Our Train chugged into Bangkok station around 10 o'clock in the morning. The station is a fabulous big old art-deco style, familiar to anyone who knows Glasgow's Queen Street Station. Basically a huge arched glass and steal roof, containing a big concourse with shops and eateries at the sides, seating and standing room in the middle and grand, though disused doors at one end and barriers leading to platforms at the other end. A massive TV screen showing whatever the station master seemed to fancy, from News, to WWF wrestling, provided ambiance to accompany the familiar station noise, and the occasional ringing of a big brass bell to announce the arrival of a train. It was a great venue for people watching, as there were two levels of shops, mostly with restaurants upstairs, from which you could watch the people sitting waiting for trains, or the harassed looking overladen westerners trying to convey their dilemma to mildly interested staff members. There were also plenty of Buddhist monks around, in their orange robes, waiting for trains, some in groups and others individually. My ignorant assumptions left me surprised to discover that not every monk knew every other one.
We decided to have brunch in the station, to enjoy the theatre and so that one of us could sit with the bags while the other stepped into the great unknown to find a hotel. We had read plenty about Bangkok being rife with bag slashers and decided to play it as safe as possible. The station sits in a peculiar part of the city, close to China Town, but nothing else. Finding accommodation was pretty difficult, and we each took a turn with the bags while the other went looking. By about 2pm we had a nice little guest house not far from the station, though at a little more than we wanted to spend. We checked in, planning to find cheaper later.
We were by now, familiar with roads that defy belief in their busyness, and size and Bangkok did not disappoint. But what was new to us was the readiness of motorbikes to use the pavement as an expressway, if the roads were too clogged for them to weave between - which was most of the time. It takes a bit of training to remember to look both ways to cross the pavement. Often, the quiet purring of a nearby engine would give the clue that a moped was lurking behind you, politely waiting to pass. They did at least generally appreciate that pedestrians had equal right of use to the space. The smog in the city was also eye catching. Looking across the 8 lanes or so and two pavements between buildings, it was apparent how much pollution was in the air, and this may have been a significant contribution to our perception that the temperature took a leap when we reached Bangkok.
Our first night, we took it easy and enjoyed the short walk into Chinatown to try and find dinner. Bangkok's China Town had quite a different feel to the others we have visited. It felt much more - Chinese, like a part of China, as opposed to an expatriate community. The streets were wider, the buildings bigger and the neon brighter. There were several markets that set up in the evening selling meat and fish (the flies came free), and other stalls cooking food. We found the least terrifying stall, made a safe order of veggies and rice and then sat and waited as every Chinese customer who sat down and ordered after us got served their food before us. We were close to walking out when finally they seemed to have no more orders and made our dinner. We suspect this could be a taste of what to expect in China.
Bangkok is home to the world's biggest gold Buddha image (image means statue, not 2d picture). It turns out, that it was made in the 13th century, but when the Burmese invaded, it was covered up in plaster to hide it from the invaders. It was then forgotten about and it wasn't until it was getting moved in the 1950's that someone bumped it and broke a bit off, revealing the shining smiling cross legged chap within. I found myself partly admiring the statue and partly contemplating the range of emotions that the clumsy worker must have gone through at the time he broke/discovered it.
We then stepped out from the temple (called a Wat) containing it and saw a very old and faded sign saying 'Gold Buddha' pointing to another Wat across the road. We duly investigated and found there was an identical gold Buddha. We suspect the second one was the genuine article because it had bits of plaster exhibited beside it but there were a lot fewer people at this one and it was much lower key. It seems even today, there is a decoy to full the invaders whoever they might be.
Getting around Bangkok is fun, with various methods of transport available. Buses, if you speak Thai and know where you're going, and for the rest of us there's tuc-tuc's, the underground, two monorails (called skytrains) and a fleet of ferryboats that shuttle up and down the river. The pilots of these boats are not the smoothest skippers in the world. The usual procedure for stopping at a pier is to race towards it, then turn at the last minute causing the aft of the boat to smack side-on to the pier. A boy then jumps off, while everyone on board lurches with the momentum, and he ties a rope round a peg, blows on his whistle and the captain puts engines on full, which then pulls against the rope and brings the boat back into the pier. You normally have about 15 seconds to get everyone off and on before the boat starts to drift again, and you have to jump. Then of course there were the times the pilots just rammed the piers dead on and scraped along till the ropes were deployed. It was mad but great fun. It was also the first place we saw signs that we would later see everywhere, marking seats as reserved for monks.
In the end, we didn't change accommodation. We took an excursion to Khao San Road which is the infamous neon-lit, thumping stay-over spot for your typical backpacker and decided that maybe we were a little more refined than we had first thought. Also, we had the advantage of a tube stop close to our guest house, meaning we didn't need to rely on the tuc-tucs to get out of the area, which usually means five minutes of hard bargaining, followed by five minutes of heart pumping adrenaline, as you are whisked between traffic, the wrong way, and down alleys to reach your destination. Again, great fun but the effort required to prevent us getting ripped off could sometimes be too much and was as difficult as the walk home.
Bangkok has a massive weekend market that has to be seen to fully grasp the size of it. To this day we don't really know how much of it we saw. It is well sorted out into individual sectors specialising in a certain thing, such as woman's clothing, gardening, pets (from dogs to scorpions), home interiors and so forth. It's big enough to support a scattering of restaurants and bars for the weary shopper or tourist and we spent about 5 hours before we decided we had seen enough. The scale of the market mirrored the size of Bangkok's malls. Like Singapore, Bangkok has streets of Malls all linked so you need never step outside, and if you do step out, there's elevated walkways that keep you well above the rushing roads. The malls though are very impressive, and anybody planning a mall in the west really needs to come to Bangkok and see how it should be done. Seven and eight stories high with Imax cinemas as standard and even car showrooms. Not just a car sitting on the ground floor vestibule, but five or six showrooms with half a dozen cars each, and just to make it all the more ridiculous, they are on the third floor. Of course these aren't your normal cars, were talking Porsche, Maserati and just for Miss Morgan, Ferrari's.
You don't need to go to the markets though to find what you want in Bangkok, on one of our walkabouts we found a road full of police surplus shops all selling genuine police uniforms and accessories, which seemed just a little peculiar. Perhaps not as peculiar as the giant swing that stood in the middle of a roundabout nearby though. Similar to a swing you would find in a play park this one is different in that it is 25 metres high. A bag of gold used to be suspended in front of it and every year people would kill themselves trying to reach it until the present king put a stop to it all. Today, the frame remains but they've removed the swing itself.
We also went along to the democracy monument. Thailand is still in a state of military rule after the army (you'll remember from the border crossing, 'the bedrock of sovereignty') took control of the state. We wandered along wondering if we would see anybody with a banner or a token protest but there was nothing at all. The monument itself was covered in stone relief depicting democracy in action. The images displayed the army with its guns above people labouring in fields and machines. There was no evidence of irony in it either, nor was their evidence of any unhappy protesters. Two days later, the very same monument hit the headlines when a rally of 4,000 demonstrators convened on the site. We were completely oblivious, instead perusing the Vimanmek Mansion, former royal residence and the biggest teak structure in the world, made, allegedly with out a single nail or screw. It was very nice, and I have been instructed to build one when we return home.
We expected Bangkok to be a seedy den of girly-bars and ladyboys but were surprised at the discretion of the vice industry. It certainly existed, but it was not rife across the city, instead confined to a particular corner, and even then only down the alleys. Apparently.
As for the ladyboys, fun was to be had picking them out from the crowds in the shops and on the trains. For all the make-up and implants they still bring attention to themselves by dressing far more provocatively than any of the girls, and for confirmation, you need look no further than their size 9 feet.
Bangkok is a great city, and in fact actually feels like two cities. There's your older lowrise city with little workshops and retailers, unserviced by underground or skytrain and home to your typical Thai resident. Then there is the afluent, Westernised city, full of hotels, malls and coffee shops, well serviced with transport and much more expensive too. The two seem to co-exist without problems either, though the transitional area lay somewhere between tube stops so we didn't see the point where they met. Like all the great cities though, Bangkok felt like no-where else. It is very much it's own place, and very much a worthy stop-over for anyone passing by.
We left Bangkok by bus, having spent eight days there and headed south-east for the Island of Koh Chang.
We decided to have brunch in the station, to enjoy the theatre and so that one of us could sit with the bags while the other stepped into the great unknown to find a hotel. We had read plenty about Bangkok being rife with bag slashers and decided to play it as safe as possible. The station sits in a peculiar part of the city, close to China Town, but nothing else. Finding accommodation was pretty difficult, and we each took a turn with the bags while the other went looking. By about 2pm we had a nice little guest house not far from the station, though at a little more than we wanted to spend. We checked in, planning to find cheaper later.
We were by now, familiar with roads that defy belief in their busyness, and size and Bangkok did not disappoint. But what was new to us was the readiness of motorbikes to use the pavement as an expressway, if the roads were too clogged for them to weave between - which was most of the time. It takes a bit of training to remember to look both ways to cross the pavement. Often, the quiet purring of a nearby engine would give the clue that a moped was lurking behind you, politely waiting to pass. They did at least generally appreciate that pedestrians had equal right of use to the space. The smog in the city was also eye catching. Looking across the 8 lanes or so and two pavements between buildings, it was apparent how much pollution was in the air, and this may have been a significant contribution to our perception that the temperature took a leap when we reached Bangkok.
Our first night, we took it easy and enjoyed the short walk into Chinatown to try and find dinner. Bangkok's China Town had quite a different feel to the others we have visited. It felt much more - Chinese, like a part of China, as opposed to an expatriate community. The streets were wider, the buildings bigger and the neon brighter. There were several markets that set up in the evening selling meat and fish (the flies came free), and other stalls cooking food. We found the least terrifying stall, made a safe order of veggies and rice and then sat and waited as every Chinese customer who sat down and ordered after us got served their food before us. We were close to walking out when finally they seemed to have no more orders and made our dinner. We suspect this could be a taste of what to expect in China.
Bangkok is home to the world's biggest gold Buddha image (image means statue, not 2d picture). It turns out, that it was made in the 13th century, but when the Burmese invaded, it was covered up in plaster to hide it from the invaders. It was then forgotten about and it wasn't until it was getting moved in the 1950's that someone bumped it and broke a bit off, revealing the shining smiling cross legged chap within. I found myself partly admiring the statue and partly contemplating the range of emotions that the clumsy worker must have gone through at the time he broke/discovered it.
We then stepped out from the temple (called a Wat) containing it and saw a very old and faded sign saying 'Gold Buddha' pointing to another Wat across the road. We duly investigated and found there was an identical gold Buddha. We suspect the second one was the genuine article because it had bits of plaster exhibited beside it but there were a lot fewer people at this one and it was much lower key. It seems even today, there is a decoy to full the invaders whoever they might be.
Getting around Bangkok is fun, with various methods of transport available. Buses, if you speak Thai and know where you're going, and for the rest of us there's tuc-tuc's, the underground, two monorails (called skytrains) and a fleet of ferryboats that shuttle up and down the river. The pilots of these boats are not the smoothest skippers in the world. The usual procedure for stopping at a pier is to race towards it, then turn at the last minute causing the aft of the boat to smack side-on to the pier. A boy then jumps off, while everyone on board lurches with the momentum, and he ties a rope round a peg, blows on his whistle and the captain puts engines on full, which then pulls against the rope and brings the boat back into the pier. You normally have about 15 seconds to get everyone off and on before the boat starts to drift again, and you have to jump. Then of course there were the times the pilots just rammed the piers dead on and scraped along till the ropes were deployed. It was mad but great fun. It was also the first place we saw signs that we would later see everywhere, marking seats as reserved for monks.
In the end, we didn't change accommodation. We took an excursion to Khao San Road which is the infamous neon-lit, thumping stay-over spot for your typical backpacker and decided that maybe we were a little more refined than we had first thought. Also, we had the advantage of a tube stop close to our guest house, meaning we didn't need to rely on the tuc-tucs to get out of the area, which usually means five minutes of hard bargaining, followed by five minutes of heart pumping adrenaline, as you are whisked between traffic, the wrong way, and down alleys to reach your destination. Again, great fun but the effort required to prevent us getting ripped off could sometimes be too much and was as difficult as the walk home.
Bangkok has a massive weekend market that has to be seen to fully grasp the size of it. To this day we don't really know how much of it we saw. It is well sorted out into individual sectors specialising in a certain thing, such as woman's clothing, gardening, pets (from dogs to scorpions), home interiors and so forth. It's big enough to support a scattering of restaurants and bars for the weary shopper or tourist and we spent about 5 hours before we decided we had seen enough. The scale of the market mirrored the size of Bangkok's malls. Like Singapore, Bangkok has streets of Malls all linked so you need never step outside, and if you do step out, there's elevated walkways that keep you well above the rushing roads. The malls though are very impressive, and anybody planning a mall in the west really needs to come to Bangkok and see how it should be done. Seven and eight stories high with Imax cinemas as standard and even car showrooms. Not just a car sitting on the ground floor vestibule, but five or six showrooms with half a dozen cars each, and just to make it all the more ridiculous, they are on the third floor. Of course these aren't your normal cars, were talking Porsche, Maserati and just for Miss Morgan, Ferrari's.
You don't need to go to the markets though to find what you want in Bangkok, on one of our walkabouts we found a road full of police surplus shops all selling genuine police uniforms and accessories, which seemed just a little peculiar. Perhaps not as peculiar as the giant swing that stood in the middle of a roundabout nearby though. Similar to a swing you would find in a play park this one is different in that it is 25 metres high. A bag of gold used to be suspended in front of it and every year people would kill themselves trying to reach it until the present king put a stop to it all. Today, the frame remains but they've removed the swing itself.
We also went along to the democracy monument. Thailand is still in a state of military rule after the army (you'll remember from the border crossing, 'the bedrock of sovereignty') took control of the state. We wandered along wondering if we would see anybody with a banner or a token protest but there was nothing at all. The monument itself was covered in stone relief depicting democracy in action. The images displayed the army with its guns above people labouring in fields and machines. There was no evidence of irony in it either, nor was their evidence of any unhappy protesters. Two days later, the very same monument hit the headlines when a rally of 4,000 demonstrators convened on the site. We were completely oblivious, instead perusing the Vimanmek Mansion, former royal residence and the biggest teak structure in the world, made, allegedly with out a single nail or screw. It was very nice, and I have been instructed to build one when we return home.
We expected Bangkok to be a seedy den of girly-bars and ladyboys but were surprised at the discretion of the vice industry. It certainly existed, but it was not rife across the city, instead confined to a particular corner, and even then only down the alleys. Apparently.
As for the ladyboys, fun was to be had picking them out from the crowds in the shops and on the trains. For all the make-up and implants they still bring attention to themselves by dressing far more provocatively than any of the girls, and for confirmation, you need look no further than their size 9 feet.
Bangkok is a great city, and in fact actually feels like two cities. There's your older lowrise city with little workshops and retailers, unserviced by underground or skytrain and home to your typical Thai resident. Then there is the afluent, Westernised city, full of hotels, malls and coffee shops, well serviced with transport and much more expensive too. The two seem to co-exist without problems either, though the transitional area lay somewhere between tube stops so we didn't see the point where they met. Like all the great cities though, Bangkok felt like no-where else. It is very much it's own place, and very much a worthy stop-over for anyone passing by.
We left Bangkok by bus, having spent eight days there and headed south-east for the Island of Koh Chang.
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