Wonderland: Modern Life is Automatic 2

It seems odd to be sitting in a tiny cafe on a tiny island off the coast of Thailand, typing a message into a computer and, hopefully by the time you see this, uploading my first few photographs. In this instance I'm testing the water: I've not taken many photos as yet and, now that the battery has fully reached red, I won't be taking any more until the UPS man arrives with the one digital object that is not sold in Asia. I'm finding it frustrating...today, having just removed the battery that had given its all, an elephant strolled past. This is my first digital camera (you couldn't tell could you?!) and I spent ages deliberating over which one to buy or whether to buy one at all. Remotely it's not as simple as a manual SLR and I'll miss the anticipation of the fat blue envelope landing on the doormat full of holiday memories. But technically, to stick with film is a bit like choosing a typewriter over a laptop so I bought a digital designed exactly like a manual. Now I'm just hoping that the sacrifice of a few days' battery power is worth the flexibility of sending them whereever and whenever I like.

At the risk of sounding like my grandparents getting out the slide viewer to show us lots of pictures of the Trossachs (when I was a child I was always amazed that my parents let them use that word in front of us, since I was convinced that it referred to part of the male anatomy) here is my favourite site in Bangkok: the Reclining Buddha. He is very very large and all that shine is gold leaf rather than paint...