Today, I went to this site and was surprised to find that all of my postings prior to 2014 have been removed. I have received several notifications in the last year that the Blogger program had been updated. I have assumed that it was updates to the computer program. It appears that it also means that older postings have been removed. Perhaps, it indicates that the older postings were not being read, and thus were deleted. Those postings contained photos and stories from the original in 2012 and all photos etc from my trip around the world in 2012.
As of today, there have been 6,803 contacts to this site, including my postings.
There will be an update prior to my going west to Asia again in mid April.
In addition to the normal works that I will be doing there, I will be visiting two of my favorite sites in Thailand. I will spend ten days in Chiang Mai, one of the ancient capitals of old Siam, and, if time permits, the small city of Kanchanaburi. This is the site of the famous Bridge On The River Kwai. The movie of that name depicts the horrors of the railroad from Thailand to Burma being built by war prisoners, and locals.
While the bridge and river are real, and most of the bridge was destroyed by bombs, the movie was filmed a thousand or more miles away in what was then Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka. This site is about two hundred kilometers north west of Bangkok, with daily tours to the city by bus and train.
Because of the terrible history of the railway construction with forced labor and thousands of deaths as a result, Thailand closed most of the line from Kanchanaburi to the Burmese border in 1947. Burma is now called Myanmar although most people still call it by the formed name.
Thailand and Myanmar two years ago decided to reopen the full line for trade and tourism, and that has now happened. The locals call the border crossing point, "Two Gorges Gap".
