Bangkok, Thailand, Day 1

The first thing that strikes you as you're coming in to land in Bangkok is that there's a gold course in the middle of the airport. In most cities, the gap between two runways, is taken up by nicely manicured grass, maybe a tree of two or a few low set luminous signs. Not in Bangkok. They have a golf course running between the two runways. We landed on the runway furthest from the terminal and drove along a bit of tarmac that split the golf course in two. The golfers politely waited for our plane to pass, looked both ways, then just walked on over to the other side of the course. No big barricades, no flashing lights, just when they thought it was safe. I suppose the membership of the club excludes bad eggs and likely terrorists. Maybe that's something other countries should look at - controlling terrorists by polite club membership.


It took ages to get through customs and immigration. There was a very officious women who took her job way too seriously. There were also a lot of people from miscellaneous countries causing troubles, as usual, so I suppose she did her best. Bloody miscellaneous countries!

To avoid getting hassled too much, we got a private limousine to the hotel. Calling the car a limousine is a bit of a stretch, but at least we paid in advance, the driver was told where to go and we were on the move in a few minutes.

Our impression of the city was a bit odd. You always hear that Bangkok is a huge dirty, bustling, grid locked city full of cars just sitting around, not moving anywhere fast. We found the opposite. The roads were wide, new and sparsely populated. The trip into the city was easy, almost relaxing. Along the way, we saw a few scars from the Asian currency crisis of the 90's - half built office towers, unfinished roadways and quite a few derelict buildings. All part of the charm!

Rather than sit around for too long, once we were checked into the hotel, we headed straight out again. Despite the insistence by the front desk that a guided and expensive tour would be a good idea, we did our usual thing and headed out into the mean city. Our first stop was three doors down at a 7-11 shop. We wereto discover these places are dotted every 10 shops throughout the entire city. They're an icy cold air conditioned oasis amongst the general bustle of the city. They also sold tasty treats, weird flavours of fanta and miscellaneous meat products slowly rotating in a pool of oil. Tasty!



Equipped with supplies, we decided to be the uber tourist and head straight to the underground station and do it like the locals do! On the way, we had our first encounter with Songkran. This is the Thai New Year festival. It runs for about 3 days and involved all sorts of arcane rituals, ancestor veneration and mass visits to temples. We didn't really see any of that. The main thrust of the festival is to get wet. Really wet. I mean soaking wet, not a dry spot on your clothes wet. People wander around with buckets of water, hoses and water pistols. As it was the last day, we thought most of the fun would be over. Two bored guys came up to us and squirted us with their super soaker water pistols. We smiled in a friendly way back. Quaint natives! We then noticed that the water in the pistol had come from a dark green cess pool. The smell was very interesting. Thinking that would be the last we saw of the festival, we headed into the super modern MRT station and rode it to the end of the line.

At the other end, we were besieged with an army of tuk-tuk drivers who couldn't quite grasp that we wanted to go for a walk. A few of them stalked us for a while, before finally giving up after a few blocks. Every few minutes, another one would spot us and drive up and ask us to jump in. How efficient we thought! After the twentieth time, we started to speak naughty words! It was at this point, that I started speaking Chinese at people. Dunno why. My sub conscious must have just associated Asian people with the only Asian language I knew a bit of. Unsurprisingly, they just stared and carried on harassing us. Oh well.

The MRT has spat us out at the beginning of the Chinatown area. Our aim was the traverse the district and end up at the grand palace, which is the main tourist area on the other side. The whole area just oozes old world charm. You have your run down, unpainted shops, funny people selling odd food on the roadside, hundreds of Thai and Chinese temples and a good insight into people just going about their normal lives. That's the sort of thing you don't see in the tourist brochures and definitely don't see on guided tours. It rained a few times during the day, but there always seemed to be a convenient temple to pop into. After getting lost a few times, we finally managed to get to the main market area.

The market goes the length of Yaowarat Road. It sold your usual range of Asian products. At one end, you had the cheap Chinese clothes - bras, underpants, socks, hankies and everything else that can be cheaply pumped out. Then you had the novelty items - dangly things for your mobile phones, guys selling just cigarette lighters, cosmetics and anything else they can get a box full of. At the other extreme was the food. Most of it looked really tasty. There was a huge variety of fresh produce - fruit we recognised and a whole lot we didn't. There were people slicing up watermelons, jack fruits, tomato sellers and a host of dried products. No wonder Thai food is so tasty, all the ingredients are great.



After walking for hours, we had run into the water festival a few more times. Generally, it was fun natured kiddies giving us a little squirt from their water pistols, then running over. Very cute. The more hard core, older kids, however, took to the roads. On the back of utes and trucks, people had huge tubs of water. If they saw anyone walking down the street, a bucket out water would come out as they went past. They seemed particularly excited to see tourists. After getting splashed lightly a few times, we started to walk to the other side of the road when we saw the water trucks coming. We started to get a bit smart and hide behind street signs so we wouldn't get spotted. There were shouts of disappointment from the trucks if they saw that a tourist had slipped past without getting a bucket on them.

Eventually, we came to the end of the market, crossed over a canal and came to the end of the of China town. This is where the water festival really kicked off. From the safety of a pedestrian overpass, you could really appreciate just how wet and organised it was. In addition to the people on the backs of trucks, everyone had fixed positions on the street to wet anything that moved going past. Tuk-tuks were the worst hit. As they have no side windows, the driver and occupants are plum targets for the water. At one street, there was a large Sikh family who would ensure every tuk-tuk or truck going past got hit by at least 6 buckets of water. It was fun to watch, but I wasn't real keen to get involved. As we walked a bit further, we tried to get some photos of people in action. We had to be careful though. A few times, the locals worked out that we were watching and were just about to chase us with buckets of water if we didn't run away fast enough!

By this time, it was late in the afternoon and our tummies were asking for attention. With my Singaporean bosses voice echoing in my head - "whatever you do, don't eat the street food", and with the restaurants shut for the holiday, our first meal in Thailand wasn't a yummy red curry, or a fiery green curry or even some nice spring rolls, it was KFC. It was the only place open. We feasted on the local menu item of chicken rice. It smelt like a butt and had the texture of broken glass. Not tasty. Not nice. MSG heaven.

Walking, walking, walking, we headed ove another canal and into the old royal part of the city. The water festival was going off here. We stopped next to the royal palace to get our bearings and decide what to do next. We didn't want to see too much today, as we thought we'd soon run out of things to do. I suggested we just head home in a nice air conditioned taxi, rest a bit, then head out later. As we were discussing things, a local guy came up to us and started to have a chat. The usual, generic tourist things - where you from, where you live, how long you been here, is this your first time in Thailand. etc. etc. We were asked these questions so many times, we could have had a card drawn up to hand out to everyone we met!



The local guy, like all Thais, was actually really friendly and helpful. He warned us to go no closer to the royal palace, as the water festival was centred there. We would be in all sorts of troubles being tourists and only a little wet. Instead, he suggested visiting a few other places. One of them, the Marble temple, was only open once a year during Songkran, so we'd be stupid not to see it. He then organised a tuk-tuk for us, haggled a good price and we were off.

It wasn't long before I pointed out to Gav that I had suggested that we NOT get a tuk-tuk. People,would see us coming and throw huge amounts of water on us. The first time, we both had our cameras out and were happily clicking away. Water and cameras aren't a good mix, so I started bitching immediately. Conceding defeat,I put my camera away and hoped that would discourage the locals from splashing us. No way.

There was the usual drive by splashing. They had to be pretty accurate to get us as we sped past, so that wasn't too bad. We soon worked out, however, that the locals were wise to this and congregated at traffic lights. Getting someone in a tuk-tuk with a bucket of water, whilst stationary is a doddle. We were soon soaked to the skin. The craftier locals were throwing ICE water. There's nothing like a bucket of ice water dumped on your groin to get you going in the Bangkok heat! By this stage, I was convinced my camera was ruined from all the water and a stern scolding awaited Gavin once we got home.

As we got closer to the marble temple, the driver realised we were getting a bit grumpy and started warning people not to splash us. That didn't stop everyone though. At one intersection, we had a 2 year old and her baby brother stand a safe distance away and dose us with a steady stream of water for the entire time we were stationary. A polite laugh, a shake of the head and general mime for "please stop" had no impact. They were having fun! At the same time, a teenage girl on the bus on the other side, leaned out the windows and got us too. Bastards!

Eventually, Gav got jack of it. In a playful mood, he splashed his water bottle at some guys on the back of a truck. Yes, he was asking for it. Next thing I knew, three buckets of water were over my head, the guys jump off the truck and start smearing our faces with wet talcum powder - another feature of the festival. It is the hottest week of the year, so by this stage I'd mellowed out a bit and saw the funny side. I would simply just kill Gavin later!

Once we arrived at the temple and discovered by some freak of industrial design that my camera bag was actually 100% waterproof, I finally saw the funny side of things. Our cameras were safe, we were nice and cool, but we were dripping water.

The temple itself was nice, but we had to avoid standing in the one spot for too long for fear of leaving a puddle of water on the carpets.


The next stop was a little known shop that the friendly Thai guy had told us about. It was open to the public once a year, sold at really good prices and was an opportunity not to be missed. You guessed it, it was a massive scam. We walked in, had a look around, looked at each other and got the hell out. The tuk-tuk driver wads a bit pissed off. He was obviously expecting us to buy something, so he would get a commission for delivering us. No such luck. He started to drive off, but then stopped to tell us of lots of other very special, one time offer places he could take us. "No thanks", we said and told him to deliver us to our final destination, as planned. HE was not happy. Straight away, we noticed that instead of telling the water splashers not to splash us, he actually slowed down. Bastard! Eventually, we got to the end of the trip - the Victory monument - and he drove off looking very surly.

By that stage, we were tired, wet, covered in rapidly hardening talcum powder and were a bit over Bangkok. We caught the super efficient sky train home, had a yummy dinner in the hotel restaurant and crashed for the night.