Advertisement
Published: September 20th 2007
We had one night to kill in Bangkok before Emilie arrived so we decided to check out the night life on Khoa San Road. This infamous street has had a lot of negative press and isn’t very highly regarded by some travellers but we are happy to report we quite enjoyed it. Yes, there are back to back stalls stretching the whole length of it on both sides. Yes, there are numerous mobile food carts selling fruit, bbq meats on a stick, tiny bags of boiled quail eggs and the like. And yes, there are more white and asian tourists than Thai people (There were few black tourists around but this has surprisingly been a theme of the trip so far). Each stall sells the same t-shirts for the same price (dependent on the haggler). Women from the Ahka tribe dress in their traditional costumes also walk the streets hawking wooden frogs that croak when rubbed the right way. A blind lady walks up and down singing in to her microphone with the amp over her shoulder. There are even children with bouquets of roses wrapped in plastic who challenge you to thumb wars and rock, paper, scissors when you turn
them down the offer to purchase flowers. Ade made the mistake of refusing to play for money and suffered the slander ‘You Ladyboy!’ from one indignant ten year old as she turned on her heel and stomped off. They approached us at the various bars and whilst sitting on the plastic stools of a makeshift cocktail stand. It seems gambling is how these kids make their money on the side, each one in turn wanting to bet and each refusal was met with a ‘Ladyboy’ retort. It became a game to see how many kids we could get to call Ade a Ladyboy. All the tack and noise can seem gaudy but it’s quite unlike anything we’ve come across and had a festival like feel to it. Everyone was smiling and having fun, including the stall workers. A visit down is well worth a few hours out but don’t necessarily get a room there!
Emilie landed not much before midnight the next day and we greeted her at the airport. Having spent 24 hours travelling from Canada to Thailand one might expect she’d be tired but that wasn’t the case at all, or at least only for awhile. We
Pink Van Bar
near Khoa Sanbrought her to our local, The Wild Orchid just around the corner from Thara House, our home away from home (on Phra Athit Road), to get some food as we were all a bit peckish. We didn’t end up leaving till 5 am stopping on the way home to interrogate the 7 Eleven staff on the pronunciation of standard useful phrases in Thai, like hello, goodbye, thank you and same same. “Same Same” is a mantra over here. We’re not sure where it originated from but it’s widely used by just about everyone and its meaning is fairly obvious. “Same same but different” is also common and many tourists as well as Thais wear the t-shirt. With our newly acquired linguistic skills safely written down phonetically we retreated to bed for what was left of the night.
The next day we took it very easy. We strolled down the neighbouring streets for Em to see and drank a bucket of Pina Colada at the pink van bar. This was our first encounter with an amputee with Em, only worthy of mention as Em had a phobia of amputees. Said amputee was legless and dragging himself around with one arm
pushing his skateboard and the other playing a harmonica. Not exactly breaking her in gently!
We slept in again the next morning but consulted our library of guide books over brunch settling on a plan of action. A Wat tour was selected and we hit the road heading in the general direction of the closest one. A half an hour in to the walk and two bottles of mouldy water later a Thai pedestrian stopped to tell us about a government rickshaw scheme which meant we only paid 10 Baht each (approx 15p) and got taken around 5 of the most popular Wats in Bangkok. Right on cue a rickshaw pulled up and gave us the same spiel just out of earshot of the first guy so we hopped on in. The first temple was interesting and we snapped away at the giant standing Buddha statue. Temple two was nondescript apart from the security guard who insisted on chatting the whole time we were there to the point where we aborted the mission and didn’t actually see the main building! At this point our rickshaw driver took us to a tailor shop and said he’d wait outside for us.
This part of the tour had been mentioned so we went in, said no thanks at all the offers of clothes and left. Our driver was most displeased and drove us to another store and told us to hang around for awhile and make them think we were buying stuff otherwise he wouldn’t get his fuel stamp (which was the whole point of the 10 bhat deal). We said, eh no, and gave him some baht then hailed down another one on the street. The Grand Palace was next up and we wandered around this huge complex of temples, including Wat Phra Kaeo, and royal palaces until we were kicked out. Ade was chased out of the armaments hall for taking a photo and made to delete it. Quite funny and caused a little stir among the tourists! It was amazing walking around as all the buildings were massive and so brightly coloured. I kept expecting dudes from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to fly around the corner with swords at the ready for battle. The only flip side of famous temple visiting is that it’s extremely hard to snap photos without people in them. We found ourselves running ahead of
Many Spires
at Wat Phra Kaeo the crowd then suddenly stopping for that Kodak moment on a few occasions.
We stopped for food at Mae Ny on Phra Athit Road where we sampled their delicious whiskey shakes. These tasted exactly like raspberry slush puppies reminding us of days gone by and we had stalagmite building competitions. Unfortunately, our waiter wasn’t as informed as he thought he was so we ended up turning up to the Thai boxing stadium late. The only tickets available to buy were super expensive but with a stroke of genius we got stickers from western people leaving and walked in with no problem. The stadium was less than half full as the big named fights were already over with only two fights left; one pair who didn’t do anything to look knock out threatening (their crotch lifts were entertaining though!) and a pair of kids who weren’t allowed to use their gloves. It all seemed very amicable.
After the boxing we headed over to Patpong, the red light district of Bangkok which is also considered a must see whilst here. We don’t need to go in to too much detail but, here’s a few clues; ping pongs, coloured string, candles
and horns.... It was an educational night! We stuck to the mainstream touristy bars avoiding the more seedy elements. Allegedly, Patpong is becoming more famous for its night bazaar now than its other ‘night’ activities.
We booked train tickets to Nong Khai, the border town between Thailand and Laos at Poona Travel just around the corner from our Guesthouse. We’re sorry to say we were swindled by approx 500 baht, or the price of one ticket, in what can only be described as a total case of incompetence and ignorance. When we tried to highlight the error to them one lady tried to help but the other (the owner) was having none of it and actually said she was happy that we’d been overcharged as she needed to run a business. Needless to say we do not recommend this place and would also like to make clear that this was the only time in Thailand we came up against this type of attitude.
On our last day in Bangkok Ash and Em treated themselves to a day in the massage parlour getting beautified and polished up. That night we took the overnight train up north, spending most of
the evening avoiding our sweat-pit, fan carriage in the beer cart. Here Ade met his BFF who accessed the Wigan results using his futuristic phone before regaling us with tales of his time spent in Thailand and Laos. We were thrown out on cue just after ordering another round and so retired to the end of our carriage with a Thai called Bang to finish up. Another great train adventure!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.135s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 11; qc: 66; dbt: 0.0819s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
karen
non-member comment
nice tan!
looks like ur tan is coming along nicely! and sounds like u had a great time with em xx