Levelling Up in Chiang Mai, Thailand

It’s time for another installment of travel tales from my Grand Adventure in Asia. Now that I’m no longer travelling, I plan to post these on alternate Wednesdays, interspersed with the same sort of mental-health posts and personal observations that I was writing before the trip. Mondays will continue to be about books and media (SF&F-focused, but not exclusively), as always. I’ll continue to post twice a week for now. Enjoy!

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Our first stop in Thailand was Chiang Mai, the country’s second-biggest city. It’s in the northwest part of Thailand, among rolling hills that keep the temperatures down to something very reasonable for North Americans. This means it’s a popular destination, not only for North Americans but also for Chinese tourists, whose numbers have exploded recently due to cheap flights.

We found Chiang Mai to be more intense than Malaysia, in all sorts of ways. Because we’re geeks, we quickly started to talk about this as “levelling up” — a video-game term referring to mastering a level and moving on to the next. For example…

The Traffic

The stupa in front of our guesthouse

Our guesthouse, Kamala’s, was on a tiny side street. (Note on addresses: Non-main streets are known in Thailand as sois. Thai addresses give the nearest main road, then the number of the soi, because the sois themselves don’t have names, even though they may be large streets. So Kamala’s was on Chai Sriphum, Soi 1.) Across the soi was an old Buddhist stupa, a useful landmark since it was visible from several streets away.

The soi was lined with other guesthouses and the occasional Thai massage place, but it was short on restaurants. This turned out to be a problem because the traffic was utterly terrifying…

Books for Earth Day

Happy Earth Day!

I’m a quiet but staunch environmentalist, and I suspect that books had a lot to do with this side of my personality (and most of the rest, for that matter). Here, then, are some books to celebrate on Earth Day…

Cautionary Tales

For those of us growing up in the ’80s and early ’90s, science fiction for teens (the term “YA” hadn’t been invented yet) tended to follow a few familiar tropes. Dystopian tales were popular, as were stories about aliens and spaceships. And it was almost taken for granted that our planet was going to come close to destruction, usually for environmental reasons.

Coming Home with Fresh Eyes

If you’re anything like me, you sometimes wish that you could step back and look at your life with fresh eyes. A new perspective on your time spent, your priorities, your living arrangements…what would it look like?

Well, I’m lucky enough to be experiencing just that. I’ve just returned from a three-month trip through Asia. My house looked pretty unfamiliar when I first stepped in the door, let me tell you — and not just because I haven’t lived here that long. I’m still working to get a handle on post-travel life, but here’s what I’ve got so far…

0. We’re lucky to live in a first-world country. There’s a lot we take for granted in countries like Canada. But you knew that, and I won’t elaborate on it, because for the purposes of this post, that’s not what I’m interested in.

1. I have too much stuff. I spent three months living out of two backpacks (more about that in a future post). Did I miss my closet, let alone the entire rest of my house? No. Do people over there own as much as we do? No — of course there’s a lot more poverty, but even the middle-class homes we visited were compact apartment-style residences, not overflowing with stuff. Now that I’m back, I can’t remember what I actually liked to wear, for example, and what was just in my closet because I didn’t want to get rid of it yet. There’s stuff everywhere and it all looks strange to me. Calling FlyLady…

Turtleduck Press New Release — Captain’s Boy by KD Sarge

First of all, my heart goes out to the marathon runners in Boston and all those affected by the events there. It’s horrible to contemplate — so many personal triumphs turned to tragedy in an instant. I’m sending healing thoughts southward as I type.

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Having said that, I would be remiss in my duties as editor at Turtleduck Press if I delayed this announcement any longer. This month we have a new SF novel out: Captain’s Boy by KD Sarge.

Blog Holiday

Quick note for you all. I’m offline for the next two weeks, trekking in Nepal. The next time I’ll be near a computer is April 8 — horrors! So the blog is going on a two-week holiday (I hope it enjoys the break). Books-and-media posts will resume April 13, with more travel blogging/photos and life blogging starting April 15. See you then!

Movie Nostalgia: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Yep, it’s time to talk about the one with the whales. Welcome to our latest installment of the Nostalgia series.

I was a big Star Trek fan throughout my teens, and I saw all the movies, but Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was the only one I watched over and over. Knowing this, I picked it up for a recent re-watch with some hesitation. Would Leonard Nimoy’s clunky directing from Star Trek III carry over? Would the comedy hold up? Would the mid-1980s just be too dated as a time-travel destination?

(Spoilers ahoy!)

Exploring the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia

Time to continue narrating my travel adventures in Malaysia and beyond…

After the jungle, we headed to another nature destination — the Cameron Highlands. This is what’s known as a hill station (a term more common in India) — a higher area of land with cooler temperatures, usually developed by British colonizers as a resort. The Cameron Highlands are also a big tea-growing area, and more recently they’ve had a bonanza of strawberries. And they’re a lovely place to hike. But as we discovered, they also have a rich ecosystem that’s being threatened by development.