Bureaucrats in Paradise

Bangkok, January 10, 2012

As I see it, the only thing that has not changed in Bangkok since my first stay in 1960 is my total feel good about that city. What is often said about New York City, applies also to Bangkok, the only thing permanent, is change.

After a hepatitis quarantine in Calcutta, I ended up in Bangkok in 1960.

Even though a few previous times before I had made serious money on my, mostly hitchhiking round-the-world trip — in Beirut, Lebanon, as a belly dancer in a gay bar, in Damascus, Syria, by decorating, and arranging displays, in the German pavilion at an international trade fair, and in Izmir, Turkey, doing the same as in Damascus, again for the same German outfit. In Kabul, Afghanistan, I sold a car I had bought cheaply in Turkey, and in Delhi, India, I sold gold coins for a lot more than what I had paid for them in Turkey — I arrived in Bangkok, Thailand, totally broke. My travel kitty had evaporated in a Calcutta hospital where I stayed with hepatitis, a souvenir from northern India.

My home in Bangkok, where I stayed for about two months, was a shack on stilts reached by a narrow wooden causeway over a swamp.

On a previous visit to Bangkok, I tried to find that swamp and my old home. I thought I could simply walk to it from the imperial palace, as I had done daily about fifty-years before. Tall buildings now
stood where the swamp had been.

In the Bangkok of 1960 I stayed in a precursor of a backpacker guesthouses. In those days there were not yet backpacker, as we know them now. Today's version can now be found in every nook and cranny of our planet, The shack's inhabitants of 1960, all young kids, mostly from Europe, all with fascinating stories, were today's backpackers' trailblazers.

Brian, about my age, according to his story, an escapee from prestigious Eaton and overly demanding parents, served as my dictionary and encyclopedia while I read Kipling's Jungle Book, my first novel in English. He explained the meaning of the words I didn't know.

Besides globetrotting, mostly young misfits, also a few sailors livened up our shack. Some had jumped ship on purpose because they didn't want to leave Bangkok, others had missed the departure of their vessel, because they were roped in by Bangkok's Siren song.

A tall, hefty, red-haired Dutch man, claimed to be on the run from Japanese police, after being fingered for a Tokyo jewel heist. He was a flaming gay and always had a few young Thai boys in his entourage. He offered the boys as many sodas as they could guzzle and as much ice cream as they managed to slurp, while he petted and fondled them.

I made good money, selling silken temple fresco rubbings. As I had seen young apprentice Buddhist monks doing it in another temple,  probably as part of their Buddhist learning, I wedged black silk over carved stone frescos on temple walls. I did it in places where tourists congregated. Rubbing gold bronze on protruding features of the frescoes, created gold bronze copies of the frescos. My creations sold like hot cakes to tourists, and my fingers took on a permanent golden hue.

I was able to pay for my lodgings, for food, for lots of orange soda, and to rebuild my travel kitty for continuing the journey.

Unlike the boys around the Dutchman, I had health reasons for emptying untold numbers of orange soda cans. Before I left the hospital in Calcutta, the doctor directed me to drink as much soda as I could, because, he said,  together with glucose powder, it is the most effective hepatitis medication. It would prevent serious liver damage. He gave me, as a parting present from the hospital, where I had just spent all my money, a large can of glucose powder.

Even though the sale of my temple rubbings kept me supplied with sweet soda, I never made enough for answering the siren song of pretty girls who patrolled the streets in bicycle rickshaws offering their services with enticing calls and gestures.

Last night was the first time I stayed in a regular Bangkok hotel, one with four stars. In Seoul I had made reservation for it on account of my late arrival. Despite thoroughly enjoying a fancy bathroom, TV, air-conditioning, and a well-stocked mini bar, I was happy this morning to transfer to the backpacker ghetto of Kaho San, where I feel again like home away from home.

In New Merry V,  where I's already stayed in previous years, I have a room with a cot, little plastic table, chair, bathroom which is a toilet bowl in the shower stall, ceiling fan. I have to have my own towel, soap and toilet paper (which I can't keep by the toilet because, as mentioned, it is also the shower). When leaving the room I look it with my own padlock, the one from my luggage. Still, even though it is probably not really needed, I chain my luggage to the table. Instead of the 200$ in the other hotel, the present deluxe digs (deluxe because of en-suite bathroom) cost the princely sum of 12$ a night.

As for the backpacker ghetto, Banglamphu, also called for its main drag, Kaho San, wow!!! There must have been a worldwide backpacker population explosion. The few streets in the neighborhood that were populated by these young travelers and the Thai catering to all their needs, have multiplied by a factor of, whatever .... but a lot. There is nothing one can not buy, eat, drink, experience, hear or see. One sign says: One suit, one shirt, one silk tie, one clothes bag, one hanger, choice of Armani or Hugo Boss label, 50 €. I had a foot and neck massage on a well padded deck chair in the street. The masseur, a man!, was at true sadist and I must have been a masochist to let him maul me the way he did. His painful ministration didn't prevent me right after from having two bowls of noodle soup, 30 cents US per bowl. Sitting with a Singha, the local beer, in the street I noticed among the young milling crowds quite a few silver foxes, the people in my age group with graveyard-blond hair. They must be, I reasoned, like me, folk who had loved this place when they were young and now came back for a nostalgic encore.

One thing strangely absent with all the young people around are the smart phones. They actually sit with their beers, juices, coffee, tea, food in outdoor establishments and talk with each other instead of texting. Apparently their home country servers don't do their thing for them here.

There are now even more places that offer cheap flights to everywhere, visas to all places, even Hotdogstan - except to Myanmar. For that they can't serve you. Applicants for Myanmar visas need to present themselves to the embassy in person.

A valuable advice to parents with children that are still at an age when they create acida for their elders because of upcoming college expenses. Here, in the streets you can, besides ID for whatever you can think of, get a Harvard diploma for roughly two dollars.

Also, Bangkok is debunking a prevailing USA fear of black mold. With the recent floods many surfaces are covered with that stuff and nobody seems to care. At least, the population looks as healthy as any other I know.

Now I'll go to the Myanmar embassy.

Evening, same day.

Myanmar seems to be as desirable a place too go to as the US. The line of visa applicants in the street outside the embassy is as long as any in front of a US consulate anywhere in the world - or is it only the intractable bureaucracy of either place that is the same? At any rate, I arrived at the front of my line after about two hours, only to be given application forms. Filled out forms in hand, I eventually made it to the front of another line, where, having reached the window, just before handing in the forms, I saw another sign informing me that I also needed a photocopy of the application to hand in with the original. Thanks to a lenient bureaucrat behind the window, the lady made me a copy for 15 cents (US equivalent). I waited (on provided chairs) about an hour then was called to another window where I was told to come back two days later to pick up that desired entry in my passport.

Among a multitude of other information about myself, the application required me to list all my employments for the last ten years. I was tempted to write in that I was married during that time, thus fully employed, but then, afraid of other delays, I wrote "retired".

Imagine New York with Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Bronx, all tied up together without any separations by rivers and harbor expanses. The layout is not a neatly divided grid of avenues and streets but a jumble of random angles of tiny alleys, regular streets, wide boulevards and elevated highways, sometimes several stories high. Then imagine an additional cool million of inhabitants. Then imagine a vast majority living in two or three story buildings.... You got Bangkok!

From where I am staying in the Khao San area, to the Myanmar embassy it is a roughly one-hour taxi ride (no worries about cost, I managed to negotiate a flat six-dollar fee, both for going and coming). Each taxi driver considered himself a wise guy who knows how to avoid the Bangkok traffic nightmare. Each squeezed through narrow alleys then zigzagged between other road users on wide boulevards between super modern cloud-scratching office towers. Instead of chocking vehicular congestion we got into chocking vegetable cart and street peddler congestion. I tried to guess by the sun in which direction we were heading. It was a wind rose heading, east, west, south, north, in wild succession. The second driver on the return trip, an old man with but one black tooth in the font of his mouth, tried to be a helpful tourist guide, pointing out all sights we passed. Problem is, he prattled everything non-stop in Thai, so I am none the wiser for it.

The short of this story is: Bangkok is huge.

Since I'll be here for another while (I also need a visa for China, the Indian I made in New York), you are condemned to get some more Bangkok dribble. Sorry, I promised exciting news of an exiting journey and now this!

Vivere pericolosamente - and reporting about it - will have to wait.