02 May 2024

 

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Bangkok Holiday Review - Kaleidoscope!

Magazine February 2003

That's how Ray Connoly saw the fabulous cultural collision of East and West that is Bangkok.

1 Bangkok city 2 Traditional dancers 3 Buddhism temple

MY NEW THAI FRIENDS were appalled. “This is your first visit to Bangkok?” they asked, amazed. “Where have you been all your life?” To be honest I didn’t know. When I was young Bangkok seemed an awfully long way away, somewhere out of The King And I, with Yul Brynner swaggering around barefooted and Deborah Kerr singing Getting To Know You.

How distances have shrunk! Today it seems every other friend of mine has stopped in Bangkok on their way to or from seeing relatives in Australia or New Zealand.

It’s on a 36-hour stopover that most visitors encounter Bangkok and that’s exactly how I saw it - jet-lagged, hurried, but determined to pack in as much as I could.

Delights for all the senses

So what’s Bangkok like on a first date? It’s a great traffic jam of East and West, a cultural kaleidoscope with a sober soul but hedonistic tendencies, a spiritual town with delights for all the senses.

Driving into Bangkok I was reminded of an American city as we followed the green road signs through the queues of cars. With the sizzling food stalls, the open shop fronts, the omnipresent orchids, the rattle of the three-wheeled tuk-tuks, the saffron of the Buddhist monks, it’s one of Asia’s biggest cities, population seven million and growing.

It is, however, an Asia with one eye firmly on the West, and on Britain in particular. They like, for instance, the fact that our two countries have royal families, our conservative dress, and understated British manners.

But more than that they love our football, with highlights of Premiership matches to be seen hours before we see them here.

From what I knew of Alex Garland’s The Beach, Bangkok’s Khao San Road, the international back-packers’ first stop in Asia, was a dangerous, druggy place of sexual sighs behind paper-thin walls, where Western junkies hid from the real world.


Well, that scene may well exist, but the Khao San Road I saw was a lively, 24-hour, bouncing place of inexpensive hotels, Internet cafés, clubs and travel agents. I was staying in the glistening, towering new Peninsula Hotel, on the Chao Phraya River, in the centre of Bangkok, across from the old city. It was, I was told (and I believe it), one of the best city views in Asia.

The river is mesmerising, the living soul and main artery of Bangkok, an ever-busy place of long tailed speedboats, junks and river taxis.

I took a riverboat ride upstream from the old port, the Farang Quarter (a foreigner is called a farang in Thai) with its hotels, embassies, shops selling antiques, jewels and fossilised dinosaur droppings, past the beautiful old, dilapidated European customs house and on to the Park Khlong flower and vegetable market.

Nowhere in Bangkok is far from a shrine or a statue of the Buddha and, as we pulled upstream passing slums and temples the spiritual presence followed. Some of the best Buddha statues are in the Grand Palace in central Bangkok, where the 15th century Emerald Buddha, made from a single piece of jade, is the most revered.

So much for the spiritual life. Night time in Bangkok suggests more temporal considerations. Everyone who visits Bangkok will have heard about its sexy image and every night thousands of Western tourists are drawn to the Patpong area.

I suppose some must enjoy the carnal delights on offer, but by far the majority of tourists end up buying nothing naughtier than a fake Rolex watch.

I can't tell you what happens inside the sex clubs, because I didn’t go into any. But after a quick look around, I was making my way around out of Patpong when a smiling Thai tout in a Manchester United T-shirt emerged from a house of ill repute.

“Would you like a beautiful young lady, sir?”
“No, thank you,” I replied politely. He hurried after me. “What about a handsome young boy then?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, and quickened my pace.


With a philosophical shrug, the tout dropped back, obviously thinking, “There’s no pleasing some folk.”

Something really decadent

Actually there was. Hiring a tuk-tuk I sped back into the centre of town where earlier I’d spotted my own carnal speciality. Slipping inside a doorway down a riverside alley, I prepared myself for something really decadent.

A beautiful young woman in a long, white dress padded over. Very gently, she took off my footwear then very carefully began to wash them.

It was the closest I’ve come to Nirvana since, well, never mind. My feet after a day and a half legging it around Bangkok, were screaming with pain.

The young masseuse anointed my feet with sweet-smelling oils, simultaneously pointing out to me, on a map of a foot, how every bone of the foot represented a different organ of the entire body. This, at last, was the exotic East.

Later, on the green-canopied ferry as we made our way back across the river to the Peninsula Hotel, I realised that for what seemed the first time for ages I was standing and my feet weren’t hurting.

It was all I could do to refrain from whistling a happy tune, courtesy of Rodgers and Hammerstein, of course.

This article was featured in the February 2003 DialAFlight magazine and was first published in the Mail on Sunday. All information was correct at time of going to print.

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