My longest airplane ride ever  of 18 hours (I had gotten used to the 14 hour trip to Australia) brought me to the beautiful new, but unpronounceable Bangkok Airport.  Leaving the 40 degree Moab weather with snow still on the ground,  I caught another plane for Ko Samui Island where it was also 40 degrees, celsius.  The airport is beautiful, but the planes never go on time,  and within moments I was drenched in sweat.

At Samui,  Southeast Asia was experiencing its warmest and driest spring ever, with temperatures in the high 90's and and matching humidity.  I remember the old days when we had to worry about film being destroyed by heat.  It only happened to me once, on my first 4x5 backpack trip in the Uinta Mountains.   I lugged the 4x5 effortlessly over every pass and up to the top of Utah's highest peak, something I think no on else has done since.  After a week I sent my film to a lab in Dallas.  It never came back.  I received a small slip telling me the film had been ruined by "heat fog," and was no good.  Only my youthful enthusiasm kept me from giving up on 4x5 photography then and there.

Over the years,  I surmised that the lab had either lost or damaged my film themselves, because I never had another incident of heat fog. Until that realization,  the very idea sent me into fits of anxiety.    From then on I guarded the temperature of my film like a madman,  but nothing ever happened.  As decades passed I became less concerned,  finally leaving film in locked trunks in summer when the temperatures must have matched the surface of Venus.

Now, of course.  we worry about nothing.  As I tell students,  "Exposure is certain,  great color is certain,  airport x-rays can not stop us, and heat and cold are only physically uncomfortable.  No tripod, no problem.  Horrible contrast,  no problem.   We only need to pay attention to focus and composition,  so let's spend all of our energies on that. "

I spent several days on Samui doing boat trips to beautiful beaches and islands.  I did a hike/climb from which my right knee has still not recovered, and I stayed at a hotel that had converted boats for rooms.  I guess this was for peace of mind should another giant tidal wave come through.  Thailand was and still is going through political troubles while I was there,  and as I was scheduled to come and go through Bangkok Airpot numerous times, this was a worry.

My next trip in Thailand took me to the northeast to a area of cliffs and rock formations along the fabled Mekong River.  Also, some of  Asia's  best rock art was painted on the walls of the national park.  My guide told me I was has first American client in five years,  and in most places I went I was the only US citizen to be found.  The rock art was spectacular,  but before we could go to it at sunrise, the rangers had to send the cobra dogs down to clear the trail.  I told this to my friend G in Moab, who vowed never to never visit Thailand again.

One thing I have learned in my immersion in HDR photography is that HDR can be used on any image, even those without inherent contrast problems.  The detail enhancer feature is kind of amazing sometimes, and  Photomatix has a color space and palate all its own.  I've noticed that 125 megabyte files processed in Photomatix are as detailed as my 300 megabyte scanned 4x5's, though maybe not as sharp?  It seems paradoxical, but I think it's true.  At any rate, I shot five images  at least, for HDR on every shot minimum on my trip. This is the first time I've done that.  Also,  having a large number of HDR images to process at home has made me learn the process.  It's like cooking--there's a pinch of this and that, and more I work the Star Trek sliders the better I get.  Check my Facebook page for a lot of images from this trip.

From Thailand I went to Laos for the first time, specifically the UNESCO World Heritage town of Luang Prabang.  I was completely taken with this town of temples surrounded by misty mountains and the magical Mekong.  My UNESCO photo tour continues around the world going into its third year, so I continue to work on images to expand it.  The show is now moving through Scandinavia from  Oslo to Copenhagen.  Luang Prabat is a treasure trove of ancient temples decorated in magnificent mosaics, and walls covered in finely worked gold leaf.

Next stop was Viet Nam, and I  braved the four hour death race to Hai Long Bay, another UNESCO site, and probably the world's most stunning ocean landscape.  Thousands of limestone pinnacles rise up out of the bay in every sort of fanciful shape,  and the small islands are honeycombed with caves.   In fact, the best cave takes up the interior of one whole island.  Unlike other great caves, like Carlsbad,  the ceiling of this one, is decorated in beautiful scallops, most likely from ocean erosion. At one point the similarities between the Lake Powell landscape and Viet Nam were amazing.

I waited four days for sun at Hai Long, but it was not forthcoming.   I saw very few images of the place in sunlight, so it must be unusual, and I had to settle for the moodiness of fog and flat light.  The water was the greenest ocean water I have ever seen, perhaps due to the general shallowness of the huge bay. I imagined how it must look with bright sunlight.   I liked the food in Viet Nam, although calamari for breakfast, lunch, and dinner was  somewhat weird.

Finally,  I traveled to beautiful Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, which I consider a much cooler name.  I also like Rangoon much better than Yangon. Fortunately Mandalay is still Mandalay as it was when I had to learn the song in the sixties version of Glee. As in the song I saw flying fishes!  The pagodas (most Asians pronounce the word "pagoder) in Yangon  and elsewhere were wonders to behold.  The highlight of the trip was accompanying hundreds of pilgrims to the top of a mountain to see the amazing balanced rock (now covered in gold leaf) that figured in legends of Buddha.  The tours starts with another four hour drive, followed by a rather unnerving trip part way up the mountain in the back of a large truck with cushionless bench seats.  Due to "insurance reasons" foreigners had to walk half the way up, but as the air was cooler in the higher elevations I didn't mind.   Several thousand people spend the night on the mountain--no alcohol, no fights, no police, no drugs, and no trash.  While I was composing my best shot of the trip,  the golden rock lit by the last floodlights before dawn above a sea of fog, they ate breakfast (strangely mostly candy), and started back down.

I would like to point out that at no time did anyone require a permit for me to photograph, or hassle me about my work in any way.  Also,  I felt very safe all the time, and I think it's worth pointing out that very few buddhists want to cut our heads off or blow up our airplanes at this time.

Now it's time to turn my attention to rising rivers and fields of wildflowers, which I'm sure are in my near future.