Category: Photos

Meet thine foe:

These things just look evil, and Nam insisted I dispatch it when we found it in her university’s parking lot. “Dangerous for students walking around,” she said. I tried to kill it with a rock, but it wouldn’t die, so I pried a brick loose from a nearby footpath and ground its head into the hard-packed dirt. The whole time, my skin was crawling.
This was probably the biggest one I’ve ever seen (around 8 inches long, and fatter than your finger), much bigger than the ones in Japan.
Fucking nasty creatures.

They appear with no warning
When they sense the rain coming (and they are never wrong about it), ants can move an entire colony inside the house overnight, as happened here. I sat down to type out some morning emails, and a thousand little dots erupted from under the keyboard, spreading out in all directions. I flipped it over to find this – it was pretty much one of the creepiest things to wake up to, ever. Previous infestations have sprung up in laundry pilers on the floor and in my inkjet printer – I was printing out sheets with little black ants embedded in the paper for weeks after that (it was actually a cute stationery effect, although no one actually asked me where I bought the paper).

I swear these are the ugliest, trippiest looking things you’ll ever see… Here’s my previous post on them, with facts aplenty.

Four or five months ago, Nam’s mother had couple of pitaya plants shipped back from her hometown of Surin (famous for their annual elephant festival and silk weaving). They were pitiful little things tied to a curious looking concrete dais-in-a-planter type of setup. I kept meaning to take photos of them back then for before and after comparison photos, but it was only a few weeks before they started shooting up, doubling, tripling, and growing to ten times their original size…. And they aren’t even full grown yet.
The thing is, we kind of forgot about them sitting there in the yard, because aside from their utterly alien appearance close up, they were just green plants on a green background, and truly unremarkable otherwise… during the day. Last week we went out for a drink for the first time in a while and returned around midnight. This is what was waiting for us:

Feed me, Seymour!

Get outta my way! – Survival of the fittest.

God must have been going through his “Giger” phase
(all photos by Nam!)
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Bonus “strawberry pear” trivia: In Thai, they call the pitaya (aka dragonfruit) a “dragon’s egg,” which is probably the most apt name for anything, ever.

Yesterday, on the way to check the progress of the new house we’re building, we came across a couple of awesome motorcycles, one right after the other.
First up was a kid riding the Buffalo Bike (aka Carabao Bike):


Next was the Death Merchant (I talked about his trade before in this post: Banks and Blades and Monster Geckos):


All photos by Nam.