I’m pretty sure that’s a lyric from a Rush song.
Yesterday we boarded the overnight sleeper from Chiang Mai to Bangkok. Quite an interesting experience in that we boarded, found our seats, headed for the bar/restaurant and stayed there until we were kicked out at 11pm. I’m sure some of the bar staff were on drugs! Not only were they generally very happy, the music they played was unexpected (the Sex Pistols
) and they had one of those spinny disco light projectors. What an atmosphere!
We met a nice, young Canadian gentleman with whom we drank and chatted for a couple of hours. I approached him because he had given the bar staff one of his CDs to play (Tracy Chapman). Perhaps he wasn’t a fan of the Sex Pistols. Still, I didn’t rib him for his lack of taste. I like Tracy Chapman too. Takes me back a few years.
After being kicked out of the bar we returned to our seats to find that, during our absence, they had been converted into our beds. At the start Liberta was trying to figure out how they worked (since we expected to be coming back drunk) but the train staff were encouraging her not to. Phew!
I’m sure I slept well but being woken at some ungodly hour - even with coffee - isn’t conducive to my good mood. The train arrived at 7am but we were awake at 6am. Still, it gave me a chance to watch the mile upon mile of slums that have grown up around the train tracks into Bangkok. I was a bit too bleary-eyed and misty-minded to judge whether what I was seeing was poverty by local standards. The people at least have somewhere to live albeit made of rusty corrugated steel and plastic bags.
Bangkok is in the midst of a mayoral election campaign. The roads here are dangerous to pedestrians at the best of times but being forced to walk on them because the pavements are blocked by enormous posters advertising the prospective candidates seems to me to be a perversion of the single issue they are all agreed upon - doing something about the traffic in Bangkok! Since the text on the posters is exclusively in Thai script, Liberta and I have been looking at the pictures of the candidates to figure out what they are trying to say. Number 15 looks very stern. Number 3 is military. Number 7 is oooooooh nice and pretty, especially in her construction helmet. Number 19 is a green ant (don’t ask, I cannot explain). There are 22 candidates in total.
Why the numbers? Well, get this. I learned from the local newspaper that for this election, the ballot papers are going to have a revolutionary new feature - the names of the candidates. In all previous elections, voters had to select them by number only. Something about that bothers me but I can’t quite put a name to it. Democracy takes a strange form in this part of the world.
I’ll have a number 6, a number 2 and, for a laugh, a number 14.
Would you like rice with that, sir?
Anyway, back to the travels. After a few coffees at the train station, we left our backpacks and went off on a mission - to get my post from the main post office and to search for somewhere to stay for the night. We were both dreading the post office visit after our previous experience there but this time it was a breeze. One down.
So, somewhere to stay. Given Liberta’s fetish for mass transit systems we hopped on the brand spanking new BTS which covers a large tract of Sukumvit Road where many hotels are to be found. The Skytrain is what it sounds like - an elevated railway - similar to the one we used in Kuala Lumpur. Not much to say about it really - the stations and trains are clean and the service is cheap and efficient. I was a little concerned at the slight squealing that the train emitted when going around bends but I’m sure the engineers could spray a little WD40 on the track to get around that.
I was insisting on a luxury hotel - anything up to 1,500 baht per night (about 20 quid). The excessive pollution from the traffic in Bangkok makes me feel very dirty very quickly and I’ve been lusting after a hot shower for about a week now. We found a charming little place on one of the Sois offering a clean room, comfy bed, hot shower, balcony and swimming pool for a little over 1,200 baht. What a relief to get out of my my sweat-soaked clothes and scrub. Luxury!
After cleaning up we had to go back to the train station to get our packs. Liberta reckoned we could do it using the Skytrain and tuk-tuk in about an hour. I was skeptical but while we were walking back to the Skytrain station I noticed that the MRTA helpfully went straight to the train station. Seemed quicker and allowed Liberta to add another system to her list so we used that. Again, not much to say - clean stations and trains, service cheap and efficient. We did the entire return journey in around an hour and a half without much stress. We could have done it more quickly but we spent some time reading the posters in the entry tunnel that describe how the MRTA was built. An underground rail system is a remarkable feat of civil engineering and it is good to be able to find out more so easily.
I must point out that neither the Skytrain nor the MRTA are representative of Bangkok in general - which is dirty, smelly, noisy, expensive and infuriatingly distracting. Here’s an example…
You have been waiting for five minutes to cross the road. I say road but imagine a six-lane racetrack full of vehicles of all shapes and sizes belching out noxious fumes and being driven at maximum speed by maniacs. Finally, you see a space forming that you can run through. Just as you step out to make use of this precious space, a tuk-tuk pulls up in front of you and the driver yells TAXI!?
.
NO! THANK YOU!
I love Bangkok. It is one of the most vile places I have ever had the displeasure of visiting more than once!
