I was going to start this post with the traditional Thai greeting, "Swadeesomethingorother" but its honestly quite annoying so I won't do that. It has taken us a little bit of time to really get the hang of Thailand. When we got to Bangkok we were pretty tired and I was sick for a bit, so we stayed in Bangkok for eight days and didn't really do that much. We did see the two major temples, we went on a lovely dinner cruise on the river, and saw one of the infamous cabaret shows (Though to protect our sanity, we picked the family friendly one).

Other than that, we just hung out in the incredible malls and saw a few movies in what could possibly be the best movie theaters on the planet. There is a phenomenon in Bangkok called VIP theater seats. Instead of plain old movie theater seats, you get a big reclining massage chair and there is a full bar with service to your seat. Since the theaters are so nicely refrigerated, you get a nice big blanket and pillow for your chair. Some of the theaters even have people that come around and do neck and shoulder massages before and after the show. Unfortunately, the seat was so comfortable I slept through the first half of Over the Hedge.

The food courts also deserve a special mention. Thais love street food. Thais love air conditioning. Until the invention of the food court, this was a great irreconcilable problem, but no more. So pretty much everyone seems to be eating in the mall these days because you can pick from about 100 different food stalls in air-conditioned mall comfort. They even have clever little debit cards so you don't have to constantly fiddle with small change. It really is kind of odd that the famous giant open air market at Chatuchak (what one thinks of as traditional) is loaded with Chinese, Japanese and western tourists, and all the Thais are in the climate controlled embrace of the shopping malls.

We had some major irritations with cab drivers in Bangkok though. If you're within sight of a tourist destination, its impossible to get a cab driver to take you anywhere for the meter price and they always want to take you to a tailor shop in hopes of getting a comission. Its really irritating, we actually had to get out of six cabs the other day before we found a normal cab ride. When you do find them though, they're a really good deal, as they're a lot cheaper than tuk tuks, and far more survivable. Some even have working seat belts.

Anyhow, we did eventually escape Bangkok and for the last four days we've been diving off of Koh Tao which has been lovely, and I'm finally getting a bit better with air consumption! Tomorrow we head for Krabi and then on to Koh Phi Phi for Heather's birthday. Speaking of whom, it does seem like I've been doing the majority of the long posts recently doesn't it? She mentioned something about the fact that we never blogged anything about our 32 hours in Dubai so I'll see if I can't get her to write something about that. At the very least I'll get her to do a post on her birthday.

Thanks again for reading and especially for the comments and emails about the Africa pictures. That reminds me, we've heard from our parents and friends that there are at least a handful of people out there that are reading this journal that we might not be aware of. If you're one of them, would you mind sending us an email or posting a quick comment to say hello? It can be a bit lonely on the road and we really like hearing from people. There's nothing worse than sitting down in a hot internet cafe and having no e-mail to read. Thanks!

When there was a bombing in Tel Aviv shortly after we left, I didn't think anything of it. When I heard about the bombings in Dahab I felt lucky we weren't there. But now 400 dead dolphins have washed up at Nungwi beach in Zanzibar two weeks after we left, and I'm starting seriously to think that we are somehow leaving disaster in our wake. So maybe we should just stay where we are.

Which, for those of you who are interested, is Harare, the capitol of Zimbabwe. Which honestly, couldn't possibly have much worse happen to it. The inflation here is just silly. We just had pizza for lunch with a couple of cokes. It came to 2.1 million Zimbabwe dollars (about ten US dollars). Which would be fine and all if they had some million dollar notes, or even some hundred thousand dollar notes. Unfortunately, the largest note available is $20,000. There are $50,000 notes, but we haven't managed to get any. Instead we had to pay for our pizza with a stack of 105 bills that was about a half inch thick. I have the equivalent of $40 USD in my bag right now, which is like three inches thick, and must weigh two or three pounds. The funniest part is, all the $20,000 notes have expiration dates, specifically December 31st, 2005. Nobody seems to care. Possibly the most fascinating bit of currency we've come across is a 5 cent coin. It would take 4 million such coins to equal the value of a dollar. People actually use the $20 bills as toilet paper because they cost less than toilet paper. Stunning really. Its not all bad though, the people here are incredibly nice, if a bit pickpockety, and we even found a brewpub last night that served real ale.

Despite any desire we might have to stay in Harare, our truck moves on tomorrow morning to Antelope Park and then Victoria Falls. We have four weeks left on the trip and the week after we'll be figuring out where to go next, which is probably Pad-Thailand. Which sort of gives me an idea...

Perhaps we can make a living by having people pay us not to go to places they like. So, Botswana, we're scheduled to arrive in about a week. If you'd like us to stay away we will happily do so for the bargain basement price of 42 truckloads of Zimbabwean dollars.

This would be a post about what we've been doing in Zanzibar and Malawi, but we're a bit preoccupied with news out of Dahab as we were there for a few weeks in February and grew quite fond of it and the friends we made there. We wish Dahab a speedy recovery, and wish everybody else would quit blowing shit up. It's irritating.