BANGKOK, ALWAYS INTERESTING

Bangkok is a city of chaotic contrasts.  It is both beautiful and wretched.  The rich cruise expressways in their Rolls Royces and the poor amputees choke in the gutter begging to maintain their existence.  The traffic of the city creates a hum and buzz found few other places, but around each corner are tree filled alleys without hardly a sound or movement.  The sweet aromas of food waft over large areas competing with the strong smell of raw sewage emanating from canals and sewer grates.  The beauty of new skyscrapers prick the sky, while decrepit shanties hide in their shadows.  The beauty of the temples and monuments leave you breathless, as well as does the choking air pollution.

Bangkok has changed a lot since I was last here six years ago.  There are many new skyscrapers, and many more are going up all over.  The pollution has lessened as many big vehicles have been switched over to liquefied natural gas but it is still the worse I have experienced (Lima gives Bangkok a run for its money).  I have even seen some tuk-tuks running on LNG. 

Tourism is more plentiful than ever.  It seems as if Bangkok captures the travels who are interested in partying and other pleasures of a new and exciting place, but at the same time accepting them for all the tattoos, piercings, and shocking clothes choices they may wear (there would have been a scandal in rural Honduras if I had the accessories that many tourists in Bangkok have).  Though I have to admit that I'm surprised again by the number of Caucasian white males with their rent-a-girlfriends.  Prostitution still holds a significant place in Bangkok's tourist industry, a hold over from it being the closest safe big city to South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.  Who knows, maybe it even goes  further back.

The openness of the city may bring about a lot of drugs and prostitution, but it also allows a mosque, catholic church, and a Buddhist temple all to be located with a block or two of each other.  I have been few places where I have seen so many people of different backgrounds.

International business is in full force in Bangkok.  The number of western businessmen (oddly, I haven't seen that many western businesswomen) is astounding, with major international business areas of the city seeming to be completely western. 

Shopping malls here in Bangkok are confusing.  There are many varieties, and they all look architecturally amazing from the outside.  What is odd is how different the insides are.  Of course there is the super high-end luxury mall with Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Rolex, and other stores that I can't even afford to enter.  There are other malls with their food court with McDonalds, KFC, Krispy Kreme (it had the longest line I've seen in Thailand) and others.  However, most malls here look more like the market of yesteryear.  The architectural skin will be beautiful and modern, while the inside is full of shops set up over a lettered and numbered square on the floor, much like the booths at a convention.  I went into one mall that was six stories tall and just had booths/stores selling electronics.  Most of the stores sold knock-offs, but there were legitimate ones as well.  I found these malls interesting as they didn't just replacing the average local tenant in the name of big international tenants, but actually accommodated them many times alongside a McDonalds or Starbucks.  It makes the mall experience a little less sterile than I would normally have expected.

I have been taking Bangkok's local buses instead of taxis or tuk-tuks.  One reason is to save money, but a bigger reason is that I'm always interested in seeing how the average person gets about.  Bangkok's buses run the gamut of beautiful luxury to ancient diesel belching rattle traps.  I have been riding on the rattle traps as they run the shorter routes.  Initially, I had some difficulties with the buses as I couldn't read the destinations written in Thai.  The Thai alphabet looks more sanskrit than Roman, leaving my illiterate.  I started by having the woman at my hotel write the name of a major site near where I wanted to go in Thai on a piece of paper.  I would just show the name to other transit riders who would tell me when the bus I needed arrived.  It worked surprisingly well.  Now that I know the buses that run to the areas where I need to go (this is only two or three buses) so I need very little help.  It was also nice to get away from all the mean tourist-dependent Thais and around the wonderfully gratious and friendly average Thais.

I'll be in Bangkok for a day or two more before I head south towards Malaysia.  I'm excited!

 

COFFEE, WATER, TEMPLES, AND LAND MINES

As always, I got too into my travels and have forgotten to write.  I'm currently in Siem Reap, the city nearest to the ruins of Angkor Wat and the dozens of other temples from the Khmer Empire.  Tomorrow, I will dive into the temples, coming up for air in three days when I head to Bangkok.

 

I last wrote from Da Lat, Vietnam.  After enjoying days of coffee drinking in Da Lat, I went to Saigon.  I met up with a fellow traveler, Rhino from South Africa, on the bus.  I had met him initially on the bus to Nha Trang.  We spent a day hanging out in the chaos that is Saigon before heading off to the Mekong Delta.  Saigon is definitely a metropolis on the move, with only a slightly smaller ratio of motorbikes to cars than in Hanoi.  The city is much more westernized than much of the rest of Vietnam, with more skyscrapers and international commerce.  But that isn't surprising considering that it is a metropolis of nearly 8 million.  There was a surprising lack of international chain restaurants.  I only saw one KFC.  

 

The Mekong Delta is the watery southern end of Viet Nam.  As the Mekong River enters Viet Nam on its way from Tibet to the South China Sea, it splits into seven branches; it used to be nine but two have silted up over the years.  The area is the rice basket of the country harvesting three rice crops annually and growing an enormous assortment of other fruits and vegetables.  The area also supports a surprisingly large population, 20 million or equivalent to the population of Southern California, despite it nearly all being swampy land.  The area is impressive for many reasons: the enormous expanses of water, the houses built on stilts, the markets created within the rivers channels, the bridges built to span the river channels, among others.

 

From the Mekong Delta, I took a really slow boat up the river to the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh.  The contrast between Viet Nam and Cambodia is drastic.  The people have a different ethnic makeup looking much more similar to the Thai than the Vietnamese.  The Vietnamese seem to more resemble the Chinese.  The food became spicier and more Thai-like (I guess the fact that the Khmer Empire ruled all of Thailand may have produced these similarities).  However, the most drastic change was the increase in economic disparity.  In Viet Nam everyone seemed to be at a relatively equal economic level.  I noticed very few super-rich, and almost no destitute. All in all, Viet Nam was poor by western standards, but the country was definitely middle income and it felt like everyone was going in an upward direction.  Cambodia, on the other hand, had rich driving around in high-end Mercedes visiting fancy restaurants, while the poor and destitute begged and slept in the filth just a few blocks away.  

 

That being said, Phnom Penh is a city of temples and monuments.  There are gilded Wats throughout the city and plenty of monuments representing one regime or another.  There are also many sites representing the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge.  The two most notable are the prison S-21 and the Killing Fields of Choeng Ek.  S-21 was a school converted to a prison for all those the Khmer Rouge determined to not be pure.  The Killing Fields were where the prisoners had their impurities beat out of them and were thrown into mass graves.  Many of the mass graves have been dug up and now there is a memorial with the bones of the victims.  The bones are on display to the public as a reminder of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge.  The most disturbing aspects of my visit to the Killing Fields were the teeth and bones on the trail brought to the service by the annual flooding and the victims clothes still littered around on the ground.  

 

After Phnom Penh, I spent a few days in Battambang.  Battambang Province is a large rice producing area of Cambodia.  It is also an area riddled with land mines from past wars.  While visiting one of the many temples in the surrounding country side, there were signs warning me to stay on the path, due to mines in the surrounding forest.  I didn't have to be told twice.  I rented a motorbike for a day and toured the countryside discovering temples and villages as I rode aimlessly.  I could tell once I had left areas where tourists frequent as I started to receive double-takes from the locals as I passed by.  The people also became nicer, not trying to hassle me, but curious on whom I was.  Amazing, I wasn't just a money symbol any longer.

 

That is all for the moment.