Southeast Asia Travel Journal

Okay, the title is a bit cliché, but what else could I call a story about Spice Roads’ Bangkok Jungle tour? This was one of those trips that I’ve been meaning to do for some time, so when I found out today’s trip was for charity, I thought the time was right.

For those that don’t know them, Spice Roads is one of Southeast Asia’s largest organizers of bicycle tours, and they’re based in Bangkok. Most of their trips are several days in length, allowing you to see some of the "real" Thailand (or Vietnam, or Cambodia, etc.) The quot;Bangkok Jungle" tour is one of their few half-day trips. More than that, the tour allows you to see a part of Bangkok that very few tourists ever see. For that matter, a lot of Bangkok residents don’t know about it.

The tour starts, somewhat incongruously, just out side the entrance to Bangkok’s port area. After a short briefing from the guides, we set off down a busy street. We only have to go a couple of blocks before we veer into a narrow alley which leads to a ferry dock on the Chaophraya River. Across the river is our real destination, an area of Bangkok called Bang Krajao. If you look at a satellite image of Bangkok, Bang Krajao is that green nob almost complete encircled by the Chaophraya River.

The bikes and the cyclists are loaded into a long-tailed boat for a short trip across the river. Then it’s back on the bikes for a tour through the "jungle". To be honest, it’s not really a jungle. "Farm" would be a better term. It seems that this is where most of the house plants of Bangkok are grown. You soon see that this entire area is fairly swampy, the residents of the area have formed the earth into long mounds surrounded by water. On these mounds they grow bananas, other fruits and an amazing array of colorful decorative plants sold in markets all around Bangkok.

After traveling down a small "country" road for a while, the guide turns the group off onto a narrow walkway. These walkways consist of concrete planks less than a meter wide elevated two meters or more above the swampy ground. These walkways criss-cross the entire area, and a good part of the tour is spent navigating them.

Not that we spend all the time on our bikes. The first stop, after about 20 minutes’ ride, is the weekend "floating" market at Ban Nampeung (which translates to "honey village"). The market is only open on Saturday and Sunday, so it’s only a stop on the tour on weekends. The market is next to Wat Nampeung Nai, right on a wide canal. Unlike the much more famous floating market way out in Damnoen Saduak, this market is definitely not for tourists. Aside from the half-dozen or so of us from the bike tour, the market is full of Thais. The stalls of the market are mostly selling food, either meals or snacks. There are traditional boats on the canal, but most of them are being rowed by young Thais who have rented the boats from a stall near the temple.

After we explore the market for a while, we set off again for a short ride to our next stop, a small incense factory. The factory is actually set in a traditional Thai house, and is a project to help improve life in the community by giving people another source of income.

The tour continues with us biking along the canal back to the river and on to another temple, where we stop to eat some snacks the guides have purchased while we were at the market. From there we cycle on a bit more until we reach Sri Nakorn Kuenkhan park, a large open space full of lakes and trees. We have another stop here, although some stay on their bikes to explore more of the park, and then from here it’s a short ride back to the pier on the river where we started.

The Bangkok Jungle tour is a delightfully different way to see a side of Bangkok most people don’t get to see. Even if you don’t want to get on your bike, I’d highly recommend a visit to the market at Ban Nampeung. You can get there by taxi on any weekend.

Posted by michael under Just back from...
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It occurred to me that perhaps I should start talking about travel technology in this journal. After all, I used to be a technology guru and I travel a lot. There was a time when just about the only technical gear I traveled with was my mobile phone, but these days, it seems I’m lugging around more and more equipment. It’s been almost 10 years now that a digital camera has been my constant travel companion. Maybe I’ll say more about those later, but for now I thought I’d discuss the latest addition, an Asus Eee PC.

For those of you that haven’t been keeping up, the Asus Eee is one of the more interesting new kids on the block. Not only is it small – the size of half a sheet of paper – it’s very light, and most important of all, it’s cheap. The early models (the 700 series), introduced last year, had a 7-inch screen; the small size owing largely to the placement of two large speakers on either side of the display. The latest models are the 900 series,which is what I purchased. These have a 9-inch screen in the same form factor, sans speakers. Not only is the screen bigger, it has a higher resolution, at 1024 by 600. The resolution was main reason I talked myself into waiting for this new model. The smaller screen would have been acceptable for writing, but I concluded that it wouldn’t be very good for web surfing – especially my own sites.

One of the reasons the Eee is so light, and cheap, is that there’s no disk drive. Instead, there’s 20 GB of solid state memory. This is the same type of chips used in flash memory cards and thumb drives. These days, 20 GB isn’t a lot of storage, but the truth is that you don’t really need that much in a laptop. At least I don’t. It’s not my primary computer. I use it mainly for writing notes and checking email when I’m on the road. The notes and other files I may need to create I can comfortably store on a thumb drive, since I’ll probably want to transfer them to my desktop sooner or later anyway.

One of the other things keeping the price down is the operating system, which isn’t Windows. You can get Windows on the Eee, if you’re willing to reduce the amount of memory, or pay more. The operating system is Linux, based on the Xandros variation. The advantage of Linux, aside from being free, is that it uses a lot less storage space than the bloated Windows OS. Of the 20 GB, only a mere 2 GB is used by the operating system and all the applications. It also boots very quickly. My Eee is usually up and running from a cold start within about 20 seconds.

Speaking of applications, the Eee comes loaded with everything you need to get things done on the road. For office work, there’s the full OpenOffice suite. It’s a rather old version (2.0.4) but it works just fine. The web browser is the Bon Echo variation of Firefox. There’s also the Thunderbird email client, PIM, instant messenger, and lots of other gizmos. To connect to the Internet, the Eee has both a built-in wi-fi adapter and a standard LAN port. The wi-fi supports the latest high-speed ‘g’ standard. It also has three USB ports and a SD memory card slot. Finally, the touchpad driver is set up to support two-finger operations. Those with iPhones know what this is. For the rest of you, this is a slick way of moving around the screen, especially when viewing pictures or images. By placing two fingers on the touchpad and moving them apart, you can zoom in on an image. Drawing the fingers together zooms out, and moving two fingers around pans the image.

Okay, so the specs are every little nerd’s wet dream, but can normal people use it? The short answer is: yes, definitely. The system boots into a full-screen menu system where each application is represented by a big icon, and applications are grouped into tabbed menus. To browse the web, click on the “Web” icon to bring up the web browser. There are even shortcuts to popular sites like Wikipedia, Google, etc. To write a document, click on the “Work” tab and then select the “Documents” icon. It isn’t your typical user interface, for Windows or Linux, but it will take you no more than a few seconds to figure it out. If you can’t, then put it back in the box, get your money back, and never look at another computer again, because you’re too stupid.

The main issue with extra-small notebooks is usually the keyboard. There’s a certain point at which keys become too small to hit with any accuracy. The Eee is perhaps right on the edge of what can work, but I’m adapting to it quite well (this entire post has been typed on my Eee while on a trip to Dubai), Granted, I’ve got rather dainty fingers for someone my size. If you’ve ten big sausages, you might want to give the keyboard a test drive before you decide.

The screen is crisp and clear. Function keys allow you to adjust the brightness, which can make it easier to read, and if you can live with a dimmer screen you can also extend the battery life. When you insert thumb drives or the like, the system will automatically mount them and ask if you want to browse the media using the file manager, photo viewer or music player. In a nod to Windows users, the drives are typically labeled using old DOS disk letters (D: for example).

So, is the Eee PC perfect? Well… no. The biggest overall drawback would have to be the battery life. With a notebook small enough and light enough to carry everywhere, you’d like to have enough power to last around eight hours or so. But the Eee can only last about two and a half hours or so before it needs to be plugged in.

Aside from that, my only other complaints have to do with the operating system. Asus has provided only a very limited version of Linux, and has limited the number of applications that can be installed easily. That’s understandable, since the amount of storage is limited, and the target market for the original versions of the Eee was the younger crowd. The fewer applications you make available, the less trouble they can get into. But the 900 series is quite suitable as a general purpose travel computer, and I’d like to install a few more applications, like a web editor, but that’s proving difficult.

A related, and perhaps more important issue, is with updates. Most Linux distributions that I work with, like Ubuntu and Fedora, are constantly being updated. Even with a mature release, there are usually two or three updates a week. Not with the Eee. There are rarely any updates, and as I already mentioned, the versions included with the OS are quite old. The OpenOffice version is about two years old, and cannot read newer file formats like MS Office 2007. The Firefox is version 2, which is scheduled for end of life at the end of this year. I’m wondering how much effort Asus is putting into supporting their own Linux distribution.

Aside from the battery issue, all the other points above are relatively minor. In the end, the Eee does what I need it to do, and does it very well, all in a package I can comfortably carry with me where-ever I go.

Posted by michael under First Impressions , Travel Tech
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Makassar’s Hasanuddin Airport has a shiny new terminal building. The new terminal has six gates with sky bridges. There was a bit of a rush to get it open about two weeks ago, so there are still lots of finishing touches to be done, like airline lounges, shops and restaurants. The new terminal is part of an ambitious plan to develop Makassar into a major tourist destination. Next year should see the opening of a new theme park as well. I’ll keep you posted.

Posted by michael under Guide Updates , First Impressions
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