One Night in Bangkok

Well, I’m back! It’s been a year (well, almost two) and to be perfectly honest, it’s been a pretty uninteresting intervening time period. I had several pretty neat trips, to be fair, but I made the mistake of not writing my thoughts down at the time and now the minutia has been lost with the passing of time. But I shan’t make that mistake again. So here we are!

For those not intimately familiar with my plans for these next months sandwiched between the joy of graduation and the apprehension that marks the start of real life, I will fill you in now. I have been planning a trip ‘round the world with my friend from high school, Nathan for several years now, but reality and funding took its toll and we limited our plans to South East Asia. As of yesterday I had a flight to Bangkok and a flight out of Kuala Lampur, Malaysia and pretty much nothing else figured out. The plans are solidifying, but still very loose.

It’s day two of my journey now and I suppose I ought to capture some of my thoughts of Bangkok as I sit here in bed at 5am (jet lag…) and wonder why I decided to save 5 dollars and not opt for the air conditioned room. But that’s neither here nor there. I arrived Tuesday night at the airport and we stayed at a hotel only a few miles from there. We woke up on Wednesday morning and wandered outside for some breakfast and a first look at this new and fascinating country (Thailand for the geography challenged). It somewhat bizarrely fulfilled my expectations. There were tiny bridges over canals teeming with fish, colorful taxis doing their level best to run over their fares, and little motorbikes zipping everywhere, dodging scrawny chickens and scrawnier kids. We had a 40 cent breakfast of sticky rice topped with mystery meat from a toothless, grinning vendor with a Starbucks t-shirt draped rather ironically over his skinny frame.

Stomachs full, we headed out on our journey into Bangkok with only the loosest of destinations in mind. The way in involved the SkyTrain, a elevated monorail type thing. The station was only about a mile from the hotel, but it was almost surreal. The station looked like a giant metal Star Wars machine rising sinisterly over the roofs of the shacks that surrounded it. We took the escalator into the belly of the beast and were soon on our way to downtown.

We passed shantytowns, gated communities, abandoned train factories, and gleaming mega-malls. The skyscrapers started about 10km outside of town and simply grew in number and size as we continued in. Never in my life have I seen such a sprawling, massive city. We ditched the metro about halfway into the city (because it stopped…) and took the city bus the rest of the way, passing loads of kids in their Thai school uniforms, which, for the most part consisted of white shirts and blue pants for the guys and blue skirts for the gals. It looks pretty classy. We finally dropped our bags at a hostel in the backpacker’s ghetto of Banglamphu and headed out to explore.

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a leisurely stroll to the hordes of rickshaw taxi drivers who cloud the area. “Sir, where you going?” he asks. “Well, we’re just walking, really.” “No, but where you going?” “umm… over there?” (pointing in a random direction). “No, no, no, sir, that’s closed! But I’ll take you to the standing Buddha for only 300 baht.” Walking away…

That being said, ‘over there’ wasn’t closed and we stumbled across Laho Prasa, a Sri Lankan style temple filled with Buddhas in all stages of laying, sitting, standing and walking. It was really a beautiful and peaceful place made all the more so by the fact that there was essentially no one there besides us and the monks. Perhaps everyone else believed the taxi drivers… The night finished with a torrential downpour and glass of pineapple juice, a fair way to end the day.

Ok, I promise I won’t have the time or inclination to go into such detail about the remainder of my 35 days, but suffice to say I’m having fun and if you’re ever in Bangkok, don’t listen to taxi drivers. Everyone else is really nice though.