Writings
Thailand Travel Journal, Introduction
My wife and I visited Thailand for almost three weeks in the winter of 2002/2003. While there, I kept a travel journal in which I recorded my experiences and thoughts. After putting a selection of photos from our trip online here at Liminality in late 2003, I intended to edit the travel journal and put it online as a textual accompaniment to the photographs. Time slipped by, though, and it is only now, over two years since the trip and a year and a half since the photographs went live, that I have completed the editing process and am ready to put the journal out there for everyone to see.
There were some days during our trip where I was unable to write, and I often found myself playing catch-up during down time. As a result, the original journal contains entries that are both lengthy and somewhat disjointed. At the very least, they were out of sync with what I was experiencing at the moment, and I was usually writing frantically in an attempt to get everything down before I forgot it. In editing the journal I have divided it up into separate days and rewritten parts to make each day seem like a more or less self-contained unit. Each entry is headed by the date and the place where we started the day. This will hopefully make it easier to follow our adventures.
I also made some additions and changes to the text, as simply rereading the journal was enough to sometimes bring back memories of things I did not originally record. What you see here online today, though, is more or less what I wrote while I was in Thailand. I cannot vouch for consistency in spelling conventions between the journal and galleries, but hopefully any inconsistencies will be minor.
There are links throughout the text to specific photographs in the six Thailand Imagery galleries. I did not link to all the photographs, so if you haven’t seen them you might want to go through the galleries separately to see those photographs that didn’t make it into the text for one reason or another. I also didn’t follow the same order as the galleries, as I sometimes found it convenient to link to a photograph that was actually taken later on (and there were a few instances where the galleries themselves were slightly out of order). At any rate, the photographs should add some color and detail to the text.
The best way to read, obviously, is from the beginning, but here is a list of links to each page (since probably very few people will read this in one sitting). As in other Writings here on Liminality, the first few words on each page link to the previous page and the last few words link to the next page (except for the first and last pages, of course).
24 December 2002, Ao Phang Nga