Of birds and beasts and Bangkok
Of speeding, and one night in Bangkok
I left you stranded, a week or so ago, at the Don Muang airport, rudely interrupting the story with an aside about questions and story frames. That is simply how things will unfold, and there really isn’t much to say about the ride from the airport into the city of Bangkok. Well, maybe a few things. We moved down the new highway at an astonishing speed. Recently completed, (early 1980s) the Viphawadee highway turned into an elevated toll road, and we were clipping along just fine. It was my first experience of Asian driving, and I wanted more of it. This was the thing. High speed, do as you please, no need for signal lights, and no policemen to stop you and ticket you. And that’s why Bangkok invented traffic jams – to enforce traffic speed laws.
Some back alleys
It wasn’t the way they said it would be…
It had been almost 30 hours since I’d last slept, so the entire trip wasn’t anything but a quick flash of images from an elevated highway. We passed over housing districts and slums, came past some magnificent temples, and suddenly were in downtown Bangkok, off the highway, and onto a normal road, where everything slowed down to a crawl, the exhilarating drive from the airport a distant memory, and cruising speed down to a whopping 11 kilometers an hour. The tallest building I had observed was the Baiyoke 1 Tower, with the Dusit Thani hotel on the corner of Silom and Rama 4 roads still one of the tallest buildings in the city. There were no large office buildings, no towering skyscrapers, and definitely very few shopping centers. Much changed, rapidly, in the early 1990s, but that is for a later entry. Remember a few weeks ago I mentioned our training session in Ottawa, the one where we were told about Pa Khao Ma and Sarongs? Well, as we slowed to a crawl along Rama 4 road and made our way to Satorn, there were plenty of people about, but none of them were wearing what we had been told was part of the local costume – a first reality check for me, one of many still to come. Turning left onto Satorn road, I could see a long row of stately older homes; the houses of the wealthy. They, like so much else, gave way to the boom and bust of the 1990s, and unfortunately only a few examples of such homes still exist, one of which now houses the Blue Elephant restaurant in front of the Thai Chinese Chamber of Commerce building near Taksin Bridge.
By 2pm, I had been handed my key, and made my way to the hotel room. As I was about to shut my eyes after a really quick brunch, a well-meaning soul popped in and notified me that at 6pm, us ‘newbies’ would be taken out to see the sights of Bangkok – all this said with a sly grin. Six o’clock rolled around much too quick, and when the knock came at my door I wished I could simply turn over and ignore whatever disturbance was at my door. Unfortunately, I couldn’t and the knocking just got louder. After a few moments of trying to make the brain cells work, I more or less rolled out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom for a shower. Showered and dressed and already sweating again, I made my way down to the lobby and the waiting ‘old hands’ – all 7 of them – and five of us.
Benign-looking during the day, Tuk Tuks can be terrifying at night…
Opening night was a blur after 10 p.m.
What comes next is only intended for mature audiences, so if you’re under 18, stop reading now. Never mind, just keep reading. The song from the rock opera “Chess” that had been banned in the country – can’t come up with the name?…… “One Night in Bangkok”, pretty much says it all. From dinner at the Whole Earth Restaurant on Lang Suan, we moved on to a local bar for drinks along Sarasin road. After that, due to sleep deprivation, I cannot recall very much. We were shown Bangkok and all of its colours that night, from upscale discos to back-alley bars. I recall a tuk-tuk ride that tore through the night along narrow alleys, all of us hanging on for dear life. We were going to one of the most fascinating places in Bangkok nightlife, or so the ‘old hands’ promised us. It was a late-night place, somewhere where you could hang out until the wee hours of the morning, or even watch the sunrise. The entrance told it all, you had to duck to get in, the door was only about 1.75 meters high. Inside, it looked like the bar in the second episode of Star Wars with its creatures and characters.
Sathorn road, 2017
A new, more modern facade, but…
Has Bangkok lost some of those things over the decades? No. The names have changed, some streets and alleys have been gentrified while others have become the new ‘hot spots in the city. As the city has expanded, new areas have been added – Tonglor, which really was an unknown backwater in the 1980s has become one of the main high-end hangout areas, while Lang Suan has lost its former quiet charm with the arrival of large-scale real estate developments. The area around Siam Square consisted mainly of small shophouses, a few theatres, and very little else. Across the road stood the recently completed Siam Centre, ‘the’ place to go for high fashion and local designer clothing. There was no Discovery Center, no Paragon, CTW did not exist; as a matter of fact, there were no other large buildings or shopping centers along the entire stretch now occupied with nothing but malls from Siam on down to the highway entrance at Wireless road. Much has changed since, much has remained the same, all I can say is that after that long night of exploring Bangkok with well-versed guides, I was simply happy that the following day was a Sunday.
