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Bangkok: Arriving at Bangkok Airport, Lonely Planet in hand, I brushed aside the many offers of taxis. Walking around at an airport with a rucksac is like displaying a neon sign 'I'm in need of something, anything, just sell it to me!' So determinedly I searched around for the signs leading to the recommended 'sky-train' to whisk me into the city in the dead on night. However, only skim reading the chapter on 'Arriving at the Airport' was probably not a good idea; I realised, when with a smile a hotel operator informed me that this, the new airport did not have a train station, but the older one did, the Lonely Planet edition perhaps not quite the latest, was written with the other one in mind. Dohh! The sound of a empty can crushing against my forehead, a la Homer Simpson, could be heard from someway off.
Forty minutes on a cold air conditioned bus later I alighted at the top of the infamous Khao San Road. The street summed up in the guides as some sort of tourist den for dodgy massages and cockroach filled cheap rooms, is actually a lot more interesting than that. Those attributes are true, but it has many more that makes it a pedestrian friendly street that you can slowly stroll along, reach the end and start again. I did that, like many others several times, simply to take in the rich visual array of activities that take place there. I had imagined the street heaving with western backpackers, again which is true, but there are many countries represented, and the warm humid air is filled with a diverse multi-cultural sound, a few English voices, yes, but an insignificant part of the blend. The gaudy neon signs that project from the buildings, which reminded me of the lively parts of Tokyo, overlapped each other, and climbed high to provide an artificial hue to the road and its inhabitants wantonly wandering amongst the chaos. I had booked into the best hotel on the road, so I wasn't really living the experience, more a voyeur, but I did enjoy the creature comforts it offered and after hearing from Emily and Louise, who I ate with later, the cockroaches are not an urban myth!
I awoke, from my very comfortable air-conditioned sleep, with a plan - to book an overnight train down the south coast to Koh Samui. The train station was a way off, so I picked up an express boat that ferry commuters and tourists though the city. The Chao Phraya river appears to be too big for the banks that contain it, it bulges with a dark brown syrup liquid which seems to want to engulf the city passes through, in fact the original older part of the city, Thornburi, was built directly on the water using timber posts, and a extensive canal network, so there was a respectful symbiosis that existed once, but now the river is rising and threatens the western style commercial city that has grown to the east.
I jumped ship at 'N4' amongst cacophony of high pitched whistles that the boat men use to communicate, much in the same way our railway guard would sedately raise his arm to signal an impending departure. I had not really planned my route so well and I was left in a working part of the city where the streets where filled with shop fronted businesses, units and units of what seemed to be the same business at that; car parts. I walked for perhaps 10 minutes on one narrow street, then turned along another and each 'shop' displayed only engine casings, gearbox parts, and stacks of axles. Huge pyramids of black oily mechanical parts neatly separated into known types filled each open faced room, one after the other, occasionally an interloper would squeeze between the lines of repetitive units, and that would be filled with people cooking some kind of street food with a scattering of small Formica surfaced tables. That was all, nothing else. Perhaps it was my perverse curiosity but I found them some of the more interesting shops I had seen, compared with the monotonous glitzy lines of upmarket shops such as Prada, Gucci and Armani that seem to fill up every city centre I have visited on this trip. I paused for a while to watch man and boy squatting on the pavement carefully, methodically and with seemingly great passion, disassemble all manner of mechanical objects. I just couldn't believe there could exist such demand for so many used and worn bits!
My trip to the railway station was unsuccessful. The train was already booked, leaving only seated 2nd class tickets for the overnight journey, I declined the offer from the ticket office and found an empty area of marble on the station floor on which to sit and study my options. Thai Airlines could provide me with a direct return flight for 600 baht (100GBP) and would save me a day travelling, deal done!
So back to sight-seeing, and on my long walk to the Palace I met a Thai teacher from Chang Mai, Thailand's second city in the north, the place to visit for all the temples and elephant rides. We shared the same direction so walked and talked for a while; he taught English and history, and consequently offered a great deal of interesting information. He had only a few years left before he retired and then his world journey would begin, he looked forward to with great enthusiasm, keen to expand his bookish studies into physical experience. Soon after we parted company the humidity finally reached it's upper limit and the heavens opened. It was quite exciting to witness a tropical rain shower, but after a hour, with flooding walkways and very wet clothes I realised it would have been better witnessed from the inside of a coffee shop rather than quite so first hand. Although to my fortune I had the company of Hanna, a Swedish tourist enjoying her final day in the city before retuning to Stockholm.
I entered the Wat Phra Kaeo of the Palace, feeling a little wet, so my enthusiasm had been dampened a little so after squelching around some of the stunning temples and giving a respectful nod to the largest lying down Buddha in the world (I had already seen the largest sitting Buddha in the world in Hong Kong) I gave in to the lure of a Tuk Tuk, turning down the offer of only a 10 baht journey via a 'shop' in favour of an 80 baht directly back to the hotel. I had been warned about the shop visits, it usually ended up as quite an excursion and a little arm bending to by 'whatever' the vendor was selling. The Lonely Planet warns you off them, recommending a taxi instead, a real shame I'd say as they are great fun, noisy yes, dangerous perhaps, better than a sterile air-conditioned cab, and it really is authentic; I was left with some of the authenticity for the rest of the holiday, fresh red paint on my t-shirt and ruck sac. Well, something to remind me of the journey.
The transport link between the shopping centre of the city and the west side is a Longtail boat speeding along a narrow canal. I couldn't understand why, once aboard that a tall plastic curtain was raised around the boat almost obscuring all of the outside world, until we started moving, and moving very fast! The spray from the bow of the boat seeped in everywhere as we raced along, this felt less like a taxi and more like a trip to Alton Towers. It was great! Noisy again, but everything in this city is noisy, or smells of something you would have preferred not to have taken in!
The area leading to Siam Square offers some good street food that I had the opportunity to watch cook just to ensure what it was I would be eating before I bought it....tasty, not entirely sure what it was but I knew enough to tell it never had a pulse! Siam Square isn't exactly a square, rather an area of up market shopping centres. All very swish, white marble, glass fronts and yet more Armani, I would have turn sharply around if it wasn't for the aquarium that drew me to one. Definitely worth a visit. Long glass tunnels looking up into pools of sharks and manta rays, this was as close as I would like to get, and bar 30mm of perspex it was very close! There was also a glass bottom boat ride, over the same pool, the fish, and sharks followed us around the deep water, naturally as the guide would periodically throw food into the tank, falling in doesn't bear thinking about! My feet just about gave out as I tried to walk back to the hotel, and when I realised I had been walking the wrong direction for half an hour I hailed a keen Tuk Tuk driver to weave his way back through the heavy traffic of the city.
The following day, after several hours of walking the streets and a visit to see the glimmering gold roofs of the Palace I treated myself to a private Longtail boat tour of the old city via the narrow canals that seem to run in many directions and at times into what seems like green suburban countryside. I really need to look at a map as it was impossible to orientate yourself as the Longtail powers through so quickly. I couldn't decide whether it was a place you would chose to live or not, it was picturesque, a little shabby perhaps, but I wondered what the insect like was like here. In these very humid conditions where little or no movement was enough to start a sweat I could imagine as the sun went down being eaten alive by all manner of airborne creature!
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