Thailand Day 1

I've been in Bangkok less than two hours and I've already allowed myself to be ripped off by a taxi driver who tried to convince me to take up smoking while hacking phlegm every hundred metres along the highway. I must have seemed a soft target when I accepted his rather cloying handshake and he blinked approvingly through his smoke.

As we wandered across the four (mercifully) empty lanes on the way in from Suvarnabhumi airport, he revealed he had just woken up from 4 hours sleep in the back of his cab, which is apparently par for the course 5 days a week. Returning home only cost him money, he explained, mimicking money-grabbing wife and offspring at some length, before bemoaning how expensive Thailand has become for anyone who grew up here (in decreasingly subtle refrains). Cleverly, he didn't fall for my decreasingly subtle references to being a poor student and in the end I felt obliged to pay twice as much as I needed to.

I am telling myself he earned this by allowing me to sit in the front and by being entertaining enough to keep this sleep-starved poor student awake for the 30 km drive in.

It's been fourteen years since I was last in Bangkok and it's hard to know which of us has changed more. Admittedly, I'm wearing marginally tidier versions of the same clothes I wore last I was here and my hair is still no shorter (if a little higher), but to an 18 year old on his first trip overseas, the city might have been on a different planet. I remembered it being low and cramped and overrun with noise and people and lights.

At six this morning, the night was lifting off the city, although it continued to linger in the foggy streets, but it wasn't the same city. As my taxi driver said, it's become a tall city, teeming with glass and steel and concrete at alien altitudes. A new underground system and skyrail have edged the city toward a cleaner sort of modernity. But, turning onto Soi 1, there were already stalls setting up and people spilling onto shabby, already-humid streets.

The hotel, at first sight, was a little grim. At the very outskirts of "urban and cosmopolitan" Sukhumvit, it was barely distinguishable from countless other decaying white apartment blocks. I began to question the hotel's key claim to be located in the heart of the central business district. This could certainly be true, if your business happened to be the sex industry. No wonder my driver didn't fall for my poor student shtick. Clearly someone had pinned "sex tourist" to my luggage.

Ah well. Incidentally, I also discovered, unlike the map the hotel supplied, that the streets here don't jump from grubby Soi 3 to swanky Soi 21 in the space of a block. In retrospect, I should have been a little more suspicious.

Research? I hear you say? Well, I'm researching now, belatedly.

In fact, I may go for a little fact-finding mission now.

(picture by UweBKK)