I get weekly status reports from these various statistic plugins that are hidden all over this site. I don’t know why I have them installed or what they are supposed to tell me, other than random bits of information from which I am supposed to intuit 2.0 swarm behavior. But I do see interesting things like everyone seems to be looking at a lot of my work from Thailand. I don’t know why this is… but here are a few of my favorites from that region:

I rented a longboat for the afternoon… it was just me and my melancholy captain, tearing trough the quay and tiny canals around Bangkok together. For 3 hours, it was a great 10 dollars!

I bought a lot of stuff I may not have needed and ate a lot of fruit that would have been better off uneaten…

Here is the colorful city in the middle of the night…

This was shot in Thailand… I think buddhists get a discount.

This is a very unusual shot. You probably did not need me to tell you that.

Here is an old woman I met in the back streets of Bangkok. She was with her granddaughter and they were serving soup out of their garage / kitchen / home.

Here is another temple I found while getting lost on purpose through the steamy backroads of Bangkok.

Every now and then I would pass an area of Chinatown which smelled, well, kinda like this…

Here is my longboat captain flying under a bridge in back canals of Thailand at 50 knots. After I pass, the kids go diving wantonly into our wake.

This was certainly a rip-roaring ride and not for the faint of heart. We went off the main river in Bangkok and found ourselves deep into a series of canals surrounded by collapsing metallic homes and colorful happy kids. I didn’t get a chance to ask any of them if they had an XBox Live account. This longboat only cost a few US dollars to rent for a few hours, but you can’t put a price on seeing a variety of dead mammals and mutated pachyderms floating down the river beside you.

As I was strolling through this steamy complex of temples, I came across this one just as some stormy clouds were moving in.  Buddha was sitting up there acting all smarmy like he knew everything in his nirvana air-conditioned glassed cave.  I didn’t want enlightenment or anything so grandiose - just a tall cool glass of lemonade would have been fine.  But no, he just sat there.

I was blessed (do Buddhists “bless”?) in Thailand with good clouds for HDR pictures. In this one, there was one of those afternoon thunderstorms rolling in about 3 PM. However, the weather there is so hopelessly humid, that there is a fine line between regular humidity and torrential downpour.

After about ten minutes walking around Bangkok, I was covered in sweat and grime. Not the good kind of grime either - the Bangkok kind. I’m normally someone that doesn’t like to be covered in sweat, but you just kinda give up after a few minutes and decide to wallow in it. Even through the sweat, or perhaps because of it, a few locals there thought I was David Beckham, since it is well known that all white people look alike.

I also included a few other pictures from my time in Thailand where I got some good (and lucky) clouds coverage. The second one just happened to mirror the shape of Wat Arun beneath.

I don’t know if this picture can convey the stifling heat and the impending afternoon showers, but there was always a fine line between walking around Thailand and soaking in a hot tub. I took this while I was on a leased longboat that was captained by a man that appeared to have little concern for the value of his own life, much less mine.

This is the market not too far from the docks in Bangkok. It wasn’t the cleanest place in the world and could not be confused with the sterile aisles of Whole Foods in Austin, but it was still a charming place to experience new strains of Thai bacteria.

I was in the middle of roasting deep inside a Buddhist temple, in some sort of sweaty Bikram walking yoga, when I decided to stop and take this shot… It was just too perfectly composed with the clouds and everything for me to ignore. I had to make a dozen attempts because my sweaty fingers could not even push down the shutter button.

Thailand is a big exporter. They export corn, which the Indians call “maize”. In sum, Thailand is a nation of contrasts.