Already I’m sweating under the straps of my pack, my jeans are rolled up and beads of sweat are forming on my forehead and upper lip.
It’s 1:15 a.m.
The legendary Khao San Road is looming before me, in its neon dirge and Western/Thai trappings.
Nearly everyone I see looks drunk – with alcohol or travel adrenaline – stumbling back and forth across the street, to Pad Thai vendors, bars and trinket stalls. The Thais are sober, however, and their eyes flash with opportunity.
Tuk Tuk? Taxi? Where you go? You want discotheque? Spicy discotheque? Lemme show you!
It’s a line they repeat hundreds of times a night. Trolling thousands of tourists every hour for an over-priced taxi ride for a visit to one of the seedier cultural experiences pervading the Bangkok night scene.
I had no other choice available in my entire existence at that point but to wade into the madness.
I reached up and shoved my thumbs under my pack straps, creating a wedge of space that momentarily cooled me off as hot air passed over the drenched patches of cotton. I simply started walking.
Blankets were laid out on the street with trinkets and bootleg merchandise like braided bracelets, little Thai-inspired carvings and knickknacks, to leather goods and ‘replica’ sunglasses and handbags. Vendors negotiated with the foreigners over these goods, and since then, that’s probably the most common scene I’ve seen since arriving, which is growing quite unfortunate.
Neon lights, fluorescent-tube street lights, torches and various candles lit the way. Indiscriminate hollering, laughing, thumping bass and the ubiquitous din of hundreds of animated conversations in as many languages provided the soundtrack to this experience, while a characteristically urban mix of street food, beer, damp garbage and piss contributed to the olfactory experience. Rounding out this sensory overture was the sweating, and unceasing perspiration tagged along the rest of the night, like so many feral dogs following a dish of noodles.
Still, it was a pleasurable experience, because I’d made it. After more than a year I was finally walking through that part of Bangkok that I’d dreamed about. Each step forward was one step deeper into this new foreign chapter of my adventures and what better place and time to start than in Bangkok at 1:30 in the morning amid all this chaos?
I had finally made it.
I wanted to find a place to stay for the night so I just walked on, making mental notes of the signs advertising rooms for rent. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to start asking some of the tourists where they stayed, if they liked it and how much their rooms were. The first two had a northern English accent and were too drunk to understand, so I thanked them and wandered on. I saw two other guys haggling with a Thai and they sounded American and more coherent than the last two so I asked them, but wherever they were staying they didn’t like, so they suggested somewhere else and essentially dismissed me.
Well, I’ll just stumble into something, I thought, and just kept walking. I got to the end of Khao San Road and took a left, without really any reason. I walked past what may have been 50 shuttered market stalls, with their steel curtains drawn to the street and the craziness therein. I passed an alley lit down its length from the light of several open doors, with a few Thais closing up shops and cleaning a few odds and ends. On the other side of the alley looked like a pleasant side street (soi) with people walking back and forth, so that’s where I went.
People from the United States would inherently be skeptical of walking down such a narrow alley in a foreign country in such a huge metropolis, but I can not stress enough how pacifist almost all Thais are because of their Buddhist religion. If anything, Thais I’ve met are a little intimidated by foreigners and are especially non-confrontational when unprovoked. (That being said, beware the provoked Thai).
Walking through the alley was actually a pleasant experience, and many of the Thais were surprised to see me walking through, and what could have been a sketchy experience was instead one filled with smiles and many pleasant sawaddee ka! (hello!)
I stumbled around the outskirts of Khao San Road for about thirty minutes, passing through an agreeable street named Rambuttri Road, a brick-paved soi with many hip and alluring bars, restaurants and hostels. It looked like it might be overpriced, so I continued on.
After finding non-vacant hostel after non-vacant hostel, I went back to Rambuttri Road and resigned myself to the fact that I should splurge on nice digs the first two nights in a foreign country, to settle down, reacquire a normal sleep schedule and establish a home base for exploring.
So I chose my hostel like I chose Thailand as my destination. It seemed like the most fun out of the bunch.
The Sawasdee House (Sawasdee is another spelling of the Thai word for hello, which phonetically sounds like sa-wa-dee-ka/kap) seemed the best bet, with a really hip lounge/restaurant as its lobby. I past a guy and girl sipping beers at a table and they recognized me from walking back and forth and smiled and I smiled back and mumbled something about giving up and finding somewhere to put my bag down.
The lady at the front desk told me she only had a double bed with A/C available for 550 baht, which is about $16 USD, so still not bad, but I was kind of hoping for something in the 250-baht range, but I think that was not going to happen without reeeaally searching around, which I was tired of doing at that point.
I paid for two nights, that night (morning) being one even though it was almost 2:30 in the morning at that point and the next, with the plan being that I was going to make my way down to Phuket on check out day. I went up stairs, put my pack down and surveyed my room… Basically a whitewashed cell big enough for two single beds with about three feet of room at the foot of each bed. The opposite wall had a counter that ran the length of the room and had a TV that didn’t work. But the room seemed like it had a relatively new coat of paint and the bed furniture looked new and the A/C was pretty powerful, so I threw my pack on the other bed, put my key in my pocket and headed back down to the lobby, passing the communal bathroom just off the stairs on the way down – a blue-tiled affair that looked more like a sanatorium than a bathroom, but it was clean.
I knew there was a 7-11 about a half block down Rambuttri so I decided to get a liter of Chang Beer, my first beer since coming to Thailand. I saw the couple sitting at one of the tables and asked them if there was any time that the Thais couldn’t sell alcohol and they just sort of chuckled and said nope. I purchased my liter of Chang for the equivalent of a little more than a dollar and the nice cashier offered to open the bottle for me, a gesture sorely missed back in the States.
Having somewhat broken the ice with the couple from before, I asked if I could join them and they were happy to oblige. It turned out there wasn’t any sort of romantic interest between the two and they had only met each other the day or so before. I can’t for the life of me remember her name, but she was a wild German girl on vacation for a few weeks and the guy was from Jackson, Wyoming, on the other side of the state from the snowmobile lodge I worked at this winter. His name escapes me as well.
We decided to get up and explore a bit, so we strolled around the neighborhood for awhile, drinking beers and talking about our travels (I had little to offer as far as travel stories go, so I was content on just listening to them…).
At about 5 a.m. we decided to make our way back to the hostel, and that night (about an hour before the sun rose) before I bunked down in my cozy, frosty bed, I felt an ominous stirring in my stomach, but before I could diagnose anything, I drifted off into a fitful sleep…
2 Comments
June 4, 2009 at 10:56 am
You left me hanging again. I hope the pangs were just hunger, What an experience! Enjoy it all.
June 10, 2009 at 2:22 pm
I am surprised you didn’t tell the couple all about your cruise to Russia.