Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten that extra gummy when I awoke at 3am and was unable to settle. The plan was for it to knock me back out. But after consumption thereby followed 3hrs of rustling packets, crunching and munching snacks which luckily did not seem to disturb Em too much. Sleepiness eventually returned to me about 6 am just as the sounds of the reawakening concrete jungle danced in through the windows. I blinked and when I opened my eyes it was 11am. I gently woke Em and we set about getting ready for a day on the streets of Bangkok. I’d forgotten about the heat until I stepped outside the glazed doors of the hotel, then boom my whole body was instantly assaulted by the unnatural (for me) heat. We climbed the steps to the skywalk and wandered into a coffee shop where Em enjoyed an oat flat white and I had an iced watermelon tea, we watched the crowds sweep past us on their way to their daily business.
We were soon aquireing tickets from a wall mounted machine to ride the sky train to the river. I’ve only used the UK underground once and that was about 20 years ago so public transport is not familiar to me. It all seemed straight forward but then I did have an Emma with me
Everything was so efficient and as we stepped on to the train and the doors silently closed it had a very sci Fi feel and brought a grin to my face as I remembered a distant episode of the Simpsons where a ‘monorail’ was built in town. Holding a post for balance we quietly accelerated and I contemplated the life of a sardine (tinned). 4 stops and change line. Where were all those people going? And where have they come from? It’s difficult to process the awe and wonder of the daily details of so many beings. Our new train was just as smooth and as the doors closed a blind man was assisted onboard. In the split second it took me to contemplate doing all this blind…..a passenger had got up and guided the blind man to his seat. Small things like this are lovely to see and spark an internal smile which I would dearly love to see more of. Witnessing people being nice to each other is so nourishing. 6 stops and off, surrounded by skyscrapers I could see the huge river snaking through the concrete. As we walked nearer we looked over the walkway ledge and in the brown water was a flotilla of green foliage washed down from upstream. There in the middle of the lush green was what I first assumed was an old giant cuddly toy but turned out to be a huge dead lizard (the length of a large dog but the height of a small rabbit). We were soon invited onto a Thai longboat trip (1.5hrs for 700 baht) and Emma must have thought she was on a role with me today and obviously decided to strike while the iron was hot and before I knew it I was stepping onboard, over the small void between boat and dock…..despite being no wider than my hand still had me fearing for losing my footing and slipping down into the wet brown gloom below as a half decomposed dog sized lizard looked at me with dead eyes.
Once onboard, the engine roared into action and we were off. As the chop hit the hull we were showered with city river water. Luckily we both had our mouths shut (no surprise for me but a little unusual for Em). Ems years of lifeguarding kicked into action and she realised everyone (except us) had life jackets on but it was too late, we had now committed ourselves to a 90 minute lifejacket free aquatic dice with death, about to be made more intense as we bounced over the wake of a large ferry. Lucky for me I could rest in the knowledge that I was well prepared for an emergency and had a badge to prove it (albeit a badge that was 42 years old)……..a badge that declared I could swim 20 metres in my pyjamas, the standard distance required to survive any water related emergency. The sight of the river edged with skyscrapers sandwiching small wooden humble homes was quite a contrast indeed. We soon turned off the main channel into a residential water world. Canals leading off in different directions with their own street signs. We Spotted a few egrets (both little and Great White) and my first ever Night Heron. They have always been at the top of my Heron ‘must see’ list and are unsurprisingly named after their habit of being active at night. We also clocked quite a few of those lizards (the ones the height of a small rabbit) and live ones at that. The houses seemed to float along the banks and I wondered what would Ratty and Moley from Wind in the Willows would think of this type of river life and how much ‘messing about on a river’ went on here. For so much infrastructure things appeared very quiet.
We passed many beautiful temples whose brightly painted red white and gold shone like stars of spirituality through the jumbled city. My first giant gold Buddha was mightily impressive despite having his back to us. We soon rejoined the main river through a busy lock…..where the boat became the sardine and we became a sardine scale. Back on the main channel there were boats of tourists flying everywhere and we crossed the channel cutting through the other floaters. Our captain expertly docked us at Chinatown and we debarked to continue the exploration.
I’m not sure how long we were in the small claustrophobic alleyways crammed with desirable (and undesirable) junk but it felt like an eternity. We eventually broke out into the open and I must say it felt good to see the sky again. Wandering round the warrens of alleys continued most of the day…..it was a lovely feeling to be in such a maze and I really enjoyed the sense of being so small. It felt we were not just seeing it we were being it. At one point we stumbled upon a cookware shop and I got caught up looking at the lovely steel woks that you see used everywhere but managed to talk myself out of buying one and carrying it around with me for the next 20 days.
There were some personal highlights. First up was my first street vendor experience, a vegetable spring roll served in a plastic cup and drizzled with sweet chili sauce. I was pretty hungry and maybe this led me to declare this is the best spring roll EVER! Absolutely delicious. Buoyed by this success I went to the adjacent stall and the old Thai lady was happy to take my 60 baht in exchange for some deep fried sweet potato balls…..served in a plastic tub…..with sweet chili sauce…..and these were great but not good enough to topple the mighty spring roll. I wondered what her life story was as we continued our meander through the maze before stopping for a drink (iced latte for Em, violet lemon tea tea for me). We had some fresh pineapple from a street cart and Emma declared we were going for another massage.
She found a Thai spa nearby and we were soon slipping off our shoes and sipping warm fresh fruit tea. The tea tray also had a small white tablet and ramekin of water. Unsure I asked Em what the white tablet was and she confidently told me it was a mint. Her ‘mint’ almost made it into her mouth before the lightening fast receptionist grabbed her arm and informed us it was actually a face towel to go ON your face not IN your face! (you put it in water to expand and open it up). The staff had a good laugh at us and we were then treated with a 90 minute relaxing oil massage which Emma enjoyed very much but not, it seems as much as she enjoyed seeing me in some poorly fitted string massage pants, she was laughing about that all day.
Time flew and I may have fallen asleep as when I was gently tapped back into the room I was surprised to see it was gone 6pm. As we drifted back outside into the cloying darkness we headed back into the alleys and lanes and onto the neon bustle of Chinatown. This was really good fun, at one point I saw a rat bounce out of a busy kitchen into a dank alleyway and I naturally bounced after it to see where it was going. My blanket called me back laughing and saying that she doesn’t know anyone else who would do that!
The food looked amazing but there wasn’t anything that made me regret my abstinence from meat and fish. There still seemed to be plenty on offer. However, if I were a meat eater there was one thing that would be top of my lunch list and that would be the bronzed crispy duck hanging whole, on parade, in countless glass cabinets. This was due to its image more so than any imagined taste. It looked just like a classic image buried deep in my brain, filed under ‘chinatown’ way back in the 1980s.
We then headed to a vegan eatery named So Vegan (although it was all vegan it didn’t stop one customer complaining she had fish in her curry and having to be reassured by the waiter that the meal was So Vegan).
We shared a pad Thai which was good (but not great, according to Emma), mushroom Tom yum (Em requested not spicy) which was deliciously flavourful and somewhere at my top limit of spice processing capabilities. We also had a leaf wrap salad, with bright green spinach like leaves, a date or maybe fig jam, crispy tofu, peanuts, chili, ginger, lime and toasted coconut which were right little flavour bombs. All very delicious and activating some dormant taste buds at the back of my mouth. After food we went out into the dark and we committed to experiencing another tourist classic and fronted up to our first tuk tuk price bartering battle. Feeling confident (fed by my near perfect bow to our waiter earlier) I opened with ‘How much’ with my finger pointed at our hotel address lit up on Emma’s phone. Despite witnessing the extreme look of coldness in my eyes, or maybe because of it, Mr Tuk Tuk came straight in with a level 8 bartering move demanding a firm 450 baht. I immediately agreed and thereby lost my first (and possibly last) Tuk Tuk price battle. We jumped on and noisily thupt thupted off into the night. At great speed, with no seat belts and no helmets, which was wild. Like the feeling you got when as a child you would ride your bike just a little bit too fast, the speed at which you knew if something bad would happen, it would be very bad indeed. It was absolutely amazing and I felt as free as a bird. We were then dropped at the hotel and went to a nearby roof top bar (30 floors up!) and enjoyed a drink whilst watching the city lights which included a gym directly opposite us with a swimming pool (30 floors up!) We walked back to our hotel whilst munching on seaweed snacks, it was the end of a perfect day that I never would have imagined. We were now tired and our crisp hotel sheets awaited us just the other side of a 6 lane crazy road junction reminiscent of the 1980’s zx spectrum game ‘frogger’. I’d forgotten how exciting the simple act of crossing a road could be, and this was some road! arms raised in celebration we made it across……alive! Tomorrow we leave Bangkok behind and head South.
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