Frustrations and delights of Bangkok
11th November 2005
Bangkok - rainy entrance and no rooms. Drat.
Now accommodated we do dinner
We fall foul of the old bill, repeatedly
Tourist traps of Bangkok - a mixed bag
Getting parts for Berthette - we get by with a little help from our friends
Meeting folk for business and pleasure
Not much of a welcome in Bangkok
A ride into Bangkok would not be complete without a drenching. We sheltered with all the motorcycle taxi riders and attempted to find out from them how we could get to the city centre. Typically for capital city signing, come up the motorway when there are very few turnings Bangkok is easily signposted and then when you hit the city limits and there is a dual carriageway splitting off every 100 yds the signs disappear or turn into Thai only. Marvellous! We’d already missed our turning or so we thought. The best advice we got was to take the next U-turn, go back a few km and take another U-turn and take the exit that we thought we should have done. All very well, but it seemed to be about 10 miles between U-turns, which I must explain..... Alongside these expressways there are service roads. Now and then, between the service road and the main carriageway, there are slip roads onto elevated U-turns that bring you back onto the carriageway facing the other direction. All well and good but if you miss your slip road onto a U-turn, you can be pretty much on the other side of the city before you can remedy your mistake. Frustrating.
Having back-tracked, we found ourselves on a most unlikely looking avenue that again had no signs. We resorted to the ‘follow the bulk of the traffic’ strategy and actually made our way into the centre with little fuss. Once there, the Lonely Planet map was bang on as usual. Although we bad mouth the travellers bible from time to time, we have not found another guide book that has such good maps of cities and so we continue to rely on it.
Once we managed to find ourselves in the centre things were remarkably easy. Then.....
We had booked ourselves into the same Hotel as Jon and Richard. Or maybe not. Somehow we had reserved and not reserved and there was no room at the inn. Bugger.
We left a note for Jon and Richard.
I, of course while Pat was finding out that we did not in fact have a bed for the night, had unpacked the bike. I thought I was being helpful.
Reloaded the bike
(brief interuption while a lad from the check-in desk ran down to the car park to hand us a note that J+R had left for us. There was some confusion and it seemed that once I had left reception, they’d returned and left a message for when we came back. But no. The reception desk had again got the message confused and we had to leave still unconnected) and went for plan B.... A recommendation by Martin Meyer near Siam square, nicely on the Skyway routes to all the embassies.
White Lodge, Siam Square, .....full
All the other Hotels on the street .....full
Eh, what was happening? We had hardly seen a tourist in the South of Thailand, now we are being told it’s high season.
Plan C recommendation by the guy at White Lodge over the other side of town.
They had room and a berth for Berthette, but were a tad expensive compared to what we were used to.
By now you can appreciated we have been thoroughly baptised into the ways of manic traffic and one way systems in Bangkok.
Bangkok traffic has a deserved reputation for being frantic. Imagine for a moment, London traffic, pre congestion charges, with hundreds of moped riders weaving randomly through the traffic and kamikazee tuk-tuk (enclosed mopeds converted into 3 wheelers, with 2 seats at the back which take anything from I to six people) drivers giving their clientele a cross between the dodgems and a roller coaster ride. The traffic never stops, and as a pedestrian you must employ the Cairo method of crossing the road. Just walk and they won’t hit you - honest. It’s a bit like playing frogger, but you have to keep going and hit the gaps not the cars. None, in this maelstrom uses indicators, and mirrors are solely for spot squeezing while you are stood at traffic lights. People only look forward. This may seem dangerous, but if everyone works on the same premise it works.
While we are on transport, Bangkok has everything that a modern city requires and more. Jon relayed the statistic that 3 million commute into a city of 9 million every day. To convey them, there are tube lines, skyway lines, trishaws, motorcycle taxis, tuk-tuks, metered car taxis, cheap buses, air-con buses and express and slow water taxis that ply the arterial river through the city. In fact, in the rush hours if you want to travel North or South in the city the water taxis are by far the best option, as the roads become gridlocked, packed with local commuters they zigzag up and down the river. But to the casual visitor, learning the most efficient way to use these services is too bewildering to fit into a week long visit.