Dear all, I arrived in Bangkok just under a week ago. The oppressive, stifling heat reminds me somewhat of Dar es Salaam, or Lima - New Orleans even. One vast, dirty, sprawling metropolis home to some ten million souls, nobody is quite sure, which is where the comparison to New Orleans departs abruptly. For it is magnificently dirty and filthy, with barely a patch of green, where the belching fumes of tuk-tuks, lorries and hordes of spuming motorbikes shovel out monoxides into the...