These Pictures are Intended to Make You Jealous

These were all taken yesterday at Ang Thong National Marine Park, off the coast of Koh Samui in southern Thailand. Ang Thong is a collection of about 40 islands. We took a boat trip out there, and had a spectacular day kayaking, hiking, and swimming. See the rope that drops over the edge of a cliff in the last two photos? The climb to the viewpoint covered a distance of 500 meters and an elevation of 240 meters. If you're quick with the math, you'll know that averages about a 45-degree angle for the climb. This is one of those places that doesn't disappoint from photographs. It's a must-see.

Today we're heading off to Khao Sok National Park to check out an ancient rainforest, and then we'll be working our way down the Andaman Coast for awhile. We'll be posting more pictures soon!

Images of Our Beach

We managed to find an affordable wireless connection, so today we bring you pictures of what we've come to call "our beach." It certainly feels like ours. It seems our primary neighbors are frogs and neighborhood dogs.

Ao Thong Nai Pan Yai

Our Bungalow

Here we present two things we can see from our lounge chairs: the pool and the beach.

We'll be moving on later this week. We'll head over to the other side of the south of Thailand to check out formations and beaches along the Andaman Coast. Then, it's off to Laos. Our tickets have been purchased and we'll be heading north on November 12.

Thong Nai Pan Yai, or Welcome to Paradise

We have found our tropical paradise and we plan to stay awhile. Thong Nai Pan Yai on Koh Pha Ngan is the beach destination we've been looking for. Bungalows are cheap and right on the beach, local restaurants boast spectacular curries, and there are very few other travelers to share the beach with. We've been spending our days lounging by the pool, playing paddle ball on the beach, swimming in the warm turquoise water, and enjoying wonderful meals. Unfortunately internet access is very expensive here, so we won't be posting pictures for awhile. You can just picture us having a long, beautiful beach to ourselves, and you'll get the idea. While we're here, we hope to participate in the following activities (aside from all that lounging mentioned above): kayak rental, elephant trekking, snorkeling day trip, and day trip to Ang Thong Marine Park, which is a group of several uninhabited islands with great swimming, snorkeling, and hiking.

In a week or two we plan to slowly make our way to northern Laos. Any recommendations for places to stay, things to do, or things to eat in Laos would be much appreciated! Sorry the blog posts are few and far between these days.

Goodbye, Bangkok!

Tomorrow we're leaving Bangkok in search of white sand, turquoise water, and hammocks. We'll be taking the overnight bus and ferry to Ko Pha Ngan. As we prepare to leave, it seems like a good time to share some photos of the neighborhood we've been living in for the past month.

Victory Monument, our local phallic landmark. Every city needs one!

Colorful peppers and tomatoes? Nope! These are look choop, a traditional Thai dessert made out of mung bean paste shaped and colored to look like tiny, shiny vegetables.

Ronald McDonald wais to his customers. On the menu at this McDonalds are three kinds of pie: pineapple, taro, and corn.

Bunnies in dresses. Amazing.

Blog posts may become less frequent over the next couple of weeks. We hear that internet access is expensive on the island, and we're not sure we'll have the ability to upload pictures, but we'll do our best to keep you up to date. In the meantime, you can practice the art of molding mung bean paste to look like vegetables.

TYCGF10B: Fresh-Squeezed Tangerine Juice

This is probably my favorite thing you can get for 10 baht. I've been loving it since Day 1 in Thailand. It's made from these here greenish tangerines:


I bought some of these tangerines at the store, thinking I could harness their juicy power for myself. I found them dry, full of seeds, and just not that good. I'm not sure how they produce such excellent juice, but I will happily continue paying 10 baht for it.

Poll Results: Elephantploitation

First off, we'd like to thank everyone for the overwhelming response to our poll. Here are the results:

Did you find the Elephantploitation post inappropriate?

16% - Yes, slavery is not a joking matter.
25% - Yes, elephants have real problems and poking fun at them serves no one
8% - Yes, the post had nothing to do with travel or Ian and Tiara
8% - Yes, it wasn't funny
41% - I'm just here for the pictures.

In a surprising turn, the overwhelming majority of you (59%) found the Elephantploitation post inappropriate. Based on your feedback, we immediately sacked the post's author (Ian McDowell) and removed him from the Farang payroll. Unfortunately, in the ensuing staff shortage we were forced to hire him back on as a consultant at double the salary. We can but hope he has learned his lesson.

It's also worth noting that fully 41% of respondents indicated that they visit the Farang site solely for the pictures. While we're unable at this time to increase the rate at which we add pictures to the site, we have taken this opportunity to run an explanatory article on the techno-wizardry that goes into bringing you each majestic image. Please enjoy our featurette: Behind The Scenes: Adding a picture to the Farang Blog

Behind The Scenes: Adding a picture to the Farang Blog

One of the most common requests we receive here at Farang HQ is to show more pictures on the blog. While we'd love to add more pictures, each picture we post requires an intense effort from a cross-functional, cross-species team. In this post we take you behind the scenes and show you how the magic happens.

Step 1: Our dedicated photographers snap a Polaroid of the subject.

The first step, and also the easiest, is for one of our dedicated teams of research photographers to take a Polaroid picture of the object or scene we'd like to post to our blog.

Step 2: Selection

A design professional reviews each Polaroid and typically selects one to four of the least offensive images for use in each blog post. The hundreds of rejected Polaroids are disposed of in a chemical bonfire, in a manner befitting their status as abominations.

Step 3: Enlargement


The surviving Polaroids are taken to Kinkos, where they are enlarged by a factor of 25 and printed onto high quality glossy photo paper. The resulting 14 1/2' X 10 1/2' image is then cut into six hundred and twenty five 5"X7" rectangles.

Step 4: Training


The stack of enlarged photo-segments are delivered to our elephant workshop, located in Malaysia's Penang free trade zone. Each 5"x7" rectangle is shopped out to an individual elephant sub-contractor, who is then trained to reproduce the image using traditional paints. On average it takes the elephants 15-35 canvases to produce a satisfactory facsimile, though in some cases it can take upwards of 100 attempts.

Step 5: Transferring to the Computer

Once the elephants are sufficiently skilled at reproducing their section of the image, the canvas is replaced with a Wacom Intuos tablet, which translates the elephant's brush strokes into their digital representations.

Step 6: Reassembly

Proprietary software uses edge-matching detection to reassemble the 625 separate images into a cohesive whole. The accuracy of the software is about 95%, meaning some hand-tuning is required before the image is complete.

Step 7: Upload to Blogger and Post


The completed image is uploaded to the server and posted to the blog, for the enjoyment of our viewing public.

Park Day

We went back to Lumphini Park yesterday for a picnic. This park is right in the middle of the business district, but it is really expansive and offers a great retreat from the traffic and noise.


While having lunch, we made friends with this monitor lizard:


Check out his tongue:

We love this statue:

It has more movement than any statue of an obese figure I've ever seen. The roundness reminds me of Leger's paintings.

TYCGF10B: Coconut Dough Balls

The latest entry in our "Things You Can Get For 10 Baht" series are these strange coconut dough ball things. They're cooked by pouring batter into a pan with a bunch of hemispherical indentations - the separate halves are scooped out and pressed together to make a ball. Behold:

Chewy on the outside, doughy on the inside, these little balls taste sugary, coconutty, and, mysteriously, green-oniony.

User poll: Elephantploitation

In an effort to better serve our readers, we're conducting a poll on what you thought of the 'Elephantploitation' post. To vote, simply choose an option from the poll on the top right of the main page, and click 'Vote.'

Those of you reading by RSS may have to visit the actual blog for this one.

Thanks for your feedback!

Sincerely,
Ian and the Farang team.

here for results>

Elephantploitation

If you haven't been following along with us since the first thrilling minute, you may have missed our insightful commentary on the elephant suffrage movement. Reception of the piece was universally positive, and thanks to your letters several members of the US house of representatives have contacted me asking what America can do. To further the case, I took the opportunity to interview Guntur "Bobo" Simanjuntak about the plight of the Thai elephants.

Ian: Hello Bobo, thank you for taking the time to talk with us today.
Bobo: It's a pleasure Ian. Also, I'd prefer it if you didn't use my slave name.
Ian: Your "slave name"?
Bobo: 'Bobo' is the name used by my captors and oppressors. Please, call me Guntar.
Ian: I'm so sorry Gunta-
Bobo: It means 'Thunder'
Ian: Right, got it. Thunder. Cool name. Anyhow-
Bobo: Don't you have like an assistant or someone who checks these things for you?
Ian: My regular guy is out sick, sometimes it's hard for the temps to get up to speed. Anyhow, can we just get on with this interview?
Bobo: Look, I'm just saying, that wasn't exactly a little slip. Calling me by my slave name, that's really not a good way to start an interview.
Ian: You heard me say I was sorry. Not everyone is familiar with the plight of the elephant. That's what I'm trying to solve here.
Bobo: Exactly. That's exactly it. No one gives a damn about us elephants, just kids and zookeepers. We suffer silently until it's a slow news day. Then some honkey reporter waltzes in calling us by our slave names and talking about how ignorant he is, in some kind of vain attempt to boost ratings by half a point.
Ian: Now listen, I'm just trying to conduct an interview here Bobo- I mean, Guntar- aw crap.
Bobo: <rears head angrily, grabs Ian's arm and starts pulling it towards mouth>
Ian: This interview is over.
Ian: Alright people, that's a wrap, let's get out of here. Can someone hit this elephant with a taser or something?

:)

Awesome. Baby elephant has a mad case of weepy red eye, but this was really fun. I'm sure Ian will be telling you all how this is elephant exploitation, but...just look at him...don't you want to feed him? Ian does have a bone to pick with baby elephant, though: his arm got slimed by that trunk.

While on our "find and feed baby elephant" mission this evening, we stopped for dinner at this restaurant in Little Arabia:

Talk about opulence.

Khao Takiab

We went on a little vacation to the beach Monday-Wednesday. Khao Takiab is a beach just south of the Hua Hin beach resort area, which is about two and a half hours from Bangkok. We took a little minivan down there (conveniently leaving from a mall about two blocks from our apartment), found a place to stay, and laid around on the beach for a couple of days. As you can see, it was pretty rough:

Hanging out on Khao Takiab beach on Tuesday.

We had been on the wrong beach, Hua Hin, the day before, and found it to be a little too full of trash for our liking. Khao Takiab was perfect: a long stretch of white sand, warm water, fruit shakes, and these beach chairs, which we rented for less than $3 combined for the whole day.

Beachfront cafe.

This was a good place for a beer, sunset, and dinner. We were actually disappointed with our meal here, but dining + feet in sand = good times.

Monkey mountain.

This hill separates Hua Hin beach from Khao Takiab (this picture is of the Hua Hin side). There was a temple up here with lots of macaques, and this Buddha:


We stayed at the Benchana Guesthouse, and our room had this amazing gold bed. I think Elvis may have had a bed like this. The ladies at the guesthouse were unbelievably nice, and gave us hugs goodbye when we left. Our room was large and clean but very cheap, so we feel we must post many great reviews about this place and the nice ladies who run it.

Our little vacation from our longer vacation was excellent, and now we're trying to figure out if we can head south toward the beaches earlier than we had intended.

Sugary grease-bread, another thing you can get for 10 baht

Tiara spotted someone serving a naan-like substance on the street today. We both enjoy good flatbread, so we picked one up:
You can see in the picture that it's a little goopier than your standard naan. That's because the vendor doused the sucker in condensed milk then smothered it in sugar before handing it to us. So much for our savory flatbread.

Here you can see the grease soaking through the paper it was wrapped in. The net effect was like a churro minus cinnamon. Not bad, but it's no banana roti.

Boating on the Chao Phraya

We boated up the Chao Phraya the other day. There are many boat drivers happy to charge tourists exorbitant fees for the pleasure of their company, but the city-run boats cost a cool 15 baht. Here's the one that we rode on:
As you can see, it's a roomy boat with seating for 60 or so. Strictly speaking they're intended as buses, but they go on the same river as the site-seeing boats. The sites themselves were certainly mixed. Here's a picture of something that looks kind of like a Wat:
And here's a picture of something that looks kind of like a shanty-town:
The ride was a little harrowing due to the bus-boat's frequent need to cross the lanes of traffic on the river, necessitated by the stops occurring on both banks with equal regularity. On some stretches the river was packed with other boats, some of which were speeding recklessly.

This last picture is for those of you who haven't had the joy of experiencing monsoon rains. Here's a shot off the side of the boat from when the clouds opened up. We get rain like this for about an hour every few days.

I'm Making an Impression on the Locals

Decidedly Durian

We finally tried it:


We're not sure if they're engineering odorless durians or what, but it really wasn't as bad as we'd been told. I can imagine that a rotten one wouldn't smell too good, but our little piece wasn't pungent at all. It tasted fine. There was nothing offensive about it, and nothing great either. Ian thinks it tasted like a sweet avocado. The aftertaste, however, wasn't so charming. Also, we're not sure why, but when we look back on eating the durian we feel really sick. So, there will probably be no more durian for us, but at least we can say we tried it.

Baby Elephant Sighting!!!

I just had my first encounter with an elephant. A baby elephant. Sure, I've seen elephants at the zoo, but this was my first "here I am crossing the street, checking out the crowd, and oh my god that's a baby elephant right next to me" kind of encounter. I had to stop and stare. It had a baby elephant face, baby elephant feet, and, most wonderfully, baby elephant fuzz. Ohhh, baby elephant fuzz. What could be cuter?

I don't know why I said no to the lady who was selling elephant food. It's my natural response now - to say no to anyone soliciting anything, particularly to tuk-tuk drivers. But, oh my, I need to go back to the "Little Arabia" neighborhood where we just were and feed that elephant as soon as possible. I know it's all for the tourists, but I can't explain this awed, obsessed feeling I currently have about the elephant. I think I need one. Christmas gift?

Wat Arun

We went here yesterday:

Wat Arun (Temple of the Dawn). An iconic image of Bangkok.


Stairs ascending the main tower.

And descending.


View of Wat Pho from across the river.

The wat was, of course, gorgeous. I am looking forward to heading down to the river at night sometime to see it illuminated.