Rain? What rain??

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Woke up at 1am, having been asleep for the grand total of 3 hours. This, categorically, wasn’t it. As I lay there, switching on the telly, switching off the telly, turning the lights on and then systematically off again, I realised the answer to a question I had from yesterday.
The five star hotel I’m in (have I mentioned before it’s five star? Did you have images of an 80’s all-sibling band greeting guests in reception, with the rooms decorated various shades of neon before I uploaded the photos?! Friends born after 1990 will be puzzled by this last statement, no doubt. I suggest Google and all will become clear ) has a spa – and a very nice spa at that – on the 6th floor. The spa has a plunge pool, treatment areas and a fitness area, which of course, I decided to check out yesterday. With the warmest of welcomes, I was advised that the pool closed at 8pm but the fitness centre stayed open 24/7. 24/7???!! Was he for real? Who goes to the gym at 3am on their holidays? I’ve heard of 24 hour opening gyms in the USA, but then that shouldn’t come as any great surprise to anyone. But in a Thai hotel, whether it be holiday or business, there’s no way you should be awake and in the gym all night. Except if you’re 34, on your extended hollybobs and apparently a newly-diagnosed insomniac. THAT’S why the gym’s open 24/7.
Clearly unmoved by this revelation, I decided to stay put in bed and try to sleep but to no avail. Before I knew it, it was time to head over to the Khao San Road, backpacker heaven. If this is new to you, let me say that the Khao San is a crazy street, full of hostels, hostelries, street hawkers and market stalls. Perfect for the backpacking masses – but not one for the locals. I asked the concierge if he could arrange a taxi for me to go there. He nearly choked. ‘You leave our hotel to stay on Khao San Road?. I went one better and showed him the ‘calling card’ from the hostel I was going to be staying in, which I’d picked up yesterday. I’m sure he would have fainted if it hadn’t been for the amount of starch in his suit.
And so, having hot-footed it across town in my bright pink taxi, I arrived at the hostel, just off the Rambuttri. Tonight I’m bunking in with Emma, before she heads off to the islands. Having dragged my bags up the stairs to the 4th floor (no carpet and mirrored lift here playing spa-esque music) and munched a quick slice of toast, I’m ready to go and we head off to the temple of Wat Pho, for a bit of culture and a Thai massage. Today the weather is unbearably humid and shockingly the sun’s out – to put you all off your breakfast/lunch/dinner/pot noodles, the sweat was pouring off me. We decided to stop off at the Grand Palace, although in typical Brits-abroad fashion, we get turned away for Emma wearing knee length shorts (deemed inappropriate palace-visiting attire, despite me wearing a dress of similar length/coverage - must’ve taken pity on my bright red, sweaty chops I reckon). Conveniently, for a small deposit, you can ‘hire’ appropriate trousers and sarongs from reception, so we got the chance to have a quick wander round, as well as be accosted by a million and one unofficial, or rather wannabe tour guides, willing to show you the sites for a fee.
Off to Wat Pho, and we had to walk the full length of what appeared to be a giant bring and buy sale. It was a car boot sale without the cars (although there were plenty of boots, of various sizes/wear levels on offer to willing purchasers). It looked like there had been a raid on every hostel this side of Siam – watches, phones, ipods… I half expected to turn the corner and find my backpack spread out on the paving stones, pants and all, being hawked to passers-by. Monks scurry past in their orange robes, whilst the poor beg you for the last 20 Baht in your purse. It’s a manic old place, made even more interesting by ‘local experts’ advising you that the attraction you want to visit is closed, so you need to go with them to visit somewhere else (for which they get paid masses of commission and for which you’ll no doubt end up at a gem shop, being coerced into buying something you really don’t want instead of having that lovely massage in a peaceful temple that was open the entire time).
We made it to Wat Pho to see that the building was undergoing huge renovation but wasn’t shut in the slightest, and made our way inside to see the enormous golden statue of the reclining Buddha within the temple. Floor to (very very high) ceiling and the full length of the room, the Buddha was unbelievably beautiful. The walls of the building were handpainted – none of this slap on a bit of Dulux or feature wallpaper for this place! Very serene and calm, and clearly still a very popular tourist destination given the number of people visiting.
After a while looking around, and finding out the massage was an inordinate price (a whole £9 – you can tell I’ve been here too long when £9 for an hour’s massage is deemed extortionate), we headed back by tuk-tuk to Rambhuttri where Emma showed me to a massage spa she’d visited before. For just over £5 (see, told you £9 was too much), we dressed in comedy yellow and brown shirts and shorts and had the heat therapy Thai massage on offer. You lie in the same room as each other, with a massage therapist each, to have this ‘relaxing hour-long treatment’. The latter part of that sentence is, in reality, is not strictly true. What the treatment roughly equates to is 45 minutes of relaxation and massage as you know it, followed by 15 minutes of wrenching and twisting, performing manoeuvres only a contortionist of Houdini’s calibre would attempt, in order to crack backs, necks, pelvises and shoulders. I wasn’t expecting the last 15 minutes – I’d happily drifted off into sleep before it started. Despite the therapist’s best efforts, there was no cracking to be had of my back. He tried harder. Nothing. Twisted me further still. Nothing. Unfazed, he really went for it but I’m clearly too tough a bird to crack…
We headed off for a bite to eat, and stumbled across a venue called The Macaroni Club, just behind the Khao San. A beautiful hostel/bar, where there is a gorgeous waterfall and pond outside, brimming with carp of all shapes and sizes. Eating dinner in here, the table behind us suddenly made this ear-piercing racket. First there was one girl stood on a chair, with her 3 friends laughing at her as she claimed something had touched her toe. ‘It was me, silly!’ replied her friend, in an effort to calm the situation. ‘Phew!’ responded the girl, who promptly sat back down again. 20 seconds passes and there’s suddenly 4 girls hysterically screaming and standing on chairs, as a rat the size of a cat decides to turn their 8 feet into an obstacle course for his own entertainment.
We headed off again, this time to watch Liverpool v Man Utd at another pub. We picked a bar near the hotel, which had a 40 inch television screen, no commentary, no atmosphere and where I realised that the background music they were playing I’d heard before whilst on hold to Sky in the not too distant past. Not everyone’s first choice of bar, but as Liverpool scored the first goal, I realised that this might just be the only bar full of Scousers, as the cheers went up around me. Man Utd is big business in Thailand and the majority of bars were filled with the red devil shirts of our north west adversaries. At this point, my night was the best it could be.
That was until the rain started. And not just a bit of rain, or a heavy rain shower. This was the monsoon at its finest, pouring down water as if someone had opened all the water tanks in the sky at once over one particular street in Bangkok. I was getting soaked – despite being under canvas, the rain flew sideways, and my back was (and this came as a surprise to me as I thought it couldn’t be any worse if I jumped in a pool) more drenched than it was during our humid route-march earlier in the day. The rain continued and Liverpool let Man U back in for the equaliser, and then it dawned on us that we had to get back to the hostel. The road was under water – and flowing like a river – past the front of the bar. People were sailing inflatables past, and I half expected a man in a dinghy selling sticky rice and mango to sail by, taking the opportunity to serve stranded punters along the new river’s route.
The beginning of the walk through the flood wasn’t so bad – but it got deeper and deeper and deeper the further along the road we waded. The water ripped the flip flops from my feet so I had to walk barefoot, as fellow strugglers splashed their way past me to the point where I was properly soaked to the skin (clearly I was complaining about nothing when the rain was merely hitting my back in that bar earlier). The shocking thing was the normally-manic Khao San – market stalls and traders knee deep in grubby water, but with barely a backpacker in sight, either not wanting to leave the bars they were already in or not wanting to head out.
We made it back to the hostel for a few beers to congratulate ourselves on our paddling prowess. Fingers crossed the storms forecast for the next week are no where near the magnitude of today’s downpour – Bangkok is more soaked to the core than its current number 1 fan… me.

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