It was my third time here, and like a kebab shop at 4am it was somewhere that I kept ending up in despite my head telling me to avoid the place. The hard bit was actually getting there in the first place. Due to some Icelandic conspiracy there had been no flights from Heathrow for days and the night before our flight there was still no news on whether our flight would be leaving. The morning of our flight we were up at about 5am and there was still no news so (living in West London) we decided to head to the airport and take our chances. As it turned out, we were lucky and our flight was as scheduled. We were so lucky in fact, that the check-in assistant, the security guy, and the passport control guy all felt obliged to tell us how lucky we were as we breezed pass them all with no queues in about 10 minutes, leaving us with a few hours to kill wandering around the empty departure terminal. We killed some of the time by watching BBC news on a nearby TV screen, which was a bit weird since they were standing outside the terminal at the time speculating whether any flights would be taking off. This is the second time that I’ve watched my flight be the subject of national news just before I’ve taken off (the first being the Air Canada pilot going a bit mental just before my flight to Vancouver), and I can do without it happening again thanks.
So having navigated one little problem we arrived into Bangkok to deal with another one. This one was a Thai political crisis that centred on a bunch of red-shirt anti-government protesters who had taken over key intersections of the city. A week or so before we arrived 25 people had been killed in running battles between the protesters and the army. We discovered that all this had happened a few minutes walk from where we were staying, but fortunately all the protests had now moved out of the centre of town a bit to the shopping area some distance from us. So it was a pretty weird atmosphere when we arrived. There weren’t many tourists around for a start, and when we spent the first day wandering around temples, we often found that we had the place to ourselves. There wasn’t nearly as many people approaching me to try and sell me stuff, although those that did were particularly persistent since they didn’t have many other victims. By and large the historic centre was pretty quiet, and the only real inconvenience for us was the fact that all the shopping malls and the main market street were in a no-go area. So no fake Rolex’s for us.
For anyone who has never been to Bangkok, it’s an interesting place. The first thing to say is that it’s a complete assault on the senses. It’s hot. It’s noisy. Some of it is old and beautiful and most of the rest of it is a concrete jungle of shops and neon lights. It smells ALL the time, good and bad. Spices, traffic fumes, sweet fruits, stagnant canal water, sweat, amazing street food, there’s always a smell fighting its way up your nostrils. I often find myself in McDonalds and 7-Eleven in Asia and it’s not because I’m a little Englander who only wants to eat western food, it’s because they’re one of the few places that you’ll find all over that place that are air-conditioned and where you can cool down, take a few deep breaths and reset yourself for a few minutes. There’s a lot of temples and once you’ve been to a few you’ll find that most of them are very similar and you’ll start to feel ‘templed out’. There is some good food though. Some really good food! And all the normal Thai citizens you deal with will be happy and helpful and charming. Thailand isn’t referred to as the ‘land of smiles’ for nothing.
There’s another major reason you’ll need a place of refuge in Bangkok though, and that’s to avoid people trying to get money out of you. You can only be asked a certain amount of times in an average day whether you want a tuk tuk before you want to start inflicting pain on people. The biggest problem is the amount of people trying to scam you. I suppose the word ‘scam’ is a bit harsh as it suggests being conned out of money, which isn’t really the case. But it does seem that everyone in Thailand will try to get you to part with your money. There are a few tried and tested scams going on which most visitors will experience after a few hours. The main one is the tuk tuk scam, which involves getting a really cheap journey to and from some random temple that someone has convinced you is amazing as they’re having the ‘last day’ of some fascinating festival. It’s usually called something like the Lucky Buddha or the Diamond Buddha. You get in the tuk tuk thinking ‘what have I got to lose?’ and go off to some nondescript temple in some nondescript area of Bangkok. You get there to find nothing going on and walk around a bit bemused for about half an hour (don’t worry, you’ll see plenty of other tourists there with the same expression on their face), and then you’ll go back to the tuk tuk and he’ll set off. This is where the fun begins. On his way ‘back’ the driver will suddenly stop outside a tailor shop and tell you that he needs to get some petrol vouchers which he will only get if you can do him a massive favour and go into the shop for a few minutes. Of course, as soon as you walk though the door you get the hard sell from the people in the shop, and end up spending £100 on a suit. This might happen two or three times, and will probably also contain a stop at a gem shop where you’ll be convinced that you can buy gems on the cheap which you can take home and sell at a massive profit. Which of course is a lie. I’ve experienced all this before, so when our driver suddenly stopped outside a mysterious tailor shop and asked us to go in, I politely declined. This didn’t go down too well and he got a bit more pushy, to which I responded in kind. He wandered off ‘to get some water’ and shuffled back to the tuk tuk about a minute later. Not quite getting the message he tried this another two times at different shops before he gave up and took us where we wanted to go. In addition to the main scam, there are a whole web of minor scams designed to get you into one of the dodgy tuk tuks in the first place. As well as the ‘Lucky Buddha’ scam there’s also the one where some helpful person suggests a great shopping festival that’s going on in town (which is just about to come to an end) which ends with you getting in a tuk tuk that magically appears from nowhere. Another one involves another helpful person stood near to a big tourist attraction like the Grand Palace coming up to you and telling you that it’s closed due to a national holiday. But that’s OK, as he can suggest a much cooler place to go called the Lucky Buddha… Check all this stuff out on www.bangkokscams.com as it’s entertaining reading!
After three days we’d seen all the things we wanted to, we’d avoided being shot by either protesters or the army, and I’d managed to not step foot in one tailor or gem store. It was time to get out of Bangkok and head to the beach. We’d played around with the idea of getting a coach down south but had been put off the idea by the ‘bus scam’ in which someone hides in the storage area of the coach and goes through everyone’s bags stealing their stuff, and in some bad cases another person goes through your hand luggage while you sleep after you’ve been drugged by the ‘free coffee’. We figured we’d be safe on an Air Asia flight since they charged for their coffee, and you wouldn’t fare too well being locked in the cargo hold at 37,000 feet!We headed back to the shiny new airport and got on a plane, dreaming of tropical beaches and beautiful islands.
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