Traffic..

Bangkok is not for you if you like driving but don't like traffic. So far Nicole and I have only travelled via road for the trip from the airport.

This is Sunday afternoon. 5 lanes of traffic heading away, two towards. Photo taken from an overhead walkway.

One unwritten road rule: if there is no one coming from the opposite direction, you can use their piece of road! Note the cream & green coloured bus is queued up on the wrong side of the road. The silver van is about to join.

One neat thing they do is display beside the traffic lights how long until they change. Refer the lights showing 11 seconds above. This is nice, although if you just miss the lights and have to wait for a green it's pretty deflating! The light cycles are often quite long -I've seen 206 seconds!- and the amateur traffic engineer in me wonders if it shorter cycles would be better.

This is about 8pm at night. Note the stream of motorcycles running up the left hand side of the road. The bike/scooter is certainly the most efficient way to travel, provided you are happy to take a risk. I read that every hour 3 cyclist are killed on Bangkok roads.

One strategy is to put multiple people in each vehicle. Utes are popular for this.

One gets lots of opportunities to take artistic traffic photos..

Siam Ocean World

Another Bangkok must do. The Siam Ocean World. This amazing place contains some 30,000 species of (mostly) sea creatures. It's located underneath a shopping center so you can get a feed or satisfy your need for some retail therapy.

One thing quickly learnt is that photographing creatures underwater is not easy, especially when the lighting is dim. Quite romantic mood lighting actually - another good place to take a date after impressing them with the Sky Bar. 

Friendly fellow. There was also an enormous crab there, a good 50cm+ wide.

Everyone is beautiful in their own way.

Usually, if you have this view of a shark, you're about to become dinner.

Fish everywhere.

My favourite. Detailed & elegant.

At one stage you can actually walk in a tunnell with marine life beside and above you. This is amazing, you just walk around gob smacked in this area.

The jelly fish area is brilliant. Dark with piano music accompanying you as you watch the jelly fish swim (?) gracefully.

Nicole and I have been avoiding any food that we would normally have at home, but we did make an exception tonight for a little bit of desert. Before and after photos below.

Before..

After!! 

Random Things

Some oddball items that amused me.

There is a lot of advertising here.

Spotted in a bookshop at the Emporium. Rob Barassi's (Australian Rules footballer) biography!

Broccoli Pie.. Coming to a McDonalds near you.

Brembo brakes.. On a Toyota Corolla!

From the Chatuchak market - workshop manual for a Commodore!

This amused me as a fan of the French & Saunders comedy TV show.

Special Day Today..

It's going to be a special day today..

It started off by my camera battery going flat. I have a spare, but one of them is pretty weak these days so I elected to head back to the hotel and grab the charger. On the way there, I slipped and landed on my knee. I then managed to destroy a cup of coffee (How do you curdle powdered milk - what talent!) and Nicole dropped her cardigan on the way to the office and had to go back to get it.

On the plus side, we hit the supermarket on the way and I bought some of the original Red Bull (Krating Daeng). It sells here for the princely price of 10 Baht, about 30 cents. This is a non fizzy more cordial style of drink than we are used to in Australia. Should keep me awake today! I also purchased some intriguingly named Dark Secret mints. How can you resist something so mysteriously named?

Ford Head Office Thailand

The training here is in the Lake Rajada Office Complex. Ford have a few floors of this building. It's the equivalent of having a few floors of the Rialto back home.

It is typical modern marble floored building that could be anywhere in the world. The Ford AAT production plant is about 2 hours drive away.

The view backwards to the hotel we are staying at. (The white stepped building.) I'm on the 20th floor, Nicole the 21st.

Looking down.. We are 31 floors up. A mere pittance compared to the 64 floor sky bar! The unfinished carpark that I mentioned in an earlier post is in the bottom left of the above picture. The ground floor contains a supermarket with a built in restaurant. They sell Tim Tams there, but only 120g in size as opposed to the 200g variety at home. The extra weight has been taken out of the chocolate & filling rather than the biscuit so they aren't near as nice. Curiously the packet also says not for sale in Australia or New Zealand!

Another shot from 31 floors up. Bangkok is quite a large city and has a fair bit of smog/cloud cover. Only once I think we've actually seen the sun; certainly we have not seen a sharp defined shadow. Today was a public holiday, and the traffic seemed better than normal, and, whether genuine or imagined, better visibility towards the horizon.

Our conference room. Demonstrators Jennifer & Brian on the far side. Nicole on the way out the door, probably for another cup of coffee!

Walking in Bangkok

In Melbourne, we take walking on flat obstruction free footpaths more or less for granted. In Bangkok, it's an adventure in itself.

The erection of objects on the footpath is quite common place. In this case, a power box. Note that the base of the box is in concrete, so the width of the footpath you can walk on is about 4cm plus the rounded kerbing.

Overhead obstacles. This sign went across the entire width of the footpath. Nicole modelling the overhead clearance.

Mind your step.. This was one of the larger step changes, and to be fair, is exacerbated by a falling road elevation. In general, the kerbs are taller and sharper than we're used to. We hypothesised that this was to do with either heavy rainfall, or to stop the motorcycle riders riding on the footpaths. Either seems plausible.

After all that, wherever there is a decent width of footpath, a street vendor fills it, generally selling some form of local delicacy, usually on a skewer cooked on a BBQ/grille type setup.

The net result is that in some areas you spend half your time walking on the road in between cars. The car-pedestrian accident statistics must be horrendous. Crossing the road is an amazing life & death exsperience, to be the subject of a future post.

Patpong Night Market

Bangkok is certainly the place for markets, and the Patpong Night Market doesn't disappoint. This is the place to go for watches, shirts, ladies bags, belts and mens underwear. It is also the place to go if you are a sports enthusiast. There are many people there who are very interested in ping pong, some 50 different people asked us if we wanted to play it. For some reason they thought that I would be a better player than Nicole, as they asked me much more than they asked her. Perhaps because I was wearing runners.

Some of the same people thought that we didn't want to play ping pong because we were hungry. They then offered us bananas. Very kind of them.

 An entirely typical scene at the Patapong market. In this case, thongs, bags & scarfes.

 And again. This time taken from the sky rail walk way.

After walking past all the places where people would invite us to play ping pong, we went through another area where there seemed to be lots of males. Note in the center of the photo is the Hot Male Bar. Nicole and I were both feeling quite warm, (current maximum temperature is consistently 38 degrees, minimum 25 degrees) but were unsure of the local etiquette so did not go in there. We seemed very popular in this area, as a lot of people stopped to look at us. When we left this lane, a chap offered to show us where the ladybugs were. It seemed quite an odd thing us, so we declined. 

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign. 

We found a supermarket near the hotel which stocked, amongst other treasures, Tim Tams. I took this shot to provide an idea of some of the prices. A bottle of Heineken and a Bacardi Breezer will set you back a total of about $3 Australian. Refrigerated, bought individually. Could be the recipe for an ugly morning. 

Earlier in the day we had lunch, because we were hungry. 

Todays lunch, delivered from a local cafe. Packaging in a plastic bag was a bit of a surprise. This particular dish was not the best meal I've had here - rather bland- but on the whole, it has been an enjoyable experience eating. Nicole and I are determined to avoid eating 'home food'. Coming to Bangkok and eating something we eat at home all the time would be very uncool. 

Some Car Of The Year awards at Ford Thailand Office. The one on the left is for the best high lifted pickup up to 2,500cc. Clearly the local awards are of the "everybody wins a prize" style award where there are so many niches that everyone takes home something in some obscure category. There was another award there for the 1 Tonne 2 Door 4WD Pickup category. It would seem that a vehicle like a Ranger which is available in a number of body styles and drivelines could be eligible for many different categories. 

To think that Wheels Magazine in Australia hands out 1 single Car Of The Year award.