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Bangkok February 12-16, 1999
We arrived in Thailand and got through customs - no
problem except for Jeff. But by now we have grown used to Jeff being constantly double
checked by custom officials. Josh, the longhaired hippie, on the other hand, is constantly
allowed to pass no questions asked. We met up with Claudia, a Spaniard, who Josh had met
on our last night in Nepal. She spoke zero English so a friend had asked the Josher to
help her get to Koa San Road (the main backpacker hang-out in Bangkok). During the 2 hour
traffic jam/cab ride Jeff and Mike snored loudly while Josh spent the time conjugating
verbs in espanol. We arrived on Koa San Road at about 6:30 pm. Kao San is a 2 block long
strip of bars, restaurants, and shops, selling everything from T-shirts to city tours to
air plane tickets. There are white people everywhere and backpacks number higher then all
of the cars and rickshaws (tuktuks) which zip up and down in a flurry of horns and cat
calls. We had been told by two Canadian travelers whom we had met on our Everest trek (not
Manny and Emmy) about a nice guest house a few blocks away from the Kao San madness called
the New Siam Hotel. When we arrived it was full but the New Siam operated another
guesthouse/laundry service nearby. We booked 2 rooms for the 4 of us. Josh being the only
one who was slightly Spanish literate, continued to discuss verbs with Claudia.
Thailand is hot, Africa hot, and we sweated out several
gallons that first night. When the sun came up early the next morning, we woke up with the
now normal sound of roosters crowing and dogs barking, while laying in pools of sweat.
Bangkok is the main travel hub for Southeast Asia and
while there, we had to purchase tickets to several of the destinations we still planned to
visit. Jeff and Mike only had a ticket from Sydney, Australia back to Minnesota, but had
to get to Sydney from Bangkok somehow. On our 2nd day we spent several hours walking the
strip and asking different travel agencies about the prices to travel all over Asia. In
the end we found that, as usual, the first place we checked was the cheapest.
During our weeks in India with Rochelle, we knew she was
going to come to Bangkok and then go on to Vietnam. During one of our many Thali meals we
had planned to visit Loas, but decided to all travel to Vietnam together instead. So we
bought Vietnam tickets and visas. Our friend Robbie from LA was going to meet us in
Bangkok when we returned from Vietnam to do some diving so we would all fly together to
Phuket, Thailand (a major starting point for many great dive sights). After the Phuket
tickets were purchased, we figured that since we had never done scuba before we needed to
arrange a bus/boat trip to Ko Tao, the main scuba training area in Southeast Asia. We
arranged our tickets to Bali, Indonesia and then on to Perth, Australia where we will
arrange transportation to Sydney. The whole process took about 3 hours in the Cheap
N’ Smile Booking Agency. After we paid for the tickets, we understood where the
" Cheap" in Cheap N’ Smile came from and then realized the
"smile" came from the large grin she had acquired from processing our visa
cards.
At breakfast the next day, while scouring a map trying to
figure out where we were and how to find some of Bangkok's interesting sights, we met
Analena, a German girl who was travelling through Thailand by herself. She pointed us out
on the map and invited us to travel with her for the afternoon to check out the canal/boat
system, see Bangkok's Grand Palace and visit Wat (temple-monastery) Poh, a famous Buddhist
temple where, conveniently, they teach and practice the ancient art of Thai message. For
200 bhat (about 5 dollars) you can get a one hour message by one of the many newly trained
masseuses. We finished breakfast and followed Analena down the street to the pier and onto
a boat.
The Grand Palace is an enormous, walled in, intricately
designed fortress that equaled in magnificence and beauty, the forts and palaces of Nepal
and India (and it actually surpassed many). It was built in 1782, and represents over 200
years of Thai royal history, with structures, buildings, and murals all beautifully
detailed and colored. After taking a number to wait in line for a massage, we wandered
through Wat Poh. Built in the 16th century, it is not only the oldest but also the largest
Wat in Bangkok. Wat Poh has the largest reclining Buddha in Thailand, about the size of a
small jet airplane. It also has the largest collection of Buddhist images in Thailand. |
