Fall Break in Bangkok

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It’s a long one, folks, so feel free to read it in multiple settings. Please note that due a certain aspect of Bangkok, parts of this entry may not be appropriate for school-aged kids. It’s unfortunate that this need be mentioned at all, but it’s a part of the world we live in; I’ve tried to keep explicit details to a minimum.
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Fall break was a blast. It turned out to be less expensive to fly to Bangkok than to go somewhere in India that our group hasn’t gone yet, so that’s what we did. Eleven of us hopped on a Nok Air flight around 3 AM on Saturday morning, and arrived in Bangkok around 7:30. The only thing I have written in my journal from that day is “In the last 40 hours I’ve slept a maximum of 3 hours, and it’s totally worth it.”

At the airport, three members of our group split off to go north to Chiang Mai. The rest of us planned on spending the majority of the week in Bangkok. As our taxi took us away from the airport, I was amazed. Most of the roads in Bangalore are rough and the city isn’t exactly easy to maneuver for a foreigner, so it was a bit of a shock to cruise into the city on smooth roads going 80 mph.

We checked into our hostel, which had rooms of eight beds, and conveniently there were eight of us so we ended up having a room to ourselves. We grabbed a delicious lunch at a restaurant near our hostel, and then hopped on the subway to go to the weekend market. We walked around taking in the sights, amazed that you can find Buddha statues, body piercing parlors, roosters, incense, crickets, pad thai, and wind chimes all in the same location. After wandering about for a bit, we took the metro to the night bazaar where we ate dinner of seafood and peanut sauce and KatyAnna and I got foot massages before we all turned in for an early night.

Sunday

We spent the morning at the National Museum where we learned a bit of Thai history. I was impressed by the great respect that the Thai people have for their king. As people at home wear LiveStrong bracelets, the Thais wear bracelets proclaiming “Long Live the King.” His picture is found on the currency, in restaurants, and is larger than life along the roads. After we left the museum, a man on the street suggested that we spend the afternoon visiting the standing Buddha, the sitting Buddha, and the gold mountain. He said that if we agreed to stop by the office of tourism as well, we could get a good price on tuk tuks (the drivers get petro coupons for stopping by with foreigners). We agreed, and he flagged a couple of tuk tuks for us and explained to the drivers where we wanted to go and they drove us around for the rest of the afternoon. The temples were beautifully ornate with detail that I had been previously unable to imagine. Our final destination, the Golden Mountain, was a man-made hill with a gold tower at the top. From the “mountain” we could see the city of Bangkok spread out all around us, but even peering to the horizon it wasn’t possible to tell where the city gave way to country side.

Sunday night we took taxis to Khoa Sarn Road, which is a street known for the international backpackers that make it their home while in Bangkok. The streat was blocked off, so the only traffic was foot traffic. It’s lined with bars, signs advertising internet and international phones, vendors cooking up pad thai right before your eyes, and people selling anything from touristy trinkets to fake IDs. We ate dinner on the street, and discovered the joy of fruit vendors, who for 10 baht (1 USD = 33 baht) will sell you half a pineapple, chopped up into bite size pieces in a plastic bag and served with a wooden skewer. Between Sunday night and the time we left on Saturday I’m sure I ate at least eight whole pineapples, they were delicious!

Monday

In the morning the eight of us split into two groups and hopped into taxis, planning to meet up at the National Palace. It was a mess of tourists, however, and we ended up not finding each other again until late afternoon. The group I was with decided to go ahead with the tour of the palace. In hindsight, it was really just a big tourist trap and not really worth the time or entrance fee. Perhaps if we had hired a guide we would have gotten more out of it. The two of us wearing tank-tops made a deposit so that we could rent modesty in the form of rather unattractive button-down shirts, and we spent the morning meandering through temples and tourists until it was time for lunch.

After the palace we went to see the reclining Buddha, where we bumped into our other half. My journal from that night reads…

“I paid my 50 baht, and went in alone because nobody else wanted to spend the money. I left my shoes and backpack with the group sitting outside, taking only my camera. As I walked up to the temple, I saw other tourists taking pictures, so I was surprised when a guard stopped me and said, “you, cover, cover.””

“Cover my camera? But they’re taking pictures.”

“No, no, camera fine.”

“Fine? My ticket?” I reached for my pocket.

“Yeah, yeah, ok, cover cover,” he motioned to his shoulders. I had, in fact turned in the borrowed ugly shirt at the palace.

Cover, cover.

“But they didn’t tell me that when I bought my ticket,” I said, realizing that there were no “free clothes borrowing for the indecent” signs like there had been at the palace and not knowing what exactly I should do next.

“Sit, Sit.”

I’m in trouble now? But I sat, just waiting to see what would happen next, watching all the other tourists walk in and start snapping pictures. A lady walked out, pulled a shawl off her shoulders, and handed it to the guard who had asked to me to sit, he handed it to me, watched to make sure I was appropriately clad, and then motioned for me to go ahead.

So I got to snap pictures of the reclining Buddha along with everybody else. It was an impressive statue.

That night we took the metro to Little Arabia where we ate kebabs for dinner, and then KatyAnna and I decided that it would be a good idea to get our hair cut while we had easy access to beauty parlors. Think again, girls, think again! But nobody was there to say that to us, so after checking out a couple of places we decided to go for it. KatyAnna’s turned out really cute, and mine, well…I had three layers when I went in, and supplementing my lack of Thai language skills with actions and a bit of English, I told the lady that I currently had three layers, and I wanted them trimmed, ad hen to ad a fourth, shorter layer. I started with three layers, asked for four, and walked out with…drum role please…TWO.

It wasn’t a complete disaster, though. It just took a couple before I was ready to embrace it.

Thailand in general, and Bangkok in particular, are known to have problems with sex-tourism. Moreover, prostitution is blatant and abundant. After our hair cuts were finished, we talked about it, and we realized that our beauty parlor probably had a second, more lucrative, purpose. A number of male customers were taken either upstairs or to a backroom that had no clear purpose, at least no clear purpose that would normally be related to a barber shop.

After our haircuts, our plan was to hang out in Little Arabia a while longer, but there came an hour of the night when we were just too disgusted, and we decided to go back to the hostel rather than stare helplessly as old white men approached young Thai girls and watch them disappear into cheap hotel rooms.

Tuesday

We opted for a relaxing day, and headed to a city park for the morning where we read and listened to music until lunch time. We decided to continue with the relaxed pace, and headed to a mall in the afternoon, where we decided to see a Thai movie. Before the movie started, the national anthem started playing, and everybody (all 16 people) in the theatre stood up as the camera panned pictures of the king and Thais showing their patriotism. It was touching, but the fact that our group made up half of the audience should have told us something about the movie. The story line of “Unlimited Love” was horrible, but thankfully we weren’t the only ones who thought so, and our laughter during the most pathetic, sad romance scenes was accompanied by the laughter of the women sitting in the row ahead of us.

Wednesday

The plan was to leave Bangkok and head to the island of Ko Samet, a three hour bus ride away. Our hostel was very helpful and helped us arrange the transportation, so we ate an early breakfast, and our bus picked us up right from the hostel at 8:30. There were three other travelers in the van that was taking us to meet our bus in downtown Bangkok. We just assumed that the other travelers were going to the same place, so it was a bit of a surprise when a man leapt onto the ladder on the side of the van and started motioning to our driver to take the van up onto the sidewalk. It was even more of a surprise when our driver listened to him, and I was completely confused when the man on the ladder opened the back door and started yelling “Cambodia! Cambodia!”

No, it was not an attempt to kidnap us and trade us into bonded labor in Cambodia. There was a moment of fear, though. It turns out that the other travelers weren’t going to Ko Samet with us.

From there, we went through a series of different forms of transportation, changing from the van, to a charter bus, to another van, then walked, practically running to keep up with the unmarked person who took us to another unmarked person who would take us to our ferry. Our ferry ride was a pleasant half hour, and from the marina we walked 20 minutes to the bungalow where we planned to stay.

We were on a student budget, meaning that we opted for the cheapest bungalow possible. We ended up renting four and sleeping two per bungalow. They were rustic, at 150 baht/night. Untreated wood complemented dried palm leaves to make up our shelter. Inside we found one double bed, one mosquito net, one fan, and one light. It was more than worth it. We were three flights of stairs away from the restaurant, and four flights above the beach.

We ate a backpacker’s lunch of jelly sandwiches and fresh fruit before hitting the beach. We soaked up the rays all afternoon and then changed before having dinner on mats laid out a mere 10 yards from the waves lapping the sand.
Wednesday was Halloween, so parties were plentiful all along the beach. We checked out a few places before finding some good music, and then we danced the night away.

Thursday

What can I say about a day that I spent lying on the beach? It was great; the most difficult part was walking out of the park where our bungalow was and ordering lunch. A rough life, I tell ya. Aside from the typical beach vendors, there were women on the beach showing cards that advertised massages for 200 baht/hour. A half hour back massage and a half hour pedicure completed my day on the sand. A half hour before sunset, we hiked to the end of the island to a lookout point where we watched the sun sink below the clouds.

Again, we ate dinner on the beach and played in the waves before calling it a night.

Friday

A few of us got up to watch the sunrise, which was rather disappointing. We decided we weren’t ready to face the day yet, and went back to bed until it was time to eat breakfast.

We said goodbye to the beach and had an adventure similar to Wednesday’s on our way back to Bangkok. In the city, we stayed in the same hostel as before, and we met up with the three that had gone to Chiang Mai there for our last night in the country. We decided to all go back to Khoa Sarn road for a dinner of street food and some last minute shopping.

Saturday

Our group of 11 split up, and some went to visit more temples and shrines while the rest of us took the sky train to the central pier to check out the floating market. It ended up being just me and “the bucks” (the three guys in our group) who thought it was worth it to take the extra time to journey to the market. So, we hopped in a boat with a Scottish couple and a Thai driver, and we were off!

We had heard that we weren’t going to the world-famous floating market, but we were sure the nearby floating market would be a fun experience as well. Imagine our dismay when we saw three women in small boats approach us waving the same trinkets we had seen at both the weekend market and the night bazaar. Our guide didn’t speak English, so just in case this was really all it was, we gave the vendors a bit of business before our boat continued through the canal.

Luckily, that was just the pre-market stop, and after passing through a lock, we reached the real deal. There were platforms in the water where our boatman dropped us off and told us that we could walk around for half an hour before our tour continued. Around the platforms, women floated, one to a boat, selling fruit, pad thai, and fish that they would cook up over mini-stoves they carried with them as you asked for it. We had another great experience with pad thai and pineapple, and then met back up with our boat.

In all, the tour lasted about 2 hours, and from the pier we took the sky train to where we thought we were supposed to meet up with the rest of our group. The idea was that we would all eat together at an AIDS awareness restaurant called Cabbages and Condoms before having a second go at the weekend market. Well, the address that the Bucks and I had for the restaurant was 6 Soi 21, and the man at our hostel had told us that if we went to Soi 6, we couldn’t miss it. So, we got off the sky train at the closest stop to Soi 6, wandered up and down the street, and apparently we had missed it. We asked the locals, and well, they missed it too. Nobody had any idea what we were talking about.

We flagged a tuk tuk and asked the driver if he knew where the restaurant was. He said yes, but since neither of us was fluent in the other’s language, the Bucks and I weren’t convinced that he actually knew that we were talking about a restaurant. I was sure he had heard us say “condoms” and was ready to take us to a local brothel. “100 baht,” he told us, and considering that we were now lost, we decided to trust that our minimal shared vocabulary had gotten our message across, and climbed in.

After weaving through a traffic jam and becoming surer and surer that we were getting farther from our desired destination, we suddenly saw the Cabbages and Condoms sign. The real address was 8 Soi 12. Why did the doubt even cross my mind? Thankfully, the rest of our group was still there, so we knew nobody had been lost in the depths of Bangkok. They had already eaten, however, and were ready to move onto the market, so I ate lunch with the Bucks at C&C.

I can’t say that it had ever occurred to me to combine AIDS awareness with a restaurant, but the organization did a good job, and it was clear that in a community ridden by the sex industry, they’re making a positive difference.

Our last adventure in Bangkok was to the weekend market, where we picked up the souvenirs we hadn’t wanted to carry around all week. The 11 of us met up at seven o’clock and took the metro back to our hostel to grab our backpacks, and then we set off to the airport where we bid farewell to the beautiful city and prepared ourselves for Bangalore once again.

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Photos

Temple Carving
Shutter from the Temple of the Sitting Buddha

Tuk Tuk Turn
The first half rounds a Bangkok corner

Pad Thai?
Yes, please. Sweet, sweet street food

Recling Buddha
Cover, cover.

Unlimited Love
Too much fun with a horrible flick.

Dinner Darlings
Everything tastes better on the beach!

Ao Hin Khok Beach
No, it wasn't a dream.

Floating Market
Pad thai and other goodness served up right off the boat.

River tour
Boys making a splash in the canal.