Bangkok Recap

Leaving Siem Reap to enter Thailand was a big decision for me last week. I actually bumped into an old acquaintance from Laos on the day I had to make my decision - she, Melina, checked into a room only a few doors down from mine - so I had a good, long chat with her about it. She had headed from Laos into Vietnam and travelled south - overland - into Cambodia, as she hadn’t been able to find cheap tickets to fly out of northern Vietnam. This sealed the deal for me: I’d head into Thailand as planned, sticking to my original itinerary of hitting the beaches before flying to Sydney, via Hong Kong.

After a heavy night of drinking hitting the streets with Melina, I didn’t really feel up to traveling to Bangkok on the day I had planned, to say the very least. Crawling out of bed at 5AM to explain to the woman on guesthouse duty that I wasn’t ‘feeling too well’, I managed to defer my trip by a day. Hooray! The result was a day spent lounging in my favourite free-wifi cafe spot, munching on cakes, splurging on coffee and browsing the web. Lazy.

My first surprise about Bangkok was getting there. The road between Siem Reap and Cambodia’s boarder was hideous. I thought I’d seen the worst whilst in India: not so. This ‘road’ set new standards: huge craters in the road were commonplace, pockmarks and holes the norm, tarmac let alone gravel wishful thinking. I made the stupid mistake of taking a back seat in the banged up van that was our transport - positioned over the rear axle - which made the bumps even more pronounced, sending my head jumping to the ceiling on many an occasion. The second surprise was how busy Bangkok was. My last visit there - just a couple of weeks before Christmas - hadn’t even been this busy. It took me and a couple of friends I’d made on the journey over (Cassie, an Australian, and a really top German guy whose name escapes me) almost three hours to find a place. In the end we settled on a very basic place off of Soi Rambuttri. A good location but the room I shared - with its paperboard walls and thin mattresses - smelled of wee.

Rather than fuss about finding somewhere else to stay - which would have meant joining the hordes of backpackers trudging anxiously from one guesthouse to the next, at kicking out time (between 11AM and 12PM) - the following day I moved to a new single room in the same guesthouse. This came with a large double bed, very quiet neighbours and didn’t smell so bad at all.

I spent several days in Bangkok doing very little at all, other than finding out the differences between it and Cambodia: much cleaner and more modern, along with a far greater quality and selection of food, but also pricier and far more exploitative (wifi does not really make much of an appearance in Bangkok, and when it does - say in a Starbuck’s Cafe - they want paying for it; members of bar staff can prove very rude - nigh on hostile - if you use their toilet facilities without buying a drink). On the Saturday, I hit Khao San Road (Bangkok’s notorious tourist strip, consisting of all-night bars, food stalls, loud music, hulking great neon signs and dirty, cheap accommodation) with my new-found friends, then headed into town to experience ‘Pat Pong’ (a street famous for its ‘ping-pong’ shows and ‘go-go bars’). I won’t go into much detail here, but the former was as disgusting as it sounds and the latter proved a lot of fun (when myself and my German friend were invited on stage and we outperformed all the ‘professional’ dancers). All harmless fun :)