Santa's lovely Thai lady helpers at the Kiwi Bar in Bang Chang.25 December - Christmas Day
In is the last remaining minutes of Christmas Day and as I start to write my thoughts from the past 2 days, fireworks are exploding outside my balcony over the beaches of Pattaya, Thailand. Knowing Pattaya as I do, including each New Year's extravagance, this is only a mild warm-up for things to come.
Today however was spent mostly on the road, starting the early morning after breakfast heading south along the coast eventually making my way to the the small village of 'Bang Chang' (Elephant Village), somewhat renowned by expats here for its rather decent selection of golf courses and seafood restaurants along the coast.
Although Bang Chang isn't exactly on the coast, it is positioned on the main highway heading south where roads bisect it to the beaches only minutes away. It is also an industrial town of sorts as it is the nearest village with shopping and the all important row of restaurants and drinking holes for which in is also equally famous as its golf courses.
I most frequently make the 40 minute or so trip south from Pattaya by motorbike taking a shortcut that winds me through amazingly beautiful back roads that include such famous places as 'Buddha Mountain' and 'Silver Lake'. For me the ride is less stressful than the ride down Sukhumvit to the huge airbase/airport of Au Tapao (one spelling) and the Thai Navy headquarters and commercial port of Sattahip.
After many years of living around the Chesapeake Bay of the United States and knowing the laws about only catching male crabs so there would always be a supply, I knew that the Thai's were slowing eliminating one very precious resource from their waters. Other than not eating any however, what was I to do as a guest in their country? They were however delicious and sweet and as the photo above shows, a nice change from the Christmas dinner of rat that I had in Chai Nat only a few years ago or the peanut butter and pancakes in Cambodia even before that. Who knows what next year will bring?
One of the reasons for these daily excursions by motorbike around this part of Thailand was to test my new Nikon camera that I had just bought 2 days before. To put it quite frankly, I was disgusted with my new Fuji camera that I had bought several months earlier in Germany and decided while headed here that these times and photos were just too important so I went back to what I consider to be one of the best cameras made, Nikon.
Having started with digital cameras at the very beginning with a Kodak that cost me over a $1,000USD for less than one mega pixel, I have been through various brands now including Olympus, Sony, Nikon and Fuji. Consistently I have found the Nikons to be far superior to the other brands and as I use to take over 6,000 photos a month when I was in Cambodia and in Thailand over the years, I think I have a pretty good idea about what the output quality of the cameras should be.
I was a fan of the Olympus brand for quite awhile, upgrading the models as they came out but just didn't like and could never get use to the sliding door concept. In Germany some years ago before another trip to the far east, I opted for a decently priced Sony and tried it for awhile. No match for the Olympus models as well. In Cambodia I dipped my toe into the water with my first Nikon which at that time was a 2 mega pixel model. I beat the hell out of it under the roughest conditions imaginable and it has survived to this day and other than having to use tape to keep the battery door shut, it never skipped a beat.
While in Germany however I was convinced by some of my colleagues after their extensive reviews and analysis that the new Fujis were the way to go. Although Germany doesn't have the bright light of Asia, I consistently was plagued with photos that were under or over exposed and far too many blurred photos no matter who or what or where I was shooting.
...more to come...
