Additional thoughts about flying Air Canada: the attitude that pervades the in-flight customer service culture at Air Canada is “we are here to protect you from the plane, and to protect the plane from you.” In-flight service is offered as more of a time-consuming distraction, and something for the flight attendants to use to fill up the empty time.

On other airlines in our recent experience — Japan Airlines and Thai Airlines — the attitude is rather different: “we realize that flying is stressful and difficult; we will do what we can to make it less so.”

The one hour flight from Bangkok to Chiang Mai in Thailand on Thai is roughly equivalent, in time and spirit, to the Air Canada flight from Halifax to Boston. The Thai flight provides hot towels, drink service, a very pleasant boxed lunch, and a service of bracing green tea, and costs about $80. The Air Canada flight offers drink service and pretzels and costs about $600.

With Air Canada as an effective monopoly, I don’t hold out great hopes for any dramatic improvement in service in the near future. Unfortunately they are essentially the only airline flying from Charlottetown, so it’s almost guaranteed that one has to fly them several times a year.

Arrived Halifax Airport last night at 8:30 p.m. and drove as far as Amherst before our bodies wore out (warning: if you ever find yourself in a similar situation, don’t think about trying to stop in Springhill, as there are no hotels there!). Left early this morning and drive the short hop (all hops seem short now, compared to Tokyo-San Francisco) to home on Prince St. New furnace was installed by our brilliant plumber in our absence and we’re all ready to have the first real bath in our house since we moved in almost two years ago.

Left Bangkok on Wednesday night, arrived Tokyo on Thursday morning. All thoughts of spending a leisurely day in Tokyo gave way to our need to sleep, something made easier by being put up by Japan Airlines in the Nikko Narita Hotel, right near the airport (spaghetti, hamburger, Coke, juic = $60).

SLept most of our first Thursday, then Tokyo to San Franciso, arriving, oddly enough, Thursday morning at 9:00 a.m. Left San Fran at noon and arrived Toronto at 8:00 p.m. Thursday.

Thus the longest Thursday of our lives.

Mom and brother Mike met us at the airport. The sinus infection I caught at the tail end of our trip seems to have gone, or at least been transferred to Catherine. I’ve thrown out my lower back, though, which should make the final Toronto - Halifax - Charlottetown leg of the trip interesting.

General comment on airline situation: Air Canada is a horrible no good airline with next to no service, esp. when compared to Japan Airlines (which we flew internationally) and Thai Airlines (which we flew in Thailand). The broken down old a/c bus we took from Phitsanulok to Bangkok had better service than the San Francisco to Toronto flight we took last night.

More when we’re back in Charlottetown.

The best 24 hours of our trip so far, I think.

Last night, after reading the section titled “Will I die?” in the Moon Guide to Thailand (where they discuss the issue of eating at restaurants vs. street stalls and suggest that generally no, you won’t die eating from street stalls) we plucked up our courage, diverted from our usual mid-range restaurant tradition, and had the best meal of our trip at the Flying Noodle on the riverfront in Phitsanulok.

The Flying Noodle is not, technically, a street stall — it’s more of a giant street-stall collection with tables and chairs and a television set, all under a tent on the side of the river. We had garlic and basil fried chicken, rice, and a large bottle of Singah beer to split, and the total bill was 120 baht, or about $5 (and, by coincidence, the same amount that Catherine paid at The Oriental Hotel for her bottle of Evian water).

By the way, the reason the Flying Noodle is called such is that if you order fried morning glory, your food is thrown backwards over the head of the chef into a plate held by your waiter standing on top of a ladder on top of a truck. You have to see this to believe it.

Phitsanulok was a very pleasant low-key town and we had a very good time there. As near as we could see we were 3 of about 6 western tourists in the entire city, a nice change from touristy Chiang Mai. This made it difficult to walk down the sidewalk, however, as Oliver was stopped every 6 feet or so to accept greeting from shopkeepers, lottery ticket salespeople, police officers and so on.

This morning we were off to the bus station at 9:00 a.m. The bus station was a confusing place, and we made the apparent mistake of buying tickets from a private bus company rather than the state-owned enterprise. As a result we probably paid a little more, and our bus was a little grotty, though not too bad. Oddly we were fed a meal of rice and chicken, along with a glass of Coke at 9:40 a.m. right after we departed, and then there was no further offer of food nor drink for the rest of the trip (save for a self-catered rest stop about 1/2 way through the trip).

The silver lining of the bus trip was that we were seated beside a young Thai woman and her 5 year old daughter. Oliver and daughter became fast friends, and the two of them alternated between our seats and her mothers. The daughter read Oliver our Thai-language copy of “Country Mouse and City Mouse,” shared her cocoa-puffs and potato chips, played puppets and generally kept Oliver well entertained. Midway through the trip we looked over and found Oliver lounging around on his back with his head on the mother’s lap and daughter playing “paddy cake” with him. They exchanged gifts — Oliver got a flower bracelet and daughter one of Oliver’s finger puppets — and then the trip was over.

It’s days like these that make you realize why it’s so important (and fun) to travel.

We arrived Bangkok 3:00 p.m. and hobbled our way to a taxi, which delivered us directly to our hotel. Bangkok is as hot as we remember, but Oliver’s waitress friends at the hotel coffee shop greeted him like an old friend.

Bangkok ‘til Wednesday, then Thursday in Tokyo, followed by another Thursday in Toronto (I think) and home at the end of the week. Snow!?

Here’s the promised story of Oliver and Peter and the prostitutes: I hadn’t been outside and around and about Chiang Mai (or anywhere else in Thailand) until the other night when I went to the Night Market while Catherine and Oliver slept. Without Oliver in tow, I found Thailand to be a much “seedier” place at night — lots more people trying to seel me things, get me places, etc.

At I also bumpde up against the edges of the so-called “sex tourism” industry — only insofar as I was gently propositioned from across the street several times — “hey, looking for a good time” sort of thing, much as you would find in downtown Toronto, and certainly not a big problem.

The next afternoon, wee Oliver and I were around and about alone while Catherine visited a craft shop, and who should we run into but a similar gaggle of “good time girls,” during their off-hours, eating at an outdoor cafe. They spied Oliver and googled over him, ran over to talk to him, asked how old he was, and generally couldn’t get enough of him. It was a totally different side of the same group of people; certainly went a long ways to humanizing the sex trade for me.

The fringe benefit of all this is that Oliver can say honestly that he visited with his first prostitutes before he was even 2 years old.

Brief update today — slow Internet in the heat of the midday while Catherine and Oliver are out at the playground. We are here in Phitsanulok, a small town halfway between Chiang Mai in the north and Bangkok in the south. We arrived yesterday by train, a pleasant journey save a minor freakout by Oliver at the crossover point from mountains to rice paddies.

We’re staying in a hotel of faded luxury — perhaps once the best hotel in town but now, alas, good mostly for its location, 1 block from the train station. But we have a TV, so I can keep up to date on my new addiction to the nightly soap opera that airs on Channel 7 just after supper.

This morning we visited the famous folk museum, which has an interesting collection of older Thai artifacts, and which bears a striking resemblance to the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit for its attempt to catalogue “everyday life” though record players, musical intstruments, household appliances and the like. Acrossthe road, run by the same retired army officer, is a bronze casting plant, also an interesting visit. Only once our visiting was done did we realize that we’d not provided for a ride back into town, about 2km up the road. We were saved by a pedal rickshaw driver who pedalled all 400-odd pounds of us back to the centre of town for 40 baht (about $1.50). Catherine is sure we took years off his life.

For lunch today we visited the restaurant of the competing faded luxury hotel in town, the Pailyn. Their operation is somewhat less faded, and the food was very good. Oliver, as per usual, was swept away from us and entertained by about 15 waitresses, cooks, barmen and concierges. He got a tour of the kitchen and of the entire back office, and cried and cried and cried when we had to leave.

This afternoon we’re off to the local temple, reputed to have the most significant images in all of Thailand. Tomorrow it’s back to Bangkok. More later.

Steve’s sons say that Linux isn’t big here in Thailand. And indeed all of the Internet cafes that I’ve visited so far have been Windows-based.

But here in the cafe in Chiang Mai, it’s 100% Linux: about 20 terminals all running Caldera OpenLinux. And it works. Well. I’m typing this in Netscape under Linux, and it looks better than it does on my home PC.

By the way, Steve is writing his online column for the Bangkok Post next week about Travelling with Children, using our experiences with wee Oliver as a jumping off point. Stay tuned. You can read this weeks column to learn more about how Steve was buried at the Oriental Hotel this week.

This is my final report from the northern frontier in the small city of Chiang Mai (actually, it’s a rather large city, at least by Prince Edward Island standards). I’m sitting here in the air conditioned comfort of Cafe Internet, listening to a combination of the roar of tuk tuks and other traffic and some sort of steamy Thai soap opera in the background.

When we first thought of coming to Chiang Mai I was afraid it would be like Hamilton to Bangkok’s Toronto — a “junior city” with nothing in particular to recommend it (I grew up near Hamilton; it’s a nice place, but why would you ever want to visit?).

I need not have feared: Chiang Mai has a character all its own. Because it is built around an historic “old city” (still surrounded by a moat, and remnants of the old walls), it has an indentifiable downtown area, which gives it the sort of focus that you can’t find in sprawling Bangkok. You can actually walk around to tour Chiang Mai (although with the heat and the pollution, we’ve tried to avoid this) as everything is relatively close together.

For some odd reason, the government here in Chiang Mai decided to do away with public transit at some point in the recent future; the result is fleet of tuk tuks (three-wheeled LPG-fired motorcycles with a bench seat and roof) and pickup truck cum taxis, with bench seats on either side of the bed, and a roof overhead. The result is a lot of noise, a lot of pollution (not quite on Bangkok levels, yet), but also the ability to get anywhere, anytime, for about a dollar or less. Of course travelling in the back of an open pickup truck with motorcycles weaving in and around and the odd giant Japanese tour bus looming large is somewhat more frantic an experience than taking the TTC, but it works.

The night market in the city (literally a market that opens around 4:00 p.m. every night the length of the next street over from here) is the focus for a lot of traveller services: there are travel agents, tour companies, coffee shops, and so on, scattered all over the place. There’s even a giant artificial rock climbing wall. It’s not genuine Thai, but then again it’s hard to identify what that means anyway.

At the other end of the alley from our Guest House is a small travel/tour agency that we’ve used twice this week. The first time was yesterday on our tour of the crafts strip; today we used them again for a trip up into the mountains for the “Elephants at Work” tour. This was a straight-ahead touristic experience (this is a common adjective in tourist-oriented publications here, usually used in the negative sense, like “must less touristic,” when a tour costs more). We drove 45 minutes north of the city to the elephant grounds, which were actually quite amazing: just the sort of “lush tropical paradise” you would imagine to find in Thailand.

We arrived just before the crush of other tourists, and thus were able to go immediately to the elephant riding area, and additional cost, but one we felt obligated to bear given possible later scorn from Oliver of the “you took me all the way to see the elephants and didn’t let me ride one?”. Riding an elephant — a first for all three of us — was considerably more thrilling than we thought (my adjective: Catherine might use “terrifying”). We were up and down the side of the mountain, through a rushing stream, and back to base; took about 30 minutes. We were perched behind the driver in a little gondola that was strapped to the elephant’s back.

It was only mid-elephant-ride that we realized that we’d forgotten to pack extra film, so the experience won’t be well documented: we only had six snaps left on the camera. It will live on in our minds, however (no doubt Oliver will have dramatic elephants dreams until he’s 29).

After the thrill ride there was an interesting, although somewhat too circus-like “elephants at work” show, which nonetheless did impress for the sheer flexibility of the animals.

Post-elephant we stopped at an orchid and butterfly farm on our way down the mountain, and then back to town for a rest.

This afternoon Catherine and Oliver hired a car to take them out to another hill tribe craft coop while I wandered around town, checked email, read the paper and generally enjoyed some time alone.

Once it got dark, we hailed a tuk tuk and headed way, way across town (I know it was way, way across town as this was the negotiating tactic used by the tuk tuk driver to get me from 30 baht to 50 baht — roughly 1 dollar to about $1.50) to visit the Central Department Store, the only place we’ve seen diapers in quantities larger than the 4-packs you can buy at 7-11 (which is a hugh chain here; they even have a mail order catalogue where you can buy fridges and lawnmowers). The ride back was a much steeper 80 baht (about 4 dollars), but it’s hard to argue when you’re way, way across town!

Tomorrow we’re up early to take the train to Phitsanulok, a city midway between here and Bangkok. We’ll overnight there, or nearby, perhaps visit some ruins at Sukhothai, and then back to Bangkok on Sunday for a last couple of days before heading back to Canada on Wednesday.

This morning we took an organized craft tour, visiting a series of different factory shops along a particular road out of Chiang Mai that is known for this. In our case “organized” meant that it was the driver, a guide, and the three of us. And the guide looked after Oliver for the duration (I think he fell in love), so we were free to roam.

Despite our initial skepticism about the whole “see the workers, tour the air conditioned showroom, buy stuff” model, we had quite a nice time, and ended up buying some very nice pieces.

This afternoon Catherine made her own way to a hill tribe handcraft coop while Oliver and I slept and then visited with some prostitutes. But that’s another story.

There’s nothing like looking in on the snow-encrusted streets of Charlottetown, via the IslandCam while sitting in the swelter of northern Thailand. Makes the whole Internet thing appear even more freaky than it usually does.