A taste of Thailand (II)

Thailand is hot, wet and spicy, and it's not just the weather and the food. Sexual tourism is huge in Thailand, and Bangkok is very justly famous for that. Heaps of old, fat and predominantly failed white men with heavy pockets snake their way to the City of Angels*, with the smell of cheap easy juicy exotic sex dragging them by their noses. And they find what they come looking for, judging by the couples I see on the street.

Massage parlours are pretty much everywhere: Thai massage, oil massage, and maybe something else, which goes unwritten but understood. At first I though it was easy to differentiate the places that offered just-massage from massage-with-happy-ending, but I've heard first-person accounts of the contrary. Even in just-massage places, where girls are not lined outside in revealing outfits and call you out, chances are sex is still an optional extra. Quoting Matt, prostitution in Asia has a full range of shades of gray.

The practical totality of the Thais I've met were disarmingly nice and polite, all smiles and bows. Smile, nod, prayer, bow, in the traditional Thai way. You might find the very occasional asshole, but it's the exception to the rule. But the one rule without exception, the one thing no Thai will ever fail to do, whatever the circumstances, is trying to rip you off. With a big smile and a nod, of course. Every single one I've had any commercial exchange with has tried to rip me off, even when I had already booked for a fixed price, even when the price was clearly tagged. The street vendors, the taxi drivers, at the hotel, the tour operators, practically everyone. Even the immigration official at the Airport wanted a 100 Baht "tip" because I didn't fill out my departure card and he did it for me. You are in their eyes, as I say, an ATM on legs.

It goes much farther than this. In Thailand, most prices are "flexible", that is, they're a rip-off and you're not expected to be so stupid as to accept them, so every purchase implies some haggling. In my personal experience, it's easy and fast to get a third off any quoted price, even if it's clearly tagged in big bold numbers. This still leaves the seller quite happy, so my guess is that real prices should be less than half the first one they give you. The only exceptions I know of are public buses and "serious" shops, supermarkets and 7-elevens. You're not expected to bargain for food either, but I can testify it's feasible and easy. At first it's heaps of fun, trying to outsmart the locals (which you very seldom achieve, believe me) and getting a real bargain, but, as Makura already reported, you do get fed up eventually, and at some point wish for fixed and reasonable prices.

And this brings me to the shops. The green-and-orange seven of 7-eleven is even more ubiquitous here than the Coca-Cola billboards. Every corner and intersection has at least one 7-eleven, open 24h, providing emergency food, soft drinks and beers at convenient convenience prices. I am absolutely thrilled by this. Here is a place where you can live and be active 24 hours a day! Wooo-hooo! There are even night markets, with some stalls open 24h (the owners take turns to sleep right there).

I absolutely adore the markets. They're so full of exotic colours and smells, of life, activity and excitement. They're so authentic and defining, so big and busy, and of course so cheap. I can spend as many dehydrating hours browsing through the stalls as the owners will have them open. The ubiquitous legions of guys calling you out can get annoying at times, though.

[indian accent:] "Hello my frien, com see my shup", "How are you ser, nice to meet you" (while he´s in your way and his hand is fishing out for yours), and of course "Hey where you go?", "Where you from?", "Taxi, tuk-tuk, chip-chip! Twenty Baht!". I´ve tried several tactics but soon discovered that the best way to deal with it is to completely ignore them. At first I pretended I didn´t see or hear them, but at the end I really didn´t hear them anymore. I´ve filtered them out. Now they´re just background noise, a constant buzz you get when you walk certain streets.

I've already pointed this out before, but my reporting wouldn't be complete without making it explicit: Thailand is cheap as shit. A daily budget of 20-25€ (including all local expenses and all regional travel) makes you the king here: restaurants, hotels, taxis, flights, and quite a few whims fit in there. You can go much cheaper than that: on a budget and with time to spare, 10€ per day should do the trick.

I ended my sneak-peek at Thailand with a visit to Phuket and Phi Phi. I loved the fine beaches and the warm sea, the views and the atmosphere. I don´t usually favour lazying on the beach, but here I indulged and enjoyed it very much. These were very touristy areas (Phi Phi horribly so), full of chunks of white wobbly Western walking ATMs, so prices are enormous by Thai standards (still "flexible" though). Even so, they´re less than a third what you would expect on a beach on, say, the Spanish coast.

Phi Phi is where they filmed the beach from The Beach. Luckily Koh Phi Phi Leh (the South, smaller island) is a National Park, so it´s not rotten with hotels, resorts and shops like Koh Phi Phi Don (the North one) is. The bay was, though, at the time I visited, full of one-day-tour boats, and the beach was so crowded you couldn´t see the sand. Phuket, on the other hand, has much more to it than sights and beaches; the towns are vibrant and quite exciting by themselves. Architecture, culture, history, life and nightlife, all around. Not Bangkok, something different, but equally thrilling.

This is getting to an end, so I wish to declare myself before it´s too late:

I'm in sincere, heartfelt, desperate love with Asia. I want to see it all, spend more time here, and Thailand is first on the list. But now I have little choice but to go.

Hopefully an Eastward wind will bring me here again soon, with pockets full and time aplenty. See you soon, Siam.


* The shorthand name of Bangkok in Thai reads "Krungthep", meaning City of Angels.

A taste of Thailand (I)

In Bangkok there are no streets; there are only markets. The street is not a place you just pass through on your way to somewhere else, the street is where you live: where you buy and sell, where you eat and drink, where you meet people, where you spend your days munching the polluted air in the humid heat.

Bangkok is an amazing, mind-blowing mixture, shaken not stirred, of the old with the new, of traditional generic Asia and global modern Brandland. Rickshaws still squeak and asthmatic tuk-tuks still cough beside brand new shining luxury cars on multi-level motorways. At the base of huge glittering skyscrapers topped by logos of Gucci and Prada, old wrinkled women with conic straw hats keep hawking goods to and fro in the dreamy tropical mist. At the market, among the fog of vapours and the smell of meat sizzling over shining embers, throngs move through the stalls, pushing wheelbarrows, chatting, talking on last-gen mobile phones or struggling to chopstick into their mouths some red-hot spicy combination of meat and rice.

Mostly everywhere you go will be thronged, except for the very modern and horribly trendy malls for hardcore fashionistas, where all big international fashion brands flash big billboards. The throngs are, against all expectation, quite ok. It's easy (though slow) to move with them and through them, and people are generally very mindful of letting you through, not bumping into you and not stepping on your foot. They also seem to purposefully make more space for me, as I am, by their standards, big and bulky. Now that's a good joke. I've been a dwarf all my life, but now I'm in the land of the gnomes.

Amazed as I was at the beginning at the way circulation is carried out here (amazed that it worked at all and accidents were not happening constantly), now I find it thrilling and very inspiring. All this time I've spent in places where they not only drive on the wrong side of the road but also walk on it, I've been having those embarassing face-to-face encounters. You know, when you pass someone on the sidewalk and you lean right and he leans to his left, so you both stop face-to-face with a screech and do a silly dance for a while. That hasn't happened to me in Thailand once. People don't walk on the left or on the right, they just walk and avoid each other without bothering to stop to think about it. I think it's something to do with Personal Distance: that thing we have and they don't. We're used to avoid invading someone else's PD and to enforce our own, except when we're in a crowded public transport and we feel uncomfortable about it. Brushing against each other doesn't seem to bother anyone here. With so little space and so many people in it, I guess optimization is essential.

They do the same while driving. Throngs of motorcycles pack the street using all available space. Overtakings are usually carried out within 10cm of an accident. Though you're supposed to drive on the left, it's quite common to have motorcycles driving on the right, avoiding the cars that come head first, if that suits their destination better or their lane is full. All other traffic rules are flexible as well. Traffic lights are only green and red. Green light means "go on, avoiding the guys who jump their red light", and red means yellow. U-turns are feasible anywhere, anytime, whenever suits you better or makes you happier. The other vehicles will just avoid you or very patiently stop and wait. Pedestrian crossings are few and just for show. In practice, when you want to cross the road, you just do, blending in very naturally with the incoming traffic (and inwardly hoping Ganesh liked your last floral offer).

You can't walk 50m without seeing a very decorated shrine to one god or another. You'll find a god in every golden cloister, as the song would have it. A god with spillover in the arms department, if I'm any judge. Buddhism here is huge. There are big wats* all over and orange-clad monks are a common sight on the streets.

But even bigger than Buddhism is The King. I already knew this from my stopover here three months ago, but it keeps surprising me. It's just too much. I've seen his face so much already that I feel I know him personally.

Most often it's just a giant billboard of the king saluting and wearing the trademark Thai impassive face, and the queen smiling a lot and being very nice about something. But sometimes you find pearls like: the King impassively examining construction plans (tovarisch King and the working class), the King impassively playing the saxophone (!!!) or (my favourite) the King impassively trying to figure out how the hell a digital SLR camera works. Keep in mind that these are all huge billboards, sometimes covering whole buildings 30 stories high. The photos are always professional and somehow artistic, apparently trying to emphasize the impassivity of his face, the size of his glasses, or how high he can raise his hand while (impassively) saluting. Long live the Impassive King!
The funniest thing is that people seem to genuinely worship the guy. Even if you could avoid the street propaganda, the guy's face is still on clocks, calendars, and of course, on every respectable desk. Tic-tic, ils sont fous, ces thailandais.


* wat = Buddhist monastery

Thailand Hopping

Flight from Singapore to Bangkok: 19 €
Taxi from the Airport (rip-off!): 2.20 €
Two-room flat with private bathroom: 5.55 €
One meal: 0.60 €
One beer at convenience store: 0.55 €

Spending One Night in Bangkok: priceless

One hour in Bangkok and no mollusc in sight

Very brief stopover in Bangkok. The landing was smooth, but the sudden difference in pressure between 11277m and ground level put my aural equipment in agony.

Just as you arrive, a big bold slogan greets you:

I thought: gosh, they’re really into Elvis in Thailand. It later turned out they meant this other guy:

King Whatever-his-insufferably-long-unprounounceable-name, the third.

The airport is surprisingly sparkling clean, technologically top-notch, and glittery enough. However, the good impression quickly vanishes when you bang your head on Thai stupidity. My point: transit passengers are required to pass through the same security controls as all other passengers.

This means, in practical terms, that you have to:

1. Leave your plane. You can’t just stay on board

2. Walk some 300-400 meters to the first available stairs

3. Go to the 2nd floor

4. Wait in line for 10 min

5. Pass again the same idiotic, insulting, no-liquids, drop-your-pants security control

6. Walk 300-400m back to your boarding gate

7. Pass another no-liquids control

8. Go through another passport/ticket control

9. And another

10. Board the same plane, with the same boarding card, sit in the same seat

11. Do it all in 30 minutes

I saw a guy who by step 7 had to leave behind a 300ml bottle of perfume he had bought duty-free at Heathrow. I say this scores pretty high on the stupid-o-meter, even by Asian standards.

I'll come back here. But now for the second leg of my journey: a bit over 8 hours to Sydney.