Flesh
The return to the adventure, I’m sat here in Chaing Mai, Thailand at a not so un-godly hour, braving the mozzies lying in a hammock in our uber hip and therefore very popular guest house…..the room wasn’t much better but now I swear the buggers are biting my threw the hammock..its bloody hot in the room plus mozzies….at least out here I’m getting a night breeze. We cant find where the damn fiends are coming into our room as in theroy, the gauzed windows should make it mozzie proof…yet I’ve still been bitten…. on my stomach….
Enough about mosquitos and their plan to destroy us through frustration (one just tried to get me on the nose)` so I’ve retreated under my sheet I brought out with me…
Its been ver frustrating without a place to type my ramblings down as and when I want……if I write short hand I just write notes and nothing much makes sense. First of all the adaptor to my computer broke- queue me on missions around Calcutta and bangkok trying to find a replacement…then just as we are about to go to a magically place where I will find out if a replacement is actually possible…..we discover we’ve been robbed…..Laptop, camera, Kate’s phone and money (thankfully not passports) and we curse the damn devils for all eternity for robbing us of some amazing images from the start of our Indian trip( on the laptop) and the end (on my camera),,,the latter of which I will describe as best as possible before they fade.
First I think the most important thing is to get up to date…I have such a back log of things which I’ve not been able to write about (or have written about but was unable to access and then was robbed of) so a quick summary will get me up to speed and I’ll back track on the missed during some of the long journeys and painful hangovers I’ve yet to come and re conjure the full adventures and insert them to the right time frame.
Summary goes something like this;
Delhi; Merav prepares to leave for home but not before we take her on a day trip to see the Taj in Agra…I mean it has to be done even if I have now lost the photos…a train ride from hell is followed by wine and then by another bout of food poisoning for me leaves us just about fit enough to book our flights to Thailand….from Calcutta for a ridiculously cheap price.
So we journey on to Varanassi, which carries on as it was when I last left it (which takes some of the mystery with it) and its secret passage way type corridors. This time Merav is replaced with Kate…we cross to ‘the other side’ of the river…and mostly we don’t get lost…also had several specials from the blue lassi shop and some night time walks down to the ghats….plus a clever young colour seller, and amazing but simple sight in the washing of the steps and a man laying himself in front of us in some kind of worship and not letting us past until we hop over him.
Calcutta becomes one of our favourite cities with the freedom we have in the night time and the easy access around the different points in the city…an awesome adventure in the heat,…to an old surreal English graveyard….a freaky trip to a posh shopping complex…..the amazing colour festival that is Holi day, gin prevails and then some…. cheap wine and whiskey at dawn…..all these amazing tales will come out eventually I promise.
Then we, I especially, freak out about leaving India, but get on our plane excitedly and arrive in the humidity of Bangkok and its high rise buildings, modern cars, lack of human rickshaws,cows and smooth rides on smooth roads in vehicles with smooth wheels.
THE NOW
Heres where I slow down and bring you right up to date for we only left bangkok 3 nights ago.
In the taxi from the airport I couldn’t take it in, where were the retro cars decrepit advertisements and litter masses? What were these..motorways/highways? High rise buildings and gigantic ad campaigns. Getting out of the taxi was another shock. FLESH and lots of it. Thai women in there denim shorts on mopeds with toned tanned legs and high heels, tourists in their floaty dresses all white and pasty but showing shoulders and cleavage none the less!
we hobbled in awe down the busy Kho San road in search of a room that would accommodate us…..we took the first one at 300bt a night still shocked by the heat and the activity of the main street. We noticed later that despite the clean simple room and the clean large shared bathrooms, the walls wore nothing but planks of flimsy wood and ours with a number scribbled on paper taped to the door was probably and additional late add on….most likely over the kitchen as we could of invited people back to use it as a sauna.
The busy and surrounding roads (Kho San obviously been the most OTT) where lined with street vendors serving everything from the traditional padtahi for 60p a plate to whole squid, fish broths and fried grasshoppers a stoners paradise. And soon we were to meet some people who prided themselves in trying every sort of weird snack available, I’m all for trying weird things, I ate the fried grass hoppers, live shrimp; which jumped about in the box and your your mouth, and the dried frogs…but I drew the line at a microwaved chicken burger from the abundant 7/11 newsagents (which unlike their name suggests are open 24hrs)
Apart from the mass of flavours and smells which included mango sticky rice and fresh fruits mingled late at night with the alcohol from the bucket bars….there were clothes or all varieties which could reveal any part of you you chose, dresses so mini they should be illegal…but hey I’m the prude that just come from India…..many a slogan t-shirts that were offensive to every gender, male female and lady boy….
Oh the Ladyboys. The bars were fronted by tiny beautiful Thai women in heels and sexy dresses promoting certain beers, all the Thai girls are soo beautiful its a wonder men bother anywhere else in the world. The lady boys may put them off, in Bangkok particularly the quality of get up is so that even sober women have difficultly spotting them (Kate). You’ve got to know what to look for…it wasn’t long till we met more than one guy that had got themselves tangled up with a Ladyboy at some stage during a night on buckets.
Learning more about this new gender it seems boys get sex changes very young, parents are proud of their lady boy sons and they are very accepted even which their own separate toilets at schools in the city so were told….we discussed at length why the gender change only seemed to go one way from male to female….then realised back in Manchester its very similar your much more likely to see a male transvestite as its accepted that women can dress like men anyway.
So bangkok was 6days with evenings spent drinking buckets of cocktails (long island iced tea and Sangsom that infamous Thai whiskey mixed with red bull were among our favourites) and dancing at a nearby, fun and not so seedy club on the main road. Frequented by Thai men, women and ladyboys as well as the handful of Westerners. This activity was very much necessary for us, me especially having not danced to anything but a street mela since leaving home and the only club id visited was an empty one in Kathmandu…..
So the nights were spent laughing, talking, drinking, bucketing and dancing having an awesome time with the people we’d met and the days that followed involved a late rise and hangover breakfast (more then once without realising it at a British cafe called ‘Oh My Cod’..Oh the shame) then consisted of one trip or another out into the city itself, you can see a lot of people getting stuck on the Kho San road….it has everything you need to a point. The roads behind are lined with more relaxed cool/retro/ chic restaurants cafes, tea shops and massage parlours (actually massage parlours)
its a nice area in that sense…except for the expense of course…
Coming from India we were horrified at the prospect of such prices when in realty the city was cheap compared to back home, we ended up deciding to more then double our budget in order to live cheaply but not have to worry about buying that next bucket, we were hear to have fun after all.. we met some very generous people who taught us to ‘splash out’ but I don’t think they’d be proud of our attempts however extravagant they seemed to us.
One day we went to the crazy weekend market, so big theirs a bus around it. There was more of our sort of 2nd hand old style clothes here as apposed to the sexy floral things on Kho San road….we like to dress up…but the Kho San sometimes calls for something extra when everyone is in their tiny little skirts and barely there dresses. Also here we food the live shrimp and dried frogs and live dogs….these weren’t for eating though, very ‘cute’ and preened (fluffy to the point of shag pile rugs and dandelions)…not my sort of thing at all and I couldn’t help being intrigued by how the bredding process and the possible or inevitable defects.
Sitting down and having a beer at the bars and people watching is very entertaining and the best way to get to know the goings on of a place, hip young Thai teens shopping for retro gear, Chinese and japanese tourists out for bargains and to soak up the delights, Westerners exploring or appearing to know their way around from frequent visits. There’s so many people here of every variety that you could never complain of craving one sort of company or another as I did in India at times.
Thailand is colourful, but in a very different way to India….its less about the bright solid or floral masses and more about western styles like fuchsia pink scooters driven by girls in heels, or enormous computer advertisements clearly in expensive prime space and well looked after, unlike the peeling Hindi posters…. I suppose it is wrong to even bate the countries against one another, especially in cities, they are there own, though at the moment simple description doesn’t seem enough to justify the shock we were in and the many western luxuries we are still getting used to. And its not.
The subway wasn’t so much of a shock having experience trams better then home in india and the sky train likewise as all I could see were high rise buildings with nothing beautiful or messy about them. The malls were huge but then again we have the Trafford Centre back home although every huge shop here was Burberry or Hermes, purely designer, none of even your upper high street. The food section wasn’t quite on the same scale as anything I had ever seen, as it seemed to stretch for miles in each direction, while out side in the main square was a car promotion show which involved a young children’s talent contest……A boy in aviators and leather pulling stud moves and a young girl who in no way at all cute, wiggled her no existent hips in a short skirt while talking on a mobile phone,,,…..
We were taken one day for Chang beer or its more expensive equivalent in what was once claimed as the tallest tower in Asia…(its been since beaten obviously and their probably building another to beat its successor as we speak) ….We looked out on the city from a magnificent height (this was the day we discovered my laptop and camera stolen…an activity to distract me from my outrage) we spotted all the retro shaped private swimming pools and helicopter landing pads on the posh hotels while studded in between where the run down and not so posh apartment flats? I don’t really know what to call them, they were only a tad more decrepit then everything else and with bangkok being a very young city everything was round about in the same style…very strange when you thing of Britain having architecture from Victorian times to the 60s to now..the city almost looked model like and futuristic with its winding raised high ways that weaved inbtween the buildings like vipers
while other traffic struggled on the ground roads below. The one beer appropriately turned into a tower of chang which we digested slowly.
The view really became itself though for me when darkness fell. On the roads a strip of yellow headlights continuing for miles in traffic and jams ,with read breaks lights luminous on the backs of cars headin in the opposite direction. Advertisements lit up, smiled and shone in thia part of the city with nothing atall so garish (though still Thai) as the tacky but fun Kho San road (it was more akin to India with its mish-mash of vendors and stalls and occasional tinsel)
We were dying after a week on no more then 8hrs of rest/sleep ( we hadn’t slept well in Calcutta a week early either) so when our friends had left us head- fucked insisting we must go to Laos (many people had done this, though not quite so well) we got sorted to head to Chaing Mai which thankfully though not as I expected…. it was a great place to sober up- well to some extent…and chill out, re-fuel, and supply our selves with necessary items and procedures that would secure our sanity now that our plans had changed yet again. From Chaing Mai we would head to Laos,….and do Cambodia after the full moon party on the souther islands later in the month (this meant back tracking across a country…not something we had done or had planned…but Thailand is small and narrow…so we can, and why not?
After the business of bangkok we were shocked at the restful atmosphere of Chaing Mai. We’d had a far to comfortable train ride in sleeper class, with sheets, blankets and even pillows….inevitably with having so little sleep and being hit with ridiculous comfort we failed to fall into any sort of deep slumber. A nice clean journey all the same though,.
We looked up a random guest house in my faithful but old L.P. Julies we would found out was thee place to stay , there were queues every morning with people looking for the cheap funky rooms surrounded by good travel services helpful advice and chilled places to hang out. It was so colourful though all most overwhelming with the activities that were on offer.
We hired a moped, and just as riding a bike, I hadn’t forgot after four months and was grateful for the freedom, I got the feeling that if you didn’t drive in Chaing Mai you could get very trapped. We escaped one day up to Doi Sutep, which took about an hour on the bike, once again with Kate as my backseat driver making appropriate warning ‘wooaaah!‘ every now and them. The roads were unfortunately stricter then India and it frustrated me that I couldn’t go which ever way I like down a one way street or do a u-turn in the moving traffic…which by the way are a ploy to get you to spend more on petrol as driving round and missing turnings adds up eventually.
The windey up road hill to the temple of Doi Sutep reminded me of playing racing video games and was much fun in the heat of the day to feel the cool breeze speeding past us and being hit by the occasiaonal angry fly buzzing in the opposite direction.
It was fortunate that just as we got 200m from the top of the hill where the temple stood that our tyre decided to give in….the reason for its demise we found after a handy thai man had wheeled it to his work shop was that the inner tube had now split right down the seam….it was an impressive reason for a flat tyre and I was surprised we had made it thus far before I felt the wobble and decided it was time to pull over. Efficiently as most if not all Thais are the tyre was fixed and inner tube replaced for 1.50 sterling and we got a free lesson on changing an inner tube before we sat down to noodle soup and pad thai.
The temple itself was an impressive if not slightly enforced mass of gold and red, beautiful though I enjoyed the contrast of the screened construction work going on about the temple while the Buddhists held flowers between their hands and walked around the wat. After being beautifully blinded with the clean clean gold we were eager to return down the steep hill…well I was with the snaking roads and the sun beginning to set.
We breezed through the dappled light soaring round the curves (albeit not as well as the locals) our faith restored in our previously collapsed tyre drinking in the yellowy orange light and looking forward to some wine coolers back at Julies.
Our plans had changed so vary much in the last week it was weird just booking tickets to laos which like Nepal had never been on the original plan…its so exciting that we can just plod off to Vietnam or Cambodia with the only hindrance being a shorter amount of time and money else where…but then more places; more new things more beauty more fun are all available.
The last day in Chaing Mai involved more a mission to get me re acquainted with the technology that was stolen from me…cue a nice red camera with which I can take a photo of my own choice any time anywhere (you so miss that luxury) and surprisingly a laptop- a tad more expensive then I would of liked but hey its worth it to be able to type whenever I want for example 2am when I cant sleep. If I limited myself to Internet cafes I’d never record the things I want to remember ( visual and description is a must with a memory like mine)
Tags: 1, Bangkok
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