Almost Over

By next month the rains should have stopped which will make a break and maybe give us a chance to get rid of the weeds in our garden. Hopefully by then our political problems will also be over. The BBC and CNN have been giving too simple a view of what is happening in politics here, forgetting the history of some of the people involved. For most of us in Bangkok it hardly has any affect.

Outside of Thailand it's good to see the price of oil dropping and we see it at the pumps here. 500 Baht filled about a quarter of my tank on Friday, although it's only a couple of years ago that it would have filled half.

Don't Cancel Your Visit

Although news from Bangkok might make a visit to the Gems & Jewelry show not seem a good idea, this would be a mistake. The present situation is not that unusual here and any problems are usually contained in a fairly small area around the government buildings. At the show you find nothing other than the welcome you always get here, so do go ahead and come.

Bangkok Gems & Jewelry Fair Heads Up

Just a warning, it's less than a month to the fair opening now. You can still pre-register on the website at http://www.bangkokgemsfair.com/. If you need a Bangkok based agent or you are looking for jewelry manufacturing here in Thailand then come by our website at http://www.cjmsea.com/.

Diesel price goes down

Good news for anyone who drives a truck like me. The price of diesel dropped again and is back to where it was a month ago I think. It's still far too high but if the cost of oil has done nothing else good, it has taken vehicles off the road. Diesel is still far higher than the price of petrol, (gas in the US and benzene here in Thailand).

When I first bought the truck, a Nissan Frontier, diesel was still subsidized here and cost about 2 baht a litre less than petrol. Now it's about 10 Baht more;-( I use the B5 diesel from PTT which has a 5% ethanol composition which takes a Baht off the cost. What I can't do with this engine is easily convert to LPG. The two gas fuels here, LPG and CNG are the cheapest way to drive. One answer to this is trade the diesel engine for a used Japanese V6 block and then do the gas conversion. Maybe next year.

New Handbags from Bali

We loaded up new handbags from Bali this week. They are sold wholesale in sets ranging from 2 to 6 pieces. They are a bit special so please have a look at Bali handbags.

Here in Bangkok we are still getting rain most days but my trip to work has been uneventful. There does seem to be less traffic recently and this could be to do with the high cost fuel. Let's hope the recent drop in price continues.

Political Problems and Visiting Thailand

From outside Thailand the present political difficulties here might well put you off coming on a visit. This would be a mistake as there is a long history of disputes like this livening up the local political scene and rarely do they interfere with life-as-normal for both the average local inhabitant and the foreign visitor. Bangkok is still the thriving center of the colored gems trade and much other jewelry manufacturing. Visit and be guaranteed of a good, profitable and fun time.

More Rain but Less Cars

I was out driving on Sunday and ended up spending twice what I expected on diesel. Others have mentioned to me that it seems like there are fewer cars on the road and I guess this is the reason. The rains are still here so we can still have some traffic jams anyway.

Coolpierce stock now online

Last week we finally got the stock of organic body jewelry online at Coolpierce. The photographs don't really do the products justice and will have to be retaken sometime but at least visitors can now see the large range of bone, horn and wood jewelry. The wood earrings do seem to be very much in fashion again this year.

Totally Bali Website Finished

I just added new buttons to the Totally Bali jewelry website. The fairly complicated shipping module was built here over the last couple of weeks by modifying the Oscommerce contribution, Multi Geozone Multi Table module.

We had to make the new shipping module because the shipping cost matrix from Bali was just too large to fit in the Oscommerce configuration table where there is 256 character limit per line. We wanted to offer parcel post, EMS express post, DHL and FedEx shipping but not all countries could have all four. The Indonesian post office seems to have a separate postal rate for each country unlike the Thai post office which has just three zones.

We simplified the zones as much as possible but still ended up with 50 zones. With the Thai table I built we got it down to 23 zones. If anyone wants to use this module please leave a comment and I will send it.

Saying the site is finished isn't strictly correct because we will be adding products including the Bali handbag range soon.

More Rain and Websites

Now everything is done on the website except the template or skin. It is for wholesale Bali silver jewelry but at the moment is using TotallyBali's skin. I will put a link in the right-hand column.

The monsoon rains really arrived yesterday afternoon and with yesterday being a holiday here it didn't cause too many traffic problems. Today is pretty bad out on Srinakarin Road though going in both directions.

Busy Times

We have three websites being built at the same time so it has got real busy. Outside the last two days have been wet so I guess we are getting the remains of the cyclone that hit Burma so badly. I just cannot understand how the generals there would rather have their people die than accept aid and help from foreigners.

The next site to go live is www.cjmsilver.com which will be selling Bali silver jewelry if I can get it finished.

Totally Bali Website

Our new Bali fashion accessory website has most of the products up now except for the handbags where we are waiting on the photographs. The jewelry is non-precious but very much fun and fashion. We already show a good range of earrings, bracelets and necklaces with some attractive lady's belts also. You will have to visit www.totallybali.com to see more and I will put another link in right column for future visits.

The rains are here

Bangkok had a couple of days of rain earlier in the month, but yesterday evening I drove into a heavy downpour just outside of Pattaya. The monsoons are here. Here it is very localized rain storms. Squalls move through an area dropping inches of rain while 500 meters away it's stays dry. Luckily I had new wiper blades and I suspect I could see more than most of the other drivers. I must be getting better. Usually I fit new wipers after the rain ends.

New Bali Website

We are now working on a new website selling Balinese fashion jewelry and accessories. Hopefully this will be ready this week. It's called Totally Bali. Click on the name to visit it.

Internet Crazies

It's still too hot here to do anything outside of an air-conditioned environment. Tempers can get a bit short. It's definitely not the time to run into an internet crazy. I suspect many internet users have run into these, but it's more likely if you are business. Sometimes it starts very normally but before long you get the email all in UPPERCASE.

Nowadays I tend to try and get out of these email conversations as quickly as possible but usually the crazy wants to continue. Best bet is to agree with everything they say and wind up the communication.

I thought about this a bit as I have been working with the internet a long time. Why does this medium attract the crazies? I think it's explained by the old cartoon of the dog in front of the computer saying, "On the internet nobody knows I'm a dog." By email people who have never said a cross word in real life can let out all their aggression in a virtual world where nobody can see they are really very mousey. They are the internet school bullies, but unlike in a real school yard you don't know their size or fighting abilities.

My only advice is don't get involved and try not to let them upset you.

End of the Holiday

Traffic still wasn't up to usual levels but far more than Tuesday. I suspect about two thirds of Bangkok's workers are back today with the others showing up tomorrow and the really lucky ones on Monday.

Yesterday was cloudy, it almost looked like an early start to the monsoon rains, but the threat failed to materialize. It's so hot and sticky that it's hard to do anything outside the air-conditioned environment.

Songkran - The Thai New Year

Well the Thai New Year holiday is almost over. Most people outside Thailand know it as the water festival and here it's called Songkran. On Thursday almost everyone will be back at work although some companies save up other holidays to make it a week off.

Traditionally it is a time to pay respect to your parents and elders. It was also a time when prayers for rain were made. It doesn't get much hotter here than it is now and the rains should arrive soon to cool it down and more importantly to fill the rice paddy fields.

So many people leave Bangkok to go back to their original towns and villages that it's one of two times in the year that it seems empty here. The other time is Western New Year holiday. Driving to the office today you could imagine you were in a small town in the US or a British country town as the traffic was so light. I have always lived in big cities so I can imagine how pleasant it is to drive to work in a small town unlike the stressful drive we usually have here. Below is a picture Srinakarin Road at 08:30 this morning. You will have to wait to the 31st. December to see morning traffic like this again.

Scams

One unfortunate side affect of Bangkok being the center of the colored gems industry is that we do have a bad name regarding scams and the retail trade. Why it has been allowed carry on I don't know. The authorities should have been able to close the worst places years ago. Unless you are a gem expert any deal offered to you via a taxi driver, tour guide or a man in the street that sounds too good to be true, isn't true!

www.2bangkok.com does cover this problem well and a quick read of the articles linked to this page will give you some background. There are responsible gem jewelry retailers in Bangkok and you can find them in the jewelry areas off Silom and Suriwong Roads or in the large department stores.

Feet of Clay

Bangkok is built on mud. For thousands of years the Chao Phraya River has been dumping silt at its mouth and reclaiming land from the sea. It's only in the last couple of hundred years that the area around present day Bangkok has been drained by canals, originally to bring it into agricultural use.

Now under Bangkok is about 30 meters of dark thick clay. When houses were made of teak and transport was by boat this didn't matter so much. Bangkok is sinking under its own weight. Water is pumped out for fresh water supply. Most buildings are on piles that go down to the bedrock. As the land sinks extra steps are added to reach the buildings, maybe one every few years. Roads are not on piles so they sink at the same rate as the land. This causes a problem where roads meet something that is piled like a bridge over a canal. Here every year or so the road needs to be repaired.

The rains have come a little early this year. They started on Sunday and continued yesterday. The rain water cannot permeate the clay quickly so it just sits on the surface for while. The roads turn into canals quite quickly. Ah well, this year I'm driving a diesel so at least I don't have to worry about the engine electrics getting wet and stalling in the middle of a flooded road.

Green Diesel

The state owned oil company PTT now sells a bio-diesel which I've bought on my last two visits to the pump. It sells at about 1.5% less than the regular diesel. The truck seems to be running the same as always so hopefully there is no mechanical downside.

There have been bio-petrols (US gas) here for a while but giving us the bio-diesel is new. I do not know what percentage of the fuel is made from agricultural produce. I do know that it is meant to burn cleaner with less harmful outputs from the exhaust.

The bad news is we are hearing that maybe making bio-fuels will lead to an increase in food prices and more lack of food in the third world. Here one of the supermarket chains is talking of panic-buying of rice as rumours of shortages are spread.

I guess as with everything a middle path has to be found.

4000 year old necklace found in Peru

A gold and turquoise necklace found in Peru is thought to date back 4000 years to a hunter-gatherer society and is the earliest jewelry found in the Americas. There is a link to the BBC's website and the picture below.

BBC article on the necklace

Too Hot

In the middle of this month we have the Songkram holiday. Many manufacturers will be closed for a week and some longer. This is the festival where everyone throws water over everyone else. There's a good reason for this, it's also the hottest time of year.

The last couple of weekends have seen busy roads as Bangkok inhabitants try and escape to somewhere cooler. I went west across the river on Sunday but even an early start didn't save me from the traffic.

It's with interest then that I see in the local paper that Laos has just completed the work on its Route 3 which is the last section of road needed to make it possible for us to drive from Bangkok to Kunming in China's Yunnan province. OK it's not a weekend's drive, but with two weeks off covering the Songkram holiday you could do it and get the benefit of the cooler Yunnan temperatures.

More Photography

So I fixed the light box. I haven't used a soldering iron in years but it came back easily. The extra lamp didn't make that much difference; it looks like it needs a couple more tubes under there but I'm not sure how to do that.

Photography isn't a hobby of mine so I don't enjoy it, but I found the manual and started playing. Changed with the exposure setting and started getting something we could use. See the first shot below. I'm storing them in Flickr and found the built-in Picnik photo editor. The second picture is where I let Picnik set the contrast automatically. I like this program.

Keeping up with the Canons

I was experimenting with a light box and my 3 or 4 year old Canon PowerShot A70 last week. It wasn't quite right as one of the lower under-floor lamps was out so I had to blast up the contrast afterwards. You can see some of the results below. The A70 has a 3.2 mega pixel resolution and that seemed great when I bought it. On Saturday a friend was showing me his Canon PowerShot G9 with 12.1 mega pixels. I thought I had matured from wanting the latest gadgets but I'm starting to get some pangs of envy. Click on the pictures to see a larger size.

Jewelry Trade Still Important to Thailand

I just saw this in the JCK Online edition. The new government looks like it still thinks that jewelry is an important export and business of Thailand. The Deputy Minister of Commerce, Viroon Tejapaibol, was quoted as saying the following.

"The contribution of the gems and jewelry to the Thai economy is significant. Gems and Jewelry exports last year exceeded $5.3 billion, up 46.72 percent from the previous year, ranking fifth on Thailand's export lists."

The industry does need all the government help it can give as we are heading into an uncertain economic period. Today on the BBC news I saw how diamond cutting was now undertaken in Botswana which although good for Botswana is probably bad news for India. The present exchange rates do not favor us while the dollar weakens, so government tax breaks make sense.

Traffic Gridlock - What was the problem?

So this morning I'm in a tailback on a Bangkok road I'm not expecting a problem on. So what is causing it? I guess the large high-school further up the road has something on today like enrollment. (It's the school summer holidays here in Thailand.) I get as far the school and the traffic starts to move freely again. There's nothing going on at the school.

How many times does this happen? You try and guess what caused the problem. You blame whatever your driving pet hates are. Maybe an old lady driving in the outside lane; maybe an obnoxious taxi driver, but in the end you never know. It stays a mystery.

Ancient Stone Earrings

I saw some black & white photos of stone earrings found in ancient sites close to Bangkok. They date from what is called the Dvaravati period which Wikipedia says dates from the 6th. to the 11th. centuries AD. They looked remarkably like the wood, horn and bone earrings we do at coolpierce.com and the patterns are almost Aztec even though we are on a different continent. If I can I will visit the National Museum and see if I can get better pictures.

Bangkok Canals

For the last two days I have changed my route to the office. Although a bit longer there is only one set of traffic lights to go through instead of three. For this one set I turn left which is a free turn seeing that we drive on left here in Bangkok.

This new route takes me through a U-turn under a bridge that takes Srinakarin Road over a large canal. I took some pictures of what I found there. It is a terminus for canal ferry boats taking commuters to work and kids to school. Click on the pictures for a larger view.

Another day in paradise

Just one of those days when things are going either slow or badly. Not sure why. I didn't get away to the coast on the weekend and yesterday was busy so that might be it. At least we never get cold here;-)

I was just told on Saturday how much a round of golfer costs. Not being a golfer I had no idea. To pay 5000 Baht to walk after a little white ball for a few hours seems far too much. I can think of so many better ways to spend that much.

Bangkok traffic gets worse

The traffic snarl-ups are getting to resemble the bad old days. This is in spite of improved public transport systems and new overhead expressways. I think we will need to go the London Congestion Charge route in the end. If people have to pay to drive into town they may think twice about it. (This is of course from someone who drives over to the office in pick-up truck when only 10 minutes away. I should bike it but that is taking a risk here.)

The excitement of the Bangkok Gems and Jewelry Fair is over for another year so it's back to just solid work. Maybe I can fit in a trip to the coast this weekend though;-)

New website is up

The new website www.cjmsea.com is up and running. Today we will be making it a bit easier to navigate and add some more product pictures and some photos from the office.

I hope everyone who attended the Bangkok Gems & Jewelry Fair had a good time, successfully found some new products and had a pleasant trip home. Remember to contact CJMSEA if you need a buying agent or quality control on suppliers in Thailand or Bali.

New Website Update

We were running slow on the new www.cjmsea.com website but it should be ready very soon. We just have to migrate the email accounts and the change the domain name servers.

The new software is an open source content management system called Joomla which should make it easier to expand the site.

Bali and Bangkok

Our location here in Bangkok gives us access to local jewelry suppliers. For a long time it has been the center of colored gem trade with jewelers both cutting and setting all sorts of stones.

The history of jewelry in this part of the world goes back far into history. The region has mined colored gems with Burma, the eastern part of Thailand and Cambodia supplying rubies, sapphires, and many more precious stones. Silver has been worked in Laos and amongst the hill tribes since recorded times.



Bali is now famous for and is the real center for organic jewelry using shell, coral, horn, bone and wood. The eastern part of Java and the next door island of Bali have a history of supplying jewelry to kings of Java. The designs seen in architecture and tattoos are being translated by the modern day jewelers into jewelry designs.

We are lucky to have our factory in Bali to get the best of both worlds. Although China and Korea do supply the jewelry trade they are both left behind by the skill of the workers for handcrafted jewelry in our two locations.

Borneo Designs

Looking through a book on tribal tattoo designs it was clear what inspires some of the Bali designs. This one below looks like some of the horn claws we do.



Here in Bangkok it looks like it's going to be a hot day unless we get a bit of rain.

As promised here is the Google Earth view of the Bangkok office. We are to the east of the city with a number canals around us. Click on the picture for a full-size picture.

CJMSEA Office

Here's a picture of where we work from. I will follow up with a Google Earth picture later.

Tribal Jewelry Designs

The SE Asia and Pacific area has been a good source for tribal designs which makes Bali a great place to find new jewelry ideas. Both in jewelry and tattoos you can find it here. Above is a Maori tattoo picture from Wikipedia. The article is here.

Save the Planet

A good friend of ours has a great video on YouTube. Here it is below.

New website

Our new website, www.coolpierce.com, should be ready sometime this week. At the moment it has just dummy product and prices in it but the complete pricelist is almost done. It is carrying organic bone, horn and wood piercing jewelry from our Bali factory at wholesale prices.

First Post

This is just getting started. I will blog about new jewelry designs as we do them. We are now working on a new line of organic body jewelry from our Bali factory and should have this on a wholesale website for it soon.