Hatless in bangkok

It was getting into late July now and to my delight the weather had become tolerable and even pleasant. I had feared the sun and brought from California an excellent straw hat, designed and branded in Australia, made in China, and bought by me in a sporting goods store for five dollars and ninety eight cents. The shading and ventilative features of this hat were excellent, but it was more than a nuisance to carry, and I began to notice that I really needed it only a few minutes every day. I had, for one, found that I was not venturing abroad for vigorous midafternoon walks as I might in America, and even then the sun did not shine much of the day, the sky filled with rapidly changing clouds, now mild and oyster colored, now blackish and turbulent. Soon enough I left the hat somewhere, I think in a movie theatre in Siam Square where they occasionally showed films that met my discriminating tastes.

I determined to design a better hat, since all that I was able to find in the markets were intolerably hot except during those very occasional and fleeting moments of fierce overhead solar radiation, for the Bangkok sun since April and until August was almost directly overhead. Extreme portability and low value were the principal design criteria for my hat; I thought that a small napkin-like folded paper disposable might do the trick, but I grew weary of trying to find the right materials and one day stumbled in desperation on the expedient of cutting a sleeve from an old T-shirt and gluing the end opening with ordinary carpenters glue. This worked well, I eventually made half a dozen, and though it might be said to have created a somewhat odd appearance I reasoned that foreigners were universally taken by the natives to be both odd and correct. I have never noticed even when shooting my most darting looks at the locals passing on the streets the slightest hint of derision from anyone.

But were it not for the impractical bulkiness for city wear, the traditional Thai farm hat, or muak, is clearly the winner, allowing for full shade and full circulation of air on your sweaty head.

Waning Heat of Summer

To my delight, the temperature moderated over the summer because of the rains, not at all unpleasant, crackling thunderstorms that might appear at any time, dawn, mid-day, most often in the late afternoon, everyone scurrying for shelter where girls had plenty of time to give you a lookover, then the black clouds would open and the dazzle would come back.

I downloaded the daily high temps for the year so far(blue), superimposed them on a speciment year fro the past (red) and it became clear that thought the sun was still hovering around in the middle of the sky, the cooling bath of rains was causing the temp to drop over the summer months. For that matter, it appeared that if you hated heat, the time to avoid in Bangkok was March through June.

That April Thrill

So my brother calls me on my new Thai cellphone.

"That's fine, your first effort, but what are you talking about women for? You're supposed to be writing about the tropical weather, how foreigners can learn to live with it, help me figure out how to stay comfortable in this house, not about going to bars and women, for God's sake. Try thinking like the M.I.T. student you once were, not like an adolescent."

He's talking about my new blog, he doesn't like the way I'm going on this thing. Annoying, but he did help with my ticket here. I'll try to get back on topic.

The sun. That's a good place to start, our ancient enemy, the sun.

The Sun

Most people don't know it, but down here in the tropics we've got two "hottest" days of the year, not one like back up north. Wintertime, the sun is down there in Australia, giving skin cancers to all those pale blokes who live at the tropic of Capricorn, 23 degrees below the equator. Around the end of the year, even at noon the sun is fairly far off vertical in Bangkok, in fact this picture of a lady at Asoke BTS station (a burning hell of a place in general) at noon shows that the sun is at 53 degrees. Makes sense, when you think that Bangkok is about 13 degrees above the equator, so

90-(23+13)=54 degrees (OK, it's not exact)

Notice something else about this picture, that lady is carrying an umbrella. In winter. She doesn't want any part of the sun, she's even holding up her shopping bag to keep out any little slivers of sunlight.

This is typical of the people here, Thailand, Malaya. They hold up their arm to show you," I very black skin," they say. You say "O I think beautiful skin, I wish I had the same." They smile, thinking "fahlang very polite, they always say this but not believe." That night they put on extra skin whitener, which is about as effective as "anti-aging cream."

Tons of the stuff sold in Bangkok every day.

It's a system, the old Khmers had it all figured out nine hundred years ago, they learned it from the Indians.works like this, the sun gets to be right overhead in April, starts to decline a bit to the north over the summer, then in August back again. On April 29 and again on August 13, you throw no shadow at noon.

You can make a graph of the relative intensity of the sun on a flat surface at noon, it gets up near 1000 watts a square meter in april and August. You can compare the relative intensity with other places, like Miami and Boston, as I've done above.

Now I got my hands on a large set of data for Bangkok weather, must be from the old Don Muang airport, and I made a chart showing the daily high temperature and dew point for the years 1982 to 1985. And the yellow line is an accurate plot of the graph above, the relative noon intensity of sunlight falling on the unshaded ground at noon on the same day.

You'll not be surprised to see that the daily high temperature starts out nicely in the beginning of the year and then as the sun gets progressively higher in the sky, the dawn heat builds with it month by month, now in the beginning of March it's getter pretty sweaty even when I get up to walk to Starbucks early, and it's going to get worse, maybe a lot worse, some people say that this will be the big one this year in April, toward the end of the month.

But then, look, there in late April or early May, when the hot tension has built to a peak, and the people are dancing around and throwing water on each other but especially on fahlangs, and they used to have these wonderful rites with lingas -- you know what they are, don't you? -- the lingas spurting water and everyone is saying "Ahhh..." or as they say in Thai "Ooooiiiiyy........"

And then everybody gets this terrific little kiss from the gods.....

Or at least it seems terrific to them. As far as the folks from Boston are concerned, it's still one helleva big heat wave for the next six months, til November.