My flight to Bangkok left at 3:35AM. The cabin attendants kept trying to feed me breakfast, pretending to be insulted that I didn't want to try their cooking. They thought this was very funny. When they finally stopped, I slept for two hours by lying across two seats in the fetal position. If I had any dignity, I wouldn't have slept at all.
My taxi driver from the airport in Bangkok wore sunglasses and jewellery and had floppy, styled hair. He laughed heartily when I put my seatbelt on. His car was new and shiny and tricked out with bits of chrome, decals, and a very loud, high-quality stereo. He enjoyed 1980s American pop. We tore along the elevated highway into Bangkok with Cyndi Lauper blasting. He sang along.
I stayed in Sukhumvit, which is full of white high-rises, expats, elevated trains, and shopping malls. India was missing a thousand luxuries I hadn't realized were luxuries; Sukhumvit has them all. Street lighting, mass transit, drainage, ashphalt, sidewalks -- sidewalks above all. I walked around on the sidewalks for a while and just revelled. Motorcycles did hop the curb to use them sometimes, but usually at low speeds, and only when it was really convenient for them. I went to a Starbucks, then a 7-11, and then a supermarket. It was very soothing.
Old Bangkok is mostly temple complexes; new Bangkok is mostly shopping malls. There's more or less a continuous chain of malls stretching for miles along the elevated train line. The city centre, Siam Square, is considered the city centre because this is where the malls are densest and most expensive. I spent a couple of hours in the Siam Paragon ("the pride of Bangkok"), the largest and most expensive of them all. I'd planned to spend a few minutes, but I stopped and ate in its very interesting food court, then got lost, then loitered a while longer because it had begun to rain very heavily (late October is the tail end of the monsoon season).
This mall is 10 storeys of polished glass and white cement. The stores are strictly luxury brands; clothing, stereo equipment, and cars: Lamborghini, Jaguar, Maserati. No one, however, seemed to be shopping in any of the stores. Instead, people were were poking around temporary booths set up down the middles of the halls that sold flip-flops and sandals and inexpensive electronics.
Weather
Bangkok wasn't hotter than India, but it was more humid. In the middle of the day, the heat was crushing. Many people slept through it. In a little street restaurant I went to, some of the staff were lying on the ground behind the counter. People slept in shops and in the backs of tuktuks. The women in front of the massage parlour around the corner from the hotel lay down out front in a state of semiconsciousness most of the afternoon, apparently asleep except for the "hello, massage" that would escape them whenever a tourist walked by.
Food
I ate plates of pad thai from a street stall in the neighbourhood of my hotel every day. They cost 30 baht ($1); exactly 10% of what the hotel restaurant charged for the same dish. Walking around the temples of the old city, I stopped and ate something on a stick (pictured). It may have been a small catfish. Otherwise, I didn't eat much of Bangkok's famous street food. A lot of it was clearly meat, and a lot of it was hard to identify.
Transportation
The problem with being back in a city with sidewalks and mass transit was that I suddenly had to start finding my own way again. In India, it was enough to take tuktuks and cycle rickshaws from place to place. In Bangkok, I had to try to read maps and figure out ticketing systems.
Sukhumvit has a new, elevated train system, and an even newer metro. Neither of these reach the old city. To get to the temples, I took a canal boat. You exit the Skytrain and walk away from the malls, through short alleys lined with corrugated steel shacks, to get to a tiny wooden dock. To board the boats, you hold onto a rope, clamber over the side, and find a spot on one of the rows of wooden benches inside. Employees stand on the narrow gunwale and edge up and down the boat to collect fares and to hold up a strip of plastic sheeting that provides some protection against the sun and the spray.
Scams
The seamier parts of Sukhumvit are full of bespoke tailors. In the seamiest bits, the only types of businesses are gogo bars and bespoke tailors, and they more or less alternate. The tailors have signs in English only. Each has a man in a suit standing outside, as legitimate tailors do, hustling for business. Their suits are famously the kind that fall to pieces as soon as they cross an international border, or spring apart like clown cars when you're saying 'I do' or reading a eulogy.
A monk with a begging bowl was walking along Sukhumvit. In his bowl was a 100 baht note -- a suggestion -- held in place by his thumb. I gave him 20 baht before it occurred to me to wonder why a monk would be walking alone up and down a street in the business centre of Bangkok after dark pushing his bowl in tourists' faces.
Bangkok's signature scam is a con that involves an agreement to transport gemstones, a lot of money, and some bits of coloured glass; but no one tried it on me.
Things that are both
India's tuktuks were yellow and green or yellow and black and swarmed everywhere like giant, smelly bees. In Bangkok there are far fewer, and they're cleaner and far more colourful. They look like the traps they notoriously are. Their reputation is so bad that tourists ride them, I think, for the experience of being ripped off, in the spirit of trying a disgusting local delicacy. I don't know whether they're actually worse than Indian tuktuks or whether the alternatives are just much better. But one important difference is that Indian tuktuks are genuinely a practical and common means of transport; Indian drivers are drivers first, and touting, overcharging, Viagra selling, and whatever else are sidelines. As far as I can tell, Bangkok's tuktuk drivers exist mostly for tourists.
By the last canal boat pier, a friendly tout stopped me to circle things on the map I'd just bought and tell a series of startling lies. The things I was going to were closed, but, by a lucky chance, this was the one day a year when government-operated tuktuks -- like the one over there -- no, not that one, that one -- offered a half-day tour for only 20 baht. It was like a rare and beautiful flower that bloomed once a year, and he was delighted for me that I was here at the right moment. We eventually agreed that, naive as I am, he'd be better off waiting for someone even dumber.
This morning, I left Bangkok and flew up to Chiang Mai. I didn't want to fly; I wanted to take an overnight train, and I actually made an effort to get one. The online booking system is broken, so I walked to the train station -- a long walk in the heat of the day through endless neighbourhoods of sheet metal workshops and highway underpasses. And the trains were full. So I took a cab back to the hotel and booked a $60 flight, instead.
My taxi driver from the airport in Bangkok wore sunglasses and jewellery and had floppy, styled hair. He laughed heartily when I put my seatbelt on. His car was new and shiny and tricked out with bits of chrome, decals, and a very loud, high-quality stereo. He enjoyed 1980s American pop. We tore along the elevated highway into Bangkok with Cyndi Lauper blasting. He sang along.
I stayed in Sukhumvit, which is full of white high-rises, expats, elevated trains, and shopping malls. India was missing a thousand luxuries I hadn't realized were luxuries; Sukhumvit has them all. Street lighting, mass transit, drainage, ashphalt, sidewalks -- sidewalks above all. I walked around on the sidewalks for a while and just revelled. Motorcycles did hop the curb to use them sometimes, but usually at low speeds, and only when it was really convenient for them. I went to a Starbucks, then a 7-11, and then a supermarket. It was very soothing.
Old Bangkok is mostly temple complexes; new Bangkok is mostly shopping malls. There's more or less a continuous chain of malls stretching for miles along the elevated train line. The city centre, Siam Square, is considered the city centre because this is where the malls are densest and most expensive. I spent a couple of hours in the Siam Paragon ("the pride of Bangkok"), the largest and most expensive of them all. I'd planned to spend a few minutes, but I stopped and ate in its very interesting food court, then got lost, then loitered a while longer because it had begun to rain very heavily (late October is the tail end of the monsoon season).
This mall is 10 storeys of polished glass and white cement. The stores are strictly luxury brands; clothing, stereo equipment, and cars: Lamborghini, Jaguar, Maserati. No one, however, seemed to be shopping in any of the stores. Instead, people were were poking around temporary booths set up down the middles of the halls that sold flip-flops and sandals and inexpensive electronics.
Weather
Bangkok wasn't hotter than India, but it was more humid. In the middle of the day, the heat was crushing. Many people slept through it. In a little street restaurant I went to, some of the staff were lying on the ground behind the counter. People slept in shops and in the backs of tuktuks. The women in front of the massage parlour around the corner from the hotel lay down out front in a state of semiconsciousness most of the afternoon, apparently asleep except for the "hello, massage" that would escape them whenever a tourist walked by.
Food
I ate plates of pad thai from a street stall in the neighbourhood of my hotel every day. They cost 30 baht ($1); exactly 10% of what the hotel restaurant charged for the same dish. Walking around the temples of the old city, I stopped and ate something on a stick (pictured). It may have been a small catfish. Otherwise, I didn't eat much of Bangkok's famous street food. A lot of it was clearly meat, and a lot of it was hard to identify.
Transportation
The problem with being back in a city with sidewalks and mass transit was that I suddenly had to start finding my own way again. In India, it was enough to take tuktuks and cycle rickshaws from place to place. In Bangkok, I had to try to read maps and figure out ticketing systems.
Sukhumvit has a new, elevated train system, and an even newer metro. Neither of these reach the old city. To get to the temples, I took a canal boat. You exit the Skytrain and walk away from the malls, through short alleys lined with corrugated steel shacks, to get to a tiny wooden dock. To board the boats, you hold onto a rope, clamber over the side, and find a spot on one of the rows of wooden benches inside. Employees stand on the narrow gunwale and edge up and down the boat to collect fares and to hold up a strip of plastic sheeting that provides some protection against the sun and the spray.
Scams
The seamier parts of Sukhumvit are full of bespoke tailors. In the seamiest bits, the only types of businesses are gogo bars and bespoke tailors, and they more or less alternate. The tailors have signs in English only. Each has a man in a suit standing outside, as legitimate tailors do, hustling for business. Their suits are famously the kind that fall to pieces as soon as they cross an international border, or spring apart like clown cars when you're saying 'I do' or reading a eulogy.
A monk with a begging bowl was walking along Sukhumvit. In his bowl was a 100 baht note -- a suggestion -- held in place by his thumb. I gave him 20 baht before it occurred to me to wonder why a monk would be walking alone up and down a street in the business centre of Bangkok after dark pushing his bowl in tourists' faces.
Bangkok's signature scam is a con that involves an agreement to transport gemstones, a lot of money, and some bits of coloured glass; but no one tried it on me.
Things that are both
India's tuktuks were yellow and green or yellow and black and swarmed everywhere like giant, smelly bees. In Bangkok there are far fewer, and they're cleaner and far more colourful. They look like the traps they notoriously are. Their reputation is so bad that tourists ride them, I think, for the experience of being ripped off, in the spirit of trying a disgusting local delicacy. I don't know whether they're actually worse than Indian tuktuks or whether the alternatives are just much better. But one important difference is that Indian tuktuks are genuinely a practical and common means of transport; Indian drivers are drivers first, and touting, overcharging, Viagra selling, and whatever else are sidelines. As far as I can tell, Bangkok's tuktuk drivers exist mostly for tourists.
By the last canal boat pier, a friendly tout stopped me to circle things on the map I'd just bought and tell a series of startling lies. The things I was going to were closed, but, by a lucky chance, this was the one day a year when government-operated tuktuks -- like the one over there -- no, not that one, that one -- offered a half-day tour for only 20 baht. It was like a rare and beautiful flower that bloomed once a year, and he was delighted for me that I was here at the right moment. We eventually agreed that, naive as I am, he'd be better off waiting for someone even dumber.
This morning, I left Bangkok and flew up to Chiang Mai. I didn't want to fly; I wanted to take an overnight train, and I actually made an effort to get one. The online booking system is broken, so I walked to the train station -- a long walk in the heat of the day through endless neighbourhoods of sheet metal workshops and highway underpasses. And the trains were full. So I took a cab back to the hotel and booked a $60 flight, instead.
