Last scribblings from Thailand

We did a big tour, my last motorcycle trip of the season, last week. We had intended to drive over to one of my favorite areas, Lake Phayao, stay a night or two, and return. But the weather was so fine and the scenery so beautiful we decided instead to go on up to Chiang Rai. Plus, I wanted to map as much new territory as I could. We have a new friend, Daniel, a recently minted expat from Maine who has taken up residence in Chiang Mai. We met last year through our mutual friend Albert and corresponded over the intervening months about living in Thailand. Danny has made a firm commitment to living here already. Like many expats, he can afford to retire and live better here than he can in the U.S. on his retirement income. Anyway, he was able to get an apartment in our little residence and since then we've become very compatible neighbors. He recently bought a 150cc Honda PCX and readily accepted an invite to go on tour with us.

On the way to Phayao - Tantong Waterfall on Route 120
(N19.06982667, E99.72897833)

After a wonderful cruise we reached Phayao, checked in to a nice hotel and took a quick ride around the lake as sunset was coming on. It's always a lovely ride and this one was no exception. We spotted an old Thai who was harvesting seaweed. We had a chat with him via Nut, our interpreter, and learned that he owns a fish farm and uses the seaweed to feed his fish, which are almost ready for market.

Fisherman - Lake Phayao

Seaweed harvester - Lake Phayao

Sunset at fish farm

The historic Kwan Phayao Stupa House in Phayao is being refurbished

Next morning at Nut's urging we visited a temple in Phayao city, Wat Sri Khom Kham (N19.17672000, E99.88981167), that turned out to be very special. I've driven by this one many times but always on the way to somewhere else. Thailand must have 10,000 wats scattered throughout the country and after a while one just stops noticing them. (Correction: Actually, there are more than 40,000 wats in Thailand. See this Wikipdia article.)

Reclining Buddha

Enclosed in a walled garden near the temple itself is a collection of statues unlike any I had ever seen before. Nut told us these were meant to remind people that if you do bad things in this life, you will suffer bad things in your next life. Whatever, much of the statuary was fantastical, grotesque.

 

Tormented souls

We found a new to us cafe near our hotel where they make a delicious latte and decorated it in exquisite style. Aptly named The Coffee, it's located on the corner of Chaykwan and Thakwan Roads.

Latte from "The Coffee"

 We made an excursion to a couple of parks north of Phayao that afternoon before heading to Chiang Rai. Mae Puem N.P. and its nearly empty reservoir are shown below.

The Mae Puem Reservoir at low ebb - in need of a refill from the April rains

We took the long way to Chiang Rai going northeast to the Phu Sang Waterfall almost at the Loatian border before turning west. This waterfall, a popular tourist spot for Thais, runs hot at about 35 deg C (95 degrees F) which is why I wanted to see it. It was beautiful but crowded so we ate a quick lunch across the road and took off.

Phu Sang Waterfall (N19.66353 E100.37622)

We spent two nights in Chiang Rai. The intervening day was taken up with a trip to the Golden Triangle. Nut and I had been there earlier this season but Danny hadn't, so off we went. This is the point, actually in the middle of the Mekong River, where Myanmar (Burma), Thailand and Laos meet, which is famous because it was a major drug trafficking center years ago (for all I know it still is).

Chang (aka: Dave) and Chang at the Golden Triangle
(N20.35320 E100.08259)

We drove back to Chiang Mai the next day. The heat in the afternoons is getting intense as summer closes in. Riding in full motorcycling regalia in that heat gets uncomfortable so we doused our clothing with water several times on the way home. The "coolth" lasts about 20-30 minutes and for that time driving at 50 mph is quite refreshing. One of our favorite stopping places along Route 118 overlooks a small river. Danny and I waded in and flopped in the cool water.

Getting cool on the way to Chiang Mai
(N18.96639 E99.24110)

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Even though mapping bores most of my friends to tears, it is still the thing that gets me out of the house and keeps my mind from straying too much to the heart surgery. And I'll continue with it until I leave Thailand. We've had a run of beautiful weather for the past few weeks — cool and often cloudy and not at all typical for this time of year — positively fantastic motorcycling. Tomorrow morning I'll stick the GPS in its mount, make sure my camera battery is fully charged, and off I'll go, exploring, and mapping. The rural countryside surrounding Chiang Mai is truly lovely. Again and again I'm reminded of rides in the country around Buffalo we used to do when I was a teenager. Being a city boy, I always loved being out in farm country with the smell of new cut alfalfa coming in the open windows of my dad's old '55 Ford Victoria. Oddly enough, these trips remind me of those days.

I've written two posts about mapping and they have widely different numbers of page views (hits). Blogger, a Google product that I am using for this blog, makes it easy to track various statistics. My last post, on Feb 12th, about a Mapping Run to Lamphun, has only been viewed about 50 times. The first one, Mapmaking 101, which talks about the Homer area among other things, has had 320 hits to date (posted Dec 12).

I've almost finished my Homer area mapping projects. The two main focal points were downtown and the end of East End Road although I hit almost every road in the Homer-Diamond Ridge area. Using the Bing imagery I've got pretty much everything straightened around and with the help of Tiger data and my memory, most of the roads named. You can see an overview using the two links below. You may zoom in and out using your mouse wheel or by using the "+" or "-" on the dashboard at the right.

Homer downtown

East End Road terminus

To continue in that vein for a moment: some of my other scribblings have been fairly widely read. It's gratifying to know that people are reading what I write. The posts about Africa top the popularity chart with, at this point, about 3600 hits each for the Zambezi rafting and the Ngorongoro Serengeti screeds.

Ranking below those, one about Phnom Penh and carrying pictures of some beautiful bar girls has had almost 2000 hits (Feb 2010), while one I did in October of 2010 after returning to Thailand and Nut has surprisingly garnered 1000 hits.  And this one, about my visit to Bilbao in 2009, has had 1200 hits. I cannot for the life of me understand that one.

Other popular posts include: one about Vespas, with 950 hits, Dirtfish Rally School, with about 830, and two about the CBR250 , Maiden Voyage and Riding the Honda CBR250, each have about 850 hits.

One drawback to having a blog that is more widely read is the spam it attracts. I had to start moderating comments because I'm getting 3 or 4 every day that are designed to get my readers to visit commercial sites. So if you want to leave a comment you'll have to wait for me to approve it before you see it on the screen.

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It's getting close to the time when I'll be leaving Thailand for the summer. This year is different though because of what awaits me back in the states. I'm scheduled for aortic valve replacement (AVR) surgery on April 23rd and it's finally getting to me. Everything is in place, the paperwork transmitted to the Cleveland Clinic, and I have a very experienced surgeon who has offered  "minimally invasive AVR" instead of the standard operation that involves splitting the chest completely. He does about 120 of these operations a year so I reckon I will be in good hands during the ordeal. Still, it's daunting to say the least, especially for one who has never seen the inside of an O.R. except on TV.

Friends are telling me to look on the bright side, to think ahead to the time when I'll have improved endurance, to be thankful that my condition can be solved by modern medical science. I have done that for the most part. Wasn't it just the other day that I was writing about how good my life felt, how happy and content I was? Things are looking decidedly bleaker now that the operation is only a few weeks off. I'm surely gonna miss my easy life over here.

A mapping run to Lamphun

Lamphun isn't a city people generally think of when you're talking tourism hot spots in Thailand. It's a small city situated on the Wang River about 30 miles south of Chiang Mai as the crow flies. Neither of us had ever been there before except on the way to somewhere else.

For me the main attraction was mapping. I had never driven on any of the roads alongside the Ping River south of Chiang Mai and I was curious about them. A riverside is always an interesting place to see and drive with a motorcycle and besides I wanted to do some mapping of attractions, street names, and other Points of Interest, (POIs). So I asked Nut if she'd be interested in a little moto trip. We've not been doing much of any traveling lately so she was definitely into it. We grabbed some stuff: our cameras, my new Garmin Montana GPS, a backup paper map, and after I'd picked an arbitrary destination, a coffee shop in Lamphun, from the current version of the OSM map, off we went.

Disclaimer: I've noticed several friends' eyes glazing over when I tried to interest them in my mapping activities so if you're one of those, you might as well stop reading right now ;-)  Mapping has me firmly in its clutches!

It was a beautiful day and the ride was lovely. When I'm going mapping I use the GPS to record my track and take a camera along to photograph interesting data. (see Mapmaking 101 in this blog for more about GPS tracks and the Open Street Map project). I used to make notes on paper as I went but it was hard to keep track of where I was when I wrote the note and correlating which photo went with the note. A better method I recently turned to uses geolocated images. It's much more accurate and allows me to postpone any writing or data recording until later when I'm back at my desk.

Basically, this method uses a computer program to synchronize the GPS track from the trip with the time stamp in a given photograph to accurately position the photo on a map. All modern digital cameras record a host of data and stash it in every photograph: such things as exposure time, metering mode, focal length, ISO setting, camera name and model, and much, much more, are stored in the EXIF area inside the JPG image file. (Wikipedia: EXIF) This EXIF area can also include the latitude and longitude of the photo if your camera happens to be equipped with an internal GPS, which many are. Seeing as my stand-alone GPS is much more accurate than the present crop of GPS/camera combos and neither of my cameras have an internal GPS, I use this method.

It involves a nifty piece of free software called GeoSetter. GeoSetter reads your GPS track, loads the photos that were taken while recording that track, and then displays the photos geo-graphically located with high precision on a background map of your choice. Here's a screen shot of a map run I made a while ago in my neighborhood. You'll have to double-click to open the full size image in order to follow the discussion.

GeoSetter screenshot with selected photo in viewer and on Google Map

Here you see my GPS track in blue and a bunch of pushpins that represent the photos I took along the route. This particular photo is of a street sign displaying the street name in Thai and English that I will later place on the OSM map. I'm sitting at the corner of Srilanna Road and this small adjoining lane, Srilanna 4. The other blue markers show that I stopped at several more intersections where I took photos and recorded street names.

If you look carefully at the map in the photo you can see that the street name on the Google Map is incorrect. The road joining Srilanna Road from the left is indeed Chotana 12 but on an earlier mapping run I discovered that its name changes to Srilanna Road at the intersection indicated by the arrowhead. That's why I claimed OSM maps are often more accurate than Google Maps. The OSM mappers typically live in the area and as a result know much more about it than Google's teams of drive-by photographers and mappers can garner in a quick visit. What Google's accomplished is amazing nonetheless. They actually have Streetview imagery for much of Chiang Mai (population 1.5 million) and the huge urban jungle that is Bangkok (20 million)! I wonder what Google had to spend to get this data?

You even can see our apartment house in this map link. Drag the little yellow "pegman" onto Siriton Road and find the "Friendly House" sign at the far western end. Amazing, no?

By the way, OSM mappers are not allowed to use actual data from Google Earth or Google Maps. It's strictly protected by copyright. In the photo I'm using Google Maps as a background reference to make a point but all street names, POIs and any other data we include in OSM must be obtained legally, i.e., manually. That's one reason, aside from the fun of it, that I do these on-the-ground mapping runs.

Once I reach the geolocating stage it's merely a matter of transferring the information from the photos to the OSM. Oh, and getting the Thai name into it (in Thai script) as well. That's tricky for me but with Nut's help, doable. Somehow, the OSM project obtained permission from Microsoft to use their Bing maps as a background for their map editing interface and using that imagery we can draw ways and buildings, etc. The same copyright restriction is in place regarding names of things but roads and lanes can be more or less traced onto the map using the Bing imagery. The names, route numbers, traffic controls, etc., can then be researched and added at a later time.

Anyway, let's get back to our drive along the west side of the Mae Nam Ping. I took photos of street signs, we visited a colorful wat, or temple, of which there must be thousands in Thailand, and finally we got to Lamphun. I discovered that the highway we'd been driving and which had no special status in OSM parlance except "residential road" when I first checked it was in fact a nice two-lane designated highway, Chiang Mai Route 4032. I photographed mile-marker posts along the entire length of the highway and have updated the OSM map accordingly.

Detail: Wat Wang Sing Kham (N18.70289 E98.98351)

Shelters, like these at Wat Wang Sing Kham, are mapped as POIs

We drove directly through the city to what turned out to be a very pleasant little coffee shop right on the riverside. Different river but with similar scenery. The shop served food as well and because it was a convenient time for lunch, we ordered several items and sat in the shade nursing iced lattes while our order was prepared. The food was terrific!! The Add Up Coffee Bar is a real find (N18.57537 E99.00924). Great food, fine coffee, a perfect setting. And because it's far from the popular tourist centers, cheap even by Thailand standards.

There was a big wat nearby that had a gleaming gold chedi. Nut likes to visit the various temples we see from time to time and they're always interesting to me too if only for oogling the magnificent decorations covering every surface, so we made a stop there after lunch. This chedi had apparently just been recovered with gold leaf (gold paint?) and it shone brightly in the sunlight.

Wat Phra That Hariphunchai

Nut spotted a woman weaving saffron-colored cloth for use in the temple. She donated 20 baht to get a short session on the loom.

Because I was interested in putting interesting places as well as roads on the map, we stopped at a botanical garden on the return trip. The privately owned and extravagant Baan Phor Lian Meun Thai Medicinal Plants Garden is a work in progress. Nut spoke with a gal we saw there and she said construction has been on going for 8 years. There are many fountains, large ponds, and beautiful red stone buildings scattered about. It will be quite an attraction when finished. (View in Google Earth at N18.60566 E98.97757)

This ended our little mapping run. I hope someone using the OSM in the future enjoys these gardens as much as we enjoyed the Add Up Coffee Bar. The days are getting warmer now as spring closes in so we turned north for home before the heat of mid afternoon got too intense.

A Life in Chiang Mai

View from the kitchen window

I've been trying to sit down to write something in here for weeks but I just can't seem to pull myself away from the maps, the maps. I'm delving deeper and deeper into it as I learn more about the Open Street Map project (OSM) and my own level of expertise increases. Mapping the world is no small chore and there are literally countless web sites, software programs, wikis, blogs, and other source materials dedicated to map editing, routing, error detection, database interrogation, etc., using the OSM data. Add to that the major distraction of the Australian Open on TV and assorted friends  from Homer who have been visiting Chiang Mai practically non-stop since about mid November and you can begin to understand why I've felt so busy these last few weeks. I've read about people who lose their will to live after retirement. Who are these people, I wonder, and what's wrong with them?

I've tried to come up with a theme for this post, something compelling enough to motivate me to write and I keep coming up with the fact that I'm incredibly happy and satisfied, perhaps more so then at any other time of my life. I wake up early every morning with a feeling of utter contentment. Despite that feeling, or maybe because of it, I can hardly wait to jump out of bed to begin the day, whether it's to play tennis or make a mapping expedition or take a ride in the country.  Life in Thailand is deeply satisfying on so many levels. I have a crew of tennis junkies to hang out with that provide enough recreation to keep me active and somewhat fit, a few consuming and satisfying pastimes including motorcycling in the hills hereabouts, and a wonderful woman to share things with. After a hot November, the winter weather settled into an almost perfect idyll of cool mornings, blue skies and temperatures that barely reach 80 in the afternoons. Damn near perfect.

We've done some motorcycling up north, visited some picturesque spots, entertained some good friends, eaten a slew of wonderful Thai meals but I'm tired of writing about that sort of thing. This blog stared out as a travel blog. However, now that I've all but stopped traveling, what's there to write about? I've settled into a pleasant life over here, with a home and a satisfying relationship — I have no desire to go anywhere else for the time being.

I reckon part of that contentment stems from the fact that I quit drinking again back in June. Those of you who have known me for a while also know how much I love my beer (and wine and scotch) and that I've quit (and started) drinking several times over the years. I love the feeling of an alcohol high, the pleasant buzz, the lowering of inhibitions, the elimination of anxiety. But for me those qualities are what makes alcohol so addictive and what makes it difficult to manage my consumption.  I've never had a drink in an evening and been satisfied with just one. I've actually noticed half-full bottles of wine in people's refrigerators from time to time. Imagine that. Saving wine for another day. Not me. If it's open I finish it. After a while I got tired of being a slave to the addiction and quit.

It's easy to avoid alcohol when you're happy and freshly committed to being alcohol free but it's also easy to backslide, especially when most of your friends drink. When I learned about my heart situation last August I immediately did some reading on the subject and two of the things the writers, cardiac doctors, harped on were these simple directives: "If you drink, quit. If you smoke, quit." Check — I quit drinking last month. Check — I quit smoking in Africa two years ago. (Yes, I temporarily slid back to that horrible habit as well.) Frank Sinatra, a notorious drinker, reputedly said, "I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning that's the best they're gonna feel all day." I can recall many mornings during the past few years, I call them lost mornings, when I experienced the truth of that statement. Blech. I love waking up clear-headed and full of energy right from the get go; it's an infinitely better way to begin the day.

Then there's being in Thailand.  What is it about Thailand that exerts such a draw on me? This is neither my country nor my state and is certainly not my ancestral home. But I do feel at home here. I've written previously about the super friendly Thai people, the mom & pop stores and food shops that you find in every neighborhood and along every roadside, the delicious Thai food, the world class motorcycling. The amount one can buy here with an American dollar is a huge factor. I can live well on my retirement income, unlike in Alaska, or indeed most of America.

And then there's Nut.
She makes my life here enjoyable, and easy, as I've often noted. She also makes it possible for me to feel very relaxed in a country whose language I still cannot speak. She's where my real Thailand home is.

My BTGF

Nut is a woman who's caught in the middle of a period of great social change in Thailand, although I don't think she's really aware of it. She's a traditional Thai woman in that she values family, duty and acceptance above all. Her needs are few and uncomplicated. She wants a comfortable life with a man she loves and who can care for her in return by providing both emotional and financial support in her later years.

Even though she's reached middle age and at age 49 considers herself over-the-hill, a concept I am understandably forced to downplay, she's modern enough to scoff at some of the old ways. Since we got together she has essentially dedicated her life to, as she puts it, taking care of me. I read somewhere that one of the things that is so attractive about Thai women is that they have a way of empowering their men. I can certainly say that I am treated very well and feel as though there's nothing Nut would rather be doing than being with me and doing things for me. Of course, the feeling is mutual. Except that in my case I'm not allowed to contribute to the housework or the cooking. My contribution is companionship — in a shared life and shared experiences — and taking care of the rent. And occasionally playing the straight man in our humorous banter.

While she treats me like a king in some respects you would be dead wrong if you were to think Nut submissive or having no sense of self. She's feisty, outspoken, and quick to anger if crossed. She knows herself very well and isn't afraid to speak her mind. She jokes about how she runs things around here, calls herself "the boss" during our playful verbal jousting. Funny thing though, I sometimes think she is.

Many people have written about the Thai-farang relationship and what it means. Many callously describe a Thai woman in such a relationship as a gold digger, an opportunist. Not that these sorts of women don't exist or that certain Thai women wouldn't take advantage of an older farang with financial resources given the chance. Many of those situations arise when a fellow falls in love with a bar girl, a woman who has been working men for profit already. To make generalizations about the entire population of Thai women from these exceptions is both foolish and wrong. While it is true that older farangs have a better chance at snagging a much younger woman in Thailand than they might back home, this has to do with several factors. According to many Thai women I've asked, including Nut, your average farang man is likely to be more stable, more faithful, and gamble less than his younger Thai counterpart. In Nut's world, this stuff counts more than just good looks and is what makes him a better, a more desirable, life partner.

Having read those things, I'll admit that when we first got together I was a bit cautious. I had been warned by everyone about this, for lack of a better phrase, "opportunistic streak" in Thai women, and being well past the age of being physically attractive to women, asked myself what she saw in me. It took some time and the sharing of many experiences to lessen my initial skepticism. During that time I've learned that because our cultures are so different it inevitably colors our views in ways not easily comprehended from the outside or during a casual relationship. Many negative judgments written about Thai women have been by people who don't really know much about the inside of a relationship with one.

As the months go by I find I'm enjoying our life together more and more. It's been three years since our first date and I seldom hear Nut ask me for money that isn't for everyday expenses, excepting for the occasional trip to get her hair done ("to make beautiful") or a recharge for her son's cell phone. She's careful with money in every respect, almost frugal. In addition, she's fiercely loyal and worries about my health and safety all the time. She is, in many ways, the perfect partner. I can only hope our next three years together are as good as the last. As for my skepticism, it's been gone for a while now.

Our kitchen on Siriton Road, Chang Phuak, Chiang Mai

Anyhow, last October we found this nice little apartment with a kitchen, two bathrooms, huge bedroom, and cheap of course. Very comfy and very homey. I wanted to do something nice for Nut and because we both love food and eat  breakfasts at home now that we have a kitchen, I decided to introduce her to my special pancakes. We gathered the unusual for Thailand ingredients from various markets and one morning I whipped up a batch. I don't use a recipe for pancakes so Nut watched me as I went about putting the batter together. Pancakes with syrup and butter are not Thai food and Nut had little experience with them, but she really liked them and said, "Next time I watch carefully and then I make for you."
I replied, "No need to do that, this is something I want to do for you."
"No way", she said, "I do everything for you!"
Of course, as in all such "discussions" about house chores, she was not to be dissuaded — I've yet to prevail in a single one of them. Sure enough, next time I made pancakes she observed carefully and asked questions as I went along.
Then one morning a week or so later while I was off playing tennis, she put together her first batch and proudly served them up when I got home. She watched as I ate the first bite and asked, "Okay, mai?"
I replied, "Well, it's very good but not perfect."
"What?" she retorted,  "Not perfect! What's wrong with them?"
"Not quite enough vanilla." She hustled back to the counter, added some vanilla and poured another dollop of batter into the pan, rotating it slowly to distribute the batter evenly. After bubbles had formed and broken she flipped it to finish the top side and then served it to me.
"Perfect," I said.
Fast forward two weeks and this time it's about spaghetti. I had made some marinara sauce and it was an immediate hit with Nut. It was pretty damn awesome sauce I must say. I had packed some bay leaves, basil and cumin in Alaska because I didn't know if these essentials could be found in Chiang Mai. Before we finished our first helping she was asking, "Those leaves you used. What are they?"
"Bay leaves" I replied.
"Use how many?"
I think you can see where this is going.

I guess I'll close now and get back to my mapping.
So much to do, so little time in the day.

Mapmaking 101

I am totally caught up in a new passion, map making. I suppose I shouldn't say map making — it's more like map contributing, but whatever you call it I'm having great fun. I'm so preoccupied I can barely keep up with emails and haven't looked at Facebook for days it seems. It does take a lot of time to do this right but I happen to have a lot of time to spare — it's the perfect pastime for a geeky map lover like me.

I've written before about my penchant for making GPS traces of my travels. Since buying a Garmin GPS receiver a few years ago I've recorded tracks for every trip I've made, every hike, every motorcycle and bicycle ride, every walk in Europe, Fiji, Africa and S.E. Asia. A "track" is basically a recording made by your GPS of your position, expressed as latitude and longitude coordinates, at a certain time. A series of these time/position values represent a "track" or path on the earth's surface.

If you think about what the GPS is doing, how much serious data processing is taking place while walking or riding along, it is a truly an astounding piece of equipment. It's receiving precisely timed signals from anywhere from four to maybe twelve satellites, each of which are constantly transmitting their local time, a time derived from an onboard atomic clock, and precise location in space from which the GPS makes navigational calculations in order to determine a lat/lon position on the earth's surface. It then records the calculated positions and times in its memory. It's also simultaneously doing a host of other things like displaying the track on a continuously updating color map, calculating and displaying speed, ETAs, course, altitude and many other parameters.

Here's a sample track from a bike ride to Red Mountain across the bay from Homer. We were going uphill so the total time involved was 2 hr, 17 minutes and my GPS recorded 419 points on the 8.9 mile long ride. A typical downhill return takes about 45 minutes. Also visible is the track of our boat trip from Homer Harbor to Jakolof Bay.

Red Mountain Bike Ride (GPS track in green)

With the use of some software from Garmin, (Garmin Basecamp, a free download) they are displayed on a topographic map of Alaska. They can also be displayed beautifully in Google Earth or in Google Maps. You can see that my track, which follows the actual Jakolof Bay Road, reveals a disparity in the location and shape of the roads as the map represents them. This is one sort of thing I'm working to correct. Don't get me wrong. You can buy very accurate maps for almost any country on earth for around $100 bucks a pop but the world wide map I'm working on is put together and maintained by volunteers, exactly the way Wikipedia works, and it's free to anyone who wants it.

The Alaska topo map you see above is also free and probably took its roads data from the old Tiger line files produced by the U.S. government years ago. TIGER/Line files are digital files and contain geographic features, such as roads, railroads, rivers, and while better than nothing they provide only a very rough approximation of the actual road shape. The topographical data is in the public domain and is available from the U.S. Geological Survey, the makers of the high quality U.S. topo maps many of you are familiar with.

(Free topo maps for much of the U.S. available here.)

The road maps I've been using in Thailand are produced by the Open Street Map Foundation, (OSM) a non-profit group of volunteer mappers and programmers located all over the world. They are completely free and because the street data are quite comprehensive they can be used in GPS units that do auto-routing. With an auto-routing GPS you merely enter a destination into the unit and then command it to "Go there". Its internal software will make decisions based on data in the maps (such as one-way streets, road segment lengths, speed limits, etc.), to create a complete route, a turn-by-turn dialog that plays as you follow it. Some units can further assist the driver with spoken directions in either a male or female voice.

(Free auto-routing Garmin Maps available here.)

I only recently learned that anybody can upload their GPS tracks to the  OSM map database. I did that never thinking those tracks would end up "in print" so to speak. But lo and behold, I downloaded an update to the Thailand maps I've been using and to my complete amazement, there were the roads I added! I was thrilled to say the least. I can make contributions to a map that is free to download, learn about auto-routing GPS maps, and then share my efforts with the rest of the world. It's totally awesome. I've added tons of streets in my Chiang Mai neighborhood, some roads over in Udon where I was last week and now I'm doing the area around Homer. Apparently no OSM volunteer has decided to fix up the map of the Homer area yet. Until now.

To explain how I got started with this, Nut and I wanted to drive around the other side of Lake Phayao on the bike while we were visiting the area a couple of years ago. I wrote about it here: Lake Phayao. It was a beautiful ride we had to scope out on our own because none of the roads we used were on the OSM map I had on my GPS at the time. We had been to the west side of the lake but only by a lucky accident. I wanted to find a better way. Using Google Earth I located a small road on the north side of the lake that connected with the west side roads I wanted to travel and with a highway that existed in the version of the OSM map I was using at the time. I set up a waypoint in my GPS and we drove there on the Phantom to make our start. Here's a screen shot of the Lake Phayao map as it looked in 2010. We followed a series of small unnamed lanes that hugged the shoreline until we got to the big highway bordering the lake on its southern side. Then we turned around and did it again.

I uploaded the tracks from my GPS and with the help of aerial imagery available on the OSM Map Editing interface, added the roads we had explored. Here's the map as it looks now.

When "my roads" first appeared on the downloaded maps, I cannot tell you how thrilled I was. I've always loved maps and have spent hours, days, months, staring at topo maps, road maps, any map I could get my hands on. Back in the 60s a friend owned the entire set of topographic maps for Cape Cod, something like 30 big maps. I inherited them when he moved to California and when tacked up on my bedroom wall they took up the entire thing, floor to ceiling. I still have a roll of Homer topos stashed in Homer but since the advent of Google Earth I never look at them.

I had often wondered how I could break into cartography but the learning curve for real map making, the background one would need in spherical geometry, the understanding of projections and datums, etc., was enough to put me off.  But with the OSM Editor, Potlatch, with a backdrop of Bing aerial imagery  it's relatively easy to add roads, rivers, even sophisticated things like freeway interchanges to the OSM road map of the world.

In the screen shot of the OSM representation of the nearby Rte 1369 and Rte  1001 interchange that I worked on you see roads/lanes in yellow (OSM calls them ways), with arrows to depict one-way lanes, the background of Bing aerial imagery, and the red dots that represent "nodes" in OSM parlance. In the photo one of the ramps has been "selected" by clicking it with the mouse thus rendering the nodes visible. There are similar nodes in the other ways but you can't see them because they're not selected. When selected any node can be moved with the mouse to align the roadways, make junctions, smooth the curves, etc. Double-clicking any node starts a new way from that point or allows extending an existing way. There is much more to map editing but that covers the very basics.

Junction of Thailand Routes 1369 and 1001 shown with Bing aerial imagery as background

When I started working on this interchange it was shown on the OSM map simply and incorrectly as two 2-lane roads intersecting at a traffic signal. The reality is as you see above. It does consist of two 2-lane roads but they don't actually intersect. For starters both roads are divided highways. Route 1001 crosses 1369 on a bridge and there are entrance and exit lanes to limit and control access in typical freeway style. I tweaked and fiddled, then tweaked some more to obtain the result you see above. If coming from the east on 1369 and wanting to go to the Rim Ping Market the GPS will now correctly tell you to proceed west until you can make a U-turn and then come back to the market (Note: in Thailand you drive on the left) whereas before it would have told you to make a right turn at the light, an impossible maneuver because no intersection exists — 1369 is underneath 1001 at that point.

Below is a screen shot of the roads at the end of East End Road in Homer as they exist in the OSM database at present. The roads are shown as they appear in the OSM editing window and are overlayed atop Bing imagery which shows a bird's eye view, taken from satellite photos, of the area. You can see that the Tiger line files they're based on are practically worthless as representations of the actual roads. However they are a starting point and generally provide correct road names that are not copyright protected.
I love that area at the end of the road. It's special because I lived there during my first years in Homer, years before Vosnesenka and Razdolna existed, and because my son Tuli was born out beyond road's end on the Rainwater homestead in 1984.  It's going to take a ton of effort to fix things up but I'm happily working away on doing the entire extent of East End Road and when I've got it finished I'll write it up. My other projects include Seldovia, the Red Mountain area and the Rocky River Road, Oilwell Road in Ninilchik, Diamond Ridge area roads and trails — all favorite haunts of mine. And then there's Thailand and Chiang Mai with its warren of small lanes, many unnamed and unmapped. Lots to do.

OSM map of East End Road and environs, November 2012

But I'm having a ball doing this. Life is good. I'm healthy and I'm busy — making maps, doing field work with my GPS on the streets in my neighborhood, playing the best tennis of my life, enjoying living in the Land of Smiles and hanging with my sweet gal. Who could want more?

Solo trip to Udon

 Not all that much is happening here in Chiang Mai but I've been wanting to write a short post describing my trip to Udon Thani last week. I've fallen into a routine, albeit a comfortable routine, but there's not much exciting stuff to write about. Life over here is easy and I'm basically a home-body happily passing my time studying Thai, eating out, riding here and there, playing tennis and lately, contributing to the Open Street Map project. I'll have lots more to say about that in a later post. Nut and I moved into a new, bigger apartment a few weeks ago and it's quite a nice place that we've been adding bits and pieces to all month. We have a kitchen now, a huge separate bedroom, a living room, and 2 baths. Quite an improvement over our old place and at 4500 baht per month ($150) it's cheaper too.

Of course, heart surgery is on my mind occasionally. There will be plenty of time to think about that as the time to leave approaches so I try not to dwell on it. I did hear from a Dr. Johnston at the Cleveland Clinic who, after reviewing my medical data, told me he was able to offer me the so-called minimally invasive aortic valve replacement procedure.This is very good news. It means that instead of the standard sternotomy (massive chest sawing and splitting) he wants to use the newer mini-sternotomy procedure, which involves a much smaller incision in the chest, to access the aortic valve for replacement. Success rates are excellent, healing time is much reduced and there are fewer side effects. After giving up on the idea of tennis next summer, now I'm thinking maybe I'll be able to play after all. That would be most excellent. My endurance on the courts is noticeably reduced now. A 5-shot rally leaves me fairly winded and 3 hours of playing doubles in the heat wastes me. But I'm happy and my game is actually improving. I have hopes that this operation will change all that for the better.

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The trip to Udon had a sort of dual purpose. I wanted to get out of the city for a ride in the country and also to visit my Homer friends who hang out over there. DC, Albert, and Sean were freshly arrived from Homer and the motorcycle has been just sitting around begging to be ridden. Nut decided to stay home and putter in our new place so this trip was a solo ride.

Udon's about 450 miles (700 km) from here and I always take two days to do it  breaking for the night in Nam Pat. It's a lovely ride especially at this time of the year when northern Thailand enjoys the clear air and moderate temperatures of its "cold season."

First burning of rice straw - Route 1105 near Uttaradit

Scene from Route 1268 near Nam Pat

I took Route 1268 to go from Nam Pat to Loei because it's such a beautiful, scenic trip. The road is very twisty though and it's become bumpy during the past year so the going was slower than I remember. I traveled the 1268 during my first few weeks in Thailand when three Homer friends and I did a big motorcycle tour of north Thailand. It seems long ago that we set off on that adventure but in reality, it was less than 3 years ago. That trip turned me on to motorcycling and to Thailand.

The jungle is lush along much of the route and that makes it shady, always a welcome situation in the tropics. I used to tease Nut about how she instinctively avoids the sun. Now, I too invariably cross over to walk on the shady side of the street.

Riding through the shady jungle - Route 1268

Along Route 1268

I got to Udon and hooked up with Albie, Sean and DC. Those boys were doing their thing, staying out late and chasing bar girls. But DC loves to ride and he's just bought a new motorcycle, a CBR250 like mine, only in black. We did a few day rides in the surrounding farmland and along the Mekong River.

The Mekong River north of Nong Khai

DC and I with the Mekong in the background

We got Sean and Don to go along with us to one of our favorite haunts, Phu Fai Lom park. I have posted similar scenes in the past because when I'm in Udon we always make this trip, so bear with me here. What you see below is a composite of two photos.  DC took one with me in it and I shot the other with him in it and then Photoshopped myself into the first one.

At the park

After a few days I turned the CBR westward and headed toward Chiang Mai. I decided to return by a slightly different route seeing as 1268 had been so bumpy. I drove Route 203 back through Phu Ruea and then split off onto Route 2013 just above Dan Sai — all beautiful roads and pretty farm country. Here are a few photos:

Route 203 near Phu Ruea

Serpentatious statue -- Route 203

I reached my little guest house in Nam Pat after a thoroughly enjoyable day of riding and ended up spending most of the evening researching alternate ways back to Chiang Mai. I wanted to try the back roads north of Lake Sirikit and after fooling around with Google Earth, my Thailand paper maps and my Open Street Maps that live on my GPS and computer I came up with a route that I thought might work. There were about 40 miles of dirt to cover but I reasoned that as long as it wasn't wet, it was worth a try. The trip up to where the dirt began was pleasant. So far so good. Route 1341 runs through very rural back country but the further I got the rougher and narrower it became.

Along Route 1341

Peaceful valley - Route 1341

Muddy ruts on PHR 4001

As I climbed higher into the hills I got excited about the views I would soon enjoy and that I was developing an alternative route over the mountains that could be a vast  improvement over Route 11, the limited access highway that one is practically forced to use for the last 100 miles to Chiang Mai from Uttaradit. But it was not to be. The road, PHR 4001, described as having a "compacted surface" was anything but. It was rocks, gravel, seriously washed out from the recent rains, slick muddy ruts, and then more rocks.

I might have toughed it out over the rocks but the mud was very slippery and I didn't want to risk a fall, especially so far from anywhere. So after just a few hundred meters I reluctantly turned around and headed back down the hill.

Maybe next time....

Sick and Tired of Politics

 I'm depressed these days.

It's this damn election and all the bullshit associated with it. I'm tired of seeing the divisiveness as I scan the news or go to Facebook to check up on the activities of my friends only to witness the constant carping from both sides. And oh, let's try to forget the Presidential Debates. The made for TV debates in which both candidates skirt and avoid serious issues. The issues most Americans would really rather not hear about. Blech! It's all such a waste, sort of like saving the pieces of a broken wineglass when the rest of the house has been destroyed. In my opinion our political campaigns are insipid and useless. I can't wait for it all to be over.

I decided to tune out of the political debates most of my friends are having because frankly, I don't see much difference between the parties. They're but two sides of the same coin. Plus, there's no way I'm going to change the minds of those on "the other side" anyway. I'm a life-long Democrat and shed tears of joy when Obama won the presidency but when you get right down to it, he's just another president that misled us about what he would do and, with the single exception of improvements to Medicare (still an unknown quantity), has steadfastly retained the status quo. We're still in Afghanistan, we're still expanding our military footprint overseas, we still have prisoners in Gitmo, we still lock up American citizens without a trial or legal counsel, we still have Homeland Security and the incomparably annoying and useless TSA, two hugely expensive new government operations that came out of 9/11 while the national debt soars and reducing the massive budget of the Defense Department isn't talked about. Obama's campaign slogan "Change" was essentially exactly that in the end, a slogan. A slogan used by the ad agencies his party hired to help him gain the presidency. Welcome to American politics, a skillful blend of advertising and bald-faced lies where it might cost a billion dollars or more to win the nation's highest office. And then, once elected, the corporations who paid to put you there demand to be taken care of. Again, Blech!

I read a thought provoking article the other day. In the article, The Opiate of Exceptionalism, by Scott Shane writing in the NY Times on October 19 of this year, the author asks us to:

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"Imagine a presidential candidate who spoke with blunt honesty about American problems, dwelling on measures by which the United States lags its economic peers.

What might this mythical candidate talk about on the stump? He might vow to turn around the dismal statistics on child poverty, declaring it an outrage that of the 35 most economically advanced countries, the United States ranks 34th, edging out only Romania. He might take on educational achievement, noting that this country comes in only 28th in the percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in preschool, and at the other end of the scale, 14th in the percentage of 25-to-34-year-olds with a higher education. He might hammer on infant mortality, where the United States ranks worse than 48 other countries and territories, or point out that, contrary to fervent popular belief, the United States trails most of Europe, Australia and Canada in social mobility.

The candidate might try to stir up his audience by flipping a familiar campaign trope: America is indeed No. 1, he might declare — in locking its citizens up, with an incarceration rate far higher than that of the likes of Russia, Cuba, Iran or China; in obesity, easily outweighing second-place Mexico and with nearly 10 times the rate of Japan; in energy use per person, with double the consumption of prosperous Germany."

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He goes on to say that Americans believe we aren't like other people, we're special, exceptional. That we don't like hearing anything to the contrary even if it's true. Americans expect their political candidates and elected officials to be cheer leaders, not people who get hung up on problems. Our addiction to this notion is akin to an opium addiction -- at first it allows us to see only the good but ultimately it makes us stupid.

But I would continue in the same vein and add that we are exceptional in some other ways too. According to Wikipedia we are the world's largest armaments producer, to the tune of $8.6 billion in 2010. We also have the world's biggest "defense" budget measured either in absolute dollars ($711 billion) or as a percentage of GDP (4.7%). China is second with an outlay of $143 billion and 2.0% of GDP, while Russia is a distant 3rd at $72 billion.

And we use more petroleum than any other country, by far. Yet our government refuses to demand auto makers produce more fuel efficient cars. Might a candidate make an issue of that?  Not very likely. American drivers are forever clamoring for cheaper gas. It's almost as if we live in a vacuum and cannot see what the rest of the world is doing. If he did decide to make that an issue our candidate would be going head to head with the powerful oil and auto industries, a battle he or she would do well to avoid during a campaign. And afterward. Our thirst for oil means we've been friendly with Saudi Arabia for many decades. In case you've forgotten, most of the Islamic fundamentalists that took down the WTC were Arabians. Our supposed allies.

Getting back to Mr. Shane's hypothetical question. How would such a mythical candidate fare in the election? He'd stand a snow ball's chance in hell.

I finished a book the other day, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic, by Chalmers Johnson, that does a pretty good job of explaining our foreign policy since 1898 when we took the Philippines from Spain. Written in 2004, it's a page turner that I highly recommend to anybody wanting a fuller understanding of what our country is truly about. The so called "neoconservative triumphalists" in our government and particularly in the defense establishment espouse "preventative war" and the forcible spread of democracy and, according to Johnson, by 2003 were partly responsible for the fact that we had 725 bases in 130 countries around the world. The largest, Kadena AFB in Okinawa, has 18,000 troops not counting Japanese and other support staff, is worth about $5 billion and has been there since the end of WWII. We have huge bases in every corner of the world and especially, surprise, surprise, in places where there's oil.

He also answers the question of why we had no exit strategy in Iraq. We had none because we intended to stay permanently. We're never going to leave the middle east, or at least not while there's still oil in the region. Our military presence there is growing even though our troops are being withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan. Our governmental leaders enjoy a revolving door policy with the huge defense contractors, Dick Cheney being perhaps the most extreme (and wealthiest?), example of this. And those contractors need a state of war to remain profitable. Enter Bush's War on Terror. It's never a ending war and consequently is perfect for those needs. Keep Americans paranoid about their security, keep those defense contractors busy, sell more arms, build more bases, incite another war somewhere, invade another country if need be, but keep the cycle going by any means available.

Upon reflection, what is it we have created in Iraq? A stable democracy? And what can we say about Afghanistan? Have we made the world safer for democracy by being there? Will we invade Iran, and if we do under what pretense? How much richer will Dick Cheney's Halliburton become, a contractor that in 2005 had already made $10 billion in Iraq alone? How many more lies will we hear that attempt to justify our terrorization of countries weaker than us?

Scanning the news yesterday I spotted this article: "Reporting a Fearful Rift Between Afghans and Americans", that reports a shootout between American and Afghan troops in which six people died, two Americans and four Afghans. These are people we trained to defend their country. But they don't like us. Is anybody curious as to why that is? Please read Johnson's book. It contains some of the answers.

I wrote this to clear my mind and lift myself out of the doldrums the election has plunged me into. But I also wanted to persuade friends who think America is on the right path that it isn't, that we have become an imperialist country, just like Rome was, like Spain, and like England. That if we ignore history, we're bound to repeat it. In the days of the British Empire the people who administered her colonies thought of themselves as smarter than, indeed better than, the indigenous people, were entitled to whatever that country could provide to the homeland, and that they were actually improving the lives of those whose countries they occupied. But the people of India, the Burmese, colonial Americans, the Irish, and all the rest with ample reason loathed their occupiers, as the Afghans loathe us. As the Iraqis  and the Arabian fundamentalists do, as do many of the Okinawans who are stuck living near the Kadena base. We are the occupiers now, the new imperialists. Our presidents have become "deciders" and can kill anyone on the planet for any reason, or no reason.

Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of Costa Rica (awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987) once stated: “When a country decides to invest in arms, rather than in education, housing, the environment, and health services for its people, it is depriving a whole generation of its right to prosperity and happiness."

I couldn't agree more. For those of you who bemoan the high cost of a college education in America, or who are alarmed by the upward spiral of our national debt, or who wonder why it is that we are almost continually in a state of war, you have only to pull yourselves away from the infotainment we call "the news" and do some reading to see just how much of our nation's creativity and resources are being wasted on the military machine we have built and are hell bent on maintaining.

When I was a boy I believed in America and the American dream. And I think back then, things were simpler. America had already started down the path to  empire in the Philippines but I didn't know it. By the way, we resorted to waterboarding the troublesome and rebellious inhabitants of those islands after we "liberated" them and substituted our dominance for Spain's. But my eyes were blind to those sorts of things then and they really weren't reported in the TV news I watched. I thought of us as the good guys, the exceptional ones. But not any more. My eyes have been opened and I don't like a lot of what I see.

Whomever wins the coming election will not change much about what we do, or how we're viewed by the rest of the world, a world that is increasingly hostile to us. Obama, my hero in 2008, doesn't seem to have the power or the drive, and maybe not even the desire, to do it. Romney is, of course, repugnant to me on many levels, is a hawk, a denigrator of the common people, a wealthy corporation man, and will only magnify our bad reputation in the world if he gets in. I  will choose Obama again because he's the lesser of two evils. It seems that's what I usually do.

Isn't that a shame? It's no wonder I'm depressed.