Advertisement
Published: December 22nd 2006
Turtle
He was crawling all around the floor of my hotel in Bangkok, when they removed him and all the fish to clean the fountain!My plane touched down in Bangkok on November 18th at 9:30 in the morning. The blast of steamy air that oozed through the cracks in the corridor leading from the airplane to the terminal reminded all the passengers that they were just a short skip from the equator. Escaping the airport in Thailand exercises muscles you didn't know you had, as place names in Thai are often quite difficult to transliterate and pronounce. I had to talk to a few cab drivers before the hotel I had chosen could be positively identified. I selected a spot away from the tourist ghetto of Khao San Road to avoid being confronted with too many people like myself. The place I went to, Shanti Lodge, is about 1 KM north of Kho San road and is an oasis of calm in an otherwise frenetic city. I spent the day getting over my jet lag and trying to get used to the heat (about 90 degrees and quite humid).
A Little History and Orientation
Thailand, which used to be called Siam, is not what I expected. First off, unlike its neighbors, Laos and Cambodia, it was not covertly roped into the Vietnam war
Road in Bangkok
Tuk Tuks everywhere. Just to give you a feel for what the place looks like. in the sixies and seventies, and suffers little of the legacy of unexploded ordnance, land mines, and the consequent scars these things left on it's neighbors' populations. It has three seasons: wet, hot and hotter. I'm here in the hot season, which some misguided souls call the "cool" or "dry" season, the daytimes temperatures hovering in the nineties and humid.
Thailand was a constitutional monarchy until a few months ago, when a senior general deposed the prime minister Thaksin while he attended a session of the United Nations in New York, ostensibly because of corrupt politics on the part of the prime minister. How to classify the government now is unclear. Nonetheless, the country seems to function largely unaffected by these goings on in the political stratosphere. The continued stability of the government comes from the king, whom the Thai people adore beyond words. I suspect that the people largely supported the coup because the king gave implicit approval. Thaksin, ethnically Chinese, was a wealthy businessman likened to Italy's billionaire PM Berlusconi. He (Thaksin) has been criticized for buying the votes of the poor by offering financial assistance and subsidized healthcare, but isn't that what politicians are supposed to
Da King
Pictures like this one are everywhere. On schools, gov't buildings, stores, highway overpasses, you name it. do? At any rate, for those who worry about my welfare, it's currently a nonevent for tourists.
One of the more curious national characteristics of the country is that if you look in a crowd, provided they aren't specially dressed in suits or uniforms, about one third of them will be wearing a bright yellow polo shirt embroidered with the Thai royal seal. This is just one manifestation of the pride with which Thais regard their country.
The nation is wealthier than I expected. Wheras Nepal evidently wasn't considered to be worth McDonald's effort (there is not one in the country. Don't get me wrong - that's fine with me, but it gives a sense of the economics of the place) you can't throw a coconut in this country without hitting a 7-11, and, if you somehow manage to miss, it's because you hit a Ronald McDonald statue that was in the way. In spite of this corporate colonialism, Thailand has a culture that thrives and prospers in its own distinctly Thai way.
Bangkok, Not What You Might Expect
Let's begin with Bangkok, where I landed. I immediately began looking for influences from India (which I
Khao San Road
That's me in front of the Axis of Tourists in Bangkok, the infamous Th. Khao San. visited recently), since tides of migration and invasion swept over Southeast Asia from the subcontinent and China multiple times in history. It's not hard to find. The Thai script, invented about 1200 years ago making it quite young, is said to resemble south Indian scripts. However, the spoken language is tonal, like Chinese. The cuisine has curries, which are reminiscent of (though quite distinct from ) those found in India, but also noodle soups and fried noodles, which are likely adapted from the Chinese diet.
My first impressions of Bangkok were
1) The city is quite well organized, the streets well paved. Overall,
surprisingly modern. However, despite this, and the fact that few people have cars, the city manages to have the most stubborn traffic I have EVER seen. More than once, I waited for half an hour in virtually dead stopped traffic the city.
2) The entire city smells like Pad Thai, something fried, or fish. Usually one of the former.
3) The song "One Night in Bangkok" is pretty accurate. There is a golden temple around every corner.
Men, Women and Wooomen I haven't seen much of the seedy side of the
The Fish Were Jumping...
because people were throwing big hunks of stale bread at them. This is a daily ritual at the Thewet ferry quai. city, though that's what gets the most press. People tell me that half of the beautiful women are actually men, so, now, whenever I see a woman, I can't help but scrutinize her to see if she is not what she seems. They say you have to look for an adam's apple to tell, as this is one thing that really can't be removed. I read a little about the lady-boy phenomenon, and it's really remarkable. In Thailand, you see lots of men imitating some element of feminine style, from wearing lipstick and speaking in a feminine lilt, but otherwise not trying to look like a woman, to the full scale, surgically-altered tramps luring tourists in miniskirts. Most of them use the feminine-gendered words to refer to themselves when speaking. Evidently, in the Thai flavor of Buddhism, there are four recognized genders: male, female, hermaphrodite, and people born into the wrong gender. Here, this last one seems to generally take the form of men who dress up as women (rather than vice versa). Though there is a conservative element of society who discriminates against these people, most people take it as totally normal. It's kinda like the West Village. I
Chinese Style Dragon
Guarding some sort of pagoda that was under construction. I don't know what it was doing in Bangkok - I guess it made a wrong turn at the Mekong River. love it, as it reminds me a little bit of home.
Markets Entering a market in Bangkok is a sensory assault. The smells that wash over you are often savory, sometimes fetid. In the prepared food section can be seen all manner of deep fried fish, usually whole, looking almost prehistoric with empty eye sockets and hollow cheeks. Also, bowls are arrayed with with stews, curries and cooked salads containing ground chicken, fish and pork. Ham legs, whole chickens and strings of sausages hang from hooks, cooked and raw, and three foot wide skillet-woks clang and sizzle as pad thai and other noodle dishes are fried up for locals and foreigeners alike. If your tastes tend towards the sun-dried salted varieties of sea food, this is your country. I have never seen so many dried cuttlefish in my life, and, yet, I still have no idea what they do with them, as I have yet to find a dish made from the unfortunate leathery beasts.
I love trying new and interesting foods, so I agonize over these markets, which break so many of the rules of food safety that we obsess over in the west. Now, those
Kristine and Silke
my German and Lichtenstinian friends (L to R), waiting for the boat in the dark before the dawn. of you who know me know that I don't stand on ceremony. However, having been seriously ill of the stomach once, and less seriously ill more times than I can count, the thought of eating fish that's been sitting in open air in the humid heat of Bangkok for what could easily be hours, gives me the heebie jeebies, even if Thais do it all the time. But it often looks and smells really good. For the most part, I've resisted the urge to partake, though I did pay a price for a dubious chicken dish that I tried a few days ago.
And, yes, they really do eat fried insects here, including maggots, grasshoppers and cockroaches. In Bangkok, I think they are sold more as a novelty for macho westerners and people who lose bets, but they are a real component of the cuisine of Northern Thailand.
Script The Thai script is completely unintelligeable to the western eye. It has about fifty characters. When you drive around the city, you will probably be struck, as I was, but the similarity some of their letters bear to our own Latin alphabet: "S", "U", "a", "n", "w", "l",
South Thailand Islands
Just your usual tropical paradise. They've got heaps of 'em here. backwards "c", and an upside down "e" are all letters you will see. It gave me the impression that they found a box of old Latin typesetting letters and decided to use it for their own script without regard to the original meaning of the symbols. As I've been trying to learn to read it, I uncovered a more nuanced explanation: the true forms of the letters don't resemble our alphabet much at all. They are much more elaborate. But it seems to be a trend in modern Thai design to adjust their own letters to resemble western ones to associate whatever they are publicizing with the modernity and wealth of the West.
And Now, Back to the Trip
On my second day in Thailand, I began chatting with two lovely women, one from Germany, and one from Lichtenstein, who were in a hurry to get down to the islands in the south of Thailand. Oh, a quick geographic orientation on Thailand: it is pretty much shaped like an elephant head. Bangkok is in the back of the open mouth, and all the islands are clustered around the trunk, which hangs down towards Malaysia. The southern peninsula is
The View from My Bungalow
Hard to believe such a place really exists, after looking out from an apartment window in New York at a blank brick wall. bordered on the east by the Bay of Thailand, and in the west by the Andaman Sea, a division of the Bay of Bengal.
Having no plans whatsoever about what I wanted to do in Thailand, and with nothing so useful as a travel guide in my rucksack (and the German ladies' books were, as you might imagine, of little use) I concluded that southern Thailand was a perfect place to start my trip. So, on the evening of my second day, the three of us boarded a "V.I.P." bus bound for Suratthani. Twelve hours later, as the sun rose, we boarded a boat that would drop us in Thong Sala, the port town on Ko Pha Ngan island. By the time we disembarked from the boat four hours later, our sociable gang of three had swelled to eight, in a fashion that would be repeated on several occasions in the southern islands.
Ko Pha Ngan is known for two things:
1) Being less developed than its neighbor, Ko Samui, having no high rise hotels and almost no jet skis. The large majority of the accomodations consist of rustic bungalows on stilts next to the beach.
Island Sunset
Just the first in a long series of achingly beautiful sunsets 2) The full moon parties. I think these were dreamed up by some businesses on the island who wanted to give the island some identity for the tourists. By now, these monthly rave-type events can draw upwards of 12,000 people in high season and continue well past sunrise. I've heard many horror stories of people getting robbed or drugged at the full moon parties, and since I don't really like big parties anyway, I didn't go out of my way to stay for the next one, two weeks away. Of course, the runaway success of these monthly parties led the entreprenurial island residents to the natural conclusion to celebrate other moon phases as well, beginning with the "Black Moon" parties, followed by the "Half Moon" parties, the "One or Two Days Before the Full Moon" parties, etc.
Since big dance parties aren't really my bag (baby), I made a point of staying a fair bit away from them. The beach I stayed on was a good 10 miles from the site for the biggest of the parties, and had a reputation for good, chilled out beach living. I did indeed stay in a bungalow next to the beach, there
More Views
From the porch. were several coconut palm trees around it (you do not want coconut palms above you or your bungalow) and, (I'm sure you are wondering) yes, it did, have a hammock on the front porch.
I don't really know what to do with myself on the beach, so after a day of floundering around, snorkeling and kvetching about how much I hate wearing sunscreen, I started a three day advanced scuba certification course, in which I supposedly learned the skills of deep diving, night diving, underwater navigation, using a dive computer, and something about buoyancy. Most of these are just excuses for PADI, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, to charge me more money. However, if you want to scuba dive, you have to swim through some hoops, and it was worth it, as it gave me the qualifications required to dive in many of the spectacular sites sprinkled around Thailand.
In the span of a week, I met up with a group of fun and fascinating friends which then disbanded, then joined another, before heading off to the next island after going a little bit crazy trying to sit still on a beach with nothing to do but
Rothkoesque?
I loved the four bands of color on this one. tan, snorkel, eat and drink.
After a week on Ko Pha Ngan, I went to the adjacent island, Ko Tao, which is an island dominated by scuba geeks. The hotel I stayed at was patronized almost exclusively by people getting their PADI certification, or people who already had it. At the bar (thatched roof, on stilts, on the water) at night, conversations generally centered on whale sharks, trigger fish, and other aquatic life, air pressure, regulators, or nitrogen absorption. All the while openly defying the rule not to drink or smoke excessively within a day of diving.
I had a few good dives. My coolest sighting was a bunch of reef sharks (they basically never attack divers), but there was an endless list of spectacular rainbow-colored reef fish, magenta, pink and blue anemones, brain coral, etc, to take one's breath away. One of the more exciting moments was a standoff between the dive guide and a big, grumpy titan triggerfish. I regret not having an underwater camera, as I would love to post some pictures of the stuff I saw. But I am posting the photo of a couple of divers funneling drinks through snorkels at the bar!
Sail Rock
I scubaed 100 feet below the surface there. It was lovely. Too bad I don't have any photos of it. 😊 They were celebrating getting some sort of certification. Great fun.
After few days on Ko Tao, I decided that I was spending a bit too much: $50 a day for diving plus $9 for the room. Those of you who are watching my budget will surely be shocked at my flagrant wasting of money. So, after a couple of days, I packed my bags and got on an overnight boat back to the mainland. Seven hours later, I was back to Surat Thani, heading for Thailand's West coast. My next stop was Railay, a small, isolated beach that is world-famous for its rock climbing.
I shall continue my story in the next post, in my continued struggle to catch up to the present. Until then, Khap Khun Khrap (= thank you) for reading, and I wish you all happy holidays.
Dan
P.S. Sorry for the cliche title. That song was running through my head for days after I went there.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.182s; Tpl: 0.025s; cc: 11; qc: 62; dbt: 0.0687s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb
claire and herb
non-member comment
great trip and great description
enjoying your details of your journeys. your caution on the food is so wise. any contact and discussion with the natives having a command of english. keep enjoying and stay well