A Buddha photo taken on a trip to Sukhothai, Thailand with my wife and brother a few years ago. While I don’t consider myself to be a spiritual person, at least in the traditional sense, I do have to admit to feeling a sense of wonder walking amongst the various artifacts of one of the old Thai Kingdoms (a lot of people don’t realize that Bangkok hasn’t always been the center of activity for Thailand).

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This Buddha picture was taken a few years ago in Sukhothai, Thailand. I didn’t, however, use any real computer special effects to take this particular picture. I dropped the shutter speed way down on the camera to do a long exposure, then I manually zoomed the lens in and out to see what would happen (I did a quick auto correct on Picnik, as I normally do, to clean the picture up a little bit).

Note: The Sukhothai Airport is one of the smallest, but cutest, airports I’ve been to.

Panda bears seem to be the least aggressive of all of the bear species to me. Polar bear attack? Heard of it. Grizzly Bear? Definitely. Even the Malay Sun Bear seems like it could be aggressive towards humans.  But I haven’t heard of any stories (of a wild panda at least) attacking humans.

This photo was taken at the Chiang Mai Zoo in Thailand a few years ago. Believe it or not, the Thai TV stations even have a channel dedicated to the Panda Bears housed at the zoo (the pandas apparently like sleeping a great deal!).

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Koh Liblong is located in the Southern Thailand provinces of Trang. While the beaches aren’t as well-known as the other Southern Beaches (Phuket or Koh Samui), the added benefit is that you don’t have ten million tourists floating around to disrupt your ability to really “get away from it all”.

My wife and I stayed at a eco-friendly resort on Koh Libong, which meant that electricity (powered by a generator) was only available from 8am-5pm; this, of course, meant that hot water was only available during these times as well. The people that ran the resort were super friendly, very simple, and were probably more representative of the real Thailand than you would find in some of the more popular destinations (they ate their meals from what they caught in the sea that day).

One of the best investments I made as far as camera gear goes has been the Olympus Sytlus 790sw. While the camera only has  a depth of about three meters deep, it is more than sufficient to get decent pics of a variety of tropical fish in the waters of Thailand and islands like Koh Phi Phi.

Note:  I am way to chicken to dare try to seal my DSLR properly to take even better underwater pics . Since I am rather clumsy, and probably more lax than I should be when checking things like seals and gaskets, I decided I would rather risk losing a camera worth about $250 USD than losing the amount of money I have invested in my DSLR.

The Simon Cabaret in Phuket, Thailand is a “must see” show if you are visiting Phuket (I probably wouldn’t recommend the show for those traveling with small children).

Most of the performers in the show are Kathoey, or also affectionately known as “ladyboys“. You will often see many of the performers in the show at “Soi Kathoey” later in the night if you’re strolling down Soi Bangla in Patong (and many of the drunk tourists actually mistake them for being originally born as a woman).

This is probably one of the few times I will publish a higher resolution picture on the web, largely because it makes seeing the sea snake easier. While I personally wasn’t afraid of the snake, because I know they would have to bite you somewhere fairly “soft” to inflict lethal damage, the guide started to freak  when this snake got a little “too close for comfort”. I basically took this snap with my Olympus underwater cam, then was whisked away a few seconds later.

Update: I found out this is known as a Banded Sea Krait.

I have another picture of this cute little Paduang hill tribe girl posted in an earlier entry on the blog. She was so cute and relaxed after we stayed and talked to her and her mother for a bit.

I did some minor post processing with Picnik to enhance the colors of her outfit & rings.