Thai Flickr Meet - June 5th 2008 at Bangkok. A trip on the Chaopraya River past Wat Arun ~ a visit to the Museum of Siam ~ then to Pak Khlong Talat [flower market] ~ and finally a few beers and look at Wat Arun at night. Thanks to all the great people I met at the TFM.. see you again sometime soon!

A class trip on the Balu River in the northeast of Dhaka city... to study the eco-system.

Had accompanied the Brownies on the same river around a year ago.

   
   
As we got off the boat to take a walk through the villages, a storm began and we were able to get back to the boat just in time. The 2 storm photos were taken 3 minutes apart - you can see how fast the low clouds moved in. High winds and driving rain. Then lightning, a few strikes into the river and some on the land to our left....probably some of the closest lightning strikes I have witnessed. The ones that hit close, were reddish-yellow [is that possible?] and I could smell the electric discharge. The kids were all huddled into the cabin below, and Denise May read horror stories to them!
  

Oh, and after processing the images from this trip - the storm landscapes sparked a thought. A few evenings ago a friend had brought over a photography magazine, and it had a great tutorial on how to create Triptych images. So, I gave it a shot and a first attempt here it is. Thanks Stein!

A trip to Sonargaon, around 30 KM from Dhaka city.... the ancient Capital now in ruins. Like a ghost town, the homeless living in abandoned buildings. Buildings that were probably majestic and stately at one time, now crumbling in neglect, robbed of their ornate carved doors and windows, full of rubbish and the homeless... pathetic but still beautiful. The old Hindu temples and the Havalis in a similar state of disrepair.

We had first made a stop at Sadarghat, the jetty on the banks of the [very highly polluted!] Buriganga..... it was disgusting. The stench from the river, the jetty and the street was overpowering and so we made a hasty retreat to the car and were off to Sonargaon as quick as we could. Here are a few images from Sadarghat - we stepped on to the jetty the ferries were coming in [or leaving?, or both?].
   

THANKS HEATHER & STEIN. Great trip!