One night in Bangkok

Tuesday, November 19

Did we mention that traffic in Bangkok is horrid? To avoid the hectic pace of the paved road, we decided that today our journeys would be centered around the fairly new [and limited] light rail system that Bangkok has sprouted in recent years. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite reach our humble guesthouse/abode, so we opted for river transit to take us from here to there, where there is the beginning [or end?] of the Skytrain line.

The ferry is uneventful, it takes us a while to figure everything out [Thai script is so hard -- read impossible -- for us to read]. While on the boat, a friendly English fellow of Indian descent makes sure that we get off at the right spot. He's on an "around the world" tour. For a single price he purchased a ticket which will take him from west to east, continuously around the globe. He's been traveling for the better part of two months, is headed for San Francisco to meet his girlfriend [we gave him our "card"] and then is driving down the coast to San Diego to finish the trip across America, and back to England. Needless to say, Kelly and I are feeling mildly inadequate what with only 3.5 weeks of travel on our itineraries. On the other hand, we meet people in Borneo who are traveling for 6-16 months, so I guess two months really isn't THAT much.

Onwards. Our primary goal today is shopping. We haven't been doing much of that, and we need to gather trinkets to prove to the doubting masses that we actually left California. I have a certain level of dread/resignation that all of our film has been wiped clean by the "FILM SAFE" x-ray machines that they've been traveling through. Unlike NASA's goal of proving that they've been to the moon, our proof will be much less rigorous, and much more flimsy [no multi-million dollar telescopes will be fixed on our motions through southeast Asia].

We move quickly and stealthily through malls and alleys, making deals and barters where we invariably feel like we are getting the short end of the stick. I haggle a beer t-shirt down to $3.5 and find one around the corner five minutes later for less than $2. Kelly buys souvenir coasters for about $5 and finds them the next day for less than $3. What? Do we have "tourist" painted on our FACE !?!

Oh, yeah, we do.

We consult our trusty/dusty Lonely Planet guidebook, and find that THE place to buy clothes is just a half mile away. Off we go, to find clothes and deals which would make the most insidious Nike sales rep envious. We find the market. It's actually not a market. Rather it's a labyrinth of stalls, stairs, escalators, and alleys, dressed in exactly the right kind of ambiance to fool the western tourist into thinking it's a market. I decide to go to the bathroom [inspired by the universal symbol hanging from a ceiling and pointing to an open door]. After taking care of business, I waste no time in getting lost. Not only do I lose myself, but I also lose the bathroom. [Where is Kelly? Where is the compass? Why did we get those walkie-talkies?] It only takes me about 20 minutes to find, in fairly UN-rapid succession:

*) the super-hero underwear section
*) the bathroom
*) the cheerleader clothing section
*) the stairs
*) the shoe department
*) Kelly
*) mannequins sales section
*) hanger stores
*) clothing rack stores

Despite cruising past over 1,000,000 pieces of clothing Kelly and I somehow leave the market empty handed.

Go figure.

Tired, and loaded with various souvenirs, Kelly and I decided to search for "the restaurant". We'd come to the realization that, while there are many hidden treasures to be found in southeast Asia, we had very little time to find them, and very little patience for what we found when they weren't hidden treasures. [recall the tofu-on-a-stick incident, and the vegetarian-restaurants-which-only-serve-meat paradox]. Therefore we'd decided to only eat at places "in the book". In this case however, every single landmark which might lead us to the restaurant was inconceivably missing from Bangkok geography actuality. Even the local Starbucks counter people couldn't help us. But then, should we really have been counting on Starbucks for guide services?

We find the restaurant finally, after about an hour of meandering, and enjoy a fairly good, if mildly overpriced [yes we are spoiled - paying $3 for an entree now becomes "overpriced" - Kelly] meal of vegetables, carbohydrates, and spices.

Yum.

Back in Oakland, we live near a very nice street called College Avenue. It's probably the main reason why we chose to live in the neighborhood. It has everything a young couple might want, just minutes from where we live. Shopping, printing, restaurants, upscale and downscale furniture stores, groceries, coffee shops. You name it and it's on the avenue somewhere.

We've even got Thai restaurants on our street. Just think of the money we could have saved. Instead of traveling across the world to eat Thai food, we could have -- as we've done before -- walk ten minutes up the street and have some food at Sabuy Sabuy (for downscale) or at Soi Four (for upscale). We, as naive midwesterners, have never been able to truly understand how some restaurants get named. We understand how they got the name "Breads of India". And we have some sneaking suspicions about why Ray Crock chose the name McDonalds. I guess we assumed that "Sabuy Sabuy" was some kind of transliteration from the Thai language. But "Soi
Four" !?!

Which brings me to the rest of the day.

BIG SIDESTEP

One thing that Thailand is known for is its libertine culture. The red light district, known as the Patpong, is a destination for all kinds of people. I even found a book in the bookstore down the street from where we were staying which chronicled the studies of a sociologist who spent three years winning the trust of those who worked there. I didn't pick up the book, so I can't really speak to what she learned, but I digress.

Looking at the Lonely Planet map book, I was mildly amused to find out that one of the main streets in the Patpong was the side street called "soi 4". I guess "soi" is a generic term for street, and they run through Bangkok, numbered all the way up to 100+. It seemed kind of strangely ironic that an upscale Bangkok eatery in our little upper middle class neighborhood, where all the mothers push their babies up and down the street, from their SUVs to "Rockridge Kids" to buy them toys... That this resteraunt was named after a street name in the red light district of Bangkok.

So Kelly and I trekked, braved neon signs, blaring music, obnoxious touts of every description, through the alleys and stalls to the street itself. We saw much of the Patpong on our walk, but more importantly we made it to Soi 4, where the most cheesy of the drag shows are. And we took a picture of street, so that we can now eat on College Avenue, and share in the mild irony that all of the waiters know, but never speak of.

Wednesday, November 20

After staying up after midnight the previous night as we pushed through Loy Krathong crowds then watched sanctioned fireworks from our balcony (this was the first year that the government actually out-lawed the general public from lighting fireworks, ostensibly because they scare us hapless tourists), we slept in late for the first time on our trip. Two weeks into the trip and we are finally over jetlag!

As we had done each day at the guesthouse, we went downstairs to the in-house cafe for breakfast. We are slowly coming to the realization that in a foreign country, you can never quite be certain of what will come out on the plate when you order from a menu translated into English for your benefit, and you can never be too committed to any special requests that you may have made to the wait staff. For example, every day Andrew tried to get scrambled eggs, and every day they came out fried. A curious mis-translation occurred at a park restaurant in Borneo when the menu said "all-that-you-can-eat salad", only to be informed by the waitress after noticing on the bill that we were charged for each salad that we had brought to us that what this really meant was "you can eat as much or as little of the one salad brought out in the one bowl". Hmm. By this token we wondered why everything on the menu wasn't "all-you-can-eat".

Another curiosity about all of our eating out experiences in SE Asia has been that you must always ask for the bill - it is never brought to you unless you ask for it and if you just wait, you will be waiting for an awfully long time. Although a perturbation to this was in the guesthouse cafe, where for each item ordered, the waitress would bring out tokens with the baht amount written on them when she brought out the food or drink. So as you ordered more things, a plate would fill up with tokens of what you then had to pay back after you were finished. Watching the plate fill up can be a humbling experience.

We had no big plans for our last day in Bangkok. We basically just wandered around our neighborhood in Bangkok and had lunch at a cafe that advertised "drinks served all night long". It's probably best not to count on getting a very good meal from a place specializing in serving alcohol at all hours.

Our plane that would route us to Borneo via KL would not be leaving until 5:30 pm, so we planned to leave our guesthouse at 1 pm on the Road Runner, "minutes to the airport" van, to allow for the Bangkok traffic. This transport vehicle made sure to sell every available seat, although unfortunately failed to consider that they also needed to have room for the luggage of the people sitting in every available seat. The driver made several attempts to reorganize and pack luggage in the small available space, and at one point we realized that my piece of luggage was not where I had put it, so most of the way to the airport we were hoping that my suitcase, which had our air tickets in it, was indeed somewhere in the van. Thankfully it was there, as we verified upon arriving at the airport.

At the airport we braced ourselves for a very full night of traveling - arriving in Borneo (Kota Kinabalu or KK for short) at about 2:30 am. One reason we would arrive in Borneo so late was because we had a 2+ hr. layover in Kuala Lumpur (KL). We attempted to get on an earlier flight from KL to KK but were told that we couldn't, both because the earlier flight allowed for less than a 30 minute transfer and because they couldn't issue a boarding pass for the KL flight from Bangkok due to a failure to communicate with the KL computers. While waiting for our flight at the Bangkok airport we met a lovely couple from Ithaca, NY who had also taken advantage of the Malaysia Airline's Access Asia pass and compared travel destinations. Although they were on a longer trip (6 wks) and had a different itinerary, we had a lot to talk about, especially considering that they were also both vegetarians.

Upon arrival to KL, we thought we'd take a chance and at least try to get on the earlier flight. After running around the airport to transfer desks, immigration, and customs, we actually were able to get on the earlier flight, make it to KK, and find a taxi who of course had definite ideas of where we should stay, then settle into a very scummy although cheap hotel by 1 am.

Next time: leaving the urban sprawl for rural national parks...

- Kelly and Andrew