jeremy woke up and eventually realized i wasn’t robbing the place. i was so eager to get out and start exploring, but i was exhausted from my day and the night before. jeremy gave me all of my christmas gifts, which included things like cheap drugstore shampoo, cool ranch doritos, teeth whitening strips, pajamas, and tom’s of maine toothpaste. that may seem like completely boring things to you, but that just means you haven’t been marooned in korea for 8 months. i think i was most excited over the toothpaste and the doritos. the doritos were gone by the next morning, by the way.
with a bag of doritos in my hand, i checked out the room. jeremy had found and booked this room, and it was pretty awesome. it had a garage like front room with a couch and a screen door, which was perfect for my chain smoking. it also had a giant jacuzzi bathtub in the bathroom. knowing my disdain for bathtubs in general, but hotel jacuzzi tubs in particular, jeremy had cleaned the shit out of it himself and made sure the nasty germ water in the jets had been filtered out. it took about an hour and a half to fill the stupid thing, but it was a nice thing to have after being crammed in airplane seats all day.
jeremy was horribly jet lagged and tired, but i talked him into coming with me while i checked out the area around the hotel. unfortunately, there wasn’t much to see. as i had read in the hotel’s reviews, it was not exactly in a happening area of town. never mind that, i said! we walked around, saw some stray dogs, and went back to the hotel. i bought a pack of cigarettes from the hotel lobby and we went back to our room to get some rest before the next day.
i’m pretty sure we requested a wake up call for the next morning. i wanted to go to wat phra kaew, and i wanted to hit it early. we woke up, showered, put all of our essential belongings in the backpack jeremy was going to carry around, and got a cab to the temple.
we arrived at the temple, and i finally got my first real taste of bangkok. scooters and cars were flying everywhere, people were chasing us down and trying to sell us stuff, tuk tuk drivers were telling us the temple was closed (but of course, they knew of another secret temple they could take us to), and it was loud as hell. i loved it. one thing i’ve learned since getting out of houston is that i have a strong affinity for big, busy, dirty cities. for whatever reason, they make me giddy and excited. i was a bit overwhelmed, though, so jeremy and i ran down a side street for a bit to collect ourselves. once we reemerged, we did some browsing. jeremy bought a giant ugly pair of pants for like $2 to wear into the temple (he was wearing shorts), and i stupidly bought the world’s ugliest skirt before i found out that my jeans were acceptable temple wear. oh well.
off to the temple we went. we bought our tickets and walked into the complex. holy shit. it was amazing. i really don’t know how to write about it, as i am no architecture expert and have no idea how to do justice to it. the buildings were huge, and every single one of them was absolutely covered in tiny shiny tiles, marble…all kinds of stuff. truth be told, it was all so amazing and overwhelming that everything kind of started to look the same. every time i turned around, there was something huge and ornate in my face. we wandered around there for a few hours and took lots of pictures. we made our way to the grand palace, where the king used to live. around 3:00, we had made our way through everything and stopped for some drinks we hung out at the cafe for about an hour and talked while i ate a coconut and smoked some cigarettes. then, we decided to see what else was in the area.
we wandered off down the street and saw a giant collection of food stalls grouped together in this courtyard type area. we walked through it, and it led to an alleyway, which we soon realized had water on it. apparently, we had made our way to the river. there was a ferry boat going to and from the other side of the river, as well as long tailed boats zipping around. before all of this, when i thought of a long tailed boat, i thought of 5 or 6 people with paddles propelling it through the water. reality was much better. basically, these people had taken tubocharged car engines, stuck a giant 15 foot pole with a propeller where the driveshaft should have been, and mounted that to the back of the boat. steering was all a matter of moving the propeller around in the direction the driver wanted to go.
i saw it and thought nothing.
jeremy the mechanic saw it and exclaimed “holy shit. those things are the most dangerous things on the planet.”
suddenly, my interest was piqued. “oh reeeeeeeeeally? why is that?”
he explained the set up, then made me realize the obvious…there was a turbo charged propeller spinning at the end of every boat’s motor. the propeller also bounced around, in and out of the water, as the driver steered. if we were to crash into another boat, we’d die. if we were to get to close to a propeller manned by a careless driver, we could be decapitated. and if the boat toppled over and we all fell out, there’d be a renegade propeller bouncing around and thirsty for human flesh.
of course, this meant that i HAD to ride it.
jeremy resisted a bit, but he was easy enough to convince to go along with me. i don’t remember how much we paid, but i remember it being way too much. we were asked if we wanted the tour that went through the canals and to some temple, or if we wanted to go through the canals and see a snake show. we had already done a giant temple, so i opted for the snake show. we were ushered off to the end of a pier, and soon enough, our chariot pulled up and we got on.
the driver maneuvered the boat out into the open water of the river, and then he fucking gunned the engine. we went flying down the river. we were passing boats twice our size, as well as flying by all of the other long tails. jeremy started cursing my existence, and i shreiked “WE’RE GONNA DIE WE’RE GONNA DIE WE’RE GONNA DIIIIIIIIE!” jeremy had his video camera on, and suddenly, he yelled something indecipherable, but with a bit more urgency than his previous comments of hatred toward me for talking him into the boat ride. i craned my neck to see past the nose of the boat just in time to see that we were headed directly for the ass end (and thus, the propeller) of another long tailed boat. jeremy’s prophecy was about to come true! i started screaming, our driver started fumbling around in effort to get the boat to stop, and the other driver saw us coming just in time to swing the rear of his boat out of our way. seriously, we missed that other boat by less than a foot. the other boat’s driver started screaming in thai at our boat’s driver, our boat driver started screaming back, and jeremy and i wished the passengers on the other boat good luck. once our driver got sick of screaming at the other driver, he gunned it again and shot off down into the canals.
the whole ride, we were flying past other long tails, long tails full of people who looked happy to be relaxing on their slow lilt through the canals of bangkok. jeremy and i, however, had our feet wrapped around the metal pole in front of us to keep from falling out when our driver made narrow turns and held on for dear life while he flew throuh intersections without even considering the act of slowing down or looking for oncoming traffic. very quickly, we arrived at the snake place. we got out of the boat, and our driver zipped off down the canal.
as we walked into the snake show, jeremy was telling me how much he hated me and how i had just made the last decision for our trip. his words – no, his very existence – faded away, however, as i saw a little baby gibbon running around on the table of souvenirs they had set up. it was way way way cute. i watched it play for a bit until its owner scooped it up and hauled it away for it’s bath. just as this happened, the man who apparently ran the operation at the snake place told us to wander around and check out all of their animals for a bit and that the snake show would be starting in about 15 minutes.
so we wandered around. we were soon grounded from any high that the boat ride had lended us, as their set up was the most depressing thing i have ever seen. they had monkeys in cages with nothing but a stick, iguanas in cages bigger than the monkey enclosure, a tiger pacing back and forth in a pathetic little habitat, parrots that had plucked out half of their feathers, turtles swimming around in murky green water…ugh. after getting our fill of this, they announced that the snake show was starting. we were the first to show up to the ring, so the man made us sit in the very front row in what was supposed to be the best seat in the house. then the show began.
it was nothing super incredible. they’d pull out a couple of cobras or some other deadly snake, charm it, then piss it until it struck and they jumped out of the way just in time. they didn’t really treat the snakes too horribly. they shoed how to milk their poison, some guy picked up a deadly snake with his mouth, we all got to touch a bunch of poisonous snakes, blah blah blah. they did pull out a python, though, and proceded to piss it off enough to where it tried to strike. that made me sad, because come on. it’s a python. the only reason he was being so aggressive was because he was being stressed out so much. still, it was pretty tame compared to what i’ve come to expect from that kind of thing and the treatment of animals in asia.
once the show was over, we began to make our way out. but my baby gibbon was back! in her nightgown! and her owner let me hold her! so cute. so freaking gosh darn cute.
so we left. as we made our way back to the canal, we were hoping that our initial driver had left for good and that a new driver had shown up. no such luck. we got back in our old boat, assumed our old positions, and made our way back to the river.
though we were flying down them at lightning speed, the canals were really awesome. they were lined with old houses, and there were people going about their everyday lives, fishing, doing laundry, playing, or just sitting around and talking. it reminded me of an asian new orleans. at one point, the boat stopped and a woman on a smaller boat came over and tried to sell us crap. keychains? no thanks. soda? no. water? not interested. a beer? nuh-uh. a beer for the driver? shit…she had gotten me into a corner! the boat driver was in on what was going on (duh, that’s why he stopped), he knew she was going to suggest i buy him a beer, and i knew he knew. the last thing i wanted to do was get him angry and driving more maniacally. also, i get guilted into things like that easily. so i gave the woman some money,and she went to the back of the boat and gave the driver his beer (and probably a commission from my purchase). as we pulled off, i remarked to jeremy how i had just supplied alcohol to our insane boat driver, and wondered if that was such a good idea. soon, we were back at the river, and by the time we got back to the pier we had departed from, the sun was going down.
we wandered away from the pier and down some street. it wasn’t anything super special, but we wandered far enough that we were soon the only tourists on the street and were surrounded by people eating delicious looking and smelling food on the street. and this is where my eating habits become a bitch. i wanted to try some of the stuff i was seeing, but i couldn’t tell what a lot of it was and had no way to ask. not wanting to create a scene or end up buying something i couldn’t eat, we decided to put dinner off until we got somewhere a little friendlier and more obvious to my needs.
after wandering around for about an hour, we made our way back to the temple we had started at. once we got to it, we realized that a GIANT government protest was going on mere feet from us. we hung out in the park and listened to people give speeches over the intercom system in thai while we tried to figure out where to go. knowing that it was NOT going to be my scene, but knowing it would cater to my eating dilemma, we decided to head to khao san road.
once we flagged down a cab and fought our way through the protest traffic, we were on khao san road in seconds. i was horrified mere milliseconds after that. i guess i just don’t understand why people go to exotic asian countries to flock to areas where westerners congregate. we jumped into the current of people making their way down the road and walked to the end of it without stopping. store full of crap, street vendor selling pad thai, bar, store full of crap, convenience store, repeat. that was the rhythm of the street. it made eating easy, though. we got two orders of pad thai, one with chicken and one without, and a few spring rolls for under $2 total. we found a police station to sit in front of while we ate, and then we got up, got another cab, and got the hell out of there.
it was only around 9 or 10, but we decided to make it an early night. we had to check out of our hotel the next morning and get a bus to pattaya. not exactly a place that was high on my priority list, but it was home of the elephant village i wanted to go to, making it a must.
a lot of people told me to skip over bangkok altogether, citing its modernization and urbane feel as reasons to why it sucked. maybe it’s my love for cities, but i just didn’t get that. i was looking forward to the other destinations we had to hit on our trip, but that night, i was already looking forward to revisiting bangkok the day before our flights left. i had been there for less than 24 hours, but i was already in love with the place.
