Filed under: Culture, Health, People, Travel | Tags: accidents, babies, Bangkok, beaches, brain, bullets, cannibalism, carnival, Chao Phraya, Chao Phraya Express Boat, China, Chinese, cirrhosis, conjoined twins, cremation, crime, cruises, deformities, disaster, disease, elephantiasis, First World, forensics, Fred West, holidays, horror, human rights, immigration, Krabi, law, markets, medicine, medicine balls, mermaids, movies, murder, museums, mutants, Myra Hindley, organs, parasites, Phuket, rape, restaurants, river cruise, science, scrotum, serial killers, shopping, shopping malls, Si Quey, Siamese twins, Siriraj, Siriraj Hospital, Siriraj Hospital Forensic Museum, skulls, smoking, temples, Thailand, tigers, tourism, tourist attractions, vibrator, Wang Lang, Watch With Mother
Together forever – even in death
Where should one take a visiting mother in Bangkok? Temple-hopping, perhaps? Bargain-hunting in markets and malls? Rooftop or riverside dining? Or maybe to see mutated babies, preserved serial killers, elephantiasis-afflicted scrotums the size of medicine balls, and all manner of diseased, ruptured, punctured, crushed and deformed organs, skulls and limbs?
If that, rather than a Chao Phraya cruise, is what floats your – or your mother’s – boat, then jump on board a ferry to Siriraj Hospital’s Forensic Museum, which mixes genuine scientific endeavour with the kind of shock appeal previously reserved for Victorian carnival freakshows or 1980s body-horror movies.
Filed under: International news, Outside Thailand, Travel | Tags: 2004 tsunami, America, American Samoa, Apia, Australasia, Australia, BBC, beaches, bottled water, Boxing Day, Boxing Day tsunami, CNN, coral, coral reefs, countryside, disaster, earthquake, expats, flying foxes, food, holiday, independent Samoa, India, Indian Ocean, Indian Ocean tsunami, Indonesia, international aid, International news, jungle, Krabi, Maldives, native cultures, natural disaster, News, Oceania, Ofu, Phuket, rainforests, resorts, Samoa, Samoan islands, South Pacific, South Pacific tsunami, Sri Lanka, subsistence, Thailand, Tonga, tourism, Travel, trekking, tropical beaches, tsunami, US Samoa, US territories, USA, Western Samoa
Ofu beach, American Samoa
Again, a part of the world that is dear to me has been devastated by a tsunami.
Last time was the 2004 Boxing Day disaster which wreaked havoc on several Indian Ocean countries, most famously Thailand. This time the Samoan islands have borne the brunt of killer waves resonating from a huge earthquake in Indonesia – also the epicentre of the 2004 catastrophe.
Phuket was worst-hit in 2004, while Krabi also suffered extensive damage, and scenes of the damage there were poignant for me at the time, as I had only two months earlier enjoyed my first trip to Thailand, spending half of it in Krabi, a dramatically beautiful province which remains my favourite place in the kingdom.
Last week the Samoan islands – both independent Samoa and the US territory of American Samoa – were hit by a tsunami of a similar ferocity, with reports of waves of anything between three and seven metres high washing up to a mile inland, devastating the southern coastlines and in some cases destroying entire villages. Tonga, too, was hit.
