It's January 9th, about one o'clock in the cold Thai morning, and in five hours I tootle (or rather bump) back to Mae La Ou for another three or four weeks of the unexpected. It's worked out that I've had to come out every few weeks so far - illness, visa extensions, cross-border travels and camp permits have caused and will cause me to venture back to Mae Sariang for brief rest bites, and this is when I get the chance to hot-bus it to Chiang Mai for camp shopping duties and to update this here little website. A one line summary of me here would go something like 'I'm fine, I'm loving it and the people of Mae La Our are brill' - for more extravagant and indulgent detail please see the other diary entries on the left, a few of which are hot off the Hammond press. And if you'd like me to answer on these pages any questions you have about life here etc, please do drop me an email.

Christmas and new year have come and gone and brought with them the horrific news of the south-Asian Tsunami about 200km due South. The camp can be a closed world, quiet and unknowing of it's complicated other half. But the news gradually filtered through via the BBC about what had happened, something close by and massive. In a sleepy daze late into a winter mountain night, I thought I'd misheard the report and sunk into grateful sleep, but over the next ten nights the radio read out figures of 35,000, 70,000, 120,000 and 150,000 and confirmed that this was very real. Without any pictures or any film, it is difficult to grasp, a really strange feeling - sat in the camp I knew and felt there was and is a horrific scene being played out, but with only verbal input via the world service and interrupted chatter of Burma's place in this Tsumami, it's something that's impossible to picture. With no other media around life does more or less just carry on as normal when a few miles away life is doing anything but.

I saw my first pictures and film of the disaster two days ago when I came out - film of the actual events which by its existence can only represent that which wasn't or isn't most severe. I've only seen pictures of the appalling aftermath and massive relief operation but quite rightly the response across the world has been huge with no-one untouched in some small way.

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On coming out I was informed how Naing Htun, the second person I met in Thailand and an extremely friendly, welcoming support to me on my first few innocent days in the country, had died in a car crash in Chiang Mai two days ago. Themes of randomness and tragedy are never far away from the lives of everyone, and being over here and working where I am, my head is often filled with ponderings this way, with answers not easily apparent.