I'm travelling in Southeast Asia: Thailand, Laos, Cambodia. My descriptions are very "wordy"...

Saturday, July 03, 2004

Thailand : Bangkok : Vimanmek

Tomorrow we go to Khao Yai for some RAINFOREST!
Liv has 20 T-shirts. She wonders why her bag is heavy.
Apparently it's all the "other stuff".
Today we went to Vimanmek, an enormous and gorgeous teak mansion in the middle of Bangkok. We noticed the gorgeous building, but the Thais were obsessed with Rama V, the king who built it, and with English stuff, all the furniture was English save the Waterford crystal chamber pot.
The Thais are very protective of their monarchy. At one point, a guy told us in awed tones "We worship King and Queen like Buddha!" Every morning and evening in all public places, on TV and on radio, the Thai national anthem is played and everyone in the street drops what they're doing and stands to attention. The national anthem is also played before concerts, dances, plays, boxing matches and even films.
Any form of dissent is looked upon very badly - apparently one well thought of Thai intellectual once made a sarcastic comment about the king's passion for yachting and was quickly arrested!
The Thais all speak in very flat tones, especially when speaking English. The guide in front of us was grating away in Thai while our softly spoken guide tried to compete.
We saw some beautiful traditional dancing. The men carry drums whilst dancing, except for Hanuman who was hilarious and lots of fun. The costumes are very bright and coordinated.
We just guzzled a pack of Pringles in the air conditioned lovelyness of the 7-11 and suddenly perked up. I think I need to eat more salt and drink more water.
Or sweat less (yummy!)...

Friday, July 02, 2004

Thailand : Bangkok : Grand Palace, Wat Pho, Thai Puppetry, Patpong

Opinions change, I like Bangkok much more than I did a couple of days ago...I think I am getting used to the heat and the grime(!)
Having said that, we tried to sleep without a fan last night and lasted about 10 minutes.
Tuk tuks are the way forward. They're such comic vehicles, like glorious milkfloats. To me, they seem very Thailand with bright colours and a quirky shape, 3 tyres for swaying round corners and 3 lights set into hammered tin.
Yesterday we went to the Grand Palace (and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha) and Wat Pho.
The temples were stupendous, every surface covered with colour and light. The whole complex was flanked by giant statues with very stylised faces, and the whole outside wall painted with a mural of the Ramakien (the Thai Ramayana) in intricate detail.
The Ramakien is fun, with Hanuman the monkey king prancing all over it and turning into colossus whenever he feels like saving the world, like He-Man.
We saw a puppet show, the style was very over-the-top theatrical with drawn out voices and melodramatic movements. All the characters appearance is exactly the same whenever they appear, in the murals, in puppet form or as costume for dancing.
The puppet show was in a night bazaar, which itself was very odd. It was totally charmless, quite unlike the lil markets scattered around Bangkok with very sterile lil stalls.
The KhaoSan road is hilarious, the way street vendors try to get you to buy things..."Beer...Fuckin' Good, 'Innit?!"
The entire temple complex sparkles with different colours, topped with golden roofs. It reminds me of "Doors to Perception".
The buildings were all built with spires in the shape of the royal crown. The Thai crown is thin and pointed. The Cambodian crown in tall and fat (like the towers in Angkor). The complex obviously included some Cambodian crown shaped spires, to signify the supremacy of the Thais over the Cambodians...!
Wat Pho via a dried fish market selling every sort of dried fish in pungent quantity.
Wat Pho contained an immense reclining buddha. The contrast of the intricate decoration on the temple walls and the buddha's bed(?) and the buddha himself, all clean lines and shapes, was gorgeous.
As always, we ended up a gay bar, ROXY, in a gay area near Silom. We wanted to go and see some Thai Elvis and Tom Jones impersonators but it was another night. So we pushed past the people offering "Ping Pong Show"...girl pops ping pong ball from pussy...girl pulls fish from pussy...girl peels banana with pussy...guys and headed for a (slightly) quieter looking street and were given a spacious spot between some lesbians and some guys who kept spanking one another, where we watched the she-males go by....

Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Seeing the world...

I must look like such a backpacker (i think the backpack gives it away). As I walked out of 76 Foyle Road, a tall round black man in a bright stripey shirt called "Going to see the world?" I said yes, he wished me good luck in a low loping voice, like Marcellus Wallace.
Liv and I are writing from a great little caf้ in NW Bangkok. There are a bunch of Thai women doing aerobics across the road from us which is hilarious and also looks extremely hot. It is very hot here, Liv was very apprehensive about cold showers but they are just what we need. We just had "drunken" noodles (loads of chilli :O ) with lizards scuttling across the wall next to us. I'm burning on the outside also from all the DEET insect repellant...
Thailand is really colourful, the aerobics women are wearing every shade of neon.
Lauda air were interesting, the sun rose as we were in the air giving a fatastic light display and then melt-your-face sunlight to wake everyone on the plane.
We flew over an amazing desert (somewhere in east Pakistan, northwest India). The sun was so strong the dunes almost looked in black and white. They towered over dust speck houses and green scribble rivers.
We are staying on the Khao-san road, which is extremely touristy, but we got to the airport and didn't know anywhere else. Liv heard of it in "the Beach" (a novel/film). We met a girl who was wearing a top made of the same material as my shirt (the one Liv made) who recommended us a guest house.
We went out in the evening for drinks in this great outdoor bar, a bit of a haven from the insomniac bustle of Khao-san and had a fun argument about what art was (fairly typical) and bashed our heads on the wooden sun-shades (designed for shorter Thai people).
This evening we walked through a market alongside a canal and saw all sorts of vegetables, inside out animals and even toads and eels in big tubs. The light through the sunshades (all different colours) made it gorgeous to walk along, but really smelly.