This is a picture of me coming home from work. I usually pick up something on the way for Ae to cook.

The city authorities in Bangkok have recently made considerable improvements to the infrastructure. The new road goes clear through a giant boogabooga tree.

Unfortunately the economy is currently in such a poor state that it will be some time before a bridge is built over the Ling Ba River, which must still be forded any way possible to get to my newspaper.

A colleague snapped this photo of me arriving at the office the other day. I understand the vine is to be reinforced with a fibre made from water buffalo hair, so it should be quite strong.

Full disclosure: The pictures illustrate the 19th-century expeditions of Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Wilkes, who were naturalists but kept their clothes on in public. The first two spent 11 years traipsing through the Amazon jungle, finding all kinds of animals that no one who had grown up in a big American or British city had ever seen before, and stealing them, not always for food.

Wilkes explored the Pacific coast from Alaska to Antarctica in the 1830s and ’40s and discovered that southern California was the best place to make movies, on account of the convenient Taco Bells.

The Smithsonian Libraries have all this and more online here.