white clouds flying: Bangkok with Ben

Flying.

I flew from New Zealand to Australia and then right across the whole of Australia.

Unbelievable.

The coastal cliffs and sprawling city of Sydney quickly gave way to rolling green hills, to a swath of flat brown farmland and then, then...

Then hours and hours and hours of ecru, ochre, orange, and red scrublands, huge endless empty dry drainage systems, outlined with small intermittent scrubby bushes, cutting across an inconceivably vast barren land. Looking down it seemed incomprehensibly inhospitable, alien, and enormous, the very occasional dirt roads or short sloughs of beige water going nowhere, the land so red at times it was crimson. Real life abstract modern art patterns painted with a palette of warm and neutral colours on a flat canvass measuring thousands of kilometers in every direction. Amazing.

Eventually we fly over the mines at Burrundie, over Darwin, and out across the Timor Sea.

And then across Indonesia, the countless thousands of Islands spotting the Banda Sea, Molucca Sea, Celebes Sea, and finally the South China sea. I wanted to write about the green of these islands, of their white beaches, the turquoise water surrounding them, the blue of the ocean, and how these colours and textures contrasted so greatly with the Australian outback but actually the second part of the trip was pretty cloudy so I didn’t see that much.

It was like this for hours!

Bangkok with Ben.

I did the aforementioned flight in order to get to Bangkok to hang out with my oldest son, Ben. I don't think I've ever done a week away with just him before. It turns out we're excellent travel partners.

Eschewing the regular tourist traps we almost take the wrong river boat by mistake (180 baht for just a few stops) but manage to get the locals’ one instead (15 baht for miles and miles) and we travel it far enough that the locals ask to take selfies with us! We end up at an endless market where we sample durian fruit (delicious but so smelly it's banned from public busses) and bbq’d meat on a stick (yummy pork slivers, and something that might have been chicken and tofu balls, and another one that was even more indecipherable, maybe goat tongue?).

One day our goal is to get to the top of a modern skyscraper that intrigues both of us. We fail in that quest but happen across a Hindu Temple, climb to the 9th floor of an apartment building and swim in the infinity pool we find there (yes, in a white bra and knickers, again, will I never learn), and go out to a Thai movie.

The next day our quest is to find a bar like the one we saw in the movie. We eat street food till we're bursting; small spicy omelettes, sticky coconut rice baked in banana leaves, roasted sugared pineapple, and more skewers of unidentifiable meats. We briefly consider battling the busfulls of Chinese tourists swarming the imperial palace, because we're sure it's fantastic, but choose instead to test the things on offer at 7 Eleven, like small pots of coconut milk floating with black beans and seaweed jelly, and then get lost in Chinatown, go out to lunch somewhere where no English is spoken, and end up with seafood soup that was not at all what we thought we'd ordered but incredibly interesting and so cheap it's practically free.

And it is, for both of us, another perfect day.