This has been a week of visitors and local sightseeing around the Monterey Peninsula for me. My sister wanted to see whales when she arrived in town. We drove to Point Pinos in Pacific Grove and saw spouts from at least six whales immediately upon arrival to the beach. I pulled out the binoculars and my sister and I watched gray whales heading south. The gray whale migration is in progress to Baja.

I’ll get back to regular posting on Loyalty Traveler by Wednesday, December 28. The weather is so gorgeous that I am spending all my waking hours out and about and unchained to my computer.

Brown pelican at Monterey Fisherman's Wharf.

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This year we are staying home in Monterey for the holiday season and welcoming family to our locale. That means hotel stays, restaurant dinners and outdoor activities. Our ten day weather forecast for the Monterey Peninsula shows no rain and temperatures in the mid-60s next weekend. This has been a gorgeously clear sky December on the central coast of California.

Many visitors come to Monterey for the Monterey Bay Aquarium on the famed Cannery Row. Here is my photo walk along the less touristed southeastern half of Monterey’s Cannery Row named after John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel.

Cannery Row Monterey

Cannery Row is a half-mile stretch of oceanfront road on the northwest end of Monterey. A century ago this parcel of Monterey developed canneries for processing sardines from Monterey Bay to feed the world. The street was called Ocean View Avenue up until 1958 when the name changed to Cannery Row in honor of the novel by Monterey County’s John Steinbeck. The road name is still Ocean View Blvd. in Pacific Grove where the town line begins just west of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

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Passports with Purpose is currently running its last week of fundraising to raise $80,000 for building two libraries in Zambia. After 9 full days of raffle ticket sales the donation mark is only $25,000 or 31% of the way to this year’s goal.

Please contribute $10 if you can.

Hyatt Gold Passport sponsored Loyalty Traveler this year with a prize of 110,000 Hyatt Gold Passport points. Top hotels in the Hyatt chain offer a free night for 22,000 points. There are also about 10% of Hyatt’s nearly 500 hotels globally in the category 1 rewards group for only 5,000 points per night.

My World in a Library

I grew up as a dependent child of a U.S. Army sergeant. Nearly every year our family moved to a new military base and I attended a different school. I had attended 12 schools by the end of 10th grade. Many of the details of those towns and military bases have been forgotten. My most vivid memories tend to be the home where I lived temporarily and the local library.

Books were my anchor.

In the desert of southern New Mexico on the White Sands Missile Range I read Mark Twain’s  Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn novels and developed the wanderlust motivating me and other middle school friends to hike into the Organ Mountains and explore mountain streams and valleys and old mines.

In Germany when I was 14 I scoured U.S. military base libraries around the country for the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hermann Hesse and Jack Kerouac. Occasionally I could raise the money to buy a colorfully covered English langauage novel from a German bookstore, but that was an infrequent event. Libraries kept my house filled with books and music I could not afford, but I could take books home and experience places and ages while reading books in my possession two weeks at a time.

Libraries gave me access to books and places and experiences I might never have dreamed otherwise.

I found my dreams in books. Words let me access the world and the ages, no matter where I was living.

Los Angeles Public Library with 'Library Tower' skyscraper in background.

“Books invite all, they constrain none.” is saying etched in stone above the Los Angeles Public Library door.

Related post: Win 110,000 Hyatt Gold Passport points with a $10 Purpose. (Nov 30)

Daraius Dubash at MillionMileSecrets.com has published a number of interviews with travel bloggers on his website and now glimpses of me are online in his post “Earn and burn your miles and points.”

I guess I should have talked up hotels more. Being in new places and seeing how people live and work in different environments and cultures is still my primary objective for travel. Nice hotels are a bonus.

My favorite question from Daraius was “What would your readers be surprised to know about you?”

Here is another thing I realized is characteristic of my travels. I spend a lot of time in grocery stores wherever I go. I buy most of my food at stores and prepare it myself when traveling. That keeps travel expenses way down.

While I generally can’t talk much about fine dining and hotel restaurants, I have extensive experience with grocery store shopping in many countries.

Grocery shopping in Australia.

Yesterday I flew SFO to ORD on an American Airlines 757. The flight was totally booked and I had a middle seat. As if that were not bad enough I had this additional seat handicap with my tray.

Brother can you loan me a tray for my drink on this four hour flight?

Nobody told me there’d be days like these. Strange days indeed. - John Lennon

A couple of weeks ago there was a Tip/Wag segment on the Colbert Report praising Spirit Airlines new revenue stream with its $14 million flying billboard ads on the exterior of Spirit Airlines planes. The piece got me thinking about how hotels could place large billboard ads on the exterior of their hotels, particularly for the side of the building that does not offer the preferred view for the hotel.

I had planned to write this up as a satirical piece.

Tip of the Hat to J.W. Marriott L.A. Live for promoting alcohol in the area of the city’s highest concentration of homeless people.

No need for satire since this practice is alive and well in Los Angeles where an 18-floor high Bud Light advertisement covers a large portion of one side of the J.W. Marriott. Here is a photo link from www.banbillboardblight.org showing the Bud Light billboard on the side of the J.W. Marriott L.A. Live. I wanted to snap my own photo, but I was entering the freeway in a rainstorm when I saw the Bud Light image.

Downtown Los Angeles – Homeless capital of the USA

I was in Downtown Los Angeles this past weekend for Blog World Expo 2011. This was the first time I have been in Downtown LA since 1977. Perhaps the centerpiece of the downtown revitalization plan is L.A. Live, a $2.5 billion entertainment complex with theaters, restaurants, music and sports venues and hotels including the J.W. Marriott and Ritz-Carlton situated next to the events center and Los Angeles Convention Center.

Ritz-Carlton and J.W. Marriott at L.A. Live - Downtown Los Angeles

I stayed at the Sheraton Downtown, about six blocks north of the L.A. Live complex. My first night in Los Angeles I went walking randomly around the streets to see what downtown L.A. looked like these days. The architecture was striking.

Los Angeles Public Library 1925 - U.S. Bank Tower (Library Tower) 1989

Los Angeles Central Library was built in 1925 on the site of the 1898 California State Normal School (college for teacher education). The Central Library building was devastated April 29, 1986 in an arson fire that destroyed 370,000 books and documents. The city of Los Angeles allowed the tallest skscraper on the west coast to be erected as part of the funding for the Downtown Los Angeles library restoration.

Los Angeles Public Library 1925

Across from the library is Bunker Hill, the center of the Los Angeles financial industry.

Bunker Hill skyscrapers are center of financial district in downtown Los Angeles.

Library Tower is the local name for the U.S. Bank 73-story skyscraper. This is the tallest skyscraper on the west coast at 1,017 feet.

U.S. Bank Tower, aka Library Tower (1989)

There is a lovely fountain winding down between skyscrapers and a grand stairway or escalators for the steep climb up Bunker Hill. There was no running water in the fountain and apparently I didn’t even take a photo of the stairs. I was too busy looking skyward.

At this point I could have asked directions to the Walt Disney Concert Hall which is considered an architectural beauty designed by Frank Gehry. But I didn’t.

I am a wanderer and I didn’t pull out my phone to check directions. I just started walking and within a few blocks I had left the skyscrapers and found myself in the streets of no name people. I was kind of hoping to find Los Angeles City Hall and see what the LA Occupy movement looked like. There was no need to find an encampment of people around City Hall.

I walked across Main Street in downtown Los Angeles where the street addresses change from the urban upscale west side addresses loaded with fine dining restaurants, hotels, shops and banks to the east side addresses where the racial makeup of the people on the streets was predominantly black and the businesses are primarily liquor stores, corner markets, city public works services and food banks.

The activist saying “Occupy Every Street” is something that has obviously been happening around Los Angeles long before September 17, 2011 launched the Occupy Wall Street movement. Block after block I walked was filled with homeless men and women living on the sidewalks. There were literally thousands of people who were living in tents, blankets, plastic tarps and cardboard shelters.

A gesture of kindness and salvation appeared as a dinner meal on the sidewalk. A dozen people who had been resting alongside the walls of buildings converged on four large foil food containers. I happened to be walking past just as the first person was removing foil from one of the lids and I saw it filled with spaghetti. I wanted to take a photo, but thought I should let people get their meal with dignity and anonymity. Looking around I saw at least a dozen more people trying to cross the street in the middle of the block to get a portion before the food trays emptied.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did. It never will." - Los Angeles Library fountain.

There are no photos to share of this walk down East 5th Street to South Central and back to the west side of downtown LA along East 6th Street. This probably ranked in my Top 10 for walks in places where keeping it real could have gone real bad.

Google Maps - Los Angeles Mission

I just have this innate desire to see how people live where ever I go and sometimes that compels me to go places where most locals will tell you to avoid.

Nobody bothered me and nobody asked me for a handout despite being surrounded by so many needy people. People were living their lives on the streets, socially interacting – or not. Many of the individuals on the streets were visibly wasted, many just looked sickly and hungry.

Mostly there were men on the streets, but probably about 10% to 20% women on some streets. Only a small proportion of people on these streets were non-black guys among the thousands of people on the sidewalks.

Outside the Los Angeles Mission were hundreds of people lined up for dinner service. The LA Mission website states 73,489 homeless people are living in the Los Angeles area. I estimate I saw a few thousand of them in the 20 or so blocks I walked.

The concierge at the Sheraton Club Lounge told me the downtown LA area is so much nicer without all the homeless people who used to be around a decade ago. Perhaps he hadn’t walked a few blocks east of the hotel in some years.

Los Angeles theater on South Los Angeles Street, Downtown LA.

Turns out that back on the west side of these numbered avenues are loads of nightclubs. On Saturday night when I met up with BoardingArea bloggers RoadWarriorette, The Wandering Aramean and AAdvantage Geek, we walked about ten blocks from a nightclub where there was the closing evening Blog World Expo party back to the Westin Bonaventure. We passed hundreds of young partiers, the majority being Asian, dressed for entertainment at clubs with $10 drinks and long entry lines where you might get in if you are part of the select crowd.

On my walk back to the Sheraton Hotel alone on a Saturday night at midnight I passed by three different groups where a nicely dressed young woman was getting sick on the sidewalk as her friends surrounded her trying to help.

The juxtaposition of young, apparently well-to-do women coming into downtown LA to party and have a good time to only find themselves out on the sidewalk unable to stand and sick on the streets while a few blocks to the east there are thousands of people struggling with life on the streets made an impression.

Downtown Los Angeles

Sunday morning I left downtown Los Angeles to drive home to Monterey.

The last image I saw of downtown LA was the J.W. Marriott at L.A. Live and an 18-story Bud Light billboard on the outside of the luxury hotel as I entered the 110 freeway.

Honestly, I was glad to be leaving downtown LA.

Fort Ord Dunes State Park is a beach wilderness park established in 2009 on the shore of Monterey Bay a couple of miles north of the city of Monterey. The Fort Ord Dunes park encompasses almost 1,000 acres of shoreline west of Highway 1. These dunes in the former Fort Ord military base had beach rifle ranges during the 1970s when I was a teenager living in Marina, the adjacent town north of Fort Ord.

Here is a photo walk of my stomping grounds around Monterey as I walked north from Sand City to Fort Ord Dunes State Park a couple of weeks ago.

View of mountains beyond mountains from Edgewater Shopping Center, Sand City, CA

Edgewater Shopping Center in Sand City is one of the biggest changes in the Monterey area since 1980. This is where the local Costco is located.

Many California cities are unrecognizable after the past thirty years of growth with population doubling, tripling, and even more since 1980. This is what happened in Salinas, California a dozen miles inland from Monterey Bay.

The towns of Monterey, Pacific Grove, Seaside and Marina along the shores of Monterey Bay have basically not increased population at all. Monterey actually had a population decline in the past decade.

This area is beautiful with forests of Monterey pines and Cypress trees up to the shoreline.  Beauty comes with a high price. There are few job opportunities and a high cost of living. This is a place where the Highway 1 traffic jams result from workers driving in the morning to the Monterey Peninsula cities for restaurant, hotel and tourism jobs and leaving in the afternoon to go home to places where they can afford to live.

View of Monterey Peninsula from Sand City.

Sand City beach path looking south to Monterey. (Best Western Monterey Beach hotel is located directly on beach.)

Fort Ord is where I was born. The army base was the largest military base in the country to be closed at the time it officially shut down in September 1994. The closure impacted my family when my parents relocated to another area to be near military medical facilities.

Highway 1 Mileage Marker near Seaside High School.

Sand dunes are the prominent coastal feature between Monterey and the Elkhorn Slough in Moss Landing in the center of the Monterey Bay crescent. I spent hours upon hours walking through the sand dunes north of Fort Ord between Marina and Castroville when I was a student at Seaside High School in the 70s.

The 1970s were an environmentally destructive time for beach dunes outside the military base too in those years. Beach parties were a regular event in the Marina dunes and the popular entertainment was partying around bonfires while watching people try to drive trucks to the top of steep sand dunes.

Marina Beach was designated a state park in the 1980s. Large portions of the sand dunes areas are off-limits to allow plant restoration and reduce erosion.

View from Sand City north along Monterey Bay.

Monterey Bay sign: Danger - unstable cliffs.

Only in the last couple of years did I learn that our prominent sand dunes and landscaping feature called “iceplant”, abundant around Monterey Bay, is a non-native invasive species primarily native to South Africa and Chile. I don’t know why it is called iceplant, but if you have ever driven on it, you might realize why it has the name. There are hundreds of species and at certain times of the year they produce colorful flowers.

Flowering iceplant on Santa Cruz shoreline

I have stunning pictures of vibrant purple iceplant flowers in Pacific Grove, but I couldn’t locate them for this post. I noticed the other day I have 120,000 photos on my portable hard drive. I need hundreds of hours to catalog all those photos.

Monterey Bay from Marina to Sand City is a popular place for hang-gliding. The winds blow steadily here much of the year. Fog is common and the summer months tend to be the foggiest months. October to April is our best weather in between rain storms blowing in from the Pacific. When I look back over years of photos I am always struck by the clarity of the air in January.

Tip for photographers is to come to Monterey Bay and Big Sur in winter as long as you come in between the Pacific winter storms. This is central coast California and sometimes the daytime temperature in winter even hits the 80s. September and October tend to be the warmest months if the fog isn’t present. Our warm weather streak in 2011 was three days in the 80s the week after I took this beach dunes walk.

bike path in Sand City

Portions of the bike path through Sand City are regularly bulldozed to remove sand covering the path after strong winds.

Keep out of fragile beach dunes to allow plant restoration.

It had been some time since I had the kind of alone time I found in Fort Ord Beach Dunes.

Restored dune plants in Fort Ord Dunes State Park.

shared bike and walking path through Fort Ord Dunes State Park.

Fort Ord Dunes State Park

Mt. Whitney is the tallest peak in the 48 states at 14,505 ft. That is one big mountain. And I helped move Mt. Whitney this summer to a new location in California – on Google Maps!

One of the effects of my July ‘Brokeass Mountain tour’ road trip from Monterey, California to Denver, Colorado and back was a couple of hours time spent studying Google Maps and satellite images of the western U.S.

Mt. Whitney, California is one landmark on Google Maps that I noticed was glaringly out of place with its marker directly in the boundaries of Yosemite National Park.

Google Maps (July 2011) showed Mt. Whitney (west of A pin) in Yosemite National Park.

[click on image to see full size]

On the right side bottom of a Google Map is a link to report a problem. I submitted to Google the problem of Mt. Whitney being located about 100 or so miles north on Google Maps of its actual location in the California Sierra Nevada mountain range.

Google Maps emailed me yesterday to state Mt. Whitney has been relocated on Google Maps.

Google Maps shows Mt. Whitney west of Lone Pine, California (November 2011).

When people ask me what I did last summer, I can honestly say I moved a mountain.

Google Maps - Mt. Whitney, California satellite image (Nov 2011)

The fastest growing hotel brand in the U.S. appears to be the recently launched Occupy chain popping up in central city locations all around the country. The room rate can’t be beat and no advance reservations required. The Occupy brand has definitely experienced unrivaled growth in the past six weeks with new U.S. properties being constructed nearly every night and simultaneously growing an international presence too. No ADR statistics probably keeps Smith Travel Research from documenting the rise of this immensely popular start-up hotel chain.

Occupy is an extremely limited-service brand. Guests should probably think of it more as a self-service brand. Just show up, and pitch in at a property near you. This is more hostel than resort and you do need to bring your own bedding.

Welcome to The Plaza at City Hall, Oakland, California

Friday, October 28 I arrived at the Plaza in downtown Oakland, California shortly after noon. I did not know what to expect when I stepped out of the BART station at 12^th Street/Oakland City Center. The subway had been traveling underground since the last stop at Lake Merritt.

A sign pointed to ‘Hotel’ and I walked in that direction. My phone map showed the Marriott Hotel Oakland nearby.

Oakland City Center

The last time I was in downtown Oakland was 2004 when Kelley and I did a 5K Walk for Hope cancer fundraiser marching the streets with hundreds of others. While I signed us up for the walk as an excuse to earn 10,000 HHonors points while donating to a charitable cause, the reality for the need of cancer fundraising hit home after Kelley spent nearly all of 2009 in cancer treatment.

Kelley survived and is cancer free. Cancer treatment often costs several hundred thousand dollars. Her Kaiser Hospital insurance coverage kept our out-of-pocket expenses to just a few thousand dollars. And we are still trying to recover financially from the lost income with her nine months out of work.

Emerging into the bright daylight from underground and surrounded by tall buildings had me disoriented. There were no crowds of people in City Center; just some café patio diners and a few people sitting on benches near the fountain pool. Nothing here was familiar to me. I headed to the first street I could find. Turned out I was standing across the street from City Hall and the newly reconstructed Plaza hotel.

Oakland City Hall

Oakland 1852 flag on City Hall

The Plaza hotel across from Oakland City Hall was demolished three days earlier after the city cited the property for health and safety issues. Unfortunately, while New York is the flagship Occupy property in this hot new brand, the Occupy Oakland property gained global notoriety this week when Scott Olsen, a former marine and Iraq war veteran suffered a head injury in a tragic incident on Tuesday, October 25 as guests were evicted from the condemned Plaza.

Undaunted by the setback, workers and guests were rebuilding and readying the Plaza facilities and accommodations for the anticipated influx of more weekend guests.  One wing of the Plaza was kind of crowded, but there was still room to construct more rooms.

Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, Occupy Oakland

Walking around the Plaza revealed a lounge area with food. Selections included the usual hotel lounge fare of sliced breads, fruit including apples, oranges and grapes, pretzels and more.

I wondered if there would be hot items in the evening?

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are actually quite filling when you just don’t have the desire or the cash for a full restaurant meal at one of the many formal dining establishments in the immediate vicinity of the Occupy Oakland Plaza hotel.

The Plaza Oakland kitchen food selection in early afternoon.

In many respects Occupy properties are adult oriented, but The Plaza Oakland has kid-friendly activities too. A Kids Zone area in one corner of the Plaza is a no-smoking zone. The kid zone had no activity at the time I visited, but a large sign indicated the space offered arts, crafts, books and fun.

Kid Zone at the Plaza, Occupy Oakland

The presence of a group numbering 50 to 75 people initially attracted me to the small crowd under the oak trees. And the fact that two large California live oaks provided the primary shade available at the Plaza at 1:00pm on a cloudless mid-70s October day in Oakland.

In the shade of the trees three speakers explained basic work assignments and procedures for handling guest services and safety around the Plaza. While sometimes difficult to distinguish the front office staff from the guests, I had found my way to the administrative headquarters located beneath the large oaks. The multiethnic front staff for the Plaza exemplified a high level of organization with one woman and two males sharing presentation duties and discussing job openings at the Plaza.

The Plaza managers accepted applications from volunteers to fill work roles, primarily for the busy evening reception. There were many roles to fill like mediators, timekeepers, notekeepers, peace keepers and crowd controllers. They successfully recruited a dozen or so industrious individuals into a variety of worker roles and immediately started training the new workers to help facilitate the large number of guests expected to arrive later that evening for a general assembly conference. Some arriving guests were expected to stay the night and through the weekend, possibly even longer.

Administrative center of the Plaza Oakland.

The first aid station was located between the oak trees and the semi-circular open-air convention courtyard on the steps.

Oakland Plaza's First Aid Center

Like most of my hotel reviews I did find some unsatisfactory aspects of the Oakland Plaza hotel. My main complaint while walking around the physical facilities of the Plaza was the lack of toilets to accommodate the needs of the large number of guests the Plaza accommodates in peak periods. I was told by one residential guest there were toilets at the Oakland Plaza hotel last week, but all the toilets were removed Tuesday, October 26 by city public service workers hours after the original Plaza hotel was condemned and demolished.

Oakland Plaza and City Hall.

I read today that teachers from the Oakland Education Association assisted with the return of nine toilets to the Plaza yesterday. While appearing too late for my stay, that sanitation improvement alone definitely earns the Oakland Plaza hotel an extra star in its lodging rating.

Like many fine hotels, the Oakland Plaza library has dozens of books available for guest check-out. When tired of all the oral encounters occupying your hours, you can lose yourself in written words just in case you are unable to sleep the night away.

Library at The Plaza Oakland

I expected far more music than I heard during my stay at the Plaza. In fact, there did not seem to be a whole lot happening and I was thinking about checking out the Marriott Hotel. Then I stopped to listen to a public speaker engaging an audience with an intellectual discourse on current conditions and the U.S. economy.

The small crowd politely listened as he spoke knowledgeably on current affairs for 30 minutes or so.

Sitting on the steps in the mid-day sun gave me the opportunity to listen in on multiple conversations. Like many new hotels the Plaza had its media and camera shutter bugs hanging out looking for some celebrity guest to film. I happened to be seated in a great location. One camera crew set up right in front of me and interviewed a disgruntled guest who had a bad experience at the Plaza earlier in the week. His arm was in a cast. Apparently he was another casualty of the Plaza hotel closure Tuesday. He shared his story with several media journalists.

While the stay might be free for some guests, other guests at Occupy Oakland pay huge incidental fees for expenses like hospital treatment, bail and the potential loss of job.

I heard this guy’s description of the Santa Rita jail setting a couple of times and the thumbs down image chilled me on experiencing those downgraded Dublin city accommodations. I’ll try and stick with Hyatt Place Dublin when traveling in the East Bay I-580/I-680 corridors. Although I do recall discussion about the possibility of opening an Occupy hotel property in Walnut Creek.

I was sitting and talking to another extended stay guest of the Plaza and she was telling me about her life troubles with things like how she lost her job a few years ago due to injury and her disability checks are getting smaller while food gets more expensive. She says she used to weigh 20 pounds more. Her friends now give her food since she obviously is losing weight in their eyes.

Suddenly there was a commotion as a big guy came walking through the Plaza surrounded by camera flashes, applause and fanfare.

The arrival of a VIP at the Oakland Plaza.

This guy in front of Oakland City Hall was totally mobbed by a flash crowd. People standing all around began chanting “Give the man some space. Media sit down!” over and over for a couple of minutes before media actually sat down to let the man be seen and speak.

Flashmob around the VIP in front of Oakland City Hall.

Someone even set up a microphone and amplifier so he could be clearly heard by the crowd that was probably over 1,000 by the time he spoke to the Plaza guests for about 45 minutes. People seemed to like what he had to say considering the number of times there was applause.

At one point during his talk there was an explosive bang somewhere off the Plaza that caught everyone’s attention. Guns and grenades are sounds heard too often in these parts. The speaker commented on how little the crowd reacted to the sound.

Someone in the crowd yelled out, “Welcome to Oakland!”

Free posters were being given away to Plaza guests.

Someone in the crowd asked the guy if he could get Michael Moore to make a film of what was happening. He responded Michael Moore wasn’t necessary since there were already tens of thousands of documentarians working on the history of Occupy. Apparently the guy speaking had Hollywood connections, although you wouldn’t know it by the way he was dressed in shorts, t-shirt and hoodie as he addressed the crowd.

Then again, I was dressed in a similar way as a guest at the Oakland Plaza Friday. But without the hoodie.

And while I enjoyed my stay, I didn’t spend the night at the Plaza either.

I didn't hear many demands, but I heard and saw a long list of needs.

Apparently this start-up Occupy chain is not well funded by Wall Street or a lucrative IPO.

Here is a musical selection I think fits well with my stay at the Oakland Plaza.

“How’s that bricklayin’ coming?

How’s your engine running?

Is that bridge getting built?

Are your hands getting filled?

Won’t you tell me my brother

Cause there are stars, up above

We can start, moving forward”

(video link) ‘Lost in my Mind’ – The Head and the Heart

In 2004 I was an unemployed public school teacher in California, fed up with my inability to find a job as the recession was taking hold in California, and thinking I would write a book on using frequent flyer programs to travel the world inexpensively.

I had United Airlines Mileage Plus 1K status and an opportunity to pick up 85,000 redeemable miles and 17,000 EQM from a single $550 ticket to Bangkok, Thailand when Mileage Plus gave 4x miles to members who signed up before the promotion was corrected based on their promotion wording screwup for a 3x miles offer.

Today I came across some diary entries from that Bangkok trip while trying to find my Excel tables on hotel-points-to-miles exchange rates. Yesterday I watched a couple of stories on PBS News Hour and BBC World News on the current flooding in Bangkok. Here is a Huffington Post piece from last week on the Thailand flooding.

Bangkok Diary February 2004

At breakfast in the Westin Grande Sukhumvit lounge I listened to a couple of American doctors discussing how they were going to speak frankly about sexual transmission of AIDS to the Thai government officials they were meeting at a conference in Bangkok.  They decided on a strategy of directness with an attempt to not be insulting.

The newspaper articles I read this week said a move has been on since 2001 to scale back the sex trade in Thailand and beginning March 1, 2004 there will be greater restrictions on the legal hours of nightclubs and bars.  Apparently the entertainment areas used to run all night long.

There was also a move to set a 10 PM curfew for children under the age of 18, unless accompanied by their parents, to try and reduce the child prostitution and immoral influence of night culture on teenagers.  Both these impending laws are receiving some protest by the affected groups.  Teenagers complain of the difficulty for legitimate activities as social birthdays, night classes, and sports often occur after the hour of 10pm and their parents are frequently too busy to accompany them.

There was a news story about female workers in textile trades making 400 to 1,000 Baht ($10-25) a month for 70 hour work weeks in sewing sweatshops with limited toilet privileges. Too many people are waiting to take their jobs, so they have no option to complain.

There were a couple of articles about Mimi Driver visiting workers this past week while touring Bangkok on her way to Cambodia.  The Royal Family of Sweden and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands also passed through Bangkok recently and visited shelters during their stays with the Thai Royal family.

City Shopping 

I walked down an alley after leaving MBK shopping center which I thought would take me directly over to the parallel street leading to another shopping center where I’d seen an internet cafe.  It started out being a typical small alley with food vendors, stray dogs and cats, and workers pushing carts of goods and foods.

Bangkok alley

There was a local elementary school on my left behind a large metal gate. I could see through the metal gate and inside the large open doors about 100 feet from the alley were 50 children sitting on the classroom floor chanting.  A couple of women were bringing a cart of aromatic hot food through the metal school gate as I passed.

As I walked between high metal walls the alley way narrowed until it was only a paved sidewalk two feet wide, and soon after, the pavement was gone altogether.  There were dozens of dwellings constructed of corrugated aluminum, plywood, and scraps of board pieced together into a mosaic of a dwelling wall.  Inside the dark rooms I saw toddlers playing on the floors, women sewing shirts, men fixing motorbikes, children and families preparing meals and doing dishes.

There was no electricity and as I walked deeper into this maze of slum dwellings the alley was just wide enough for one person to move by at a time without stepping off into the mud.

There were several men digging a ditch and laying pipe along one portion of the alley.  They had no motorized machinery.  They used hand spades to cut a trench about 30 feet along.  One of the workers looked to be a boy, 12 or so. They were up to their knees in water and I watched them for a minute.  One of the men smiled and motioned to me to join them in digging.  I laughed and told them the work looked too hard for me.  I doubt anyone understood me.

There was another group of men nearby sitting in the shade, talking and playing cards.  I was at the point where I thought I should be coming out to the major road I was heading toward, but the straight narrow alley had closed in completely and I had to make a right turn along the path.  Haphazard structures closed in around me as I continued along the alley.

I had a choice to either turn around or venture on.

This urban slum in the middle of one of Bangkok’s most upscale shopping districts attracted me. Most of the people I passed smiled at me, and there were hundreds of them looking out from their little, dark rooms. I had that feeling of being in a place that could be dangerous, yet at the same time feeling these people were not going to bother me as I passed by their homes.

I ventured on.

There was a small clearing in the jumble of shacks with a playground placed in the shade of two large trees.  Several kids were swinging on the swingset and just being kids laughing and smiling in play.

A tiny old woman sat in a little metal chair watching the children play.  This slum appeared to me as a commonplace community for Bangkok alleys with little stores and food stalls interspersed between the shacks.

At one location I could see over the wall separating the slum from luxury hotels.   I snapped a photograph of a set of newly made garments hanging on a line between these two slum houses next to the high metal wall separating the slum from modern Bangkok’s luxury condo skyscrapers on the next block.

Two chickens pecking at grains in the mud were milling around the front of one shack and walking around dirty dishes in soapy water tubs on the ground.  Apparently nobody had been in this neighborhood to kill the food source. Millions of chickens have been killed in Bangkok in the past few months to combat avian flu virus and there are not supposed to be any live chickens in the city.

So, if I come down with avian flu virus I can blame it on my wanderlust.

Buddhist monks pray for 26 million slaughtered chickens in Thailand Feb 2004.

The mid-day heat made me thirsty and I was exasperated with the maze of paths through the housing area.  I just couldn’t find my way out of the slum. I wandered for about 35 minutes between the dark homes, unable to get directional help from any of the local people.  If they spoke English there might be upward mobility out of this place.  English language development seems to be the primary educational focus for the urban population in Thailand. Tourism is the avenue so many of the Thai people use to gain better economic standing.

I was at a crossroads, or more accurately a crosspaths where there were three routes I could take.  The housing was two floors high and the path so narrow that I couldn’t see over the buildings to get a bearing of my location.  The paths I had taken weren’t straight lines so basically I was wandering through a maze and constantly turning between the houses, workshops, and food stalls/markets.

A group of young guys on a second floor porch were looking down at me.  I asked in English which way I needed to go to get to the street.  One of them motioned to turn left and within a couple of minutes I found myself exiting out of the housing slums and into an open construction site.  There was the shopping mall I had been looking for just a couple of hundred yards away.

Hand laborers were carting concrete blocks and sand in bags and loading dump trucks.  There were several large construction cranes and heavy earth moving equipment doing the groundwork for another shopping mall or condo complex or office building or luxury hotel.

The realization that the slum community I had been immersed in for the previous hour had a limited life kind of saddened me.  The people will be relocated as their slum dwellings are razed to allow modern development.

The slums literally abut the deluxe shopping center of designer label stores like Burberry and Gucci.  There were a half dozen young women with their babies and toddlers on the smooth tiled walkways leading into one side of the shopping center.  Children ran around barefoot on the polished stone in the sun and shade while mothers toiled with sewing or handicrafts or just sat sleeping in the shade of the shopping center steps.