I am having a great time exploring Bangkok, but I don't want to live here. It is a city that entices as it repulses and bewilders.

There is none of that "which country am I in?" sense I that I got arriving in Chiang Mai - Bangkok is too wild, too big, too plain smelly to be hidden even for an eye blink. The guesthouses hold no sway here - step outside of Khao San and you're on your own. They might have a chance at controlling Chiang Mai for us, but Bangkok's feline eyes scare off the loops and wiles of tourism. The only tours they offer are all very noticeably for places outside the city - southern beaches mainly. And indeed, there is this quality to Bangkok that makes the head buzz, makes one long for a full moon party just to calm down. Time seems speeded up, as though I'm never concentrating hard enough to catch the whole day.
From my guesthouse, I am supposed to take the number 15 bus for the central Siam shopping mall area. The bus waits forty minutes before appearing, then shoots straight past, giving only the weakest pretence of picking up passengers: slowing down for no more than a second to open and snap shut its doors. In that case, I was able to catch it as it immediately hit a red light queue. Then we raced as much as traffic allowed, "air" pouring into my wimpering lungs, over bridges spanning the remaining canals, waterways that once made up the entire city.

Bangkok is a zoo of smells. Everywhere a base stink of car fumes, a canvas of pollution, the puke of an Asian Tiger. But then, simply from walking down the street: the smell of Bangkok's grey rain, trickling down eves and balconies, the smell of eye watering chillies hitting a street kitchen wok, the smell of cooked noodles in pots, an oily dough steam, the smell of burning charcoal under browning cup cakes. By a small shrine in the centre of the city, incense sticks lit, bringing back memories of Hong Kong. Professionally fat old women, cooking peanut aromas of Pad Thai in the mouth of an alley way, customers croucing over small plastic stools. And other, less identifiable or explainable smells - my nose never rests in Bangkok. I come to a Chinese shop selling sticks of cinnamon, seeds of other herbs and seasonings. The old women inside starts to get up, but I gesticulate, "No, don't worry, just smelling".

Ironically, given that Khao San itself is so dreadful, the neighbourhood around it, Banglumpoo, is rather nice. It has a great feeling of being a good place in its own right, a place trendy Thais come for the bars and cafes. While anyone who eats on Khao San deserves only pity, my guesthouse's long street Phra Sumen/Phra Athit has all kinds of cafes and eating stalls. My favourite place is "Roti Mataba": Women in aprons make fresh rotis in a tiny narrow street diner, serving them with everything from milk and sugar to red fish curry. I see a deep relationship starting here.

I'm in a street bar right now, pulled in by the Latin guitar falling out of speakers into the road. There are two or three other Westerners here - everyone else looks Thai, fair sized groups clustered around tables. I eat, relax a little from Bangkok's bedlam frenzy, listen to the music, then head home.

But a difficulty with Bangkok and Bamglampoo in particular is that its too easy to make friends. The men who want to be my friend, purely coincidentally, all have parked tuk tuks by the roadside. They ask me the standard questions, "Where are you going today"? The worst is when I have my map out - then a simple "No" can't deter them. Their eyes leap on to the pavement to offer unwanted assistance. So, one has the choice of someone following and quizzing you for a minute, after which you will meet another man just like him, or alternatively, getting rude. I've got rude - I say, "No", and if that doesn't work, a loud "Go Away!" invariably issues from my mouth. The tuk tuk socialites usually look at me with a hurt expression, but...

I went to the central shopping mall area, Siam, to look for a digital camera. This is an ice chilled Versailles of consuming. Suffice to say, lots of things are on sale, with the exception of the low priced Canon A75 I was hoping to find. New and bigger shopping centres were under busy contruction as I walked the area. The hoardings protecting one building site were a perfect ambassador of consumerism. Every abstract value in life these adverts had converted into a thing owned. "BE YOURSELF" - buy a certain type of chair. "BE INSPIRED" - if you're a man, wear a sharp suit and throw paper aeroplanes; if you're a women, sit naked on a sofa, a sleek laptop concealing your, well, inspirational parts.
It is an endlessly fascinating, if tiring area to explore. I scaled six storey malls, crossed footbridges, ducked into little shops, rotated from escalator to escalator, all in search of that camera. Lots and lots of Thai young things in jeans or school uniforms, looking as if their entire existence lived to excitedly browse these shop windows. One shopping courtyard, a band was rocking a huge crowd of teenagers. I climbed stairs to a photo shop. Turning inside, the small two rooms were filled, filled, with Thai schoolgirls, screaming and giggling, looking at their photos. I was completely ignored, the bedlam of the electric guitars outside and the nattering inside made me unsteady on my feet - and the shop had no cameras.
I crossed to the MBK shopping centre, a long, vast four storey mall. On the fourth floor, a vista that would have impressed Dali. Everywhere, in every direction, for as far into the distance as I could see, glass stalls selling mobile phones. So many mobiles, so many accessories, every component from the screen to the motherboard on sale, teenagers queuing to download ringtones... words can't convey the immensity. The bright ceiling strip lights glinted on the glass cabinents, glinted on the chrome cases of the phones, so the effect was like looking into a shimmering lake. My optical functions began to shut down, it was so endlessly homogenous - I would turn my eyes and they would just say, "Yep, same as before". I would insist they look, "Are there any cameras there, for Christ sake"? But I was sipping from a mirage.
Finally, I tracked down a few stalls. After various and long winded engagements with store owners that I won't bore you with, I successfully parted with the camera I had sought. It is really nice, as I get to know it more. I can record short movies and even shoot in sepia or black and white! Isn't buying things cool?

I walked through Bangkok's Chinatown one morning when the rain fell fast. Under a grey sky and over a grey river, my river bus carried me from Banglampoo to the middle of Chinatown. The great walking alleyway of Sampeng Lane, shops for a mile, never more than 8ft for the pavement between them, awnings pulled from both sides of the street to protect shoppers. But the middle two feet of the lane lie unprotected, so from both sides a wall of glistening water rolled off the awnings on to my umbrella. Strange old Chinese businesses, anonymous names: "Ordinary Registered Partnership" - inside only stacks of papers and boxes. A bewildering number of shops, big winding shops, selling nothing but stickers. At some points, sunken plastic sheeting covers the whole of the sky - I walk head low. The swollen ceiling of this lane, the smell of moisture everywhere, the dripping coming from a dozen spots near me, I feel as if underwater. Bangkok has this strangeness, this other worldness, despite all the consumerism and supposed westernisation, that makes walking it never relaxing, but equally, never ever dull. There were more walking markets I that visited in Bangkok, more shopping centres, cinemas, cafes I reclined in, little restaurants I browsed and street food I munched... But enough, I think, for one diary entry on this - otherwise your head will be spinning as much as mine was. I feel pleased, at least, that I have got my money's worth out of Nancy Chandler's map.

My plan, the day after tomorrow, is to leave Bangkok for the south. My plan is to spend a few nights in a jungle national park, then visit the islands around the town of Krabi, then get on a train, and, given the security situation in the extreme south of the country, not get off the train until I am in Malaysia.

The loneliness of an old bore

As an almost final topic, I have, it must be said, a big problem in Thailand. My problem is that a lot of the travellers I'm meeting have come to Thailand as the first part of their travels. A bit younger than me, lacking most of my pretensions at travelling for observing the world, whatever that means, at finding some answers to the puzzles of life, at enjoying difficulty. They seem happy to go on organised tours, are just amazed how cheap everything is, and find Thailand really wild and maybe a bit scary. I find myself bottling up a superior, irritated rant:

1. This is the easiest bloody country in the world to travel around! Inland Spain would be trickier than this, WALES would be trickier than this. Everything is set up for you, all you have to do is open your gob and drink it up.

2. Yes, prices are low, but so is my budget. Stop comparing everything to how expensive England was! 1000 baht for a meal between four is not fucking cheap!

3. Stop travelling around so fast, stop acting as if this just a longer range than usual pub crawl!

I could go on. Now clearly, were this my first destination, I'd probably be very guilty of 1 and 2, and were I still a gap year student (late teens), I'd also hit rant 3 too. Maybe.

The problem is that I haven't yet vented these angers, yet can't relax and take the philosophical view that, "There's no right way to be a traveller". So I am reduced to seething and muttering, "Well, if you think this is scary, let me tell you about something that happened to me in Guatemala"... Or:"Think the food's cheap here, well in China...". In other words, I have become quite the old bore.
The additional problem I'm having is that I'm vaguely worried that maybe these gap yearers have got it right and I've got it wrong. They do seem to have a lot of fun drinking beer, going on the same hilltrek all their friends went on, plotting the days to the next full moon party. The day after I met him, Liam (the guy I met in the coffee shop after my Filipino encounter) met up with some people he'd known before and they all left Bangkok for the south coast that afternoon. Maybe I am the silly one for spending days hanging around Bangkok...?

But after a conversation with one of Liam's friends, I felt a little more justified in my decisions. We talked about Chiang Mai, she was going on a hilltrek to see some indigenous people. She said how a number of her friends had been to Thailand before, everyone had gone on a hilltrek, everyone had emailed back saying how great it was. But, she smiled, although they all travelled separately, all their emails described exactly the same thing - rafting the same river, walking the same hills. I asked her if she was going on one herself, and she was, despite this funny foreknowledge. It was as if we have to, have to, do the same things, mainly because we have so little time to make detours. With more time in the north, I'm sure there are less touristy hilltreks to find - one could go to a town in the hilltrek area like Mai Hon Son and organise something from there.
And indeed, it felt like these guys hadn't seen much of Bangkok either. They had come straight to Khaosan on arrival, and were now getting a bus to pick them up that afternoon.
Well, actually that's not true, a few of them had been to one area of Bangkok.

To go to Patpong?

I met Liam the evening after we met, and he asked me if I wanted to come with him and his friends to a Ping Pong club. The two friends had actually gone to the club the previous night, but had been so drunk they couldn't remember anything.
For those of you still retaining some innocence on this Bangkok highlight, these are strip clubs, in the area called Patpong, where women, to give just one example, pull razor blades on a string out of their, well, inspirational parts... Other parts of the show involve ping pong balls being... I'll stop, my mother's reading this.
Was this something I wanted to / should see? While this trip is supposed to be about learning new things, challenging preconceptions - I quickly knew this was not an experience I wanted. Some experiences, if you'll forgive the verging on pretensious language, might be more injurying than growing, more desensitising than enriching.
Plus there was the moral aspect. My understanding is that Patpong's heyday is a while gone, nowadays the majority of punters are actually backpackers "just having a look". It seems a bit dubious to be extending the life of something like Patpong on the false impression that what we backpackers do has no effect. Plus, the inevitability of racking up a huge beer bill during the show, with lads I had only just met, was a negative factor too.

I declined, and saw Liam the next day - he echoed what everyone I've met said, nothing at all erotic, just very, very strange and a little disturbing. One of his friends again had no recollection of the night - but felt he couldn't face going a third time.

Daniel, 22 May 2004, Bangkok