So finally, after many years of talking about it, I finally had an opportunity to see Thailand. On December 19, 1999, my girlfriend, Oum, her sister, Maneewan, her sister's friend, Lox, and I were able to take a Thai Internation Airways flight from LAX to BKK to begin our two week break from America.

The trip itself was grueling but fun, educational and tiring. Strangely enough, I had no Thai food there that was better than Oum's mother's cooking, so I can't really say I enjoyed that aspect of the trip, but we did get a chance to see a lot of the country itself thanks to some judicious planning on the part of Oum's brother, Malin Noi (heretofor referred to as P'Am) and his friend P'Tuk.

For the uninitiated, Thai people refer to older individuals with the "P" prefix as a sign of friendly respect. P'Am is older than all of us on the trip, thus the reference.

For the trip, I took along a Minolta DX 1500 digital camera and my old Sony Hi-8 HandyCam. I used them both, but I have to admit that the second half of the trip was much more relaxing than the the first half, which meant less time visiting places that might make good photographs. A selection of the digital photos are pointed at below, while the video may or may not see the light of day, depending on the availability of a video digitizer. In addition to these images, Maneewan took along a nice Olympus zoom camera and snapped about 10 rolls of film, and about 98% of them came out. The choice shots are/will be scanned in and posted.

Along the way, I was able to log in to a web-based email account and send off some email updates to friends and family. Those emails are posted here as well to give some idea of how the trip progressed.

Oum's brother had Oum purchase him a Garmin GPS III+ here in the Bay Area, and he put it to use as soon as he put batteries in it (which was when we were still putting our bags into the van when we arrived at the airport, I think). Hopefully, I will be able to get an image of our trip around the countryside when he is able to overlay the points on a good map of Thailand.