption and simple data transactions.  It works fine with dictation which helps a lot since typing on these smaller digital devices is time-consuming and not really good for the tendons and muscles.  So this iPad needs to be charged up at least once a day. I even have an extra fairly high powered external battery to pump it up while I’m working if I need extra power.  In the morning sitting outside without the air conditioner is very comfortable and a lot better on my sinuses.  It’s warm outside but when you get used to the heat and the humidity it’s often more comfortable sitting outside and bearing the heat rather than going in and out of air-conditioning. 

My MIT colleagues and students bought me an extra smaller battery which I use to power the iPhone when I need to inside or outside.  

During thunderstorms, which happen now about every third day, it is wise to unplug my laptop. Trust me! Bad things can happen especially in Thailand where there is no ground ( Earth) used in most small buildings.  One thing to note about the HDMI external monitor is some thing I found after I got the MacBook air and had it constantly plugged into the external monitor. Even with your monitor off it drains the battery if it’s connected to the MacBook Air. I couldn’t figure out why it was very very difficult and time-consuming to get the MacBook Air to start up. I found each time the battery was zero.  So don’t leave your external monitor, especially HDMI connection, plugged into a laptop if the laptop is not also plugged in for charging.  Oh, I didn’t mention just before the battery drained in the laptop because I didn’t have it plugged into a power outlet while I had the HDMI cable attached.

So if you’re traveling extensively I highly recommend making sure you have your devices charged up by the morning and also have some kind of portable battery to carry with you during the day. There are probably many times you will run out of battery power especially the way some of the devices react to touch even if they’re in a backpack, turning on and off, executing applications even when you haven’t touched it.  And when that one photo or sound you want to record comes into view or into hearing distance you don’t want to have a dead mobile device.  So that’s about “batteries in paradise“.   HAVE A NICE DAY!

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Diet and Death in Thailand

Khanom Area, in Nakon Sitamarat Province, Thailand

The word hyperbole is from two Greek words.  HUPÉR (above) + BÁLLŌ (I throw). So let me do a little throwing above. 

When you learn to scuba dive a very important principle is from Archimedes, supposedly, the law of buoyancy.  The key is weight.  If the weight of the water which is displaced by some object is heavier than the weight of the object then the object will float and we say it is positively buoyant. My additional rule is a very simple one. Humans are basically fish. How do I know that? We are basically neutrally buoyant, which means if we breathe out we will sink and if we breathe in we will float. But as we get older that can change.

When I was 62 kg all the way through high school until I was about 48 I was neutrally buoyant, actually skinny.  But then I started eating Philippine food four times a day, lots of adobo which is half pork fat. So I wound up at between 78 and 84 kg. So what happens to all of that pork fat and a certain kind of way we tend to gain weight as we get older?  It turns into filler throughout the muscle which we call fat.  That is lighter than, less dense then, our general muscle tissue so that tends to change our buoyancy. 

How do you survive on the ocean and on the beach?  when I was a kid going to the beach our father taught us kids a very simple principle. If you hold your breath and let your body float on the top of the water with almost none of your body under the surface you will float and the waves will bring you into shore  That is almost always true with a few exceptions.  That rule saved me from drowning at Sandy Beach in Hawaii number of years ago. It took two hours to get back to the beach after I was completely worn out from fighting the current. But I remembered what my father taught me when I was a kid, I floated on the top of the waves and eventually made it to shore. The art of the save was in spending most of my time with air in my lungs so I would float. At that time I was 62 kg and if I had let the air out of my lungs I would have sunk.  

Before I came back to Thailand a few months ago I was 84 kg. Through exercise and diet I’ve gotten down to 77 kg.  But even with that diet it would be very difficult for me to die in the ocean. If I let all the air out of my lungs I still float due to the fat in my body being more buoyant than the water it displaces. The problem is when I go diving I have to put on more weights to get me back to neutral buoyancy than I did when I was 62 kg back in the 1990s.

So the moral of the story is if you diet too much and get back to your neutral buoyancy state you could risk death in the ocean.  Hyperbole?  Maybe, maybe not.

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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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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. 

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Tip, Commission, Bribe, or Scam?

In the previous blog I described the adventure trying to find a hotel, just someplace where I can sleep at least. During that adventure a few things happened that are kind of interesting and shed some light on Thai culture and business.

The driver of theThe taxi I took from the hotel I was staying at to the hotel at the airport where I had the booking kept talking with the hotel people about hotels open in the next province. I was not quite sure why
he spent so much time talking about it but I soon found out.

When we got to the airport hotel I saw the driver slope about 700 baht to the hotel owner and just after that the hotel owner keep huge prices on the taxi driver, how reliable he was and how much good information he had regarding hotels. I was assuming the payment was for the hotel owner to promote the taxi driver. I wasn’t sure if they knew each other and the payment might’ve been for something else. In fact, a lady who tried to check into the clothes airport hotel the day before could not check in since the hotel is closed and through the discussions with the hotel owner they told me the taxi driver had taken her on an hour and 15 minute taxi ride to the next province to a hotel that was open. So I think the 700 baht was Commission for either taking that lady the long distance to the open hotel where it was for my ride. 700 baht is about half of the taxi fare and a good daily income for anyone in this difficult economy.

Both the hotel owner and the taxi driver kept talking about the 1000 baht daily room charge I might face when I get to the hotel.
During the trip the taxi driver talked about how I could probably negotiate the daily charge down to maybe 650 bud.

When we got to the hotel the hotel owner said the room charge is 650 bud but I asked how long I would stay. When I explained that it depended upon the charge and that I might stay a week or even a month she reduce the daily charge to 600 but. Two days ago I pulled up to hotel booking websites and both of them indicated that the room I had rented was normally 500 but. So for the second week staying here I negotiated the price for the next week. It turns out that taxi driver is the one they use here at this hotel all the time to drive customers to and from the airport which, again, is an hour and 15 minutes away, a 1500 baht fee. Having lived in Thailand seven years I can tell you that the difference between 500 baht and 600 baht which in total was 700 but since the difference was paid for seven days, was a commission to the taxi driver. So you can see how the commissions were flowing.

When I explain what happened to a friend of mine who was a diving customer with me many years ago he kept saying, “oh that’s the old hotel scam”. What he was talking about is when you wind up someplace, not knowing any hotels and having to take a taxi and the taxi takes you to a hotel that usually increases the daily fee in order to pay commission to the taxi driver. That, of course, is one way to look at it, as a scam.

In my situation all of the hotels in the province were closed and the Airbnb were rejecting people as well so there was no place to stay . I did have to pay 1500 baht and another 700 baht for the convenience of being able to go to a hotel that was open in another province. I look at those differently from my friend, based on my experience. I didn’t see it as a scam, I saw it as a convenience, a fee for a very friendly emergency advice in guidance. Some kinds of these commissions I look at as very much like a tour guide for you. And in a difficult economy I was not angry that the airport hotel owner benefited, the taxi driver benefited, the new hotel owner benefited and I benefited. It cost a little money but everybody was happy.

And what about Groves? Well, you might pay some cash to policeman when he catches you in a traffic violation. If you didn’t pay the money you would have to go to the police station and fill out forms and go through a bureaucratic fit process while paying a smaller fine. Paying the policeman is clearly a bribe. But the policeman will try to explain to you that he’s trying to save you time and hassle going to the police station and going through the bureaucratic process and a very friendly way.

When you’re moving to Thailand and your personal effects come to the airport and you have to go to the airport to clean them in customs, you have probably done enough research to understand there is no import duty on those personal items. But you go with a tight friend who knows how to do this process and when the customs officer leaves the office you are currently in your friend will direct you to putting a certain amount of cash in a desk drawer. With the customs officer comes back in the office, he will open the drawer to “get the appropriate forms to fill out”. He will see the cash in the drawer, you will fill out the forms and there will be no duty imposed on your personal effects. This is also clearly a bribe. But in the case with the policeman and the customs officer the amount is not very high and the benefit of getting things done quickly and smoothly it seem to benefit everybody. Everybody complains about the system but it is not really changing. Everyone knows the appropriate amount to pay as if it were a menu in a restaurant.

So you can look at the extra fees being paid as a tip, a scam, a commission, or a bribe. As we say in Thailand, “up to you”.

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Musical Hotels and Total Confusion in Paradise

About two weeks ago I had spent three weeks in Suratthani, the main town in the Suratthani Province and the port that carries most of the people to some of the very nice islands on the east coast of Thailand, Koh Samui, Koh Phangan and Koh Tao.

But a few days before April 8 the hotel rang the room and said the government told them to close the hotel on April 8. Since I paid until April 10 I could stay until the 10th. They help me try to find other accommodations which was very difficult. Once they found something a few days later the police went to the place and told them they had to close down.

I tried Airbnb and most of those were asking questions how long I had been in Thailand and in that area. Once they found I had been there for more than 2 weeks they refused to except me. One Airbnb host said there was an airport hotel allowed by the government to accept guests. So I called the hotel, they confirmed they would accept my reservation so I booked online.

On the 10th I went down to check out and the police were there with people from the health department. They wanted to interview me asking questions concerning my travel to date, how I felt and what I planed to do. They were very nice, I answered all the questions and I got in a taxi and went to the airport hotel. When I got to the airport hotel the owner came out of the entrance which had blacked out the name of the hotel on either side of the door, an ominous sign. The owner confirmed I had a reservation but said the police had been there two days before and told them if he did not close the hotel on the 8th he would go to prison for one year and be fined 40,000 Baht (US$1,250).

The taxi driver passed some money to the hotel owner which I described in the next blog and explained the next province of Nakhon Si Thammarat had a hotel that would except customers but the ride would take an hour and a half and cost an extra 1,500 Baht (US$47). After some discussion back-and-forth about the different possibilities I decided to take the taxi ride. I got to the very small hotel with six rooms in the middle of the jungle, very nice place and nice people and I’m very happy here. Evidently the governor of this province noted that there are very few virus infections in his province and so did not issue the hotel closure orders that Suratthani had issued. I am still here in this little hotel bungalow and find it very sufficient for just staying and waiting until, I really don’t know what. But at 500 Baht/night (US$16) and a family restaurant with delicious food next door I can’t complain.

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HAPPY VIRUS DAYS?

When times are tough and when travel becomes a little bit more complicated very often the stories turn to difficulties, sadness and complications. But maybe I can just get around some of that and try to give you a little picture of what it’s like to commit yourself to traveling during a virus outbreak.

I left Singapore on March 17 to fly to Phuket to go diving with my godson, Dennis, the second generation of Bubbles, and to visit a few friends on the island. But what started out as a somewhat normal yet vacant vacation spot turned into what everyone realized was becoming a fairly dangerous situation. Too many people not taking care to keep distance or protect themselves from the virus. So after a week there I left for Suratthani to get away from the tourists in Phuket who were not observing most of the safety measures to keep from getting the COVID-19. The streets were also fairly crowded and Patong Beach is always a very noisy place to be.

Getting a 5 1/2 hour bus to Suratthani was not quite as difficult as I had expected since there were quite a few mini buses employed instead of the normal large buses to take large number of tourists here and there. But I got lucky and I got a big bus so there was a lot of space between passengers and it was very relaxing.

But upon arriving at a very nice hotel, costing only $18 a night, everyone found the government orders were increasingly shutting down the city. Now restaurants can only provide take-out meals, regulations even coffee shops need to obey. But there are plenty of little carts selling deep fried chicken, barbecued pork, sticky rice, mashed up fruit drinks and all sorts of other kinds of food so life was going on just fine if you are satisfied with fairly minimal survival necessities being plentiful.

Everyone is wearing masks and in order to enter many shops, especially department stores, you have to have a mask, get some alcohol and wash sanitizer and have your temperature taken with the laser gun. On returning to the hotel one time my temperature read above normal and above the recommended maximum so they asked me to sit down for a few minutes. After about two minutes my temperature went down to an acceptable maximum. It was the heat and the walking outside and the black hat that raised it above the allowed maximum.

After the first three days of just walking around, going by the docks and watching the people fishing and feeding the pigeons, and then going on to see the Thai temples and Chinese temples and open marketplaces, my tourist journeys were completed and it was time to spend the rest of my two weeks getting some work done, reading a lot of newspapers and information about the virus, protecting myself and getting some of the 7 to 8000 images of family photos and heirlooms organized, a job which will take several more months.

So today I decided that since the hotel called me yesterday and told me that beginning today all the hotels had to close, it was time for me to go to immigration to try to extend my stay here another month as well as look for other accommodations. I have two more paid days at the hotel so they let me stay for those two days. Immigration was pretty easy since I was only one of two foreigners there. Immigration officers on the islands around seem to be extremely crowded since that is where the tourists are. Suratthani City is the jumping off point for those islands and so there really aren’t many foreigners here. On top of that the immigration office is way out in the countryside which discourages people from using that office to get anything done. Good for me.

So now that I have another month okayed by immigration I need to find a place to stay. There aren’t many options since all the hotels will be closed tomorrow so I’m trying to be a little creative. But the staff here at the hotel has been very helpful and has given me some ideas. If I can get to one of the islands Airbnb accommodations are available which seem to get around the regulations that shut down the hotels. I read in the Bangkok post today that a fellow from France was walking around Phuket without a mask and so was arrested. I am not only wearing a mask when I go out but when I buy anything and bring it back to the room I wash my hands and then I wash whatever I bring back in. Since I can’t see the virus I don’t know how much good this is doing but I know it’s a good practice to at least be doing my best to keep healthy.

The cleanliness in this hotel is exceptional. Every day they go into every unoccupied room and clean it as though it were occupied. They don’t take all the sheets and towels out but they do a fairly good once over. And of course they thoroughly clean and fix up all the occupied rooms. Today since they are closing they have taken a lot of the mattresses off the beds and have obviously put them somewhere, not sure where they went.

Well I think that’s enough for today.

PS I want to explain why Dennis is my Godson. I was at the Phuket hospital when he was being born. When I saw the 4kg (8.8lb) newborn I said, “God, son, you are big.” That’s the rest of the story.