Originally published in September 2005.

Talk about spyware! Here’s a tour of Ae and my life’s meanderings as seen in images from the marvellous Google Earth program.

It certainly helps, but you don’t have to be geography-minded to get (up)loads of enjoyment from Google Earth, a free application available from the nice folks who made Web searching easy. It’s quite astonishing.
Within a few minutes of arriving at your selected destination, the satellite image clarifies into amazingly sharp detail, becoming blurry only when you get to the point of peering into someone’s backyard. You’ll need the CIA’s help if you want a closer look.
On my first visit, naturally I wanted to see familiar locales, so Georgetown, Ontario, Canada, where I grew up, was quickly tracked down, then the street where I lived (Normandy Boulevard, at left), and the schools I attended.
Upon arriving via Google Earth at my current place of abode, in Bang Na, a suburb of Bangkok, I discovered that the images are far from current, because a nasty great freight-container station is still visible next door to our apartment complex, and it hasn’t been there for more than a year. (It was temporarily replaced with a nasty great heavy-metal-and-concrete-and-migrant-labourers storage facility for the highway extension under construction not far from us. Now the property’s exquisitely quiet except for the occasional howling of stray dogs wondering where everyone went.)

This is our place in Bang Na, called The Village Condo, with its dual, 12-storey towers. Our third-floor, two-bedroom apartment overlooks the pool. Our front balcony overlooks the driveway and near-daily tennants’ assemblies that seem more like village gatherings far upcountry than The Village Bangkok. Noisy and not very appealing for quiet homebodies like us, but as Hillary Clinton says, “It takes a village …”
Just up the road is The Nation, the newspaper where I work now and where I worked when I first came to Asia in 1992. They say you always come back to The Nation, but I’ll leave that for another posting.
I travelled on, further back in time, to Hong Kong, where Ae and I lived in 2000 and 2001 while I worked for the Hong Kong Standard newspaper (known for most of that time as the Hong Kong iMail) and she worked for TNS. We had a terrific apartment overlooking a bay in Nam Wai, a village in Sai Kung, which is a vast country area east of Hong Kong proper. I didn’t even know Hong Kong had rural areas before I moved there, but it does – lovely places – and nice beaches too.
At this point in my journey I noticed that the cursor was reading the land elevations, so I could track how far up in the air I’d been at each stop. The altitude of our place in Nam Wai was 60 feet above sea level (which we had to climb on foot every day), but there was a whacking great 425-foot hill right behind us and 1700-foot peaks on the way to work. I love mountains and the sea, so this place was perfect. Back in Canada, Georgetown was flat at 800 feet. It had altitude but no attitude.

The Hong Kong idyll ended when my newspaper had an epileptic fit a couple of weeks after the 9/11 attacks and 100 of us foreign subeditors were suddenly shown the door. I don’t think Osama had anything to do with it, but it definitely wasn’t an economic convulsion. A lot of the guys were called back when the owners realised they’d been fools. Maybe they just wanted to get rid of me and had to find a sneaky way.

But get rid of me they did. We pushed on into Mother China, where my pal Bivash Mukherjee was working at the Shanghai Daily. We spent six months there, through the dead of a very frigid winter, but it was an expensive and fussy place and soon Bangkok was beckoning us back. Shanghai, where we were about 50 feet above sea level, not counting the steps to our apartment, is a fascinating place to visit, not to live, not for us.

To be continued…