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Published: October 12th 2005
Though I had already waited out an eleven hour layover after a very short last night in Germany, I could scarcely think of sleeping on the equally long flight out of sheer excitement at FINALLY being on my way to Southeast Asia. Five years ago I had heard of the Freeman Foundation’s scholarships to study in Asia and had started this lovely obsession with the region, which continued long after my university nixed my plan to spend yet another semester abroad in Malaysia. After two failed holiday attempts to Southeast Asia, however, I was finally on board a Bangkok-bound plane and could hardly contain my enthusiasm. A couple of afternoons at the Hugendubel in Berlin allowed me to peruse most of the guidebooks, which all seemed to echo a common strain about my first destination: “You might want to save your Bangkok explorations until after you have seen other parts of the country. That way Bangkok won’t seem quite so overwhelming as on first arrival.”
Somehow that only created more intrigue on my part, imagining the myriad sights, smells, and noises that would heighten the sense of wonder I already held for this Southeast Asian hub. I suppose that the
Temple Detail
Wat Pho, Bangkokbig draw to Asia for me was to see a way of life so incredibly different from my own that everything would astound me, from the language to the food to the architecture to the way of life. So I was naturally disappointed when I emerged from a somewhat ordinary airport to take a somewhat ordinary taxi down the seemingly ordinary highway roads of what could be any metropolis in the world along my way to the backpacker central of Khao San Road. Okay, so we passed the glistening tops of a couple of wats on the way, a sight before unseen by my own eyes, but the majority of what I beheld seethed an unwelcome familiarity. Clusters of steel and chrome towers sprung up like islands in the sea of endless city, seeming to mirror the layout of the financial and consumer fortresses of US supercities and broken only by the waves of billboards proclaiming the intrusion of foreign fleets into its waters. There were even ads for A&W in Bangkok…how overwhelmed could I be when you could wash down your pad thai with a root beer from A&W, an iced latte from Starbucks, or a slurpee from 7-11
(if you should so desire)?
In retrospect, I suppose that the glaring noonday sunlight actually softened the experience of arriving on Khao San Road, for it is at its most memorable - and arguably also at its most revolting - after the sun goes down and the neon lights go on. Fortunately I hibernated the first two and a half days to catch up on much needed sleep and therefore acclimatized to the chaos somewhat through the round-the-clock blaring music from the streets below, though I couldn’t be certain that I had fully thrown off the fetters of the dreamworld when I emerged into what immediately struck me as the Thai version of Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Okay, the streets smelled of meat on a stick instead of Bourbon Street’s repulsive urine-vomit nocturnal concoction, and instead of raucous college kids, the bacchanals were slightly lower-key backpackers…but only slightly. Replace the hurricane glasses with buckets, the “I survived Mardi Gras” T-shirts with flowy hemp hippy clothes, the flashers with ladyboys and prostitutes, and you get a pretty good idea of the scene.
For all its faults, however, Khao San Road offers almost everything you need (transport and visa
services, backpacks, full array of new and used books, electrical adapters), as well as things you never will (wooden croaking frogs and knit Bob Marley caps), at incredible convenience. Thankfully, your liberation from this surreal microworld is just minutes away as you are whisked off on a white steed that is the tuk-tuk by one of many eager drivers waiting to rip you off at the end of the street. Or of course you can walk, through the choking pollution. An early morning venture to visit a floating market, which apparently no longer exists, was not a complete write-off, for the quiet of the city as the sun rose over the Royal Palace was a kind of harbinger to the peace I was to find at Wat Pho. The contrast could not have been more extreme between the rowdiness of Khao San and the manicured temple grounds where monks went silently about their business hedging shrubs into perfect form. Relatively free of visitors at that hour, I was left to wander among the countless golden Buddhas and stupas covered with colorful porcelain mosaics like Alice in Wonderland until the tour groups arrived at 10 and I had to flee for
Another Buddha at rest
Ancient ruins at Sukhothai my sanity.
Every afternoon the rains came around 4 and continued until about 7, never very hard, just enough to put you off from actually wanting to do anything. Perhaps this is why Khao San Road seemed even more extraordinary, because the amount of backpackers around to me was stifling, and this was the low season.
The rest of Bangkok was somewhat unremarkable to me; I realized how quickly wats get to be boring - as much as I didn’t stop to pop into every cathedral in Rome, I couldn’t muster up the desire to check out all the wats either. But there was one other item on my must-see list, which was Patpong. Ever since I worked on the anti-trafficking projects for OSCE, I have become rather obsessed with the problem of sex trafficking, particularly in Asia. Bangkok being a well-known major sex tourism destination, and having researched much over the years about its internal as well as transnational trafficking problems, I simply had to see the level of nefariousness with my own two eyes. (“Trafficking” is just a sterile way of saying slavery without getting people up in arms, which I feel does a huge disservice
Courtyard Decor
Wat Pho, Bangkok to the problem when even the name of the problem seems to admit to the culpability of humans to be objects that CAN be bought and sold and moved from place to place, i.e. “trafficked.”) Approximately 1.2 million people are forced into slavery every year, with estimates of 200,000 in Thailand alone, doing everything from forced begging to performing sexual services for Thais and for nasty old perverted Western men, who seem to come on holiday or to linger in the country during their retirement specifically for that reason. And while the Thai cultural habit of not making you feel uncomfortable would probably preclude much honesty if they had a chance to speak earnestly without fear of retribution, the fact is that the ones who are there unwillingly have been deceived or sold to get there and are kept there by violent overseers who generally beat, rape, sometimes gang rape the girls and use threats of torture on them and/or their families if they try to escape, and thereby hinder the “purchasers” of their rightful income by exploiting their capital, their “possessions.” Human trafficking is the largest organized crime dealing in the world, more profitable than drugs trafficking, more profitable
than arms trafficking. So why in the hell is my country pouring millions of dollars every year down the toilet in a War on Drugs that they, by their own records, are doing worse at now than when they started, and not putting forth similar financial efforts into a War on Slavery? Disgusting. And coincidentally, while flipping through a magazine here, I read an article by an undercover reporter who joined one of these organized sex tourism holiday groups from the States to take advantage of cheap prostitution, who claimed that the sex industry in Thailand owes a lot of its thanks to the US government, who initially funded the Thai government to initiate “Relaxation and Recreation” programs for its GIs back in the seventies, and to the World Bank, who set up a development strategy largely encouraging this sex tourism as one of its chief “exports.”
Anyway, I anticipated being overwhelmed when I headed down to Patpong, and in fact I was, but not in the way I had supposed. The strips of go-go bars, which are now called Patpong 1,2,3, and 4 (I’m scared to think of returning in 10 years and finding Patpong 17 as well),
The Rainy Season
Policeman attempts to motor through the downpour are not only softened by the existence of a night market and food stalls all around, but the marketing methods employed by the touts out front and the “dancers” in each bar mingling by poles give the average passerby the impression that these are all “innocent enough” strip clubs.(Although in Nana Square you can go into a multistory prostitution shopping mall and take a girl back to your hotel for about $12.) Though it makes me want to barf, I can understand that Mr. 55-and-Balding American/German/Japanese/Englishman thinks that all these girls here somehow really want to be there, doing him as a profession, because you would really have to know about trafficking beforehand to even entertain the thought that some of them did not want to be there, wouldn’t you? And even if the one he happens to be with has not been forced there by a violent slavedriver, she has almost certainly been driven there by circumstances, no doubt helped by our uncontrolled western short-term speculation whose sudden withdrawal brought on the Asian Financial Crisis and plunged Thailand into economic trouble. But come on, get a reality check man, what young and beautiful 15-year-old girl is not cringing and
shuddering with repulsion when so much as your fat hairy hand touches her, Mr. Ugly Western Businessman? And speaking of ugly businessmen, what else would be right across from the streets of sleaze than the fat bastard American establishment of McDonalds??? I noticed an English lady ordering a Happy Meal for her daughter of about 8 or 9 years, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Uncle Bob was in one of the go-go bars across the way treating himself to a twisted happy meal of his own.
I’m not sure what was a worse experience so far, the harassment I experienced myself in Mexico or being a spectator to the mass degradation of women in Thailand. I’d be inclined to say it was the latter, however, because you really can’t escape from it anywhere in the city or other parts of the country, and even though it is a Thai societal view of that gender which helps hold them there, you can’t go there as a non-Thai woman and not feel degraded yourself when you witness how your fellow countrymen have objectified them too. You know that scene in “The Beach” where Daffy has fantasies of taking out
a machine gun and firing rounds into Khao San Road to kill all the backpackers? I never fancied myself to be violent, but imagining the same situation turned on all the filthy old men accompanying their little Thai girls out of the go-go bars was all I could do to keep my nausea from erupting.
I needed to get out of there and caught a tuk tuk to Chinatown when it started pouring, where the food was relatively expensive even at the food stalls (which was the only place that didn’t advertise as one of its two specials Bird’s Nest or Shark Fin Soup) and was mediocre at best. And an attempt to view Muay Thai kickboxing was nixed as well when I discovered that they had raised prices for foreigners three weeks prior to an outrageous $50 per ticket. So I figured that a respite from the city was in order, particularly since I was hobbling around like a gimp after injuring my knee the day before departing Germany and needed to go somewhere where walking around was not exactly necessary. I settled on Ko Chang, not wanting to spend 14 or more hours going down south but
Fisherwoman
Canals between Old and New Sukhothai hoping to avoid the masses on Ko Samet or more of the dirty filth I had just witnessed in Pattaya. Holing up on Lonely Beach during the rainy season meant that I spent the majority of the time reading rather than lounging on a beach and that the water was a bit murky when I did venture out for a swim, but it was peaceful enough and the sunsets were spectacular. Black butterflies larger than your hand flutter around and monkeys play in the trees on this verdant island, but the claims of elephants roaming wild in the interior I find hard to believe, since I saw a number of agencies selling tours to their elephant “camps” when I took a motorbike ride. The Thai government has apparently flagged this island as their next big tourism project, and although it didn’t seem overrun with tourists while I was there, it was obvious from the sheer number of hotels and guesthouses and restaurants advertising European cuisine that this is not the case during the high season.
The experience was still lacking in many ways, however; generally I am quite easily amused and inspired by things I see whilst traveling, but
here the onus of inspiration seems to fall back into your own lap. It seems that the whole economy is set up for tourists, meaning that you have to make almost zero effort in getting around or locating accommodation or really in finding anything you might be looking for, which means you forgo many experiences with locals that enrich your experience. I had begun to wonder if Thailand hadn’t set up this little world within its borders solely for foreigners to enjoy, like a Disneyland of sorts, until the bus eased its way slowly back into Bangkok and the expansive shantytowns built in the shadow of the highrises became clearly visible.
This extreme gap between the haves and have-nots could not have been crasser when I compared what I saw there with the futuristic mega-shopping complexes that Bangkok has to offer. I had headed over to the Wireless Road area of town to get extra pages inserted into my passport at the embassy, so I decided to explore a little while hoping to find an charger I needed. Though I was unsuccessful in that task, I got an interesting look at how cosmopolitan and cutting-edge Bangkok could be. The
department stores were of the caliber of Marshall Fields on State Street in Chicago, complete with Western models on all their in-store photo advertisements, and the Starbucks in this part of town were filled with well-dressed Thais of both sexes, business suits and laptops. The upper level of one of these supercenters was full of state-sponsored libraries, computer rooms, cafes and special TV viewing areas highlighting educational materials, named the Thai Knowledge Library, and was all very modern. A posh electronics store had special “sound rooms” fully furnished like living rooms with different TVs, stereos, and the like in each one so you could make a better buying decision, and I saw my first ever “Eat for Your Blood Type” restaurant nearby. I had a hard time believing that I was still in Bangkok, since many of the things I saw seemed more westernized in a way than shopping centers in Europe or the States, but then I walked outside and started coughing from the car exhaust again. The smell was briefly masked by incense as I passed the Erawan Shrine, a dazzling Hindu shrine packed with people offering up coconuts and flowers and adding to the incense bouquets, where
A moment of reverence
The "Boy Scout" type schoolboys stop to kneel at one of countless Buddhas in Old Sukhothai traditional dancers in full costume and a couple pounds of makeup waited for pilgrims to pay to see them perform, which purportedly bestows blessings upon them.
Trying to get back to my hotel from there was a bit of a scam, since the Tourism Authority of Thailiand (TAT) was having some kind of promotion that day whereby they would give the tuk tuk or taxi drivers coupons for 2 liters of gas if they got people to go to certain stores or to the TAT offices for at least 10 minutes. After a couple failed attempts at getting a decent rate to go directly home, I finally gave in, since fifteen firetrucks sent in on that street had blocked off traffic and I was bound to sit around more than 10 minutes anyway. So the tuk tuk driver told me he would take me back for free if I would stop at 2 TAT offices and shoot the breeze with them for at least 10 minutes, which was actually quite a convenience for me to be able to get some information on northern Thailand and get my ride home for free, so I agreed. Of course, rather than merely
Incense Offerings
Japanese tourists at The Golden Buddha being an innocuous information source, the TAT office is trying to get you to book treks and tours and train tickets with them. I found it all to be a bit dodgy, and I question the logic of the economic benefit they derive by paying out tuk tuk drivers to bring people there who have no intention of booking anything, because it seems that in the end they are only subsidizing the tourists and the drivers.But I really can’t complain, I got my free ride and even had to decline my driver’s offer to pay me to go to a couple more, as it was beginning to grow dark.
With my knee mostly functioning again and my errands out of the way, I was ready to finally start my way north. I learned that Thai trains are remarkably punctual, but that they will still sell you tickets one minute before departure even when it is dubious if you will get there before they pull out of the station. But I also found out that they stop the train if you are running toward the platform watching them slip away from you. :0) The newspapers had reported on the big
floods around Chiang Mai, but the effects had obviously been felt around Sukhothai as well, as evidenced by the farmers boating across their rice paddies. Sukhothai is renowned for its ancient ruins of the Angkor period, which I was fortunate to see before the giant Dutch tour group arrived by bicycle, sharing the site instead with groups of curious and well-behaved school children dressed in uniforms like those of the Girl and Boy Scouts.
But what I found most memorable about Sukhothai was the information book at the guesthouse in which I stayed. The owner, Ronny, had been running this place for about a decade I believe, and in addition to providing information on what to do in the area, had filled the book basically with his beliefs on life and pleas for travelers to put in a good word about this place to others. While the staff at the place were indeed very friendly, this Ronny character was something of a Backpacker Fascist. His diatribes went on and on about how backpackers need to be content with barebones accommodation with local families and not demand to have TV, air conditioning, internet, en suite bathrooms with hot water, etcetera
whatever, because “back when I was traveling…” that is the way he did it. But I think he is beating a dead horse; the whole environment has changed, even this smaller town has a KFC in it, for heaven’s sakes! To find a nice barebones homestay and really get to know a local family would be truly delightful, in fact that is the Thailand that I romanticized in my daydreams before I arrived and perhaps it is the Thailand he fell in love with decades ago….but my travels thus far also tell me that this is the Thailand that unfortunately no longer exists.
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Johan
Smile... you're in Thailand
It was interesting to follow your journey to Bangkok, I recognize a number of your impressions but I just felt I wanted to share my opinion on this matter, as I have seen a number of bloggers coming up with similar ideas about Thailand and Bangkok in particular. It seems that travellers sometimes base their opinions on Thai society based on what is offered on the tourist trail. As famous as they may be, I would argue that places like Khao San, Patpong or your typical resort town are not providing much insight into neither Thai culture or customs. Don't worry, I am sure you can still find a Thailand that you will love, and you may even find it squeezed into a corner between a 7-11 and Starbucks.