On to the most innuendo-rife city in the world

A scant few hours after I left Hong Kong, I touched down in Bangkok. The flight was pretty uneventful, aside from the weird whining kid next to me, who apparently pissed his pants or something while I was asleep, forcing his mother to awkwardly wake me so she could go clean him up, as well as fetching a wallet that I spotted another guy had left behind before leaving the airline.

Other than that, I made my way to the end of the line at the airport, and made my way through yet another immigration and customs department with little trouble. From there, I made my way straight to an airport express bus that would take me straight to Khao San Road, a backpacker’s haven in Bangkok, where I’d look randomly for lodgings. I was pretty much the first on the bus, and took a seat close to the door so I’d have an easy way out when it came time. Eventually, the bus was fully packed.

A fairly cute young girl sat down just in front of me, and it turned out she spoke English, as I heard another traveler ask her a question about something or another. The girl’s accent also sounded rather American, so I asked her if she was, but she wasn’t. Turned out she was Dutch. Her name is Yara, and we ended up talking for the whole bus ride, and ultimately got a room together, with separate beds.

She had just come off a 15 hour flight from the Netherlands, so wanted to rest a bit before we headed out to see the city a bit, so I went down to the common area of the hostel to grab some lunch and give her some space while she showered and such.

I had my first Thai meal in Thailand, some chicken red curry, and I was thrilled. I LOVE Thai food, and looked forward to eating lots of curry and pad see ew while in the country (something I’ve not at all failed at thus far). I got acquainted with two Danish people, including the guy who I had retrieved the wallet for on the plane. Turned out this couple had just quit their jobs and decided to go on a six month tour of the world, and had just started month 2. They were quite a nice pair, and I had a good time talking to them for a half hour or so, but ultimately had to go back up to Yara to make sure she didn’t think I had disappeared. With that, we set out, to see what we could.

Unfortunately, a few of Bangkok’s central sights, not far from Khao San, close rather early, and it was already 4pm. We walked around anyway, and here’s a couple pictures of what we could take:

 

  

 

We stumbled across a local’s market, also, where there was almost no foreigners, which I guess was a first for Yara, so that was neat, but we couldn’t really see a whole lot of almost anything else. Eventually we made our way back to Khao San, and ended up just hanging out around there for the rest of the night, starting out with some more Thai food for dinner. She wasn’t used to eating Asian food, and, according to her own words, didn’t like rice or noodles, but I figured she was just going to have to deal with it anyhow whether she liked it or not. In fact, she did like it alright enough, so that was what I considered a great success.

After that we just wandered, and drank. Khao San Road, for those San Diegites who are reading this, is a whole lot like Ocean Beach, which is to say there’s a lot of dirty fun-loving hippies and acoustic guitars and marijuana leaf or Bob Marley print shirts, as well as just a lot of nice people having a good time. Of course, with that, there’s also a good number of people trying to make a few bucks, but hey, that’s just how it goes.

There were tons of bars with third-rate musicians playing, and tons of stalls selling fruit slices (which I thought was awesome, and definitely had to partake in), as well as the odd stall selling fried crickets and the like, not to mention people selling wooden frogs you roll a bar across to simulate a frog’s croaking, or severely disabled people begging, but it all comes with the territory.

We ultimately settled at one bar and had a couple of cheap cocktails, before heading back to the hostel, and lying in our respective beds, chatting a bit more, before I passed out on accident. Seriously. I woke up a couple hours later, and was totally confused, as the last thing I remembered was being in mid-conversation with Yara, but clearly I had failed in some way about that. I felt a bit embarrassed, went to the bathroom, then returned to sleep, and did my best to dream off the shame.

The next morning, Yara woke up whenever she woke up, and took a long time to get ready. I pretended to be asleep the whole time, and waited until it looked like she was just killing time to wait for me to wake up to finally show I was in fact awake.

I found out what time it was, and it was already past 11, so it was definitely time to get going and see the world.

We had three main destinations, Wat Pho, Wat Phra Kaew, and the Grand Palace. The first two are both temples, and the first one is home to the world’s largest Reclining Buddha. The second is home to the Emerald Buddha, which has a lot of lore about it, and has been housed, supposedly, in a lot of different temples in Thailand. If one felt so inclined, they could make a grand tour following the “footsteps” of the Emerald Buddha.

Since we had already hoofed it there the previous day, we decided we’d save a bit of time by taking a tuk tuk, which is a sort of motorcycle taxi with a box on the end; really it’s a motortricycle taxi. We got a bit overcharged, but not too badly. It was still only about three dollars total, and the wind from riding in the back box was heavensent. Man it was hot.

Soon they dropped us off at the Wat Pho, and we took pictures of the immensity inside (with a couple pictures of the outside first):

 

  

 

 Other than that, we walked around a bit, but there wasn’t tons to see at this temple grounds in particular. What was readily apparent, though, was something we had already noticed the day before, which was the uniforms of all the college students, and how there was really a ton of college students hanging out in general. I mean, sure, maybe some of them were on a field trip, but it still seemed uncanny that there was probably a couple hundred hanging out at a temple wasting midday.

We left this complex, and tried to make our way to the next, though we started out in the wrong direction, it was easily correct, and soon we were at the Wat Phra Kaew. The only problem was that at this particular temple grounds, you had to wear “appropriate clothing” which means you had to have at least a short sleeved shirt, and nothing other than long pants or a long skirt, which Yara didn’t have. However, a lot of visitors don’t, so they have a dressing station where you can make a deposit to have some admissible clothing for the interim to make up for it. Here’s a blurry picture of her emerging from the dressing room:

 It just started raining as she was in the dressing room, so we waited a while to see if it would stop, but ultimately I bought an umbrella, as we didn’t have a ton of time to enter the place before it was time to shut down. I bargained the umbrella down by a couple bucks until I figured it was at an approximately acceptable level, then we wandered on. At the entrance, there were two separate lines, one Thai line of people and one non-Thai line, as Thai people can actually enter for free, because they still carry on with some religious ceremonies there.

We wandered around, and there was a lot of impressive, distinctly Thai-style religious buildings. I don’t have a lot to say about the area in general, so I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:

 

  

 

 The last is the clearest picture I was able to get of the so called Emerald Buddha, which you could only take zoomed in photographs of from outside the temple. Inside, cameras were required to be turned off.

From there it was a short walk to the Grand Palace. There wasn’t a lot to see here, as there was a bit of reconstruction being done, and you couldn’t enter the Palace itself. It was some pretty nice grounds, though, so we did take a few more pictures before heading out, as shown here:

From there, it was time to get lunch. We took a tuk tuk in the direction of the next place we wanted to check out, a temple called the Golden Mountain, but got dropped off at a monument to Democracy just nearby. There was a decent number of food stalls around, and we each got some Pad Thai, which was a first for Yara, and totally awesome, not to mention cheap. I also saw a white guy hanging out there in some sort of uniform that made him look like a delivery guy for FedEx or something, and he looked a lot like a guy I worked with back in my first job at Smart & Final, who was the dad of a classmate of mine in high school. Weird, but inconsequential.

From there, we walked on in the direction of the Golden Mountain, with just a bit of figuring out where we were, and we had to walk up a whole bunch of stairs like these:

Before getting up to the very top, where we had this view:

Afterwards, we headed straight back down, and decided we wanted to take a canal boat. We planned on taking it south towards Chinatown, but soon we realized that we were going the wrong direction, so we just hoped for the best.

This canal boat was crazy, plowing down the waters like it was nothing. I stood up for a few seconds to take a couple of quick pictures, but it wasn’t easy to stand.  A couple of guys stood on the sides to get fares from everyone, and I wondered out loud how often those guys fall off. It wasn’t exactly a smooth ride.

The cool thing was that a lot of local people used it as a normal form of transit, which is something totally unfathomable in the USA. When we were dropped off at the last station for this riverboat, Yara and I realized we were almost right next to a big tower in Bangkok, called the Baiyoke Tower, which Yara wanted to check out, since the Netherlands is a bit short on big buildings.

So we went up. It’s the cheapest tower I’ve ever gone up, for only six dollars, to go up almost 90 floors, and, not only that, get a free drink too. At the top of the building, they had something different than what I’d seen in most buildings thus far, which was a revolving floor at the very top so that you could get a nice view of the whole city without having to actually move. I’m not really sure it was necessary (I.e. it was a total waste of energy) but hey who cares. So here’s a picture or two from that:

Afterwards, we got our free drinks, and reflected on the fact that this bar at the 83^rd floor wasn’t really a bar, but just a tourist’s bar, and it was pretty janky. But it was nice for us as cheap tourists. As soon as we went down the tower, we looked for a taxi to get back. The weird thing was that the security guard outside was in on it.

The thing is, the tourism industry in Thailand is ludicrous, and extortion is far worse than what I’ve seen anywhere else. So for a rather small ride, a driver might ask for 10 dollars, when 4 might be most appropriate. The security guard asked us if we were okay with 8, and we said no no no, that it would certainly be less, and he kept offering lower amounts until he agreed to 100 or so, and helped us flag a taxi down, and told him what we were willing to pay, and then we got in. The taxi driver said “oh, you never know, traffic could be bad, it might be more”. He did use the taxi meter though, so we got a fair deal, and it actually was even less than what we asked for, which was far less than what they originally wanted to fleece us for.

Then, we did just a bit of shopping, so I could have a pair of shorts and be a bit more comfortable in the crazy heat, and something similar for Yara, then relaxed, got some more curry, and repeated our end phase for the previous night, bouncing around a couple of bars and cheap food stalls so I could get alcohol at a reasonable rate and have some bbq chicken while I was at it.

And again, at the end of the night, I passed out on accident which made me that much more embarrassed the next morning. Same deal, too. I woke up a couple hours later and realized I didn’t remember even trying to sleep, but, c’est la vie. Here's where I passed out, on the left:

The next morning, we both had to get ready to roll out and go our separate ways. Yara was heading north, towards the city of Chiang Mai, near which she’d be volunteering at an elephant camp. I on the other hand, was going to be heading towards Krabi, which was to the South, to see beautiful beaches and do some climbing.

We still had a few hours before our trains left, though, so we were going to head to a special Saturday market, first, which Yara was really looking forward to. It wasn’t quite what she was hoping for, though, and had really not all that much super special about it in general. We saw a bunch of sad performers, like this scary guy who wasn’t trying to be an actual ventriloquist at all:

We got some more good Thai food, including my first cup of Thai iced coffee:

And from there, we headed out to the metro station to go back to the train station, where we didn’t wait long until it was time for me to depart, as my train left an hour earlier than hers. Just one hug and we were gone, as tenuous as any of a dozen other friendships I had created while traveling in my time thus far, but it was a bit sad for me at least.

The train was to be a sleeper train with no a/c, just rotating fans. I didn’t know whether or not I’d really be able to handle it, but I was going to have to try one way or another, right?