Bangkok

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Big city, dense traffic, dirty, polluted and stinking. Night hides the grime, giving it a false charm. But you can feel tremendous energy in the air here, floating above its grimy sidewalks. Checked into a youth hostel in Silom district, into an unbelievably small room. I could not have swung even half a cat. Jail cells are bigger than this. A bed fills almost all of it and the bed is little more than a cradle. A fan mounted on the wall. A high window that gives onto a hallway. Checked out the following morning and into a much better place near Khao San Road. Went out for a meal and a taxi driver suggested a fish restaurant. Should have known better. A tourist trap with a listless stage show (off-key singing, costumed dancer shuffling mechanically through the steps) and high prices. I returned to my hotel, my wallet wounded badly. Was thinking of going to Soi Cowboy for a look but the taxi driver warned me it’s all just ladyboys there now.

For all of its renown and all of its infamy as well, I find Bangkok curiously disappointing except for one thing: Wat Phra Kaew. Dense congregation of many-coloured temples and related buildings. Overall impression is that you’re in a child’s story-book world. Statues of giants set to guard gates. Small pavillions, towers representing various things, a huge, bell-shaped golden dome and the main temple housing the centerpiece: the emerald buddha (made from jade). All of it done in gold and multi-coloured glass - ruby, sapphire, emerald, topaz. The main temple walls are painted in fresco while the emerald Buddha sits high atop a golden pyramid surrounded by a dozen standing or sitting buddhas, all made of gold. The emerald Buddha is not particularly big, maybe a metre high, sitting cross-legged and wearing a golden headpiece. But it is valuable and venerated. Guards hustle people into place to sit cross-legged on the stone floor. Photos are not allowed. There’s too much coming and going for it to be serenely peaceful. Still, it's fascinating.

Khao San
After Wat Phra Kaew I went to Khao San Road to relax with a beer. It must have been interesting before it was ruined: a cool hangout of cheap eats and low-cost bars with a few clothing and jewellery shops. Now it’s a bunch of tin roofs and awning sheltering booths selling T-shirts with resurrected heroes and rebels (Che, Marley, Hendrix, Bruce Lee), junky jewellery, sandals, shoulder bags, imitation brand-name backpacks, and costumed women stroking wooden frogs while selling bangles, beads and embroidered change purses.

Add to this an endless parade of tourist backpackers. The twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, the fifty- and sixty-somethings. Dredlocks, shaved heads, tribal tattoos, goatees. Swedes, Israelis, American, Japanese, Koreans, Thais. Young, old, beautiful, ugly, fat, thin, girls, boys and ladyboys…it’s all here. But what do they want? To find some vestige of what once was but will never again be, or just to come and look and experience and later say I’ve been to Khao San Road and thereby tie themselves to a mythical place? Just one of many Stations of the Cross.

It’s hot and humid and dirty in Bangkok and I felt the southern beaches pulling at my skin. But there was a place I had to go to before the islands.

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Photos

Reclining Buddha
Thai statues of Buddha usually show a much thinner figure than those in China.