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Bangkok, Thailand
13° 45' N 100° 31' E
Jan 06, 2003 01:22
Distance 67km

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Bangkok - just another big city

Text written in: English

Bangkok is an amazingly big place with many highlights and low lights. Like all cities, it features the homeless, but pleasingly they are not beggars, rather just get on with what it is they do – Sweat FA!

The most significant lowlight is the pollution. Nothing short of choking, my eyes are sore and irritated and there is little breathable air. The other discomfort is from all the 2-stroke exhaust. The oil in the atmosphere forms a thin film over your skin making it hard to perspire or feel clean.

I caught the train into the central northern line train station which was quite easy. The goal was to head into the main backpacking part of town, Banglamphu, and stay the night. This proved to fail after I walked down the wrong street at the very beginning, and ended up in the classy tourist part of town, Thanon Silom.

Found a hotel that cost a bomb and was pretty average in terms of quality. Still, it had an air conditioner that worked, so that's something. After meeting Beth who flew in from Sydney, we made our way down to Banglamphu the next day and found a really neat place that was half as much as the shitty hotel in Silom.

Banglamphu is simply brilliant! Tidy, cheap, clean and sociable. Full of backpackers who are more often than not broke. Frequently you would see signs up that say 'We buy everything and anything'. Then you would see lines of people selling anything they possibly could.

Today's goal is to find a goldsmith and buy a digital camera. Well, we managed to fail, but had food fun trying. Visited the palace, though could not enter due to lack of long sleeved shirts and pants. In 35 degrees of humidity, I don't think so. Next, was the market and boat into Chinatown. The hardest bit is getting the confidence to have faith in the system, as well as deal with people trying to sell you a private boat at a massively inflated price. Of course they explained that no public ferries stop at this station, despite the fact we are standing right under the ferry sign!

Chinatown is incredibly busy. Can't help but to think the maps let us down. Well, the street names were correct, but significant landmarks were all over the place, which the map failed to place accurately. Unfortunately, whether the maps were right or wrong, being the map carrier, I was the one who got all the grief for not being able to put a pin point location on the map. What's, wrong with that I claimed? I mean, we can put our location down to a single grid block, how much precision do you possibly need?

To me Chinatown is no different to any other part of Bangkok, its busy and covered in shops. So, I don't know really, one may say they are grooved tin sheds for the homeless, but I am not convinced. The people are happy and its warm. You need an open floor plan for ventilation and a roof to stop the rain. Since they have all that, who needs air con?

Its funny, poverty is all relative to what you see. If you come straight out of a western city having not experienced any of this, you would agree. But if you have been elsewhere you would say its very clean and not so bad after all. But at the end of the day, a city is a city and it doesn't matter much where you go, they are all much of a much ness.