Back in Siam
We dropped into Bangkok with severe jet lag and sent our broken gadgets on their own holiday to the technology Shangri La of Singapore.
Thailand has its lips firmly wrapped around the fire hose of American capital and tourism. The opportunity and inequality of the unchecked market are readily apparent. Bangkok is a huge sprawling city of gleaming steel and glass towers next to shanty towns. The city is an environmental disaster area of sewage and motorcycle fumes cut with the sweet stink of coconut. The air quality ranges from eye-stinging on a good day to choking on a bad one. American corporations control the real money, but the rich locals are ethnic Chinese. They parade around in their bling and mercedes like gangsters. The Thai’s, however, are a happy and optimistic people.
Thailand is a constitutional monarchy. A hard thing to understand is that most everyone uncynically loves the king. Every business and home has a small shrine to the royal family. If you go to a Thai restaurant at home, it will too. The king is Thailand, he’s Thai pride. He’s given direct credit for all Thailand’s success. Thailand is an economic jewel in the region and Bangkok is the only fully modern city. The king’s not a bad guy either, as far as royalty goes. Taxi drivers crack up with pity whenever we mention that we don’t like our head of state.
There’s no gay movement here, because there’s no anti-gay establishment to move against. This is most readily apparent in the large number of girl-boys. One out of every 20 or 30 guys just feels that way and dresses that way. While its not necessarily “normal”, nobody seems to give them crap. Looking around, it gives you a better perspective on what the sociological situation probably is in the west.
To kill some time we went to see the fights at Lumphini Stadium. The guys came out and just lit into each other with knees and elbows. They even manage to get off these fast kicks to the neck sometimes. People bet like mad all around the ring while live musicians accompany the action. A reverse spinning elbow makes a hell of a sound when it hits someone’s head. We got to see several weight classes fight and a couple fellas get put to sleep before their bedtime. Our brutal appetites satisfied, we high tailed it out of the city.
We went to the quaint little island of Koh Samet while we waited for our stuff to be repaired. We got some much needed time relaxing on the beach. While we were there, the festival of Floating Lights took place and we found a little old woman in town to cook delightful local dishes for us.
When our equipment came back from its holiday, we zipped south without checking the weather. Huge mistake. The monsoon was spitting out storms from the Philippines every three days. This sucked a lot because we got trapped for a long time on the big islands of the south, which are nasty tourist traps. Eventually the storms abated, we had some calm seas and our Thai time had a very happy ending.
Diving was as otherworldly as I hoped it would be. All of a sudden we could fly and were amongst thousands of brightly colored animals of every size and shape. Many of the animals were killing each other, which greatly added to the entertainment. On our first dive a trigger fish attacked our instructor. This pie sized blue fish with gold stripes and large bony beak leaped out of the coral and went nuts on his fins. You cannot beat diving for wildlife observation. I could spend all day down at 18 meters just watching the infinitely varied kaleidescope of eels and anemones, fish and more fish.
Our mission accomplished, we lusted for more new experiences. On the cheap, we took boat and bus back up to Bangkok. With very little sleep, our transport dropped us in the backpacker ghetto at six in the morning. We stumbled over to a travel agent and asked how to get to Cambodia. She rushed us on to a waiting mini-bus and we continued our journey without rest…
Island photos.