It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of poor decision-making, it was the age of only slightly better decision-making, it was the epoch of I cannot believe I’m doing this, it was the epoch of It turns out I’m pretty comfortable doing this after all, it was the season of Neon, It was the season of Stars, it was the spring of dancing on the bar with the girls at that one place in Soi Cowboy, it was the winter walk of shame afterward, we had everything, and I mean everything, before us, we had far less, relatively speaking, before us a few days later, if we were going directly to Heaven, we’d have some serious explaining to do, if we were going directly to the bad place, well, we accept that—in short, our time in Thailand so far has been a wild ride, indeed, with girls working one side of the street and monkeys enjoying corn on the cob on the other side of the street, with truly white-knuckle inducing motorbike rides through the Bangkok traffic and far more leisurely rides through the countryside of Lopburi, in other words, there’s no way to really write about our time in Thailand so far, for good or for evil, except in the superlative degree of comparison only. So comparison it is.
It took a while for me to figure out how to write about Bangkok. Of course, getting the story about Coffee and Obsessions down was a piece of cake. That one practically wrote itself. But trying to find another angle on Bangkok was a challenge. I think is because I found Bangkok to be pretty almost immediately. And so the angle came to me only after we rented a motorcycle—the mighty Honda CB300R—and got out of town.
Getting out of Bangkok took some doing. It’s a massive city, and the traffic is jacked pretty much 24/7. Want to visit Bangkok and ride in a Tuk Tuk? Well, you can sit in one, anyway, taking in the exhaust from all the other vehicles that are stuck in traffic with you. Think you’ll get around the problem by waking? Think again. Bangkok is massive. Massive. It takes forever just to cross the street. Not, by the way, for the same reasons FNGs might take a long time to cross the street in Hanoi, which is just looking for the perfect moment to commit to stepping out into nonstop traffic leap-of-faith style. It takes forever to cross the street in Bangkok because the street has like eight lanes with a divider in the middle so you can’t simply cross. Instead you have to walk up a flight of steps and across a platform and back down to get to the other side. It took us 20 minutes to walk to the movie theatre to see Oppenheimer. The movie theatre was literally across the street. Any chicken in its right mind would look at the street-crossing situation in Bangkok and say, “You know what? Fuck it.”
So Bangkok’s no place for walking. Many would argue that Hanoi’s no place for walking either—and they’d be right. But in Hanoi you take a motorbike everywhere. And because there are almost no stoplights in Hanoi, the traffic just flows nonstop. It might seem chaotic at first glance, but the traffic in Hanoi is optimal for motorbike riding. I think this has a lot to do with there being very few cars on the road. Hanoi hasn’t had a traffic accident in 25 years.
The motorbike drivers in Bangkok are far more aggressive. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that there are cars everywhere in Bangkok. So to get anywhere, you need to take a motorbike and swerve in and out of the bumper-to-bumper traffic jam. There’s lots of lane splitting and overtaking in oncoming traffic lane and hoping you don’t get crushed between that bus that’s merging inexorably from the left—because the busses in Bangkok are on a schedule and are not to be fucked with—and the SUV on your right. You do this for long enough and you get pretty good at maneuvering around vehicles without taking out their mirrors. I did not do this long enough to get good at it, but I gave it the old college try.
Bangkok: It’s massive. It takes forever to get from one place to another. And it’s expensive. To be fair, we’ve pretty much hemorrhaged money since we left Hanoi. But outside of Bangkok we at least know where the money’s going.
(I will eventually get around to wrapping this one up.)