On Board the Picnic Bus

It was a long ride from Pak Cheong, about 70 km North east of Bangkok, to Sawang Daendin in Jangwat Sakunakhon. The ride took approximately 8 - 9 hours on board a local open air truck known as the song tiao.

Here are 10 interesting things about the song tiao:

1. It has no door. U can jump out of the truck out of its back end anytime you want. At your own risk.



2. It has big rectangular cut-outs framed by metal stems for windows. These cannot be closed. If it rains, you just unroll a flap to cover the window opening.



3. It has only 2 long benches running along each side of the truck. There are only lower backrests but no head rest.



4. That means you can't really lean back to take a nap, coz the windows are directly behind you and you'll fall out.
5. The wind is so loud you can barely hear yourself when the truck is on the move. Definitely a strain to talk.
6. Do NOT stick your head, hand etc out of the window or you may risk loosing it.
7. The central portion of the truck have grass (the kindergarten sort) and foam mats laid out so commuters can have a picnic. ie. sit, recline, play guitar (which the locals did but not that you can hear it), eat snacks and sleep during the long journey.












8. Or you can curl up on the narrow and thinly padded benches if your are desperate enough to get a shut eye ( which me and many others did. At times like these, I thank God for my petite built.)
9. It can travel at no more then 70km/hr.
10. Hence, you snack like crazy on the truck coz minimal rests stops are preferred. Or else you'll never get home.

You will want to pray hard that the song tiao does not meet with any mishap coz very likely either
a) fly out of the rear end of the truck,
b) fly out of one of it cut-out windows
c) get get stuck in one of them if you're too fat.


One of the hyperactive kids, Christy, on board.


Me sitting at the cranial end of the truck so I got to rest my back for a bit.


My very shy translator, Kickapo, to help orientate me coz everybody hardly spoke a word of English.

Thailand - the land of ... Stagnant Water

I'm so relieved I got the internet to work on my comp!! Am I glad I decided to bring my laptop after all. The computers here are so slow that when 5 people tried to chat with me on MSN, it hanged.

After months of anticipation and an 8 hours ride on board an open-air local bus called e song tiao (will post some pics soon - its an amazing journey aka picnic-in-a-bus), I've finally arrived at my ultimate destination, Sawang Daendin.

This is barely my 3rd day at Christchurch at Sawang Daendin and am still trying hard to adapt to the sub-urban life here.
The locals seem to be even more traditional then those at Bangkok.

The toilet is a manual scoop - and - pour flushing system; you need to make sure you don't choke it up with toilet paper coz the drainage pipes are pretty damn narrow (those that have been to climbing trips at Krabi shd be familiar with this). Not sure how it handles big offloads form big guys, ha ha. Got to check with Melvin.

One end of each toilet is quartered off with bricks to contain water for the flushing. At any one point, every toilet in each Thai household will contains enough stagnant water guaranteed to make even the slackest NEA ( National Environment Agency) officer cringe.

Having been drilled thoroughly about the perils of Dengue Fever (which is also present here btw) by the Singapore government, one of the first things I did compulsively was to peer into the deep and stagnant waters of the tank to observe for any moving creatures. Amidst the floating dead beetles, other bugs and dismembered wings (yes, yucky isn't it), lo and behold, there it was - the condemned larvae of the our bloodsucking foe, a wriggler!!!. Alright... this is Thailand, I told myself, it's ok and its normal.

But it is NOT ok when the number of wrigglers increased from 1 to 2, and to 5 over the last couple of days. Every time I visited the toilet where I stood still for > 1 s, I got bitten.

So I decided the NEA officers are right (if they had been there) - the tank needed a 10 minutes Mossie Wipeout http://app.nea.gov.sg/cms/htdocs/article.asp?pid=675
Ok... make that a 30 min Moissie Wipeout. I pulled the plug and drained all the water in the tank, which took forever. Then I drowned the struggling wrigglers at base with a generous helping of chlorox (I didn't want them to complete their life-cycle in the sewage). Next I flushed out all e dead insects and wriggler remnants well before refilling it again with fresh water (which again took forever).

Bye bye my wriggling companions , I thought to myself happily with a big sense of satisfaction. Since then, I have yet to be bitten by any mossies in that toilet.

However, I have a feeling that it won't be for long before I have to do my 30 min Mossie Wipe-Out again!

But that is only a small part of the big picture. Out on the fields, there are countless large and small patches of stagnant water every where. Yes, please sent truckloads of NEA officers to fumigate the place!


Check out the enormous urns of stagnant waters commonly found in Thai households ( toilet, backyards and all)