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Published: April 21st 2008
This place is like a steam cooker. Its like some all-powerful deity has taken a whole lot of high-rise buildings, some palm trees, some flash cars, lots of Thai people and a few sweaty and ill-prepared tourists, chucked them all in an oven set to max, and slammed shut the lid. This is the hot season in Thailand, and even the locals are complaining about the heat. The humidity is incredible too... gasping in warm exhaust fumes in a futile attempt to taste fresh, cool air, we only succeed in inhaling what feels like dense water vapour. Thankfully, almost every contained space features an air conditioning unit - the restaurants, shops and minicabs all have their dials set to 'Arctic' and walking into one of these self-contained atmospheres almost induces a chill in contrast. Walking back outside again is like falling face-first into a bowl of boiling porridge. It's intense, and far hotter and more humid than either India or Nepal.
Struggling with the heat, we descend from our room to the main road, where giant hotel complexes soar upwards and their peaks shimmer in the haze, and flickering silver water mirages appear in creases in the jet-black road. Discarded
Bangkok tuk-tuk
Immensely powerful, fast, and piloted by loonies... chewing gum, so easily ignored in England because of its ability to quickly become a dormant part of the pavement, lies on the ground with an almost palpable menace and if stepped on, attaches itself to the sole of your shoe like a parasite. For the next ten minutes' walking, your right leg requires considerably more effort to lift than the left, and your foot trails strawberry-scented wispy pieces of pink goo. I always thought that the total ban on chewing gum in Singapore was ridiculous and draconian, but I'm starting to see their point. We need coffee urgently, and so stop at the first place we find to fuel the day's activities with near-lethal amounts of caffeine.
The goal for the day, really, is to organise transport to Kanchanaburi, a town 200 miles or so west of Bangkok in which we'll get the chance to meet tigers in a Buddhist-run breeding centre, walk over the Bridge Over The River Kwai in Alec Guinness' footsteps (kind of), and swim in tropical waterfalls. For now, though, we're stuck in the big city. We descend into Bangkok's wonderful tube train system where the carriages, amazingly, are air conditioned. Transport For London
take note - rather than cramming commuters into super-heated tubular prisons for hours every weekday evening, why not install a little air con? God knows the Central Line needs it. Ten or so stops later we step off at Hua Lamphong, one of the hub stations in the city, and insert our little disc-style tickets into the exit gates. A large, tall, miniskirted woman walks in front of us, busy doing her make up and tottering along on six inch heels. She's built like a rugby player. As she turns her head to either side to check the application of whichever cosmetic potion it is she's been applying in her mirror, we get a vivid side profile view of an adam's apple like a melon and a five o'clock shadow of stubble that Dick Tracy would envy. As far as transvestites go, that is one of the most spectacularly unsuccessful I've ever seen.
Buying a ticket is amazingly difficult, and we're presented with a dazzling array of timetables and schedules by eager-to-help station staff who manage to contradict each other ceaselessly, but the consensus seems to indicate that we leave the next morning at 8am. We decide to think
it over with a spot of lunch, and once again we find ourselves walking for ages trying to find a meal that doesn't consist of the corpse of something that was once quite happily mooching about at the bottom of the ocean. Or, in fact, something that was relatively unhappily mooching about in one of the fishtanks in the restaurant windows. Zoologically, these tanks are very interesting, however, and blue-streaked shrimps as big as my forearm eyeball right back at me. After a liquid Coca-Cola lunch, we manage to find a travel agents - almost by mistake - who offer us bus tickets to Kanchanaburi the next day for a fraction of the price of a train ticket. We snap them up, pay and head hotel-wards.
After a snooze (the heat is utterly knackering) we head out for some dinner and find a garden restaurant that has some veg dishes. Shown to our table by young Thai girls wearing latex miniskirts the length of a decent watch strap, we're presented with the menu and choose our food - stir fried veg, mainly. Then suddenly a perfectly-manicured and delicate hand shoves a cocktail menu under Maya's nose, and almost simultaneously a booming voice like Brian Blessed's enquires as to whether she might like a Mai Tai or Pina Colada. This transvestite was none too convincing either, and covers up hers/his/its adam's apple with a scarf, but the mannerisms and feminine airs he puts on are so over the top that he is like a caricature, a cartoon tranny drawn by the animation artist who draws Ren & Stimpy, and as he turns away to make the cocktails I laugh so hard a grain of rice shoots out of my nose. After a nightcap over the road, watching the cars and bikes cruising on the main highway, we retire.
30/03/08 - bus to Kanchanaburi
Up at 7.30 and there's no-one at the desk of the hotel. We leave the key and head to Hua Lamphong, to the travel agents where we're being picked up. Even at 8am, the heat is strong and rising by the minute, and lugging our packs around is hard work. We are stopped at the station entrance to show a security guard the contents of our packs. I guess he's trying to prevent terrorism, but all he gets is a faceful of my pants stash. Not what you need early on a Sunday morning.
Within an hour, we are on a small minibus with an incredibly powerful air con unit which pumps cool, dry air directly into my face. After another 20 minutes or so we are dropped on the Khaosan Road, the infamous backpacker's haven, to wait for our coach. We don't see much of Khaosan Rd, but the amount of dredged up old hippies and staggering British men in England shirts (who manage, somehow, to be utterly arseholed on beer by lunchtime) makes us reluctant to investigate further. Eventually we're installed, relaxed and Bangkok falls away behind into a cloud of smog, illuminated orange by the sun. The journey was dull, and the King of Thailand's face flashes past on every billboard of the motorway, every 200 yards or so. I wonder to myself, in a semi-sleep state, if it's like one of those flickbook animations you used to make at school, and so if you travel along the road fast enough, those poses he's in all blur together in one long sequence of animated motion and reveal that he's actually doing something, like karate chopping a monkey or eating a lemon. Hmm. I sleep on this theory and vow to return to it.
There's a brief bit of interest at a petrol station where I spot a Yamaha V-Max motorcycle, nicely modified in the style of the magazine I work for. I snap a couple of pics on my phone camera (the posh one is hidden away in the luggage) and chat to the owner, who's just leaving. He's an ex-pat Brit who's just got back from Malaysia. Back on the bus, I buy a pack of super sour Mentos sweets and spend the next half an hour alternating between chewing contendedly, and puckering up like a chihuahua with a grapefruit fetish.
Eventually we arrive in Kanchanaburi, and slowly but surely, everyone departs the bus at their pre-booked hotels. We don't have any bookings - throughout India and Nepal we managed, and probably had more fun, by simply turning up somewhere and seeing what happened - and we hope the same will be okay in Thailand. As the bus empties and the last tourists depart, we spot a bar and hotfoot it in there for a cold beer and a recon of the town. A sprinkler system is running out of the front of the bar, spraying fine mist over the whole place, and it is lovely as the heat is up into the 40s by this point. The bar maid recommends we check out Blue Star, where some of her family work, which is a collection of beautiful little air conditioned huts suspended on stilts above the river Kwai. We finish up and go for a look, and it is beautiful - wooden huts peek from lush green tropical vegetation, and at the back the river flows past. A hammock is outside on the porch.
Checked in and unpacked, we head out for dinner to a restaurant that keeps pet ostriches (?!) and then manage to find a bar showing the MotoGP! I am chuffed in the extreme with this. We settle down for the long haul - the 125s have just started so it'll be a couple of hours before the 800s come out - and I get chatting to a Welshman who's on holiday here and is also into MotoGP. It's down to him that they're showing it. A bit later, as a storm breaks outside, the 800s start, and Toseland is right up there. Then there's a signal fault caused by the violent tropical storm outside and the show ends. Great! We manage to re-establish connection in time to see the last few laps, and are then thrown off the telly without any ceremony by a couple of low-foreheaded Londoners who want to watch the football. We run back to the hut through torrential rain and lightning flashes, and are soaked by the time we get back. I nobly send Maya out for a bedsheet but as soon as she puts a foot outside the door there's an enormous flash of lightning and explosion of thunder simultaneously, and the power goes down, leaving us completely in the dark. We decide to sleep under a towel, climb under the mosquito net and fall asleep to the hypnotic sound of rain on leaves, echoing thunder and the incredible chorus of marsh frogs who raise their voices so that they drown out even the most penetrative rumbles of the storm...
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Kate
non-member comment
GGNNAAARR!
Wow!!!! Huts on stilts sounds lovely! Heat a bit too much I bet...Still not up to date tho, ur running weeks behind, tut tut, but i'll forgive you. Still jealous! Love you guys take care n keep having fun! xxx