Cimaron hits town...

Sweating it out... 


Due to the Typhoon Cimaron (who is classified in the same category as Katrina, aka "super typhoon") flights going to Manilla today were cancelled, so yours truly is spending some "quality time" in Kota Kinabalu, a small city on the Malaysian part of Borneo. Altough there are some great treks to be made in the surrounding area, if you only have one day all you can do is pretty much confined to staying in the city or walking the shoreline, since jungle treks to spot some urang-utangs require some more time. Anyways, I checked the news and so far the typhoon seems to have taken 10 lives, a low number considered the strength of the typhoon (compared with earlier typhoon Xangsane, Cimaron would be Goliath. ) and the fact that a lot of Filipinos where on the move to their hometowns for the all-saint festivities. Furthermore the damage to rice crops was also very low, less than 10 percent, which is good since Luzon is considered the rice-bowl of the Philippines, so lots of people depend on the crops from Luzon. (So if you compare the damage then maybe Xangsane was smaller in force but like David compared to Goliath Xangsane did a lot more damage, killing over 169 people in Vietnam and 48 in Philippines and smashing up everything in its path...) Now about the picture that comes with this post.... Hmm.. Well, I was just wondering why that boy is sweating so extensively from his lips...

One advantage of being on the road is the constant possibility of ending up in places you would never end up in normally. In this case I decided to check in to the faded Niagara hotel in some Soi of Silom road in Bangkok. The place reeked of the old days when kids would still get whacked on the fingers in school and men still wore hats on sunday. All in all this place was charming enough for me to stay exactly one night, enough to have seen it and lived it a little, but I can imagine the effect such a place has on the people that decide to stay there long term... One would pick up smoking just to feel more in place with the decorum.

Pai Kabaan

After a little stop in Abu Dabi Airport (charming, really, just like any other place in the united arab emirates) Read: lots of posh buildings and expensive looking cars but they all still wear a white sheet as their public dress, I mean, come on, that was hot during the Greek times, but this is the new millenium dudes! And of course there's the matter of the sand, which, as a matter of fact, there's way too much of if you ask this city slacker. Anyway, after lots of planes and sorts i arrived in my second habitat, Bangkok. So far I've been going about seeing old friends with the same old faces, old places with new faces, and lotsa food... Oh Joy to the asian bustling way of living and working on the streets, where spicy noodles can be bought at the corner of one soi and the next soi brings you the scents of pork on the barbeque. Oh, there's a foodstall passing by selling some crispy wontons, gotta go!!

Well hello there people from the world! (Eh, so far I'm not considering extra-terrestrials to read my blog, unless of course they ran into me on that wicked party in the U.F.O. bar the other night) Anyways, yours truly is dusting of his shoes and packing up again, because soon this restless soul will wander the surface of the East again. So while I might be floating around on some cloud of sun-sand-ricewithchicken, I intend to keep you all posted on an irregular basis. So make sure to check in every once in a while to find out what curious and wonderful people I've ran into this or that week, or just check in to see if my pictures are still good enough to get you curious about the other half of the planet... Cheerio!