BENOUT IN BANGKOK

We left Goa just after 6 on a pleasant’ish Friday evening with a Spice Jet flight that took us to Mumbai where we sat in the plane for half-an-hour before heading to Kolkota. We arrived after ten and were scheduled to depart just after midnight, but there was a delay during which I wish I didn’t see the technicians first fucking around with the front landing gear and then one of the engines. At least the aircon in the departures terminal was set cold enough so that I could at least wear my Nepali dik-trui for a bietjie. 

We eventually left at four in the morning for a trouble-free two-and-a-half hour flight to Bangkok where the humidity had already managed to turn the baking thirty-two degrees into a decidedly distasteful Saturday morning tom yum. Thank Buddha for air-conditioned gas-driven taxis! At the hotel it’s the usual dilemma. Too hot to sleep and yet too moeg to do much else, so we walk through the backstreets where local food stalls line the road and fill the air with an assault of aroma’s; through a market, over a bridge that spans a canal, and then a side street lined with nurseries selling plants and flowers and herbs and clay pots and bamboo and, and, and.

At midday the streets were not yet too crowded, but as we neared the fabled Khaosan Road, I began seeing palefaces for the first time since our arrival. Another exotic city; another tourist trap; same shit, different flavour; different branding even, but ultimately still the same shit. I mean for fuck’s sake, there is a St. Patrick’s Day Pub & Restaurant in Khaosan Road; Diagonally across from the McDonalds’ and around the corner from the Burger King… Once again, thank Buddha for democracy! Or is it the monarchy? Or should I say the Monarchy? And mind you, it is a constitutional Monarchy too. And on the front page of today’s Bangkok Post a lesser headline proclaims “Court jails three MORE of EX-princess’s kin” so maybe it is just monarchy, but then again on page three there’s a story of a 67 year old man who was jailed for three years for writing defamatory remarks about the Monarchy in a shopping mall toilet. Best I leave this topic for further deliberation when I am safely back home in my own apartheid state of mind… 

Anyway, I have been checking out for some good music in the city tonight but it seems that either there is not much online marketing of events happening or there is nothing happening tonight. And it being always six in the evening, it is much too late for a nap and much too early to call it a night… What to do with one night in Bangkok?

Postscript!

We ventured forth for dinner into the teeming streets and right across from the guesthouse at the local food market we bumped into a ‘live music’ scene! It was an engagement party and the clichéd Asian Karaoke from hell was klapping virtually right on our doorstep. I will definitely make a note never to complain about the live music scene in Bangkok – or anywhere else for that matter.