Well it's not too bad... if you want to book a cheap bus ticket to pretty much anywhere, buy harem pants and fake sunglasses and drink cheap sang som. But I'm not in the mood for all that at the moment so I decided to stay somewhere a bit more anonymous, and so I'm now tucked away in a hostel on a back street in Silom, the business district.
This is actually quite a promising location - the skytrain is just down the road and I can get to anywhere in the city (except for the dreaded Khao San Road, which has no transport links whatsoever except backpacker buses) for 20 baht on the skytrain, which is shiny and super air-conditioned. Today I ventured to Siam Square, where I checked out Siam Paragon, Bangkok's fanciest mall and looked at things I couldn't afford, like Mulberry handbags and italian-thai fusion cuisine. The air conditioning was nice though... then I headed out to the street market, got an iced coffee and generally had a wander. It felt a bit like New York or maybe Singapore, giant malls, big brands and sunshine. And for the first time, I began to quite like Bangkok. I had a hint of this wandering road Jatujak market last time around and now I really get it... Bangkok is trendy and shiny, full of beautiful people and with malls, restaurants, cafes and bars everywhere, if you can afford them. Sadly I now have no money and I'm on my own, so I'm not really in much of a position to enjoy it but still, if I ever hit Bangkok for a 5th and final time, it's gonna be amazing. Tomorrow I'm going to hunt down some contemporary art.... there's a promising exhibition about being a minority by a feminist and a gay native of Isaan (one of Thailand's most rural and poor provinces, in fact where I was last night, but on to that in a minute) that sounds very me. Today it was a bit difficult to do much because it's the 4th anniversary of the coup that outed Thaksin Shinawatra (the leader the red shirts all support) so there's a massive red shirt rally downtown. I saw it from the skytrain. I'm really hoping it doesn't get violent or cause trouble because a) I don't want to get blown up and b) I want to be able to catch my plane home tomorrow!
Anyway, before Bangkok there was Nong Khai, a sleepy riverside town just across the Mekong from Laos. I went to the pretty awesome and crazy hindu mystic sculpture park which involved giant snakes, climbing into the mouth of a stone dragon and skeletons holding hands, as well as sunburn from cycling down the highway. Most of my time though, was spent sitting in the hostel garden on the riverbank and gazing at Laos on the other side. It was kind of nice to be somewhere fairly off the beaten track though, just a random Thai town without much to recommend it. Unfortunately, the journey from there to here was fairly hellish. I would have been quite willing to pay the extra 100 baht (£2) for the 1st class bus, but couldn't find it, so instead I got the 2nd class bus. This was a mistake.
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| The Bus: I know it doesn't look that bad but trust me, it really was |
The bus left at 5.30pm, which in itself was absurd because it was an 11.5 hour journey, meaning we would arrive in Bangkok at 5am. At 6.30pm, after being on the road an hour (and having already stopped once), we arrived in Udon Thani. We then waited there for an HOUR AND FORTY MINUTES, with a full bus of passengers, for no discernible reason. I was the only foreigner on the bus and my Thai isn't good enough to ask why we were waiting, but it is good enough to know that at no point did the driver suggest we could go eat, go to the bathroom, or do anything other than sit in the bus. I was beginning to panic that the bus had broken down and I'd be out on my own in Udon Thani, but eventually we left again, only to stop again approximately every thirty minutes FOR THE ENTIRE SEVEN HOUR JOURNEY. (apologies for all the caps lock but I'm really quite irate). We also had the standard thai bus absurdly timed food stop, at 1am this time, and the old asian classic, turning on very loud local pop music at some ungodly hour of the morning, in this case 3am. I'm used to this and now have the ideal weapon: my bloody valentine's "loveless" at full volume, an epic wall of sound but also quite soothing. Lifesaver. Still, any thought of actual sleep was firmly crushed by the hard seats and the fact that at every one of the approximately one million stops along the way, they turned on all the lights at shouted in Thai. Finally the nightmare was over and we arrived in Bangkok AT THE WRONG FUCKING BUS STATION. At this point I just wanted to get to a bed as fast as possible, so I grabbed a 7-11 pizza bread to soothe my soul and jumped in a taxi meter to my hostel in Silom. Thankfully there was no traffic (one of the few benefits of arriving at 5am) and I arrived at my hostel by 5.30, paying only 100 baht... thus making the journey from hell equal in cost to the 1st class bus that would have arrived at a time for sane people who could get the skytrain. However, the journey had one last sting in its tail... the hostel was locked. I stood there banging on the door and was just about to sit on the kerb and sob, when finally things changed for the better and the door was answered... by an incredibly sexy english-Vietnamese guy, who I then did my best to chat up, despite the fact that I looked and smelled awful from the long journey (and the sunburnt cycling) and I had had no sleep so I was getting slightly delirious. And then I got a bed and all was well. The End.
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