[Story starts here] I was aware that a motley band of like-minded scoundrels, including my brother, were already raising hell in Bangkok, and when we finally caught up with them it was three in the afternoon and they were deathly hungover. Such a term is relative, however. Whereas when you’re at home ‘deathly hungover’ means camping out on your couch, ordering a pizza and watching True Blood reruns for the next twelve hours or until you stop hating yourself, in Khaosan it means about ninety minutes of low-grade self-pity followed by a further twelve hours of heavy drinking – and that through a straw, because it’s Buddha Day and we must keep up appearances.

I believe this is one of those times where one can quite confidently say something is worse than it looks. And it looks pretty bad. These guys are in rough shape.

Tana orders two buckets of Chang. There is some random but half-hearted groaning from behind sunglasses, and then the straws are passed around and resignation sets in. So it begins.

Things continue at a fairly good clip for a few hours. We trade one bar for another, somehow manage to identify the most expensive riverfront restaurant in the entire city and eat at it, and then reconvene at Khaosan Road to see where the evening takes us. It takes us nowhere good. There’s an awful lot of Chang involved, some of it delivered in towers, all of it in defiance of the Buddha. At one point we’re involved in a card game. There may or may not have been a snake. A guy with a monkey tries to sell me what he claims is fruit, but I’m convinced is some kind of giant insect egg. We revisit the quality of pad thai that can be acquired from street vendors for 20 baht – about 66 Canadian cents. Turns out it’s surprisingly good when you lack any kind of culinary objectivity. We change bars five or six times, from patios to backrooms to rooftops to the street.

And while all this is going on, these guys are playing a game: they bet each other to do stupid shit for one baht and some glory – a practice that soon came to be known as one-baht betting. They goad each other into eating deep-fried insects, bribing street vendors, making strange proclamations loudly and at inappropriate moments, and performing general shenanigans to the amusement of tourists and locals like – all for the hell of it and one baht (about a third of a Canadian cent), and some video footage that is probably best forgotten. I suck at this game, a fact they won’t soon let me forget, but these guys are disturbingly good at it. They’ll do anything. All it takes is about fifty Changs and twelve cents in Thai change for hours of entertainment. It’s like being back in college.

Meanwhile, all around us Khaosan Road exists: a mind-numbing riot of sound and texture and aroma and colour that is so utterly chaotic it finds its own strange kind of order. Society is represented in cross-section: from destitute backpackers and the poverty stricken, to ladyboys, prostitutes and the working class, to rich Euro travelers, American college students and Eastern Bloc refugees. It’s a filthy hot mess of every type of human imaginable, most of them unwashed, sipping dirt-cheap alcohol through a straw and suffering from mild sensory overload. This bizarre and vibrant chaos continues well into the early hours, and even after the street vendors have gone home there are still pockets of revelers and stray dogs who just aren’t willing to let go. When the bars finally close people sell beer out of coolers. No one seems to mind. Police presence is minimal at best. If there are no rules, what is there to enforce? And somehow it all works: while I’m sure crime and violence exist, I saw no evidence of either. Khaosan and its inhabitants maintain a base level of decency and hospitality that continue until first light, when street vendors begin to reappear and the show starts all over again.

What a life.

[Story starts here] At some point a few hours later, a phone rings from the end of a very long tunnel. My iPhone alarm was set for nine, but somehow instead of hitting snooze I managed to swipe in and turn it off without waking up – a clever trick, but not very useful. Now it’s 9:45am, forty-five minutes after we agreed to meet in my hotel lobby, and it’s the room phone making all the noise. I fumble the receiver to my ear.

“Didn’t arrange a wake-up call, did you,” says Tana, presumably from the lobby phone. She should be feeling smug, but I’m not sure she’s capable of it. I’m not capable of processing verbal communication, so I say something incomprehensible (it may have made sense in Thai) and then hang up and attempt to get started. The mirror is not my friend: I look like I haven’t been to sleep in three days, which is only a few hours shy of the truth. I don’t have a hangover, but figure one will arrive in due course. In this, at least, I am correct.

The breakfast buffet presents, among other things, green curry with chicken, which I inhale along with a black coffee, half a yoghurt and little to no consideration for the way in which these items may interact, and then we’re out on the street. It’s my first exposure to Bangkok in daylight, and the first thing I notice is the temperature. Stay in air-conditioning overnight and it’s easy to forget you’re in a controlled climate. As soon as we step outside, though, the heat slaps me in the face like a wet dishcloth. The air feels so humid, it’s almost like breathing liquid, a liquid infused with the second thing I notice: the smell. It’s dog shit, sewage, fresh fruit, rotting seafood, deep-fried meat, gasoline, engine exhaust, wet animal, body odour, cut flowers, lime zest, river grime and a thousand other smells in an immensely heavy, complex, layered blanket of odours that run together into the olfactory equivalent of greeny-brown sludge. As a sensory experience it’s pretty spectacular.

I inhale mightily of the greeny-brown sludge as we trudge a few blocks south, resenting yoghurt. We make it to the rally point at seven minutes after ten. None of the gang is present. I don’t really care about missing a snake show, but I do find it odd that our window of abandonment is less than seven minutes. Later I find out that apart from one they’re all still asleep, and will be until three that afternoon. When they do eventually emerge, around the same time as my hangover, it’s more or less the hour for a Chang. This timing sets a precedent for the days ahead. And to be fair, Khaosan Road is a place best experienced at night, so a case can be made for abandoning oneself to nocturnal habits. It seems to work for everyone else.

At lunch, in a busy courtyard cafe filled with statues, another problem presents itself: the Buddhist community in Thailand celebrates many holy days throughout the year, and today is one of them. Inexplicably, beer is not allowed. Wine and spirits, yes; beer, not so much. Once again the issue evaporates before it coalesces: a brief and conspiratorial exchange occurs between my guide and the server, and wheels are mysteriously set in motion. The server puts hand to mouth and titters like a schoolgirl. Then she vanishes, reappearing shortly thereafter with a giant bottle of Tiger beer and two chipped teacups. The cups go on the table, the beer in the cups; the half empty bottle she hides under the table, concealed by the tablecloth, before darting away with a furtive smile. And thus we defy Thai custom, restaurant management and the Buddha himself, all in one easy 5% hit.

“I don’t get it,” I say. “I thought Buddha was a jovial fellow who sought the path to true happiness through enlightenment. If he was here, would he not offer us beer and say ‘Drink, my friends! Drink and be happy!’”

Tana gives me a look to suggest if you’re lucky enough to wangle a beer on Buddha Day, maybe you should just drink it and keep your mouth shut. I do so. Later she repeats the secret beer trick at another bar, only instead of teacups there’s a bucket and a series of very long straws, which sounds a lot worse than it actually is, but makes everyone very happy. The trend continues well into the evening.

After finally meeting up with everyone else, there’s more Tiger at an outdoor cafe where we recline on beanbags in a gently illuminated courtyard by the river. Here they have no Buddha statue behind the bar and much less compunction about serving beer, which they proceed to do in a large tower. That was the first mistake. The second through ninth mistakes all involve Khaosan Road at night, which is what happens to us next.

I arrive in Bangkok on July 14 at about 9:30pm after an uneventful transit, and with very little idea about the immediate future. Customs and immigration are a non-event: Thailand is indifferent to my arrival. Upwards of ten million people visit the Land of Smiles every year, so I try not to take this personally.

At the taxi stand I have an awkward conversation with a custodian about my intended destination. While I have no illusions about how much English may or may not be spoken here, I don’t expect to be bunting the language barrier so soon. However, the issue promptly evaporates when I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn to find the solution to all the problems I don’t yet realize I have.

“Excuse me,” says the girl behind me in near-perfect English, “did you just say you were going to Khaosan?”

“Yup!” I say, sizing her up. She’s about 5’9″ and has a single suitcase which is almost as big as she is. The suitcase sits upright on the pavement next to her like a giant black refrigerator. She has a big, disarming smile, like a stewardess. Despite her language mastery, she’s clearly Thai.

“Great, so am I! Want to share a taxi?”

I have a momentary flashback to the film Taken in which two girls are approached at a Charles de Gaulle taxi rank with an offer to share a cab into Paris; bad things shortly follow, some of them involving heroin and automatic weapons. But, I reason, I’m bigger than her (although perhaps not bigger than whatever is in that suitcase) and I have no idea where Khaosan is, so let’s live dangerously and give the Thai stewardess what she wants.

The cab driver employs brute force to get the immense suitcase onto the roof of his taxi (it won’t fit anywhere else) and we’re shortly on the freeway. We introduce ourselves – her name is Tana – and put our heads together to figure out what’s supposed to happen next. Then she slips into Thai to converse with the driver – a fortunate thing, since based on my brief exchanges with him he appears to speak slightly less English than one of my cats. It’s my first real exposure to the Thai language, and my initial reaction is that it’s rather attractive – none of the harshness of Mandarin or Japanese, and less guttural than Korean. I will later discover that Thai can sound quite diversely different depending on who’s speaking it: in Tana’s mezzo, somewhat lilting voice it ebbs and flows with considerable elegance. On other less-refined tongues it can be abrasive and twangy, not at all a soothing experience.

The dialogue between the two Thais resurfaces from time to time as we pass through two tollgates and down a long highway punctuated by massive illuminated billboards. As soon as we leave the highway I’m immediately lost – apparently the Cartesian grid had yet to be invented at the time of Bangkok’s inception, and it’s as if every street intersects its neighbours at an arbitrary angle. Very little effort seems to go into urban planning. It’s all a haphazard, random placement of stuff landing in places by accident and never moving thereafter. I’ll soon discover that this seeming indifference is characteristic of Thailand: things fall where they may, and that’s good enough. It can be endearing or maddening, depending on context and blood-alcohol content.

As it turns out, Tana’s English is so good because she’s just getting home for the first time after six years in the US. When I tell her it’s my first time in Bangkok, she admits she sees things in much the same way. Great, I figure. Now we’re both lost. Of course, we’re anything but. We arrive some time later at Khaosan for a fixed rate, with none of the extra stops at fake jewellery stores, ping-pong shows or other such scam magnets that the internet would have you believe you’re destined for. It all feels a little bit too easy.

Tana’s family has no idea she’s back in Thailand – they live in the north and it’s supposed to be a surprise – so she decides to stick around for a while. My brother and his friends, who’ve been loose in Khaosan for two days already, are MIA. I get text messages from them, but the messages arrive out of order, making coordination impossible. Our reunion will have to wait one more day. Instead we find somewhere to stay, and then it’s time for food (my first real Thai food, in real Thailand!) in a courtyard restaurant known to my new local guide, followed by some drinks at a club.

Things are a bit of a blur after that: I have vague recollections of befriending other random travellers, cocktails that appear suspiciously on fire, seeing ladyboys catfight at Gulliver’s, getting a free shot of something acrid at Khaosan Center while the bartender made snide comments about how Tana should find a nice Thai boy (she denies he said that, but using my extensive knowledge of Thai it was clearly discernible – heh). At one stage we were drinking cold Changs from a cooler while sitting on the sidewalk of Khaosan Road in the early hours in a circle of American backpackers, one of whom had a guitar, a passable voice and a soft spot for Coldplay and U2, while Tana struck up an oddly purposeless conversation with a homeless little-person who claimed she was pregnant and wanted to sell us something deep-fried and with far too many legs. If all of this seems impossibly surreal to you I understand, but who knows. Maybe there are people who really do like Coldplay when drunk on Chang.

I spend the entire evening in that kind of new-city-confusion-of-place haze you get whenever you’ve landed somewhere alien while sleep-deprived. When it’s finally time for rest I’ve been awake about thirty-six hours. We wander back to our respective abodes around 5am, with plans to meet the gang in about five hours time for – I don’t know, some kind of snake show? The text messages are a little hazy on the details, and my brain is a little hazy on the Roman alphabet. I somehow locate my room and fall into bed, still dressed, and neglecting to arrange a wakeup call.

Big mistake.

This microcosm of Bangkok, described in Alex Garland’s 1996 novel The Beach as the centre of the backpacking universe, is a world unto itself. If you’ve seen it you already know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, no words will really convey its essence with any kind of effectiveness. So instead, here are some pictures:

I have been arguing with the Flickr badge for an hour or so trying to convince it to display more than ten thumbnails, but evidently it is immune to my charm. In the meantime, here's the link to the full set. Lots more still to come!

Very beautiful, very expensive lenses. For a while I owned a D-Lux 3 and it was a remarkable little thing. If I hadn’t moved on to dSLRs I’d still be using it – I miss that little red dot.

This is how Leica makes lenses. Enjoy.

If you’re off on an adventure specifically to take pictures, of course you’ll want to take more gear, and dealing with it day-to-day will be a built-in expectation. I, on the other hand, like to travel light and streamline things as much as possible, and I suspect most casual photographers feel the same – that way we have less stuff to schlepp around, and less things to go astray in a worst-case scenario.

(Photo credit: Andrea_44.)

Apart from that, when I travel I do it more for experiencing things than for taking pictures of things. Taking photos is an artistic pursuit, but not one I want controlling my movements. So the question is always what can I get away with leaving behind? I can’t answer that for you, but as a lifelong light-packer I can tell you what I’d do, and hopefully that’ll help you make the right calls for your upcoming voyages.

To bring or not to bring…

• Extra lenses – Always the burning question. It’s really a matter of personal taste, but most of our lenses share some focal distance overlap, so we can afford to be selective. As a rule of thumb I take one zoom and one prime, and that’s it. For the zoom, I’d choose my ‘walkaround’ lens – the one all-purpose lens I use when I’m out shooting casually. Skip the 70-200, and instead take something with a reasonably wide-angle bottom end. For the prime, I prefer something fast like a Canon 1.8 – the 1.4 would be more ideal but the 1.8 is dirt cheap so it’s perfect for traveling with.
• Tripod – unless you’re going somewhere specifically to take pictures, don’t take it. I tend to think in terms of space:use ratio, and a tripod, even when checked in cargo, is a unitasker that takes up a ton of room in return for the occasional convenience. Alternative: GorillaPod.
• Flash – Again, personal preference, but I’m not a fan of flash so I leave mine at home.
• Extra battery pack – Unless you’re heading out on the savanna to be without electricity for days on end, leave that paperweight on the shelf!
• Storage – This depends on your download strategy. I take a Macbook with me when I travel, so I can dump the photos I take to Lightroom daily. It means I can travel with only two memory cards – and I very seldom end up using the second one. If a laptop falls into your ‘too much gear’ category, though, you have some other options:
  
  • Take an iPad with a camera connection kit. Nice and light, very thin, but the drawback is space – iPads come with 64GB of storage, max. If you’re shooting a lot, and in RAW, that might not do the trick.
    

  • Take a portable media device like this Epson P-6000. You’ll be able to view and cull your photo collection on the go with up to 80GB of storage.
  • Use the brute force approach. Some trips, especially backpacking trips, don’t play well with laptops and other such gear, meaning you just have to pack enough memory cards to see you through. You’ll have keep track of what’s used and what’s free, and be aware of the potential for loss.
    

  • Upload. Certain memory cards have built-in wifi transmitters that will allow you to up your images to the cloud, sans computer, any time you’re in a wifi hotspot.

Things to remember

1. Keep your gear with you. Unless you’re doing a pro shoot with lots of heavy gear that has to travel in cargo, keep your camera in carry-on. Use a bag especially designed for the purpose. It can carry your Macbook too or iPad too.
2. Protect your download core with your life. I’ve known photographers who literally kept their SD cards in their moneybelts, on their person at all times. Unless you have a chance to upload to somewhere in the cloud, wherever your pictures are residing – your download core – must be jealously guarded, and wherever possible, defended with heavy weapons.
3. Be insured against theft and loss. If the worst should happen, it makes sense to be covered. As for the pictures themselves…
4. … back up whenever you can. It’s the only kind of insurance there is against the loss of all your efforts and achievements.

Dos and don’ts

• Do empty all your memory cards before you go, and number them so you can tell them apart.
• Do use a carry-on pack designed for camera gear. These bags have padded, configurable insides that will protect your dSLR and lenses, and your laptop too.
• Do expect that you may get stopped at security and have to prove that your camera is in fact what you say it is. Pack accordingly.
• Do make sure your gear is labeled with your details, just in case it goes astray and is discovered by an honest person (hey, it could happen). Tag your bag, and put a sticker on your camera body. Office labelmakers work great for this.
• Don’t pack camera gear in your checked baggage. There’s a good chance it won’t survive undamaged. There’s a good chance it won’t arrive at the other end at all.
• Don’t put your camera in the easy-access ‘top pocket’ of your backpack. Those pockets are the first victims of opportunistic theft, and they usually don’t have enough padding to keep your baby safe.
• Don’t leave a lens on your dSLR when you travel. Use the bayonet cover that came with the body, and cover the lens at both ends. This will help keep the bayonet mount safe from damage when things move around in transit.
• Don’t travel without having your gear insured.
• Don’t walk around the airport with your camera out looking for shots, unless you’re in an observation lounge. Airport Security hates that.
• Don’t let your camera bag out of your sight. They just love to run off when you aren’t looking.

Remember to think in terms of space:use ratio. You can’t possibly plan for every eventuality, and ultimately the more gear you have to manage, the less fun you’ll have, so take less wherever you can. As much as we enjoy it, photography must stay in its place: the stuff that happens to you first-hand is far more important than recording 2D photographic evidence which, no matter how sublime, will have none of the visceral impact of actually being there. So, don’t place too much stock in being armed to the teeth with photo gear. The experience is worth far more than the shot.

It’s a mere two weeks out now from my trip to Thailand. Three days in Bangkok, a week on Koh Samui and another week on Koh Phangan should yield plenty of good photo opps. I’m going to put this 7D through hell (I’m confident it’ll perform admirably). On top of that I’m taking a GoPro for video capture – it’s small and simple enough that even my young relatives should have no problem capturing some fun footage to mess around with later.

Skylanterns are released during the Yi Peng festival in Thailand (credit: unknown)

It’s not a backpacking tour, although I’d welcome one of those; this is a family event and it’s fairly well-catered for, meaning I’ll be jacked in some of the time and will be posting photos as I go. So stick around and enjoy some of the sights!

With what’s left of our listless Vancouver Spring now receding, it’s as if we were robbed of the usual impressive array of flora that usually pops up all over the city after the snow has gone. Except that this year we didn’t have snow – we had rain. And instead of Spring – rain. I can get that kind of Spring back in New Zealand.

There’s still plenty to shoot though, in the plant kingdom alone. A change of lens to a Canon Macro 2.8 and we’re ready to open a window onto a whole other world. I love this lens – at about $550 it’s relatively cheap, at f/2.8 it’s nice and fast, and with a focal length this long you can shoot things at a distance of a single inch. There’s lots of stuff at that scale that you normally wouldn’t even notice.

We were lucky to get a break from our lovely Spring weather and see some sun for a couple of hours, and I took advantage. Here’s a couple from this afternoon:

The stage performances are so achingly bad that they’re good – elderly ladies doing slow-motion tai chi out of sync to a lethargic gu zheng; karaoke sung by people in shiny embroidered suits, who really have no business being seen or heard in public – but no one seems to mind, and a large crowd forms and is genuinely entertained, especially the children. It’s a community event after all, so the casual, unpolished presentation is a part of its immense charm.

By the time it gets dark Keefer Street is packed with visitors, many of them Chinese, many not, and while a good many of the stalls are dedicated to peddling cheap toys, sunglasses, clothes and plastic trinkets that inexplicably glow, an equal if not larger number are making and selling street food, and that’s what most people are here for. It’s also what makes some of the best photos – the way folks behave as they prepare and sell, and buy and eat it while taking in the spectacle around them makes for interesting studies.

People are friendly – a fortunate thing because at a public gathering like this the magic is found in the human element. No one seems to mind having their picture taken (although I have my inquisitive look and ‘may I shoot?’ gesture refined to such a disarming art that it’s usually all over before most people realize they’ve already nodded yes.) They’re especially proud when you photograph their kids, and the kids themselves are always delighted to see their own image on the preview screen of the 7D. A cute kid giggling at their own photo warms the insides even more than spicy szechuan beef on a stick. Parents beam happily.

I probably shot around 250 frames in total, and running them all through my Lightroom workflow takes time, but if you’d like to check out the selects, keep an eye on the Flickr feed. They’ll show up here on the sidebar at random also.