3 days in Bangkok

---

We arrived in Bangkok around 1 AM and shared a cab into the city with an awesome Portland, OR airport baggage handler named Pam who was on her way to a ten-day silent Buddhist retreat. Apparently, when you work for the airport, you get to travel as much as you want for free!! The traffic was wild as we wended our way under serpentine overpasses into the pitch of this exotic, Blade Runnerish cityscape. We encountered a bad accident, around whose grisly exterior scores of Thai people swarmed with cameras raised high to try to capture the gory details on film.
We stayed at Tavee Guest House on Sri-Ayutthaya Road. Between the wood paneling and bright red sheets, our room seemed to evoke something of an overdone American Chinese restaurant. We had hot water, Western toilet (non-squat), and the privilege to view their ‘very expensive- do not scare!’ fish imprisoned in austere tanks by their lonesomes. Mr. Tavee was a jolly, loquacious presence when he surfaced briefly from the back rooms in the evenings.

We stayed in Bangkok for three days. Highlights:

--Getting soaked to the innards in a monsoon style rainstorm downtown with no umbrellas. Running amok in the rain.

--street vendor food-several blocks from our guest house—for 15 baht we had the finest meals in the whole city.

--meeting Terry, a Brit ex-pat from Chiang Mai, a wealth of knowledge about travel, Thai politics and regional culture.

--Wat Pho, home of the Reclining Buddha who has three meter high feet made of mother of pearl!

-- trying durian for the first time (creamy and delicate—looks like a yellow blossom once harvested from its anklosaurian shell).

The streets are like an endless open air marketplace, seductively luring in pedestrians for hours through unimaginable wares. Khao San Road is a horrible Bourbon Street party zone that is to be avoided at all costs. People say that ‘everything you need for your continued travel is there’ but really, most of the tours offered from there are rip-offs and scams, everyone is Western, and the food is as bland as a St Patrick’s Day buffet. On surrounding streets, we purchased second-hand guidebooks at sidewalk bookstalls for less than a third of the asking price on Khao San.

On our way out of Bangkok, we caught the SkyTrain and felt as if we had been transported into an entirely different city. The glitzy, polished business section around Siam Station felt more like Japan than our sweaty, close quarters on Sri-Ayutthaya. It felt more advanced than any American city we’d ever been to. Bangkok breathes likes a dragon loosed from the murky depths of the Chao Phraya. Her smooth carapace quivers and glows with the pulses of innumerable villages roiling in her fiery belly.

-Schannelhannel and the Snorks.

---

Photos

The back of the Reclining Buddha's Head
or a gigantic durian?