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Brazil

"Seeing is different from being told."
Kenyan folk saying

travelling wide-eyed and bushy-tailed

Naivety included with all mains.

dblog

Today we leave Thailand and fly to London. A phone call to confirm our flights the other day had the nice surprise of confirming our seating into 33b and 33c, which on a 747 are exit row seats with about 2 metres of leg room! This should be a much more comfortable 12 hour flight!

Before we depart, I thought I'd give you a random list of some things I've learned in our time in Thailand...

• You can drink Coca Cola from a plastic bag.
• Both live and roasted chickens are permitted on the trains here, neither particularly well restrained.
• In my opinion, after "Hello" and "Thank you", the most important thing for a traveller to learn in a language are the numbers.
• You can put corn in ice cream.
• I'm not too worried by how expensive or cheap things are, but I hate feeling like I'm getting ripped off.
• Every person I know in the West is extremely wealthy, far more than they realise.
• New Zealand is a beautiful country because of many things it has.
• New Zealand is a beautiful country because of many things it does not have.
• We like travelling light, and would always travel with backpacks, but we could never be "backpackers", in terms of spending months or years just travelling. We like having roots.

We've enjoyed our time in Thailand, but are looking forward to arriving in London. It's a good combination, pleased to arrive, pleased to leave. For some months, attempting to be ironic we predicted that we'd land in Heathrow on the day the war started. With preliminary bombing yesterday and the full offense yet to start, it looks likely we may be right. We're unconcerned though, confident that we are in the right place at the right time, and this is part of a bigger plan God has for us that we do not know but that we see graduallly developing. It's exciting.

Happy 2nd Birthday Harry Troughton!

Two entries in a row is long-weekend in Palmerston excessive, but I wanted, nay needed, to rave about our experience today at the Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School. It was awesome! If you're in Thailand, come to Chiang Mai and take one of these classes. If you're not in Thailand, get with the programme! This school was the first set up with the idea of giving people visiting Thailand the opportunity to learn how to cook Thai food. They run a rotating schedule of five courses, each a day long. On each course you learn to cook six Thai dishes, so you can attend for anywhere from one to five days. It was professionally run and we enjoyed learning skills that we plan to employ in London! We cooked in a class of ten, with people from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Slovakia, and then us from NZ. We had picked today's class because it started with a guided tour of a local market (good choice; learned heaps about the ingredients we went on to use). Bronwyn then joyfully discovered when we arrived that the first dish on the menu today was Thom Kha Kai, her favourite from Palmerston North ever since it was recommended by our friends Adrienne and Geoff.

"Seeing is different from being told.". That's this month's quote (eyes left)... I put that there while in Melbourne, anticipating our experience in Thailand would change a lot of our perceptions about this country and about Asia in general. It's been fascinating. Firstly, they're lots of things where you go, "Ahhh, yeah, that's what Marike was meaning..." I had a moment like this when dodging through traffic on a busy road where two-thirds of the traffic is powerful motorscooters being ridden at top speed, weaving around the sawngtauw (open-at-the-rear taxi/pickup bus things...) And yet, many things in Thailand are so familar. The Thai food for instance is essentially the same as that offered in the three noodle places that suddenly opened up on Broadway in Palmerston North last year. Globalisation has meant not only that when you get over here is there a whole lot of stuff from the west (Starbucks is right opposite McDonalds, if you're looking for it), but also that the Asian-ness of the place is less, well, foreign. Along with quick and relatively easy international travel, this has interesting implications for Christians for world mission. It shouldn't be so hard to "go" anymore. And yet...

Greetings from Chiang Mai! Ahh, the miracles of the internet... web site updates are possible from anywhere. We've been here in Thailand since Monday morning. The flight from Melbourne wasn't toooo bad, despite not being able to get an exit row. The Thai seats appear to have slightly better clearance under them, so I was able to stretch out straight with some gyrations. I got about five and a half hours sleep on the flight, though Bronwyn didn't fare quite as well. (She never does.) From the airport we headed across the overbridge to the Don Muang train station and bought tickets straight to Lopburi, a town to the north, rather than heading into Bangkok itself. The tickets for the over 2 hour train journey cost us 24 Baht (NZ$1) each! And so, after catching the wrong train (at least in the right direction) and finally the correct train when it then arrived some 30 minutes late, we found ourselves in the capable hands of Peter and Diane McIvor.

Peter and Diane are the parents of John McIvor, who we know from Palmy. He and Bex Jourdain were in fact recently over here also, so we'd also had the benefits of her emails back to prepare us (a little) for Thailand. When we told John we'd be in Thailand in March, he had offered to see if his parents could put us up for a night or two. And so on our we found ourselves on our first day here, with New Zealand guides with 25 years of Thailand experience. It was excellent, and we're so grateful for their time. Over the two days we were with them they sent us on an introductory exercise to find our way around the city, took us out for a Thai meal, teaching us the names of a couple of dishes we then knew would be "safe" to order elsewhere, arranged a two-hour introductory Thai language lesson for us, educated us a little about Thai culture, and provided an opportunity for us to eat Western food for breakfast! As if that wasn't enough they helped us buy train tickets to Chiang Mai, and for me to purchase material and arrange for a tailor to make me two custom-fit shirts. The tailor said I had the longest arms she'd ever measured!

And so after a night on the sleeper train which left at 10:12pm (actual departure 10:35pm) and arrived at 8:00am (actual arrival 9:45am), ew find ourselves in Chiang Mai. Over the last couple of days we've oriented ourselves to the place, eaten lots of excellent Thai food (though not at breakfast; I had banana pancakes yesterday and coissants today), and today visited the Zoo. Highlight of the zoo was without a doubt the walk-through aviary. The scale on the signs indicated it was 150m long, and certainly it was the biggest we've ever seen by a number of orders of magnitude. The birds were beautiful. Peacocks make sense among these other birds.

Tomorrow we're booked to attend an all-day Thai cooking class where we will be taken on a tour of the markets and then taught to cook six Thai dishes. We will also eat them, though less teaching will be required for that section. Over the next few days we also plan to go hiking in one or two of the nearby National Parks. We expect to head back to Lopburi again on Tuesday; if nothing else, we've got to pick up my shirts, and our packs: so much of our gear is London clothes that we were able to bring just our "day packs" up here, even with our sleeping bags in them! We plan to stay at the McIvors again Tuesday night, before heading down to Bangkok for two nights. Then Friday the 21st we fly out to London. Life ain't boring.

A brief update tonight; no time for further Melbourne news as we depart for the airport, to fly to Thailand, in less than an hour. As soon as I've uploaded this update the iBook will be packed up into a box that will be sent directly from Melbourne to London, hopefully beating us there. It turns out that good old Australia Post is the cheapest (well, least of the expensive) ways to get it there. It's going airmail, while some other things are following from here seamail. It doesn't mean we're quite travelling fully "light" yet, but certainly lighter.

We're flying out of Melbourne at 1.15am, so it'll officially be tomorrow morning. After a 9 hour 15 minute flight we'll arrive there at 6:30am Bangkok time. Rather than staying there, we're travelling tomorrow straight to Lopburi, two hours north of Bangkok by train. We'll be staying initially there with the parents of John McIvor, recently also visited by him and Bek Jourdain. We've had email contact with them and it's great to be able to know we've got a contact in Thailand. It takes a little of the unknown out of things. It's still a big scary journey for us though, and an exciting adventure. We've got ideas about some of the things we want to do in the 11 days there but no fixed plans beyond travelling to Lopburi tomorrow. Maybe a new experience for us to go with the flow this much as well?

We expect to be able to access the internet in Thailand, so there may be the potential to send a few emails, but we don't expect to be able to update the web site. We arrive in London on March 21st but again may not have full internet access immediately. We'll see you when we see you, with a new oriental gleam in our eyes. E noho ra.

All right, all right, I admit it... yesterday's entry was uploaded this evening... but it was written yesterday, and that's what counts, isn't it?

I blame the javascript. And something I ate for lunch.

We've had some good times here in Melbourne, with my family and also with friends. Today we met Leath and Rosie at the Melbourne Zoo, along with their children Olivia (3) and Kate (just on 2). We've enjoyed hanging out with them as a family... Kate has dubbed me "DocDoc" (based solely on an inability to say the name "Duncan", rather than a knowledge of educational background or my initials: D.R.). The DocDoc name has stuck, reinforced by her parents it has to be said... and who could say no when Kate walks up to you, looks up with a big cute smile, holding up her arms and saying, "Duddle!" (ie. Cuddle! or really, "Pick me up and carry me now please, I don't need to walk with you around here...")

Home from the zoo, we had a further visit tonight from Joy Cryer, who'd seen us earlier in the week and who was still down from Brisbane. This time she also brought with her Matt Barnett who arrived down from Brisbane this morning. We know each of them from Wellington days... It's a tiny world! So cool to catch up with both Joy and the big man once again. As of tonight we have established Matt is now officially as tall as me. These Queenslanders were having a tough time adjusting to the less tropical Melbourne climate, and before the evening was up we had both Matt and Joy in borrowed jerseys and with a sleeping bag each for warmth. I was still in a t-shirt. My New Zealand blood hasn't thinned yet.

This week has also seen continued work at Wycliffe, which has been sufficient to keep us from getting bored without being exhausted. In addition to Bronwyn and I working on conference prep, I've spent some hours getting to the bottom of the scanner problems that have plagued the Media Centre here too. I'm pleased to say this is now completely fixed. With the results of some, ahem, final critical tests on their professional scanning setup yesterday, I am therefore able to leave you with images of Survivor Canberra: putting the "reality" back into "reality television"...