Bangkok Sunrise

Though the title would suggest otherwise, I never did see a Bangkok sunrise. I wasn't ever able to get up that early, though I can think of half a dozen places that would be great to see one from. I remember when I came to visit the city for the first time with my family, we were often up as early as possible to catch the cool weather and to beat the crowds but this time I'm living the hostel lifestyle and that means late nights and later mornings. It's frankly a great time.

After flying into BKK and taking the train as far as possible into town I had to switch over to a taxi to get to my hostel, which was my first step into the bullshit that is the Thai tourism industry. Near the taxi stand I was approached by a well dressed man who spoke good English. I took this as a warning sign. First I'm told that it will cost $10 to drive the 3km and I openly laughed at them and said that I'd give them a dollar if they convinced me well enough that I should pay that much. We had a good long talk about this and then after saying that I was on my way to the islands they said that a student holiday was approaching and that all the hotels and trains would be full. Helpfully, they suggested that I could go with them to a travel agency and make reservations. This is a well known scam where they take you to an unofficial agency that doubles all the rates and gives a kickback to the drivers. I'll admit, at first I thought that he could have been on the level since it's been so long since I've been lied to by a local. Thanks Europe.

So, I blew him off and approached a dozen taxis, none of which would give me a metered price, and got the job done for $3 which is about twice what it should have been. Oh well. The hostel is awesome. It's lobby is an air conditioned paradise against the humid weather of Thailand. It's 30 degrees in the day and 24 at night (86-75F) with 86% humidity. Also, it rains for a couple hours a day in broken intervals. I've been sheltered from monsoon weather for too long but I hear in the south (I'll go there later) it rains much more than it does here in Bangkok at this time of year. I can't wait.

Later in the evening I met up with an Irish guy named Kevin and a German named Timo. That's a Scandinavian name since he lives in the North of the country. Kevin was just finishing up his journey of 1.5 years and was to return to Ireland the following day. I thought that he sounded and looked a bit tired but maybe I was reading into him too much. In any case he said that he was ready to return home and then gave some tips on the local beers and where to eat. Timo was just starting his trip of 1 month and flew in on the same day as me. I think that the two of us were pretty excited to be in Thailand and ended up drinking much too much and coming home very late.

The hostel is two blocks away from the epicenter of backpacker culture in Bangkok, at a street called Khaosan. That street is lined with clothing venders (in western proportions), food stalls of every variety, massage parlors (legitimate ones), fake licenses and IDs of all sorts, bars, discos, shops, travel agencies, internet cafes, and 7 elevens. The 7 elevens here offer powerful AC, clean interiors free of fish stink, competative prices, and are everywhere. According to Wikipedia, there are 5409 of them in Thailand, half of which are in Bangkok. I love them all and if you got to experience the sweltering heat of this place I'm sure that you would too.

So the next day Timo and I spend most of the day recovering from our hangovers, escaping the heat in the hostel, eating street food, and looking around Khaosan. The street food here is out of this world and like nothing that I've ever seen before. In the two block walk to my hostel, there's got to be at least 30 different stalls and they chnage every day though some are fairly consistent. They sell, young coconuts, smoothies, juices, tons of fried foods, spicy salads, and the vast majority of it is impossible to identify. I guess that my favorite things so far are the pad thai noodles, prawn eggrolls, and green mango salads. Each of those cost about $0.5 to $1 though it takes 2 of them to fill me up. when they make the dressing for the salad, they mix lime, sugar, peppers, mystery liquids, and a small live crab together with a large mortar and pestle. Yummy.

Later that night we went easy on the beer and vowed to be more productive the next day. The beer here comes in many varieties and the most popular of them is called Chang. It comes in 0.64 liter bottle and is pretty strong at 6.4%. There are some stories that the batches are not consistent and that some are much stronger than others but who knows. It's probably just a rumor. The way it makes you feel the next day is called a 'Changover'. It turns out that Timo is headed in the same direction as me, so we've been talking about our plans. I think that our goals include seeing the famed Ko Phi Phi featured in the movie The Beach, taking diving lessons in Ko Tao, and experiencing a full moon party at Ko Pha-Ngan. This is going to be a great couple of weeks.

In the morning Timo and I braved the already formidable heat and went down to the river which is not such a long walk from the hostel. The river is very wide and busy with traffic. Most of the boats are a long and shallow variety called 'longtails' and have a cars engine powering them. It gives them a funny look. We also ate more street food in an area only visited by Thai people and it was pretty grim... a rice bowl with some strange chicken, a fried egg, and lots of bits of bone. The first destination was the royal palace and it took us a good 45 minutes to find the place which felt like an eternity in the heat.

Of course on the way we were approached by dozens of tuktuk drivers wanting to take us there. The tuktuks are 3 wheeled motorcycle taxis with open sides. They've got a bad reputation because they don't have meters and try to scam every passenger they get or any foreigner they drive by. They'll claim to give you a ride for $0.5 but then say that they're taking you shopping along the way at a 'very special' discount store that sells silk, pearls, gems, etc. The stores give the drivers a kickback and the tourist gets overcharged. Another one they try is to take you to overpriced restaurants that give petrol and free meals to the drivers. If you insist on not stopping then they try to charge you more. It's better just to take the less unique taxis instead at they have meters, cost less, have AC, and are more comfortable. Still, you've got to talk with half a dozen taxis before you find one that agrees to use the meter instead of a fixed rate 2x the usual price. Jerks. Still, every tourist falls for it on their first few rides.

When we got near the palace a nicely dressed man approached us and said that he worked there and that today was a special buddhist holiday and the palace was closed for the next couple hours. Also, that we had to buy our tickets on the other side of town. Helpfully, he knew a tuktuk driver that could give us a tour of the city for the next couple hours for just $4 apise. We sort of believed him for a while (we're so green) but we said that we would just walk to all the places that he drew on my map and enjoy the heat. We didn't walk for 2 minutes before we found the entrance to the palace and saw that it was clearly open for business. Jerk.

The royal palace itself was a sort of walled in set of smaller temples, and one larger temple called the 'Emerald Buddha'. All of the temples and columns are decorated with tiny bits of mirror that makers the place shine brightly in the heat and also reflects some light into the shaded corners of the complex. These shaded corners housed a long wall covered in traditional paintings of traditional folklore, much of it involving gods and wars. It was mesmerizing to look at really even though Timo and I didn't know what the stories were really about. The place was interesting, but they make you wear borrowed pants since it's disrespectful to people who no longer live there to wear disgraceful shirts. After enduring the heat for far too long, we headed off to parts unknown.

I wanted to replace my whole wardrobe here in Bangkok since the prices are so low and I've been wearing mostly the same clothes for 6 months. To that end, we decided to walk out to the Siam Square shopping district where I went with my family a few years earlier. As I recall, I got a few hip t shirts there but they all shrunk so much that I couldn't wear them. Well OK, I wore them for a few months but Erika yelled at me that I'd wear something so tight even though I look so good in them. She's mean. On the way there we crossed the Golden Mount pagoda which is a man made hill of earth, brick, and flowers that was built 150 years ago and topped with a temple. The view from the top made us forget the heat for a couple minutes.

When we reached the Siam Square area, we were totally overwhelmed by the scale of the malls there. Basically, there were 4 full sized indoor malls, each 5 floors, all next to each other on the north side of the road. On the south side of the road was a series of multi floor strip malls featuring closet sized stores catering to the teenage denizens of Bangkok with bright and outrageous fashions. The most stunning of the malls, the Siam Paragon, has Lamborghini, BMW, and Aston Martin dealerships on the 3rd floor along with an IMAX theater, aquarium, and the largest food court I've ever seen. Speaking of that, they had a line of at least 300 people for the Krispy Kreme store. Seriously.

We wandered all over the place for a good couple hours and I determined that I didn't want to pay the money for the nice brands in the big malls and I also couldn't wear the tacky crap in size XXS in the teenage area. So, we argued with tuktuk drivers for a good half hour and went back to the hostel to recharge and escape the escalating rain. We didn't get much rest there however.

We met 3 British people at our hostel, 2 guys and a girl, and started drinking with them on the patio. It took a few beers and a lot of rowdy talk but we determined to head out to the Patpong district. This are is famous as the historical center of Bangkoks red light district, though today it's mostly gogo bars and pingpong shows rather than outright brothels. So, it's a seedy tourist oriented district and also features a night market selling knockoff purses, jewelry, and other crap. The girl in our group took charge of scouting out the show that we would see, and after visiting half a dozen places we marched into the 'Super Pussy' club to see a show.

Let me just say that the reason that we came was because it's such a famous thing to see here in Bangkok and was honestly more hilarious and shocking than it could ever be sexy. The series of acts included a woman who smoked a cigarette (with gusto) without using her mouth (so that's how one gets cervical cancer), another who shot darts out of a blow gun to pop balloons, one who wrote 'WELCOME TO BANGKOK, PATRICK' for one of our crew, one who pulled a string of razor blades out of an unexpected place, and of course one who gave us a ping pong paddle and then attempted to have a rally with us while on her back. It was pretty sick really, but we all laughed a lot. Finally we were presented with a bill 5x what it should have been but we negotiated down to $10 each though Patrick somehow paid $60 because he was drunk and dumb. We went home and dreamed of something more pleasant.

The next day was a slow one. Timo and I spent the whole morning loafing about the air conditioned hostel laughing about the night before and later that night we met a new crowd and decide to start drinking with them. One of them was a Dutchman named Tim, an Aussie named Ruth, a British couple Jane and Martin, and another Brit named Alice. I'm amazed that I remember all that! We had some Changs in the hostel until they ran out and we went out for buckets instead. The bucket here is a mixture of a small bottle of whiskey, coke, and a bottle of Redbull syrup. See, Redbull was invented here in Thailand under a different name, and then an Austrian guy teamed up with the Thai inventor to market it around the world under a new name. The Thai guy still owns 51% of the company. The syrup form of it is very strong and must be so unsafe that it's only sold here in Thailand. It was a fun night.

Timo and I felt bad about not doing anything the day before so in the morning (OK, 1 PM) we went to see the temple of the Reclining Buddha. It's a series of smaller pagodas, and one huge golden Buddha laying on his side under the roof of an enormous building. At the temple, we ran into Tim, Alice, and an Alaskan guy named Taylor once more. They didn't have anything in mind to do, so they joined us to visit the Teak Palace on the north side of town, but when we got there at 3pm it was already close for some reason. Oh well. Afterward we returned to the mall once more.

In the Paragon food court we found some fried insects for sale though Talor and I were the only ones brave enough to eat them. We each had a fried grasshopper but only I ate the caterpillar and the beetle. They tasted like cooking oil and salt and I guess that I would have them again. The way I see it, they eat grass so doesn't that make them like cows? It should. We also saw a group of girls lipsync along to some rock show on the bottom floor of one mall in front of a screaming audience. They weren't terribly good in any respect but they did look pretty.

Later that night Alice, Jane, Martin, Timo, Taylor, and a random dutch girl we met at the mall went out to the tallest building in Bangkok for a drink. You can go to the top floor where they have a rotating balcony and then got maitais. I'd say the whole place felt pretty shabby for being such a popular place. Oh well. Afterwards we went back to Patpong for the street food, night market, and so that the girls who hadn't seen it before could peek their heads inside the clubs for a preview without paying. We didn't stay long.

On our final day in Bangkok, Timo and I, got lunch with several other people front he hostel before saying goodbye and we all went separate ways. Actually, we spent most of the day hanging out in the lobby of the hostel writing this and the previous post and then later in the night went to the train station to make our escape from the vice that is Bangkok. The station looked like a refugee camp. We took an 9 hour overnight train to Surat, then a 30 minute bus to another bus station, a 3 hour bus to the port, and finally a 2 hour boat ride to Ko Phi Phi. Suffice to say that it was a hot and sleepless ride and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Pay the extra $5 for the real sleeper car.

Suffice to say that Ko Phi Phi is beautiful, slightly overrun in an almost tasteful way, with crystal clear water, white sand, and more palm trees than I could shake a ladyboy at. I'll cover it in the next post as this is just my first night.