Thai Hoaxing

It was late and dark by the time I came out of the airport. The first thing that struck me was how clean this place was. Just a little garbage on the street, buildings that seemed sturdy and elegant, and most important: The air! Aaaaaah... Soooo clean. Now, the next day I read that Bangkok is up there fighting with Mexico City for being the most polluted city on our planet. Somehow I think the guys making up these statistics should take a look at how Kathmandu is doing. I definitely found Bangkok better than Kathmandu in all ways, except scenery-wise.

As most backpackers, I stayed in Khao San Road while in Bangkok. I got a functional, clean room for 100 baht per night. A US dollar consisted of about 25 baht at the time. This street is incredible. About 400 meters long, it has just about everything: Pizza Hut, fake I.D. (International Press freelance journalist/photographer, ICSI student card, passport replicas etc.) salesmen, pirated software and music, a supermarket, a police station, prostitutes, massage parlors, international phone centers, dozens of guest houses and hotels, cinema/restaurant combinations, cheap "brand" clothes, drug dealers, tailors, bookshops and travel agencies. They even had the very same Esther which I walked the Himalayas with for a few days, so I had a pleasant talk with her, catching up with each other's Nepali food poisoning stories, before going to bed.

I knew Bangkok was big, but I didn't really know HOW big. So I decided my first mission in this city would be to walk from one side of Bangkok to the other. Hence I got up really, really early and took a bus westwards until I could see rice fields. I decided that would be my starting point walking east, and I would not go back to the hostel until I could see rice fields again.

It took me 13 hours. I don't know how far I walked, but I had a pretty good pace, and I just made a few stops on my way. First at the Norwegian Embassy, to read some newspapers. Then at Pantip Plaza, a shopping mall consisting of computer shops only. This was my first meeting with commercial software piracy, and it rather stunned me. Next to large business computer centers there were small pirate CD shops, where ANYTHING could be bought at ridiculous prices. Interesting concept.

My third stop was in Lumphini park, which must be about in the middle of Bangkok. It is named after Lumbini, the city in Nepal where Buddha was born, years and years ago. It's a good place for watching Chinese do their morning exercises and line up for fresh snake blood afterwards. This was just about the first green spot I happened upon in Bangkok. Bangkok is huge and mostly grey, with semi-tall buildings everywhere. The traffic is incredible. One-way streets with 8 lanes, where you find the most incredible luxury cars side by side with three-wheel rickshaws and sensation-seeking motorcyclists. It doesn't really work, so the traffic is utterly disturbed by a massive effort to build a monorail system all over the city. Sadly, the company behind the monorail seems to have run out of money and are not sure whether they can afford to actually buy the trains when the building is finished.

But just as it was getting dark, I again saw rice fields, and decided I had reached the east end of Bangkok. I got on a bus and after two hours of bus changing, I was back in Khao San Road, feeling I knew just about how large Bangkok is. It's very large.

I also visited the Grand Palace. It's a big tourist thing, and rightly so. There are amazing amounts of walls and towers covered with leaf gold and coloured pieces of glass in nice patterns, as it can be found in most cultures on this planet. It looks beautiful as long as you're more than 3 meters away from it. There's a lot of temples in Bangkok, and this complex probably is the nicest one, although it is also the most crowded one.

From there I wandered down to the river. I was just admiring the view when a boat came up to me. I felt guilty, maybe I had made a secret "Oy! I need a ride over the river"-sign? Anyway, I got on the boat, and it actually took me to the other side of the river. Cost me 5 baht. And then I was in a hospital. And there was a sign with an arrow on it, pointing towards a museum. Going to see a museum sounded like a good idea at the time, so I walked in the arrow's direction. I kept seeing more signs with "Museum" on them, but I couldn't find any museum, so at last I started asking people where the museum was. It took quite a few requests before I found someone who knew what a museum was, and even more communication was called for to have someone show me the way there. But it was worth it.

It turned out to be the most peculiar museum I have ever been to. Apparently the hospital is famous for it's techniques for preserving human bodies. So the museum consisted of dead bodies surrounded by preservation liquid in large bottles. The most incredible part of the museum is the mass murderers' row. The Thai medics had a theory that the desire to kill people could be traced in certain anatomical ways. To prove this they killed all mass murderers that could be found in the prisons at the time, cut them in half and put them on bottles. So now everyone can go and see what a mass murderer looks like inside. The slicing of the bodies is just incredible.

In addition, a lot of really tall skeletons can be found here, quite a few dwarves, with and without flesh. They also have managed to separate the veins and the neural system from bodies and put them on display. If you want to see what fetuses, both human and different animal versions, at different stages of development looks like, search no longer. They are all here. And as a bonus you also find preserved bodies of people that suffered from all kind of terrible diseases. Oh, and there's of course a Siamese twins section. And it's free!

Hmmm... What else? There's a lot to see in Bangkok. Long time travellers often spend a long time in this city. Some of them just stay in Khao San Road, eating good food, meeting and talking to other travellers, watching brand new (pirated) movies and bargaining for cheaper rooms. I recommend not spending more time in Khao San than absolutely necessary. Nice daytrips can be done out of Bangkok, if you get up early and learn how the public transportation system works. Do not drive anything on your own. The traffic is really for natives only. The traffic lights are manually controlled by a couple of policemen sitting in a control hut next to the road. If you take the wrong turn somewhere, you can end up in a street which never really gets a green light. Be sure to bring pants or a long skirt if you want to go inside holy buildings. You can't wear shoes there either, so having a pair of cheap sandals is the best thing, as you'll have to leave them outside quite often.

The travel agents in Khao San Road offer a great many cheap bus trips to various destinations. Shop around a bit. I left for Ko Samet, just off Eastern Thailand.