Four Nights In Bangkok And The World's Your Oyster... Or Fried Grasshopper (Thailand)

Early March, 2006

I spent a long and tedious night awake in Mumbai airport, waiting for my 5:20 am Cathay Pacific flight to Bangkok. The night ended with me pouring my semi-comatose self into the plane seat, and drifting between grumpy sort-of-awake and restless not-really-asleep. When I arrived in Bangkok I felt I wasn't in any kind of state to deal with yet another Asian city, but I girded my loins and, after the customs doors slid open to the real world, I steeled myself for the onslaught of hotel touts, taxi drivers, rickshaw wallahs and general Asian in-your-face-ness.

Only there wasn't any. My experience of Asia so far - India - had not prepared me at all for the polite, clean, modern, quiet, orderly situation that I found as I walked out into Bangkok. The cab to where I was staying, (in the backpacker ghetto of Banglampho), came at a reasonable fixed-price with none of the blood-letting involved in negotiating an Indian cab. The roads from the airport were three-lane highways, not pot-holed cart-tracks. The vehicles on the road were all modern and fully intact, not the held-together-with-string-and-a- prayer-to-Shiva contraptions of the country I had just left. There were road signs, (the white-on-green design commonly found in North America), road markings, traffic rules and - crucially - not a cow to be seen. Not one. Nowhere. This was a modern city which, at first, felt more like America than Asia!

I was in culture shock for quite a few days. The smallest things were amazing to me after two months in India: being able to buy mosquito repellent (in branches of Boots, no less!), the easy availability of iced coffee and good sandwiches, the lack of hassle from people in the street. I went to Siam Centre, a large shopping mall in the western tradition, and replaced some of the now rather ratty clothes I had brought with me or bought in India. There was a Paul Frank store there; real Paul Frank, not the rip-off stuff you can get in Goa. I have to admit, I went around the stores grinning inanely at the novelty of it all, and bought some excellent new t-shirts! There is, of course, a down-side to all this consumer opportunity and western influence; check out Ronald McDonald giving the traditional Thai greeting of wai, (placing hands together as if in prayer). How nice of McDonald's to assimilate some local culture into their corporate imagery.

Speaking of food, (if indeed McDonald's qualifies), another revelation on arrival in Thailand was Thai cuisine. It is simply some of the best eating I have ever enjoyed. Even at the cheapest end of the scale, the street vendors, there is an attention to freshness and hygiene which means that eating is almost always an absolute treat here. The best Pad Thai I have ever tasted was cooked right in front of me on the street for 20 Baht, (30 pence).

However, I soon met someone who was not sharing my wide-eyed wonder at this urban paradise. Swedish Frida had come for a few weeks vacation in Thailand, and it was her first trip outside Europe or Scandinavia. She was suffering culture shock in the opposite direction, having come from the orderly environment of Gothenberg to what she perceived as the dirt, noise, pollution, hassle and chaos of Bangkok. I think she was a little confused at my starry-eyed wonder at my new playground city! However, since she'd had the grubby experience of being grabbed and hugged by an over-friendly Thai guy in a shop, I could see to some extent how she was thinking.

We spent a couple of days hanging out, visiting Wat Pho, (a Buddhist temple), to see the huge reclining Buddha and to get a Thai massage at the temple massage school. The reclining Buddha was a little disappointing. Very grand and covered in gold leaf he was, but also surrounded by scaffold for refurbishment. Even if the scaffold hadn't been there, you still couldn't get a proper look at him because he is sheltered by a building only a little bigger than he is, so it's impossible to stand far enough away to get a proper look! There were some very beautiful buildings and statues in the rest of the grounds, though.

The massage, however, was excellent! Thai massage is very much about using the masseur's whole body to manipulate yours, and you can expect to have your back walked on, elbows pressed down hard into your shoulder muscles and to have virtually every joint in your body cracked! I loved it, and left feeling totally relaxed and about two inches taller. Frida declined to have her finger joints cracked on account of the noise that it makes.

We also went to the weekend market in the north of the city, which enabled us to sample the city's excellent metro and skytrain systems. The market was interesting, and used mainly by Thais. I saw, for the first time, a stall selling classic Thai delicacies - fried insects: grasshoppers, maggots and what I swear must have been cockroaches. I was waiting for Frida to use the loo, and so had plenty of time to stand and watch in amazement as Thais came and bought this stuff by the bag load. Noticing me, an amused Thai man tried to convince me how tasty the grasshoppers were. I took his word for it, but part of me will be disappointed if I leave Thailand without crunching up one of those suckers at some point.......!

So having loved Bangkok, and planning to stop there again when I pass back through to northern Thailand, I bought a ticket for the sleeper train south to Surat Thani and a boat to the island of Ko Phangan - and back to the beach!