Four Nights in Bangkok

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On my second to last day in Bangkok, I came across the occassion to spend 4 hours or so in an internet cafe avoiding someone. That afforded me the time to read pretty much all of the recent Travelblog.org entries from the city. Not one of those entries avoided making a joke, an introduction, or a title out of the song "One Night in Bangkok". I guess history is sometimes destined to repeat, as I am right this moment making both a title and an intro out of that very song. However, I will not burden you with lyrics or references to the lyrics, as I truly have no idea what they are. I think I've distinguished myself in this, shown you I'm different from the rest of the pack. But, the gist of all those blogs (and of the song, I suppose), is that Bangkok is a totally crazy, wild, and mixed-up place. I will not differ with them on that, and now that I have you reading, I'll tell you a bit more about it.


A Totally Crazy, Wild, Mixed-Up Place

When my bus dropped me off in Bangkok, I was the only non-Asian on it. I thought I still might be able to get directions off people at the bus stop, but I was wrong. Until I found a nice Chinese-looking girl with perfect English who kindly directed me to the Sky Train.

The streets in that part of Bangkok were as filthy as any part of the town I ever saw. Down there in the dirt I saw street vendors cooking under the dust of building demolishers, 7-11s with stray dogs and homeless people asleep in front of them, and vivid displays of graffitti to rival anything in the U.S. or Europe. But, just up above on the high walkways, the place looked more like Taipei.

It seems that most of the city has these elevated pathways, highways, and train stations. Just like something out of science fiction, there is another city just above the city. Unlike the one below, this city is clean, it's full of advertisements, there are helpful transit workers and policemen around, and every walkway leads to a mall or a train. I met a couple of Americans up here, both middle-aged and returning from Pattaya. Between whispering stories of their exploits to one another and laughing quietly, they halped me find my train and get to my proper station.

But, coming back down into the real city left me at least as lost and confused as I had been to start with. Luckily for me, I ran into another English-speaking westerner: this time a young Irish woman named Gemma who was enjoying her last day here before returning to her home in Australia.

Gemma introduced me to the Bangkok bus system, where another bus from the same route comes along every minute, the ride only costs 15 cents, and the drivers will take off when you're halfway on the bus. (You should have seen my awkward near-collapse, hanging off the stair-rails with my whole body and bag out over the road while the bus sped away.) The #15 bus got us to the Khao San Road: my ultimate destination, a quarter-mile strip of road in the middle of what westerners refer to as 'Bangkok' (actually a 630 square-mile metropolis officially named "Krung Thep Maha Nakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayutthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udom Ratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Phiman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanu Kamprasit", and home to about 9 million people).

The Khao San was as nutty as anything I've seen anywhere. The sky is choked with signs advertising this and that; the sidewalk is covered with t-shirt stalls selling cheap knockoffs of western clothes, good-quality Thai shirts, and others with ridiculous novelty sayings like, "Drink, Drank, Drunk," and, "Punks Filth"; there are so many greasy-food vendors with their carts and buckets and little tables that the Tuk-Tuks and Taxis can't even drive through the street safely without dodging some of the hundreds of foreign backpackers that fill it; and the actual blocks of buildings are an ants-nest of side-alleys, hallways, and stairwells, choked with Indian tailor-shops, American fast food restaraunts, tattoo parlors, underground night clubs, and hotels or guest houses reaching up into the sky.

I ended up spending my whole time in Bangkok around just this road. The area is a hub for backpackers leaving and entering Bangkok on trips through the Southeast Asia region and the mix of cultures here is astounding. Aside from the many Asians living here from all parts of the continent (hundreds of Indian tailors, Chinese refugees, Japanese ex-pat business people, and Filipino servers and laborers), there are also a great number of Europeans, Australians, and even Americans who have moved to the place over the past few decades. As a consequence of this, you can find pretty much everything around the Khao San. With this many cultures in one place, however, things are bound to clash, which is evidenced by the standoffishness of so many of the Israelis here, and by some of the other stories I am going to tell.

Wats, or monastaries, can be found around every corner in Bangkok, and the Khao San terminates at the front gate of one of them. Cross the street and you're bound to find at least two 7-11s. You'll also find a Royal Dutch Shell gas station that drags out tables, chairs, and tiki torches at night to become a full-on cocktail bar. If you ever wanted to smoke a cigarette within five feet of a gas pump, this is where you do it, but watch out for the pushy kids who will try to sell you flowers at 3am. They start out cute, but quickly turn rude or even violent: 8-year olds yelling, "fuck you!", pulling on your clothes and kicking your shins. You'd think it would be a good idea to just buy a flower, but that brings even more of them and all the money goes to local criminals anyway (or so I've been told).

So this is where I spent my time, wasting my days away at a hostel called MyHouse, and adventuring by night with a fantastic team of backpackers from around the world.


I Spent My Days At MyHouse

If you'd been able to find me on Saturday morning, you'd have had one up on me because I wasn't able to find anything. I spent the morning wandering the streets of Bangkok with an Englishman named Matt. We'd been up all night partying and had decided around 7 or 8 to head out in search of a full English breakfast. After asking dozens of confused locals and other travelers where we might find a, "full English" a, "good steak and eggs: trucker's steak, not sirloin" or, "a real hearty meal to fill up on", we actually did end up in a good breakfast restaraunt. We each had about three plates of breakfast. (Each. They're tiny.) We also sucked down a couple Bloody Mary's, Chang Beers (which they call Beer Chang), and I drank two glasses of milk. After half-heartedly trying to start a scuffle with a wimpy ex-Marine and his pool-shooting Lady Boy friends, we headed back out into the sunlight and promptly realized that we had no clue where we were.

So, we started to ask. It had to be hard for the people we spoke with to determine where exactly we were trying to go, as we took turns asking them, "do you know how to get to my house?" We made it pretty difficult for them to help anyway, because we'd follow any affirmative answer with something like, "well, how do you know it's my house?", or, "what were you doing snooping around my house anyway?" Sadly, MyHouse was the one place we were trying to find, and these jokes--while fun--were just getting us more and more lost. Eventually we found the place, despite our best efforts, and settled in for a long day on the couches at our informal base of operations.

I first discovered the place when wandering the neighborhood with Gemma (Irish girl, see above). We got to the Khao San Road that first day, sat down for some good authentic Thai food, and then went out looking to find me a home. Down the street from Khao San, we found a cluster of guest houses tucked in behind a Wat. One of these was called MyHouse.

I never actually stayed the night at the MyHouse Guest House (except the night I spent sitting around Matt and Andy's room, partying and swapping adventure stories until well into the next day), but I spent a lot of time there. A block and a half away from the Khao San road, MyHouse is close enough to enjoy the neighborhood, but far enough to afford a little peace and quite here and there. The downstairs lobby is open to the street, and is home to a restaraunt with western food, Thai food, Sang Som (Thai whiskey), and cheap beer. There is also an internet cafe, a travel agent, and a big screen TV on which they play movies (mostly American) at 1pm, 8pm, and 10pm every day.

The hamburgers are terrible, and most of the movies they play are crap, but MyHouse is THE essential meeting place in this neighborhood. It's the place where I met dozens of fellow travellers and kindred spirits, with whom I headed out at night in search of exciting experiences (see below). It's also the place I got most of my sleep while in Bangkok, sprawled out on the comfy triangle-shaped cushions that are spread out everywhere.

One of those days, I also ran into a German of Taiwanese descent named Su-Au. Su-Au and I were both hangover-free that day and had an urge to see some of Bangkok's famous sites. We found many of the temples to be elegantly beautiful and well-kept, while others where in a state of exquisite decay, and most of the places somehow managed to straddle both of these worlds. Most of the pictures you see in this blog are from that day.


I Spent My Nights as Part of an International Super-Team of Adventurous Spirits

Let's get back to the scene where Matt and I are wandering the streets of Bangkok in the early morning, clueless as to how to find our homes. We remember that MyHouse is just in behind a Wat (the Thai word for a buddhist temple), and we decide that finding that Wat will be the key to finding our beds. So we start to ask people where the Wat is.

Of course, by this time we're feeling quite punchy. It's about 10AM and we've been going since the previous morning without any sleep. We've seen a lot of craziness this night, but we're still ready to create some more. Consequently, the first time we ask someone where the Wat is and are met with, "the Wat?", we have to give the Marx Brothers reply, "the what?"

And it goes on like this: "The Wat?" "The what?" "What Wat?" "What?" etc, etc, ad nauseum...

So our quest for home turns into a quest for supreme annoyance. Content to wander, we continue to press people for the whereabouts of our Wat, just so we can hit them with a barrage of "Wat?", "What?", "Wat?", and, "What?" the instant they say the word. This is incredibly amusing to us, but as soon as people catch on, they just shake their heads and walk away. After a while, we found our Wat out of complete accident. Now, standing in front of the Wat, we think our little 'Wat, What?' bit has taken on a whole new humor. But no one else seems to agree, so we switch back over to the, "do you know how to get to my house?" bit from earlier.

As I've mentioned, this all came at the end of a night filled with adventures. I'd started out at MyHouse with an Englishman named Mike and a Swiss girl named Claudia. The two of us had spent the night before drinking and wandering Khao San with a couple of Australians, Gemma the Irish girl, and a couple more Brits, and now we were recounting our experiences. Tonight was Claudia's last night, so we gave her the authority to call the shots.

She decided to go to the Ping Pong Show at Phat Pong Road (a Bangkok road famous for its night markets and sex shows). So, we gathered out Aussies, Su-Au, and a German girl named Nina and we headed to the gas-station bar to pre-funk.

Su-Au and I took Jello shots, while everyone else shared a carafe of Daquiri or shot back whiskeys. While there, we met up with an Irishman whose name slips my mind, and this is where we first met Bazin.

I got most of the story later, but at the time new nothing of it. We just saw this random man come up behind Nina and tap her on the shoulder, she startled, then startled again when she saw him. They spoke quietly in German while we all watched--suspicious. Then he lifted her reluctantly from her seat and gave her a timid kiss before returning her and taking his own seat with the group. Then single Nina (who'd told us all she was travelling alone) introduced her Swiss 'boyfriend' Bazin.

I gather that they'd had a rough break-up somewhere in the southern islands and she'd left him to continue travelling on her own. But, he tracked her down in Bangkok and here he was. She didn't really get a chance to wrap her head around the whole affair, though, as a squabble with the three Tuk-Tuk drivers we'd chartered to take us all to Phat Pong quickly found our group split into two cabs. One held Su-Au, the Irish fellow, an Australian named Ben, and the mysterious Bazin. The other cab was home to the characters who will play a real part in this story: myself, Claudia, another Aussie named Damien, Mike from the UK, and lovely Nina.

The five of us made it to Phat Pong very quickly, and we assumed the others hadn't got there yet. So, we waited at the end of the street with our beers, fending off street vendors and letting Claudia make our plans for the show. It turns out that the other group was waiting for us at the other end of the street, but--ignorant of that at the time--we gave up on them and headed into a show. I won't describe this experience in detail, but this ordeal involved a woman shooting darts in a most unusual way, and popping baloons with them. It also involved the five of us getting ripped off, mobbed, and nearly robbed, before escaping back into the street.

At the first place we sat to recuperate, we were run off by a surly Dutch bar-owner. So, yeah, now we were looking for somewhere to relax.

Moments later, we stumbled across a packed night club. The place was full of Asians and Europeans dancing to the sounds of a Thai band with Middle Eastern singers that played a set consisting completely of American pop-rap covers. After buying our drinks, we marched up to the dance floor. I started dancing with the German girl, until I realized that she had no rhythm AND she had no idea how to dance to this music. I looked at the Swiss girl and saw she was in the same boat. Then I looked at the Australian guy and saw him dancing like he was in the muddy outback somewhere with Digery-Dos and Bongo drums.

A smile creeped across my face and I stood back a bit. I saw the English people dancing a little something like the Europeans, and I saw the Asians dancing way too crazy and too fast for anyone else to keep up with. That's when I noticed that there were four other people standing like me: in the middle of the dancefloor , but stock-still watching the crowd. I asked them where they were from and it turns out they hailed from Denver Colorado. Small world. We shared our shock at the way people danced here; laughed at their total ignorance of how you were supposed to move to this sort of music. And when I turned around, Damien was in a fist-fight with the lead singer of the band.

Mike and I jumped up there right away. Picking Damien up from the ground where he was getting stomped, bigger, older Mike was able to bear-hug him despite his frantic attempts to fight off helpers and assailants alike. I had to follow up the rear with my fists cocked, ready to take on the whole room, but hoping to talk them down (before we all ended up dead in the alleyway). In the end, Mike and I were successful, dragging Damien out to the street and convincing the thuggish Thais who roll with the band that this was just a 19-year-old drunken Australian and nothing to get too worked up about.

he next couple of hours was Drama-Fest. I was upset at Damien for getting Mike and I into this mess. Damien was pissed at everyone for who-even-knows-what (and pissed at me for clocking him in the face during a mini-scuffle on the way out of Phat Pong). Claudia was upset at Damien for being upset at anyone after the scene he's caused. Nina was stone-cold pissed off and staring straight ahead, still trying to figure out what to do about the estranged boyfriend who'd just come back into the picture. And Mike was spending every last bit of energy he had to cheer us up with corny jokes and to convince us that the whole affair was just a misunderstanding due to the "Culture Gap", but at this time of the night--with Mike drunk--you couldn't understand a word he said anyway and all we heard was, "maybe issa culture thing."

Anyway, I guess that's what it was, a culture thing. As soon as we returned to the Khao San neighborhood, we all split up. Nina found Bazin and they got a chance to talk it out. Claudia and Damien went off down the street to yell and slap at each other and finally make up. Mike and I found Ben and the Irish dude and Su-Au and we all sat around with some of the cats from the night before and a few new German girls and we told stories late into the night.

Eventually, Mike and I joined up with Matt and the three of us went to wake up his roommate Andy. We stayed up in their room until well after the sun was out, and Matt and I went out for our infamous breakfast-run and Wat-pestering.

That was just one night around the Khao San Road. I stayed up the rest of the day, but blacked out the next night as there was an England football match and the Brits had given me a jersey to wear, then expected that I do them proud. I guess I ended up doing somersaults down the center of the Khao San road, then passing out in a handful of bars and having to be carried home. Sunday was another adventure night, part recovery, part wandering, with a decent helping of acoustic guitar and discussions about Norwegian Black Metal.


Goodbye Bangkok, For Now...

And on Monday morning I took off. Now Mike and I are headed north to Laos, where we plan to meet Matt and Andy in a sleepy town called Vang Vieng. We'll spend a few days there, then I return to Bangkok onthe 25th to meet my friend Kirra. And from there, who knows? Matt and Andy will still be in the region. Nina's invited me to do some diving with her on Kho Chang. My friend Gary will be in town. I might find work in Bangkok, and I might go do some organic farming. If the urge strikes me, maybe--just maybe--I'll go live in a Wat...

A what?

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Comments

[Erik Neigbour]

Camera Crew
Great story! I'm thinking about hiring a local camera crew in Bangkok to get some video of your exploits. I would have liked to seen you doing somersaults down the center of Khao San road...you crazy nut.

[Annie]

a wat
Call " Wat " = temple not wats or what. seem you had four days adventure here in thailand. thanks for sharing / Annie in bkk

[Aaron Brown]

sounds like crazy fun- took me for a bit of a ride and I know this isn't nearly the full story. Nice, I must get the full scoop on the organic farming (make sure and look at all the biodynamic techniques- the cover cropping, permaculture, composting, nitrogen fixing) if you go with that.