Shortest day

For millenia we northern folk have been mighty nervous about these shortening days of winter and have invented all kinds of potions and ceremonies to ward off the fear that the days were going to get shorter…and shorter.. and God know what then. So we have mulled wine and moldy grain (which is what Tacitus described as the favored beverage of the barbarians of the north) and those big stone henges in Ireland and even Peru where the priests coax the sun back from wherever it has wandered off to, and nowadays Prozac for Seasonal Affective Disorder and doubled up holiday AA meetings for those who overdid it in Christmases past. Here in Thailand it was April, not Decmber, that was the big deal in the old days, but this hasn’t prevented the Thai from going mad with joy over Christmas and New Years as you can see from this little video clip I took last night in the Emporium. Notice at the end that it is against the law to photograph Santa Claus here in the land of smiles, leaving poor Santa looking like some kind of frightened and much overdressed hostage imprisoned here far from his native latitudes.

With the sun vacationing somewhere down in Australia some 36 to the south, solar radiation, as you can see from the readings of a solar radiometer at Bnagkok's Mahidol University is now peaking at about 750 watts per square meter.

http://nanotech.sc.mahidol.ac.th/weather/Weather_Soil_Experiment.htm

As always you correspondent finds the season an emotional challenge, taking comfort that though the days are a little shorter they aren’t a lot shorter. This morning, in fact, the sun rose over Bangkok at 6:30 am, and tonight setting at 6:00, as I make my way to the pub for what I hope will be a modest pint or two, leaving the sky over Sukhumvit washed with a smoky plum, when I take this photo thirteen minutes later.

But where are those refreshing cold snaps that are supposed to be blowing down from the north? This year you hear Thai complaining of the heat and muttering about global warming, with the wind even now backing around to the south and the temps creeping up into the low thirties, a preview of the coming hot season.

Red wine in them hills

Jack and Dah had me over for dinner, quite a nice pasta with little sea clams, plus a red wine that Jack said was a local Thai wine, 600 baht a bottle.

It was certainly drinkable. We did a second bottle. I thought about this. "Don't wine grapes have to grow in a cool place?"

"That's it, this stuff is only 100 clicks from Bangkok, it's a kind of hill station. Look at the bottle."


"Fourteen degrees latitude, that's not far."

Jack said "About three hundred meters above sea level. Cool nights, not far from our village. We're at two hundred." Jack and Dah were building another house in this little Isan village they had discovered, four hours from Bangkok.



Now after the second bottle Jack was mad to grow wine grapes. He wanted to know all about the climate there, he wanted me to compare Bangkok, and the PB wine growing place near Khao Yai, and his new village at the foot of the same hills a little to the west of Khao Yai. The next week, mid December, we took the bus to a little place south of Korat called Pak Tong Chai, near where Jack and Dah were building their house. An uncle picked us up and drove us around, we stayed a couple of days. The mornings were delightful, dew on the grass and nice little jungly tropical mists over the patches of rice paddy.


I took temp measurements with my roving Hobo, compared them with Bangkok. Here they are.




Cool nights indeed, you can see the difference at night, I shaded it blue. Sundown the temp dropped a lot up there, much more than Bangkok. You could se stars at night.

Sunday roast

This Sunday afternoon I was alone and I took to the streets walking, no more than a slight film of sweat on the brow on this fine California-like afternoon, then sitting in the park for a while then consumed a giant roast pork dinner and the Financial Times in the Robin Hood.

The steady graphed points are a recording of the temp and dew point on my deck at home, beneath a large mango tree. The irregular traces are a recorder that I carried with me, you can see every time I go into an air conditioned space where the temp and dew point both drop a few degrees. Consultation with Carrier's chart indicates that each cubic meter of conditioned air has been subjected to about 10 KJ of enthalpy reduction--at considerable energy cost.

Sunday afternoons bring a few families out and into the pubs, you can see this sixty-something guy with his thirty-something Thai wife and "half child", the dream of many a Thai girl. Some of the foreign-Thai relationships are disastrous for the man, but this one looks pretty pleasant for all, arguably more interesting than playing golf and visiting prospective nursing homes back in the old country (or obsessively recording temps in the new), and certainly a step up in comfort and respectability for the girl from an poor Isan village.

Interesting stuff blows in from Isan

Sometimes for relaxation in the cooler evenings now I like to go down to Soi Cowboy and watch the world go by, just sitting at a little bar by the side of the road, watching tourists and bar girls, I try to figure the girls that are fresh from upcountry from the ones who say they are fresh from upcountry. They blow into Bangkok, the prettiest girls from the villages, dozens a day, on buses to Mo Chit and trains to Hua Long Pong, and a lot of them drift over to this street and the other two or three venues that cater to the tourists looking to see Bangkok's notorious sex scene. There they wait by the side of the road, in front of their clubs, like trout waiting under the banks of a stream for passing grubs.






This time of year the wind is from the north to northeast too, and along with the girls comes the cool air of the north, equally delightful, the air warming like the girls themselves as it blows out of Udorn and Korat and Surin, down from the hills, across the plain, and into the wicked concrete alleys of the town. The journey takes about a day, and you can see from the twin pictures here of parallel temp and dew point of November air in Bangkok and Korat, 165 to the north. The air moisture stays pretty much the same, but you can see the arrival of the air in the big city heats it up by about 4 degrees C. Even so, most Bangkokians will be complaining of the cold, and if they venure to the northeast, they will make special purchases in fahlang thrift shops or expensive department store, depending on their situation in life, of "winter" clothes.





Oh, I should note that not all of them are girls.