Thailand Day 1 – Gritty city

I only know how to say three things in Thai – hello, thankyou and excuse me, and today I think I’ve used each about a billion times (making up for all the other things I can’t say, I guess). In this tourist-laden city, it seems like enough though – lots of people speak English (un-glick) well enough to help us clueless foreigners. The odd attempt at Thai seems to be more-or-less appreciated though.

Bangkok truly is another world – it’s a crazy contrast between decrepit, filthy, shambling houses and apartment blocks, and glittering sky-scrapers, immaculate train stations.

A few frantic hours of final preparation in Australia, a tram & bus ride and half an hour in the Thai Airways queue at the airport, and we were all set to go. The plane ride was long but relatively comfortable – we slept a little, in between contortionist routines and my first few goes at ‘khop-khun-khrup’ (thankyou) with the attendants.

We arrived in Bangkok (wow, foreign soil!) around 6am, and eventually located the ‘Gecko’s’ sign that was our rally point. After a couple of failed attempts to identify our contact, we stumbled across a harried-looking guy on the phone who made a few vague hand-gestures at us – we can only assume he was the right guy, as we ended up in an unmarked sedan that, as luck would have it, took us to our hotel.

The industrial eastern suburbs of the city were our first glimpse at Bangkok, as an enormous red sun rose behind us. We passed utes with what looked like twenty people packed into the back, several just holding on, swarms of multi-coloured taxis, and several-people-deep motorcycles, interspersed with modern sedans and four-wheel-drives. The scenery was mostly soot-blackened and crumbling buildings, with sci-fi-esque sky scrapers in the background. All this with lush-looking tropical foliage poking through.

We arrived at our hotel, the ‘First Hotel’ in Pratunam, a particularly dense and gritty suburb, with stalls lining the main road selling anything one can think of, and probably many things one can’t (or, being vegetarian, would prefer not to), all deep-fried in woks of churning oil. This place smells funky. Election posters also lined the road, although that was all we witnessed of the election.
Our hotel room wasn’t ready for several hours, so we dumped our stuff at the lobby and headed east along the main road to visit a local market. We were stopped by an enthusiastic but kinda creepy looking tuk-tuk (three-wheeled motorcycle taxi thing, a slightly more modern version of the rickshaw, with an appropriately onomatopoeic name) driver who gallantly offered to take us on an hour-long tour for 30 Baht (about $1.20 AUD); we politely turned him down – Katherine recognised the ploy from our Lonely Planet book, where tourists are taken to dodgy shopping spots where the driver gets a commission. Tricksy.

We continued east, until a helpful passer-by, noting our confusion, pointed us back the way we came, in the direction of the ‘real’ east (or as I like to call it, conformist east…); now, heading in the right direction, we quickly found the Pratunam market, a labyrinthine sprawl of little clothes shops in a building echoing with cheesy Christmas music (what the? Isn’t Thailand 90-something percent Buddhist?). Clothes were selling at around 150-300 Baht (that’s about $6-12 AUD). Katherine bought a pair of pants, at 700 Baht, as it turned out (~$30); while the shopkeepers, teenage girls, giggled at us being ‘friends’.

We returned to the hotel for a trip to the ‘happy room’ (Mmm, giant cockroaches) and to plan our next move. We took the sky rail from the stop near the hotel to Mo-Chit station, to visit the huge Chatuchak market (Victoria market in Melbourne very much put to shame). We had Pad Thai for lunch after utterly failing to locate a restaurant mentioned in the Lonely Planet book, then wandered through the bustling market, which was truly enormous, and the temperature sweltering. I had some success getting some fisherman’s pants for the trek.
We admitted defeat after a few hours and found ourselves a tuk-tuk to take us to the hotel – great fun really, as the driver lurched wildly around corners and the wind fanned us.

Hotel room for a few hours sleep, then a false start as we attempted to join our tour group meeting an hour early (Somebody set my clock wrong), a blissful shower, then the group meeting for real – six of us, a nice small number. Early start for tomorrow.

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