The whys & whens
I spent most of 2001 traveling around Asia and India with my then girlfriend (now wife) Anne. During this time I kept a very irregular travel journal for friends and family to read. In retrospect, most of it seems insanely innocent but it was my first ever attempt at an on-line journal (using a hand-rolled CMS!) and so I’ve decided to republish the posts for posterity’s sake.
Please do note though that nothing has been changed and so the posts will contain all of the original factual & spelling errors (I was never any good at remembering place names and I’m even worse at spelling them once remembered). Unfortunately, the accompanying photographs have been lost in the ether so you may have to picture the scene for yourselves.
This is the first installment, written after only a few weeks in Thailand. Enjoy.
Bangkok ahoy
Well, we arrived in B’kok at probably the worst possible time of the day – the dreaded ‘rush hour’ which, through a combination of 7 million people trying to get home in unison, a horrendously designed road system and traffic cops more intent on smoking Marlboro’s than actually directing traffic, brings the average vehicle speed down to a heart breaking 3 m.p.h.
So, it took us just over eight hours to fly almost six thousand miles and just under four hours to traverse the 23 mile journey into the centre of the city by bus… welcome to Bangkok!
Like all Bangkok virgins, we automatically headed straight for the Kho San road, Bangkok’s equivalent to Dublin’s Temple Bar area.. full of touts, thieves, lady boys, prostitutes, flea ridden dogs, expensive beer, bad food, cheap clothes, noisy tuk tuks and a multitude of bronzed drunken tourists desperately trying to look cool whist avoiding neat parcels of feaces deposited by the aforementioned dogs… as Marlon Brando so famously said in Apocalypse Now, “The horror, the horror”.
One night in Kho San road is enough to make even the most hardened traveler weep openly and so we decided to head straight to an Island for some R&R on the beach. Twelve hours later and we had installed ourselves in a bamboo hut on a beautiful white sand beach on the island of Kho Chang situated off the Thai/Cambodian border.
Kho Chang is Thailand’s second biggest island and one of it’s biggest National Parks. Fortunately, this has halted the construction of farang (Thai for ‘western tourist’) holiday resorts and means, for the most part, accommodation is limited to simple bamboo beach huts. Ahhh, the bliss…
...the short lived bliss. An avalanche of rain (read ‘tropical storm’), the likes of which I have only ever witnessed in Hollywood movies, battered the bamboo hut after just two days of clear weather. This caused every farang on the island to evacuate a.s.a.p. The ferry back to the mainland was so crowded that thirty of us had to climb onto the roof to suffer the forty-five minute journey!
So, here we are back in Bangkok (but definitely NOT on the Kho San road).
Hunter S. Thompson once described Peurto Rico as “a place where grown men sweat twenty-four hours a day”. I have never been able to truly comprehend this statement until now. It is so hot and humid that the consumption of six litres of fluid a day is just enough to keep a farang like myself alive. The beer actually gives you a hangover before it gets you drunk but, for anyone that has ever experienced a ‘Chang’ (local beer) hangover, perhaps thats not such a bad thing after all!
OK, Anne’s Thai massage should almost be finished (three dollars an hour – it certainly put me out of the massage business) and it’s almost time for my nightly bottle of Singa (slightly better local beer) and Pad Thai (fried vegetable and noodle) so, I’ll sign off for the moment. Tomorrow we head down to the river Kwai for another few days of R&R in a floating bamboo hut…
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